The rock tells the story. Following the ascending volcanic dike to its crest, a wall of the red pebbly splatter rock lay hard against the cold andesite lava that had long ago poured out building this hill and flowing into the surrounding basins. But, the land is now only a collection of clues – if that is how one sees it. Or it is what it is: hills and valleys, temporary streams and canyons.

As I walked and scrambled up the broken piles of rock toward the top of the old vent, a mule deer whistled below telling all and sundry that I was there. A few minutes later it whistled again and then once more. I had seen her tracks, quite fresh, in a hidden curve of the dike wall lower down and wondered how nearby the deer might be. The sound was shockingly familiar, like the hands-clasp whistle that my son uses to call his dog; and for a moment I searched the valley below me with binoculars looking for some other human walking in this remote place. (Later, as I returned to my evening spot, the deer hopped out of hiding, crossed the valley and disappeared into the tiny trees of an adjoining hillside. I watched its hindquarters disappear into heavy cover, and then, like the closing scene from Harry and the Hendersons, parts of several deer appeared briefly in the spaces between the trees and just as rapidly disappeared into the tall brush.)

I sat on the top of the tall hill, sat on the lava that for a few moments all those many years ago was 2000º F and pushing up out of the earth making a terrible mess of this place – it would have been catastrophe for the plants and animals living here. But the serenity and beauty of the present moment would not let me delve too far into the conflagration that visited, and built, this area over the space of about a million years, over a hundred or so square miles, all fed by about 100 volcanic vents like the one upon which I sat.

The serenity and beauty of this place and this moment also formed the mansion of experience in which to contemplate the present conflagration that was “flowing” in from only several miles away, but from millions of “vents” spread, literally, over the whole surface of the earth.

Not to be too dramatic, though perhaps unavoidably: the lights from Los Alamos shine down on this place. Oppenheimer, Groves, Teller and many others have seen this landscape from their physical and intellectual aerie as they plotted and, others like them, continue to plot several of the potential futures of the world: the atomic and hydrogen bombs born on the pyroclastic ash-flows from a super-volcano! But this was not on my mind more than as the recollection of the previous color that a room might have been painted; no, from this hilltop, looking out over the valleys and hills of this old volcanic shield, seeing the lights of Los Alamos to the west, Santa Fe to the east, the glow of Albuquerque to the south, it was the class war of the worlds that came into focus.

Sitting there at the crest of the long volcanic dike as the sun was setting, a geological feature called a ‘hog back’, my lack of being alone was more than palpable; it was reality. The doe just down the hill was, without question, giving my presence her attention; this was the center of the range of a mountain lion that I had once caught napping in a shaded canyon and had recently seen tracks and scat nearby; though unseen, coyotes were coming out to hunt all around me and would sing to me later in the evening; and all the smaller mammals: skunks, cottontails, jacks, the various rats and mice. I listened for them, watched the changing light define and undefine the land shapes in which they were certainly walking, stalking and secreting themselves.

Ravens flew in, 2 by two, calling to each other, swinging by overhead to have a look and treating me to the whoosh whoosh of their wing beats. I was of little interest, too far from their cliffs and had no visible long gun, a recognition that they make most readily. Other than their occasional sounds the rest was an embracing silence.

These partners in the experience of the moment were also part of my considerations. I was not alone in this place – not far away from “real life” under the twinkling lights. I was here, on purpose, to be with the creatures of the desert hills. I was here to feel my life in communion with theirs, seeking a different context. I was here to be free of language, to be hungry for every sound, every sight of movement; here to be free of level floors and paths, to walk on the uneven earth; here to be free of comfort, to feel the cold wind, to have to shield my eyes from the low angled sun.

So I sat on the hilltop and felt my way through the wash of sub-verbal ideas: the 100 thousand people in the valley east, west, north and south were an anxiety, an empathy, as I looked around beyond the low hills; their lives, hopes and dreams, rushed by like a super-speed fast-forward, all montaged together as in a bad movie; reaching out beyond the hills, beyond the Rio Grande Valley, beyond the western high plains to the coasts and on over the oceans; a billion voices in the whoosh whoosh of the raven’s wing.

It was really pretty simple: humans possess biological capacities that have been adapted into very powerful designs, and have lost control of the power that changes the world around them; and some humans had collected to themselves such vast power that a madness has been created in them beyond all help. All the behaviors, instincts and feelings that matter have been swept aside by domination of physical spaces, ability to carry out almost any desire, domination and control of other people, feelings of omnipotence and omniscience: the madness of power over others rather than the communion of common purpose.

The human species is ultimately flawed. The primate social pattern of domination, long since obsolete as an adaptive device, continues to be expressed in our economics and politics; and is now imbued with physical and organizational powers thousands, even millions, of times that which both enforced and inhibited the actions of our ancestors. We adapt, in our expectations and behaviors, to our present powers and the conditions that surround us and yet still feel about and act on them with the emotions of a tribal primate.

For all the complexity in the human world, our situation comes down to a class of humans acting in every possible circumstance to advance their interests without regard to the costs that are inflicted on living others and the future. As long as there is a significant surplus of material and services available, the native design of human species will move some of its members to try and collect that excess to their control. This creates the basis for an escalating process of wealth accumulation with primate hierarchical social patterns transforming into aberrant power-dominated class systems.

This process can take on a hundred different forms, and so confuses us. Those who follow this course as capitalists claim that it is the socialists that are making trouble and the communists say that it is the capitalists who trample people’s rights to the right kind of wealth. So-called Christians team up with capitalists and another set of Christian beliefs finds more commonality with socialists, yet both act with antagonism toward atheists or Muslims. And on it goes.

The one “religion” that seems to cut across all of these lines of difference is excesses of power and wealth: the obscenely rich may fight among themselves, but it is mutual understanding of their common relationship to the rest of humanity that draws them into communion for the maintenance of wealth, power and privilege: the actions that are needed to extract an abundance of wealth from the labors and fears of the human herd are a blood-bond for the elite.

The elite of Roman abused the common folk. The elite of Europe abused the common folk, first at home and then abroad in their colonies. The elite in the old Soviet Union abused the common folk. The elite in China have and are abusing the common folk. The elite in the US are abusing the common folk. The elite in India are abusing the common folk. The elite of the major institutional religions abuse the common folk. And in places where the common folk are not being abused, the elite are preparing conditions of the global economy to abuse them. When there is sufficient stored and tradable excess converted to private wealth, 10, 20, 50 times greater than basic need meeting wealth, this will always be the outcome.

If I can’t imagine life except within the circle of the distant lights, the whole package of “goods” must be accepted: mining, smelting, manufacturing, retailing; economic growth, progress, wealth accumulation and power; the overcoming of meaninglessness with the meaningless.

How is it possible to live without the light switch, without unlimited access to TV, refrigeration, wifi, year round 70º F regardless of ambient temperature, unlimited choices and supplies of food and ‘consumer goods?’ Who and how many would give these up willingly? And in these questions lies the understanding of the elite; who and how many would give up willingly absolute power to have and do as they wish, to live with impunity, and what actions would be taken to maintain such power?

The question isn’t what is happening so much as what can be done. What are the global responses; what are the personal responses?

It is easy to say that wealthy and corporate interests have leveraged their increasing control of economic and political institutions to the point that the primary legal foundation of the US and much of the world must be broken to accommodate them – these foundations, as habits of practice and expectations, have already been bent as far as they will go. It is what we, as a people, accept as correct and honorable, applied consistently and to an extreme – an extreme that we never intended – that is the essential engine driving us to this place.

Like all movements we have our prophets: Henry George, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, C. Wright Mills, E. F. Schumacher, Hervé Kempf, Joe Bageant, Noam Chomsky, David Cay Johnston, Chris Hedges, Chris Glugston, George Monbiot, Paul Craig Roberts, Herman Daly, Bill Mckibben, Derrick Jensen and dozens of notable others, most you will never have heard of, like Coralie Koonce who has written very readable, and scholarly, books bringing all of the issues together. And there are many many more, completely ignored by the media and the “world of influence”, who work everyday to better understand and to better inform their fellows of the grave danger and the hard choices that the immediate future holds.¹

It is so clear a summary of their work, and that of my companions on the hilltop, that great wealth must not be in private hands; human hands must belong to the same class – the human class. And the amount of wealth extracted and sequestered outside of the movement of environmental processes must be reduced to the barest minimum. Humans must take less from the total energy flux and material cycles. The human pleasures of life, and there are many, must and do come primarily from communion with our fellows, both human and non-human; we must again learn to distrust inventions of behavior and objects that separate us. All of this and more will come, if it comes at all, with the greatest of effort, pain and great luck.

As I sat on the hilltop all of these thoughts went through my mind as movements of emotion, as wordless sensations guided by the far away city lights. What was real was the doe below me in the cactus meadow. We were both occupying the same space in the desert hills with our similarities and differences. She was about 170 pounds, young, strong; sharp eyes, ears and sense of smell; fleet of foot and dangerous with sharp hoofs. She knew the terrain, the plants, where to find water, the dangers from mountain lions, coyotes, and humans. I am 170 pounds, old and strong enough, in a weak sort of way (I could not hop across the 200 meters to the trees in a few seconds). I have weak eyes that need prostheses; my hearing has been damaged by years in noisy places and especially the use of firearms; I can smell things placed under my nose and sewage treatment plants. I know the area in a general sort of way. I am very dangerous with a big pistol at hand and very fast, though limited, on a motorcycle. I can build a fire. I can think ahead. My delicate feet are cased in fine boots; my cold-prone head is cased in a wool fleece cap. My hairless, thin-skinned body is cased in wool and out-door approved synthetics. I have, in my panniers, food, water, emergency sleeping bag, flashlight, cameras, campstool and other useful items. I can leave this place if I wish.

The doe belongs here. Her lineage almost certainly goes back thousands of years in this general area, perhaps 1500 generations. 1500 generations for me would include the episodic pulses out from the African cradle, the cave painters of southern Europe, the explorers of the west Asian steppes and the intrepid probers at the Beringia passage to North America.² Not only do I bring the ideas and concerns of the present intellectual world to this hilltop, but also the generational history of a good part of the earth; where I belong is a matter of conjecture.

The deer should whistle a warning again and again, louder and louder, until all can hear it.

1. I apologize if I have left out one of your favorite prophets, my point in making a compact list is that there are many – enough to make up the rooster of a baseball team or of a representative body.
2. There are two ways to make such comparisons: directly with years; this area would have begun repopulating with the present fauna about 6000 years ago (after suffering a stifling thousand year drought), or by the number of generations comparing the number of birthing cycles which would indicate the degree to which the present population is related to the population of the past.

The human species has produced a new organizing principle evolved to increase the rate and reach of adaptation using new and unprecedented methods.  For two million years or more, and through several versions of our genus, this forming principle was caged by the immediate biophysical boundaries of environment.  However, its absolute confinement in the ecological space served not so much to limit its capacities as to allow them to develop without inherent limits; the limiting forces were external and immutable and so did not require the evolution of inhibiting designs.

I call this principle the Consciousness System of Order (CSO); everyone is aware of its functioning, but like the air its very ubiquity and transparent presence hides its nature from us.  The natural environment in conjunction with our biological instincts and propensities were the information sources for the CSO, its design is to create causative maps from this information; events can be predicted and behaviors can be tested before they are put to actual practice.  Behaviors that succeed especially well or that prove especially dangerous are stored in Story, forming the essential information storage device of the CSO and allowing its content to be spread through space and time (analogous to DNA/protein information nexus in living systems).

For the last few tens of thousands of years the CSO has gradually been creating its own reality, slipping in small ways through the boundaries of environment and biology.  The capacity to influence the immune system by convincing a person with an illness that she or he will improve or will die is an early example.  In essence, the causative map created in the ‘mind’ and institutionalized in Story can begin to compete with biophysical reality for those periods of time following and prior to forceful environmental action.  It was even possible to model environmental action in the CSO and avoid some of the consequences.  The evolutionary power of such a design cannot be overstated.

Ultimately, the trickle of the CSO’s creation of its own reality became a flood until we find ourselves in the situation of today. Billions of people “believe” that human descriptions of the real are equal to or even more important than biophysical Reality.  Reality itself is treated as negotiable.

The magnitude of earth processes, the degrees of human knowledge and technical capacity and our not insignificant, but relatively small numbers historically, have buffered our impact on the total biosphere until now.  However, our species has always had a major impact on the ecosystems where we have resided; we have steadily spread to all environments and so have powerfully influenced the biological construction of the whole earth.  But now our powers have moved to changing the biophysical structure of the atmosphere, the oceans and even to some extent the near depths of the earth’s crust.  It is becoming abundantly clear that the momentum of our present uninhibited application of CSO principles will end badly: our capacity for staving off forceful environmental action will soon reach its limit.

It is essential that the capacities of the CSO be applied to discovering and instituting inhibitions of its functioning. We have tried religion and politics in this role and they have been uniquely unsuccessful since they are the essence of the created realities that distort our relationship with environmental reality.  The scientific method is the one principle that can give the biophysical the place and value that it had in our origins.

Fundamentally, science is a process for the veridical adaptation of behavior to the immediate universe of our actions; it is one of the processes with this purpose or function, and it has its own unique set of opportunities and consequences.  In the most general sense there is no disagreement from any quarter with the argument that humans must, over the long run, act in the world with correct responses to “reality.”  Argument arises, however, when we try to describe what that Reality is.  Further, most people, most of the time, hold the view that there is but one “really true” Reality, and, therefore, those who hold other views are misinformed, pathological or criminal – even as they might be unaware of their errors.

Science is a process; it is not the various bodies of knowledge generated by that process.  Although we divide up the products of science into areas of study, this is done for pragmatic reasons and has nothing to do with what science is.  But these divisions create a fruitful basis for confusion: the question, “Is physics a better science than biology or biology a better science than psychology?” is but one example.  Certainly, the technical application of science methodology is different for different areas of study (the laboratory skills and equipment of a microbiologist would not serve the needs of a volcanologist or sociologist), but the underlying principles are, and should be, the same.  It is science conceived in this way that needs to be compared and contrasted with other methods of adapting our actions to our world – which is always the ultimate test of our biological suitability: failure to function agreeably within the constraints of biophysical reality is the final measure for any living thing, even humans.

The classical distinction made between primary methods of knowledge acquisition contrasts authority with direct experience.  In the first case, a question is addressed to an existing source of knowledge for an answer.  In the second case, the question is formed into a created experience from which the answer is supposedly obtainable.  It is abundantly clear, with a moment’s reflection, that both methods must be part of the human repertoire, and that the quality of the authority and the adequacy of the created experience would be determinative of the quality of the answer gained.  It is here that science has pitched its tent.

The greatest problems with authority are the origins and quality of the knowledge possessed and spread by that authority.  An imperfect partial solution is to ask the authority to support answers with evidence, the source of that evidence and some measure of the success of their answers in practice.

The greatest problems with creating experiences that might answer questions are that the created experience must be appropriate to the question and that the experience be free of bias that might decide the answer in favor of some preconceived notion, whether intentional or not.  An imperfect and partial solution is to require that the created experience be described in such detail that someone else could try the same thing in exactly the same way.

These two methods of gaining the knowledge needed for living are used by everyone every day.  We ask for directions when lost.  We add a new spice to a recipe.  We might time the drive to work by one route to compare to another route.  And we seek wisdom about those things beyond our experience from those who either have such wisdom or claim to.

What distinguishes science as a special form of the foundational processes by which humans gather the information to act in their daily lives is a nonnegotiable demand for complete transparency; there are no secret ingredients, no special proprietary processes. The gold standard of a scientific report is one that allows another researcher to perform the exact same steps with the exact same materials (or an arguable equivalent – and methods for determining equivalency).  A scientific theory is one that is constructed from the details of many such reports of experimental experience and is utterly dependent on correctly predicting new results of new experimental experience; and thus floats on the fragile buoyancy of the original transparency.

To repeat, science is a process: geology, for example, is a subject that can be “studied” by many methods, of which one is science.  The science “facts” of geology are under constant review by the method. Some details have been so thoroughly and transparently tested that an assumption of final truth can be made, but it is only a shorthand: things like the composition of minerals and the conditions under which they are formed, the sequencing of sedimentary rocks, the origin of various fossils.  But these facts are not science, they are the product of science as a method.  Allegiance to a set of “science facts” is a human fault, not to be confused with science as process.

This last notion can be expanded, must be expanded, as a general principle.  Humans need to be clearly and transparently devoted to some process, not to some set of details that they hold to as final realities. The nature of their process will determine the quality of adaptation to biophysical reality.

It should be noted that rejection of the need to adapt to biophysical reality is a tip-off that a form of mal-adaptation is functioning. This can come from two directions: nihilism/solipsism at one extreme and devotion to supernatural “realities” at the other.  Neither requires intellectual consistency or a transparent statement of beliefs, only an attachment to the simplest of all propositions: “it’s someone else’s problem.”  People with these attachments do not dematerialize; they consume energy, act on the world and are acted upon by all the lawful principles of biophysical reality even as they claim independence of it.  The solipsist integrates with the movements of matter and energy even as he or she rejects the reality of that integration.  The religious zealot is continuous with the material world as its product/participant even as she or he sees only the movement of a supernatural ‘will’ controlling events.  Both of these, when removed from the basic human unit of the heterogeneous community, are a form of madness; within a natural human community they are only expressions of human diversity since it is the community adaptation that is ‘measured’ by Reality.

In the deep and recent past our intellectual and material tools were inadequate for the full flowering of science method as a means for adapting to our world – conveniently, neither was it necessary.  Religious process had long been the method, an evolutionary form of adaptive process mediated by stories given power by their supernatural content created in human imagination and supported by the complexity of Reality.

But times have changed.  The level of detail and power that we bring to acting on the world, reached by the application of science method, now demands that we moderate and inhibit our actions with the same science process-based understandings that led us to this pass.  In other words, we must fully embrace the process of science as a belief system.  We cannot continue supplying our old, slowly responding and woefully distorting belief systems with details of Reality that both allow and force us to act rapidly and with huge effect.  Science-based power simply cannot be effectively mediated with present belief systems.

There are two great obstacles to moving toward science process as a belief system: 1) the present condition of belief – ancient forest and desert beliefs carried forward to this time by the momentum of human Story – to which billions of people are totally devoted; and 2) the different design of process belief as opposed to ‘fact set’ belief systems.  When belief is in a process, then the consequences of that process must be taken as the basis of new action; bases will change with new knowledge and with changes in the world. ‘Fact set’ based beliefs allow and demand adherence to acceptable behaviors.  Process based belief systems demand that details of actions tested by the process be changed when exposed as inaccurate by the process.

This is a higher order way of functioning, and would be a revolution in human cognition, not unlike The Enlightenment when reason became the challenge to tradition.  The Enlightenment was not entirely successful in “enlightening” the world in part because it did not go far enough; today a fully formed science process can be offered as a belief system without its necessarily being seen as intellectually elite.

The various areas of science “fact” are elite and will remain so.  They have their own language, concepts, organizations and “intellectual ethnicities”, but science process is completely available.  It can be taught to 9 and 10 year olds using a wide range of subject areas requiring a minimum of “science fact” detail.  Science process is only a particular formalizing of the way we all gain information.  It is actually easier to believe in a process that, in general, over time, produces “correct” answers than it is to believe in a ‘fact set’, often so inadequate, that only ‘faith’ can sustain. It is a matter of believing that an appropriate process will supply answers rather than believing in answers already fixed in place.

Focus is on the method for arriving at information and not the uses to which the information may be put or which person or collective entity will be advantaged or disadvantaged.  For example, it is obvious that flows of heat energy in the oceans are not influenced by needs of a corporation, a political party or a religion, but changes in such flows can affect them as well as determine the fate of millions of farmers and consequently billions of people.  Belief in a process of discovery that explicitly limits the power of bias has become essential.

Relatively small positive differences in the average importance given to information coming from the methods of science and a noticeable difference in the ability of many people to evaluate, not necessarily all the detail, but the ways in which the information was obtained all supported by a principle-based demand for transparency, could make a great difference in how our present institutions respond to the best available “facts” about our world.

I know that science process can be easily learned and appreciated by children and adults, even when they are encumbered by the distortions of other created realities. I do not know what facts would be generated by science process if it were to be broadly and generally applied to the problems that we confront.  But with an understanding of science process, knowledge of how to evaluate its products and a belief in its value, the changes required by improved knowledge and understanding could become a normal part of life experience.

Humans require a belief system to function; we are not data driven, but operate from general principles that can apply to a wide variety of situations; i.e., beliefs.  It is time that we have a system of belief that is based on how to gather the best information in the most trustworthy way rather than belief systems that prescribe what the “facts” of our truth will be independent of a measurable reality.

This form needs to be practiced.  Each gathering could, even if they have a PA system, prepare and deliver some of the remarks in this fashion, even in the meeting format.  Imagine the power of a soft-voiced participant presenting a concern to a group, and five or six surrounding people repeating the words as a choral reading for all to hear.

A meeting of 200 and many more people could easily function this way.  Participants would need to frame their ideas as simply and powerfully as possible.  Filibustering would be seriously discouraged.  No electricity would be required, no batteries or ‘technical’ people to set up and maintain equipment.

I have prepared a short address to an Occupy gathering to be delivered in this delightful and deeply human form.  Try to imagine the doubled form of the presentation, the kind of essential cadence of the single voice and the resonating recitation.  Watch for the subtle shift of meaning as the words first go out to the crowd from the presenter and as they are returned and spread far and wide; to wit:

Great to see you here.
[Great to see you here.]

We are here to learn.
[We are here to learn.]

We are here to teach.
[We are here to teach.]

We are here to prove…
[We are here to prove]

to the corporate and political world…
[to the corporate and political world]

that we, the people, matter… and
[that we, the people, matter and]

must have,.. and
[must have, and]

Will have, our natural rights…
[will have, our natural rights]

as human beings.
[as human beings.]

We are not asking for anything;
[We are not asking for anything;]

we are telling…
[we are telling]

those in power…
[those in power]

that our many and different needs…
[that our many and different needs]

will be heard… and
[will be heard and]

will be met.
[will be met.]

We are not on bended knee;
[We are not on bended knee;]

we are standing up…
[we are standing up]

for ourselves and our children,…
[for ourselves and our children,]

for the poor…and for the greedy.
[for the poor and for the greedy.]

We are finally standing up for everyone.
[We are finally standing up for everyone.]

We must stand up for everyone.
[We must stand up for everyone.]

We are here to learn…
[We are here to learn]

that real human power is in the people,
[that real human power is in the people,]

not in the greed of a few.
[not in the greed of a few.]

We are here to learn…
[We are here to learn]

that powerless people gathered together
[that powerless people gathered together]

are a powerful force.
[are a powerful force.]

We are here to learn…
[We are here to learn]

that our inalienable rights…
[that our inalienable rights]

to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
[to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness]

are real, tangible…and
[are real, tangible and]

enforceable by our collective action.
[enforceable by our collective action.]

And we are here to teach…
[And we are here to teach]

all that we have learned
[all that we have learned]

to those who believe
[to those who believe]

that they are the power
[that they are the power]

and not us.
[and not us.]

We are what we have been waiting for.
[We are what we have been waiting for.]

Thank you.
[Thank you.]

Unless the Occupy Movement contains the roots of real behavioral change it will be a flash in the pan.  People will become excited by the possibility of regaining control of the forces that surround them, but unless they are clear on what is required, they will, of necessity, fall back into the behaviors that support the economic elite rather than discover the actions that will chasten them.

Being heard is not winning.  The plutocrats know that the masses are being abused; they are the abusers, for Christ’s sake (take that last as you will).  These are not people who are unaware of the consequences of their actions; they do not care that hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of people’s lives are damaged or destroyed: they do not care!  Their behaviors will not change if their actions are pointed out to them.

The plutocracy is concerned that their behaviors might become generally known to an increasingly informed populace, but only in the sense that they would then have to own-up to being an aristocracy, a nobility, that can more easily do as it wishes when the people are ignorant, but just as willing to exercise its power directly over the people if it has to.  The Occupy Movement may be effective in exposing power relationships, but without its own participants’ willingness for personal changes, there will be no greater result.

If the goal of the Occupy Movement is the resurrection of the American Dream and the Great Middle Class, it will fail fast.  The economic elite owns that road and controls all the tollbooths.  They are wired into that path like the brain is wired into the muscles.  No; the elite must be starved out by the formation of self-sufficient heterogeneous human communities all over this country and the world who are willing, even desirous, to live a simpler life, a life in which the economic elite and their tollbooths can be avoided.

We have no targeted  “antibiotic” for the disease of plutocracy. Like pre-penicillin medical “cures”, the pathogen must be attacked with a poison, designed in its dosage and application to kill it, before the patient is too seriously damaged.  That is where we are now in our understanding and capacity to deal with the machinations of run-away economics and growth.  It is now time to take our medicine, though there is very little likelihood that we will, preferring rather to die of the disease.

As long as each person absolutely has to sell some large bit of his or her life and labor in order to not die, the world will always turn out as it has.  As long as food, shelter and other essentials for life are obtainable only by purchase using money gained with labor sold to someone else, no governing design, no system of laws will support the masses, but will always become the tools of enslavement to an elite who will use the masses as instruments for their desires.  This is quite independent of any ‘ism’ under which the people labor.

The selling of labor must, at some level, be voluntary for human societies to be both stable and healthy.  This means that real viable options for satisfactorily meeting essential needs be part of the “ecology” of the society.  When ‘work’ that no member of a society will do voluntarily becomes necessity, especially for some members, then a few must be forced to do it.  Patterns of social conflict, slavery and war – the stuff of our human history – are the result; patterns that we can no longer afford.

The mass movements evident around the world, of which the Occupy Movement is a part, are possibly the last chance that the species has to make adaptations to our real situation on the earth before the biophysical processes that support the present structure of life are so perturbed that ecological collapse is inevitable.  If the energy of these movements is devoted solely to wresting power and wealth from the present elite, which would be most easily facilitated by starting a struggle to gather wealth and power into the hands of a new elite, then the pot will have only been stirred with no change in our actual circumstances.

What we require may be impossible, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t require it: a drowning man requires a breath of air; the degree of need doesn’t determine that he will get it.  Rather than uncritically redistributing wealth and power in some manner acceptable to the ‘movement leaders’, these instruments of human maladjustment must be redefined as community and environmental property.  This redefinition must happen in the minds of the people. The Occupy Movement cannot, in its heart of hearts, have as a goal that “the people” will take over power from the elite, but must understand that the present forms and structures of power will only create, in no time, new elite communities that are just as mad and self-serving as the present ones.

It must be recognized and acted on that the human unit is the heterogeneous human community; the economic and power elite form or buy “communities”, but demand that the masses confront elite collective action as individuals without power, like a single person confronting a street gang.  We see this everywhere: the company “bargains” with the employee or with the customer; the petty criminal confronts the police, the DA’s office and the court; the home buyer is delivered the developer’s covenants, the speeder talks with the cop representing ‘The Law.’  Collective action that does not support elite community needs and desires is co-opted, marginalized or criminalized.

As long as a critical mass of the masses desires to have what the economic elite has, as long as they honor the result of elite behavior, then they will be ripe targets to be persuaded to support elite methods.  Belief that individuals have the right, even the responsibility, to collect excess wealth into their absolute control is a destructive insanity; any unbiased look at history associated with competent reasoning demonstrates the consequences.  And when a society makes the individual collection of excess, not just desirable, but essential for both safety and acceptability in that society, there is no other outcome than the one we currently face.

The Occupy Movement and the other mass movements worldwide challenge status quo beliefs and habits; this is the best possible time to begin planting the seeds for the beliefs and understandings that just might allow the species to get out of the trap we have constructed.  It is almost certainly too much to ask that the movement message include a major shift of societal story; so much simpler to stay with the same story and only attempt to reassign the players. But the effort must still be made.

Here are three, somewhat overlapping, lists of changes in thinking that need to begin to percolate into the new societal story; all more fully explicated in previous essays posted on the Dissident Voice site.

A new Seven Deadly Sins:

1) Progress

2) Economic growth

3) Property

4) Excess

5) Censorship

6) Repression

7) Religion

Five foundational beliefs and actions to replace our current hodgepodge (from What We Must Do):

1) All life is important.

2) The value of a life is in the daily living of it, not in the tallying up of duration.

3) No one is to live from the fruits of another’s labor.

4) We must not make the assumption that the ‘life style’ (really level of consumption) that is average for the highest consuming population is the one we should adopt as our standard.

5) We must finally come to a socially and intellectually mature relationship with our “religious instincts.”

Eight foundational beliefs and understandings to replace our current hodgepodge (from Extremism in the Defense of Survival)

1) Humans are animals that must integrate their behaviors into ecological processes.

2) Nothing can be owned by anything; all claims of property and ownership are relationships in which one party is arbitrarily devalued based on short-term power imbalances.

3) Wealth accumulation is an aberrant behavior – a form of psychopathology.

4) The measure of normal in the world must be from places and processes that are uninfluenced by human action.

5) There are no normal or natural human behaviors, group or individual, of any scale remaining in the human repertoire.

6) Humans are a community-based organism.

7) Our understandings of and relationships to health, illness and death have become terribly distorted.

8) Our spiritual understandings and habits are the distorted products of the pre-scientific forest life made to serve the interests of kings and other authoritarians.

I add this final thought:

Individualism is the opposite of valuing individual human beings.  Individuals are supremely valuable and that value is only formed and sustained in community.

1) The banking/financial community get it – that they have gone too far – and begin to listen to the masses along with making real changes in their behavior.  The masses are empowered, and just possibly some balance could be struck that would hold for a time.  This option has the variation that the financial powers attempt to appear to follow such a course while actually supporting the removal of protest leaders, various divide and conquer strategies and all while offering seeming concessions.  This would lead to an optional version of the second possibility.

2) The banking/financial community use their influence to bring the media and enforcement communities down on the heads of the protestors, the protests wither and the elite grazing on the amber waves of the masses and fruited plain of middle class desires continues unabated.  Of course, the protests would not be ended, but would go into a new phase, more circumspect, more guided by their own kinds of excesses; the country divided along increasing numbers of fracture lines.

3) The banking/financial community could attempt to crush the protests either directly or indirectly and end up only shaking more ripe fruit from the tree of discontent.  The demands of a crowd are always more concrete than the thoughtful machinations of the labor negotiator.  The desire to not be mistreated by an economic elite can, in the movement of the crowd, become a nasty affair; then a very simple form of the demand might be expressed as the great unwashed drag the plutocrats from their aeries to join the crowds for a more face-to-face explanation of grievances.

(There is a forth option involving a reasonably competent and independent polity, but since neither of these conditions obtain, there is no point in considering it.)

Thus far a mild form of the second option has been the choice of Wall Street and its political sycophants.  The response has been more inline with the third option, but the real power of money influence and the police state has yet to be applied.  The obvious first option will not even be considered and will, therefore, force the nearly complete capitulation of either the people or the moneyed interests.

The history is that the people have long been dominated by moneyed interests; it has become the habit to see the rich as superior people and deserving while the poor are slovenly and disreputable.  The absurdities of such habits of thought are seldom given voice.  Evidence is accumulating that the rich, as a class, are less like the human species than the masses, but as interesting as the research is, it has always been obvious that people who would ruin the lives of others to gain wealth are different from normal people.¹

In the close-knit communities in which humanity formed, such people were obvious and useful, just as any number of human styles were useful.  Their ways of thinking and acting were moderated by community habits of collective values.  It is exactly that dynamic that we play out today, but on a much different level and by quite different standards.  Today such human styles are sociopathic and psychopathic, that is, they are allowed, by the form of our societies, to express without the modulating influences of community; without guidance such ways of organizing a life experience creates monsters.

John Paulson, of hedge fund infamy, is not a serial killer, but, with carefully planned intent, his financial scheme with Goldman Sachs destroyed the financial security of thousands, perhaps millions of people, literally stealing from them billions of dollars and passing any obligation for repair onto the very people cheated.  In a stunning admission of relationship, the Godmother of veneration for such maneuvering, Ayn Rand, had as real-life hero the psychopathic murderer, William Edward Hickman.  It would not be wild speculation that John Paulson’s actions killed, maimed and otherwise damaged thousands, and that to do such things with foreknowledge represents the behavior of a psychopath as much or more than the 2 recognized murders and various petty robberies of William Edward Hickman.

And Mr. Paulson is not alone in his privilege; there are thousands like him gathered like flies to honey around the flows and accumulations of wealth in the society.  Who they harm is not a concern to them, but it should and must be made to be a concern and that is where Occupy Wall Street comes in.

There is only one authority of final consequence, and that is the collected people.  Any narrowing of interest always disadvantages the many.  Wall Street wants to make its own rules which will, as we have seen, impoverish the people, over 90% of them anyway – not rhetorical impoverishment, but the real road to serfdom; individual worker/laborers “negotiating” with the monopolized moneyed collective on the world market of wages.  “So what if it costs $50,000 dollars a year for a family of four to live a minimum life in the USA; work for $8 an hour or forget it.”

A person would have to work 3 full-time jobs at that pay to get close to $50K; that’s 24 hours a day, 5 days a week for 50 weeks a year.  At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution wages were set so that the “savings” for capitalization could be extracted from the workers.  This was done by paying just enough to men, women and children that, when all worked, they could just put together enough to live (or not die in distressingly large numbers).  That is the “Golden Age” conditions to which our present industrialists/financiers aspire.

So, what do the Occupy Wall Street protesters want? They want their world and their lives back. No more, no less.  If we all join in and if we are ready to take the beatings that will come as the moneyed interests fight back with all the psychopathology they can muster, we will win.

Learn how to explain these things to people; become an Occupier of the Mind as well as an “Occupy Wall Street” participant no matter where it is that you might find yourself.  A million people commenting in a friendly way – and in an effective way – to the clerk in the store, with the person in line next to you, to friends, neighbors, relatives; everyone, every time, every chance: Faux News can be defeated in this way.

A few million get it, though are still a small minority, but the truth is compelling and right there coiled to spring out from the shadows.  The national media is almost saying some true things.  Some of the words still have enough meaning left in them that they can be spoken with effect.  First a thousand, then a million and then ten million speaking with the one voice of the human microphone can shake the foundations of the criminal enterprise that our financial and political system has become.  Occupy All Streets: everyone, every time, every chance.

1. Google “psychopathology of the rich” or “corporate psychopathology” and read to your heart’s discontent.  David Sirota’s article also references some of the newest research.

Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and variants of these and others are all story based systems with one original bio-consciousness function and, after a time, a variety of political, social and economic functions attached as power migrated from community structure to political and economic institutions. They are all incredible violations of the Reality within which our species must live: they are not true in any way.

But it essential to understand that they are not supposed to be true, we are only supposed to believe that they are true. Psychologists call this crazy-making, and that is how religion functions: simple compelling, yet inherently untrue, stories that organize behaviors. The stories are not intended to be veridical reality; they have always only been intended (adaptively) to guide the massively powerful and largely directionless capacities of the genus Homo. The only way for the directing effect to work is for the people to think the stories supremely important. The Consciousness System of Order supplies the tools: imagination and belief guided by environmental necessity.

But we have outgrown this simple formulation; in fact, we have been outgrowing it for at least 10 thousand years. For most of our time on earth, nearly 200,000 years, our close environmental attachments gave our behavior and biophysical reality a veridical relationship, religion was like the string tied to a finger to remind us to do the right thing. The environment had the power, behavior had its function in the environment and religion organized and motivated the behaviors across communities and generations.

Today our behavior is the power and it is still guided by stories and beliefs, but now it has become deadly dangerous that our stories do not have a veridical relationship to the Realities that control the world. Once the form was: belief in the story led to behaviors that were adapted to a sustaining environmental relationship, and the details of the story really didn’t matter in reality so long as the action was functional (though believing in them is what made them work!). Today the form is: belief in the story is the measure of social acceptability; the actions generated are considered correct only so long as the story is supported and this is where it ends; there is no systemic feedback design with the biophysical Reality of the environment; in fact, it is often specifically rejected. The result is that the aforementioned institutional religions are madness; real insanity. Buddhism is the least mad of the list, but its many practitioners make it about as insane as the others.

It is the insanity of these religions that their critics are responding to, and have conflated with religion as a process. It would be correct to say that we must rid ourselves of religion’s insane content, but we cannot rid ourselves of religion since it is the structuring of belief systems in the community and society. When the environment was the mediating source for the designs of belief, the details of our stories were of little significance, but when disconnected, details take on unwarranted importance; societal madness is the outcome.

Virgin births, returning from the dead, miracles of all sorts, 800 year old people, reincarnation, grandfatherly despots living as spirits, infallibility of the written (and multiply translated) word, absolute necessity of following a certain code, convoluted sophistries of trinities into unities and back again, devils and demons, reverence for a piece of cloth, and literally thousands of other details of belief and story that are measures of worthiness and action – all of these disconnected from the biological and ecological realities that sustain the living condition and the living space. There are actually people who would see the whole world burned to a crisp if they believed their God told them it was the right thing; it is difficult to imagine anything more insane than that.

And so, to the extent that it is the insanity of religions that we eliminate, I am on board. But we humans must continue to believe and act from summary generalizations based on very little direct and personal knowledge. Also contained in all of the insane religions are real accumulated human wisdoms, stories of how community order and stability are maintained; stories of how we are to treat other humans, other living things and the earth in general. And perhaps more importantly, there are the basic stories of why we should or must follow these prescriptions. If the insanity of religions is removed, the sanities of belief and organizing designs have to be replaced.

There are billions of people who are so thoroughly trained in the societal madness of insane religions that reaching some critical mass of human numbers with belief systems based on a veridical relationship with Reality seems unattainable. But we must try with the clear understanding that most of humanity will go to their graves or cremations with the beliefs that they hold at this moment, with the understanding that that is how religion was evolved and adapted to work.

Whatever we do, it must not be only attempts to create competing insanities. Religion began as the way to act, but not believe, with accuracy in the natural world; it has now become one of the most distorting influences. The deepest understandings of science are now the only source for how to act with accuracy in the world, but we must correctly understand the functioning of religion and not make the mistake of dismissing the process of religion, another of our realities, as we try to free ourselves from our accumulated insanities.

There are no Gods. The physical events of the universe occur as a consequence of the laws of the Physical System of Order; the living process functions through the machinations of the Living System of Order and the information nexus of DNA/protein; humans operate in those spaces and with the Consciousness System of Order, a new information system that creates new probabilities for what can manifest in physical objects, living things and behaviors. Somehow a critical mass of humanity must come to grips with these Realities. Adaptable belief systems must grow from them using the religious process so that much of the rest of humanity can effectively engage the real world that our species faces.

Religions seem to promise a meaning for life; it is often said that a sense of purpose can only derive from Christian (Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, etc,) faith. But any gathering of humans in activities of common purpose is purpose. Institutional religions allow, actively perpetuate, the illusion that the religion is supplying purpose and meaning when it is only the gathering of people devoted to an apparently common action.

A search for truth can look to the work of modern scientists and philosophers just as well as it can look to the writings of Bronze Age mystics – should be done in both. The unchallengeable belief can be in the primacy of scientific, historical and philosophical method rather than prescriptions of “fact” and the “mysterious ways” of an anthropomorphic creator.

Belief has always been an adaptive behavior. Religion’s requirement that belief be turned into absolute faith has been largely a political act to support political and economic power in the face of obvious evidence, evidence that without such “faith” would lead to adaptive change. The belief in hard and fast facts has always been dangerous in a changing world. Belief in a process that guides adaptive change in the most reality based directions possible seems a better choice.

We will always create religions from our belief systems. For most of our tenure on the earth the religious process functioned adaptively; it is only for the last brief few thousands of years that it has gone of track. We are now up against the terrible and dangerous consequences of our general failure to adapt successfully to our great powers, one of which is the power of religious process to guide behavior. It is going to take a general change of belief to avoid the most drastic forms of those consequences.

One need only imagine the response to this essay in the fundamentalist Baptist churches of my southern youth, much less in a Wahabi Mosque, to realize our chances. Finding just one receptive person might be less the issue than getting out in one piece.

Yet, even back then there was a nagging question: America was great, powerful and good, how was it possible that we should have so much, both material and security, and others be so deprived? In my childish simplicity it seemed that my country could, if not fix the plight of others, then improve the conditions of their lives.

As a child I moved to the rural south. There I saw that migrant workers lived in tiny one-room shacks with no plumping, no glass or screens on the windows, often no real doors; I could see thin stacks of cardboard partly covered with dirty blankets on the floors. Blacks lived in isolated “towns” off the main roads, really medieval villages, out of sight, out of mind.

I began to marvel more specifically at my good luck to be born in America as a white child to parents with enough money to buy a little land, build a real house and have a working car. I visited a friend’s house, a small frame place with only exterior covering, the framing still exposed on the inside. In the bedroom, behind a blanket curtain, I saw my friend’s uncle, a skeleton in a bed, skull face with wet searching animal eyes; a man with some terrible degenerative disease. I added to my list of marvels that everyone in my family, including myself, was healthy.

The Korean War (police action) was thoroughly terrifying to my nearly 10-year-old person. I added to my list that my immediate surroundings were not being overrun by millions of bloodthirsty Chinese in very scary quilted fighting suits. At about this same time the sanctity and security of my white, middle class, American, healthy, not in a war-zone life began to be challenged by the Russian Communists, who could, and perhaps wanted to, deliver and drop atomic bombs on my grade school. I felt completely out-classed by atomic bombs; that famous aerial photo of Hiroshima, ‘after,’ would dance up in my mind and I would search it for something that looked like my schoolyard.

Yet, even with all these things going on, the paradoxes of my safety and ease of life compared to those skinny farmers in India, their stick children trying to hide behind their stick mother or the naked little children of a Central American jungle village… I tried and tried to understand how they felt, how they might think about their world, what it must be like to be them.

My life remained remarkably easy by comparison: school, work, relationships; maybe not so much relationships, I wasn’t very good with relationships, but I was bright and quite attractive – like a shiny object that you want to pick up and play with until it proves not so interesting after all – and so always had people around. The rest of the world, on the other hand, also continued on with its incomprehensible inequities: Vietnam, South Africa, Central and South America, the Congo and a hundred other places where human life was not recognized as such or of any particular value by the powers-that-be there.

And the point of this little reconnoiter through personal reflections? It seems the usefulness of the social and economic structures that protected me and many millions more like me are coming to an end. I have come to understand that never was the “normalcy” of my life experience normal; it was a hiatus from the normal lived out in the momentum of a previous time. The experience of South Korean villagers driven from their homes by war was normal. The aboriginal displaced from ancestral lands (pick your country) was normal. The little 400 square foot apartment with 7 people and just barely enough food was normal.

The mineral and biological wealth of the North American continent, supplemented by the stolen wealth of the undeveloped world, was so great that just the splashes from the carrying bucket soaked the people. Those with serious psychopathic greed feverously gathered all that they could get, but were easily seen and somewhat easily constrained, though, perhaps more importantly, they needed the American people and, especially, they needed the people to need them. Not that they always remembered; it was possible to remind them.

But with the last half of the last century has come an explosion of transportation and communication technology, the imminence of peak everything, the obvious near-term end of population growth and consequential end of economic growth binges; it was becoming increasingly clear that the bubble of American popular sanctity and security would have to end for the psychopathically greedy and their attendants to avoid sharing.

And they are frantic to avoid sharing. If sharing were to start, even a little bit, then the gates would be torn open and, horror of horrors, the elites would have to begin to confront the possibility of normalcy. And living like the rest of humanity is not on the table, the options have been thought through and are being put in place. There is always the moment, as a plan begins to be implemented, when all the participants can see what is happening; we may not like it, may be in denial for a time, but we know.

As our certainty in our American greatness and personal safety begins to weaken we cry out our old phrases, the ones that we were taught by the economic and political elite: “economic growth, personal responsibility, free market, free trade, greed is good, pro-life, don’t tax the job creators:” like children who, when they suddenly feel out of favor and in danger of loosing parental protection, search for just the right thing to say and do to return to good graces. But these phrases are out of date, are of no interest. And we are bewildered: one says to the other, “I still love you.” and it is replied, “But, I no longer love you.”

The powerful no longer need us, at least not as they did in the past; the American people have become fungible. Germany still needs Germans; if all the Germans were to disappear there would be no Germany, but if Americans were to disappear they would just be replaced with new ones from all over just like in the beginning, and just like “in the beginning,” stubborn ones who stayed on would have to be reeducated into the new society. The economic superstructure has come not to care who is running around on the streets and fields below so long as the running around is in all the desired directions.

The good cop/bad cop routine of the Democratic/Republican party proves that the people cannot yet be completely ignored, but the time is getting closer when we, common folk in general, will have experiences like the people of Chile, Argentina, China, Kenya, Iraq, Egypt and dozens of other places where the elites don’t feel the need to hide their intentions.

My childhood conundrums have been largely cleared up. The “normalcy” of my youth and early years was really not normal at all, but life in a very special protected community, one over which I either never had or had given up influence. The American Dream of more and better every year should have tipped all of us off to the con game, that we were being used and that there would be a judgment day. All that was required was Life Magazine or National Geographic and a newspaper or a radio.

There is still the opportunity to remake the place that we live, this country; not into the country that it was (or what we thought it was), that was and is a lie, but into something more real. There is still great power in the people, great energy when the TV is turned off. There are ideas and many millions of available ‘man-hours.’ First, however, it is necessary to see ourselves with honesty and reality, and there is where I despair.

A pure secession from the State is, however, not easy (or possible); it is a bit like trying to separate consciousness from the brain in which it resides.  The model is that of an organism trying to become free of the demands of its individual cells – the ‘idea’ that fulfilling my desires is limited by my body and that I might ignore the actions of individual organs and cells, divorcing my ‘self’ from their needs.  Such a view, of course, would tend to be held in secret by the economic elites, and would be not only an incredible hubris, but also an incredible mangling of metaphor in the service of a form of schizophrenia.

And so business is moved to a more old fashion form of escape – freedom through domination: the Corporate Confederacy must actually take over government in order to be free of it.  (The prescient reader will be ahead of me.)  When one State secedes from another, it must create all the machinery of a new State often using the old State as template; like budding a new plant from the old one.  Some things are specifically rejected, otherwise there would have been no secession in the first place, but for the most part new States, in such situations, are much like the old.

But the Corporate Confederacy doesn’t really want to create a new State, corporate managers just want to be free from the obligations of citizenship in the old State; they want all of the institutional support, stability and coercive power, but none of the responsibility to the people and the institutions upon which corporations depend.  This presents the Corporate Confederacy with the dilemma of how to be free of a structure that it requires in order to exist.

What we are seeing today is the opening parts of this struggle.  The first impulse is to destroy the existing structures that seem to oppress corporate action – to, by whatever means, create the conditions in which corporations can act with impunity – and to replace them with models from the corporate template. But the corporate template is remarkably incomplete for the purpose and corporate authority has little idea of how to proceed.  Autocratic authority is an early choice, supported by all of the “tricks of the trade” and wealth power.  And so we are seeing a kaleidoscope of theories and efforts to explain and form into law what is really the quest for lawlessness by corporate and wealth power.

Governing, which equals control from the corporate perspective, is often a matter of putting the right people in place to give the right orders – for corporations that means tough-minded corporate loyalists who will toe the line of the bottom-line, and see to it that ‘those below them’ do too.  This is not ‘evil’ in the corporate frame of reference no matter how much suffering and injustice is experienced by the ‘consumer’ of corporate governance: “It’s nothin’ personal, Rosco, ja know, it’s just business.”

But can nation-states allow corporations to actually manifest the insanity of corporate secession?  A. Lincoln – an expert on State secession was deeply concerned with growing corporate and wealth power – offered many reasons for rejecting the secessionist demands of the southern states; I think he would have been somewhat flummoxed by our corporate secessionists; the shear craziness is mind-boggling.  To recap succinctly: corporations have gained sufficient power that they can effectively fight governing regulation, but must take over governing to finally be free of it.  They are utterly unequipped to actually govern, but don’t realize that, being, as they are, blind beyond their frame of reference.  They can buy anything and almost anyone, but that only functions in the corporate frame, not a true governing frame of reference.

Faced with these facts, I think that Mr. Lincoln would have had the courage to fight a different kind of civil war, perhaps an even more difficult one than the Civil War actually fought.  You will remember that that one had armies marching and fighting at our doorsteps, killed possibly a million of the nation’s citizens, did billions in damage and is still remembered bitterly by a major section of this nation.  What would be the consequences of denying the Corporate Confederacy its secessionist plans?

There are a number of parallels.  Many southern members of congress dissolved their loyalty to the Union before 1861, but remained in their elected positions acting in ways damaging to the Union.  Comity disappeared and was replaced with open hostility. Today, corporate senators, representatives and governors are showing that their loyalty is no longer to the Union, the constitution or the people, their disrespect for those who don’t share their perspective is obvious and some of their behavior is in violation of their oaths of office.

The arguments have a familiar ring to them.  The Southern Confederacy couldn’t imagine functioning without a captive labor force over which they had complete control.  They required ‘freedom’ from economic restraints imposed by a hostile Northern government (which was actually often doing the bidding of northern business interests).  The Corporate Confederacy is trying to remove all employment protections and regulations to effectively create a pool of serfs from which they can select labor completely on their terms.

A mythology was created in the south that the plantation system and slavery were beneficial to all concerned, a natural and God given arrangement.¹  In the face of sound economic argument that such a system was fatally flawed, the myth was fertilized with social arguments and fears.  The “free market” and capitalist ideologies of today are similar myths and their failures are hidden behind a smoke screen of abortion talk, homophobia, racism and xenophobia.  Again, what the myths share in common is the supporting of the narrow short-term interests of an elite or corporate cabal.

It is time to take a stand against this corporate secession and reattach corporations to the control of nation-states; this would be obvious if it were clear that the choice is actually between social democracy and fascism.  As bad as the nation-state model has been, it will continue to be better than government by corporate power.  It would be the corporate model to create a Government Division, as both a coercive force and a profit center.  There is no place in corporate thinking for “something for nothing” which is how government services tend to be viewed, except, of course, for those services that extract wealth from the many and put it into the ‘capable’ hands of corporate managers.

While there are many differences between secession by regions of nations and secession by an economic segment of a nation, the biggest is that the Corporate Confederacy cannot and will not govern even if it succeeds in its version of secession by domination; it is still secession from responsibility; the opposite of effective governance.

Powerful national and international corporate entities no longer respect State power; their wealth power and information control have superceded the chartering function of the State. And they only weakly respect the obligation of the State to protect the people from the privations of wealth power. With their vast wealth, the world’s leaders and greatest sophists can be bought to present the corporate argument via the corporate owned media allowing for the illusion of governing to be maintained for a time.  But the only actual governing style available in the corporate frame is a brutal and distant autocracy, and ultimately the people will decide just how much of that kind of abuse they will take.

(In my research for this idea I came across this piece by Roger Bybee posted in January of this year in which he talks about corporate secession.  This is a shorter and slightly modified version of an essay of the same title posted on the Keye Blog)

1. A version of John C. Calhoun’s (1782 – 1850, Senator, South Carolina) defense of slavery might very well have been heard in the corner offices of Enron, might still be heard on Wall Street or among the corporate majority on the present Supreme Court: spoken to the US Senate in 1837: “I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slavehold states between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good – a positive good….I hold, then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history.” It was a simpler time with still some remainder of honesty in public life: Calhoun seems to be speaking for today’s elite with this: “Liberty is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious to be capable of either appreciating or of enjoying it.” We forget that such views remain important in the thinking of those who attain power and wealth, and need to dominate others to retain them.

Pete Rose’s birthday. Lindsey Lohan’s arrest record. The half-life of an isotope. It is all just numbers and stuff! But the last one can give you a tool to know when you are being lied to about matters of life and death; that is, if you want to know when you are being lied to.

The world, as our senses perceive it, is made of the naturally occurring elements – roughly 92 elements with a couple of them in a sort of grey area because of that half-life thing. ¹ An element has two distinctly different sets of properties depending on what parts of the atom of that element are being considered: chemical properties and nuclear properties. Chemical properties have to do with how the element interacts with other elements. Two or more elements may combine to make a compound; and so the many elements can combine to form the millions of different substances that make up the stuff of our world. ²

But at the center of each atom of each element is the nucleus or a core where the greatest mass of the element is contained. The number of protons, positively charged particles, in the nucleus determines what kind of element it is: oxygen has 8 protons, iron has 26 protons, uranium has 92 protons. Also in the nucleus are neutrons, particles much like protons with no electrical charge; it is the architecture of the proton/neutron structure that determines whether the nucleus will be strong like a well-made and mortared brick wall or easily disturbed like a pile of poorly stacked bricks. This structure of the nucleus has basically nothing to do with the chemical properties of the element.

Imagine a large parking lot with a thousand piles of bricks, poorly stacked. The first day you look at the lot, all the piles are intact. After several days (weeks) you notice that some bricks have fallen from some of the piles. After several years many of the piles have lost their original structure. It is easy to imagine that in a few hundred years, the piles would be bumps in a field of bricks. If, rather than piles, the bricks had been made into solid walls they would be unchanged in that length of time. This is the difference between an unstable atomic nucleus and a stable one.

Radioactive isotopes are the result of an unstable nucleus, but rather than a brick dropping to the ground when the pile is disturbed, the nucleus breaks up explosively – like a tightly wound spring – and pieces fly off at great speed, at or approaching the speed of light. It is these little pieces, and the huge amounts of energy that they carry, that make radioactive isotopes both useful and dangerous. ³

This is the first basic understanding needed to grasp the situation facing specifically Japan, and any other place that attempts to use controlled nuclear reactions. The second basic understanding involves numbers – really big numbers of really tiny things.

Put about 2 drops of water on your hand – really do it. See how that little bit of water is not even enough to puddle. Rub your hands together and in a moment the water is gone and you hands are dry. Do you know how many molecules of water there were on your hand? More than the number of stars in the entire total universe – and three times that many atoms – more than 10 billion trillion molecules of water.

Now imagine that 1% of the molecules in those 2 drops were radioactive (contained isotopes that might decay explosively): that would mean that there were 100 million trillion radioactively unstable atoms. Let’s say that you didn’t put two drops, but that only 100th of that amount of 1% radioactive water misted onto your hand: that would mean that there were (only) a million trillion radioactively unstable atoms on your hand.

A dust particle containing radioactive iodine or cesium can be millions of trillions of atoms. Lodged in lungs, the isotopes decay over time and some of the little pieces flying off explosively strike the structures of nearby living cells sometimes killing the cells, sometimes hitting the DNA; and sometimes striking the DNA in such a way that the cell is not killed but loses its bearings, goes rogue and reproduces outside of the body’s control.

Our human intuition is useless in the domain of the Big (and Tiny) Numbers. Certainty and uncertainty are turned on their head. A particle of dust that you would only see with the greatest attention can contain a trillion million radioactive nuclei with a half-life that result in 100 atomic nuclei decaying (exploding) on average every second (8,644,000 a day and thousands of millions in 25 years). These are monkeys typing Shakespeare numbers. The ‘impossible’ becomes certainty. A lung with only one particle too small to see has a good chance of one or more of its cells eventually being damaged in such a way that it will become cancerous. Perhaps the immune system will find it, perhaps not. Imagine a 100 pieces of dust, a thousand. Look at the light streaming in a window; watch the dust dance on the air.

With these understandings it is possible to make some sense from the ‘radioactive cloud’ of bull-shit spreading from Fukushima nuclear plants and Tepco corporate offices. First and immediately heart-rending is that the men (I assume that they are only men) working in the plant facilities are dead men; only weeks or months of life left for some or even most them. Second, many millions of people will be effected, especially in the region, but also all over the world. When the epidemiological studies are done (if they are done), specific long-term cancer rate patterns will follow the emission and weather patterns occurring over the next weeks, months and years.

And perhaps the saddest of all; it is possible to know these things. A competent understanding of chemistry would prevent the lies being told – even in the beginning before the plants were built. A little general knowledge of geology would make the locations at Fukushima, Diablo canyon, and San Onofre (last two on the San Andres fault system in California) unlikely locations even if a knowledgeable public could be convinced that nuclear generation of electricity was a good idea.

The situational sociopaths and actual psychopaths that are willing to endanger all living things for a little power (both political and material) will always be with us and unaddressable with normal human concerns – that is what the pathology part means. Public awareness is perhaps the only guiding and governing force.

I had a student once who “couldn’t” learn math or science, but who could tell the exact familial relation of 300 people to her and to each other in her extended family; that is what mattered to her. I in no way diminish the importance of being the teenage ‘grandmother’ to her family, but she could have learned anything. There isn’t 50 pounds of learning and 30 pounds used up on the relatives.

What she taught me is that we must believe in the importance of what there is to learn. We are at the mercy of the situational sociopaths unless we know enough to recognize their half-truths and lies. The only way I can see to bring these two statements together is for everyone who sees the third element of the syllogism (that we must come to see as important the learning that will protect our human and living interests in the face of economic and political interests) to go out of their way to inform the public mind of the importance of knowing enough not to be lied to.

The reactors are burning: the uranium and plutonium are on their own now that we have concentrated them, stuffed them into tight quarters and then lost control. The nuclear material will not be brought to heel; that is another lie. That we were ever actually in control of the process is another one. But We let it happen. Our willing ignorance and greed for ease let it happen. We need to learn enough about the world that we actually live in to actually live in it.

1. Half-life is not a difficult idea. It is the measure of the length of time it takes for one form of an element to “go bad”, that is, for it to breakdown. One form (isotope) of an element may take 20 minutes for ½ of the amount that is there to turn into something else (breakdown). Another might take 1000 years for ½ of the amount that is there to breakdown, while a third form of an element might take a billion years for ½ of the amount there to breakdown. The first has a half-life of 20 minutes, the second has a half-life of a 1000 years and the third has a half-life of a billion years. The first will be almost completely gone (turned into other stuff) in a few hours, the second gone in a few tens of thousands of years and the third will take “forever” to go away. The first is considered very unstable, the second is unstable and the third is a stable isotope (but radioactive).
2. Atom – the unit of an element; made of a nucleus (protons and neutrons) in the middle surrounded by electrons equal in number to the number of protons. Electrons are about 2000 times smaller than protons, but have a negative charge exactly equal to and opposite of the positive charge of the proton.

   Isotope – a form of an atom with a specific number of neutrons. The same element can be represented by several different isotopes: atoms, all with the same number of protons and electrons, but with different numbers of neutrons. Because of the differing numbers of neutrons, the nucleus of different isotopes of the same element have different structures and are therefore often more or less stable than the other isotopes of the same element.

3. Three different ‘pieces’ can be ejected explosively from a decaying atomic nucleus. Some isotopes produce all three and some predominantly only one or two; depends on the architecture of the nucleus. They are: gamma rays and other high-energy electromagnetic radiation, alpha particles (positively charged high energy helium nucleus, made of 2 protons and 2 neutrons) and beta particles (high energy negatively charged electrons or positrons).

Dispensing immediately with the obvious: G.W. Bush was a figurehead president, just not pure and completely pliable. His connection with his powerful dynastic family and his own pathologies limited his usefulness. Obama is a figurehead, though more on his own terms. He is acceptable as an antidote to the poison of the Bush presidency, but too willful and broadly hubristic to serve all the wishes of the elite with the desired alacrity.

Palin is perfect. A shallow person, with the unreflective, narrow pridefulness and arrogance needed to believe herself capable of discharging the office, but ultimately aware at some level that she has no ideas and that others will run things as they see fit… and she is naturally lazy; all hat and no cattle, and she just loooovvees showing off the hat.

I don’t think that the manufacturers of political wisdom and talent, the Roves and the Luntzs, will try her this time around, but the following is the fantasy:

A look inside the mind of a psychopathic political manipulator – you may picture Karl Rove if you like – “Black guy as president, economy in trouble, high unemployment, unpopular wars, social confusion and unrest… and we still have abortion, God and the homos to dick around with. Then there’s our candidate list; can’t really see how to get the lipstick on that pig: divorces with prejudice, flip-floppers, egomaniacs and just maniacs… maybe it’s time to just go for it. I’ll check with the C of C and the other boys, but this may be it.”

After checking with ‘the boys’ and working on the possibility of manufacturing the needed image from the available raw materials; “Sarah is going to be just right. We only need 20 sound bites and a simple stump speech, she can learn those; it’ll be just like the question period of a beauty contest. We’ll parade her around the country half the time to the rodeo and NASCAR crowd; the other half to American Idol, Fox news and talk radio; and the other half to the staged “intellectual” events, but only half as much as the others.

“Let’s see, positives: great looking and old enough to seem mature. She’s got the come-hither and watch-out-bud looks on command, cuts in half the need to know the international situation. Good physical presence, moves well; we can use that. Socially fearless – useful but dangerous unless managed; loves the spotlight and glows under adoration: This is contagious with the crowd.

“Never been divorced. The new baby thing seems to be neutralized and the Dems aren’t likely to go for blood on that stuff anyway – still, better have a spot or two prepared. The protective mother thing can be worked, but gotta get away from the mother bear angle, too… sort of smelly and individual. Mother loves you all, a national mother; something more like that; can work in the bear strength a little, but not so much the claws ripping hikers to pieces thing.

“The name is good: Sarah Palin. Little House On The Prairie. President Palin. She’d look great in a sunbonnet.

“Negatives, wow! No experience, no appropriate knowledge, not especially bright, family history like Peyton Place (I can see it now from the Dems– for the older folks – references to Palin Place), but might work the ‘everyman’ angle, long suffering mother thing. She’s lazy, ambitious yes, but not an 18 to 20 hour a day worker. High maintenance, will need a team of professional sycophants.

“She quit as governor of Alaska in the middle of her first term after having been the major of Tiny Town where she was fiscally irresponsible (please, give me the job of playing something like that up in my opposition)… get 30 guys working on that spin this minute.

“The bouncy, bubbly thing can only go so far especially when about all that’s left is Mean Girl. Got to get ‘sincere and caring’ going – maybe with actors and a little selected footage of Sarah looking wholesome – she always seems to smirk at just the wrong moment; and some Goddamned liberal media photographer will get it.

“But compared to the rest she’s pretty good and she’s perfect as a figurehead. The C of C and the boys will supply all the ranch hands needed to run the cattle and Sarah, uh, President Palin, will wear the hat with style.”

So I ask you, are the American people ready to be rolled, rolled finally and completely out of democracy and fully into an unrecoverable plutocracy? If Palin is run for president, then you can be sure that the US Chamber of Commerce and the boys believe we are.

Put another way, this can be done with some serious efforts at fairness or it can be done catastrophically. Our opening efforts, while not irrevocable, seem pointed toward catastrophe. At present the need to reduce average consumption is occurring at the same time as the world’s wealthiest people are increasingly using their power advantage to gather up (steal from other humans and the rest of the living world) and control as much real wealth as possible.

Much of the analysis, in the developed countries, of our changing life styles, living standards and material well-being has been done with the unstated, underlying assumption that any reduction in personal wealth is an unnecessary, dreadful and unacceptable loss – this is a very dangerous foundational belief, and suffers from a variety of errors of thinking and living.

The biggest danger is that the rich use this way of thinking to justify what are, from any reasonable point of view, excesses that do violence to other humans and the living space. The other major and nearly equal danger is that those living beyond the earth’s productive capacity, though not rich, not only use this argument, but are encouraged in it by all that find it appealing, and thus make it impossible to have the serious consideration of our future that is needed.

The belief that the value of one’s life is dependent on material measures is at once too easy and too deeply incorrect to be satisfactory, but the ease has trumped the inaccuracy. The great distance that our human lives have moved from the forming and effective experiences of our origins have left a vacuum of meaning and purpose to be filled. The shame is that we have filled that need with garbage – if not true garbage to begin with… all the ‘stuff’ ends up as discarded in the end.

This cycle of filling, inappropriately, the needs of meaning and purpose with disposable material objects, discarding and replacing them as they are superseded by other material objects and claiming this to be a fundamental and obligatory way of life is about to come to an end; and we are completely unprepared. Not only are we unprepared for having less stuff, being required to do more for ourselves and facing material uncertainties; we are not prepared to replace these losses with the human contacts, supports and communities that have eased humans through material hardships for the many tens of thousands of years that the species has been on the earth.

About half of the world’s people will have their material standard of living reduced over the coming years. It will either be the half that uses more than “their share” of the earth’s capacity – they will have less excess, their status systems will have to be reformed and a number of social dislocations adapted to – or it will be the half that are using “their share” or less than their share. These people would die off in great numbers since there would be nothing left for them to adapt to.

At the moment the developed nation’s “middle” classes, those who use between 3 to 15 or so hectares of productive capacity are being squeezed by the wealthy, people using many 10s of hectares to support their consuming behavior; though neither group is looking at events in these terms. They, for the most part, see money wealth and all the convoluted machinations that the clever and insane¹ have constructed around it; they see money wealth being carved away from the middle classes in a theft of a thousand appropriations. Complex stratagems to use tax collection, transaction charges, debt and interest, political power, social pressure and the emptiness of modern life to capture the labor and tiny bits of wealth of the masses and transfer it to the massive piles of the wealthy. And more: the blatant blackmail and robbery of national treasuries, accumulated retirement and pension funds and the wealth of the national commons represented by public lands, health services, education and Social Security systems.

The natural tendency is to fight back on the established model, to try to regain the ground lost. Those who are cheated of their 10 hectare life style demand its return and would rather gain a little in the bargain. Those who have lost their 4 hectare consumption, who are pushed into the socially ‘unacceptable’ poverty of 3 hectare consumption look for someone to blame rather than try to find life’s meaning, value and opportunity beyond the material loss.

Clearly two different, but related, processes are conflated. First, the Great Many are being stolen from by the psychopathic and situationally sociopathic rich. That theft needs to be stopped and economic equity restored. But secondly, the productive capacity of the earth has been exceeded by at least 50 percent, and actually a good deal more if ecological stability and biodiversity are considered, requiring a reduction in consumption. This reduction looks and feels the same whether it comes from the theft of labor product by the economic elite or from the adaptations required by the overuse of earth’s resources.

At the present time most of the earth’s people use about 1 to 3 hectares of productive capacity per year with hundreds of millions using less than one hectare . The most gluttonous use hundreds of times that number; such use should be a crime against humanity. Canada and the USA use about 8 hectares per capita per year. The ‘TV life style’ presented as ‘normal’ and desirable represents about 15 or more per capita hectares per year of productive capacity.

We, in the high consumption regions of the world, must find new ways of being satisfied in life. Of course, we should not be stolen from and taken advantage of by the wealthy oligarchs of the corporate and political elites. These are almost a separate species of madmen and madwomen, humans who have lost their association with humanity – and who would accept, even engineer, the suffering and deaths of millions of their fellows to maintain high levels of consumption. They, like any dangerously diseased animal,² must be appropriately responded to, first with attempts at a cure and then with segregation unless they can adapt to living with the rest of us without being a danger. This has always been the way of human communities; however, first there must be a community!

The fact is that whether the misbehavior of the rich is dealt with or not, whether humanity actually develops ‘humanity’ and approaches our future with some equity – or not – we are at the end of economic growth. The full force of economic contraction will come in its own time, driven by the various peak supplies of resources and ecological free services. It should be obvious that we have passed the peak of atmospheric absorption of greenhouse gasses, that peak oil is immediately upon us, peak water may have been passed, approaching peak food, well passed peak biodiversity (and the implications for ecosystem integrity) and several other peaks are being approached, achieved or passed. In other words, the earth’s productive capacity is beginning to force economic contraction.

While these matters have general importance, it is the personal response to them that ultimately counts. Human action is never more than the summation of the actions of many individuals; and activity of the most vital importance is no action at all unless actually preformed in numbers sufficient to produce the necessary effect.

Individuals may move others to take actions, but acting only by themselves accomplishes only the smallest part. And so it is in the movements of the many that some change occurs. Margaret Mead was not wrong though: change does rise from the small and committed group, but by that group’s influence on the many, by engaging them in the imagination created, formalized and spread from a concentrated and incipient source.

This is where you come in; and me. We must begin to make adjustments. Fight the crimes of economic and power elites to be sure, but realize that we are not fighting to restore an unsustainable and profligate consumption: we cannot be about taking from the rich so that we can be rich; that is how we got into trouble in the first place. Our struggle must be for equity in our social lives and the humanity of specieshood in our personal lives. We can rediscover what is just barely hidden from us, ready on a moment’s notice to reappear. We can rediscover the capacity to help others and to receive help, the pleasures of making do in the company of others making do. We can rediscover meaning and purpose in life more fulfilling of our biology, history and human capacities.

There is much to learn that we already know, but have been made too frightened to approach. Some of you must become leaders in that risking, learning and doing.

1. I am somewhat liberal in my use of the ideas of sanity and madness, but it is my argument that being in accord with many others is no defense against the charge of insanity. The concepts are grounded in the relation of behavior to biophysical Reality: behaviors and beliefs that are consistently at odds with Reality are insane, and it doesn’t matter if belief and action agree with a significant group of others. These definitions are especially true when Reality is laid out before us and must be denied or rejected to maintain non-comporting beliefs. By this way of thinking, whole collections of people, and even societies, can be quite mad. Today such madness is often our normal; far from a unique comprehension, but a reasonable one.
2. These people are not uniquely disordered, their direct removal would only leave the niches in the economic and political structure to be filled by others. Stable material possession requires a level of equity that I define as ‘mutual comprehensibility.’ Those with the least material possession and those with the most must not be separated by a distance greater than allows for their ability to fully understand and empathize with the other. The earth’s capacity and our large human population prescribe that the center point of such equity be at a place presently called poverty in the ‘developed’ world. Assuming that humanity successfully navigates the coming troubles, “growth” and “progress” will be redefined as increasing material well-being through population and impact reduction rather than increase. Our present habits will be seen, in the future, as incomprehensible – just as they are actually incomprehensible now.

But let us affect a certain credulity and assume that there was such a person and that some general information can safely believed to be true; what of the available stories can we accept as most believable? Here are my selections:

Osama bin Laden was the son of a wealthy Yemeni contractor of major industrial construction projects with connections to the Saudi royal family. He was one of 20 plus sons (his father had several wives) and of above average height. Though trained as an engineer, he had a philosophical turn of mind and fancied himself a warrior poet. He was political. He was a committed Muslim. His wealth, social position, height, attractiveness and manner would all suggest a person who could easily develop narcissistic tendencies, possibly seeing himself as important, even pivotal, in the struggle with modernity’s impress on Muslim beliefs and the political challenges from the USA and others as forces from outside the region attempted to dominate the Middle East for reasons of oil and its geopolitical centrality. Many events support this perception of him.

There will be more of this as I go along, but I want to dispense with the primary issue early on. I don’t know if Osama bin Laden was a bad man or not. I am told that he was; I am told that he was the worst of men, that he was the devil. It is repeated endlessly with no objection allowed.¹ The image is posed of bin Laden as the central controlling agency for the US embassy bombings in Africa, the bombing of the USS Cole, the 9/11 attack and a list of bombings in Europe and Asia. This is all predicated on the importance of his role in the operation of an organization that has come to be called al Qaeda.

I will not dwell on the history or importance of al Qaeda, there are may sources that the reader can go to by googling “history al qaeda”, but I have no reason to believe that such an organization exists in the form that the media has come to reflexively present it. Almost no evil occurs in the present world without one media person asking another media person, “and what, do you think, was the role of al Qaeda?” For al Qaeda to be involved in all the actions associated with such questions would require it to have the powers, reach and structure of the CIA.²

The organization funded and directed by bin Laden in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion was more like the regiments raised by business and political figures in the American Civil War than the formation of a clandestine terrorist organization: a few thousand men brought into the country, equipped and funded by a self proclaimed “general.” It was during this time that bin Laden, a seemingly practiced networker, developed contacts with the American CIA. Given his education and knowledge of Middle Eastern history, he could not have trusted them. But his family’s close ties with the Saudi Royal family, the Royal family’s ties with the US government and his own family’s ties with US oil companies must have complicated the situation for him. It is almost too easy to speculate about how Papa Bush’s oil and CIA relationships might have figured in.

For all of the smoke and heat generated in the world media about this thing called al Qaeda there is little evidence of a consistently directed enterprise. The actions attributed to al Qaeda in the US include the fantasies of Jose Padilla, the burned feet of the Shoe Bomber, the burned groin of the underwear bomber, the smoking car of the failed New York city bomber and 2 or 3 clumsy entrapment stories from the FBI. The Fort Hood shootings in Texas seem not to be related to bin Laden although you wouldn’t know that from watching TV news.

Lacking better evidence than that delivered by a chronically dishonest media, the principle of parsimony forces the assumption that al Qaeda, in the form used to support the stories of Osama bin Laden as the ultimate terrorist, does not and has never existed. It seems to have begun as part of a record keeping project, a need to keep track of especially Saudis coming into Afghanistan in the 1980s, more a list than a political or religious movement; though bin Laden was almost certainly acting religiously, politically and militarily at the time.

Those who call themselves al Qaeda seem, today, to be largely self-assigned; at least in part as a result of the publicity given to the name by the media. The parade of ‘frightening’ foreign sounding names, the constant assertion of al Qaeda’s malevolent omnipresence and the attribution of unique evil to bin Laden all seem to be propaganda aimed at frightening and controlling the common folk, to create distractions from the truly devastating plans that the economic and power elite have for us.

We need only compare the danger of being harmed by a crazy person empowered by some dream of glory to the possibility of being harmed by having access to medical services reduced or removed; it is obvious where the greater danger lies. Compare the odds of a terror attack with the harm created by the increased redistribution of wealth to the top 1%; doubling and tripling the wealth of the wealthiest contributes to social instability, economic weakness, loss of economic safety and actual starvation on a scale hundreds of times greater than all the terrorism of the last 20 years.³ But I wander in my intended purpose.

Removed from the prejudgments constantly applied by the media and government, Osama bin Laden appears to have been a regional actor trying to protect his religion, his tribal and national affiliations and the resource/economic base of his homeland.⁴ Foreign invaders, for thousands of years, had marched across Arabia and for thousands of years the desert tribes had driven them away. This was the tradition in which bin Laden probably saw himself. The rest is detail – some of it quite damning to be sure.

His relationship with the CIA, his willingness to fund and otherwise support the killing of innocent human beings, his associations with Pakistani intelligence services, his association with drug smuggling and other unsavory activities, but these are all obligations in the world of armed conflict – and these are the people that own the ball with which the game is played.

From the information available to us, information with some reasonable value, we can be confident that there is a much deeper game being played here. We can also be sure that the real Osama bin Laden is (was) nothing like the cartoon one used to frighten the children. And if he died as he is said to have died, then it was the murder of one of the players of that deeper game and not the removal of evil incarnate making this a safer world.

And that funny aftertaste; that is the bitterness of being lied to yet again. Neither bin Laden or al Qaeda were in charge of the narrative; US and British officialdom and corporate actors used the events that occurred, created those didn’t occur on their own and constructed from the disconnected, even unrelated, stories, narratives to support their goals. bin Laden’s death is no different – and ultimately will make no difference on its own terms.

1. Another part to this story is the irony of bin Laden’s code name for the operation that killed him: he was codenamed Geronimo. Geronimo, a hero to his people, was fighting an overwhelming power with, what would be called today, terrorist tactics; bin Laden might have chosen such a name for himself. It is entirely possible that Osama bin Laden was, right-headedly or wrong-headedly, trying to defend his view of his people, religion and region from the oppressive influence, domination and thievery of the Western powers. Certainly the case can be made that the US and Europe have used the Middle East’s peoples, land and resources for their own interests and in the process caused no end of suffering and troubles there. What is difficult to understand is how few prominent freedom fighters there have been from the Middle East, not that they occasionally occur.

   The indignation of many Indigenous peoples at the codename represents the (mis)understanding of bin Laden as a bad man; this is the same kind of prejudiced and “simplistic” understanding suffered by the Indians during their struggles with the US government, business interests and media. Geronimo was maligned in the media and was the ‘devil’ of his time in the American southwest. In fact, the treatment of those who have been fighting against the destruction of historical Middle Eastern culture by colonial powers is not dissimilar to the treatment, and its explanations, once (and to some extent continuing to be) delivered to Indigenous peoples. This is something that Indigenous peoples should understand.

   The military’s use of Geronimo as a codename for bin Laden was a thoughtless and stupid choice, but finally not because of the insensitive use of the name of a good man for a bad one, but for the more telling prospect that a man once vilified is used to name a man presently vilified – and the possibilities of understanding therein.

2. Consider the madness! Media Story: years of planning, millions of dollars, thousands upon thousands of man-hours, extensive training, deep infrastructure of information collection, analysis and military acumen required to discover and invade a house with about 7 or 8 adults and some children. But bin Laden is supposed to be controlling the world’s most dangerous terror shop out of a cave with a few hundred to a few thousand half literate followers… and using ‘runners’, not radios, to deliver messages.
3. An honest comparison would be the human costs of the Middle Eastern Oil Wars over the last 90 years with the retributive response of oppressed peoples that we call terrorism; the differences would be on the order of many thousands to one.
4. Furthermore, the national governments of the Middle East had all been to some extent co-opted by the Western powers, political and corporate, so as to allow the slow and not so slow appropriation of resource and culture.

Most days we all move in our own ways, moving in the pursuit of myriad demands, coordinated only by the most general sense of order. There is no great stirring of emotion; only sometimes a small and private stirring. There isn’t that grand synergy of feeling as when playing in a band, being part of a great crowd of cheering fans or marching in step to stirring music in a military parade. Peace, while it leads to generalized order, is boring. It is martial order, emotions inflamed and regimented that drives the blood.

In the early 1960s WWII was still relatively fresh in people’s minds, the Korean ‘police action’ even fresher. It had been not quite 10 years since the images of frozen American bodies, stories of waves of Chinese infantry and the great David Douglas Duncan photos of young soldiers showing expressions of such weariness and pain that people cried just looking at them. The memories made another war so soon a hard sell. But the opportunities were overpowering.

It was then that I realized that my real enemy was not Ho Chi Min or General Giap, but my own government.¹ If I was to be taken against my will into the armed services and sent to a far away land to fight people that I had never met and who had done nothing, really could do nothing, to me; then it was not the Vietnamese civil war and the Viet Cong endangering me but the ‘legal structure’ of my own nation.

This was clearly, to the sighted, a crazy people’s war. Mad men who either feared too much or were greedy too much or power-mad too much were absolutely willing, even desirous, to send conscripted young men to be physically and emotionally destroyed for economic and political gain. I could see little difference between what I had been told about the Germans being misled by twisted national feeling and the attempts to inflame the American people against the people of a sliver of land in Southeast Asia. I was in my teens when the pressures of the war began to be felt and in my thirties when it was said to have ended. But of course it never did end those who fought – and those who did not.

I am now in my late sixties. And the government is still and again my enemy, but today it is making war, not just on its young men, but on 90% of the population, those with middle-class and lower incomes (as it is also making shooting war on 3, 4, or 5 nations for that same old economic and political gain). At the same time simple and complicated, the government has become almost completely the tool of our most dissociated population – the superrich – and so itself has become dissociated from the people it is intended to serve.

In a bizarre twisting of economic orthodoxy the wealthy, rich and superrich have gamed the economic system to collect half of the nation’s income – just a few percent of the nation’s people (top 1% — 24% of income, 5% to 1% — 16% of income, 10% to 5% — 12% of income² ). More than half of the people of the country live with incomes that are inadequate to meet their basic life needs in the present economic/social structure (a family of four, on average, needs over $65,000 a year to educate children, save for the future and live daily life, but median family incomes are closer to $40,000/yr³ ). That leaves 20% to 30% of the people with basic economic safety and moderate wealth, and that number is shrinking.

But the rich, even though they are collecting half of the national income, want to pay for the national expenses based more on their numbers in the population than on the part of the national income they take. Of course, that is not how they explain it. It doesn’t matter to them that millions of their fellow humans are struggling with basic necessities; from their point of view if those people can be made to pay into the national treasury and if spending from the collected taxes on the Great Many can be avoided, so much the better. A ‘perfect world’ would collected all “surplus” above subsistence from the masses as taxes, a government would protect the wealthy and support their wealth gathering activities (paid for by the taxes collected from the poor) and leave to their own devices the wealthy to do as they wished. The masses would be appealed to or conscripted as needed to do the labor and the wars required to sustain the empire. It should be noted that this is precisely the functional form of governance that the United States was created (imperfectly) to resist and grow beyond.

Back in the 1960s I struggled with the idea that my own nation could be my enemy; perhaps it was too strong a word, too strong an idea. But I soon came to the realization that the degree of danger that my government was willing to subject me to was greater than any other source of danger in my life: That is an enemy. The young men that I met who returned from war injured, poisoned and emotionally damaged sustained my resolve even in the face of my guilt for it.

Today the guilt is gone, only the anger and the fear remain as my government blatantly demonstrates its domination by madmen, its domination by people whose interests are not just different than mine, but antithetical and utterly uncompromising as they gather to themselves greater and greater wealth and power. We so often leave it there, but it must not be: again!…as they gather to themselves greater and greater wealth and power to control, for their own convenience, our lives and futures. For that is the consequence; it is We, the Great Many, who the power is intended to dominate.

The distrust of government and those doing the governing was the default position for the men and women who created the nation’s founding principles – codified in the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, its Amendments and other documents – even to the point of considering all governments to be the most dangerous institutions that a collection of people could create; and yet they had to be created. The instant the people relax their vigilance, the sociopathic greedy would try to take it over and turn it against the people. This has happened to greater and lesser extents since the nation’s founding. It would appear that it has now happened to such a degree that only a revolution in the streets can break the present hold on power that has arrogated to the superrich and the lackeys who marionette on their behalf.

The government is again the enemy. I was able to take it on by myself and for my own purposes those nearly 50 years ago, but it is a different war (and world) today; it is here, the war is here in our own Royal mansions, congress, statehouses, city halls, court rooms and living rooms. The inalienable rights of living human beings are turning out to the ‘soluble rights;’ soluble in a solution of obscene wealth and corruption.

First, the people must see the advancing armies, must see the loss of that most precious national goal: the pursuit of happiness as a primary function of our collected intentions. Not just for the wealthy, not just for the landed, but for everyone. Our founding principles were not “We the People of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice for the rich and servitude for the poor, insure domestic tranquility for the privileged and suffering and economic danger for the masses…” You get the idea.

No, we let our attention wander and our government has turned against us all, all accept the psychopaths and situational sociopaths that make up the powerful, yet unworthy, elite who have been corrupted by their own wealth and have corrupted the principles upon which the nation was founded. It is time to fight back, but against the real enemy.

The wealthy elites and their marionettes would have you fight your neighbor who is not yet as stressed as you; would have the factory worker whose job was sent to another country by the situational sociopaths running the company, would have this worker see his or her troubles as being caused by a teacher who has yet to be seriously injured by the elite.

The real enemy is a practiced soldier in these kinds of battles of perception, deception and misdirection. The men and women of the economic elite have been lying to each other, cheating and stealing from each other for so long that they see dealing with naïve common folk as child’s play. But when you realize and accept who the enemy is, all of their dancing and prancing, lying and jiving, slipping and sliding looks like exactly what it is: cheap tricks of a birthday party magician (no offense to birthday party magicians).

And like a magician they have all the tricks on their side, but none of the reality. They only are believable when they are believed in. They can buy thugs to do their dirty work only as long as the thugs believe in their power. They can direct armies only as long as the officers accept their orders. They can control politicians only as long as the politicians are benefited by the people’s deference and acquiescence to them. When one powerful man says ‘yes’ and 10 powerless men say ‘no,’ then the locus of power is shifted.

Eventually in the late 1960s and early 1970s the people began to see through the lies and turned against the war and the people who were pushing war. 20 years later former Ford Motor co. president and Vietnam War architect Secretary of Defense McNamara give public voice to his “mistake” claiming that he know it was a hopeless exercise at the same time as he drove it forward. Does this sound familiar in this time?

The risks are great, but the failure to stop the plutocracy that is our present government will certainly result in the enslavement of the people of this nation. The Republican marionettes are not even trying anymore to hide their strings or their masters. The Democratic marionettes still attempt the subterfuge, though with less and less concern. This can only be because the elites must be more and more confident of their domination of the masses. As Warren Buffet said, “…and my class has won.”

But they have not won, they have only been allowed to believe that they have won because they believe that the people are too cowed and frightened, too disorganized, too discouraged, too co-opted and too stupid to do the simple thing that would change it all: to stop believing in the superiority and power of the elite, to see them for what they are: psychopaths and situational sociopaths who would both allow and instigate the millions and billions to suffer and die to maintain elite life styles.

The people began to see the truth in 1968; they can begin to see the truth in 2011. They went to the streets in 1970. They were shot and killed by soldiers. They were beaten and jailed. They will have to be shot and killed again and beaten and jailed again. It is the price that the elite demands as proof that the masses are serious. These are the precipitating events that destroy the illusions of belief in the power of the elite. It is time to begin. It will never be easier than now.

1. Government is really systems of organization that perform functions that individuals cannot and profit-seeking interests will not. Someone has to set its agenda. In this nation that ‘someone’ is supposed to be the will of the majority tempered by the collected wisdom of centuries gathered up in the “Holy Writ” of the Constitution and modified by thoughtfully amendments, legislative applications to specific needs and the adjudications of a supreme court for those matters still in contention. This is not the government that is my enemy. There is another idea of government, the idea of power vested in elite interests, acting ad hoc for its own ends. Perhaps taking the time and trouble to try and justify actions in the language of popular government, perhaps not. But, always power functioning for the sake of power. That government is my enemy.
2. Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States, Emmanuel Saez, March 15, 2008.
3. Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs, Motoko Rich, New York Times, March 11, 2011.

…extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.  …moderation in the pursuit of  justice is no virtue

—  Barry Goldwater, 1964

I remember hearing this shortly after it was spoken.  I was immediately impressed with its rhetorical force and then by its stronger second taste, anxiety.  My life was a, if not carefully, then somewhat successfully constructed, house of cards: work, savings and bit of larceny, deferments, class schedules, grad school applications and a serious relationship all run through and through with the pretty ribbon of ‘the plan.’  Extremism in the pursuit of anything sounded to me like danger.

My roots were nourished in the bloody soil of WWII; extremism was not unknown to me as a concept or actuality.  In fact, my generation was never far from the tiger ride.  McCarthy, Russians, Cuba, the Bomb.  Growing up in the south and the violent swings of hate, love and confusion that were its daily bread only spiced up the mix.

And I was a young man and wanted a future.

I reflect of these things since I am reprising Goldwater’s lines, though with quite different goals – they would have sounded the same to me back then with any intention; it was the embracing of extremism that frightened me most, not the insanity of Goldwater’s worldview.  I had seen people with crazy ideas, lots of them.  It was the ones who were willing to go to the mat for those ideas that concerned me then; ‘upsetting my plans and all!’  I actually didn’t know that much about the ideas themselves, but could easily see who was trying to make big changes that might, sort of randomly, tumble down onto my little house of cards.

Goldwater’s Manichaean libertarian conservatism, informed out of a stew of Calvinism, individualism and incipient xenophobia, appealed to a world of saintly Americans in mortal (and universal) combat with the evil Ruskies.  It was like a boil on humanity’s butt; and it got us wrong as a species: not Calvinist, not individual.  We are Manichaean and xenophobic, and other things that make getting out of our present mess problematic; but rather than appealing to them to energize our politics, we need to realize and mitigate them in the present world.

I didn’t understand these things back then; I only believed that extremism was dangerous.  And yet today I see that only a particular extremism is all that can save the biophysical world we live in.  But I expect that extremism will be rejected just as I rejected it.  This is made especially difficult and confusing since the political descendents of Goldwater have learned the same lesson: they are just as extreme in their narrow crazy way, but they now begin every sentence with, “I am just following the will of the people,” as though they have no personal position and are moderate neutrals responding to the masses.

Because of the extremes to which we humans have gone in our attempts to “conquer” nature over the last few thousand years, we must embrace new extremes – even greater extremes – if we are to return to living in biophysical reality.   It is a simple fact available for all who will see, either with their own eyes or with the literature of science, that our changing of the earth’s surface and processes has a limited future.  It is also clear that the economic systems that presently run our human existence are unfit for the problems that confront us.  And, finally, there are only a tiny number of years in which to make the shifts in attitude, understanding and action required.

Taken together these facts dictate extreme solutions.  More and more people are saying this — Derrick Jensen, Bill Mckibben and others; what Rachel Carson told the world 50 long years ago, what Malthus understood in general form 200 hundred years ago.   And so here we are, once again needing to do our chores at the last minute.

What are the things we need to change?  I have prepared my partial list.  There are others that I may have missed, but for the most part these would be a good start.  I have written the list in the form of what we need to understand and believe – there are many many objections to these ideas, but they are not the point – these are the ideas that would reform our relationships with each other and with the world around us in ways that would allow other species and ecosystem relationships to continue on in some harmony with us.

1) Humans are animals that must integrate their behaviors into ecological processes (even if they can get away with not paying attention to ecological reality for some extended period of time).  As animals we have behaviors characteristic of our species that, so long as we were sufficiently connected to the natural environment in which they evolved, took care for themselves, but which today take special attention to understand, support and mitigate as we confront the “unnatural” world we have created. ¹

2) Nothing can be owned by anything.  All claims of property and ownership are relationships in which one party is arbitrarily devalued based on short-term power imbalances – always the result of the failures of full system integration (usually because we are driven by desire for ‘gain’ dependent on limited understanding).  This doesn’t mean that human political and economic systems don’t have to address the use of space and material, but our ways of thinking about them must change.

3) Wealth accumulation is an aberrant behavior – a form of psychopathology. Emotionally healthy people strive for sufficient material wealth to be safe in reality and realize the damaging effect that excess has on both environment and specieshood.  The concepts of property and wealth accumulation are among the most dangerous ideas and behaviors of humans.

4) The measure of normal in the world must be from places and processes that are uninfluenced by human action (except where humans are fully integrated into the relevant ecologies).  Finding such places today is difficult, but can be reasonable well modeled still.

5) There are no normal or natural human behaviors, group or individual, of any scale remaining in the human repertoire.  I wish that you would read that statement a couple of times.  Normal, that is the behaviors and feelings of specieshood, has to be rediscovered with focused intention.  All references to “normal and natural” that depend on present behaviors are seriously suspect.  Since most of the information we receive from the world is created by some human with an agenda to influence us in some way, we must become careful of what we subject ourselves to, when and how.  Just as we are learning to eat with a mind to additives and nutrients, actively avoiding some and selecting other foods, so we must also be careful of our perceptual diet.

6) Humans are a community-based organism.  We are individual only with the support of a community.  It is ironic that as we have come to depend on more and more others, some of us have taken to trying to see themselves as more and more individual and independent – to the point of proclaiming absolute ‘individualism.’  The absurdity of this is obvious if you simply imagine them without the millions of people that they depend on (yet deny and reject – see #2) as supporting cast.

7) Our understandings of, and relationships to, health, illness and death have become terribly distorted.  A biological body is not evolved to continue functioning for much more than the average live expectancy of the species.  The devotion of individual people to their own ‘individualism’ gives the impression that there is something there to ‘live long and prosper.’  But that is only appropriate in a community design where living long and prospering supports the community.  Healing individuals and defeating death (for a time) to the detriment of the species is madness.

8) Our spiritual understandings and habits are the distorted products of the pre-scientific forest life made to serve the interests of kings and other authoritarians.  We need to recognize the incredible creation that is the Consciousness System of Order, its immense power to support our relationship with reality and its devastatingly dangerous power to distort it.  Our connections to the universe are vital and can grow into forms and in ways of being that we cannot guess if given the opportunity to do so in Reality.

These all combine to suggest a life beginning by being raised in a loving and supporting community, being trained and educated in the Realities of the situation in which one lives: an education formed around a combination of the best of factual material from the sciences, the best of epistemological understanding of reasoning, studies of human historical and cultural experience, and all wrapped in the ideas of personal joy in living life well through the experience of it.

The goal would be to gain the greatest joy and pleasure in life from the using up of the least amount of the world’s material.  The greatest human consequence would be to have lived a life of fulfillment while only leaving footprints.  The idea of leaving factories, vast highway systems and other mountains of waste should create the greatest sense of horror and shame.  As the body failed or as disease began its assault, a fulfilled person would not cling on in the hope of some mythical happiness, of meeting some unmet need.  They would go, the community would grieve and go on.

Such a way of living would in no way be utopian; it would be filled with all of the difficulties that confront people today less one: human life would be integrated into biophysical reality and delimited by that reality the way it is for every other species.  Human rates of change would be slowed to allow the evolution of other species and ecosystems to keep up.

These are extreme views and would require extreme changes in how we live.  It is clear to me that most will reject them even if realizing their necessity.  But these ideas and others like them need to be planted in as many minds as possible, planted and nurtured.  And as they wither in the sterile rain of our craziness, then replanted for as long as we are able.

1. Each individual of each species is formed from an informational template created by the evolutionary process in completely interpenetrating integration with environment – the “two” are really a common process. As a result, every species has an ecological and behavioral description as defining as the structure and physiology of its body. In other words there is a way that each species lives; the term that I am using for the total behavioral/emotional formation of a species is specieshood.

Today’s wars, economic crimes, environmental disturbances, injustices and inequities are overwhelming.  And what is the cause, what is the source?  Are we just doing it wrong?  That is, of course, the first and most obvious conclusion: we are driving the car badly and have ended up in the ditch (taken from a now famous metaphor!).  We must, then, discover who and what was wrong.  If we only select better drivers, make sure the car is properly maintained and respond appropriately to the conditions of the road, then we will be safe.

War will be OK, if we just do it right.  Vast economic inequities are fine as long as they are obtained legally.  The environment is so much bigger than humanity that we cannot actually harm it.  The injustices of the world are just how it is, and most of ‘them’ deserve what they get anyway.  God is in his heaven and all is right with the world… if we just do it right!  Many people wear these emotional protections like a shield.

If you didn’t feel it the first time, reread the first paragraph and try as hard as you can to imagine yourself at an opposite end of the political continuum.  Do you still agree with the sentiments expressed?  Who would not agree? If you have trouble imagining who might be offended or otherwise disturbed, let me help: those without values, those who lie to maintain power, those who benefit from the abuse of others and those who regard the Great Many of humanity as fields to be harvested, as soil to be plowed.

There was an intersection just north of my town where people were killed and maimed regularly; one of my dearest friends and his daughter were killed there.  No amount of car maintenance or driver training could fix the problem.  Drivers had to cross a four-lane high-speed road at the very top of a hill; the approaching high-speed drivers could not see the intersection until they were in it.  There was no way to do it right; driving through the intersection was a crapshoot.  The only solution was to redesign the highway, which was eventually done after scores of “accidents” and many deaths.

The process of redesigning a highway is pretty clear, but how do we begin to correct the tragically dangerous intersections of human necessity, biological imperative and the immensity of our presence in the biosphere? If we can imagine for a moment that all human beings enter the world in approximately the same condition, then we are in a good position to realize that there might be a way to organize the world that would best suit the growth and development of those new humans; and if we have gone wrong in a big way, you know, wars, injustice, etc., then our difficulties may have more to do with the design and construction of our societies than with whether the people in general are ‘doing the societies right.’

“But we can’t change the construction of our societies!” I can hear the cries go up.  “It is not like redesigning a dangerous intersection.”  But I say that it is exactly the same.  Eventually the resistance to change is overcome by the horrors of the status quo.  The “only question” is how many deaths, how much abuse, can be endured before we demand a redesign.  The answer has always been, a very great deal.

In fact, we can endure so much that when the detonation of change comes (in society, thankfully not in our roads) we fail to even ask the other “only question”: What are the underlying forces that brought us to these difficulties in the first place?  No, we don’t ask for fear that things will stay the same if we take the time to answer it, and so destine that no fundamental change will be forthcoming.¹

We have repeated this failure for thousands of years, carrying with us from social iteration to social iteration an increasingly heavy burden of beliefs and habits that drive our changes faster and faster as well as further and further from the biological imperatives of being a living organism totally dependent on a tiny region of biophysical stability, for that must be our baseline.

The human species was driven from Eden to be sure; Eden, where the rules of order were tailor-made for living things by the natural world, just as living things were tailor-made for the rules.  And we have been driven ever since to ‘overcome’ the rules of Eden and to simultaneously rediscover them.

It is becoming clearer and clearer, for all the reasons above, that we are in trouble, more trouble as a species and as a planetary ecosystem than our species as ever seen and more trouble than the earth as seen in 65 million years.  We have been watching, as only a disaffected and psychologically stunted people can watch, the incredible pain and suffering of billions of people, enduring crippling stress ourselves and living meaningless distorted lives that we pump up by filling our nests with bright and shiny objects.  An even more disaffected and emotionally stunted elite has cornered the market on the most desirable shiny objects even to the point of intentionally harming their own countrymen to collect them.²

The failure to meet the basic biological expectations of new humans gives us people like Michele Bachmann, Charles Manson, Tim Geithner, Bernie Madoff, Sarah Palin, John Paulson, Tom DeLay, Adolf Hitler, all sociopaths differing only in degree.  Manson was not at the Tate house, but motivated the crime.  Madoff and Paulson were not at the various suicides and stress related deaths that they also motivated.  Do you really think that DeLay wouldn’t demagogue like Hitler if it served his purposes; how far would he go given the chance?  Palin, Geithner and Bachmann are dishonest and narcissistic at pathological levels and thoughtlessly heartless.  This is just a random list; it could be populated with many others.

We are creating our own monsters and giving them huge Tonka Toys of power to play in because we have lost the human designs that make being born and growing up as a fully functioning human being relatively common and safe.  We have no difficulty understanding that certain conditions are required for raising and training of a good dog, and yet we expect that people should be  essentially the same regardless of the average conditions in which they grow up.

In our attempts to overcome Eden we are also rediscovering Eden and have learned a great deal about the needs and biological expectations of our new born, things our long ago ancestors did without question.  Harry Harlow,³ in the 1950s, gave ‘mothers’ made of chicken wire to monkey babies turning them into sad monkey monsters and showing us what any baby would have told us if it could: babies need to be held with warmth and feed with mother’s milk and love.  What is to be thought of a society in which this is not a first priority?

No manufacturer of machine tools would willfully or willingly create tools that would damage the machines of which they were a part and yet we produce broken disaffected people as though we had no choice and have designed a system of belts and funnels that gather the most ambitious, brightest and sociopathic into positions of power.

I offer this simple question: What would be the consequence for a society if the majority of the people in it were raised in ways that reduced their sense of insecurity, increased their confidence in their right to basic human dignity and taught them to be the most powerful agents in their own well being? ⁴

We know what happens to the people in societies (and subcultures) that deny the opportunity for a biologically effective childhood.  We have America today.  Our children have been raised by TV.  They play in the meadows and woodlands of video games. Significant adults are not at home; and when they are, far too many are second, even third, generation products of neglect and, like Harlow’s second generation of adult monkeys from “wire mothers,” have lost the warmth of affection.   The result is a population that is easily misled, easily frightened; a group-think population ready to follow some arbitrary belief tailored by sociopaths for their ascent to power.

From early educational research to current sociological studies, the evidence is clear: the more support for the emotional and intellectual development that is given in the first 3 to 5 years the healthier, happier, humanly competent and more socially independent the adult.  In economic terms, a dollar spent on making such conditions possible returns 7 to 10 dollars in economic production and social savings.

Our failure to nurture our young is here now upon us like a biblical plague.  The disaffected rich no longer hide their disaffection for the disaffected masses.  The masses, in their confusion, give up their ultimate power to withhold their labor since they have believed the incredible lie that a new plasma TV will love them as they cannot love themselves.

But as a final caution let me point out that this problem, as intransigent as it is, does not require the ear of a world leader (though it would be nice) or the regulating of world currency manipulation (though also helpful).  We, ordinary people, know, or can “remember,” how to do this; if there is no help coming from the powerful, from those who dominate employment and its options for maturity leave or flexible schedules and the other things that would allow for more real “monkey mother” behavior, then we can and must make the opportunities.

We have lost much, far too many have lost natural human warmth, but we are not ordinary monkeys; many can, even if diminished by neglect, rekindle their humanity especially in the presence of their (and other) children.  I have no idea what the world would become if some critical mass of humanity began to express their truly human nature mediated by our best scientific understandings, but I know what it will be like if we do not.

1. It is not actually true that the effort has never been seriously made. The founding thinkers of the USA were dutiful in their study and contemplation of the mistakes of precious systems of governance and not entirely devoted to creating a system solely beneficial to themselves and those like them; though that too was a powerful motive.
2. A deep part of their disaffection is that people not of ‘equal status’ are not really recognized as their countrymen or neighbors and need not be treated as humans fully worthy of respect. This is old in human history and must be considered in any remediation of social design.
3. ‘Love at Goon Park’ by Deborah Blum, Perseus Publishing, 2002, if you’d like more information. One of my roommates picked up Dr. Harlow at the airport when he came to the University I attended as an undergrad, picked him in the bar. Being Harry Harlow and knowing about the love deficit in our human children was a cross to bear.
4. An answer is hinted at in ‘The Spirit Level’ by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Bloomsbury Press, 2009, though it was not necessarily their intention.

I have sympathy for the fears and dreads of my fellow citizens, but little for the detail of their aspirations and none for the unsocial actions that they are willing to take to make their expectations real.

One of the coded messages presented in many different forms especially by the Republicans translates into screwing over the other guy so that you can keep what you have– coded messages are especially a Republican thing since if their true agenda were honestly explained,  they would get only about 5 to 10 percent of any election.  Why anyone would believe such messages is unclear to me since when someone tells me something like that, I am quite confident that I am the one that they have in mind to screw over; but shortsighted greed has fueled con games for thousands of years.  The whole ‘big government’ meme is a con to empower big business – when was the last time you had any say in the leadership of Bank of America – and to disenfranchise and disempower the working classes.

So here is middle class Joe Normal American; he wants a regular life (he learned to think this way from politicians!) and by ‘regular life’ he means having the goods and services associated with the top 20% of income (beginning at about $90,000 in 2005).  He just wants to be like everybody else only a little better off: 4 thousand square feet of house (“everyone has 3 thousand!”), a little bigger SUV, a boat and jet skis and so on.  He is told that this is both normal (that is his middle name) and “good for the country.”  Both are also lies.

And here is the rub: what is recognized as good for Joe depends a great deal on Joe’s expectations and beliefs; what is good for the country, and by extension also good for Joe, must be evaluated by much broader and substantive standards.

Joe cannot be expected, nor should he expect of himself, to either fully understand or to fully respond to the major forces of the biophysical space, but he should be expected to know that such forces exist and are essential in how we, as inhabitants of a region, nation and planet, act in the world.

Such a recognition implies restraint and so is anathema to the greedy way of life.  It is the ‘party of greed’s’ argument that Joe only needs to consider his own wishes, that by fully committing to self-aggrandizement he will be supporting the economic growth that will bring all good things to all people… unless, of course, he is materially poor, in which case he is to have no opinion or desire other than to bow to the wants and needs of his betters; restraint is essential for those who are not recipients of the invisible hand of greed.

But what is good for the country?  Are we only to mean by that question the economic elite? Can we mean all of the nation’s people? Are we to include the biophysical structures and systems that support and sustain all of life?  Is it other than shortsighted madness to leave out the people and the ecology from the question?

The last question above is, of course, rhetorical.  Failing to consider all of the relevant and substantive sources of influence on us is something we train our children against, and a sign that a person is losing the compos of their mentis. So, by ‘what is good for the country?’ we must mean to include all of the people and the biophysical forms and functions of the physical space.  This should be so obvious as to need no comment, but I fear it may not be and will add that the damage and destruction of the systems that sustain biological life, not the economic health of Goldman Sachs or Halliburton, ultimately determine the quality and possibility of human life.  That which is good for the biosphere is finally what is good for the country.

Seen in this way, there are some changes that need to be made.  In broad strokes: economic growth as currently configured would have to end; population would have to be reduced; total human consumption of earth’s productive capacity would have to be cut in half and then half again; the expectations and beliefs associated with a good human life would have to dramatically change.  If a typical poorly informed manipulating-message repeater were to say, “you are trying to change our way of life,” they would be correct (if Joe Normal American only realized: ‘Our way of life’ is elite code for, “I am happy having incalculable power and wealth and have no intention of giving them up even if all of life on earth has to suffer.”).

If meaningful changes were to be made, how would Joe have to live? What would his life be like? First let us understand it is only consumption by the many that creates the wealth of the few, the more consumption the more wealth.  All the immediate social drivers are for more rather than less use of the earth’s productivity.  So even if Joe were to realize that he needed to use less,there would be great forces at work to get him to use more.

This would be the first condition of his life; confusion, pressure and the resulting anger.  The physical conditions would not necessarily be ameliorative.  No 4000 square foot houses, more like 400 sq. ft. for 2 or 3 people.  No boats, ATVs, SUVs, more like bicycles and public transportation; most people would travel long distances rarely.  Joe would need to grow some of his own food and would, therefore, have to learn the skills of gardening and animal husbandry.  Most people would eventually live in villages of no more than a few hundred, these grouped into super-villages totaling a few thousand and these grouped into townships of several tens of thousands.

There would be a good bit of collective functioning as a way to reduce the consumption of major capital goods.  This should not be an especially foreign idea since we do this now with things like libraries on the public side and factories on the private side.  There would be a shifting of personal goals away from private consumption of material goods as a way to maximize the human experience (He who dies with the most toys wins) to maximizing the human experience with as few material goods as possible (getting the most pleasure and fulfillment from using as little of the earth’s productivity as possible).  This is the ‘way of life’ of all other species, and is driven by natural biological incentives; we would need to reintroduce the incentives that result is sustaining adaptations.

Joe would be very very unhappy if he continued to believe, and if the society around him believed, that excess was the way to success.  If Joe didn’t want to grow food; if he wanted to go where he wanted when he wanted by any means he wanted; if he continued to believe that his behavior was only his and no one else’s business, that he owed no compensation to the air to breathe it, to the wood in his chair or clothes on his back other than to pay the store a money price; then Joe would be a very unhappy camper indeed.

But if he began to discover the body pleasure of walking or biking; if he found satisfaction in preparing soil, planting seeds, protecting the growing crops, collecting and storing food for a season; if he began to realize the need and seek the methods for compensating the ecosystem that supplies him with the very conditions of life, and then find the pleasure in both the actions and connection of that compensating, then Joe could live with a fullness unavailable through excess.

And so my dilemma when I read and hear about our financial tribulations: There is a desperation to return to normal, return to a normal that is destructive of our environment, our humanity and our specieshood. Returning to normal often means today returning to the abnormal; like drug addicts, we create the new ‘normal’ of intoxication that we are driven powerfully to return to. There is the maddening fear of what is come if we have to give up our economic expectations, the big house, the hundreds of thousands ‘in the bank’ for ‘the future,’ the toys.

But what we are collectively experiencing now is only a very mild form of the changes that we will have to endure, and embrace, to get to a ‘way of life’ that will allow us to live not only on, but with, the earth and its total living process.  There is anger at the elites for lying to us, for manipulating our information, for intentionally controlling our expectations.  But we like today’s normal, as infantile and unhealthy as it is.

I want people to recover from their present fear, but I don’t want them to fall back into the lethargy of excess, yet that is exactly what they see as normal.  The closer we are to what is called recovery, the farther we are from the path and the forces that can initiate and guide the changes essential for the human species to reconnect with the behaviors and beliefs that can let us move from now to the future without the major conflagration that certainly awaits us otherwise.

I want to yell out, “This is the future.  See what you want of it.  Make it work for you.  Use the courage of your disrupted life to take on the elites – they are nothing without you; they know that, but will kill you to keep you from knowing it.  These economic disruptions are a gift; it is only through them that the real structures of power and economic domination can be seen.  Then you must act, act in defiance of the normal and in pursuit of a truly human life.”

But I am speechless.  It all sounds so foolish to the modern ear when said out loud.

I soon discovered that there had been a war – I knew about World War II, of course, and thought at first it was that one – of such terrible and lasting importance that it had to continue being fought in a guerrilla action against 5 year-old boys from Ohio.  The local boys knew a great deal about me that I didn’t know myself.  I was a yankee and therefore of a disreputable species insistent on telling lies about a thing called the Civil War and also a nigger-lover among other horrors.

Where I had lived my charmed and happy previous life was curiously empty of all but pale skinned humans; I knew little of how to correctly feel about, what were then politely called, Negroes.  My new peers, playmates and tormentors dutifully tried to teach me about the various errors of my ways, though I proved a poor student.  I took their lessons to heart, however, since they were committed and serious instructors, with bloody noses and “Indian burns” as teacher’s comments.  But, like students everywhere, I learned what they were really teaching – how to avoid the unpleasantness.

For the faint hearted, do not be too moved by this narrative; I quickly learned the rules and turned my small, but farm hardened, body into a sufficiently brutal weapon that soon even the tough kids preferred to avoid being my teachers and allowed me to wallow on in ignorance so long as I didn’t show it to them too powerfully or often.

My point, beyond the pleasure of remembering my youth, is that those young men (and some girls, although they mostly found me just ‘too cute for words’) are now the so-called Tea Partiers of today’s political world.  The direct, powerful and monumentally misguided certainties of their youth have not substantially changed.  The cocoon of their daily existence has, however, been torn open by a black man in the White House, by the unavoidable falling apart of their life’s economic narrative, by the stench of rot coming from the piles of fetid lies told to manipulate them.  They are looking for someone to give a bloody nose or an Indian burn.  And they know, for certain, who it is; it is someone not like them, it is the foreigner, it is anyone who questions their certainties.

I know them, I grew up with them and they were my friends.  My first serious girl friend told me as she was about to graduate from high school (and planning the certainty of her future) that I would have to give up believing in evolution if our lives were to go on perfectly.  Another close friend told me that I had to not smoke a pipe around others, it was OK with him since he really knew me, but others got the wrong idea.  Just image if I had talked about General Giap’s book on guerilla warfare or the gentle and loving brush off, and not a thrashing, that I had given to the gay black student at university who had professed his love.

There are a majority of people in this country and all countries who must live their daily lives in certainty, and they will endure all manner of lies to do it.  They are not bad people; they are people, what the species is.

A group of the political class in this country have worked their way around to the complete cynicism of The Lie as policy.  With the help of psychologists, linguists, poll takers, sociopathic manipulators all supported with the money of another species, Homo elitus, this collection of power seekers has harnessed the fear of these former friends of mine – friends still if I were to go see them.

I have forgiven the rashed skin on my forearms and I gave bloody noses as good as I got.  I came to love and respect those poor misguided souls who even in their high school years couldn’t accept that the south lost the Civil War or that their God might have a speck of sympathy for a non-white person.  They were and are baggaged with a version of American culture that is a lie.

And now that the most despicable and hateful of political lowlifes are victimizing these folks, using their most cherished weaknesses against them, I am becoming heartsick.  I realize the power contained in the certainties of these, now terribly frightened, people.  I gave up confronting it as a boy and man; it was nearly futile.  And I am completely flummoxed now as to how it might be confronted today.

But it must be, and not with lies denying lies.  Somehow the stench from the lies of the power elite (they are not conservative or right wing or republican although those are the masks they are presently wearing) must be traced to their sources.  Hard truth, slow truth must be told and told again and again until it is heard.

I have written before that a lie is worse than murder.  A lie is intended to get you to behave in ways that disbenefits you in favor of others.  A big lie can ruin your life; rather than a quick death, many 10s of years can be spent destructively of self and others.  We are, today, in a downpour of lies about ourselves and the world that we live in, lies that are intended to support the immediate advantage of an economic elite, to disempower the rest of us both now and in the future and with the eventual consequence of reconstructing the human world into global oligarchic wage-slave states as the only form of governance that the economic elite can or are willing to imagine.

How do I explain this to Billy or Alicia?  They will not hear it on CNN.  They will not seek it out; if you live on narrow certainties, especially when challenged, you seek in, not out. The liar has seeded the lie with ready rejections of the truth, with ‘socialism’ and ‘abortion’ and ‘take away your way of life.’  So that when I say, “You can’t continue to live as you do; we are all changing the world in ways that will make life intolerable for our children.”, they answer back, “Socialist, you only want to change my way of life because you are jealous.”  And then they give me an Indian burn and tell me to go away.

I have great sympathy for these folks, the real grass-roots that have been stirred to action by the feeding of their greatest fears.  They will often be the first and the most harmed by the very politicians that they support.  And sympathy that if the nation is to be saved from itself, they will have to have their certainties shattered; some would not survive it.

At this point in time I see no force formed or forming that can take on the Big Lie machine of Homo elitus.  All political parties are infected or can be, religious institutions too.  The educational system is running scared.  The intelligentsia either isn’t or is ignored.  The media is the elite with minor exception.  The economic elite has the weakness of doing anything that will make money so that truths that pay off can be told for a time; but my point is, who would you tell, and how, when many of those that you need to reach still believe in their heart of hearts that the south really won the Civil War and that non-whites aren’t really human.

Owning property provides an incentive for innovation. Society benefits from inventions. People can get rich, but society gets richer. It’s innovation that raises the standard of living in a society. That’s the story of the rise of the west. Then there’s a contrasting story.  When you don’t get to keep what you create, the incentive to create is lost.

— Austin J. Jaffe, Ph.D.

There will come a time in the not too distant future when these words or words like these will be read with the same disbelief and horror that we feel when perusing an account of Aztec attitudes toward the ‘obvious necessity’ of human sacrifice: ‘for the rain to fall, for the kingdom to sustain and thrive, living hearts must be cut from living bodies.’

That Professor Jaffe’s and similar views are taken as an unquestioned and unquestionable good is the underlying basis of our present, and long developing, difficulties.  No biological system can function with unregulated growth; in fact, biological systems seldom actually grow, they repair and replace; innovation is slow, invention is far more often harmful than beneficial.  No biological system can function with the parts that create keeping what they create, yet no part of a biological system can take what it does not create without compensating in effective kind. 

Humans are animals, biological entities living in ecosystem relationships with the rest of life on the earth – even as we do violence to the relationships, we are still in them.  We have an adaptation that, because of its newness and power, ¹ distorts both our relationships with the rest of life and our understandings of those relationships. 

And we have reached the end of the line for those distorted relationships.  The thin biospheric space, sufficiently stable to support life, is about ready to ratchet back a notch or two to a somewhat simpler order – this is what it does when severely stressed.  And our maniacal obsession with our independence from the rest of life will be shown to be the dangerous illusion that it is.  Even a small loss of environmental ‘free’ services will cut through human civilization like a reaper’s scythe.

Our biology is the basis of our life and all the stuff, all the power, all the wealth of knowledge and wealth of material is nothing without biological life.  The conditions for sustaining life are well known and yet in the face of such clear understanding we poison our air and water, offer toxic materials as beauty aids, damage our food supply, live with stresses that damage our hormonal systems and digestive systems, eat poorly, treat our bodies like an enemy, believe in the most outrageous palliatives and generally devote our actions to “raising our standard of living in society” while having no comprehension of what it even means to live fully as a member of our biological species.

The source of our dilemmas is deep in the design and structure of our social/economic/political/religious world.  So deep, in fact, that these sources seem like the natural and necessary bases of our existence – just as Aztec culture seemed the natural and necessary bases of their world.

The human species exists in numbers and with powers of manipulation orders of magnitude beyond our ability to comprehend, much less measure with accuracy.  We are quite literally bursting the seams of this world.  A tiny few have seen this coming for hundreds of years, but now that it is upon us that number is exponentially increasing – increasing in number but not increasing in comprehension, just in a simple recognition of danger driving doubt and fear.

An unfocused sense of danger is itself extremely dangerous.  We will see this like the displaying rashes and buboes of a systemic disease breaking out (and cynically used), as we have seen, in the fear of a ‘black’ president, a manic oscillation of acceptance and rejection of social and economic palliatives, and a pathological entrenchment in our oldest palliative, religion.  That, of course, is when the temple steps become a cascading river of blood!

I began with a quote about property; this was not without intention.  Much of our present difficulty has been driven by way humans have come to relate to the space, objects and consistent imaginings we have about the world: we have come to think of these things as property.

There is no natural reason for this.  Property is purely a construct of the imagination and has no basis in the physical or living order.  If I hold a object in my hand and am using it, the living world has every expectation that I will protect the object and my use of it with symbols of force and eventually real force if necessary.  That I should put that object down and leave it alone at a distance from me and maintain the notion that it is still mine and therefore not available for use by anyone or anything else is new to our part of the universe; and as Professor Jaffe points out, filled with consequences.

Since the idea of property is just that, an idea, it has no more than a history in thought and human function.  There is a religious component to the argument that I will talk about in another number in this group of essays, but for the moment oblige me the conceit that property is an imaginary relationship unsupported by substance beyond the fact that this is how we have been acting for some time.

But even that last statement needs correction.  Property is not treated the same everywhere by everyone; in fact, as one would expect for an imaginary relationship, the idea of property in highly variable from place to place, culture to culture and person to person.  There is no one notion of what property is or should be.

But it is popularly held notions of property that decide whether a priest can cut your heart out, whether poisonous chemicals can be poured into a stream, whether I will strive for knowledge/spiritual wealth or material wealth, whether a dangerous innovation will become the newest form of human sacrifice.

Western conceptions of property have not changed much since John Locke articulated the local wisdom of the middle and late 1600s.  Karl Marx had a run at these conceptions, but had the bad luck of his ideas being taken up by revolutionaries in the most improbable country in Eurasia.  The great power of present property notions and resulting laws, as per Professor Jaffe, to create change and to concentrate material wealth, have driven us to both deify property ideas – and to the brink of the abyss.  It is not a conception that we should or can leave alone.

1. For a consideration of the human adaptation and its powers see The Madness – Part Four

People are presented with millions of pieces of information every day, from the chemistry of your liver to the latest political outrage, from which they can only select a small percentage to recognize and overtly respond – thus, in part, the head down, tunnel vision push through life hoping for the best. Most people accept this state of affairs, stay at least a little light on their feet, even as they try to find some reasonable and reliable pattern so as not to start each day from scratch, set upon with overwhelming sensation and information.

Karl Marx made the argument that different classes in the same society can have quite different ideas and beliefs about what is real. He called this ‘ideology’ – like styles of clothing and an accent might identify someone in the mid 1800s in England as belonging to a certain class, so would their ideas and beliefs – and these would form the possibilities for their lives. Marx also assumed that such class-based ideologies were inherently untrue in their details measured against human potential and a reality larger than prescriptions of a particular society and its classes.

Ludwig von Mises dismisses this seemingly sound bit of thinking by suggesting, in what sounds to my ear like a “best of all possible worlds” sophistry, that these are beliefs adapted to reality, functionally true beliefs, and thus are not ideological in the sense that Marx means. Why or even how, he asks, could people function from a set of belief principles that are untrue. He argues that mechanical devices depend on correct theory and application and that there could not be an ideological (false) science of mechanics; and by implication that if societies function, then the principles that underlie them cannot be ideologies since they must be ‘true’ working principles.

A larger reality, I would note, can be thought of as a rocky ground that we can cushion with adapted beliefs in good times, but that delivers its full discomfort, demonstrating the narrowness and failures of those beliefs, in bad times. A whole social design can be ultimately mal-adjusted to biophysical reality – a condition that might not critically show itself for some generations.

Some people are not so disposed to the ambiguities of a general ideology. Such people construct an internal system of ideas bulwarked and buttressed against all bending and flexing – prepared to go through life like an ice-breaker ship, crushing out a path in a hostile environment – and even thinking, because they can allow themselves to see only what they wish to see, that the narrow channel created is really the whole ocean. These are the ideologues.

Ideologues are confident, certain and claim to be in complete possession of THE truth. They use the language of reality and truth just as if they possessed them. Actually humanity has been deciding between the Real (what would be functioning in the universe if people were not present) and realities that are local in a time, a place and a belief system for a very long time. Add to this difficulty what I will call ‘highly adaptive individuals’ who use existing ideas, confusions, beliefs and desires without regard to their connection to Reality, as social and political devices for their own ends.

But remember the analogy to an ice-breaker; the world of their competence is very narrow and often fleeting. One of the signs that a person is an ideologue is an unwillingness to consider anything beyond their narrow path as being part of the actual world (the rejection of consideration does not prevent the ideologue from claiming wide, forthright examination of all opinion). Such a test is useful, though not fool-proof: the ideologue can claim that a refusal to accept their reality is the true act of narrow exclusion.

If we stir together a large number of regular people with a few hard-core ideologues, many of the regular folks end up sticking to the ideologues; drawn by the crushing power of their certainty and the way that certainty appears to ease the path through life.

Religions are good examples of ideology-based systems and the role of ideologues (though once religions were local environmentally-based belief systems that organized complex highly adaptable human behavior to function ecologically in the environment). Religious people, for the most part regular folks stuck to ideological institutions, believe that their way of making observance to their image of a higher power is the correct way and that other ways range from misguided to dangerous. It is necessary for religious (regular) people to gather in sufficient number that their local individual realities are mutually supported in the face of inevitable contrary evidence; and often they require a true ideologue (or ‘highly adaptive person’ to play one) to act as the prow on the ice-breaker.

An issue of greatest concern is how to measure notions of truth, accuracy, honesty, reality, effective adaptation, environmental fit – the actions of our human world that are answerable to biophysical reality – in a social/political world in which ideologies are the standards of truth and ideologues can seem like honest brokers.

Now everything cannot be true. It has become our habit these days to assume that there is “some truth in everything.” At least it is the habit among the least ideological. But that is just foolishness. The atomic mass of chlorine is about 35.46 atomic mass units. This is not open to argument; you can’t pick an atomic mass that you like for chlorine. Why this mass and not another is more open to opinion, but that opinion needs to be informed; the theoretical foundations for atomic structure are pretty solid these days. While it is clearly, and unarguably sound, to have “true” answers for the nature of chlorine, would it not be very useful to have testable and measured answers to many questions that, today, we leave to typical ideologues?

What is believed depends on how those beliefs are arrived at. If it is our dominant social habit to believe in authority, beliefs will come from established institutions and adapt in the self-referenced way that they have for thousands of years. It was the great contribution of the Enlightenment that knowing should come from direct experience and that there had to be epistemological principles to properly use that experience; an understanding of understanding that seems to be weakening just as we need it the most.

More than ever humans are confronted with new and surprising experiences: many a day whether we realize it or not. What belief system, what ideology, would be best for a world in which two conditions, previously not a primary concern, have become essential to respond to; (1) huge amounts of rapidly changing information and (2) an immediate need for our actions to comport very closely with biophysical reality. Would you select an ideology that is confident in an existing set of answers even as new information is conflicting or would you select an ideology that doesn’t base its beliefs on unchallengeable facts, but on a method to evaluate new information and with a track record of discovering the ‘truths’ that underlie our understanding of the physical and biological worlds?

This is not a new observation. How to discover the truth of things and make an understanding of what is true into appropriate and meaningful lives is one of the oldest questions on the books. You’d think that an animal that can build the Large Hadron Collider and produce energies approaching those of the origin of the universe might spend an effective moment or two getting clear how not to destroy the world it lives in through the madness of its political and economic actions… you’d think!

What if part of a belief system is the demand that the specific content of belief be put to test? What if the ideology – the belief system – required testing and replication of basic data from which testable hypotheses are organized into theories about the general form and function of the stuff that happens in the world? Is it not possible that an ideology of process, scientific method and epistemological philosophy, would more accurately and consistently discover ways of thinking and behaving that are closer to capital ‘R’ Reality than the local adaptation of idea to form, ad hoc, in the service of the immediate and the self-interested?

This would demand a great deal of people, to learn about these things, to develop a clear understanding and reasoned use of scientific method, have a basic comprehension of statistical probability and epistemology, but what the hell! It was demanding for 4 or 5 guys to kill a mammoth; it was difficult and demanding to sail in a little tub of a wooden ship around the world; it was demanding to march across Europe in 1944 -45.

I am talking about a critical mass of humanity developing the critical understandings and using processes that have demonstrably attached our human technical reality to the physical reality. It is time that we attach our human reality to the biophysical reality – there is just no choice. Now how is that for an ideological statement?

This is true when discussing religious arguments against science and especially arguments ‘against’ evolution. This is true when considering human impact on the earth’s ecosystems. And it is true when growth based economic behaviors are represented as our only options for our future. There are other examples, but these have the most far-reaching consequences.

• An argument against evolution could only be an empirical one: ‘Dr. Xyz has demonstrated, in peer reviewed and replicated studies, that genes don’t actually produce the proteins that are the basis for the form and function of the organism; furthermore, genetic material is not passed on from one generation to the next dependent on the success of an organism to function adaptively in an ecosystem.’

To say that “Evolution is just a theory!” is simply a misunderstanding of how ideas function to form increasingly veridical concepts. Descending the argument to a level of ‘the meeting of minds’ infantilizes and trivializes the argument to a point of absurdity. A baseball fan would not even consider talking to someone who, in an equivalent way, was so tragically ignorant of baseball.

And yet we are supposed to give such failures of education, comprehension and curiosity the standing of a fully developed and worthy system of thought. It is quite simply ridiculous: it is foolish to listen to the opinion of someone who doesn’t know where the shortstop should position for a left-handed hitter who routinely pulls toward right field or who would put a player 3rd in the batting rotation who has a 250 average. My uncle would have just said it, “Shut up! You don’t know your ass from second base.”

• Human impact on the earth’s biosphere includes, but is not limited to: salinization of millions of acres, cutting of millions of acres of forest, creating large regions of ‘artificial climate’ in and around cities, industrial areas and agricultural areas, putting chemical industrial products and wastes into every cubic inch of the earth’s air, water and soil, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from about 200 ppm to over 350 ppm in the last 200 years, using nearly half of the total photosynthetic product of the earth and increasing population (and consumption) exponentially by more than a hundred thousand percent over what is but a brief moment in geological/evolutionary time. These are not the actions of a species that is so limited in power that we need not even consider its impact.

Rather than the baseball metaphor, this is more a matter of straight up, outright denial. No one sitting in traffic on a six lane city loop-road with nothing but the tops of buildings for miles in all directions can fail to recognize human impact unless they are just batshit crazy; and many many of us are. Anyone who drinks bottled water because they are afraid of pollution or germs can’t say that humans are not impacting a world where streams were once safe to drink from; but they do. It is impossible to read the data on human use of the earth’s productive capacity without realizing our impact; but it is possible to not read the data.

• The dominate economic design, in function and in law, requires an increase in the use of materials and energy, and then distributes the wealth created by the increase to those who are said, in law, to ‘own’ the materials and energy.

Here is what is obvious:

It is obvious that every living thing has as much ‘right’ to a place to be and the sustenance to prosper as any other living thing. ‘Ownership” is a function of force, not some abstract right.

It is obvious that the proper role of law, as a counter to raw force, is to effectively distribute the excess accumulations of material wealth, beyond what is required by the members of the community, based on the simple assumption that it is the community that creates the wealth by its education, cultural history and support of the individuals who, acting as agents of the community, perform the greatest acts of accumulation.

It is also obvious that without compensating the taking of material and energy from the environment in such a way that the environment is sustained, that all life in a given space would be endangered.

And lastly it is obvious that the most common experience, once a community is broken into those with wealth and those without wealth, is that those with wealth use it to control community law and power dominating the rest with force and fear – and today with propaganda as a thin layer over force.

While all of these things are obvious if given a moment’s thought, it is also clear that the idea of private property has become the central madness of our economic system and that this madness drives growth economics so powerfully that no other idea is even allowed. How to comport the kinds of economic growth considered essential with the biophysical realities of zero-growth exchanges (compensations) and the absolute limits that are put on uncompensated takings by the evolutionary functioning of ecosystems is so far from inclusion in deliberation that those in power find such suggestions ludicrous.

But what is, however, beyond all credulity is that so many could have gotten so disconnected from the biological basis that allows the living state to exist; that those who are seemingly directing the human enterprise see essential reality in geopolitics, economics, weapons, money and power, electronic media, and not in biophysical cycles of water, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen; not in biodiversity’s essential role in environmental ‘free services’, the dangers of perturbing natural stabilities and so much more.

So why do we encourage these uninformed and ridiculous opinions by listening to them, even trivializing sound thought and learning to try and communicate with these levels of misinformation? There are three basic reasons: (1) the fabrications and distortions are the basis of political and economic power, (2) elite power actively perpetuates the ignorance of the Many and (3) vast numbers of people are consequently very poorly informed.

But, you can bet (and win) that the children of the economic elite are not going to schools that reject the teaching of the very best science and math available. You can also be sure that these elites are making practical preparations for climate change and other dramatic effects of human impact. And they also are acutely aware of the consequences of growth economics, the opportunities to redistribute the tiny bits of wealth held in billions of hands using governmental taxing powers (or simple corruption) as the last great entrepreneurial act before closing down growth for the Many as the last and only means to retain a livable environment for themselves.¹

What is truly unthinkable is that the Many should become thoughtfully aware of the desperate position that we are in. And yet, reasonably accurate opinions keep bubbling up from the fetid pool of media propaganda.

I, for one, am tired of trying to find common ground with the uniformed, the ignorant and the societally insane. Those who have been poisoned by the information cyanide cannot be allowed to take our time. The elites may or may not have adopted the strategy with intention, but like wounding soldiers depletes the ranks more than killing outright, the confused are more demanding than those fully demented.

We need to speak out forcefully, with the full strength of the message. ‘Fixing’ the language to the form and presumed understanding of the confused only confuses more, allows misinterpretation and provides open ground for counter attack.²

My message: institutional religions are the centers of societal insanity, human action is leading to a major extinction event and the most basic assumptions of our economic behaviors, private property and growth, are the greatest possible crimes against human life and the living earth. There are people who are ready to hear these things, ready to be told the truth. The fully demented are KIA, the confused have to be left for now. It is time to tell the truth and gather the informed.

1. US hegemony, in the form of the G8 and G20, has now made it official; the economic and power elites have committed to the support and survival of the economic behaviors destined to conflict with biophysical reality. They have, in the simplest terms, chosen their team. It is as though the New York Yankees had decided not to play on the league schedule or by the game’s rules, but rather to arm themselves with automatic weapons and take on the other teams in one grand finale.

   The elites have made their calculations and seem to have decided that it is time to gather up the wealth, both abstract and substantial; that their best chance is to call and play their hand with as much devastation as is required to maintain their superior position. The goal of cutting global deficits in half is code for removing the titular middle class. A significantly large educated class with goals that include controlling and inhibiting the power of an elite has been an obstacle to elite dominance for 200 years. It would appear that the economic elite believes that obstacle can now be overcome.

2. I am using violent imagery for the simple reason that we must understand that we are entering a period of violence; done to us, and soon enough, done by us.