Hagens: The Real Global Macro

 The Real Global Macro | Frankly #28

Tsakraklides: We were never in control

We Were Never In Control. George Tsakraklides. Apr. 7, 2023.


Contrary to what humanity’s impressive technological milestones and achievements may suggest, the surprising truth is that we have never been in charge of what happens to us. As a biological organism aiming to maximize its chances of survival, all of our accomplishments and decisions were blindly driven with this primary survival objective in mind: economic growth, technological evolution, population increase. Whatever it takes, at whatever cost to us, or to the planet. From our humble beginnings as a monocellular life form and up to today’s complex industrial civilization, evolution has never stopped self-selecting for exactly the same traits in humans: greedy and exploitative tendencies, and the physical and mental skillsets that accompany these – given that, it is these precise skillsets which are the most likely to avert extinction in the short term. Our brain therefore was enlarged and optimized to become a resource exploitation logistical device: it was customized to “mine” all aspects of its environment for resources efficiently, quickly, and most importantly, at terrifying scale. The seemingly quantum leap in data processing power that evolution gifted us with is so immense, that its impact has still not fully been realized. Our brain is still able to keep up with any sophisticated technology we develop, just about. Humans with exactly the same brain as us, living just a few thousand years ago, would never have imagined that their brain can do all this, and keep up with it.

Humans aside, our greedy tendency is the natural, evolutionary driver of any species, whether it is an amoeba or a Nobel prize winner. However complex and sophisticated our DNA becomes, it will always self-select for attributes that favor its successful replication into the future. Social intelligence, philosophy and ethics cannot weed out greed, ever, simply because greed will always be supercharged by the evolutionary process. Therefore, although we often erroneously think of ourselves as the only species with true sentience and “free will” to take our own decisions, the reality is that we have never really been in charge. The most important factor in any of our decisions is, and will always be, our own personal survival in the very short term. This is a permanent, indestructible feature of our hardware that came with our factory settings: our DNA. This DNA codes for mental skillsets and hormonal responses which influence our attitudes and behaviors, and which our popular culture often likes to classify as social “norms” which are determined and shaped by our environment in different societies and timepoints in our history. While much of this is true to an extent, the big elephant in the room is the part of our greed which is DNA-based: it simply cannot be tackled.

Of course, this is not good news when it comes to addressing the apocalyptic catastrophe we have in store for this planet. Implementing any of the myriad of already existing solutions for stopping our self-destruction would require us being able to step outside of the context of economic growth and exploitation, which is so paramount to our identity. We simply lack the faculties to do this, and proof of this is that the more solutions to climate change emerge, the more conscious our discussions become on what it is we need to urgently do, the more obstinate our resistance grows towards implementing any of it. Our greedy personal survival instinct is much stronger than any rational or technological solution which benefits the greater society or ecosystem. Are we introspective enough to recognize this, rise above it and begin to cultivate the mental tools we desperately need, despite this pre-disposition? It is a question of nature vs. nurture, and nature is overwhelmingly winning thus far, hands down, for the overwhelming duration of our history. Addressing climate change and the ecological apocalypse is not an issue of yet another technology or increased processing power, these have both run their course. It is an issue of truly, genuinely claiming our own destiny, for the very first time in our 200,000 years of existence as modern humans. The expectation is almost impossible, as much of humanity does not even believe we are responsible for what is happening. Those who accept no responsibility have already given up on their potential to make a difference in the course of events.

It is of course a profound disappointment, not to mention a paradox, that evolution didn’t know any better than select for some of the most ecocidal attributes in humans. But evolution is not an infallible process. Its drawback is that it can only operate based on current wisdom, that is, what it knows at the time of mutation. It is always completely oblivious to the future. We evolved in an era of abundance on the planet, which is not the case today. New evolutionary mutations, new species of humans are needed urgently in this new, depleted environment we have created. The life forms that evolve after we’ve wrecked Earth will probably have no choice but to be a bit more thrifty, at least for the first few million years. As far as humans go, we cannot simply redesign ourselves like a new iphone version. Evolution is a cumulative process and DNA code can only be amended, not rewritten. We have gone too far down the evolutionary path to remove greed out of our biological system. Crocodiles are much more ecological in comparison: they can go without a meal for 12 months, and don’t even get grumpy about it. They have more patience and Zen wisdom than our own Dalai Lama.

I know that many philosophers, environmental activists and economists will disagree with me. They believe that we have the power vested in us to take control of our destiny. I wholeheartedly hope that they are right, and that I am very wrong, but I come to this conversation from a biology perspective, and biology eats philosophy, economics and social theory for breakfast any day. Biology is the raw blood and bones of who we really are. Our hormones and our “wiring” do determine much of our behavior, unfortunately.

Look at today’s world. Despite all of this technology and sophisticated civilization, do we really think any of us are in charge of our lives? The same survival instincts still rule at large, the same irresistible “lifeforce” within each organism to greedily appropriate as much resource from its environment as it possibly can. The difference between humans and other species is that greed for us is as much an instinct, as it is an institutionalized, perennialized and sophisticated economic system that controls every aspect of our daily needs, and every corresponding natural resource catering to these. The irresistible survival instinct that all species have is, in the case of humans, harnessed and monetized by an organized economic system that has become impossible to escape, unless one goes off-grid and completely checks out of society. As an organized industrial society, we have long ago outsourced our future to this economic system, which supersedes any national or global political entity.

What is also unique to our species is that the survival of this economic system has become more important than the survival of humanity. The system only cares about propagating itself, and it does this by farming more humans and creating more consumer needs in order to increase its revenue. We are all strongly encouraged, and with the utmost urgency, to keep on consuming, polluting and having more children. Not for our benefit, but solely to prevent this toxic, unsustainable capitalist system from collapsing into itself any earlier than it will anyway. The industrial revolution, institutionalization of society and digital marketing all evolved with the same, common goal: to scale up consumption and create easy-to-manage identical humans, who all helplessly depend on this system like a hospital patient hypodermically connected to a drip feed. Modern human life is as unnatural as that of a chicken, living and dying under electric light in a chicken factory. We have relinquished control of our lives long ago to this factory, addicted to its hallucinogenic drugs and growth hormones and not knowing any better. Moreover, this system is completely watertight. There is absolutely no escape. The “chicken humans” do not even know what free-range means, growing up in a cultural context which legitimizes a completely artificial life, yet one that feels vividly real to all of us, given that it is the only reality we have ever known of.

From this dystopian but pragmatic perspective, human civilization is technically no longer run by humans. It is run by profit and algorithms, both completely selfish, non-human entities that have zero ethics or social and environmental conscience (arguably we lack these as well). Human or other life therefore already has no value within this matrix. We have effectively been hijacked, turned into working zombies, simply so that this system can continue, regardless of our own well-being or future. Just like true zombies, we have no idea that we are technically dead.

This system would have made sense to an extent, if at least it was a sustainable economic model that could continue into the future, securing our survival within a mutually parasitic/symbiotic relationship. But it isn’t, as it is based on the exponential leveraging of the very resources which it destroys. It is exhausting its own fuel, and it does so at an accelerating rate, much like stock market derivative instruments which rely on fake money. All of Earth, including its beings, resources, climate systems and all of humanity, is being parasitically exploited by a non-human, semi-sentient, self-destructive Ponzi scheme entity we shallowly call capitalism. It is now in full control of our lives, and of the planet’s resources. This is a sure death sentence for human civilisation, a large proportion of biological life on Earth, and, depending how bad things get, a significant hurdle to any new complex life forms who may try to emerge one day out of the planet’s radioactive ashes.

The system of course has evolved to give us the impression that we DO have full control and choice over our lives. But both the list of choices as well as the decision options are limited and prescribed. They represent different flavors of the same option, which aims to maximize returns for an economic system addicted to profit. Sentenced by birth to be stakeholders of this scheme, we are purposely miseducated and groomed to become greedy, insatiable consumers, running around all day working, purchasing, paying bills and destroying Earth in the process. We have not simply lost any rudimentary control over our lives, but our own lives simply do not matter. It is the preservation of the hard, cold profit indexes of the economic system that matters, and which all of us work for.

This Ponzi scheme of “wealth creation for wealth creation’s sake” has been an Armageddon of natural wealth destruction for the planet so far. Most of us are just not able to see it, as we think we were getting something out of it for ourselves. In reality, we abandoned all 8 million other species of this planet when we signed under the dotted line to join the ranks of this Ponzi scheme corporation, forgetting that we are one of these 8 million species ourselves. Ironically, the better the profit numbers look, the poorer we become, eventually stealing from each other in an oversubscribed betting scheme that is heading for collapse. We, collectively the stakeholders, will of course pay the full price. As for the “system”, it is non-biological, non-sentient, and will simply hibernate until the next big civilization it manages to hitch a ride with.

Climate Realism not Doomerism

A critique of the WaPo article : Why climate ‘doomers’ are replacing climate ‘deniers’


An article called “Why climate “doomers” are replacing climate “deniers” ” by Shannon Osaka was published on March 24th 2023 in the WaPo. I consider myself to be somewhat of a climate doomer so I thought it would be interesting to see what they had to say about “doomers”.

The article starts with the story of a young man, Sean Youra, who learns the truth about climate change, we are basically screwed, it’s too late, climate change is going to destroy the world as we know it. But apparently, according to “scientists and experts”, his discoveries are just “defeatism”, which could “undermine efforts to take action” and “may be just as dangerous as climate denial.”

Really? I’d be interested to learn how these efforts can change the fact that the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is now above 500ppm CO2e, which will warm the planet by about 10°C in the long term, according to the latest paper by James Hansen.

We are then introduced to Zeke Hausfauther, a contributor to the IPCC report, who says “It’s fair to say that recently many of us climate scientists have spent more time arguing with the doomers than with the deniers”. I dug a little to learn more about the fellow. Zeke is the typical paid climate scientist who spreads absolute non-sense, like the myth that “climate change stops at net zero”.

I recently wrote a thread on this subreddit debunking this myth. The gist of it is that the biggest contributor to climate change are the 1 trillion tons of CO2 already in the atmosphere, not current emissions. It can sound counter intuitive, but current emissions are keeping us cool because burning fossil fuels also produce aerosols which cool the planet by about 1°C. But unlike greenhouse gas, who stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, aerosols only stay there for a few days/weeks. Net zero will therefore accelerate global warming and not stop it. Net zero is not even possible anyways since just to feed 8 billion people, you need fertilizers made with fossil fuels. And like we saw above, with current GHG concentrations, 10°C of warming are locked in.

We are then introduced to Guy McPherson, with whom many here must be familiar with. Guy claims that humans will be extinct within 10 years. I don’t want to enter in a debate about this claim or the person behind the quote, but knowing how much global warming there is in the pipeline, even if it’s not in 10 years, is it that crazy to believe that humanity won’t make it?

She then describes Guy McPherson as the type of conspiracy theorist who claim that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is downplaying the seriousness of the issue. Is it even a conspiracy theory at this point? The IPCC has consistently been downplaying the pace and severity of climate change. One good example from the link I just shared : “The IPCC has always confidently projected that the Arctic ice sheet was safe at least until 2050 or well beyond 2100.” How is that going?

We are then introduced to a man called Andrew Smith. I’ll leave the full quote because I believe that Andrew is completely right, and he is probably the sanest person quoted in this article.

Andrew Smith, a retired engineer from Yorkshire, England, is slightly turned off by the term “doomer.” It provokes, he says, a sense of being on the fringes of society, or visions of doomsday preppers filling their bunkers with canned food. “For me, a climate doomer is simply a person who’s taken a look at the peer-reviewed science, taken stock of the natural world around them, and come to a conclusion,” he wrote in a message via Twitter. Smith believes that the world is on track to warm 4 to 8 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial times.

The author then mentions 2018 as the year that doom really started spreading, with the strikes from Greta Thunberg, protests from Extinction Rebellion, the publication of Deep Adaption by Jem Bendell – I somewhat agree with this, it’s the time when I started opening my eyes too.

That same year, the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C was published too. The author quotes Hausfather again regarding that report, who says that “part of the problem is that climate targets — say, the goal to limit warming to 1.5C — have become interpreted by the public as climate thresholds, which would drive the planet into a “hothouse” state. In fact, scientists don’t believe there is anything unique about that temperature that will cause runaway tipping points; the landmark IPCC report merely aimed to show the risks of bad impacts are much higher at 2C than at 1.5.”

Again, Hausfather is spreading nonsense. First off, it's not possible to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. Climate change is driven by GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. The study of paleoclimates has clearly shown that. During the Pliocene, 3 millions years ago, GHG concentrations were around 400ppm CO2e and temperatures were around 3-4°c higher. We are now at more than 500ppm CO2e, why does he think it’s possible to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C?

The 1.5°C and 2°C objectives are an invention by people like William Nordhaus, an American economist from Yale University. They have no basis in science, it’s all based on what he thought capitalism could get away with. The idea was that we were only at 1°C of warming, that we still had a “carbon budget” and that we could keep emitting greenhouse gas for a while, for the sake of economic growth. He even got a Nobel Prize for economics in 2018 for being such a good defender of the status quo.

Funnily enough, Hausfather is a fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, founded by no other than Ted Nordhaus, William’s nephew. The Breakthrough Institute advocates for technological development, and increasing economic growth, through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. While people are starting to cook to death, the Nordhaus family keeps its priorities straight : infinite economic growth!

The author then quotes, Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute, who has said that while humans probably won’t go extinct due to climate change, “not going extinct” is a low bar. I hope that Kate has some solid advice for surviving in a +10°C world, because I frankly don’t. It’s funny that it’s pretty much always people with kids like Kate who spread hopium. I guess it’s easier than telling your kid that all they will ever know is a dying world?

At the end, we learn that Youra corrected his way, rejected doomerism and embraced hopium, with congratulations from the Washington Post.

Now here is my advice. I don’t know how long civilization or humanity have, or how exactly this will end, but I can see the ship going down with the next few years or decades. We are beyond screwed. The first step is to accept this reality. You may feel terrorized by this, you may feel numb, powerless, and it’s a completely normal reaction to have, many have gone through this in this space. Then it’s up to you to decide what you want to do with the time you have left. I would personally recommend not having kids, preparing at least a little, both physically (storing food, water, etc.) and mentally, not working too hard, and just doing what you enjoy most while you can.

R.I.P. Will Steffen

Will Steffen’s crucial climate ideas on “Hothouse Earth”, tipping cascades and non-linearity. David Spratt, Climate Code Red. Feb. 1, 2023.

(go to Spratt's article at Climate Code Red for active links)


The eminent Australian climate scientist, and former Labor government advisor and head of climate at ANU, Will Steffen, who died early this week from complications following cancer surgery, will be remembered for some of the big, crucial ideas he and his collaborators contributed to the understanding of the Earth System, particularly planetary boundaries, climate tipping point vulnerabilities and cascades, risk and nonlinearity, and the “Hothouse Earth” scenario.

Particularly in the last few years, Steffen was very clear and forthright in communicating the threat and the dynamics of the climate system, and the trajectory towards collapse:

"Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse … That is, the intervention time we have left has, in many cases, shrunk to levels that are shorter than the time it would take to transition to a more sustainable system.”

More recently, Steffen and others asked:

“Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe.”

And in a recent book chapter, "The Earth System, the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene", he recognised that climate change was already dangerous:

"It is clear from observations of climate change-related impacts in Australia alone – the massive bushfires of the 2019–2020 Black Summer; the third mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in only 5 years; and long-term cool-season drying of the country’s southeast agricultural zone – that even a 1.1 °C temperature rise has put us into a dangerous level of climate change.”

Steffen was the key scientific climate advisor to the 2007-2013 Australian Labor government. In that role I often disagreed with his political advocacy, and told him so. Will’s advocacy stuck pretty rigidly to the 2°C, 450-ppm-CO2 goal that was de rigueur in global and national policy-making circles in those days, even as the science was already clear that it was a dangerous goal, and Jim Hansen had persuasively outlined the case for a goal of under 350 ppm, which had been adopted around the world by some more progressive parts of the climate movement.

But Steffen was far from alone amongst scientists around the world who become jammed between politics and science, in the struggle for balance between research knowledge and wanting, or sounding, to be politically relevant to governments either in denial or unwilling to grasp the size of the task.

At the same time, Steffen was keenly aware in 2008 that “the scientific community is underestimating the speed at which the climate is changing”, warning that the world's sea levels could rise by up to four metres by the end of the century.

And whilst Ross Garnaut’s 2008 report for Labor on climate change had contemplated the 450 ppm and 550 ppm goals (with short-term warming of around 2°C and 3°C respectively), Steffen in a 2009 report for the climate change department had recognised that 550 ppm (a doubling of the pre-industrial CO2 level) could lead to 6°C of warming:

“... when ice extent is treated not as a forcing but as a climate system response, so that both fast and slow feedbacks are included, the climate sensitivity approximately doubles (Hansen et al. 2008). Therefore, the eventual temperature rise in response to a doubling of CO2 is at least 3C and likely up to 6C, depending on the behaviour of the slow feedbacks.”

Many scientists and collaborators have already expressed their sorrow at the death of Will Steffen and paid tribute to his legacy, for example here and here and here.

Steffen’s passing is a great loss to climate understanding and advocacy in Australia, and to the research community at a global level. I will remember his work particularly for publications over the last fifteen years that dealt with system-level analysis of climate change, boundaries, risks and dynamics. In no particular order, some key papers and contributions in which he was either lead author or a co-author include the following:


1. “Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against” (2020)

Authored by Timothy Lenton, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, this paper was the first peer-reviewed paper (to my knowledge) to recognise the climate emergency as constituted by existential risks: “We are in a climate emergency… this is an existential threat to civilization” and “the evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute”.

The paper pointed to “biosphere tipping points which can trigger abrupt carbon release back to the atmosphere.. Permafrost across the Arctic is beginning to irreversibly thaw and release carbon dioxide and methane… the boreal forest in the subarctic is increasingly vulnerable.”

The authors said that:

“the clearest emergency would be if we were approaching a global cascade of tipping points that led to a new, less habitable, ‘hothouse’ climate state. Interactions could happen through ocean and atmospheric circulation or through feedbacks that increase greenhouse-gas levels and global temperature. Alternatively, strong cloud feedbacks could cause a global tipping point. We argue that cascading effects might be common. Research last year analysed 30 types of regime shift spanning physical climate and ecological systems... This indicated that exceeding tipping points in one system can increase the risk of crossing them in others. Such links were found for 45% of possible interactions. In our view, examples are starting to be observed.”

The conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that the threat, the risks, are overwhelming. And it is a slap to conventional economic modelling of climate risks, when they write that:

“If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization. No amount of economic cost–benefit analysis is going to help us. We need to change our approach to the climate problem.”

2. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” (2018)

With Steffen as lead author, this paper known colloquially as the “Hothouse Earth” paper, and one that captured the public imagination, was downloaded 270,000 times in just the first few days after publication.

A “Hothouse Earth” scenario is described, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining (without further human perturbations). This “Hothouse Earth” planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even in the 1.5°C-2°C range.

Steffen also said that: “even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5°C to 2.0°C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway.”

In other words, even 1.5°C of warming could be so dangerous that further warming would become self-sustaining; a warning seemingly ignored by policymakers and most advocates.


3. Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios (2022)

This paper published last year by ten authors, including Steffen, cannot be underestimated in bringing together a high-level analysis of the need for climate research to focus on the worse-case high-end possibilities:

• “Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios.” We know that temperature rise has “fat tails”: low-probability, high-impact extreme outcomes. Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises “are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.” Thus “a thorough risk assessment would need to consider how risks spread, interact, amplify, and are aggravated by human responses”.
• “Climate damages are likely to be nonlinear” and result in an even larger risk tail. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high greenhouse concentrations that are often missing from models.” There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state [including] “recent simulations suggest that stratocumulus cloud decks might abruptly be lost at CO2 concentrations that could be approached by the end of the century, causing an additional ∼8 °C global warming. Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.”
• Feedbacks and future warming: Declining emissions does not rule out … extreme climate change [due to] feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high greenhouse concentrations that are often missing from models. Examples include Arctic permafrost thawing that releases methane and CO2 , carbon loss due to intense droughts and fires in the Amazon, and the apparent slowing of dampening feedbacks such as natural carbon sink capacity. These are likely to not be proportional to warming… instead, abrupt and/or irreversible changes may be triggered at a temperature threshold. Particularly worrying is a “tipping cascade” in which multiple tipping elements interact in such a way that tipping one threshold increases the likelihood of tipping another.

4. "A safe operating space for humanity" (2009)

Led by John Rockstrom and Will Steffen, with 27 others (including Hansen and Schellnhuber), this landmark paper proposed that a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide should not exceed 350 ppm:

"We propose that human changes to atmospheric CO2 concentrations should not exceed 350 parts per million by volume, and that radiative forcing should not exceed 1 watt per square metre above pre-industrial levels. Transgressing these boundaries will increase the risk of irreversible climate change, such as the loss of major ice sheets, accelerated sea-level rise and abrupt shifts in forest and agricultural systems. Current CO2 concentration stands at 387 p.p.m.v. and the change in radiative forcing is 1.5 watts per square metre. There are at least three reasons for our proposed climate boundary. First, current climate models may significantly underestimate the severity of long-term climate change for a given concentration of greenhouse gases. Most models suggest that a doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentration will lead to a global temperature rise of about 3°C (with a probable uncertainty range of 2–4.5°C) once the climate has regained equilibrium. But these models do not include long-term reinforcing feedback processes that further warm the climate, such as decreases in the surface area of ice cover or changes in the distribution of vegetation. If these slow feedbacks are included, doubling CO2 levels gives an eventual temperature increase of 6°C (with a probable uncertainty range of 4–8°C). This would threaten the ecological life-support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and would severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies."

5. “Human impacts on planetary boundaries amplified by Earth system interactions” (2020)

In this paper, Lade, Steffen et al surveyed and provisionally quantified interactions between the Earth system processes represented by the planetary boundaries and investigated their consequences for sustainability governance and identified a dense network of interactions between the planetary boundaries. The resulting cascades and feedbacks predominantly amplify human impacts on the Earth system and thereby shrink the safe operating space for future human impacts on the Earth system. The three key findings for policymakers were:

• Interactions are crucial to understanding the planetary boundaries and humanity’s impacts upon them. For example, biophysically-mediated interactions have almost doubled direct human impacts on the planetary boundaries.
• Most interactions we found were amplifying, meaning that impacts on one planetary boundary lead to increased impacts on other planetary boundaries. Cascading of human actions through multiple components of the Earth system complicates governance of the Earth system. On the other hand, these interactions offer substantial scope for synergies: if impacts on one planetary boundary are decreased, impacts on other planetary boundaries may also lessen.
• Interactions between planetary boundaries lead to trade-offs between the boundaries. For example, interactions between agricultural activity and carbon emissions mean that high levels of both cannot be maintained. On the other hand, these trade-offs offer humanity some freedom in choosing how to navigate to a safe operating space.

6. Model limitations

Will Steffen was clear about the limitations of models and a quantification fetish when dealing with hard-to-project non-linear change and “Hothouse Earth” possibilities, for example in this Guardian article from 2018:

“I think the dominant linear, deterministic framework for assessing climate change is flawed, especially at higher levels of temperature rise. So, yes, model projections using models that don’t include these processes indeed become less useful at higher temperature levels. Or, as my co-author John Schellnhuber says, we are making a big mistake when we think we can ‘park’ the Earth System at any given temperature rise – say 2°C – and expect it to stay there”.

“Even at the current level of warming of about 1°C above pre-industrial, we may have already crossed a tipping point for one of the feedback processes (Arctic summer sea ice), and we see instabilities in others – permafrost melting, Amazon forest dieback, boreal forest dieback and weakening of land and ocean physiological carbon sinks. And we emphasise that these processes are not linear and often have built-in feedback processes that generate tipping point behaviour. For example, for melting permafrost, the chemical process that decomposes the peat generates heat itself, which leads to further melting and so on.”

This is important because so much policymaking has been based on a goal of climate getting towards 2°C and then assuming that could become stable, when in fact the paleoclimate history suggest that 2°C is not a point of system stability, but a signpost on the road to a much hotter 3–4°C outcome.

And with William Knorr in The Conversation, Steffen warned that due to model limitations, we will not know exactly how the climate crisis will unfold until it’s too late.

Finally, Steffen’s capacity to communicate clearly and succinctly is well encapsulated in an interview with The Intercept when he said getting greenhouse gas emissions down fast has to be “the primary target of policy and economics” with something “like wartime footing”.

That sounded to me like a very short, effective description of the climate emergency.

Fabio Vighi on Senile Economics

please see his site for more of his writing, but this piece was too good not to re-post in its entirety: 

Fabio Vighi: Senile Economics: Bubble Ontology and the Pull of Gravity

What are the drivers of senile capitalism? I will list five of them in no particular order, and then proceed to discuss their interconnections:

1. Debt. The only road into the capitalist future continues to be signposted by liquidity creation programmes. Creating cash “out of nothing”, and setting it in motion as credit, is the elementary monetary strategy that keeps our societies from staring into the abyss – like the cartoon character who, having run off the edge of a cliff, floats in mid-air before acknowledging gravity. However, the pull of gravity is now irresistible, and the descent has begun with a violent bout of currency devaluation.
2. Bubbles. Financial bubbles, inflated by cheap credit feeding a delusional mechanism of perpetual motion, are the only meaningful measure of wealth-production left. Nothing but keeping the bubbles from popping matters to the minions of the “beautiful machine”. While the financialised economy balloons away from its social bond, human existence turns into collateral for the speculative algorithm.
3. Controlled demolition. Wage dumping and downward competition for fewer and fewer jobs is the necessary other side of the bubble paradigm. For the speculative markets to persist, the “work society” must be gradually downsized, since today’s artificially inflated financial assets and real demand are mutually exclusive. Simply put: Main Street is a liability for Wall Street, which is why consumer capitalism is now morphing into the management of collective immiseration.
4. Emergencies. Our existential condition during the terminal phase of bubble-to-bubble capitalism is an intrinsically terroristic meta-emergency ideology, a permacrisis that must accompany us from cradle to grave. In this respect, the pseudo-pandemic of 2020 was only the icebreaker. Let us not delude ourselves: a world that is set on defending so fanatically its own implosion has many more shockers in store for us.
5. Manipulation. Media propaganda in the age of digital hyper-connectivity comes naturally, so it is only natural that senile capitalism, sensing its collapse, makes the most of it. A stubborn confluence of blind stupidity and cynical calculation is at work here. As George Orwell predicted well before the internet, it comes down to telling lies while believing them: ‘The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.’[i] Jean Baudrillard called the result of this process ‘hyper-reality’.

Capital’s perpetual-motion machine

Having run out of monetary tricks, the financial elites have painted themselves into a corner. The debt-based speculative system they have pumped for decades through money printing and artificial suppression of interest rates can no longer be sustained without significant “collateral damage”. Bourgeois economic theory’s illusion that money can move autonomously, as if through a perpetual motion machine, is finally being exposed. The current inflationary spike is the first obvious symptom of a cancerous disease rapidly spreading through the social body, forcing a large share of the population – including the increasingly insolvent middle classes – to choose between putting food on the table and paying the bills. By now it should be sufficiently clear that any money-creation programme – which are desperately needed to prop up the financial sector – will cause further erosion of purchasing power, therefore requiring new creative methods to control the impoverished masses. The alternative to this scenario is for Central Banks to keep on raising rates until the market bubbles pop – which would get us straight to the hard-landing scenario.

The illusion of financial perpetual motion works as follows: the expansion of credit pulls money into risk assets whose valuation grows as demand increases; soaring financial assets then serve as collateral for more borrowing, setting in motion a feedback loop where credit feeds asset valuation feeding collateral feeding credit. Under the illusion of eternal liquidity expansion, leveraging capital to buy assets to use as collateral for more credit is all that matters. And as long as the self-fulfilling loop holds, debt-service obligations can be rolled over. But if interest rates rise and collateral drops in value, suddenly the borrower begins to sweat and starts selling assets, which soon turns into herd behaviour. With the deterioration of collateral, assets are at risk of dropping below the outstanding debt, which causes liquidity to dry up and, eventually, bubbles to pop. This is the stage we are approaching, where the fake wealth-creation loop reverts into a death spiral: asset valuations fall, collateral shrinks, credit collapses. The paradox of our time is that the speculative money inflating the bubbles has no real value substance; but if the bubbles burst, all hell breaks loose.

It is worth reminding ourselves that in the globalised West we have already pawned everything we own. That is to say, we (states, businesses, families) own nothing but our debt, which is falling underwater. And, as the global casino threatens to go bankrupt, our puppet masters understand all too well that they must act swiftly if they are to retain power and privileges. Crucially, they know that their only chance to continue to flood the markets with the necessary amounts of artificial liquidity requires controlling (through authoritarian measures legitimised by emergencies) the freefall of the real economy as it shrinks into stagflation. Inaugurated in style by the pseudo-pandemic, today this process continues to take place under the coordinated watch of Central Banks, whose rate hikes only tickle inflation but further depress real demand.

In this respect, the recent rise in the cost of energy must also be viewed contextually as part of the wider attempt to decompress a highly flammable system – the equivalent of carefully defusing a bomb. The sanctions to Russia have been a farce and, for Europe, a masochistic exercise from the start, for the simple reason that Russia sells its oil and gas to China at a discount, and China then exports them to Europe at a premium. Similarly, the aim of the corporate-led “fight against climate change” is to impose lower living standards upon those working and middle classes who, until only a couple of years ago, were still lured into embracing the utopia of endless growth and mindless consumption. Ukraine can be seen as today’s tragic symbol of such controlled economic downsizing: thanks to a cynically prolonged proxy war, the country is facing the obliteration of its industrial infrastructure. Significantly, on December 28, 2022 Larry Fink (BlackRock’s CEO) and the deified Volodymir Zelensky agreed to coordinate investment to rebuild Ukraine, confirming the familiar pattern whereby the devastation of an entire society is an opportunity for financial expansion. Here is a reason why the West is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the Ukraine, rather than peace negotiators.

A controlled demolition of demand in the real economy is now essential if the financial aristocracy is to prevent and postpone the deflagration of the speculative bubbles. This means that capital can only self-reproduce by widening the gap between a handful of super-rich owners (the “key financial players”) and the impoverished plebs, who are expected to 1. Own nothing and also be happy; 2. Sacrifice their personal freedoms (including the freedom of speech, increasingly stifled by a grotesquely hyper-regulated cultural discourse); 3. Surrender their right to exist to the State, whose biopolitical role is to administer such right on behalf of transnational capital. Unfortunately, this dark phase of “crisis capitalism” has been vastly underestimated – to use a euphemism – by our “radical” left-wing intelligentsia (from Noam Chomsky to Slavoj Žižek) who, like Pavlov’s dogs, have greeted the “return of the State” as a sign of emancipation. Their reluctance to grasp the elementary nexus between a global economy hooked on growing mountains of credit without substance, and State authoritarianism, suggests they are now embracing a very sinister form of conservatism.

The depressing short-sightedness of the left was particularly painful to observe as the recent global health emergency unfolded. COVID-19 was not the Bubonic plague of the new millennium, but a financial coup enabled by the largest and most spectacular brainwashing operation ever experienced by humanity. It served to hide the fact that the system was infected by terminal sickness, not the global population. Ironically, or predictably, what the left seems unable to accept is that capitalism itself, with all its familiar categories, is fading into obsolescence, and can only fake a life it does not have by mobilising fear to beat the immiserated masses into obedience. COVID-19 was most of all a pandemic of fear, whose damaging consequences on the human mind and body remain unknown. With “vaccines” mandated as a magic bullet (95% efficacy we were told!) against a disease with a 99.8% survival rate, how could anyone fail to smell a rat? By the same token, none of our anti-capitalist gurus felt perturbed when Pfizer admitted they did not have a clue whether their serums actually stopped transmission – when stopping transmission was sold to the public as the indisputable scientific truth behind the discriminatory mandates. Similarly, no outrage when the “Twitter Files” where released (on December 26, 2022), revealing the pressure exerted by US government agencies to manipulate the scientific debate on COVID-19 and silence critical journalism. How far right has the radical left moved if it fails to recognise the criminal sleight of hand of emergency capitalism? By supporting global discrimination and destruction under false ethical pretences, most of today’s left does the job of the right more efficiently than the right itself.

While the awareness of mass deception is now slowly emerging, most people prefer the head-in-the-sand solution: better not to know than question their levels of gullibility. And yet, there is little point recriminating. What instead remains crucial is to remind ourselves that Virus was the invisible shield utilized to avoid a banking & financial crisis that would have put 2008 to shame, while simultaneously ushering in a pan-emergency strategy for the coordinated management of mass impoverishment – not only in the peripheries of the capitalist world, but also in its centre. It is especially revealing that we are now being persuaded to accept the economic freefall as fate: a somewhat mythical stagflation originating in external and largely uncontrollable triggers (the pandemic, war in Ukraine, climate change) rather than in the rotting away of our economic model. In retrospect, one could even appreciate the evil genius of a system that conceals its massive social, economic, and cultural implosion behind a tiny, invisible scapegoat.


Wobbling bubbles

Many critical issues have threatened the global financial casino during 2022. In total, equities and bonds lost more than $30 trillion. The Nasdaq index closed the year at – 33%, its worst performance since 2008. The global volume of negative-yielding debt shrunk from $18.4 trillion in December 2020 to $686 billion in December 2022 (which, despite misleading media reaction, is bad news for the global debt bubble, as it means that bonds are tanking). Naturally, rate hikes are being held responsible for the loss of market value. The latter, however, took place against the backdrop of record-breaking corporate buybacks (which artificially increase share prices while also boosting corporate profits). Ergo, while taking a hit, today’s markets continue to behave like casinos on the Vegas strip, with Central Banks happily playing the House (who always wins). With the Quantitative Tightening regime currently in place, the system is stalling. Yet, the central bankers’ cavalry will return with more sustained monetary injections as soon as deemed necessary – most likely, under the protective shield of the next emergency.

Moreover, if the global liquidity index is now deteriorating fast (after more than a decade of artificial growth) the last day of 2022 registered an all-time high in reverse repo deposits at the New York Fed: $2.5 trillion by 113 counterparties. This means that, as we ordinary people try to figure out how to pay mortgages and bills, investors park inordinate amounts of cash at the Fed as the reverse repo facility guarantees higher returns than market investment (the current repo rate stands at 4.3%). While it would only take a small increase in counterparty risk for this repo business to backfire, it still means that large volumes of insubstantial liquidity, carrying a massive inflationary potential, are trapped in the financial markets, thereby not appearing directly as real demand – precisely the strategy that, since the 1990s, was employed to keep inflation suppressed. However, this stopgap has now passed its use-by date, for the heap of fictitious capital has swollen to a magnitude that can no longer be contained. In fact, it has long started cannibalising the real economy.

For quite some time, global capital has been dancing to a “bubble-to-bubble” tune. Since the start of the millennium our world is captive to the cloning of financial bubbles, from tech to housing to sovereign bonds, each of which depends on frantic liquidity creation and bond rate suppression, courtesy of Central Banks. More importantly, the above is what keeps real capitalist production (i.e., our societies) going. The original logic is therefore inverted: speculative bubbles are now systemic drivers, while in the past they were isolated phenomena both in time and space. Their current ontological character makes them incomparable with, for instance, the Dutch tulip bubble of the 1630s, or the South Sea Ponzi-scheme of 1720 (built on profits from the slave trade), for when those bubbles burst, they gave way to new cycles of real accumulation – i.e., new mass exploitation of labour-force – while today a popping bubble can only morph into another bubble. The main implication is that an enormous share of real production is already part of the speculative process. At the same time, the financial conveyor belt has reached near-total disconnection from the work society. We have been kidnapped by an invisible self-perpetuating mechanism, whose abstraction is so great that its comprehension eludes us.

Let us recap the key point. Bubble inflation requires “hot air” in the form of borrowed liquidity. The lung capacity of the system is its bond market, the place where debt securities are traded. If capital needs to be raised for asset investment, or to finance State expenditure (including wars), bonds are issued, which obliges the issuer to repay their cost at a negotiable maturity date and interest rate. Corporations issue bonds, and so do governments. Our system is now existentially dependent on skyrocketing piles of bonds, through which investors secure the credit they need to speculate in financial markets. Borrowing aggressively in order to invest is the risky strategy known as leverage that makes up the DNA of contemporary ultra-financialised capitalism. In 2019, the bubble economy was, again, on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to toxic derivatives behaving hysterically and interest rates rising steeply in the repo market. COVID-19 was the answer to this cataclysmic risk: a cynical response to a looming financial Armageddon. A recent data dump by the New York Federal Reserve revealed that a total of $48 trillion in term-adjusted cheap loans were given to distressed mega-banks during 2019-2020 – well beyond what the looniest of tinfoil hatters could have possibly imagined. This would not have been achieved without lockdowns and other restrictions helping to ‘insulate the real economy from deterioration in financial conditions’ – to borrow from the BIS paper published in June 2019.

We are now approaching what for bubble-capitalism is an existential moment of truth. The fuse to the next bomb deflagration is the debt market, and it has already been lit. Bonds are no longer “fairly priced” in line with a by-now mythological law of supply and demand. According to this law, when a bond is in high demand, its price rises, while its yield (and therefore its repayment rate) falls; conversely, when bond demand drops, its price also falls, and its yield (and repayment rate) rises. Higher bond rates should provide a release of “hot air” in any asset bubble, for less affordable bonds lead to a liquidity drain. That is to say: the bond market is supposed to blow off steam when bonds carry high rates, thus preventing the economy from overheating. However, the entire financial metaverse is now systematically distorted by Central Banks, who, through the massive liquidity injections of the past decades, have created a Frankenstein monster they can no longer control. The current heavy turbulence in bond markets across the world, with yields showing signs of structural instability, suggests that Central Banks are running out of glue to cover the cracks in the credit-doped system. If in principle there is no end to credit creation, the consequences of uninterrupted artificial asset inflation are no longer manageable through economic policy alone. As COVID-19 should have taught us – including those pseudo leftist academics and intellectuals who have long retreated into the safe haven of “culture wars” – the elites are preparing for total social warfare.

The destructive potential of the debt avalanche is immense, to the point that it can no longer be hidden. Or rather: it is so threatening that it has to be hidden. Last December, the BIS issued a warning relative to a staggering $80 trillion-plus off-balance sheet debt held by financial institutions and funds – an amount greater than the total stocks of dollar-denominated Treasury bills, repo and commercial paper in circulation combined. This is derivative debt that is not being captured through regular statistics: mostly complex speculative instruments like foreign exchange swaps and forwards. The BIS claims that this invisible debt has grown from $55 trillion to $80 trillion in a decade, with daily foreign exchange (FX) swap deals totalling a whopping $5 trillion a day. US financial institutions and pension funds have twice as much FX swap dollar obligations as the amount of dollar debt listed on their balance sheets. Foreign banks have $39 trillion in derivative debts that also are not showing, which amounts to ‘more than 10 times their capital’. This debt burden is a ticking time bomb at the heart of the global economy.

While in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis the Fed claimed it started running stringent stress tests for the Global Systemically Important Banks, the BIS disclosure of undeclared derivative debt brings us back to Alan Greenspan and his Fed Chairmanship from 1987 to 2006, when Wall Street was allowed to build the pile of toxic derivatives which blew up in 2008. That nothing has changed is an open secret, for credit bingeing has been the system’s modus operandi of the last four decades. In an interlocked environment, however, contagion is always lurking. At a time when dollar-denominated debt is more expensive due to rising interest rates, the default of a globally interconnected bank, or a fire sale of financial assets, are concrete possibilities, and so is the ensuing meltdown. For this reason, the system must find reasons to keep itself liquid at all costs, while also managing the consequences, including currency devaluation and recession.

In fact, the only option left for a debt-soaked bubble regime would seem to be currency debasement. As some financial analysts have been forecasting for a while, the prospect we are facing is that the greatest bond heap in history will be washed away by a tsunami of mouse-clicked liquidity. Despite the central bankers’ current hawkish posture, they might soon be forced to destroy their fiat currencies in an attempt to protect the bond markets. Then, a debt bubble morphing into a monetary bubble could pave the way to the widely announced CBDC-based system. In fact, more inflationary money printing is already with us, as evidenced not only by the slowing pace of rate hikes but also by the Fed’s injections of repo liquidity, which already dwarfs Powell’s timid Quantitative Tightening (-2.4% in 2022, compared to +76.7% in 2020 and +18.9% in 2021). The bottom line is that our social bond remains hostage to the astronomical expansion of speculative liquidity. In this respect, the crucial problem faced by transnational entities like the BIS, the WEF, the IMF and the World Bank, is how to save the wobbling bubbles while selling us the story that the contraction of the real economy (which in truth is a slow-motion collapse) is the consequence of an unfortunate series of events.


A sense of perspective

The real paradigm shift within capitalism occurred a few decades ago, when a new type of financial capital emerged, one that is qualitatively different from its precursor.[ii] Since the 1980s, financial abstraction (i.e., speculations on asset prices) is no longer an appendage to a thriving and expanding “real economic abstraction” – the sociohistorical discourse based on the correspondence between a given amount a labour time and a given amount of monetary compensation (wages). Rather, the financial “industry” is now both the driver and the escape route of the social narrative that around five centuries ago founded capitalism – when labour-power first appeared as a commodity exchanged on the market. As discussed above, there is now a growing cleavage between the massively stretched credit chain and the total mass of value originating from labour, which means that keeping up appearances is increasingly problematic. Since 2001 we have seen a huge transfer of liquidity into the bond and real estate markets, generating unprecedented bubbles not only in the US and UK but also in China and Europe. This created a qualitatively new mix between speculative growth and the economy based on the real production and consumption of goods.

For a period of incubation, the escape into the future of insubstantial credit did not generate inflation. Today, however, it is absurd to continue to believe that the mass of fictitious and speculative capital remains trapped in the financial sector. Rather, it has colonized the real world, eroding both our purchasing power and the model of capitalism we still believe we live in. The internal limit to real accumulation acts as an external propeller, pushing capitals toward the virtual space of transnational circulation of financial assets, which is powered by growing stacks of self-cannibalising debt. This is not a pathological corruption of the original capitalist model, but the logical consequence of its structural crisis: the overall fall in the mass of surplus-value is larger than the increase in the relative surplus-value of individual capitals competing with each other through reductions in the cost of labour-power.

This means that the capitalist discourse is now broken, having irreversibly damaged the pillars of its socio-historical narrative. Starting with the Third Industrial Revolution in the 1970s, the productive use of cost-cutting technology has made productive wage labour increasingly redundant, thus inhibiting the creation of new surplus-value and triggering an implosive spiral. Since then, the financial supplement to the work society has turned into its basis and raison d’être. Financialising the economy was the historical answer to the demise of Fordism. Today, our lives remain hostage to the grand illusion that, while making its original formula obsolete, financial capital is capable of turning into a perpetual motion machine. Yet, because global unproductive labour has crossed a critical threshold, currency devaluation is inevitable – an economic shock that is bound to turn into a violent shock for social consciousness in general.

A bubble-system of the current magnitude cannot coexist with real growth, i.e. flourishing mass consumption and mass production. If today’s volume of fictitious capital were to circulate freely in our societies, it would spark hyperinflation – which so far has been exported to the neglected peripheries of the globalised world.[iii] The endgame scenario we are in is the result of the extraordinary growth of credit-dependence during the 20th century, which means that money could not preserve its previous form, i.e. its convertibility into a hard asset. Already WWI showed it was no longer possible to finance a war with gold-backed currency. The increase of debt that came with WWII and the following Fordist boom eventually lead to the decision, in 1971, to abandon the gold standard. At this stage, money lost its substance, something which bourgeois economic theory (or neo-classical economics) could never quite comprehend in its radical implications. In this respect, even Keynesianism was merely an attempt to save capitalism from itself, specifically through deficit spending: more State debt supposed to reignite the labour economy. At the same time, Marxist labour movements never fully assimilated Marx’s critique of value. Instead, they focussed on struggles for redistribution, but always within the ontological horizon of capital. After 1971, money as a “store of value” became a mere convention without objective foundations in the social bond. The logical and inevitable consequence of this loss of value-substance – which under neoliberalism led to the ideology of “jobless growth” – is structural devaluation: either inflation, or a violent deflationary wave triggered by a market crash.

This trend is irreversible. No sector of the economy can reignite real growth and bring us back to something even vaguely similar to the Fordist period, itself already powered by extraordinary injections of State credit. When the Fordist accumulation cycle hit the buffers, no new mass reabsorption of labour could be mobilised, which is why fictitious capital today has achieved ontological status: it compensates for the permanent loss of surplus-value creation. The dream of constant growth sustained by mass consumption is turning into a nightmare, with most of today’s consumers already tapped out. The dystopian capitalist phase we have entered is characterised by productivity without productive labour, which means that the work society as a whole is dying. Many businesses, of course, will continue to compete by making use of increasingly sophisticated technologies, while exploiting the immiserated workforce; but the social bond organised around wage labour can only continue to disintegrate.

Gaining a sense of critical perspective on the implosion of senile capitalism requires, as a fundamental precondition, resisting the onslaught of deception and distraction relentlessly churned out by the info-sphere. Mainstream media will never inform us about the causes of a structurally insolvent economy, for the simple reason that they are a branch of that bankrupt system. On the contrary, they will try to persuade us to look elsewhere: pandemics, wars, cultural prejudices, political scandals, natural catastrophes, and so on. While the reactive media can no longer hide the downfall, they have learnt to blame it on exogenous events. In truth, our economic predicament is the second instalment of the 2008 crisis, part of a systemic collapse so acute that its cause is now systematically displaced on ideologically manipulated, or fittingly manufactured, global emergencies.

Arguably, understanding our condition requires the effort of thinking against ourselves, since, as a rule, a subject who ‘organically belongs to a civilization cannot identify the nature of the disease which undermines it.’[iv] Conformity and wilful ignorance are infinitely more contagious than the strength needed to overcome the biases of our time. Most of us are determined to remain asleep, preferring to believe that what we are experiencing is only a temporary glitch. Yet, we must gather the courage to see through the smokescreen that hides the decaying substance of our world. Defensive reasoning crushes the vitality of thought. It colonizes not only consciousness, but especially our unconscious attachments to the obsolete categories of a collapsing civilisation.

Every civilisation immunises itself by drawing a line between its own constituent order and a malevolent other. Evil-doing must be projected outside the dominant social body if the latter is to retain the illusion of its consistency. Yet, a global civilisation on the verge of defaulting on its own value (the self-valorising value called capital) can no longer rely solely on fighting localised enemies – it must unleash global and ubiquitous villains. This is why, having replaced the pandemic, the Ukrainian war was from the start portrayed as a kind of synecdoche for global conflict: we must constantly be reminded that a “Dr Strangelove moment” is always behind the corner. The fear of Virus has been replaced by the Doomsday Clock. This way, the war really turns into the ideal continuation of Covid: an ideological screen dissimulating the painful everyday reality around us, from recession to structural inflation and mass corporation layoffs. Furthermore, the war allows both monetary expansion by financing the military-industrial complex, as well as systemic self-immunization via re-drawing the line between us (morally and culturally superior) and them (the barbarians). In this respect, the geopolitical tension between the US-led globalized Western model and the multipolar world in the making (BRICS+) is, strictly speaking, an effect of the ongoing economic collapse. The “new Cold War” in the making has already been factored-in, as none other than Morgan Stanley claim that rewiring for a multipolar order is now a priority.

Regardless of where you are on the geopolitical chessboard, the common problem faced by every capitalist state and its overseeing transnational aristocracy is, and will continue to be, how to control the waves of mass discontent stemming from increased immiseration. We only need to browse the recent G20 Bali declaration, or the latest WEF programme at Davos, to see that the elites’ main concern is to make sure the growing levels of global poverty are met with “global solutions” ranging from digital IDs linked to vaccination programmes, to the releasing of Central Bank Digital Currencies. Global cooperation is the ideological catchphrase of the jet-setting ultra-rich who seek to regiment the increasingly stagnant world population. In this regard, the neo-feudal spirit of our time is best captured by the “lockdown model”: on the one hand, we tend to forget that millions of socially excluded humans were already living under “lockdown conditions” before the pandemic, confined to suburban slums and rural peripheries of the world, without access to work and basic goods; on the other hand, iterations of the lockdown model will be extended to most of us in the near future, allegedly to protect us from global threats.

It is crucial, then, to realise that we are facing total socioeconomic breakdown. Those who drive the financial gravy train will continue to promote conflicts and divisions of all kind to hide systemic collapse. Every conflict, geopolitical or otherwise, begins and ends within “crisis capitalism”. The demise of Socialism in the 1980s lifted the veil of Maya. Since then, as a Buddhist would say, “duality is a delusion”: there is only One socioeconomic dogma, and it is no longer working. Keeping consumer capitalism alive while also expanding debt toward infinity is now impossible. The pile of IOUs is reaching beyond what we own as collateral (essentially, our assets, labour power, and lives) while fiat currencies have long started their journey to the land of rubbish. The entire banking system is closing in on folding, which is why it so desperately needs new inflationary liquidity to keep afloat. The Great Reset is our owners’ authoritarian attempt to respond to this systemic threat by taking control of the collateral (our lives) and remain in the driving seat. All the rest is perception management.

Radagast: A fata morgana in the desert of the real

Radagast: A fata morgana in the desert of the real

The nice thing about 9/11 is that it taught a lot of people never to trust anything their government is involved in ever again. The reward for that lifelong distrust you were immunized with came in 2021. Am I saying it’s an inside job? Before psychedelics I would say yes. Now I would say: 9/11 happened in your head. There’s no objective reality, it’s all in the eye of the beholder and you’re (un)lucky enough to have ended up in synch with mine.

And you might say I should watch some 2 hour documentary that proves who did it. But here’s the thing: They caught FSB agents in Russia with explosives in an apartment complex, yet you can’t PROVE that the FSB caused the Russian apartment complex bombings. And in a world where you can’t prove the FSB committed a terrorist attack, after the FSB agents were caught planting explosives in an apartment complex, what chance do you have to prove that Cheney and the PNAC gang had those planes fly into those buildings?? It’s a fool’s errand.

The point is: Physical matter doesn’t determine what happened. Rather, these are the constraints within which we, the conscious observers, have to maneuver. And from your angle it’s obvious what happened, but that can only ever tell us something about you. It’s a Rorschach test: It’s not designed to have a single correct answer.

It’s like the wave-particle duality. Is it a wave, is it a particle? It’s both as long as we don’t force the function to collapse through sufficiently careful observation. And events like 9/11 or the Russian apartment bombings are forever in that grey zone, where it looks like a particle, but it might just be a wave.

The sufficiently paranoid conspiracy theorist will point out that the attacks were FORESHADOWED! Look at Neo’s passport in the Matrix! It expires on 9/11!

Or look at that Lone Gunman episode, where the government flies a plane into the WTC to increase defense spending!

Or look at how the Simpsons predicted 9/11!

So what happens is you find yourself expanding your conspiratorial vision of the world. Apparently these people insist on giving you hints. As part of their Satanic religion, they must foreshadow what they’re going to do. And they are dedicated enough that a Lone gunman Episode is insufficient, the SImpsons have to be made complicit too.

But what I would argue, rather than calling you crazy, is that you haven’t expanded your paranoid view of the world enough yet. You’re looking for an agent here within this world. That’s the mistake. It’s something that designs this reality you experience, that’s toying with you. It’s pulling your legs, never quite giving you concrete proof of what’s going on, forever keeping you guessing, forever keeping you deeply suspicious, but unable to prove that something is not adding up. And when it decides to troll you through the Matrix out of all possible movies, it’s just laughing in your face.

You’re stuck with a society that expects you to believe a completely ridiculous story, about the mightiest nation in the world that has two of its skycrapers brought down by a guy in a cave in Afghanistan who decides a bunch of dudes have to hijack some airplanes and fly them into the buildings. Buildings that were bought by a guy a few weeks before, who then went on to sue his insurer to insist the two buildings being hit by airplanes constitute two separate terrorist attacks and thus entitle him to double the money. What actually happened on 9/11 appears more like a parody of a conspiracy, than as an actual conspiracy.

The Pentagon somehow announces the day before a couple of trillion dollars are unaccounted for. The people involved in the accounting are blown up the next day by an airplane strike into a section of the building that was recently reinforced.

The top dogs in government write a creepy document where they explain how they wish to build an American empire, for which they will need a “new pearl harbor” to pull the whole thing off. And they even go around, giving speeches where they warn about such a surprise event:

And simultaneously, at the end of the day you’re just unable to poke a sufficiently strong hole in this whole thing to deflate it, the kind of big hole that allows you to move on with your life. Your choice is: Either ignore it like all the normies do, or turn yourself into a social pariah by digging and digging and digging in an attempt to find that one silver bullet that allows you to finally put the whole thing to rest. But you won’t find it. It’s a rabbit hole, filled with quicksand at the bottom.

And the mistake you make, is that you play along in the game. You signed up to go on the fool’s journey. Like a young farmhand who has his colleagues ask him to get the strawberry ladder, they’re going to keep the game going as long as you’ll play along with it: “Where’s the strawberry ladder?” “Oh haha it was out there somewhere in the attic, see if you can get Joe to get it for you, ask him about it.”

Because the real game here, is metaphysical. You’re looking for something concrete, here in this world. Something you can grab and hold and show to someone else: “Look, this type of metal doesn’t create this kind of crystalic structures until 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, which JET FUEL CAN’T REACH!” And so you’re like the young farmhand looking for the strawberry ladder. As long as you play the game, your coworkers will help you out in search of the strawberry ladder.

The joke is that you won’t find it here in this world. I’ll never find that video again that proves Timothy McVeigh was still in the army months after he had supposedly quit, it was on Youtube, it was deleted and nobody bothered to back it up. You’ll never find that video that proves the controlled demolition beyond a doubt. And http://archive.org won’t have that news article you seek. But if you’re naive enough to play along, this world will happily keep you forever searching, searching for your very own strawberry ladder.

It’s a supernatural event. 9/11 happened in your brain and what really happened is in the sight of the beholder. There is no objective answer, because there is no objective reality. It’s all subjective. From time to time events happen, events where us mere mortals can’t agree on what took place.

What 9/11 is, is the desert of the real. When Slavoj Zizek wrote Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he was quoting Morpheus in the Matrix. And Morpheus, was referencing Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. A Simulacra, according to Baudrillard, is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

To Baudrillard, we live in a world of symbols, symbols which serve to obscure the fact that reality, insofar as it may even exist, is irrelevant to our lived day to day experience. So it is with 9/11. What actually happened on 9/11 is irrelevant, what matters for our lived experience is what it became as a symbol. And when you try to find out what really happened, when you try to replace their symbol with that of your own, first you will encounter a conspiracy, but as you dig deeper, you will merely encounter a void.

These events are like forks on the road. And as our boats split off into different directions on the river, we try to hold hands, we try to pull each other back towards our direction: “Look at this obscure Youtube video I found! This proves it beyond a doubt! Your fact-checkers have nothing to say about it!”

But again, it’s a fool’s errand: The boats will be pulled apart. The forks on the road exist for a reason. Maybe a consensus reality with 8 billion people is just hard to run, maybe it takes a lot of processing power.

You’re stuck in a ride in an amusement park. And what runs this amusement park is entirely indifferent to your suffering and confusion. It seems to find it hilarious that you continue to believe any of this is even real.

You could call this a metaphor if you want, about the nature of reality. But I would say: Just smoke it. Smoke the Salvia plant. The metaphor will manifest itself before your very own eyes. The clowns will appear and they will joke with you, they will mock you, you will see their whole circus, along with the device within which they put you through all of this insanity.

And when you do, when you return from the circus, you can forget for a moment about trying to prove what happened on 9/11. Two skyscrapers where 3000 people were immolated by their own government becomes among the least of your worries. You felt as if there is a joke that’s being played on you, but it’s much bigger than you held possible.

Caitlin Johnstone

re-upping this post, originally posted Sept 2018, refreshing with a few new links, including:

We’ve Been Dominated By Narrative Control Since The Dawn Of Civilization

The science of modern propaganda arguably got its start over a century ago during World War I when a young Edward Bernays was recruited to help sell the conflict to a reluctant American populace, after which he took what he’d learned on that front and folded it into a lifetime of work on the study of mass-scale psychological manipulation.

That was when propaganda as we know it today came into being, with the scientific method applied to the task of refining techniques for manipulating large-scale human behavior using modern media distribution. Those methods have been in research and development this entire time, and have advanced at least as much as our other instruments of warfare have advanced since World War I.

But that wasn’t the beginning of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful. That has been going on since the dawn of civilization.

Back when humans were a nomadic hunter-gatherer species, there was no need for tribal leaders to impose mental narratives over their tribe in order to keep them moving and behaving in the way they wanted. The animal needs of food, drink, and safety were enough to keep those small societies moving, hunting, foraging, reproducing, and fighting wherever it was necessary; they would have done those things even without the existence of language, and our evolutionary ancestors probably did exactly that for millions of years before the behavior of speech first emerged in humans.

That all changed with the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Once humans began learning to trick the Earth’s biosphere into making the food appear next to them, they became capable of sticking around in one place without starving, and civilizations began to emerge. Where as hunter-gatherers humans were only organizing in groups of a few dozen, with the ability to settle and build things we began congregating in villages and cities of hundreds or thousands.

Once you’re dealing with human groups of that size with sustenance coming from farmlands and livestock, the animal impulses of hunger, thirst and safety are no longer complex enough to determine the way those humans are going to be behaving from day to day.

Copious amounts of language will now be needed. Agreements. Protocols. Rules. Etiquette. How is the civilization planned out? How are decisions made? Who does the work? How are resources allocated? How are children conceived and raised?

From here you can already see how the possibility of abuse is opening up. Someone’s going to be doing the work. Someone’s going to be making the decisions. Someone’s going to be deciding where the resources go, and potentially assigning a lot more to themselves than to others. Someone’s going to be deciding who gets to have sex, and potentially assigning that responsibility entirely to themselves and their supporters, and potentially not leaving any say in the matter to the women.

Once humans moved from organizing in villages and cities to moving in kingdoms and empires, the potential for abuses increased exponentially. Then you’ve got the matter of wars and who should fight in them. You’ve got money and the capacity for vast wealth. You’ve got laws and the ability to determine what they are and whom they benefit. And you’ve got someone holding an immense amount of power over a very large number of people.

You can’t rely on instinctual animal impulses to organize people in civilizations of that kind of complexity. To get people moving in accordance with your will, you’ve got to use narrative. You need to overlay your civilization with a conceptual world of mental stories that people believe in and move in alignment with. And that’s what has happened with every civilization that has ever existed.

Up until the last few generations, religions played a major role in this. Getting the public valuing meekness, obedience, poverty, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s (paying taxes) while teaching them that it would be sinful to murder their rulers and take their treasure was an essential component in subjugating the masses and keeping them moving in alignment with your will. The religions of Christianity and Islam look quite different from belief systems like Confucianism, but all three are narrative overlays spread on top of giant civilizations which kept the rank-and-file public marching in accordance with the will of the powerful.

And of course it wasn’t entirely bad. Civilization would have been impossible if everyone was robbing and killing everyone else all the time, and narratives about sin and eternal punishment were one way of keeping that from happening. The narratives of religion, law, government and culture preserved a given order where there would otherwise have been disorder; it may have been a tyrannical, exploitative and unjust order most of the time, but it was order.

In modern western society religion plays a less dominant role in the organizing narratives, but there’s still the same amount of thick narrative overlay as we had in ancient times. In place of the priesthood we’ve got the pundits, news reporters, politicians and thought leaders, in place of heretics we’ve got tankies and conspiracy theorists, and in place of the old scriptures and doctrines we’ve got the current mainstream worldview. Before the mainstream worldview involved Jesus and God; now the mainstream worldview involves capitalism and an entirely faith-based belief in democracy.

And just as before, it’s not all bad. It’s probably a good thing that the mainstream worldview values freedom and justice, even if our freedoms are largely illusory and our judicial systems are profoundly unfair. It’s probably a good thing that the mainstream worldview now officially opposes racism, even if that is partly because race wars and vigilante justice are inconvenient for our rulers. It’s probably a good thing that the mainstream worldview values getting children vaccinated against diseases which used to kill lots of people, even if the pharmaceutical industry does have way too much power and diseases are now used as a pretext to roll out authoritarian agendas.

It’s not all bad, but it is bad. The status quo systems we’re manipulated into accepting by the narrative overlay on our civilization are creating terrible injustices and are imperiling our entire species. Ecocidal capitalism is killing our biosphere, imperialism is threatening our planet with nuclear armageddon, people are being starved, impoverished, abused and exploited by the sociopolitical status quo we are manipulated into consenting to by the science of modern propaganda. And it’s all for the benefit of the same types of people who took control of the dominant narratives of the ancient civilizations lived in by our ancestors.

From the dawn of civilization, we have been ruled by manipulators. Those who rise to the top of our current civilization have the same qualities as those who rose to the top of the kingdoms and empires of old. People who are just a little bit more clever than the rest, and just unprincipled enough to use that to their advantage.

The next stage in our development as a species, if we get to the next stage, will be to transcend this model. To transcend the model in which our lives are dominated by mental narrative, in which manipulators are able to use the fact that humans are storytelling creatures to rise to levels of power over the rest of us, in which we are forced to trade peace, justice, sanity and a healthy ecosystem for the order and stability of our ruling systems.

This will mean becoming a conscious species. It will mean casting aside our primitive psychological delusions to such an extent that we no longer need the narrative overlay of a mainstream worldview to move in harmony with each other. That we no longer need the narrative overlay of law and government to treat each other with kindness and keep things moving in an orderly way. That we no longer need the narrative overlay of money and economy to move resources where they are needed.

If we can achieve this one day it will be a kind of return to Eden; a return to the narrative-free innocence of the hunter-gatherer days of our ancestors. But it will be the conscious, mature manifestation of that way of life, just as spiritual enlightenment is the conscious, mature manifestation of the same nondual experience lived accidentally by babies. We won’t hunt in tribes as our species did in its infancy, we will live in civilizations, but we will live in harmony with each other and with our ecosystem, because we transcended our unwholesome relationship with mental narrative and replaced it with a wide awake direct encounter with reality.

And I suspect that if we ever get there, it will feel very familiar. Very old, and very familiar.

also -- read the 2018 stuff below from the original post, then come back to these more recent links:

1. Caitlin Johnstone is F'g brilliant (Oct 2018)
   

2. Caitlin Johnstone's Red Pill.. and Assorted Thoughts (Dec 2018)
   

3. Have I mentioned before the Caitlin Johnstone is the best? (June 2019)
   

4. some recent CJ (Apr 2019)
   

5. Psychopathy (Oct 2019)
   

6. Johnstone on Capitalism... and avoiding extinction (Dec 2020)
   

7. CaitOz re: Humanity's Imminent Doom (Nov 2021)

8. CaitOz: Once Upon A Time (Oct 2022)
   

essential CJ stuff I initially posted:

The End of Kings. authored and narrated by Caitlin Johnsone, video by Sustainable Human. youtube. Sep 4, 2018.

Big Thoughts

Babies.  July 4, 2018. 

When a baby is born, its parents teach it how to eat solid foods and walk and talk, which generally works out fine. Then they start teaching the baby all the lies their parents taught them, and things start to get messy.

When the baby is old enough, they send it to school, where it spends twelve years being taught lies about how the world works so that one day it will be able to watch CNN and say “Yes, this makes perfect sense” instead of “This is ridiculous” or “Why does this whole entire thing seem completely fake?” or “I want to punch Chris Cuomo in the throat.”

The baby is taught history, which is the study of the ancient, leftover propaganda from whichever civilization happened to win the wars in a given place at a given time.

The baby is taught geography, so that later on when its country begins bombing another country, the baby’s country won’t be embarrassed if its citizens cannot find that country on a globe.

The baby is taught obedience, and the importance of performing meaningless tasks in a timely manner. This prepares the baby for the half century of pointless gear-turning it will be expected to undertake after graduation.

The baby is taught that it lives in a free country, with a legitimate electoral system which facilitates meaningful elections of actual representatives in a real government. It is never taught that those elections, representatives and government are all owned and operated by the very rich, who use them to ensure policies which make them even richer while keeping everyone else as poor as possible so that they won’t have to share political power. It is never taught that highly secretive intelligence and defense agencies form alliances with those rich people to advance murderous and exploitative agendas for profit and power. It is never taught that the things it sees on television are mostly lies.

The baby is smoothly, seamlessly funneled from uterus to full-time employment through this system, often with a little religion mixed in to really drive home the importance of obedience and meekness and the nobility of poverty.  

From there the various screens in the baby’s life take over its continuing education, tightening the bolts of the propaganda cage and making sure that baby keeps turning those gears without asking too many questions. This continuing education continues until the baby dies in a mass shooting or nuclear holocaust, or of cancer from trying to numb the pain of living with cigarettes, or of liver failure from trying to numb the pain of living with alcohol, or of suicide because it just couldn’t take it anymore, or from its body and brain simply falling apart after a long, pointless, immensely unsatisfying life.

So now you’ve got all these babies wandering around, just as confused and clueless as the day they were born, thinking thoughts they were told to think and believing beliefs they were told to believe. Some are better at feigning confidence than others, but one baby’s guess about what’s going on is really as good as the next baby’s. The only thing any of them have ever known is the stories that they have been told.

So those stories get treated as something very important. All they’ve been taught to believe from womb to present moment tells them that it’s very important to keep turning those gears and walking in the same direction as all the other babies, so if all of a sudden one baby steps out of line and starts saying things like “Uhh, guys? We’re marching off a cliff of ecocide and omnicide. Maybe we should turn around?” or “It’s all a lie! We’re being exploited and deceived by an Orwellian oligarchy!”, that baby will usually sound crazy to all the other babies.

“Shut up you crazy conspiracy theorist baby,” they might say. “We all agree on our story about what’s going on. Our parents told us the same story, our teachers told us the same story, the news man on TV told us the same story, and the politicians told us the same story. We can’t all be wrong!”

But of course they can, and they are. All it takes is a dominant power structure wielding sufficient control of the stories that all the babies are told.

Imagine, though, if one of the other babies stepped forward and said, “You know what? Maybe that baby is right. None of the stories we’re told have ever added up. How come voting never seems to make much difference no matter who we elect and our lives stay shitty even though we always vote for the politician who promises to make them better? How come the news man on TV is always telling us about a New Official Bad Guy we need to go bomb, and how come it always happens the same way each time? And how come they can always afford all those big fancy bombs while we’re getting poorer and poorer?”

Then the story of total agreement would be disrupted. If another baby steps forward and does the same thing the story loses even more weight. If those babies get better at communicating with other babies, say with the invention of the internet, more and more babies start questioning the official stories they’ve been told since birth, and before long there’s no more herd mentality keeping all the babies moving in the same direction.

But those gears still need turning if the rich are going to remain rich and powerful. So they come up with even more stories to restore authority to their old stories about what’s going on. Stories about Russian propaganda, stories about fake news, stories about “useful idiots”, a term applied to babies who believe different stories from the ones they were taught by their parents and teachers and the news man. They do this because they know if they no longer have widespread consensus giving the illusion of credibility to their stories, they’re going to have to start relying on facts and evidence. And that won’t go well for them at all.

And now the babies are growing restless. The babies are growing cranky. The old lullabies aren’t keeping them asleep anymore.

The babies are waking up. The babies are growing up. Soon the babies won’t be babies anymore. Soon the babies will be able to tell their own stories. True stories.

What will happen to those gears then? What will happen to the machines they power? The answer to that question is why the rich have been fighting so hard for so long to sing the old lullabies, and keep the babies asleep.

Humans. July 5, 2018.

A while back some ambitious apes figured out how to stand up straight and use abstract thought, and now deep fried Twinkies are a thing. It’s been a hell of a ride.

If you asked a human what the most amazing thing about humans is, they’d probably tell you something very humany, like “Our ability to think” or “Our capacity for self-awareness” or “Our resemblance to the White-Bearded Paternal Deity Who created us in His own image.”

If you asked an alien who’d never seen a human before what the most amazing thing about humans is, it’d probably say something like “Holy shit! Get that weird toothy fingery skin monster away from me! Kill it! Kill it before it breeds!”

If you waited for that same alien to calm down a bit and asked it the same question again, it’d probably say something a little more rational, like “The way they process electromagnetic radiation with the ocular organs in their heads,” or “The way they literally eat the life force of other organisms, pass them through a series of slimy tubes to extract the nutrients, and excrete them from their anuses.”

Humans don’t think much about the things that make them really interesting, though. They don’t think about the fact that they’re riding a spinning orb through a universe none of them actually understand, and how they get to digest their particular slice of that ride through their sensory organs and think thoughts about it, forming a nonstop explosion of dazzling appearances in their field of consciousness every single day. They think what makes them special is the fact that they have pink hair and listen to obscure European punk music from the eighties, or the fact that they have read a lot of books, or their quirky personality, or the deal they’re trying to close in Tokyo that’s going to blow everybody’s mind back at the office. 

...

Light. July 16, 2018.

You muddle through as best you can.

Every morning you slide into a society you had no hand in constructing and don’t really understand, like an awkward introvert arriving late to a party full of strangers who all know each other.

You interact with the whole thing through an interface of culture, language and etiquette that was invented by people you don’t know who died a long time ago. Any time you want to interact with someone, like when you’ve got an interesting idea you want to share or because they’re looking especially beautiful in the light of the street lamps or whatever, you’ve got to plug into this whole network of information which is dictated by past events ranging from how their parents treated them when they were little to the migratory behaviors of Anglo-Saxon settlers in fifth century Europe.

You shove a sloppy effort at communication through this thick veil of unknowable variables, and whatever happens is called conversation. They say something back like “What do you do for a living? I manufacture fish poison,” and you say “I turn a gear at a factory that makes gears,” and they say “I understand society perfectly and everything makes sense and we’re never going to die hahahaha,” and then you say something like “I know right hahahahahahaha,” and you just want to scream or punch them or kiss them full on the mouth, or anything to make a real connection happen beyond the vapid small mouth noises of gibbering naked ape monsters.

You stumble away vaguely frustrated and muddle on. Maybe you turn on one of the glowing rectangles you own, and maybe it tells you you’re ugly unless you wear the right kind of makeup. Maybe it tells you you’d fit in much better if you were rich and famous. Maybe it tells you the government is dropping smiley-faced bombs on smiley-faced peasants in Boingbonkistan to spread freedom and democracy. Maybe some talking head thinkbrain looks you right in the eye and explains why it’s good for you to work hard for not much money. The screen is full of strained, plastic smiles and calm, confident tones of voice, which are nothing like the confused desperation behind the eyes of your neighbors.

You muddle your way outside and look at all the other human creatures scuttling around on their leg stalks. Maybe you walk past a dead accordion angel with sailboat wings in the gutter, and you stare at it for a while wondering if the stars in the sky are still there. Maybe you remember what it was like riding your tricycle as a little kid, and how good and how real it felt.

Maybe you decide then and there that you’re just not going to anymore, you’re not going to keep pretending and faking your way through a fake civilization made of fake ideas with a fake smile on your fake face. Maybe you turn around and say to the people walking by, “I’m not doing this anymore.” And maybe they say “But but but what about the gear?” And maybe you say “I do not care about that gear.” And maybe they say “But there’s that new fish poison factory opening down the road and it will need gears from the gear factory.”

And maybe you say something back like, “Well I don’t know. I’m just muddling through the best I can here, okay? I showed up as a little baby and you all told me what to think about things, and then a whole muddled confusion happened and now I’ve got these calloused hands from the gear and when I’m really honest with myself it hurts to live. I want to fall in love and learn the songs of skybirds and sip train smoke through intravenous tubes. I want to swim with the manta whales and the barking wolf sharks. I want to grow a flower in an old boot and have a frivolous abortion. I want to get into fights with broken bottles in a dusty tavern and get a bad facial scar and choke a man unconscious with my legs. I want to dream like there’s no tomorrow and write poems like there’s no today. I can’t lie anymore. I can’t keep pretending to be shaped the same way as the cardigan clowns on the sitcoms. I am a howling beast. I am too alive for this cage.”

“But but but but but but but but but but but but but but but but, what about the gear?” they might say.

And you may end up saying “Ah yes, good point,” and go back to the murk for another few years before you catch another glimpse of that three year-old on that trike. And that’s okay. You muddle through. You muddle through and move toward the light whenever you spot it.

And it is real. In the name of all that is holy, I swear to you that that light is real, and that it leads to the other side of this mess. Upon my broken wings and my broken hands, I swear it from the bottom of my peacock feather heart. Keep muddling through, beautiful ape monster. Keep muddling through.

Humanity Is Deciding If It Will Evolve or Die. July 27, 2018.

I write a lot about consciousness, enlightenment and the potential humanity has to rise above its conditioned patterns, because if I only wrote about politics and media propaganda I’d be accomplishing nothing but helping the anti-establishment fringe feel good about itself while waiting for human extinction. I can’t do this thing honestly and sincerely without periodically pointing to the dangers on the horizon, and to what I perceive as the only off ramp in sight. 

Human society is clearly at its most interesting point ever. Billions of human brains are now interconnected in real time by the internet, we’re realizing on mass scale that all the rules of society were invented by dead people long before any of us got here, and we’re seeing that we are free to re-write those rules in a way that benefits us. From popular grassroots examinations of socialist ideas, to cryptocurrencies and an evolving understanding of what money is, to redefining social institutions as ancient and ingrained as marriage and gender identity, more and more people are saying in effect, “Hmm, it looks like all those old thoughts we’ve been using to describe our reality are causing some problems. Let’s find new ones.” It could be described as a collective awakening to the fact that reality and our conceptual model for it are two very different things, and the model is as flexible as your ability to change your mind. We’ve never seen anything like this before as a species. We’ve literally never been here. 

We are in uncharted, unprecedented territory. When you’re in uncharted, unprecedented territory, there’s no valid basis for ruling out any conceivable possibility. Stodgy intellectuals may say “Hurr, yes, this is very similar to the Bulgarian Wheat Rebellions of 1809, so this will likely turn out the same” or whatever, but they’re wrong, because it isn’t. The past can be a useful tool for predicting future outcomes, but in an entirely unprecedented situation, that is not the case. Anything is possible.

But we are also facing an unprecedented set of challenges. Our planet is currently in the midst of a sixth mass extinction that is entirely the result of human ecocide. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent, so the very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is dying, and every few weeks there are new reports that anthropogenic climate change is progressing more rapidly than previously anticipated. There are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, meaning that a chain of events can conceivably be set off tipping us rapidly into climate chaos and making industrial farming impossible, causing global starvation. 

If we dodge that bullet, we’ve got steadily mounting new cold war escalations between the world’s two nuclear superpowers imperiling us more and more with every moronic increase in nuclear tensions. There’s also the looming and seemingly inevitable invention of artificial superintelligence, which could end us in any number of completely unpredictable ways. If we manage to dodge all of those bullets in the next few decades, we’re still headed straight toward an Orwellian global empire which controls all access to information and ideas using AI-controlled censorship and propaganda. Serving out the remainder of our existence as a sanitized, homogenized and propagandized servile class for sociopathic elites would be a kind of extinction in itself, and arguably a worse fate. 

So we’re at a pretty significant juncture here. Our present situation could accurately be described as a question that we are collectively being asked as a species: do we want to (A) live on and find out what the future holds for us, or do we want to (B) go the way of the dinosaur? 

Whenever I bring this subject up I encounter proponents of both answers. Though they never frame it as such, the people who show up in my social media notifications proclaiming that it is naive to think humans will ever cease their destructive patterns are very much on the side of Answer B. They insist that turning away from our ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory is impossible, and apparently their plan is to sit back and feel smugly vindicated when the world burns. They are choosing extinction, and their prize is that they get to be right and feel good about that if it happens. 

Answer A is less sexy. Less egoically satisfying. You don’t get to feel smug and superior with Answer A, because Answer A involves changing. It involves waking up from that same ego structure which gets so much pleasure out of being right and knowing better. 

If we’re going to pull away from catastrophe or dystopia and survive, we’re going to have to take full advantage of the unprecedented situation in which we now find ourselves. We’re going to have to make a miracle happen. We’re going to have to evolve beyond our current relationship with thought. We’re going to have to wake up. 

Throughout recorded history and across all cultures around the world, there have been individuals testifying that it is possible to undergo a transformation in the way one relates to the world, experiencing life as it actually is instead of filtered through unconscious conditioned thought patterns. After such a transformation, thought becomes the useful tool it’s supposed to be instead of the writer, director and star of the whole show. 

If such a transformation is possible on an individual level, it is possible on a collective level as well. With a shift in our relationship with thought and ego, we would become impossible to propagandize, and therefore able to determine a course of action that isn’t selected for us by plutocratic manipulators. We can awaken from the old patterns of fear and greed and need to control which are constantly used to manipulate us, and begin working in harmony with each other and our environment instead. 

This as near as I can tell is the only way to avert catastrophe. All the other exits we’ve tried are bolted shut; political attempts at solutions are shut down with plutocratic manipulations, activism is shut down with media propaganda and corporate censorship, and violent revolution just puts the same problems into different hands. The deck is stacked to keep funneling the momentum toward the agendas of the ruling elites. Our only option is to change ourselves. 

Such a collective transformation has always been possible, and everyone from Buddha to the hippies of the 1960s has pointed to it and insisted that it is possible. The difference now is that we are in unprecedented times, and that we now have no other choice.

But it isn’t sexy. It is, in fact, in the exact opposite direction of egoic gratification. On a collective level, it means giving up on barking and snarling at the Russians or the libtards or the Muslims or the Trump supporters and relinquishing the notion of your pet political, religious or social faction ever being proven right and vindicated over the others. On an individual level, it means letting go of everything you’ve built your identity on. It means realizing and fully understanding that you’ve been basically wrong about everything your entire life, as mental narratives are seen for the babbling nonsense they are. It means forgiving yourself for your mistakes and forgiving your mother for hers. It means the ultimate humility of taking everything you’ve held yourself to be and unceremoniously discarding it like an old piece of gum. 

It means examining everything you think you are and seeing it for the story it is. All the babbling thoughts that go on in your head about who you are, what you like, what you think, they are all just re-runs of old stories playing in the TV of your mind, and they all need fresh eyes and a critical appraisal. Put together, these thoughts create the impression of the thing that you call “me”, but they’re as arbitrary as snippets from a cutting room floor. The more meaning you imbue into them, the more fascinating you’ll find the re-runs, the more you’re glued to the screen and the less attention you pay to real life. These stories also create hooks by which you can be trolled and manipulated. Take a step back and watch your thoughts like old television, and they’ll be no less noisy but much less interesting, and eventually the noise disappears into the background and you can begin engaging with life as it really is. 

This personal inventory has messy consequences. It means facing your fear of death to the point where it no longer controls every decision you make so you will be free to live right now. It means resolving to hand your desire over to the highest interest, not just when it suits you but every time. It means giving up everything you ever do for anyone else’s approval, including your own. It means admitting to your own arrogance, your own violence, your own hypocrisies, your own projections, your own sneaky manipulations, your own sins, and tracing them back to the point in time where you created this little coping mechanism gone mad. It means forgiving others, but it also means forgiving yourself. It means applying love to your wounds until they heal and the pain of the scars doesn’t rule you anymore. It means getting playful and curious and unafraid to jump down rabbit holes. It means letting the intelligence of your animal body purge your stuck emotions and dormant fears. You might look silly sometimes. That’s okay.

Then, in the relative quiet of your mind-cave with the TV no longer dominating your attention, a silent inner voice emerges and rather than allowing the ghosts of the past to dictate your every move, a greater wisdom will get a chance to inform your choices. In many ways, this is when it gets harder. This means doing what’s in the highest interest even when it’s scary and everyone you love is trying to stop you. It means you will have a much clearer idea of what’s your responsibility and what’s not, but it means taking responsibility. It means having a much better idea of where you stop and where others begin, but that means ceasing to lean in on other’s sovereign boundaries to manipulate them for your own perceived safety, and it also means getting up the guts to throw out the predators that you suddenly realize have been in your sovereign space this whole time. It means becoming fearless. 

If everyone who is capable took these steps, the world will change at a miraculous pace. Individually we will become ungovernable from the outside, and guided from within, and as a group, our clarion call will siren each other into quietly taking the actions we need to take to avoid extinction. Inspired, fearless individual actions will harmoniously and wordlessly collaborate with others in a way that will look like magical rolling coincidences but is really just as mundane and natural as the daily work of an ant colony. With the babble of ego turned all the way down, we will start behaving in concert with each other like a marvelous improv troupe, taking cues and accepting offers and intuitively building something more beautiful together than our individual thinker brain could ever hope to even glimpse. 

The journey out of egoic consciousness isn’t something that can be undertaken lightly. Relinquishing everything that has made up your inner world your entire life is not something you can do as a casual pastime. You need to plunge into it with the intensity of someone fighting for their life, and what we have working in our favor today is the fact that now we collectively are fighting for our lives. This has never happened before. It’s scary, but it’s also a time of unprecedented potential.

It’s all here. We have all the parts right here and ready to go. All we need now is to individually get humble and do the work to quiet the mind. We just need to set our intention to mute the babble of ego to give us the space to let something extraordinary create itself through us. There is nothing stopping us except the concept of ourselves that we hold, and surely we all must be getting bored of that by now. Besides, what choice do we have? Sit around and wait to die, or sit down and do the work and see what happens when we’ve thrown off our brain boxes and we can dance with each other naked? 

Get naked with me. You know you want to. Come on. Let’s see what’s on the other side of this thing. I’m pretty sure it’s more beautiful than we can possibly imagine. I want to know. Don’t you?

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix. Aug. 21, 2018.

In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code. 

Life in our current society is very much the same. The difference is that instead of AI, it’s psychopathic oligarchs who are keeping us asleep in the Matrix. And instead of code, it’s narrative. 

Society is made of narrative like the Matrix is made of code. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government, they’re all purely mental constructs which exist nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads. If I asked you to point to your knee you could do so instantly and wordlessly, but if I asked you to point to the economy, for example, the closest you could come is using a bunch of linguistic symbols to point to a group of concepts. To show me the economy, you’d have to tell me a story. 

Anyone who has ever experienced a moment of mental stillness knows that without the chatter, none of those things are part of your actual present experience. There is no identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics or government in your experience without the mental chatter about those things. There’s not even a “you” anywhere to be found, because it turns out that that’s made of narrative, too. 

Without mental narrative, nothing is experienced but sensory impressions appearing to a subject with no clear shape or boundaries. The visual and auditory fields, the sensation of air going in and out of the respiratory system, the feeling of the feet on the ground or the bum in the chair. That’s it. That’s more or less the totality of life minus narrative. 

When you add in the mental chatter, however, none of those things tend to occupy a significant amount of interest or attention. Appearances in the visual and auditory field are suddenly divided up and labeled with language, with attention to them determined by whichever threatens or satisfies the various agendas, fears and desires of the conceptual identity construct known as “you”. You can go days, weeks, months or years without really noticing the feeling of your respiratory system or your feet on the ground as your interest and attention gets sucked up into a relationship with society that exists solely as narrative. 

“Am I good enough? Am I doing the right thing? Oh man, I hope what I’m trying to do works out. I need to make sure I get all my projects done. If I do that one thing first it might save me some time in the long run. Oh there’s Ashley, I hate that bitch. God I’m so fat and ugly. If I can just get the things that I want and accomplish my important goals I’ll feel okay. Taxes are due soon. What’s on TV? Oh it’s that idiot. How the hell did he get elected anyway? Everyone who made that happen is a Nazi. God I can’t wait for the weekend. I hope everything goes as planned between now and then.” 

On and on and on and on. Almost all of our mental energy goes into those mental narratives. They dominate our lives. And, for that reason, people who are able to control those narratives are able to control us. And they do. 

Most people try to exert some degree of control over those around them. They try to influence how those in their family, social and employment circles think of them by behaving and speaking in a certain way. Family members will spend their lives telling other family members over and over again that they’re not as smart/talented/good as they think they are to keep them from becoming too successful and moving away. Romantic partners will be persuaded that they can never leave because no one else will ever love them. To varying degrees, they manipulate the narratives of individuals. 

Then there are the people who’ve figured out that they can actually take their ability to influence the way people think about themselves and their world and turn it into personal profit. Cult leaders convince followers to turn over their entire lives in service to them. Advertisers convince consumers that they have a problem or deficiency that can only be solved with This Exciting New Product™. Ambitious rat race participants learn how to climb the corporate ladder by winning favor with the right people and inflicting small acts of sabotage against their competing peers. Ambitious journalists learn that they progress much further in their careers by advancing narratives that favor the establishment upon which the plutocrats who own the big media companies have built their kingdoms. They manipulate the narratives of groups. 

And then, there are the oligarchs. The master manipulators. These corporate kings of the modern world have learned the secret that every ruler since the dawn of civilization has known: whoever controls the narratives that are believed by a society is the controller of that society. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government: all mental constructs which only influence society to the extent that they are believed and subscribed to by a significant majority of the collective. If you have influence over the things that people believe about those mental constructs, you have influence over society. You rule it. The oligarchs manipulate the narratives of entire societies. 

This is why there have been book burnings, heretic burnings, and executions for mocking the emperor throughout history: ideas which differ from the dominant narratives about what power is, how money works, who should be in charge and so on are threatening to a ruler’s power in the exact same way that an assassin’s dagger is. At any time, in any kingdom, the people could have decided to take the crown off of their king’s head and place it upon the head of any common beggar and treat him as the new king. And, in every meaningful way, he would be the new king. The only thing preventing this from happening was dominant narratives subscribed to by the society at the time about Divine Right, fealty, loyalty, noble blood and so on. The only thing keeping the crown on a king’s head was narrative. 

The exact same thing remains true today; the only thing that has changed is the narratives the public subscribe to. Because of what they are taught in school and what the talking heads on their screens tell them about their nation and their government, most people believe that they live in a relatively free democracy where accountable, temporary power is placed in the hands of a select few based on a voting process informed by the unregulated debate of information and ideas. Completely separate from the government, they believe, is an economy whose behavior is determined by the supply and demand of consumers. In reality, economics, commerce and government are fully controlled by an elite class of plutocrats, who also happen to own the media corporations which broadcast the information about the world onto people’s screens. 

Control the narratives of economics and commerce, and you control economics and commerce. Control the narratives about politics and government, and you control politics and government. This control is used by the controllers to funnel power to the oligarchs, in this way effectively turning society into one giant energy farm for the elite class. 

But it is possible to wake up from that narrative Matrix. 

It isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes work. Inner work. And humility. Nobody likes acknowledging that they’ve been fooled, and the depth and extent to which we’ve all been fooled is so deeply pervasive it can be tempting to decide that the work is complete far before one is actually free.  

Mainstream American liberals think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by Fox and Donald Trump, and mainstream American conservatives think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by MSNBC and the Democrats, but the propaganda strings on both trace back to the same puppet master. And seeing that is just the beginning. 

But, through sincere, humble research and introspection, it is possible to break free of the Matrix and see the full extent to which you and everyone you know has been imprisoned by ideas which have been programmed into social consciousness by the powerful. Not just in our adult lives, but ever since our parents began teaching us how to speak, think and relate to the world. Not just in the modern world, but as far back as history stretches to when the power-serving belief systems of societal structure and religion were promoted by kings and queens of old. All of society, and all of ourselves, and indeed all of the thoughts in our heads, have been shaped by those in power to their benefit. This is the reality that we were born into, and our entire personality structure has been filtered through and shaped by it. 

For this reason, escaping from the power-serving propaganda Matrix necessarily means becoming a new creature altogether. The ideas, mental habits and ways of relating to the world which were formed in the Matrix are only useful for moving around inside of it. In order to relate to life outside of the power-promulgated narratives which comprise the very fabric of society, you’ve got to create a whole new operating system for yourself in order to move through life independently of the old programming designed to keep you asleep and controlled. 

So it’s hard work. You’ll make a lot of mistakes along the way, just like an infant slowly learning to walk. But, eventually, you get clear of the programming. 

And then you’re ready to fight. 

Because at some point in this process, you necessarily come upon a deep, howling rage within. Rage at the oligarchic manipulators of your species, yes, but also rage against manipulation in all its forms. Rage against everyone who has ever tried to manipulate your narrative, to make you believe things about yourself or make other people believe things about you. Rage against anyone who manipulates anyone else to any extent. When your eyes are clear manipulation stands out like a black fly on a white sheet of paper, and your entire system has nothing to offer it but revulsion and rejection. 

So you set to work. You set to work throwing all attempts to manipulate you as far away from yourself as possible, and expunging anyone from your life who refuses to stop trying to control your narrative. Advertising, mass media propaganda, establishment academia, everything gets purged from your life that wants to pull you back into the Matrix. 

And they will try to pull you back in. Because our narratives are so interwoven and interdependent with everyone else’s, and so inseparable from our sense of ourselves, your rejection of the narrative Matrix will present as an existential threat to many of your friends and loved ones. You will see many people you used to trust, many of them very close to you, suddenly transform into a bunch of Agent Smiths right in front of your eyes, and they will shame you, guilt you, throw every manipulation tool they have at you to get you to plug the jack back into your brain. But because your eyes are clear, you’ll see it all. You won’t be fooled. 

And then all you’ll want is to tear down the Matrix from its very foundations and plunge its controllers into irrelevance. You will set to work bringing down the propaganda prison that they have built up around your fellow humans in any way you can, bolt by bolt if you have to, because you know from your own experience that we are all capable of so much more than the puny gear-turning existence they’ve got everyone churning away at. You will despise the oligarchs for the obscene sacrilege that they have inflicted upon human majesty out of greed and insecurity, and you will make a mortal enemy of the entire machine that they have used to enslave our species. 

And, because their entire kingdom is built upon maintaining the illusion of freedom and democracy, all they will have to fight back against you is narrative. They’ll try to shame you into silence by calling you a conspiracy theorist, they’ll have their media goons and manipulators launch smear campaigns against you, but because your eyes are clear, none of that will work. They’ve got one weapon, and it doesn’t work on you.

And you will set to work waking up humanity from the lie factory, using whatever skills you have, weakening trust in the mass media propaganda machine and opening eyes to new possibilities. And while doing so, you will naturally shine big and bright so the others can find you. And together, we’ll not only smash the narratives that imprison us like a human caterpillar swallowing the narrative bullshit and forcing it into the mouth of the next slave, but we’ll also create new narratives, better narratives, healthier narratives, for ourselves and for each other, about how the world is and what we want it to be. 

Because here’s the thing: since it’s all narrative, anything is possible. Those who see this have the ability to plunge toward health and human thriving without any regard for the made-up reasons why such a thing is impossible, and plant seeds of light which sprout in unprecedented directions that never could have been predicted by someone plugged into to establishment how-it-is stories. Together, we can determine how society will be. We can re-write the rules. We are re-writing the rules. It’s begun already. 

Out of the white noise of a failing propaganda machine, a new world is being born, one that respects the autonomy of the individual and their right to self-determination. One that respects our right to collaborate on large scales to create beautiful, healthy, helpful systems without the constant sabotage and disruption of a few power-hungry psychopaths who would rather rule than live. One that respects our right to channel human ingenuity into harmony and human thriving instead of warfare and greed. One that respects our right to take what we need, not just to survive but to thrive, and return it to the earth for renewal. One that respects the sovereign boundaries of not just ourselves and each other, but of the planet spaceship that we live in. 

Unjack your cortex fully from the fear-soaked narratives of insanity, and let the true beauty of our real world flood your senses. Let the grief of what we have unknowingly done send you crashing to your knees in sorrow. And when you’re ready, stand up. We have much work to do.

How to Own Life Like a Fucking Wizard. Sep. 4, 2018.

Hey! Want to know a secret? A secret that people have used to overtake those who don’t know it and rise to the top of civilizations for as long as there have been civilizations? 

I’ll tell you the secret in a second, but first let me ask you a question. Have you ever noticed how unambiguous and unequivocal the pundits and reporters on the corporate news media are? How confident and assertive their voices are? How little emphasis is ever placed on the many, many unknown factors of a given situation, or how dismissed and ignored dissenting narratives are? 

Wait, hang on, that’s too vague. Let me try something more specific: Bill Maher. 

Have you ever watched Bill Maher? I wouldn’t blame you if you avoid it; watching him can be a viscerally uncomfortable experience for anyone who doesn’t share his mainstream corporate liberal worldview. If you agree with him, watching him feels extremely validating and comforting, but if you don’t it can feel as psychologically uncomfortable as being reprimanded by your boss in front of the whole office. And there’s a reason for that. 

Bill Maher, as near as I can tell, has no redeeming characteristics of any kind. As far as talent, looks and personality goes, there’s no good reason for him to be famous, or for anyone to know his name at all. And yet he is, and we do. 

The reason Bill Maher is famous is the same as the reason he’s uncomfortable to listen to when you don’t agree with him: his voice. You’ve never heard a more assertive, condescending, “I know what’s true and you don’t” voice in your life. He has perfected the voice of authority, and he uses it with such forcefulness that it can cause a lot of cognitive dissonance in people who don’t agree with what he’s saying. But when you’re on his side it feels powerfully rewarding and validating, which is why he’s famous; listening to him triggers the reward center of the corporate liberal brain, and they want more. 

Which takes us to the secret I promised to tell you. Are you ready? Here it is: 

Nobody knows what the fuck is going on. We’re a bunch of hairless apes on a spinning rock in space, and we only know the stories that we’ve been told by the people who got here before us. We come out as clueless little babies, then when we get bigger we learn some fancy words and how to open a bag of chips, but underneath all the data we add on top of our fresh baby minds there’s still the same cluelessness we started out with. The process of sorting out the true and useful data from the false and unhelpful is confusing, difficult, and prone to error. So people tend to just listen to the most confident-sounding voice in the room; the one who steps forward and says “I know what’s going on, follow me.” 

This is how those confident-sounding pundits and politicians have been able to control the dominant narratives about world events and keep a huge majority of the population in alignment with the narrow Overton window of acceptable ideas. It isn’t because they have better ideas or more truthful narratives (I just made myself laugh typing that), it’s because the people who get hired and promoted by the plutocrat-owned media are the ones who can speak lies and half-truths with the confident voice of authority. 

Thing is, there’s no trademark on the voice of authority. Nobody owns it; it’s just a trade secret whose importance nobody who knows it talks about publicly. Which means there’s nothing stopping you from using it, too. 

Because here’s the thing: since society is made of narrative, and since nobody knows what the fuck is going on, you can pretty much arrange the narratives around you in a way that suits you just by declaring confidently, consistently and assertively what it is that’s happening. People will adjust their ideas about what’s going on to accommodate your ownership of the narrative, and before you know it you’re being uplifted by society and supported toward whatever goals you’ve got in mind. Decide you’re a leader, they’ll make you a leader. Decide you’re successful, they’ll make you successful. Decide you know what’s happening, they’ll believe you. Say what you want like it’s going to happen, and if it’s a want that society can fulfill, they will. 

It’s like being a wizard. Just by becoming confident and assertive, you can control social narratives and ride them wherever you want to go. It’s immensely powerful once you get the hang of it, so it’s in the highest interest to only use this power for the good of society. I’ve been strongly advocating a grassroots information rebellion in which the public seizes control of the dominant narrative about what’s going on instead of remaining subject to the authorized official stories being promulgated by confident-sounding pundits and politicians. We can use the confident voice of authority to override the voice of the establishment propaganda machine. 

But to be clear, people are already using this power; the only problem is that only the wrong sorts of people are using it. The social engineers have been promoting strong-voiced establishment loyalists in the mass media for generations, and sociopaths also quickly learn how to master it without ever being taught due to a lack of investment in truth or compassion. If you’re clever and you’re only interested in success at any cost, it doesn’t take long to figure out that you can manipulate your way to the top using confident-sounding assertions for the purpose of social narrative control. 

So I don’t feel worried about showing people this secret, and I plan on highlighting it often, because otherwise it’s the equivalent of sociopaths being the only people in the world who have weapons. The problems of our world are due to the fact that selfish, oafish, amoral people speak with unequivocal self-confidence, while compassionate, insightful people wait their turn, use mitigated speech, stay as boringly objective as possible, and treat establishment voices with the same respect which they themselves want to be treated. The fact that the sociopaths and manipulators are constantly firing all their weapons on full auto while we’re politely nudging at the problem with one finger has created a power disparity which explains why the worst among us are in charge. 

Trump. Perfect example. A rich man with a rich father and nothing going for him personality-wise other than massive confidence and a rock-solid understanding of the power of assertive narrative control. The man can say something, then days later confidently assert that he never said it knowing full well his comments are on the record, and still get half the country saying “Yeah, fair enough, that sounds about right.” He was able to beat down both Bush and Clinton dynasties and take the White House by sheer force of entitlement and self-confidence. 

Imagine a world where it wasn’t only powerful plutocrats doing that. Imagine if all truth-tellers began speaking with the same forceful authoritative confidence of the manipulators at the top. The social engineers would have no way of keeping their authorized narratives in control and manufacturing consent for war, ecocide and exploitative oppression, because Chris Cuomo’s voice wouldn’t have any more force behind it than anyone else’s. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and putting that control in the hands of the people is vastly better than leaving it in the hands of a few sociopathic elites. 

So get confident and take control. Say your truth and say it like you’re right, because you know you are. Your own best guess about what’s happening in the world is infinitely better than what you’re told to believe by mass media manipulators who you know for a fact are paid to deceive you, so say what you reckon is happening in the world with unmitigated, full-throated authority. When it looks like they’re lying to get a new war or more internet censorship or whatever, voice your own best guess about what’s really happening, and don’t be shy about doing whatever it takes to get it heard by as many people as possible. You have as much a right to speak as the sociopathic manipulators do; more even, since your intentions are not self-serving but world-serving. 

If we don’t control the narrative, only omnicidal, ecocidal sociopaths will control the narrative. I repeat: if we don’t control the narrative, only sociopaths will control the narrative. So take control, using every tool in the toolbox. Take their weapons from them, and use them. 

Be big. Be bold. Step way outside the rank they have assigned you. Speak way above your station. Do not let anyone shame you into equivocation or meekness, and don’t let them bully you into the usual dull academic recitation of objective data. Fight the propagandists with the same loud, aggressive assertiveness that they are using, and bulldoze over anyone who tries to admonish you for being impolite about it. 

It’s life or death at this point, and our choices are fight, flight or freeze. Near as I can tell, freezing means death and we’ve got no other world we can flee to, so we’ve got to fight. 

If we’re going to fight we should fight, not with one hand tied behind our backs while they manipulate our species into consenting to its own extinction via war or ecocide, but with full force like our lives depend on it. Because they do. 

So take control. Grab the narrative by the balls and own it. Because it’s better you than them.

America. July 13, 2018.

In America they build flying war robots, but you can’t drink the water. America is where the empire keeps its billionaires and bombs. 

Giant wars left Europe a mess many years ago, so America rose to the top. Now it’s where many rich and powerful influencers centralize their operations. America is the cattle prod used to compel the world to march along with the interests of western aristocrats. Governments which comply are rewarded with military “protection”, while noncompliant governments are sanctioned and bombed. The Mafia does this also. 

Americans are kept poor by the aristocracy, because money equals power and power is relative. The poorer ordinary Americans are kept, the more powerful the aristocrats are. Agencies like the FBI were invented so that there will be someone to help shoot and kill ordinary Americans if they ever decide to start eating the aristocrats for food. 

It is very important that the aristocrats be able to control America, because they need to be able to protect their assets while directing its military firepower. This means keeping ordinary Americans poor and politically impotent while conducting trillion-dollar military operations overseas, which is a hard sell. The aristocrats engage that hard sell on a daily basis using the mass media corporations which they own. And they do so successfully. 

Americans are surrounded by screens which promote capitalism and consumerism for eight-minute stretches between commercial breaks promoting capitalism and consumerism. If you ever get a bit uncomfortable about the expensive planes dropping expensive bombs on people who make less money in their lifetimes than the military explosives used to kill them, just turn on any of the screens you own and there will be a talking head ready to explain to you why you’re just imagining silly things in that ditzy little head of yours. Relax. Don’t worry. Uncle Sam has got everything under control. Uncle Sam loves you. Uncle Sam knows what’s best. 

America is too important to be left in the hands of the Americans. If you ever wonder why America is behaving in a strange way, that is always the explanation: America is too important to be left in the hands of the Americans. The intelligence agencies, military firepower and massive economic influence that is wielded by anyone who exerts control over the US government are such valuable tools that there’s no limit to the horrible things that aristocratic manipulators will do to secure it. This includes pummeling ordinary Americans with mass media psyops day in and day out to manufacture their consent for agendas which do not benefit them. While this is an effective way to control how Americans think and vote, it also makes them more than a little crazy. 

This is why there is an opiate epidemic in America. This is why white supremacy is becoming more brazen. This is why every few weeks an American grabs a gun and kills as many of his countrymen as possible. Because of their nation’s strategic significance, Americans are the most aggressively propagandized people in the tight alliance of nations that comprises the western empire. But there’s only so far you can twist a mind away from truth before it snaps. There’s only so much you can do to convince a populace that mass murder is perfectly fine overseas before someone gets the idea that it’s perfectly fine at home, too. 

Americans are in their nature as compassionate and generous a people as you will ever meet anywhere else on earth; they’ve just got manipulative sociopaths elbows-deep in their minds conducting psyops all the time, and it makes them a bit weird. But their good-naturedness is evident in the fact that even the propaganda used to manipulate them into consenting to depraved war agendas is always meant to exploit their caring and compassion: it’s always about saving children from a monstrous dictator, or spreading freedom and democracy. Americans are blasted in the face with so many hero narratives from Hollywood and television that this makes perfect sense to them, and of course they want their military to do something heroic and save those poor kids. Even the sick things they consent to are rooted in basic good intentions. America is a country full of decent people with propaganda boxes around their brains. 

Propaganda is what makes America America. Without the endless aristocratic influence campaigns convincing Americans that economic injustice is economic justice, that war is humanitarian, that insanity is sanity, and that their government is acting with their best interests at heart, the nation would be unrecognizable. America is a psyop wearing a cowboy hat. 

Vast, sprawling aristocratic kingdoms have been built upon the manipulation of the American psyche. If those brain boxes ever get shucked off, those kingdoms will necessarily collapse, and a new world will emerge. Because those brain boxes are made of lies and manipulation, the new world which emerges will necessarily be better and healthier. Health and harmony are born of truth. 

It is not okay that the aristocracy keeps warping and brutalizing the American psyche. It is not okay that they use their power and influence to advance inequality and war. Americans need only to turn around and face their manipulators and tormenters for this all to end. Once you’ve seen the puppeteer, the puppet show is ruined. 

Keep pointing at those strings, oh clear-eyed rebels. This fight is very winnable. The spells holding the deception together can be broken. America belongs in the hands of the Americans. Americans can take America.

Current Events

Happy New Universe Day. Apr. 27, 2018. 

Not long ago I was downright terrified that the western empire was going to provoke a dangerous military escalation in Syria, and while that still could very well happen it looks like the warmongers are going to have to do a lot of work to get there. An aggressive opposition to military interventionism and intense skepticism of the establishment narrative about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma arose all across the political spectrum as soon as the drums of war began beating, and after a few empty buildings were bombed under the false claim that they contained chemical weapons, the drums are much quieter. 

What has replaced the sound of the war drums is the desperate shrieking of the establishment propaganda machine, which has been frantically attacking anyone who dared to express skepticism about the official western Douma narrative. One particularly shrill day saw no less than seven high-profile smear pieces published about antiwar voices toward that end. Seven. In one day. 

The war propagandists exposed themselves very badly with that one, and the public is unlikely to forget it. You can only be seen screaming "You're not allowed to ask questions about that" so many times before people start wondering what you're trying to hide. The propaganda machine has never been so visible to the public, and this is all coming after the empire was caught lying about the Skripal poisoning.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. June 4, 2018.

The Council on Foreign Relations is a massively influential think tank with members in the leadership of pretty much every significant media outlet in America. In late April it held a conference titled Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News in which a man named Richard Stengel told the audience that it is necessary for the US government to propagandize its citizens. Engel is the former managing editor of Time Magazine, a position he vacated to go and work for the US State Department. Yes, really.

“Basically, every country creates their own narrative story and, you know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the ‘chief propagandist’ job,” Engel told the CFR audience. “We haven’t talked about propaganda… I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

You can cringe all you like, but he’s right. Not about propaganda being a legitimate weapon for an ostensibly free democracy to inflict upon its citizens of course; manipulating the way your citizenry thinks is manipulating the way they vote and organize and what they consent to, and is plainly sociopathic. But he is right that all the shrieking the US does about Russian propaganda applies fully to its own behavior.

As we’ve discussed previously, the only real power in this world is the power to control the public narrative about what is going on. The only reason governments operate the way they operate, the only reason money works the way it works, the only reason power exists where it exists, is that we’ve all agreed to play along with some made-up mental stories about those things and pretend that they are true and real. The only thing stopping the populace from collectively deciding to change the way money works, from deciding that the assholes on Capitol Hill aren’t in charge anymore, or from deciding that every billionaire in America should be butchered like a hog and turned into Slim Jims is the fact that those ideas have not become the dominant narrative. If you can control the stories that the masses tell themselves about what is in their best interests, you control everything.

Twelve tips for making sense of the world. June 12, 2018.

In an environment that is saturated with mass media propaganda, it can be hard to figure out which way’s up, let alone get an accurate read on what’s going on in the world. Here are a few tips I’ve learned which have given me a lot of clarity in seeing through the haze of spin and confusion. Taken separately they don’t tell you a lot, but taken together they paint a very useful picture of the world and why it is the way it is. 

1. It’s always ultimately about acquiring power. 

In the quest to understand why governments move in such irrational ways, why expensive, senseless wars are fought while homeless people die of exposure on the streets, why millionaires and billionaires get richer and richer while everyone else struggles to pay rent, why we destroy the ecosystem we depend on for our survival, why one elected official tends to advance more or less the same harmful policies and agendas as his or her predecessor, people often come up with explanations which don’t really hold water. 

The most common of these is probably the notion that all of these problems are due to the malignant influence of one of two mainstream political parties, and if the other party could just get in control of the situation all the problems would go away. Other explanations include the belief that humans are just intrinsically awful, blaming minorities like Jews or immigrants, blaming racism and white supremacy, or going all the way down wild and twisted rabbit holes into theories about reptilian secret societies and baby-eating pedophile cabals. But really all of mankind’s irrational behavior can be explained by the basic human impulse to amass power and influence over one’s fellow humans, combined with the fact that sociopaths tend to rise to positions of power. 

Our evolutionary ancestors were pack animals, and the ability to rise in social standing in one’s pack determined crucial matters like whether one got first or last dibs on food or got to reproduce. This impulse to rise in our pack is hardwired deeply into our evolutionary heritage, but when left unchecked due to a lack of empathy, and when expanded into the globe-spanning 7.6 billion human pack we now find ourselves in due to ease of transportation and communication, it can lead to individuals who will keep amassing more and more power until they wield immense influence over entire clusters of nations. 

2. Money rewards sociopathy. 

The willingness to do anything to get ahead, to claw your way to the top, to betray whomever you need to, to throw anyone under the bus, to step on anyone to pass them in the rat race, will be rewarded in our current system. Being willing to underpay employees, cheat the legal system, and influence legislators will be rewarded exponentially more. People with a sense of empathy are often unwilling to do such things, whereas sociopaths and psychopaths are. About four percent of the population are sociopaths, and about one percent are psychopaths, with some five to fifteen percent falling somewhere along the borderline. The less empathy you have, the further you are willing to go, and the further up the ladder you can climb. 

3. Wealth kills empathy. 

If that weren’t bad enough, studies have shown that controlling large amounts of wealth actually destroys one’s sense of compassion for one’s fellow man. When you are able to use wealth to obtain everything from security to loyalty to personal relationships, you no longer have to be tuned in to the brain’s empathy center the rest of humanity depends on to get an accurate reading on what’s going on with the people we’re surrounded by. Most people need to be constantly feeling around their families, coworkers, employers, friends and acquaintances in order to ensure their own safety, social standing and security, whereas a wealthy person can simply purchase those things. Being born into wealth or having it for a long time can prevent that sense of empathy from being as strong as it is in the rest of the population. 

4. Money is power. 

A 2014 Princeton study showed that ordinary Americans have essentially zero influence over their nation’s policy and behavior regardless of how they vote, while wealthy Americans have a great deal of influence. This is because the ability to use corporate lobbying and campaign donations effectively amounts to the legalized bribery of elected officials, which means that money translates directly into political power. This creates a ruling class which is naturally incentivized to use their influence to increase their own wealth while decreasing everyone else’s, because since power is relative, the less money everyone else has the more power the ruling class has. 

This is why billionaires keep hoarding more and more wealth while using legalized bribery to stifle economic justice legislation. It isn’t because they want to be able to buy thousands of luxury cars or dozens of private jets; they can only use one at a time the same as everyone else. They hoard wealth to keep the rest of the population from having it. Because money equals power, spreading wealth around would be tantamount to making everyone king, and because power is relative, making everyone king would mean that no one is king. 

Rulers, historically, do not give up power easily, and this elite wealthy class is no exception. Hence all their aggressive attempts to suppress any movement against the status quo from the unwashed masses. 

5. This same ruling class controls the media. 

It’s common knowledge that most media is controlled by plutocrats, whether it’s the old money plutocrats who control the legacy media or the new money Silicon Valley plutocrats who control much of the new media. Media control is an essential component of rule; this has always been the case, since the days when kings would order dissident books burned and bishops would torture dissident orators to death. This is why the first thing a new plutocrat does as soon as rising to a certain level of wealth is start buying up media influence, like Jeff Bezos did when he bought the Washington Post in 2013. Bezos bought WaPo not because he is a stupid businessman who thought newspapers were about to make a lucrative resurgence, but because he is a brilliant businessman who knows that the status quo he is building his empire upon requires a propaganda firm that the public will trust and believe. 

6. People are always manipulating each other. 

Cultivating an acute awareness of when you are being manipulated, and considering whether someone might have a motive to do so, is an essential component to making sense of the world. 

It is very rare to encounter someone who won’t try to manipulate you in any way. Generally people you’ll encounter in your life will try to influence the way you perceive them and your relationship to them, they’ll try to pull you in in some ways and push you out in others, try to hook you up to their personal agendas and goals and shape you in a way that fits with their shape. There’s nothing inherently malevolent in such behavior, it’s just what people do and what they always have done. Again, humans are social creatures, and we do what we can to increase our standing within our social circles. 

The big problem is when skillful manipulators find their way into positions of large-scale influence like government or media. Unfortunately, these are the types who tend to get elevated into such positions, because they can manipulate their way in, and generally they do so for reasons of personal ambition rather than altruism. These skillful manipulators form an essential echelon of the ruling class’ loyal servants, and are the minds behind the pro-establishment narratives you’ll suddenly see circulated from think tanks to media platforms to the establishment lackeys on Capitol Hill.  

7. Society is made of narrative. 

Most of human experience is filtered through our mental stories about it, from our sense of self, to our ideas about who we are, to our beliefs about how we’re supposed to behave in society, to what money is and how it works, to where power exists and who we’re supposed to obey. All of these things are purely conceptual constructs which only exist in the realm of thought; a “dollar” exists to the extent that we’ve all agreed to pretend it’s a real thing and that it has a certain amount of purchasing power. At any time we could collectively decide to change the rules about how power functions or what money is and how it operates, and then instantly the rule of the elite class would be over without anyone firing a shot. It really would be that simple. 

That’s how powerful a force narrative is, which is why the ruling plutocrats fight so hard to keep us from seizing control of it. This is why whistleblowers and outlets like WikiLeaks are aggressively and constantly smeared and demonized in the corporate media; if they can create suspicion of truth-tellers then they can keep them from being trusted, and thus keep them from being believed. This tool has been used to minimize the impact of everything from on the ground reports of what’s happening in Syria to leak drops from Edward Snowden; if you can create enough suspicion of someone it doesn’t matter if they’re speaking 100 percent truth; nobody will believe them, and thus the dominant narrative will remain the same. 

Maintaining an awareness that there is always an unending battle to control the narrative and manipulate it to advance plutocratic interests is an essential part of understanding the world. 

8. The lines between nations are imaginary. 

Those lines drawn on the map between countries are pure narrative as well; they’re only as real as the collective public agrees to pretend they are. The ruling elites know this and exploit this. They don’t think in terms of nations and governments, they think in terms of individuals and groups of individuals. 

Key strategic region in the Middle East? No need to take over the whole country, just flood it with extremist groups who are loyal to your agendas and control its oil fields. Primo naval real estate in the southern hemisphere? No need to annex it and plant your country’s flag there, just secure enough influence over the important moving parts using corporate contracts, trade agreements, military/intelligence treaties and secret deals and you can use it however you want. 

This is why I am dismissive of arguments that “Israel controls America” or “America controls Europe”. There is no “Israel” or “America”; they’re made-up ideas which rulers once upon a time treated as real, but in the modern days of nationless plutocracy they no longer do. There are individuals, there are corporations, there are government agencies, there are factions and groups, and these are what the ruling elites deal with. 

Governmental structures are only tools which are used by the ruling elites for the purpose of manipulation, control, and military violence, and they only do so insofar as it is useful. The idea of real nations and governments is a cutesy fairy tale sold to the masses so they won’t see the manipulations. 

9. Powerful forces are naturally incentivized to collaborate with each other toward mutual interests. 

You can be a low-grade millionaire and still live like a relatively normal civilian, but once you start obtaining giant amounts of wealth control you need to start collaborating with existing power structures or they’ll snuff you out to prevent you from rocking their boat, because again, money equals power. This is why Jeff Bezos contracts with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board, and it’s why Facebook and Google collaborate extensively with government agencies; they never would have been allowed to grow to their size if they had not. Plutocratic dynasties which have been in place since long before Amazon, Facebook and Google figured this out many generations ago, and have agreed to push forward in a direction of mutual interest that doesn’t upset the status quo that their wealth is built upon. 

This is extremely true of the west, where an effective empire has been created by a complex transnational alliance of mostly western plutocrats, but it is true outside of that empire as well; there are power alliances to be found everywhere that there is power. 

10. There is an immense amount of wealth that can be grabbed in the chaos of war and conflict. 

In the same way that existing power structures are naturally incentivized to quash any emerging power which would upset their status quo, alliances of power structures push to crush non-aligned power structures the world over. Whenever you see the tight western alliances and their media propaganda arms attacking the interests of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Venezuela etc., you are seeing an alliance of power structures working to disrupt the interests of another alliance of power structures in order to absorb their assets. 

The chaotic, Wild West environments that these conflicts create allow for an amount of underhanded looting and pillaging that you could never get away with in your own country, in the exact same way the colonialists and conquistadors of old could never have gotten away with brazenly grabbing gold, land and slaves from their fellow Europeans in Madrid or Rome but were given no legal trouble in the new world. The colonialists and conquistadors pushed into the Americas, Africa and Asia on the pretense of spreading Christianity and civilization; modern day conquerers push into non-aligned power structures on the pretense of spreading freedom and democracy in precisely the same way. 

This chaos doesn’t require direct military conflict to be profitable; the uncritical enmity against Russia that the western plutocratic alliance has manufactured with its media control has allowed them to be blamed for everything from incriminating WikiLeaks documents to a corporate raid by Ukrainian oligarchs without any questions asked. 

Anyone who has ever had to deal personally with a sociopath knows how much they love to exploit the gray areas that chaotic situations give them, and geopolitical conflicts create those situations in spades. 

11. The neocons are always wrong. 

This one’s really easy. If you ever want to be on the right side of history for a foreign policy debate, look at what Bush-era PNAC neocons like John Bolton and Bill Kristol are saying about it, and take the opposite position. Neocon thought leaders have been loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything since the turn of the century, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria, and they’re not about to start being right now. 

12. The push towards truth always starts with yourself. 

You can’t out-manipulate seasoned manipulators. The main error most people make when trying to deal with a sociopath is to try and manipulate them back. Don’t even try. They have years of experience on you because they literally have done nothing else. While you were laughing and crying and worrying and connecting and relating to people, they were working out how to play humans like Garry Kasparov worked out how to play chess. And when you have literal teams of sociopaths collaborating together to amass power, you my dear child, do not have a chance. Don’t play their game. You will lose. 

The only way to win this is to set your compass resolutely to “true.” Always be honest with yourself. Find all the different ways that you are manipulating others and see them and acknowledge them. Find your tribal allegiances and your desire to be right, and tip your hat to their existence. The more self-aware we are, the less levers we have to be manipulated by. If you are blindly partisan or loyal to a particular faction, that makes you gullible to propaganda because your wishful thinking and your desire to be right come into play. Get honest with yourself about who you are and what you want, and you will start to become an un-playable piece on the board. 

If we can’t beat these bastards with truth, we don’t deserve to win.

Mattis: Putin Is Trying To “Undermine America’s Moral Authority". June 17, 2018.

At a graduation ceremony for the US Naval War College (barf), US Secretary of Defense James Mattis asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aims to diminish the appeal of the western democratic model and attempts to undermine America’s moral authority,” and that “his actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals.” 

This would be the same James Mattis who’s been overseeing the war crimes committed by America’s armed forces during their illegal occupation of Syria. This would be the same United States of America that was born of the genocide of indigenous tribes and the labor of African slaves, which slaughtered millions in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya and Syria for no legitimate reason, which is partnered with Ukrainian Nazis, jihadist factions in Syria and Iranian terror cultists, which supports 73 percent of the world’s dictators, which interferes constantly in the electoral processes of other countries as a matter of policy, which stages coups around the world, which has encircled the globe with military bases, whose FBI still targets black civil rights activists for persecution to this very day, which routinely enters into undeclared wars of aggression against noncompliant governments to advance plutocratic interests, which remains the only country ever to use nuclear weapons on human beings after doing so completely needlessly in Japan, and which is functionally a corporatist oligarchy with no meaningful “democratic model” in place at all.

A casual glance at facts and history makes it instantly clear that the United States has no “moral authority” of any kind whatsoever, and is arguably the hub of the most pernicious and dangerous force ever assembled in human history. But the establishment Russia narrative really is that cartoonishly ridiculous: you really do have to believe that the US government is 100 percent pure good and the Russian government is 100 percent pure evil to prevent the whole narrative from falling to pieces. If you accept the idea that the exchange is anything close to 50/50, with Russia giving back more or less what it’s getting and simply protecting its own interests from the interests of geopolitical rivals, it no longer makes any sense to view Putin as a leader who poses a unique threat to the world. If you accept the idea that the west is actually being far more aggressive and antagonistic toward Russia than Russia is being toward the west, it gets even more laughable. 

In order to believe that the US has anything resembling “moral authority” you have to shove your head so far into the sand you get lava burns, but that really is what is needed to keep western anti-Russia hysteria going. None of the things the Russian government has been accused of doing (let alone the very legitimate questions about whether or not they even did all of them) merit anything but an indifferent shrug when compared with the unforgivable evils that America’s unelected power establishment has been inflicting upon the world, so they need to weave a narrative about “moral authority” in order to give those accusations meaning and relevance. And, since the notion of America having moral authority is contradicted by all facts in evidence, that narrative is necessarily woven of threads of fantasy and denial. 

Establishment anti-Russia hysteria is all narrative, no substance. It’s sustained by the talking heads of plutocrat-owned western media making the same unanimous assertions over and over again in authoritative, confident-sounding tones of voice without presenting any evidence or engaging with the reality of what Russia or its rivals are actually doing. The only reason American liberals believe that Putin is a dangerous boogieman who has taken over their government, but don’t believe for example that America is ruled by a baby-eating pedophile cabal, is because the Jake Tappers and Rachel Maddows have told them to believe one conspiracy theory and not the other. They could have employed the exact same strategy with any other wholly unsubstantiated conspiracy narrative and had just as much success. 

In reality, Russia is nothing other than a rival power structure that the US-centralized empire wants to either collapse or absorb, but they can’t just come right out and tell the public that they’re dangerously escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower because westerners live in an invisible empire ruled by insatiably greedy plutocrats, so they make up nonsense about Putin being some kind of omnipotent supervillain who has infiltrated the highest levels of US government and is trying to take over the world.

Of equal interest to the Defense Secretary’s “moral authority” gibberish is his claim that Putin’s actions “are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals.” 

I mean, like… what? So Russia isn’t challenging America militarily and isn’t taking any actions to attempt to, but it’s trying to, what, hurt America’s feelings? All this new cold war hysteria and nuclear brinkmanship has basically been America acting like a bitchy high school drama queen because Russia is saying mean things about it behind its back? How does a guy named “Mad Dog” get to be such a thin-skinned little snowflake? 

I’m just playing. Actually, when Mattis says that the Russian government is trying to “undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals,” he is saying that Moscow is interrupting the lies that Americans are being told about their government by the plutocrat-owned media. As we’ve been discussing a lot recently, control of the narrative is absolutely essential for rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear establishment policy makers babbling about “Russian propaganda” and Putin’s attempts to “undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals,” all that they are saying is that the plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think and vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to do that. 

More and more, the threads of the establishment narrative are ceasing to be unconsciously absorbed and are being increasingly consciously examined instead. This development has ultimately nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with our species moving out of its old relationship with mental narrative as it approaches evolve-or-die time in our challenging new world. I am greatly encouraged by what I am seeing.

OMG This This This This! Aug. 19, 2018.

That’s right, I’m writing an entire goddamn article about a single tweet made by another political commentator. It probably won’t even be a long article, because the excellent Tim Black said it all. Call me lazy, I don’t care, this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen all day: 

“Last night, one of my callers said we needed journalists and commentators willing to die for the truth,” Black tweeted. “I disagreed. We need journalists and commentators willing to give up their status, quit their jobs and make less money telling truth and sadly to most that’s the same as dying.” 

There’s so much truth in that I just want to unpack it a bit and riff on its implications from my own perspective. What would happen if a significant percentage of journalists got fed up with spoon feeding lies to a trusting populace and decided to place truth and authenticity before income and prestige? Or, perhaps more realistically, what if people who are interested in reporting and political analysis ceased pursuing positions in the plutocrat-owned mass media and pursued alternate paths to getting the word out instead? 

I contend that if enough people did either of the above, it would save the world. 

The omnicidal, ecocidal Orwellian power establishment that is oppressing us into heartlessness and driving our species towards extinction depends on deception and manipulation to manufacture support for depraved plutocratic agendas, so truth is poison to those agendas. 

The plutocrat-controlled media outlets advance that deception and manipulation, and honest alternative media outlets disrupt it. If enough talent began flooding into the latter instead of the former, it would become impossible to manufacture the consent of the governed for the deranged agendas which imperil our whole world.

STOP. HUMANIZING. WAR CRIMINALS. Sep. 2, 2018.

As of this writing, a tweet by disgraced Broadway fraud convict Roland Scahill has 90 thousand shares and 362 thousand likes, which if you’re not used to Twitter is a ridiculously high amount that nobody generally hits. The tweet features nothing but four seconds of video footage from the John McCain funeral, and the caption “George W. Bush sneaking a piece of candy to Michelle Obama is warming my heart.” 

That’s it. That’s all it took to win Twitter for the day. Those four seconds of footage have been circulated around TV news stations to ‘ooh’s and ‘ahh’s of fawning establishment pundits yammering incessantly about how the death of War Hero John McCain™ has let everyone Put Aside Our Political Differences™ and Come Together As Americans™ to celebrate the life of a man who dedicated his entire political career to sowing death, suffering and devastation at every opportunity. A war criminal giving a piece of candy to the wife of another war criminal at the funeral of a war criminal is all it took to get mainstream American brains gushing with dopamine and oxytocin. 

Because that’s how compartmentalized Americans are from the reality of what war is and what it means. The explosions, the screams, the charred and shredded human bodies, the chaos and displacement and all the suffering, terrorism, slavery and rape that necessarily always comes with it, the million Iraqis killed under Bush, the unfathomable humanitarian disasters created in Libya and Syria under Obama, all the devastation created in all the military interventions McCain helped push for, all of that is so peripheral and distant in American consciousness that it can be dismissed with a wave of the hand and a piece of fucking candy. 

And it isn’t really their fault. The more woke Americans who’ve grown to resent their brainwashed countrymen hate it when I say this, but it isn’t. It’s not a coincidence that the nation with the most powerful military in the history of civilization and the most billionaires in the history of civilization also happens to have the most sophisticated propaganda system in the history of civilization, and that propaganda system is pointed at them from a very early age to normalize the war machine that is used to protect the empire of the billionaires. 

The United States is the most important player in the imperial alliance centralized around it, and therefore its citizenry are necessarily the most propagandized people on earth. You can’t have the populace of such an important nation suddenly demanding that troops be brought home and the resources being spent on bombs be spent eliminating the economic inequality on which your empire depends instead, so you’ve got to get into their minds early and aggressively to manipulate the way they think about war. Everything from flag worship to the fetishization of military personnel to Pentagon-controlled Hollywood movies are used from early childhood to install the assumption that their nation’s bloated military budget is only ever going toward good and never evil, and to prime their minds for the war propaganda they will be fed by the plutocrat-owned news media. 

Day after day after day after day, from when they are small until their dying breath, the American psyche is pummeled with this relentless assault upon its natural sense of empathy and reason. So it’s understandable that every now and then one of them snaps and shoots up a building full of people, inflicting the same kind of mass murder at home they’ve been trained to accept as normal abroad. And it’s understandable that they’d be duped into thinking the monstrous evils that have been inflicted upon our world by Bush, Obama and McCain (and Henry Kissinger, who also made an appearance at the funeral) are innocent little oopsie-poopsies which pale in comparison to something so monumentally heroic as correcting a woman who called Obama an Arab once, or sharing a piece of candy. 

But if Americans are ever going to escape from the chains of oligarchy, they’re necessarily going to have to cease consenting to imperialism. Without their resources being funneled into hundreds of bases and countless military and intelligence operations overseas, there’d be a chance to fix America’s infrastructure and make sure everyone gets what they need. Without the US economy being propped up with the barrel of a gun to ensure the success of globalist agendas, Americans would have a chance to create a real economy based on real things that they themselves own and control. Without the ability to use the US war machine to advance their agendas, the oligarchs who control America’s economy, government and media will be unable to rule over the increasingly wealthy and powerful masses. Without the best technology and the brainpower of the brightest Americans being sucked up into the war machine, the nation’s most creative minds will lose their incentive to point their ingenuity at death and destruction, and can point it at useful innovations instead. 

And then the propaganda machine which holds the whole empire together will be useless and impotent, and the shackles on American minds will crumble. And the rest of the empire will follow. 

The first step in this direction is to cease normalizing the monsters who facilitate human butchery around the world. Stop believing they need to be regarded as “heroes” just because they wore a uniform at some point. Stop believing that it’s ever okay to push for needless wars which butcher innocent men, women and children. Stop believing a man can facilitate the slaughter of a million people and not have that clearly be his single defining legacy. Stop believing that it’s worse to criticize a warmonger than it is to be a warmonger. 

Because if it’s up to the bastards who rule us currently, they’ll happily keep shushing us into polite silence while continuing to march us along our current ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory until it gets us all killed. They’ll make saints of warmongering empire loyalists and uphold their murderous lives as exemplary and virtuous, and if we say we want to move things in a different direction we’ll be shouted down with buzzwords about heroism and decency until we shut up. If we leave it up to these pricks, we’ll become the first species to go extinct due to politeness. 

Stop letting them normalize and elevate people who embody the very essence of the imperial oppression machine. Stop letting them humanize psychopathic war whores. Stop letting them twist this into a conversation about respecting those with different political opinions and make it about what it is: the mass murder of innocents for power and profit. Refuse to be reprimanded into polite silence. Refuse to die of politeness. Seize control of the narrative and force sanity into our imperiled world.

Trump Minus Narrative Equals Bushbama. Sep. 8, 2018.

Barack Obama is making headlines today. In a speech at the University of Illinois, Obama called out the “politics of fear” which are used by his successor and criticized an insufficient denunciation of “Nazi sympathizers” by the current administration. 

“How hard can that be?” asked the former president. “Saying Nazis are bad?” 

Also in the news, getting far less attention than the sparkly spectacle of Fauxgressive Jesus wagging his finger at Orange Hitler for being too nice to Nazis, is a report from the Washington Post (open it in a private browser to get around the paywall) that the Trump administration has done a complete 180 degree reversal of its prior position on Syria. And before you jump on me about believing anonymously sourced reports from an establishment outlet that is fully owned by a CIA contractor, this isn’t one of those: the sources are senior State Department officials who are named in the article. 

According to the State Department’s James Jeffrey and Joel Rayburn, the Trump administration has now abandoned its previous goal of pulling out of Syria as soon as possible. The conditions for ending the US military’s illegal occupation of a sovereign nation now reportedly include “the exit of all Iranian military and proxy forces from Syria, and establishment of a stable, nonthreatening government acceptable to all Syrians and the international community,” which is another way of saying that the occupation will continue indefinitely and regime change is back on the table. 

Twenty paragraphs into the report, we get to something even more disturbing. While the Trump administration has been issuing warnings that there will be harsh consequences for using chemical weapons, apparently now no attacks of any kind by the Syrian government on the terrorist militias occupying the province of Idlib will be permitted by the United States at all. No attacking the terrorists, period.

“We’ve started using new language,” Jeffrey said, referring to previous warnings against the use of chemical weapons. Now, he said, the United States will not tolerate “an attack. Period.”

“Any offensive is to us objectionable as a reckless escalation” he said. “You add to that, if you use chemical weapons, or create refu­gee flows or attack innocent civilians,” and “the consequences of that are that we will shift our positions and use all of our tools to make it clear that we’ll have to find ways to achieve our goals that are less reliant on the goodwill of the Russians.” 

So we’ve got Trump administration officials saying that the extremist factions which were armed and supported by the US and its allies during the Obama administration are completely off limits, and that the military occupation of Syria will continue until Syria’s Middle Eastern allies leave the country and the Syrian government begins acting as America commands. 

So, maybe, the reason Trump doesn’t spend all day tweeting “Nazis are bad” is because if he did, the establishment propagandists would lose the narrative that not saying “Nazis are bad” is the worst thing that this president is doing? Maybe if Trump started talking about how bad Nazis are whenever he’s in front of a camera, people might stop calling him Orange Hitler and start noticing that he’s actually Orange Obama? 

Mainstream Democrats and Republicans (who I’m tempted to just start referring to as “The John McCain Party” for simplicity’s sake) have been suffering from an increasingly bizarre form of amnesia about George W Bush, completely forgetting about his draconian, Orwellian bloody smear of a presidency and presenting him as a cuddly wuddly old man who gives candy to nice ladies. But even people who remember what a bloodthirsty monster that man is tend to forget that he actually campaigned on a “humble foreign policy” to get (kinda sorta) elected. 

In 2008 Bush was succeeded by Obama, who’d campaigned against the warmongering of his predecessor and pledged to clean up the messes Bush made in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead he continued and drastically expanded Bush’s neoconservative war agendas, as well as expanding his Orwellian surveillance program while adding unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers into the mix as well. And now Trump, who campaigned against Obama’s interventionist foreign policy and harshly attacked his Syrian interventionism for years, is continuing Obama’s foreign policy and preparing to harshly attack Syria. 

There is a pattern here. It isn’t hard to see. It is grinding its pelvis into our faces. The only reason more people don’t see it is because there’s so much narrative spin around US presidents. 

If you listen to the mass media about Trump, you either believe that he is a Nazi Kremlin agent who presents a unique and unprecedented threat to America, or a populist hero who is fighting for the common man against the Deep State, depending on your echo chamber of preference. But if you mute the mass media narratives and just look at what’s happening without any partisan filters, what you see is soldiers, planes, bases and wars ships continuing to expand into other countries. You see more and more money, resources and creativity being poured into the war machine. You see a plutocratic class continuing to dictate the behavior of the US government. You see ordinary people continuing to struggle to make ends meet. You see an increasingly militarized police force, a continually expanding Orwellian surveillance system, dangerous and steadily increasing tensions with Russia, increasingly uninhibited ecocidal capitalism, increasingly unregulated exploitative corporations and banks. 

You see the same bullshit with a different skin pigmentation.