How are we to understand this? Heartless, bloodthirsty people with no moral compass? Bored, diminished people with no interests beyond the most immediate and dramatic sensations? A deeply divided and class based society in which some humans were considered human and others were rejected from the human family? A society that valued on the basis of some artifice and not the living condition?

I remember the shock that attended my first learning of gladiators; not the moment itself (most likely associated with a Hollywood film), but the sensation of disbelief laid over by the certainty of actuality; an incomprehensible abyss separating two clearly true and incompatible things. It is a sensation that has revisited me many times and that is as poignant today as at its first occurrence.

‘There must have been something wrong with the Roman people, with their leaders and societal trendsetters.’ This was as far as my thinking went for many years. The details of a world in which slavery was common place; where war was conducted ‘man on man’ from arm-length distances with knives; where the elite didn’t do any work other than to manage their social relations and wealth; a supporting caste saw to the delivery and distribution of goods and services; and a vast population of poor supplied the muscle and struggled with daily survival needs; this was all foreign to my small town experience and formal education about the rights and plights of humanity. Understanding that place and time has become more and more important as my own immediate society begins to look more and more like the Roman society that I could not comprehend as a child (not only the Romans, they just stand as the pinnacle example).

I am not making the facile comparisons of real gladiators with the WWF or wage slavery with the indentured slavery of Rome. It is rather a whole set of designs and behaviors adapted to our time and technologies: it is a descent into meanness of spirit and narrowness of vision; it is about easy fear and easy escape from fear; it is about all the normal and expected human behaviors made bigger and more concentrated than a society can stand.

Rome is only a metaphor. I don’t really care about Rome. It is now, yesterday and tomorrow that I care about. “Think of the children” is not trite. If you believe this trite and simple minded, then I would happily remove your head with a short sword. The people of Rome were not thinking of the children. The elite made their children into monsters. We are making our children into monsters; because children will be made into the image of their society. The children, in their biological wisdom fight back until they are ultimately overwhelmed with materialism and the incomprehensible abyss; they do give up. Giving up means that the human body and mind are distorted into some, primarily, economic form and are left to express what is left of their humanness in twisted and destructive ways like depression, obsession with powerful biological drives and (mostly) passive violence.

In Rome the people had each other. In today’s world we have media. Nothing of consequence was delivered into the homes of the Roman citizen, and so they had to come out. There was money to be made by giving them a place to go. For our world there is money to be made, vastly more, by delivering into the home something to do. This changes things.

I believe that the concentrating effect of mass activities led to the bloody arena, but it was forces like those that we experience today that supplied the push. We are able, today, to design and deliver all manner of distraction. While Rome did have pictures, it did not have moving ones. Movement requires real bodies; real bodies in real movement bleed real blood. We might be a very long time away from real killing as public entertainment, but we are fully in the world of the twisted. Our media, be it information media or the distracting media, is filled with images of power; power abused, power used, power vastly more accessible than it is in our daily lives: it is in the gun, it is in the martial artist, it is in the wealthy, it is in the supernaturally stimulated, it is in the ruthless and the mad. And it is to power which we, like remora, wish to attach ourselves no matter how tenuously.

A design begins to reveal itself. As the people feel power in their own lives they do not support and sustain the power of their leaders, but rather expect them to function as organizers and suppliers of the services of governance. As the people feel less and less power the more they grow the image of power in others to whom they may attach in some fashion – primarily that of believing the powerful to be representatives of their needs and safety. This draws out the most distorted of behaviors the way a poultice is supposed to draw out the puss from a sore.

The individuals drawn to power over others are never those who can be trusted with such power. Some people will accept the need to take on a responsibility, but to actively seek authority over other human beings is a pathology rather than a vocation. In a world where everyone has personal power in their own lives sufficient to see themselves as in charge of their destiny, those who seek more power must simply serve to attain some sense of authority; and they will always be ‘brought up short’ by their community when they overstep (which they will do consistently).

If the people become less personally powerful, due to some perturbation in their world, an opening is made for the power-hungry to begin the process described above. And such perturbations always come. So it is that human societies have cycled through egalitarian and despotic governance. Despotism will, like a bad parasite, kill its host, the people will be thrown back onto their own resources and, in being personally powerful again, require governance that supports the community and not just the interests of the leadership.

Another dynamic is that the power-hungry are certain to come to an understanding of the role of distributed personal power in their quest for power over others. Since it is to their advantage to reduce both the real power (difficult) and the perceived power (much easier) of the people, ‘those who would be King’ make such reduction a major goal. They are supported in that effort by all the parts of the society that are disbenefited by empowered, self-possessed individual citizens.

From here we can return to Rome, to the Coliseum, to the cheap seats, to the psychological needs and state of a people without sufficient power to control their lives. No one person or group of people conspired to create a stadium, a city, an empire full of people whose dependencies reduced their personal power to such a low point that the most basic needs for security and safety sought a source of power outside of themselves. It was the combination of population growth, economic growth and design, rapid social change exacerbated by the very process of empire; and the release of the power-hungry (amplified by the systemic real powerlessness of a society out of control) to dominate others.

It was not the blood on lascivio agri that drew the Romans to the stadiums; it was the hole in their souls, hollows left by the loss of their immediate and daily capacity to be in charge of their own life experience.

It is not the mature pleasure in CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, The Terminator, Batman and the others in the endless string of blood sport “entertainments” that fills the couches and the lazy-boys in isolated living rooms across the nation; it is the holes in our souls.

I think of the prescient observers of the decline of their Rome looking desperately for some salvation, something to change the course of events. Eventually even they must have said, “Let’s just get this over with.” Our situation today is different in a number of regards. One is the desperation of facing a biological limit for all of our actions, but another is that the tools of our distractions have the potential to communicate rapidly and clearly with huge numbers of people. Our direction is actually changeable.

The Great Many have been diminished in their sense of power, even as they still retain real power if they could recognize their own best self-interests and organize around them. And the dangers are not 100 years, 300 years in the future: the barbarians are at the gates in the form of ecological collapse. Those “leaders” who refuse to see the immediacy of our dangers are, everyone, benefited in the moment by that refusal. The acquired ‘helplessness’ of the Great Many must be recognized for the terrible, perhaps insurmountable, problem that it is and must be given the deepest consideration, but assuming that it is addressable:

The present world is not Rome, but has come to its own and new place driven by the same human forces. Getting it wrong this time will not simply lead to the rise of Constantinople and the empires of a new Middle East, but will shock the biosphere and change all of life on earth.

… now this may sound convoluted, but not if one tracks the cultural response of hostility from every passionate point of view when a leadership itself is so prone to unjustifiable violence and un-American diminishment of the constitution. What do you think is going to happen? What do you think the American hopeless will do…? We better consider what the fundamentalist within will put on our table…

This quote is from Sean Penn speaking last August in Denver, CO at a rally to open the presidential debates to “third parties” and independent candidates. This excerpt was part of Penn’s attempt at foreshadowing how violence could become the last line of defense against a corrupt government and debased political process that is devoid of substantive democratic debate and participation.

“Shooter”

Last Thursday afternoon at the initial press conference regarding the Fort Hood shooting, it would take General Cole over a minute – and a check of his notes — to quickly and begrudgingly clarify that “the shooter was a soldier”. To be fair, this was probably a difficult and embarrassing admission for the General; indeed, the reservation, disbelief, and shock that embodied the General’s speech and demeanor during this press conference smacked of genuine surprise and exigent circumstances as opposed to premeditated, administrative misdirection. Linguist John McWhorter has noted that the pervasive and grammatically incorrect use of the term “troops” to identify individual soldiers killed or sent to war is impersonal and demeaning; additionally, he states that “using a name for soldiers that has no singular form grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war”. Nidal Hasan as “shooter”, and not the more accurate, descriptive, and clear “soldier”, further decouples the actions of the Major from the appropriate military context and pushes it into the realm of inexplicable civilian criminality.

Shock

The real shock of last Thursday’s events is that they were much of a shock at all. There was the justifiable visceral shock of individuals having to emotionally internalize and absorb this act of brutal violence and murder; on the other hand, there was a larger, needless, abhorrent, and dishonest intellectual shock and morally-bankrupt flight to fantasy used by individual actors within our reified mainstream media to explain the day’s events. This faux shock took the form of prejudiced, irresponsible, and sadistic language, images, and fabrications designed to cover-up our society’s colossal failures of military aggression (i.e., global war on terrorism), soldier care and protection, and American democracy as a whole. One General using the term “shooter” to allay the cognitive dissonance associated with his soldier’s behavior is perhaps understandable. The corporate-crafted-elite-friendly news coverage provided a nefarious distraction from the more obvious and likely motives, context, and factual circumstances of the event. The media projected the collective guilt and ramifications of this nation’s larger war ethos and bloodlust onto this “shooter” in an attempt to further ameliorate the discontent of the citizenry brought on by a duplicitous permanent war economy.

The Media

Last Thursday’s media spectacle unfolded as a disgusting montage of avoidance and denial. Prior to General Cole’s initial address to the media, TV news outlets focused on the more improbable and far-fetched scenario that outside actors penetrated the base to carry out an attack — stories and questions abound about lax and inadequate security measures, permeable gates, etc. The focus was traditional “terrorists”, like the ones we’re supposedly fighting overseas, or homegrown “domestic terrorists”. Though not impossible causes, given the type, breadth, and scope of operations of Fort Hood (soldier returning and debarking centers, psychological services, etc.), the media conveniently discounted the likely scenario that a soldier(s) instigated the attacks and instead focused on terrorist perpetrators working from the outside-in. Even after the General’s announcement that this was soldier-on-soldier violence, the language of the media did not embrace the basic facts — we continued to see “suspect”, “shooter”, the very convenient and oft-used “lone gunman”, and more problematic “Muslim” splash across our screens. Hasan was no longer a soldier — perhaps a justified, if not trite and childish redaction of a murderer’s factual stature – but now was part of a possible “sleeper cell” or domestic terrorist conspiracy. No evidence abound to substantiate these theories, but reiterating the factual scenario that this was an apparently stable, accomplished, and respected American soldier turned murderer had to be avoided — it begged the larger questions and challenged America’s narcissistic mores. Any factual and empirical analysis of context, one that could actually occur in the absence of the more tactical facts of that day, was avoided in deference to further innuendo and speculation. The potential spectacle of terrorism would be much more useful to state-corporate power than a humiliating analysis of America’s global military folly coming home to roost with devastating consequences.

The real story was not broached in deference to the morbid advertisement of the body count, a sadistic drive to understand the killer’s exact path through the buildings, how he managed to fire so many rounds, trite detail about where his handguns originated from, etc. The true thrust of the story should have been that the act was committed by a soldier, and why? Predictably, the only suitable means for the media to address this fact was not on the public policy level, but exclusively on the private level of neoliberal tenets: personal responsibility and individual pathology: What, literally, was wrong with Hasan’s brain? What about his personal life and religion? Why didn’t he have a wife? Why did he require psychological counseling? Did he not relate well to others? Was he exposed to interpersonal discrimination because he was a Muslim? Etc.

The media conveniently ignored the prescient questions and relevant policy issues that could have been informed by military experience and empirical fact. A more appropriate and probative line of questioning and investigation might have gone as follows: What is the prevalence of violence, murder, and/or other antisocial/self-destructive behavior among soldiers and veterans to our recent wars? Under what conditions and why have similar acts occurred — how have we addressed them? What drives other soldiers to resist deployment? What is fueling the soldiers’ and veterans’ record levels of domestic abuse, divorce, suicide, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness etc? What do the difficulties of our enlisted soldiers and veterans tell us about our war efforts? What ramifications of our wars could inspire such violent behavior? Does military violence overseas beget violence at home — how? Do civilian casualties of war inspire soldiers and others to commit crimes? Are soldiers empowered with a constructive way to stop civilian casualties within their work scope and operating procedures? Are objecting soldiers encouraged to leave active duty? Can soldiers object or opt-out of war and still maintain their military livelihood? Are soldiers helpless, powerless, disempowered, and driven to violence because they have no means to prevent their duplicity in unjust wars? Are foreign soldiers and civilians respected by our military? Are war crimes prosecuted adequately? Are appropriate reparations consistently granted to innocent civilians affected by our wars? Can soldiers be heard and bring charges against military personnel without retribution? Are military strategies coherent, defensive in nature, and do they have a moral and ethical foundation? Is military strategy and justification understood along the chain of command — is soldier input considered and valued? Is conscientious objector status too onerous? The military knows the wars are unpopular at home, abroad, and with soldiers — why weren’t they prepared? Shouldn’t this act have been expected? What does this say about our war efforts? Some of these questions seem naive, even after the killings, given the nature of the military and our pernicious appetite for invading; however, if they were seriously considered in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be counting the dead at Fort Hood.

The vile and cruel nature of the media was further evidenced by the impugning of Hasan’s reported history of psychological counseling. A simple sound bite in the news let viewers know what the proper cultural attitude should be: seeking psychological help is a sign of weakness; worst yet, by implication, it is a precursor to murderous rage. Major Hasan became a double-whammy of weakness: not only did he seek psychological counseling, but he inflicted it on other soldiers and thereby facilitated the weakness and stigmatization of his fellow soldiers. The hypocrisy of this media teaching is overwhelming. How many of the media-dubbed “heroes” killed by Hasan had sought psychological counseling due to their exposure to warfare? This malignant labeling by the media is akin to calling a soldier who seeks mental health support a “ticking time bomb” or “sleeper cell agent”. More importantly, it devalued the ongoing importance of mental health services in the military and diminished the level of cultural caring for those who suffer psychologically.

Similar correlations (i.e., not causality) were mangled in a prejudiced attempt to impugn Muslims. When soldier-on-soldier violence is between Caucasian parties of strong Christian faith, we don’t start investigating the perpetrator’s church and reverend as a source of motive. America’s imperialist wars disproportionately affect followers of Islam. It is common sense that many Muslims are resistors to our empire; however, the implication by the media that there is something inherent to being a Muslim that drives anti-American and antiwar sentiment is false. This assertion is only useful in a propaganda system designed to demean and devalue our enemies, to make those affected by aggression more disposable and invisible, and divert attention from the human toll of state terrorism.

The inconvenient truth is the deplorable act committed by Major Hasan cannot be a shock because we knew it was coming; in fact, it was foreseeable, unavoidable, and inevitable to a moral certitude. It takes no leap of imagination to understand this act as a predictable outcome of criminal wars of aggression, torture, and indifference to the slaughter and displacement of foreign peoples under the guise of freedom, democracy, and the market. The tragedy at Fort Hood represents a failure of the ubiquitous rotten soul shared by our major political parties — a soul that throws taxpayer capital and the weight of corporate campaign contributions behind the projection of American power and empire. Contrary to the current state of our nation’s maniacal foreign policy denial, the “liberated” foreign recipients of American interventionism are not disposable or invisible — Major Hasan’s mass murder was a simple violent inversion of our military expansionism. Last Thursday, in the absence of the more or less trivial, private, and logistical facts surrounding Major Hasan’s actions, our country’s blatant criminal indifference to the ramifications of expansive foreign policy is what truly informed the events of the day. If we disregard the media delving further into the sadistic and titillating spectacle of details — along with its use of discriminatory deflection masquerading as informed speculation — our focus could have been narrowed to the scant but significant known facts at the time: an apparently successful and otherwise stable American soldier had turned on his fellow soldiers in cold blood. The context in which to evaluate such an act is painfully obvious, empirical support abounds, and analogous events involving soldiers were readily available to use as a lens to understand Major Hasan’s actions. They were all discarded because of their common thread: what they tell us about war and how it affects people.

Scribd

The mangling of language surrounding Hasan was best evidenced by the yet unproven attribution of a Scribd comment to him regarding suicide bombings. Whether Hasan is the author is beside the point because the quote was used in a very real way by the media as disinformation, propaganda, and distraction. The quote was never addressed or explained in its full context; additionally, selective text and interpretation of the full post was leveraged by the media to create a false impression of equivalency. Omissions played on our nation’s larger cultural pedagogy of fear. Here is text of the full post:

NidalHasan scribbled: There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that “IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE” and Allah (SWT) knows best.

What is immediately clear is that this is not in any sense a direct, first person equivocation of suicide bombing with a soldier sacrificing his own life to save his comrades. This is clearly a man using metaphor and real life examples to explain another man’s writing and interpretation of Islam relative to suicide and what are contemporaneously called suicide bombers. At any rate, this is hardly a direct endorsement of suicide bombing; additionally, neither example used in the post reference the killing of civilians.

Let’s take what the media intended to construe after they mangled, circumscribed, quoted out of context, and generally reshaped the meaning of this post: an American soldier throwing oneself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers is equivalent to a suicide bomber. We all know “suicide bomber” in western-corporate-media parlance means killing civilians. The media’s assertion is obviously true: throwing oneself on a grenade to save your fellow soldiers is in no way morally equivalent to preemptively killing civilians.

However, consider the following quote given that the civilian “kill ratio” of American drone bombings inside Pakistan have been reported by the Brookings Institution to be 90% (9 civilians are killed for every 1 “terrorist”) and perhaps much higher according to other sources:

      They tellin’ you to never worry about the future
      They tellin’ you to never worry about the torture
      They tellin’ you that you’ll never see the horror
      Spend it all today and we will bill you tomorrow
      Three piece suits and bank accounts in Bahamas
      Wall Street crime will never send you to the slammer
      Tell all the children in the arms of their mammas
      The F-15 is a homicide bomber

      – “Yell Fire!,” Michael Franti & Spearhead, 2006

So, how is our “homicide bomber” different from Hasan’s purportedly righteous suicide bomber? They aren’t — they are both the same: morally repugnant and based on the vacuous logic of preventive killing. This kind of preemptive, criminal murder is sanctioned and largely unquestioned US policy — the kind committed by our enemies is condemned. Moral equivocations that do not justify American empire are outside the spectrum of what is considered polite, acceptable political discourse. Perhaps our version is just more cowardly, as the bomber is not eviscerated in the cause and doesn’t become a martyr. Our bomber sits behind a computer, maybe flies a plane hopped-up on amphetamines, and is always in some manner detached enough (physically and psychically) from the act to confer continued legitimacy on the act’s criminal planners. The inevitable “collateral damage”, as it is repeated over time, is not aptly designated as state terrorism — it becomes an Orwellian “accident”. This is the policy of our President; a man Libertarian Christopher Dowd has called a “criminal sociopath” for labeling our misadventures in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement”, among other things. Obama is the “Teflon Don” behind the uniquely American version of the suicide bomber: he is instant judge, jury, and executioner. He is a recidivist homicide bomber who will remain legally infallible until the civic imagination and courage of his countrymen put an end to his run.

Leadership

A cogent and fact-based analysis of the effects of unjust war on the health and attitudes of soldiers was lost on our “leadership” as well. It is indeed shocking to have to digest the mind-numbing hypocrisy of a President decrying “a horrific outburst of violence”, while he is on the verge of sending tens of thousands more “troops” to a bottomless pit of US-sponsored death and despair in the Middle East. Obama’s impending “surge” of violence and manpower in his “war of necessity” is of course acceptable when conducted by our corporate-imperial state. The results of this brand of leadership are as predictable as the events of last Thursday: more acts of criminal violence justified as legitimate resistance by the powerless, more budding jihadists overseas, and hundreds of thousands more innocent women and children slaughtered on foreign soil. Shocking is the deviousness of a leader willing to minimize the ramifications of bankrupt imperial hubris — his logic of preventive war and empire, through its own weight and internal logic, collapsing inward and consuming itself along with the victims at Fort Hood.

Our leaders are well aware of the bubbling undercurrent of rage and resistance regarding our unjust wars and the disproportionate-to-rank physical, mental, and moral toll it places on soldiers; they know all the reasons for the discontent of their “troops”; and they know that soldiers are disempowered, discouraged, punished, and stigmatized for speaking-out or seeking help. In doing absolutely nothing of significance to rein in our criminal wars, they are responsible to forestall the foreseeable violence that will be enlisted by soldiers who feels powerless, overwhelmed, and boxed-in, a la Major Hasan. They abrogated this responsibility and have yet to offer anything but puffery and palliative solutions when it comes to soldier discontent and preventing inevitable soldier-on-soldier violence.

Our President, oft dubbed a brilliant orator, didn’t manage to mention soldier-on-soldier violence during his initial remarks last Thursday at a Tribal Nations Conference. Instead, he opened with several minutes of inane rambling that included a mislabeled “shout out” to “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow before vaguely addressing the situation at Fort Hood (Crow was award the civilian Medal of Freedom). Obama’s performance was eerily reminiscent of George Bush Jr.’s Booker Elementary fiasco on the morning of 9/11.

The President’s weekly radio address on Saturday was another dilatory exercise that reeked of distraction: Hasan, not mentioned directly, remained a “shooter”. Obama let us know that any painful exploration and reexamination of the unintended consequences of our war machine was off-the-table — preemptively. Obama divined: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” No — but we are obligated to explore all causes, including the ones that lie beyond the waters-edge of personal responsibility, deviance, and unintelligible rage and murder. We also can’t brush aside the unpleasant, blatant, and searing facts staring us in the face — the ones that blind us from reality and conveniently remain outside the acceptable spectrum of American political discourse.

The suicidal and Pyrrhic forces unleashed as a result of 9/11 need to be addressed in the light of day, as part of a broader, civic self-examination of our nation. This seems to be a moral and ethical exploration that Obama is unwilling or incapable of leading. Obama’s real constituents, like campaign benefactor turned government-sponsored enterprise Morgan Stanley, announced in a report published that day after his election that “…Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend…” Indeed, the opportunity costs of the daily outbursts of violence, suffered by citizens of all corners of the globe where US forces are deployed, could never be enumerated by a financial-sector sycophant such as Obama. Fort Hood is just another “no peace dividend” event to Barack. Torture, rendition, indefinite detention, criminal indifference to the suffering of civilians overseas — all these are a slap in the face to soldiers. Sending soldiers to unjust wars and letting them reap the whirlwind of consequences is an abrogation of leadership. Kowtowing to corporate leaches whose single-minded pursuit of profits, no matter the cost to the earth and mankind, does not instill hope. Change is accomplished by addressing the real twin deficits of our supposedly participatory democracy: corporate power and empire.

The second casualty of war: imagination

The events at Fort Hood were a massive security breakdown, not on scale but of type with 9/11; in fact, it was a double failure that we couldn’t protect the soldiers from harm at home, nor ensure the mental “security” of the very people entrusted to maintain the psychological well-being of soldiers. This fact represents a complete abject failure of military and civilian leadership at the highest levels: they know the havoc and despair we (as an imperialist nation) are heaping-on foreigners overseas; they know we are indiscriminately killing, displacing, or impoverishing millions in the Middle East; they know that our “accidents” and apologies do not justify criminal murder and fail to meet the standards of international law; they know that US military might is destroying any real hope and opportunities for change available to generations of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani youth; they know that we are torturing, rendering, and denying basic human rights; they know we treat global justice and the sovereignty of nations with scorn; they know all these things — but most importantly — they know we know. Only arrogant denial and lack of caring on behalf of our leaders explain this security failure; that is the shock. This double failure of security merely informs a larger double failure and interdependency of our foreign and domestic policies: our imperial devastation overseas (killing civilians, spurring more budding jihadist, etc.) can only be driven by domestic degradation (police states, inadequate care for soldiers and veterans, civic disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, etc.)

We, as a society, can’t continue to pervert language and sideline the public-private linkages that drive the human cost of war to incalculable levels. We can’t continue to deny Hasan is an American Soldier, a Major, and our native son, just because he turned against our “wars of necessity”. He chose a deplorable and bankrupt path that mimics his own country’s policy of preventive executions and homicide bombings. Apparently we can’t handle this truth; it has to be terrorism and radical Islam; we’re unable to pray for his soul or our own. We can’t imagine the asymmetrical moral horror and evil that is our “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq, our continuously rebranded “Af/Pak” policy, and all our other malevolent “overseas contingency operations”. We can’t continue to avert our eyes from the private suffering of human beings due to these public policy failures.

Much needed and accessible democratic outlets don’t seem to exist in Obama’s corporatized worldview. As Chris Hedges has noted, moral autonomy and political agency are under attack; the results of which are docility and pacification, but also bouts of unfocused, unproductive, and abnormal rage, violence and desperation. Our morbid government-corporate alliance can’t continue to kill with impunity overseas, unleash a police state on the homeland, enslave the majority of Americans to neoliberal scraps from the economic table, and feign shock when homegrown resistance occurs in a radicalized form. Our leaders can’t ignore sane advice and expect peace — consider the following from a Rand Corporation report published last year titled “How Terrorist Groups End — Lessons for Countering al Qaida”:

Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups… and military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of the cases… The evidence by 2008 suggested that the U.S. strategy was not successful in undermining al Qa’ida’s capabilities… Al Qa’ida has been involved in more terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, than it was during its prior history.

In terms of recommendations, here is some of the language:

First, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts… This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all. The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.

As far as the thrust of last Thursday’s events, Nidal Hasan was a soldier who turned on his comrades with whom he spent years trying to ensure their psychological wellbeing given the theaters of war in which they operated. Why? Perhaps time will tell, but the private travails and motives of Hasan can’t be decoupled from the larger public policy issues and context that inform his actions.

Our myopic cultural obsession with terrorism forestalls antiwar debate and consideration of the trauma of war; it blinds us from recognizing that peace should be considered, weighed, and debated as an alternative. Peace has become devoid of value, delegitimized, and undeserving of human caring and championing. It has been stripped of cultural fit in a society constantly under the siege of fear; it has lost credibility in the neoliberal-friendly “emergency time” posited by Henry Giroux. Collectively, citizens must find a way to discuss Major Hasan’s action not only as a possible stress response, but as a misguided antiwar statement of a powerless man, in a hallowed-out democracy, that is increasingly devoid of personal political agency and power sharing. Explanation, understand, and cause should not be trumped by the fear of “justification” when a legitimate concern is expressed inappropriately. Murder is the desperate flight to fantasy of a “shooter” — why it became the only instrumentality left for a US citizen and soldier requires a pragmatic and realistic investigation of motive, not one moored in a fantasyland of “freedom-hating” Muslims and terrorists.

As a country, we can’t deny our self-destruction masked in the pride of nationalist glory and “justifiable” vengeance. Every soldier sent, every civilian killed, and every dollar spent is just another step in our own ruination, in service of a corporate-military agenda, against a much ballyhooed “evil” enemy. We don’t understand our real enemies, and we do not dare, lest we approach “justification” of their “terrorist” resistance to US military might. We disregard the legitimate concerns of Hasan and our enemies abroad, and they need do nothing but sit back and watch us self destruct as we “spread freedom” around the globe. “Preventive”, “preemptive”: both words mean pre-fact and pre-cause, and result in unjustified criminal violence and aggression. Our military’s self-ascribed omniscient, predictive, and existential abilities do not jive with the realities of the world.

The needs of capital are a critical player in the circle of violence that enveloped the life of Major Hasan and Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate capital has become the means to its own ends via a publicly subsidized-for-profit-private militia that operates in tandem with the US military overseas. Opening markets by bringing “democracy” to unwilling foreign recipients dovetails perfectly with the needs of capital. In this sense, our county’s wanton, international excesses are inextricably linked to our domestic moral deficits. Our recent historical transfer of wealth upward, regressive tax cuts, corporate bailouts, a business paradigm of growth (profits) at any extrinsic cost, etc. –the preconditions and funding of these capital-friendly events can only be achieved by the exploitation and gutting of the welfare state, the social contract, and any social safety net.

For us citizens, this neoliberal umbrellas means more Hasan-like events, police states, privatization, crushing military expenditures, debt peonage, media consolidation, etc. and a blind eye to the suffering of our youth, soldiers, veterans, children, and all those that can’t survive in America’s high-stakes game of state capitalism. The constitution is shred and we are left to cleanup the carnage at Fort Hood. The circle is completed with the debasement of representative government via “regulatory capture”, the “revolving door” between the government and private sectors, and a complete debasement of the electoral process by corporate campaign contributions. Politicians are corrupted and left to engage in what Ralph Nader has called “the politics of avoidance” when explaining events like those that took place at Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate-imperial leaders, the needs of capital, and overflowing campaign coffers demand continuous war at the reciprocal expense of social justice and real political, economic, and cultural “safety”.

How much more debased and perverted can our war language become? It isn’t just convenient that our enemies lack state affiliation and sponsorship — our culture has embraced and internalized the impersonal language that denies the human dignity of our enemies: “combatants”, “insurgents”, “detainees”, “terrorists”, “extremists”, etc. None of this misdirection changes the fact that our disrespect for them and de-legitimization of their resistance is evidenced in the same lack of care and security we afford our soldiers — both our “terrorists” and theirs are caught up in the same dehumanizing and destructive US imperial drive.

This is the situation that the whole world faces. The major points of contact with the information that the world’s people require in order to make personal and societal decisions are primarily: TV, radio and print media, and internet sources that are driven by these sources; other internet sources are more correctly called propaganda tools regardless of their ideological position.

The primary “news” sources lay claim to some degree of neutrality and veridicality; but, they only pretend “neutrality” on issues that do not directly concern their owners or the self-interest of individual reporters and “news” departments. They use the cheap device of giving “equal time” and authority to positions whether or not there is any valid reason to assume equality; they always distort and ignore news that would negatively impact the economic and political elite.

The consequence is that there is no consistently reliable source for vital, informing descriptions of the conditions of our world. We cannot act with any confidence that the information upon which we must act is accurate. While we know we are being lied to, there is no source that stands as sufficiently honest and unbiased that we can use it as a reference to measure the maelstrom.

Of course, some people with enough time, experience and determination can often piece together descriptions of events in ways that they might reasonable trust as veridical, but there is little or no way that their efforts can be generally disseminated – or for that matter, separated from the propaganda that is boiling up as a substitute for real information. So, regardless of the motives, of which there are many (to be looked at more closely in moment), the result is the almost complete impossibility of the general public having the information that they require to act in response to the actual events and processes going on in the world. This is the loss of a most basic survival tool: accurate information to inform action in the environment.

Insidiously, the non-news part of media acts to set the base-line expectations for the “news” itself. ‘Every’ person in TV dramas carries a gun, drives a Land Rover, uses a satphone and lives in a million dollar house or condo; even if they have a 50K job doing what, in the real world, might be some form of accounting. ‘Everyday-people’ have al Qaeda sleeper cells in the house next door to them. Serial killers roam the streets of every neighborhood. And personal success and satisfaction is never ever seen as a moment of quiet reflection.

If we average the content of the lives we see portrayed on our “home theaters” and compare them to the actual modal lives of American citizens, the disconnect rises to the level of the pathological: the stories that we tell about ourselves have absolutely nothing – nothing – to do with the lives we lead, even as we attempt, as we always have done, to model ourselves after them. For every film like The Remains of the Day, there are hundreds where the moral choices are drawn in crayon and gratuitous blood.

People embrace the entertainment media, giving it 50, 80, even 100 % of their non-working life (and many times part of their working life) not so much to be entertained, but to be part of the common human experience. If people felt fully connected to flesh and blood people, then they would not spend 5 hours a day watching 2-dimensional electronic representations of people that they can’t know, can’t touch or ask a question. If people felt informed and competent in the execution of their lives, then they wouldn’t so desperately seek the slick and phony “competence” of media “heroes.”

The professional news media is now only an extension of this pattern. To a large extend it is competing with fictional stories, with the carefully rehearsed control of emotional content and production values, while at the same time purporting to discover and extract accurate descriptions of events and behaviors that talented and powerful interests wish to remain hidden. My critique in no way is intended to suggest that this social role and responsibility is easy, only that this vital role is being thoroughly mishandled and abused.

The reasons for the abuse run from the most mundane to the most violently draconian. Reporters and editors have often been the targets of the forces who wish not to be reported on. In 2006, 81 journalists were killed (other accounts give the number as 110) and 871 were put in jail worldwide. 2007 saw 86 (95) killed and hundreds more jailed. The assumption is made that the vast majority of the journalists so treated were acted on in response to their reporting things that someone really didn’t want to see made public. A message was being sent: speak and die; this would distort what is reported on.¹

But there are many other ways to motivate the distortion of information. Limbaugh is reported to have a 400 million dollar contract! Top TV “news” anchors are all in the 6 to 8 figure range. These amounts of money create organized interest groups deep within the media beast with a disproportionate voice in how stories are framed so that the “news” show can ‘get its story’ day after day. The self-interested corporate ownership of media has its own influence.

At the other extreme the public must be appealed to to watch and listen. This has become about polling and presentation, personality and production values, matching expectations and desires more than giving the most straightforward accounting of events no matter where the chips may fall – there must be no chips, though sparks are good, i.e., there must be no real consequences, just shiny things to distract attention. If real substantive stories with real consequences that led to human action were presented, people might come to expect, and eventually demand, substantive information…. And then there would be the danger of the numbers a couple of paragraphs above going up – it is a tough decision: package a dishonest product, have sycophantic fame and make lots of money… or tell the greatest truth that can be divined from the muscular digging of evidence and be ignored, rejected, threatened, fired, jailed or killed.

What matters, what gets lost in the wailing over this and that specific crime against the public good, is exactly that, the public good. Just as wind sailors died from the lack of specific vitamins, so societies die from the lack of accurate information on the vital details of life. A social order cannot sustain on lies. It is just so simple: the biophysical world in which we live requires that it be responded to from veridicality. The ‘vascular system’ through which is pumped the information necessary for societal and individual survival is diseased and failing. The informational nutrients of life delivered by it cannot be trusted and we accept them with reluctance even as we must, at some level, accept them.

What hope there is in this model of our informational dilemma comes from those who will not give up trying to organize, out of the cacophony, some bits of the real. So long as this impulse is alive there is always a corner to be turned. Like the creature that collects tiny drops of water, one at a time, from the morning dew in a rainless land, those who have the ability and inclination to organize some more truthful image of our present time must do so to stay mentally alive. As those people spread their efforts and share their methods for making sense of the intentional chaos perhaps, just maybe, a critical mass can demand even more.

1. For comparison, there are 50 to 100 teachers for every journalist. Teaching can be very dangerous in regions of deep social conflict and tyrannical governments, teachers are jailed and killed for their teaching, but the numbers are generally small and certainly far below the proportional rates for journalists. I couldn’t find a source that totaled the numbers of teachers killed or jailed for their professional activities, but a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation gives me numbers perhaps half those for journalists, almost all in the most troubled places. This would make journalism about a hundred times more dangerous given the smaller numbers.

Of course, it is not so simple. All processes and events occur in a context – often called environment.

It is not the goal of our historical time to adapt to the conditions that surround us, but to change them. This is long human practice and the slowly accumulated changes to our environment are the reason that we are in the trouble we are in, but we are now being told that we must adapt to the holey ad hoc structures that make claims of “reality” solely because it is what we are supposed to believe.

There is no reason to ‘believe in’ the accepted structures of our time, like economic growth; no reason to believe in Christianity, private property, Islam, American Exceptionalism, progress or hundreds other things, but there is reason to believe in physical “laws”, evolutionary and adaptive process and scientific method. We believe in “facts” as a matter of convenience; we adopt processes because they work. This is one of the oldest and most well worn paths in the human experience.

Experimentation v. authority has been a tension for the whole of human existence; and experimentation began formally winning with the enlightenment. The assumption (belief) that statements could be true and complete, and the property of those with special powers or superior connections (like with a God), began to weaken as people actually looked, measured and theorized. But humans often continue following the old habit and believing in science ‘fact’ when what we need to believe in is science method.

This is not to say that there should be no inhibiting force to rein in and ‘govern’ experimentation. There should; it is called the scientific method and requires that a consensus of experts (authorities) agree based on repeated experimental results comporting with theoretical foundations. This means that ‘facts’ will always be in a state of change, but that the Method can be usefully relied on to bring those ‘facts’ closer and closer, more adaptively useful, to an ultimately unknowable reality. And even the method itself is subject to adaptive changes as the processes uncover better ways to perform its function.

Designs for behavior may or not comport with the best understandings of the moment supplied by a soundly based adaptive process. We see this all the time: * I am better off eating broccoli, free range eggs (and then just the albumen) and high quality sardines. But I like lasagna, beer, ice cream and pie. * Waste chemicals from my small business damage the environment, but it costs so much to dispose of them properly (if that is even possible) that I dump them secretly. * Increasing population and consumption is clearly endangering the ecological stabilities that support and allow the present ecological structures of the earth, but I am benefiting in this moment from the economic growth that is driven by increasing consumption and can’t imagine life without those benefits.

Belief in ‘facts’ is dangerous, potentially dramatically so. Einstein couldn’t ‘believe in’ quantum mechanics because he didn’t believe that the underlying principle of physical order could be probabilistic, even as the experimental data piled higher and higher. Alan Greenspan believed in economic theories that had been come to by ‘echo chamber’ research and Randian philosophy unfounded in human behavioral studies; he liked them like I like ice cream. And at the greatest and most depressing extreme, Henry Paulson (and now Tim Geithner), pathologically, believed in his own righteousness and self-importance, and so was the front man for an on going monumental theft bringing damage and destruction to millions of people all over the earth.

A deeper belief in the adaptive processes of the scientific method could have led Einstein closer to the truth, could have caused Greenspan to question his certainties and moderate his actions and, perhaps, could have caused Paulson to be diagnosed as dangerously sociopathic before he found his way to the highest eyries of power.

It should be obvious that we are in a terrible situation: billions of people, thousands of ‘fact-based’ belief systems and almost none of them naturally supporting of adaptive process-based systems. Yet, we all must become method-based and not ‘fact’ based; we must all become scientists, adopting process-based belief systems just as we have, over time, all become literate. There was, for a long time, a prejudice against being literate with letters and numbers, just as today being scientifically literate is considered geeky. As long as we continue arguing over beliefs as ‘facts,’ there is no hope for resolution: there are endless years of squabbling over facts. If people have mutual respect for the process, divergence in fact only supplies material for adaptation, not reason to compete for truth as an absolute.

And there is little time, perhaps a generation. I can only guess at the thinking of the economic and political elites, whether they support an enslaved world or an enlightened one, though I have serious doubts that the necessary changes in education and media are high on their agendas. But as helpful as it would be to have the elites fully engaged in the next salutary steps toward a ecologically sustaining future, they are not required if enough of the rest of us are willing to do the necessary work and to take them on when required.

Ralph Nader has recently made the argument, in a work of fiction, that the economic elite can save us – and it is certainly true if they were to seriously devote themselves and their resources to the problems detailed by sound scientific research, that many seemingly intractable problems could be solved, but it is more likely that they will obstruct the changes that are needed since most of the solutions contain the lessening of their power, their wealth and their entitlement. The more amorphous masses will have to lead the way. In this direction lies more suffering, closer brushes with oblivion and other dangers, but it may be the only way.

Becoming evermore depressingly clear is, based on a vast evidence base that the world’s leaders have seemingly chosen not to believe in, that maintaining our present human habits will so damage ecological and biophysical systems that many present ecological structures will collapse with drastic consequences for human social and economic order. A process-based belief system would examine the data, evaluate it on its merits and develop actions corresponding to the greatest weight of the evidence. Focusing on whether the ‘facts’ benefit one political party or another is the sort of madness that comes from belief in propositions over process.

We need to believe in the process of the scientific method,¹ but first we need to be well versed in its functioning. We, a significant part of humanity, must make this process the basis for our actions. The old ways of believing in Men and Gods and their proclamations must give way to adaptive systems of change based on the processes of discovery that have led us so well in our material quests. This is no more than adaptation explicitly within the consciousness domain: we have no more time or space to do it in the old ways; they have brought us far, both in understanding and knowledge… and to the brink of destruction.

Just as reading and writing were once new, suspicious, seen as largely unimportant and seemingly for only a few, yet fueled the greatest changes in human societies; so today the broad epistemological and social designs of science must be poised to be both tool and primary system of belief for any successful future.

1. This has to be an unapologetic sustaining of a method for selecting the most veridical options to be the ‘facts’ with which we inform our actions. A common current model for discord, that of looking for equality in all positions, is silly, fundamentally unscientific and flagrantly non-adaptive.

The Monster returns. He’s unconventional, though. Not with the horns and the fangs and all. But with dark circles, the sunken, dimmed eyes, the creased-up face with his advancing years, the silver in his hair. Sun-beaten, sun-worn, threadbare — my definition of the Monster. The definers have hammered the definition on me with authoritative finality. I succumb — like everybody else. I ought to believe he is dangerous. I am supposed to condemn him, get frightened of him, loathe him, spit in his face, and righteously pronounce him horrendously sinful, perverted, hideous, damned, hell-bound, with all the wealth of jingoistic and religious rhetoric at my disposal. I cannot but obey. I join the chorus. Like everybody else.

And I kill me softly. I stifle the human essence, the still small voice that resists. The voice that questions. The militant voice — always politically incorrect. It questions ‘why?’ It does not allow me the comfort of following the crowd and biding my time. It discomforts me with the instinct to seek out the answers for myself. It makes me wonder why I have to buy the definition and believe that the pathetic grey man was a vile monster. It makes me wonder why, after all, he was a monster, perhaps — or so it seems?

I do not judge. I do not allow myself the terrible privilege. I just wonder, and want my right to ask questions. I want my right to feel, to understand. I want my right to be and stay human. And I simply wonder what went wrong…

In 2001, when the United States pounded Afghanistan with their firepower just across the border on a flimsy pretext, my people here in Pakistan were hurt too, because the national boundary running through the northern tribes does not cut across eon-old tribal affiliation. With the Pashtuns on the other side of the Durand Line under occupation, the Pashtuns on this side considered it a tribal obligation and religious duty to assist. That is the ethic running in the blood of the Pathans — the ethic they grow up with, just as their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers had grown up with it. You cannot hope to extort it from the hearts of men. The freedom they prize is a treasure they would not give up for the world. This fierce defence of their freedom is something you simply cannot hope to extricate. Not with all your arsenal, your marines armed to the teeth.

The United States and its ‘non NATO ally’ failed to understand this simple truth. Afghanistan bled, and Pakistani tribesmen, those once-upon-a-time heroic sons of the soil suffered with it. Yet we did not fall to brutalizing each other. The myths, on the other hand — Terrorism, Extremism, Fanaticism, Fundamentalism, Enlightened Moderation — continued to proliferate, and the Great Fiction encroached upon sanities. Yet we did not fall to brutalizing each other.

Till, a couple of years down the line, the Former General imperiously ordered an operation in Waziristan. It came to pass. In the thick of the darkness, in the hush of the night. The country taken by surprise. In clandestine moves, the trigger-happy military men advanced and we waited with bated breath. The usual collateral damage. Men, women, children, masjids, madrassas, schools, earthen huts. With a fell sweep, on orders of a Dictator. We still did not fall to brutalizing each other.

Things took their logical course and the resistance began. A Pashtun resistance. Earlier, aggravated by their country’s alliance with the US and the establishment of American military bases in the north to assist the NATO-sponsored slaughter and occupation in Afghanistan, the Pashtuns had expressed resentment. Their government had refused to budge. Now, they were cannon fodder, officially. And for Somebody Else’s interests.

Faced with a guerrilla resistance in a rugged terrain by ruddy mountain dwellers imbued with the tribesman’s fighting spirit, the khakis were in a quagmire soon enough. To save face, and the little that was left, they sought reconciliation with the irate tribesmen. It materialized, with pledges on both sides — the tribesmen agreeing to put down arms and let go the foreign militants (stationed in Pakistan ‘officially,’ and by Washington’s invitation, since the Soviet-Afghan war); and the Army agreeing to end the operation. We dared to hope.

Till the drone zeroed in on what we call Sovereignty. And on human lives — madrassas, schools, wedding parties, followed by official apologies for ‘misguided missiles’ or ‘intelligence failure.’ Collateral Damage. Full Stop.

In 2006, before the TTP (Tehreek Taliban Pakistan) was ever heard of, right after a successful settlement between the government and the tribal leaders which promised a durable peace in the restive north, American UAV ‘drones’ battered a village searching ‘militants’, leading to several civilian deaths. And so the talks derailed, the guns were picked up again. With blessings from Washington. The TTP raised its head shortly afterwards — a group much more militant and even violent in character than the original Afghan Taliban of yore who do not very proudly profess association with these Pakistani neo-Taliban. The TTP was a child begotten of the vicious cycle of violence and injustice.

The Pakistan govenment’s complicity in the intermittent and incessant drone attacks is poorly disguised by pathetic foreign office spokespeople. First there were the official apologies. Then, the flabbergasted attempts to explain the bloody ‘deal’. And soon enough there were none. Just the raining missiles and the human mincemeat. And handshakes and high-profile visits.

But the victims do not forget their dead. They are not taken in with prettily phrased official apologies which cannot bring their dead back. The hurt festers. It turns poison. It maddens. It dehumanizes. It turns men into suicide bombs. It makes life pointless, worthless. It makes the world a cruel, hateful place. It ignites the sense of honour and incites a burning revenge. And it makes my maddened countrymen, brutalized by unashamed tyrants, fall to brutalizing one another.

And it is as simple as that.

Blending into the chorus, soaking up the definitions, the headlines, the jingoism and the propaganda, the simple fact gets lost somewhere in the morass of our sensibilities. We righteously condemn, we judge, we toss our heads from side to side with disapproval and nod it up and down in assent. Just where and when we are wanted to. And we harden up to this simple fact, failing to understand. Failing to question. Dehumanizing ourselves.

Journalist Hamid Mir recounted his firsthand experience of visiting the injured in a primitive hospital in Waziristan after a US airstrike. A young boy, having lost his limbs, informed that his mother too had died in a similar attack, and that, in her dying moments, she had instructed him to avenge in Islamabad — where the decisions to maim and kill are made — what was done to her in Bajaur. Years later, his elder brother was caught in Islamabad attempting to blow himself up in a high-security area.

It is as simple as that. It is, plainly, human nature distorted brutally out of shape. It is, plainly, the work of our own hands. And it shall come to pass.

A ‘Winter Soldier’ working for the US Army in Iraq decided to quit the job, among several others like him. Addressing a meeting of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, he said: ‘Let me reverse the equation for a while. Let me ask you, that if a foreign force was to land in America on the excuse of democracy or freedom or whatever it may be, would not every patriotic American come out of his house with a shotgun? Would we not resist? What would you do?’ His voice trailed off in the midst of uproarious applause.

It is as simple as that. It is about being able to reverse the equation, and asking oneself ‘what would anyone do?’ It is about overturning the definitions and refusing to buy the propaganda. It is about refusing the official amnesia imposed on us all.

And it is not about Islam. It is not about an ‘Extremist Ideology’ out there to take you over by storm. It is not about monsters and demons. It is not about bloodthirsty suicide bombers with an inbuilt genetic drive to bomb the hell out of you. It is about human beings like you and me. It is about human beings horribly gone wrong. It is about the sinned-against who become sinning in this dreadful mire of poverty, disease, lawlessness, corruption. It is about naked, barbaric injustice and oppression. It is about human beings being made ‘as flies to the wanton boys.’

And it is as simple as that. As simple as Newton’s third law of motion. An equal and opposite reaction. To every action of ours.

So I refuse to sit in judgement. I refuse to self-righteously condemn. I refuse to sing along. And I demand my humanity, my right to think for myself, my right to question, my right to reclaim the Truth. ‘And if anyone of you would punish and lay the axe on the evil tree, let him see to its roots. What judgement would you pronounce on him who slays in the flesh and yet is slain in the spirit? And how persecute you him who is a deceiver and oppressor and yet in himself is aggrieved and outraged?’ (Kahlil Gibran).

I stand the risk of being misunderstood and misjudged. I do not condone the ongoing violent attacks in civilian areas all over Pakistan which victimize innocents. I cannot possibly justify them, nor can any human being in his right mind. But I think I can understand why. I can dare just that much.

And this understanding is important. Because it is through understanding that you reach the heart of the matter, and it is reaching the heart of the matter that you find the solution and begin the healing process. And the heart of the matter is the simple truth about human nature. The heart of the matter is to understand. The heart of the matter is looking to the roots. It is as simple as that.

To begin the healing, we need to set the record straight that this war never was ours, and that the critical transition from ‘theirs’ to ‘ours’ is the triumph of the mighty empire that seeks to export its wars to lands it can buy over with a few billion dollars. We need to face the wrongs we have done. We need to realize that there is no profit in the billions made out of the blood of innocents. We need to realize that violence begets violence. We need to realize that we willed this all, and that ending this vicious cycle of violence is our responsibility, because ‘a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent assent of the whole tree. So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong but with the secret will of you all.’ (Kahlil Gibran).

We need to realize that armies and weaponry can never win this war — just like it never could in Vietnam, or in Iraq, or even in Afghanistan. And we need to realize that it is never too late or too impossible to sit down and talk things out with your own people, no matter how alienated they are. The troops must be withdrawn, the operation must end and we must get talking. These aren’t monsters, these were my countrymen, and it is never too late to get talking — only my enemy would tell me otherwise.

There isn’t another way. The other option is to let this madness go on, making madmen of us all. The other option is the madness turning visible in all the horrors of spiraling violence — bombs going off in the midst of my thriving cities, the gored flesh and the pools of blood, the gripping fear, the haunted, deserted roads. Just like the death and destruction reigning the dirt-streets of some unnamed village in Waziristan. It comes full circle.

Every bomb going off adds to the horrible, crippling Terror that sinks into my bones. The fear and hysteria is of far more import than the death and destruction. When I am frightened to hell, I am easily manipulated, and when I am easily manipulated, I am owned, controlled, made to do what Somebody requires of me. I lose my sovereignty, my identity, my everything. I become the etherized patient spread over the operating table. Somebody Else’s operating table.

And every bomb going off strengthens the case of the Somebody Else who tries to tell us their war is ours, and that we must do their dirty work and shut up with the billions of dollars of aid doled out. Every bomb going off will be quoted in Somebody’s speeches, telling us with triumphalism and authority how terribly important it is for us to stay the course, to keep on this self-destructive path. It will keep us terrorized so Somebody can promise us security with his Blackwaters and Dynacores. It will keep us impoverished so Somebody can win us with promises of aid. It will keep us enslaved so Somebody can convince us only they can truly liberate. And it will keep us repeating the old refrain: ‘Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and War is Peace.’

It is as simple as that.

As a theorist of the Elliot Wave, Prechter grounds his forecasts upon a mathematical pattern that tracks impulses of social mood. Everything else is symptomatic.

The background theory of the Elliott Wave is different from the kind of thinking that expects a straight-line series of effects from causes. Instead, the Elliott Wave returns us to pre-modern intuitions of cycles. It must have been clear to anyone caught up in the recent Bear market rally that pure stubbornness had taken hold of buyers. On Prechter’s account, that stubbornness is about to change sides.

If the humming engine of human history rides a geometry of social mood, then downtimes cannot be caused by anything that uptimes do — although consequences of downtimes can be altered by the preparations that uptimes make. As social mood descends into the seventh circle of hell, there will be every temptation to blame the descent itself upon uptime actors. Yet all blaming will miss an important point.

What could the natural purpose of downtime be? In the bullish 1978 book, Elliott Wave Principle, Prechter and A.J. Frost argue that the up and down waves of social mood provide “the most efficient method of achieving both fluctuation and progress in a linear movement” (26). If social mood adjusts the mode of our approach to reality, then we see things differently and engage them differently when we are up. But that means there are things to learn when we are down, too.

On the fractal model of the Elliott Wave, we experience smaller fluctuations of mood within a series of larger patterns. In his bearish book of 2002, Conquer the Crash, Prechter argues that we are on the cusp of a very large degree downward drift. We will be learning hard lessons the hard way, and largely because that’s what down moods are good for. Such lessons will be meant to last more than a lifetime, and we are the generation fated to carry these lessons forward.

We will shortly see which lessons from the high times have any worth in the valley of our shadows. Old man winter is a rock hard grader. There can be no bonus points for students who do not use the warm months to prepare. Get ready for some serious grade deflation.

To begin thinking about the political future that would correspond with Prechter’s crash assumptions, we could turn our clocks back to Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency or the less-remembered panic of 1837. Unlike Roosevelt, who was able to transform depression politics into a winning streak, Democrat Martin Van Buren was not able to win even a second term against the mood of 1840. He was ousted by the “log cabin” Whig candidate William Henry Harrison, who promptly died of pneumonia.

Illness is a fateful consequence of down moods according to Prechter’s systematic theory of Socionomics. Looked into your local flu clinic lately?

Perhaps the most reliable guide to downtime politics will be found in the life—and the curiously timed death—of Huey Long, who argued that American politics had better deliver a Christmas tree after every election if politicians wanted people to prefer the ballot box as their form of political change. Depression politics killed the messenger but not the message. If the Constitution survives the coming crash, it will earn its keep through tangible benefits.

Returning to the crash of 1835 to 1842, I choose to think about Emerson, who opened 1836 with the essay “Nature.” If you want to maintain order in your mind and spirit the thing to do is take long walks in the woods. Interesting how Ken Burns turns our attention this very week to the conservation system expressed in our national parks. There is an American mecca, and it boasts a jobs program that can’t be outsourced.

Reading Emerson’s 1836 text as a downtime crammer gets more interesting when we see that Chapter 2 is about “Commodity.” How poor can we be, Emerson asks, so long as we live upon the earth? “Nature, in its ministry to man,” he writes, “is not only the material, but is also the process and the result.” We live in the arms of a “divine charity.” Commodity cuts a path to Beauty so long as we nurture the inwardness of the work we do. Emerson pulls Thoreau aside in 1837. “Do you keep a journal?” As the nation falls into panic, Thoreau began to write.

On the model of nature that was so important to Emerson and Thoreau during that great depression, I think about a big tree. Part of the tree puts out leaves, reaching up, showing off. We have been through a great leafing time together.

Another part of the tree works ever in the dark, quietly pushing downward in solitary, unforeseeable effort. Of course the deepest roots could blame the highest leaves for making all the dark work necessary. But that would be like blaming Wall Street for the collective turn we are about to make.

Then there is the ugly stuff, the kind of thing that Thoreau went to jail over. As downtime invites the spiritualist to dig deeper within, it also kicks up real dust. Never before have the tools of conflict been so lethally arrayed. Remember the Alamo? That was 1836. Over in Alabama, the Creek nation was driven off its land, again. In Florida, federal troops at Ft. Defiance drew “first blood” in the Seminole War.

If Prechter is right for the right reasons, then in about two more years it should be clear enough to everyone why the peace movement must prevail. Surely, that would be a lesson worth learning once and for all.

Is justice right side up?

Has world justice been frozen in an upside-down position?

The shoe-thrower of Iraq, the man who hurled his shoes at Bush, was condemned to three years in prison. Doesn’t he deserve, instead, a medal?

Who is the terrorist? The hurler of shoes or their recipient? Is not the real terrorist the serial killer who, lying, fabricated the Iraq war, massacred a multitude, and legalized and ordered torture?

Who are the guilty ones—the people of Atenco, in Mexico, the indigenous Mapuches of Chile, the Kekchies of Guatemala, the landless peasants of Brazil—all being accused of the crime of terrorism for defending their right to their own land? If the earth is sacred, even if the law does not say so, aren’t its defenders sacred too?

According to Foreign Policy Magazine, Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world. But who are the pirates? The starving people who attack ships or the speculators of Wall Street who spent years attacking the world and who are now rewarded with many millions of dollars for their pains?

Why does the world reward its ransackers?

Why is justice a one-eyed blind woman? Wal-Mart, the most powerful corporation on earth, bans trade unions. McDonald’s, too. Why do these corporations violate, with criminal impunity, international law? Is it because in this contemporary world of ours, work is valued as lower than trash and workers’ rights are valued even less?

Who are the righteous and who are the villains? If international justice really exists, why are the powerful never judged? The masterminds of the worst butcheries are never sent to prison. Is it because it is these butchers themselves who hold the prison keys?

What makes the five nations with veto power in the United Nations inviolable? Is it of a divine origin that veto power of theirs? Can you trust those who profit from war to guard the peace? Is it fair that world peace is in the hands of the very five nations who are also the world’s main producers of weapons? Without implying any disrespect to the drug runners, couldn’t we refer to this arrangement as yet another example of organized crime?

Those who clamor, everywhere, for the death penalty are strangely silent about the owners of the world. Even worse, these clamorers forever complain about knife-wielding murderers yet say nothing about missile-wielding arch-murderers.

And one asks oneself: Given that these self-righteous world owners are so enamored of killing, why pray don’t they try to aim their murderous proclivities at social injustice? Is it a just world when, every minute, three million dollars are wasted on the military while at the same time fifteen children perish from hunger or curable disease? Against whom is the so-called international community armed to the teeth? Against poverty or against the poor?

Why don’t the champions of capital punishment direct their ire at the values of the consumer society, values which pose a daily threat to public safety? Or doesn’t, perhaps, the constant bombardment of advertising constitute an invitation to crime? Doesn’t that bombardment numb millions and millions of unemployed or poorly paid youth, endlessly teaching them the lie that “to be = to have,” that life derives its meaning from ownership of such things as cars or brand shoes? Own, own, they keep saying, implying that he who has nothing is, himself, nothing.

Why isn’t the death penalty applied to death itself? The world is organized in the service of death. Isn’t it true that the military industrial complex manufactures death and devours the greater part of our resources as well as a good part of our energies? Yet the owners of the world only condemn violence when it is exercised by others. To extraterrestrials, if they existed, such monopoly of violence would appear inexplicable. It likewise appears insupportable to earth dwellers who, against all the available evidence, hope for survival: we humans are the only animals who specialize in mutual extermination, and who have developed a technology of destruction that is annihilating, coincidentally, our planet and all its inhabitants.

This technology sustains itself on fear. It is the fear of enemies that justifies the squandering of resources by the military and police. And speaking about implementing the death penalty, why don’t we pass a death sentence on fear itself? Would it not behoove us to end this universal dictatorship of the professional scaremongers? The sowers of panic condemn us to loneliness, keeping solidarity outside our reach: falsely teaching us that we live in a dog-eat-dog world, that he who can must crush his fellows, that danger is lurking behind every neighbor. Watch out, they keep saying, be careful, this neighbor will steal from you, that other one will rape you, that baby carriage hides a Muslim bomb, and that woman who is watching you—that innocent-looking neighbor of yours—will surely infect you with swine flu.

In this upside-down world, they are making us afraid of even the most elementary acts of justice and common sense. When President Evo Morales started to re-build Bolivia, so that his country with its indigenous majority will no longer feel shame facing a mirror, his actions provoked panic. Morales’ challenge was indeed catastrophic from the traditional standpoint of the racist order, whose beneficiaries felt that theirs was the only possible option for Bolivia. It was Evo, they felt, who ushered in chaos and violence, and this alleged crime justified efforts to blow up national unity and to break Bolivia into pieces. And when President Correa of Ecuador refused to pay the illegitimate debts of his country, the news caused terror in the financial world and Ecuador was threatened with dire punishment, for daring to set such a bad example. If the military dictatorships and roguish politicians have always been pampered by international banks, have we not already conditioned ourselves to accept it as our inevitable fate that the people must pay for the club that hits them and for the greed the plunders them?

But, have common sense and justice always been divorced from each other?

Were not common sense and justice meant to walk hand in hand, intimately linked?

Isn’t common sense, and also justice, in accord with the feminist slogan which states that if we, men, had to go through pregnancy, abortion would have been free. Why not legalize the right to have an abortion? Is it because abortion will then cease being the sole privilege of the women who can afford it and of the physicians who can charge for it?

The same thing is observed with another scandalous case of denial of justice and common sense: why aren’t drugs legal? Is this not, like abortion, a public health issue? And in the very same country that counts among its population more drug addicts than any other country in the world, what moral authority does it have to condemn its drug suppliers? And why don’t the mass media, in their dedication to the war against the scourge of drugs, ever divulge that it is Afghanistan which single-handedly satisfies just about all the heroin consumed in the world? Who rules Afghanistan? Is it not militarily occupied by a messianic country which conferred upon itself the mission of saving us all?

Why aren’t drugs legalized once and for all? Is it because they provide the best pretext for military invasions, in addition to providing the juiciest profits to the large banks who, in the darkness of night, serve as money-laundering centers?

Nowadays the world is sad because fewer vehicles are sold. One of the consequences of the global crisis is a decline of the otherwise prosperous car industry. Had we some shred of common sense, a mere fragment of a sense of justice, would we not celebrate this good news? Could anyone deny that a decline in the number of automobiles is good for nature, seeing that she will end up with a bit less poison in her veins? Could anyone deny the value of this decline in car numbers to pedestrians, seeing that fewer of them will die?

Here’s how Lewis Carroll’s Queen explained to Alice how justice is dispensed in a looking glass world:

“There’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t begin until next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”

In El Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero found that justice, like a snake, only bites barefoot people. He died of gunshot wounds for proclaiming that in his country the dispossessed were condemned beforehand, having committed the crime of being born.

Couldn’t the outcome of the recent elections in El Salvador be viewed, in some ways, as homage to Archbishop Romero and to the thousands who, like him, died fighting for right-side-up justice in this reign of injustice?

At times the narratives of History end badly, but she, History itself, never ends. When she says goodbye, she only says: I’ll be back.

Trotsky wrote that “every ruling class creates its own culture, and consequently, its own art.” While one might be hard pressed to justify most television shows and most pop music as art, they are what pass for culture. Once, a conversation with a friend who worked as a college faculty member turned to the question of whether film and music reflected or created popular trends and thought. In other words, does the culture we absorb influence us or do we influence it. Naturally, there is no conclusive answer to this question, and we did not reach one that day. However, there are some clear examples of each. To begin with, television shows like the quasi-fascist 24 and its less unnerving predecessors like the 007 series of films exist to instill a fear not only of the enemies of the state but of the state itself. Thusly, we are encouraged by these obviously propagandistic works to ignore or consent to whatever illegal and immoral actions taken by those who claim to protect us. Furthermore, we are subconsciously trained to identify the state’s enemies as our own. Reality shows like Cops further this consciousness.

To substantiate the other side of the coin let me turn to the most popular rock band of all time, The Beatles. These young men arguably began as consumers who picked up musical instruments and replicated the music of their musical heroes, most of whom were bluesmen from the United States. They went on to become the most popular rock group of the 1960s and a cultural phenomenon with out parity. When the band grew their hair long and talked about LSD, were they propagandizing a new way of life or were they reflecting a way of life already in existence? To put it differently, did the Beatles and other rock bands lead the youth of the western world into the counterculture or did the counterculture consume the bands into its community? There is no clear answer to this, of course. The relationship was symbiotic at best and parasitic at its worst. Just like the later phenomenon of hip-hop, the streets created the music and the music in turn mutated, reflected and popularized the culture. Unfortunately, the aspects which were popularized were those that challenged the dominant system the least. In rock music that turned out to be the sex and drugs. In hip hop it turned out to be the sex, drugs and money. Politics and the sense of community were removed in favor of an individualistic pursuit of gratification. In other words, the capitalist ethos prevailed. This makes sense, of course, given that we live in a capitalist society and the companies that produce the music are instrumental players in that society’s economy.

Even on the occasion where something truly remarkable that serves a purpose beyond titillation comes into the cultural marketplace–a phenomenon seen in cinema and music more than television–the coverage of the work and its creators is often trivialized if it is covered at all. This was brought home to me recently as I watched the coverage of the Golden Globe Awards at a friend’s house. Little was said about the meaning of the films presented but thousands of words were wasted on the clothing worn by various actors and actresses as they walked around outside of the event showing off for the cameras. In the media coverage the following day, more print space was used describing people’s clothing and who they were with than on the works that were nominated. When it comes to music, reviewers tend to delve a bit deeper. However, at the end of the year, it is usually the musical works that made the most money that are celebrated in the media events viewed by the general public. This usually means that the works with the least meaning are those which are publicized most. This in turn propels even more sales, leaving works of consequence to linger in the CD bins until they are dropped by the industry.

Books are quite similar. Hundreds, if not thousands of titles, are rarely acknowledged by the media, while certain authors monopolize the sales charts and the minds of the reading public. I see this phenomenon daily as a library worker. Thousands of dollars are spent buying books that read very similar to the last work by an author, while other literature is never ordered. Well-read people end up reading materials that not only endorse the thought processes of the dominant culture of consumption and alienation, but are convinced that they are consequently somehow more enlightened than those that don’t read. Once again, we return to the question of which influences which. For example, are second- and third-rate crime authors like Patricia Cornwell popular because people like her writing or are these authors popular because the advertising budgets behind them convince people that they should read them precisely because they are popular?

I’m listening to Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “Machine Gun” from a concert he performed in Berkeley in May 1970 while people rioted in the streets against the US invasion of Cambodia. This song is not only a prayer for peace and love. It is about the massacre of Blacks in the streets and Vietnamese in the jungle. It is also a cry for an end to greed and the wars it causes. It is a condemnation of the masters of war and a cry of defiance. I don’t think it will be appearing in a commercial any time soon. Do you think Obama has this song on his iPod? Would it make a difference if he did?

Mother Earth Circling Grandmothers: Women’s relationship roles, revolving around motherhood, are the key to understanding Indigenius Socialism. Photo: Stewart Steinhauer

Ready?

By the the beginning of the 21st century—after the imagined end of history, and much to Euro-origin intellectuals’ surprise—a call for socialism in the 21st century arose in Latin America, first among Mayan Zapatistas and then spreading southwards across the remainder of Turtle Island.

Socialism for the 21st century became Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s electoral battle cry, where, in spite of the complete and absolute opposition of the privately owned public media, he won election after election on the promise to redistribute oil revenues to the 60 per cent of the Venezuelan population that was desperately poor. Following Chavez’s program of Catholic liberation theology mixed with a smattering of Marx and topped off with hefty doses of pragmatic state capitalism, nation states across the southern continent tilted Left, with the notable exception of Colombia—after Israel, the largest recipient of US military aid in the world.

Like Evo Morales and the Bolivian Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), Indigenous-led social movements throughout Latin America are openly anti-capitalist, because capitalism as a system of political economy means ongoing genocide for Indigenous Peoples and perpetual ecocide for the non-human portion of the Mother Earth Super-Being, of which humans are a part. (See CIBC and Me, Part IV for details.) Coming from a deep history of harmonious relations with Mother Earth, and having already spent millennia in systems of political economy based on simple egalitarian sharing, Indigenous Peoples have something to say about what a potential future steady state global system of political economy could look like.

The first thing I have to point to is the European model of industrial development. It doesn’t work for a multiplicity of reasons, and negates Marx’s theoretical explanation of how capitalism would automatically create a human society filled with workers who will, some day, transform capitalism into a socialist society. From an Indigenous perspective, the Euro-origin industrial model arises from a psychological pitting of human against nature, manufacturing an ideological division that does not exist in Indigenous reality. Further, it posits that something called “scarcity” exists, and that technological development is necessary to better this supposedly natural state of scarcity. Within this imagined dichotomy, nature is wild and humans are civilized; humans living in a state of nature are wild, and therefore not real humans. The real humans live in a state of technologically ameliorated scarcity, assembling vehicles for Ford, GM and Chrysler, with two mortgages and four credit cards. So much for Marx.

From the Indigenous-to-Turtle Island point of view, there is no dichotomy between wild and civilized. There is no such thing as wilderness. When Europeans arrived on Turtle Island they saw wilderness, while Indigenous Peoples saw the space as fully inhabited by culturally developed humans who were living in an active relationship with Mother Earth. Land that was fully, ethically, sustainably inhabited by Indigenous Peoples was seen by Europeans as undeveloped. John Locke’s labour theory of value claims that an Indian’s land is not worth one-thousandth of what the same acre of land would be worth were it located in England. Several hundred years after Locke’s writings, agricultural researchers are suggesting that, if all factors from the global industrial base are included, free-ranging a 60,000,000-head herd of buffalo is most likely the best agricultural use of the High Plains region of North America—exactly the use it was being put to prior to the introduction of Europe’s industrial development model.

From an Indigenous point of view, a logical recommendation for socialism for the 21st century is a complete redesign of humanity’s global industrial base. The redesigned industrial base has to abandon both the myth of scarcity and the myth of wilderness, while embracing the reality that humans actually are an integral part of an enormous Super-Being, whom Indigenous folks have long known as Mother Earth.

A quick dash back to reality for a moment: we humans aren’t going to voluntarily undertake a task of that magnitude while we are in our current antisocial state of mind. It’s easy to point to the global problems facing humanity and say that our self-induced trauma has shaped us to be the species we are now. The challenging part is imagining the way forward from here.

This brings my imagination to the crucial place: the crux of the matter; the originating point. The human vagina. Not being personally endowed with one, and certainly subject to the same forces noted by psychological studies concluding that a man’s imagination goes there at least once every 10 seconds, I realize I’m fair game for criticism.

However, as a once-popular song might have said had it been penned by an Indigenous lyricist, the vagina bone is connected to the stomach bone, and the stomach bone is connected to the heart bone. In an odd way, that just about sums up gender relationships while being anatomically correct, energetically speaking. Indigenous socialism arises from the relationship between mother and child, the first social relationship we humans experience. Looking into the structure of the social institution of Indigenous motherhood, prior to the cataclysmic assault staged by Christian missionaries hell-bent on their civilizing mission, I see some noteworthy features.

Connecting the heart bone to the head bone, I see the common thread of Indigenius Socialism expressed through a particular aspect of human sexuality. Modern medical researchers call it oxytocin, but you don’t have to name it to know it. Human females experience an inter-human bonding, or a primary socialism, during sexual arousal, sexual activity, sexual orgasm(s!), child birth, breast feeding, communal food preparation, communal feasting, and communal socializing in general, when the mood is non-violent. From the very specific Indigenous point of view found on the High Plains, where all those buffalos were roaming among the playful deer and antelope, pre-Christianized human societies practised a non-hierarchical matrifocal social form, where women’s relationships established the social norms. Men had roles, too, and I’ll get to that in time, but women’s relationship roles, revolving around motherhood, are the key to understanding Indigenius Socialism and the foundation of what I am proposing here as Syncretic Indigenius Socialismo.

In the human brain, there is a formation medical researchers call the limbic node; it is croissant-shaped, with one end arching around to almost touch the other. Almost, but not quite. Electricity-based human nerve impulses can jump the gap; stimulation on either end causes excitation on the other end. Oral receptors are at one end of the limbic node and genital receptors are at the other end of the limbic node.

Those crazy medical researchers! Their studies show that in societies with higher emphasis on general brain development, there is a corresponding higher level of oral-genital sexual activity. French and Cree societies both fit into the higher-brain development category and I’ll gamble a wager on the origin of the Metis Nation from the shared preference for oral sex. Is the Metis infinity symbol really just a clever play on a sideways 69?

The head bone is connected to the vagina bone, as many intelligent people know, and you don’t have to be able to articulate the mechanics of it all to get it. In pre-Christian Cree society, adventures in sexuality were separated from pregnancy by well understood and widely practised plant-based and practice-based birth control. You could have your cake and eat it, too. Women were free to choose when, where, and with whom they would conceive a child. Women chose to have children spaced about four years apart—two or three at most—in a lifetime and had children in age cohorts within their own circle of age cohort sister-cousins. Children grew up with an age cohort of cousins, without the burden of having immediate older or younger siblings and with the benefit of being born into a circle of similarly aged playmate relatives.

Women often chose to have a first child around the age of 16, when their mothers were about 32, their grandmothers were about 48, their great-grandmothers were about 64, and their great-great grandmothers were about 80. It was not uncommon for women to live to 100 years, so up to six generations of mothers could be present in an extended family, with the newborn infant representing the seventh generation. This meant that every new mother was surrounded by a depth of experience in the fine arts of Indigenous Socialism. She was certainly never on her own, without support, trying to care for several, or even a dozen or more children, all her own, often on her own, as was the European standard at that same time in history.

Out of this foundational matrix arose the basic form of Indigenous Socialism. By choosing fathers from across the bio-region, extended family villages were cross-linked with many other extended family villages, in an intricate web that formed the regional and national governance systems. It was literally all in the family. The genius of Indigenous Socialism was that it did not extend from an avant-garde of intellectuals as a theory imposed imperfectly, top down, on a mass population, but instead was an organic product of a matrifocal society. When Fredrick Engels travelled to upper New York State to see for himself Haudenosaunee society in action, he marvelled at how a territorially large and heavily populated region could self-manage without elected officials, judges, police or prisons.

Like technological development, the organization of daily affairs in human society was founded on a completely different paradigm. Men did have roles, but women’s expectations of men were adjusted to account for men’s inherent weaknesses, most notably a propensity towards violence and a severe shortage of oxytocin. The poor dears could only get a blast of the primal socialist juice during orgasm; all the more reason to assist them in attaining as many as possible during a lifetime. Along with frequent orgasms, ceremonial activities also played an important part in reducing the potential stressor on a socialist system caused by an overabundance of testosterone—for instance, the sweatlodge. This wasn’t just an Indigenous introduction; Scandanavian societies, too, recognized the social benefits of immersing men in energy-sapping hot steamy environments for prolonged periods of time.

The Indigenius twist was an emphasis on the latent altruistic nature possibly underlying male humans’ obvious violent nature, as a remedy to the anti-social behaviours otherwise all too dominant. Protocol rituals in a simple sweatlodge ceremony remind and reinforce the necessary immersion of humans in the natural world; many times I’ve heard Elders leading sweatlodge ceremonies ritually comment on how we humans must humble ourselves and crawl on our hands and knees into the lodge, re-entering the womb of Mother Earth. During normal sweatlodge proceedings, water, earth, wind and fire are acknowledged with gratitude, from the perspective of the human family, while reminding us of our survival-based obligations to the circle of natural forces we have emerged from. The combination of intense heat, complete darkness and an extraordinary soundscape often moves participants out of day-to-day mundane realities and into the immediacy of relationship with Mother Earth. Everyone simultaneously has a unique experience and a deeply bonding common experience. Real socialism.

The genius of Indigenous ceremony is that it intentionally creates a psychological space where Indigenius Socialism can come to life, rewarding co-operation, voluntary sharing and spontaneous acts of kindness, while penalizing greed, selfishness and violence. These actions are easy for women, but hard for men—that damn testosterone! Within the ceremonial space, Indigenous women have figured out a method, over millennia, for engaging men, by using the same tactics used with young children. Useful roles are identified and social prestige is offered, while steady, firm Elder female hands quietly steer the ceremonial proceedings from a discreet position in the background.

I realize that we seem to be a long way away from the way of life that Rosa Luxemburg called primitive communism; she was just looking at what Marxists call the mode of production and she didn’t mean the mode of reproduction of the reserve army of labour. A syncretic Indigenius Socialism for the 21st century has to account, in practice, for both the mode of production and the mode of reproduction and does so by putting the mode of reproduction where it belongs: first. You can’t build a socialist future among antisocial human beings; the 20th century is a fine illustration of that point.

Becoming pregnant, being pregnant, giving birth, nurturing a new life: here’s where we can see the transcendence of the notions of wilderness and scarcity. Mother Earth is not wild, nor is She short on essential items for Her existence. The same is potentially true for every human mother; the keys are sharing and co-operation. Exactly what a global human society would look like following those two simple concepts is not for me to say, but I can predict something.

Indigenius Socialism will be built by women, for humanity, utilizing everything now in existence, to rise above the barbarism of the present moment. We men can choose to be women’s assistants in this project; it could be an ecstatic experience. Imagine global human population plummeting in a women-led movement, while orgasms per lifetime are skyrocketing. Perhaps the Metis Nation is a signpost to the future: Indigenous Peoples will be Peoples indigenous to Mother Earth—one race, diverse, living locally while thinking globally, wickedly intelligent, one more species among many worth saving from extinction. There is a window of opportunity now, but, if we humans don’t take it, we will just create another one soon. We will eventually choose socialism over barbarism; our Mother told us to.

The first is sustainability. The best plans and ideas, no matter how profitable, or altruistic, or wonderful they may be, are doomed to eventual failure if the processes driving them are not sustainable over time. Long-term thinking and sustainability inexorably go hand in hand; they are the two sides of the same coin, and it’s the coin we should be using to fund our future. In practice, however, the question of sustainability rarely comes up when making decisions. Governments and elected officials rush into new policies and pass laws that will temporarily please their constituents and earn them some votes, or will give momentary upper hand in some political situation. Often they find that what they put into motion comes back to bite them, as when we trained and armed the Taliban to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, only to find them years later using their training and weapons on us. We typically only question the sustainability of a situation when we realize—too late—that’s it’s not in fact sustainable.

Because of the worldwide Green Movement, sustainability is a concept that has gotten more attention of late. It’s bandied about in all areas of the social and business spectrum, from corporate marketing to political activism. But what, exactly, does “sustainable” mean? My sister, Susan Brumm, a writer who has covered sustainable farming methods in the wine and food industry, provided the best definition I have heard for the word sustainable. It’s very simple and elegant: Able to continue without lessening. I don’t think we can improve on that. It’s something you may find yourself holding up against decisions in your own life. When the decisions we make and the things we do and take for granted are looked at through the filter of this simple phrase, it can be a real eye-opener. Using that definition, the disconcerting fact that much of what we’re doing in today’s world is not sustainable is obvious to anyone who pauses and asks themselves, can this last? Can we keep this up indefinitely? Usually the answer is a big, fat no.

The next consideration we need to have at the forefront when making decisions is this: How will what we’re planning affect everything else? There is a desperate need for whole-system thinking in our world. Naturalist John Muir pointed out that “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Thinking beyond the boundaries of the immediate situation is vital. Like good chess players, we must do our best to think many moves ahead when altering any part of our environment, and try to create room for and ways to mitigate the inevitable cascade of collateral change which will occur. Often we behave like the man in the fable who climbs a tree and begins sawing off the limb on which he’s sitting. A passerby calls up, “If you keep sawing that limb you’re going to fall.” The man in the tree ignores this and continues to saw until he cuts through the limb and falls with a crash, thinking to himself, “That guy must have the gift of prophesy.” As you read this we are blithely sawing away at the limbs which support our entire culture and environment, and it doesn’t take a prophet to tell us that if we keep it up, we’re going to come crashing down. Many of our best ideas have turned out to be huge problems in the long run. A little foresight may have helped a lot to offset much of what we face today.

A third consideration is to be sure, when we’re problem solving, that we’re actually solving the problem, not just hiding the symptoms. We often can see the problems and the bad results we’re getting but instead of trying to fix the root causes of the problems, which would often cost more, take longer, or require deeper thinking, we take the easier, short-term route and chase the symptoms instead. This sort of thinking permeates our society. Commercials on television show people suffering from terrible indigestion from eating poorly, then push antacids to relieve the symptoms, never for a moment suggesting that, I don’t know, maybe less pizza is in order? Insects are eating too many of our crops? Don’t promote biological diversity. Douse them with pesticides. Dissatisfied with your life? Don’t try to discover the underlying cause of your dissatisfaction, buy this new car or this new gadget instead. Can’t cope? Take this drug called COPE. It’ll fix the symptom, at least for a while. Nearly all over-the-counter drugs treat symptoms instead of causes. But, as my sister used to say, you don’t have a headache because of a lack of aspirin. When I was a kid there used to be commercials for a type of detergent that was supposed to be great at cleaning men’s shirt collars. These commercials showed distraught housewives upset and ashamed because their husband had “ring around the collar” and they were so happy to have this new detergent that would end their shame. When these commercials came on, my mother would yell at the TV (really), “Hey lady, try telling your husband to wash his neck!” Now that’s getting to the root of the problem.

Even if we honestly couldn’t have predicted the problems some of our decisions would create in the past, we can at least start now to honestly acknowledge that the problems do in fact exist and take measures to correct them. But too often we have in gotten so deep that fixing the problem seems worse than ignoring it; the cure scares us more than the disease. Many of the worst problems we face today are things that are so deeply intertwined in our economy that even the thought of changing them causes panic. We are so afraid of affecting the economy, of losing jobs, of changing the status quo or the balance of power that we will ignore something that is obviously going to blow up in our face down the road in order to continue to benefit in the short run. We pretend it isn’t happening and just pass it on to the next administration or the next generation. In therapy they call this denial.

Denial has become necessary for us to get up in the morning and go about our business as though everything is going to be okay. Because if we were to face reality, we would be forced to see that there are many, many things that demand our attention, things that are going to bite us badly when they reach the point where we can no longer deny them. When it comes to facing the fact that we are rapidly approaching peak oil and a post-carbon world, that our environment is degrading faster than it can repair itself, that our obsession on growth and profit is unsustainable, for a long time we have been collectively sticking our fingers in our ears and singing, la, la, la… In his excellent and funny book, Farewell, My Subaru, Doug Fine called this “the societal equivalent of not thinking about dying.” But our way of doing things is dying, and denying it won’t make it go away. The good news is that if we are willing to stand up together and tackle these problems head-on, we can solve them. We have the intelligence, the know-how, and the technology. We just need to find the desire and the will.

With all the talk of the Clash of Civilizations, the need for an alternative paradigm which does not use a fallacious abstraction as a justification to extend power and influence is underscored. With the current state of things as they stand, we may be moving towards the clash that Huntington predicted, but the understanding that such a clash is not inevitable, and that it does not have to be so, is extremely important. Such a clash, if approaching, can and must be prevented. There is need for understanding, co operation and dialogue on both sides. Unity and tolerance for each other, respect for cultures or religions that may be different is required. Intellectuals, writers, scholars, academics, the media and political leadership have a very important duty to highlight the grounds for co operation between cultures and civilizations.

This said, however, the imperatives of a successful and effective framework for dialogue between civilizations must first be established, otherwise all attempts to create an alliance between civilizations through dialogue will be little more than chasing an illusory ideal. Dieter Senghaas points out the flawed strategy in contemporary attempts at bringing civilizational representatives to the talking table. He contends that participants in the dialogues sponsored by the West (as in fact all dialogues have been, so far) are not true representatives of the sides to the conflict. Particularly, Muslim representatives in the Dialogue are almost invariably those of the West’s choosing — believers in a ‘moderated’ Islam which does not enjoy any sizeable following in the Muslim world: “On the whole, the Muslim participants are not hard-boiled representatives of Orthodox Islam. They are all the representatives of a ‘modern’ Islam (whatever that means).”³ On the other hand, Senghaas notes, Western participants are rather naive and unaware of the Muslim standpoint, with little to offer. Such a dialogue, as Senghaas terms it, is ‘intellectually exhausted’, leading to a dead end.

Another danger the West needs to guard against for a genuine dialogue between civilizations is the belief in one’s own culture to be essentially unique and exclusive. The West must pull itself out of the Cold War mentality of creating and bloating up enemy images in order to direct an ambitious foreign policy at an adversary — real or imagined. The West should reject attempts at demonization of the enemy and understand that its version of modernity cannot be imposed on the Muslim world. It must allow other communities to develop according to their own orientation and essential values. Besides, the West must engage with authentic, popular representatives of the Muslim world: “An intellectual debate should rather be dealing intensively with the concepts of the democratic representatives of the Islamic world… How do writers, scientists, politicians, the representatives of social and especially religious groups envisage a desirable political constitution for their increasingly complex societies?”⁴

On both sides of the current divide, voices of conciliation, tolerance and peacemaking need to be empowered over and above the call to isolate and avenge. Religion has a very significant role in the process of reconciliation. A number of religious personalities, scholars, organisations and institutions are engaged in the task of reconciliation, peacemaking and rapproachment through religion. However, their contribution and potential has largely been unacknowledged and unrecognized: “We do not know most of these people, nor do we understand their impact, because we in the West have had a tendency in the modern period to view religion as only the problem in the human relations of civil society, never part of solutions.”⁵ However, it is also true on the other hand that religion is also misused for generating violence, hatred and conflict. Religion, therefore, has the potential both for peacemaking and conflict resolution as well as violence and conflict. It is the peacemaking and conciliatory role of religion that ought to be highlighted and emphatically asserted, through interpretation of the sources of religion:

At the end of the day, it will come down to interpretation, selection and the hermeneutic direction of religious communities. That, in turn, is deeply tied up with questions of the economic and psychological health of their members, the wounds of history, and the decisions of key leaders to direct their communities’ deepest beliefs, practices and doctrines towards healing and reconciliation or towards hatred and violence.⁵

This can help create a global civil society based on the sanctity of human rights and the necessity of conflict resolution. However, to truly accord that position and role to religion, it must be learnt that “Religion does not kill. Religion does not rape women, destroy buildings and institutions. Only individuals do those things.”⁶ This is particularly true for the West to understand in its perception of Islam which has, unfortunately, plummeted sharply after September 11, 2001, bringing the prospects for a clash closer. Instead of viewing violence as an intrinsically ‘Muslim’ phenomenon, the West needs to take responsibility for ill advised policy victimizing Muslims that has raised apprehension and mistrust in the Muslim world.

In his speech at the ‘Dialogue Between Civilizations’, President Khatami spoke of Islam’s role in peacemaking and arbitrating between civilizations:

I should also highlight one of the most important sources that enriched Iranian thought and culture, namely Islam. Islamic spirituality is a global one. Islam has, all through the history, extended a global invitation to all the humanity. The Islamic emphasis on humane quality, and its disdain for such elements as birth and blood, had conquered the hearts of those yearning for justice and freedom…⁷

Several writers and intellectuals throughout history have recognized the extraordinary potential of Islam as an arbiter between civilizations through its emphasis on equality, justice and brotherhood that goes beyond all distinctions of nationalism, race or creed. According to H.A. R Gibb:

But Islam has a still further service to render to the cause of humanity. It stands after all nearer to the real East than Europe does, and it possesses a magnificent tradition of inter-racial understanding and cooperation. No other society has such a record of success uniting in an equality of status, of opportunity, and of endeavours so many and so various races of mankind … Islam has still the power to reconcile apparently irreconcilable elements of race and tradition. If ever the opposition of the great societies of East and West is to be replaced by cooperation, the mediation of Islam is an indispensable condition. In its hands lies very largely the solution of the problem with which Europe is faced in its relation with East. If they unite, the hope of a peaceful issue is immeasurably enhanced.⁸

Ample evidence for the aforesaid is present in the sources of Islam. According to Islamic tradition, the Prophet (PBUH), in his Last Sermon made to the entirety of his living followers at that point in time said:

O people! Verily, Allah says, ‘O mankind! We have indeed created you from a single male and a female, and then We made you into nations and tribes so that you may recognize (or identify) each other. Indeed, the most honoured among you in the Sight of Allah is the one who is the most righteous.’(In the light of this verse), no Arab has a superiority over a non Arab, nor does a non Arab have any superiority over an Arab; and a black does not have any superiority over a white, nor is a white superior to a black, except by one thing: righteousness. Remember, all human beings are the sons and daughters of Adam (A.S), and Adam (A.S) was made from dust. Be warned! All (false) claims of blood and of wealth are under my feet.⁹

The huge stumbling block towards an understanding of Islam as an egalitarian, emancipatory, humanistic tradition in the West is the Orientalist lens with which the West has always viewed Islam. Due to a very flippant, superficial understanding of it, violence in the Muslim world is seen as intrinsic to Islam and Muslim society, while the role and responsibility of the West in provoking militancy through its policies is overlooked. This mindset becomes obvious in the Palestine-Israel conflict, a weeping sore in the modern world which embodies in itself all the prejudice, misunderstanding, hate, mistrust with which human beings have viewed others on the basis of difference in religion or race or country. Karen Armstrong states,

It is not sufficient for us in the West to support or condemn parties to the conflict. We are also involved and must make our own attitudes our prime responsibility… Crusading is not a lost medieval tradition: it has survived in different forms in both Europe and the United States and we must accept that our own views are blinkered and prejudiced. The prophets of Israel, the parents of all three faiths, proclaimed the necessity of creating a new heart and a new soul, which was far more important than external conformity. So too today. External political solutions are not enough. All three of the participants in the struggle must create a different attitude, a new heart and spirit. In the Christian West we must try to make the painful migration from our old aggressions and embark on the long journey towards a new understanding and a new self.¹⁰

Overcoming this stumbling block requires acknowledgement of the West’s debt to the Orient and to Islam, and reaching the realization that Islam in fact is central and not extrinsic to Western civilization. In his speech to the Muslim world, U.S President Barack Obama mentioned Europe and America’s debt to Islam:

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, ‘The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.’ And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.¹¹

The West needs to reinterpret history and do away with the narrow, parochial understanding of an exclusively ‘Western’ individualism that its history celebrates. It needs to acknowledge the debt, for only through that will mankind be able to seek the common thread buried beneath the morass of clash and conflict. Effort needs to be made to create the realization in the Western mind, of the historically attested fact that “The Western heritage is not simply Judaeo-Christian, but rather Judaeo-Christian-Islamic. Islam belongs to the same Abrahamic family of religions as Judaism and Christianity, and modern Western civilization has inherited a large part of Islamic intellectual and scientific culture.”¹²

The task ahead is to overcome the stumbling blocs in order to acquire a balanced world view, through which to strive to reach a middle ground on the basis of a system of sharing, exchange and intercultural communication between civilizations on an egalitarian basis. At the heart of the process is the understanding that we may be different, but we also share our humanity, and must make the most of this shared, indissoluble bond.

This does not mean, however, that personal identities ought to be diluted, distinctions erased, barriers eliminated. That is neither practical nor advisable. What is needed is a delicate balance between civilizational (inclusive of religion, culture and all other identities short of singular humanness) and human identity. Edward Said reiterated the same concept when asked what commonalities can unite the human race:

There are already commonalities that need to be recognized. I do not, however, suggest that differences should be eliminated. Things cannot be flattened out and homogenized. However, the other extreme is that everything is clashing. I think that is a prescription for war, and Huntington says that. The other alternative is coexistence with the preservation of difference. We have to respect and live with our differences. I do not suggest a unified, simplified, reduced culture, but the preservation of differences while learning to coexist in peace.²

The potential and promise of Islam in fostering the ‘fraternity’ or the ‘alliance’ between civilizations is immense, as in fact, Islam has achieved this tremendous undertaking at several high points in its history. Spain under Muslims is an ideal worth emulating. Malaysian Professor Osman Bakar states,

Was not the civilization built in Spain by Muslims, Jews and Christians under the banner of Islam a universal civilization? A number of Jewish and Christian thinkers think so. Max Dimont makes the remarkable claim that the Jewish Golden Age in the medieval period coincided with the Golden Age of Islam, thus implying that what Muslims, Jews and Christians had built together within the Islamic civilization was truly universal in nature. There exists among some European scholars nostalgia for the Andalusian culture and civilization. They wish to return to the universality of Andalusia because post modern Western civilization has become particularistic and exclusionary.¹³

Despite the essential differences between Islamic and Non Islamic tradition, historically Islam has never had ‘adjustment problems’ or difficulties in creating pluralistic societies where peoples of diverse religious traditions have lived together and prospered. In fact, Islam has a rich pluralistic tradition unsurpassed by any other civilization. It has a vast experience of interaction and alliance with non Muslim communities. Instances of conflict between Muslims and Non Muslims have never been, it must be observed, over ‘civilizational differences’. The idea, therefore, that Islam’s differences in worldview with non Islamic civilizations makes a clash inevitable is falsified by the history of Islam itself. Rather, the history of Islam presents a veritable model of a ‘world civilization’, as stated by Professor Bakar:

Huntington’s view that the idea of the possibility of a universal civilization is exclusively Western conception is not supported by history. It is a historical fact that Islam built the first comprehensive universal civilization in history even if we go by all the modern criteria of universality. Islam was the first civilization to have geographical and cultural borders with all the major contemporary civilizations of the world, and it was Islam that had the most extensive encounter with other civilizations.¹⁴

Where, then, does a Clash emerge? It emerges as a corollary to interventionist, adventurist, exploitative policies vis a vis the Muslim world by the ascendant West steeped in the compulsions of its espoused Materialism and Capitalism. The Clash is not inevitable, but it can become possible if such policies are mindlessly and relentlessly pursued by the West and if the Muslim world does not engage in self criticism and undertake a rediscovery of the pristine message of Islam. As long as the West keeps pursuing its ill advised course, insecurity and militant responses will proliferate among the Muslims. In such a case, Muslim opinion leaders will be compelled to rally together their people for strengthening, fortifying and gearing up for the West’s assault on what is most precious to them. Given the insensitivity and superficial grasp of the West over the prevalent mood in the Muslim world, the vicious cycle of hostility will go on. This is exactly the self-destructive path towards the Clash of Civilizations which in the long run will be in the interest of none.

1. Michael Dunn, ‘The Clash of Civilizations and the War on Terror,’ 49th Parallel, Vol.20 (Winter 2006-2007).
2. Remarked by Professor Edward W Said in his 1998 lecture titled “The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations” at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States of America.
3. Senghaas, Dieter, The Clash Within Civilizations, Routledge, London, 2002., p. 105.
4. Ibid, p. 107.
5. Marc Gopin, “Religion and International Relations at the Crossroads,” International Studies Review, Vol III issue III, Fall 2001.
6. Stated by Giandomino Picco, quoted in United Nations Year of Dialogue Between Civilizations 2001, Introduction, www.un.org/dialogue
7. “Empathy and Compassion,” The Iranian, September 8, 2000.
8. H.A.R. Gibb, Whither Islam, London, 1932, p. 379.
9. Quoted by Martin Lings, Muhammad (SAW): His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, Vermont, Rochester (USA), Inner Traditions, 2006.
10. Karen Armstrong, The Crusades and their Impact on Todays World, New York, Random House, Inc, 2001, p.539.
11. ABS-CBN News, Text of Obama’s speech to Muslim world, June 4, 2009.
12. Osman Bakar, Islam and Civilizational Dialogue, Kuala Lumpur, University of Malaya, 1997, p.42.
13. Ibid, p. 10.
14. Ibid.

If we examine these lists closely, we find internal contradiction, limits of application and other exceptions to strict adherence, but we don’t really understand these devices as absolute anyway, but rather as guides. Even those that have the force of law, like the Bill of Rights, must be adjudicated in specific situations since a few words can do no more than offer direction for a journey, not prescribe its every turn.

It is in this spirit that I offer this list of the Real Seven Deadly Sins. The limits and contradictions may seem especially glaring, but this is only because we are not use to them – and I will deal with some of the exceptions.

The “original” Seven Deadly Sins have a long history, quite a variety of inclusions and have been 5, 7, 10 and more sins at different turns. A society picks its sins; they are adaptive.

We have come to a time when we desperately need a new list. This is not to say that the list that evolved from Dante (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) has become acceptable, although fashion has certainly changed for several; in fact, if we had been more serious about these, we might not be in such a present pickle. But we need to refocus on those activities and, especially, the principles that have morphed from sin to saw.¹

These are the New Sins:

1) Progress
2) Economic growth
3) Property
4) Excess
5) Censorship
6) Repression
7) Religion

One of the first things that you might note from the new list is that it is easily adaptable to collective action, where as the Dante list is more easily seen as the unfortunate qualities of individuals. For this and other reasons, we might best keep those seven available for personal use. The new list is, in some cases, the “originals” writ large.

It is, today, our institutions that are dominating human action, and human institutions are not just the summing up of individual human behavior, but are, under the Consciousness System of Order, developing into new entities with new properties for which new guidance is needed.

1) Progress

This is the most insidious sin and one from which some others receive their motive force. We have come to see this greatest source of devastation as the essential positive value – and we rarely question it; taking the assertion, “It is progress,” as a substantive and often final argument.

Progress is change that arises from some previous condition, change that is judged by some humans as an improvement. But it has come to pass that the only guiding principle for the design of change is a previous condition that formed from some even earlier progress. That this seems perfectly normal to you is a measure of just how insidious this sin is.

Living things “progress” by adapting to the biophysical realities of the living space. Of course, they begin with what they have, but the changes occur in a universal context of long scale forces and processes. In humans, progress has come to mean changes that modify some existing condition arising in the human context, a condition that came to exist with the last round of progress. The speed of adaptation and the power to discover and use specific bits of information about how the biophysical world functions has allowed humans to ‘defeat’ certain biophysical rules. By bringing enough energy to bear and using mechanical physics, heavier than air machines can fly. By concentrating specific chemical species a concentrated consequence can be made to happen: poison, acid, lighter than air balloons, metals, etc. There are millions of examples. These things we call progress.

An evolutionary system would have to integrate every consequence that occurs within evolution’s time frame. Consciousness Order system time frames are so much more rapid than biophysical time frames that we have avoided the consequences of our behaviors. This we call progress.

Progress is building dikes to keep the waters out – both literally and figuratively; and then building buildings behind and on the dikes, and then building more and better pumps to remove the water that seeps through, and then, and then… The reality is that the water level is higher that the land level. Think for a moment on this from a position of sanity.

The sin of progress is to act outside of the context of the biophysical time frame, to make changes in response to existing conditions in such a way that the biophysical costs are deferred to other humans, other species and the future. Our societies today are dependent on billions of jobs that are the products of progress and all but a handful are made from the overcoming of the overcoming. We now have to keep trying to overcome the very fabric of universal reality to continue to ‘make progress.’ Such is the depth of our depravity.

And so Progress is a sin. Rather than seek it, we must make appeal to attempt it; must be able to demonstrate that the proposed changes enhance integration into biophysical reality, not attempt to defeat reality with some slight of hand. We would continue to change, to learn and to use the living and physical worlds, but at a pace to which all living and physical process on earth could adapt; a pace that will not create the dramatic synergies of a convulsive rejection of living things as the consequence of our progress.

2) Economic Growth

The sinfulness of growth is more obvious than the sin of progress. One need only think for a moment of the concept of the exponent. And it needs to be clear that human capacity has created a new model for growth; it is not the same process as growth of biological systems – just the same word. Biological growth is replenishment with the capacity to exceed its bounds, but fully inhibited by homeostatic feedback so that ecosystems are no-growth, sustaining systems.

Economic growth means an increase in the volume and speed of transactions of exchange. Transactions of exchange are the trading of one thing for another. Since there are basically three kinds of things (material/energy, behaviors and abstract tokens of exchange) there are a variety of forms that exchange can take, but ultimately increasing amounts of real stuff must be extracted, moved, modified and consumed as an economy grows. To some extent the need to actually raise crops, dig in mines and cut forests brings perspective to our economic growth, but…

economic growth can occur, so long as participants believe that tokens of exchange represent real things, as a result of trading those tokens – really betting on how many of a particular token will be required to trade for a particular real thing at a particular moment. This allows ‘not real things’ to increase in amount without limit. If the tokens are in a demand relationship with real things, then it is possible for there to be more ‘real stuff’ represented by tokens than there is or ever can be. The result is that demands are made of the earth’s capacities that cannot be met; the reality of the effort and limits of extraction is overcome in the perception. This is a sin.

A component of economic growth is investment: I loan you a hatchet to cut firewood and you return the hatchet plus a bit of cut wood, or I could loan you tokens to trade for a hatchet and you give me back the tokens plus a few extra. Either way you have to cut more wood than you require. The amount of material or behavior traded becomes more and more dependent on the obligation and less and less on the actual state of need. Economic growth mutates into increasing states of obligation.

If there is not a constantly increasing need or obligation, then there can be no more than momentary or situational occasions for investment. And so – placing the cart squarely in front of the horse – our economic system sustains the investment model without regard to the relationship of human economics to the natural biophysical economy. This is a sin.

3) Property

Property once seemed so simple; I learned it at my father’s knee: It is mine, you may not use it or touch it without my permission. I hold it by a force as close to a divine right as such things get. And yet, my ball (hat, toy or _____ ) could be taken and tossed around and eventually tossed onto a roof in the age old game of ‘humble the property owner’, AKA ‘keep away.’

I have discovered that humans come with a great variety of respect for property. Some have arm’s length rules and others will take even useless things. Different groups of people define property in different ways – what can be property, degrees of holding property, what must be done to identify property.

“Keep away” offered this instruction: property and force are intimately related. Property is mine so long as I am willing and capable to use sufficient force to keep it. A powerful man in my town lived at the end of a long road; the sign at his gate, “If you trespass, you will be shot.” This was not at his front door – his house could not be seen – but was at the most easily approached edge of the 30 or 40 acre mountain valley to which he lay claim. Records show that his family drove out the previous inhabitants with legal trickery and one punctuating dynamite explosion.

There are 3 ways that we can view property: 1) that which is, 2) that which is ours (or theirs) and 3) that which is mine (or his or hers).

“That which is” belongs to all and to no one. You may use it only as long as you don’t change it or deny its use to any other organism or process. “That which is ours” belongs to the commons, the community decides potential uses and what compensations and ablutions are required. “That which is mine” belongs to me; again, however, the community decides what can be personal property and often the limits of control and use – this should tell us something. The attempt to turn ‘that which is mine’ into absolute domination without regard to the rest of existence is a sin.

It is circumstance and excess that moves the sustaining to the sinful. Human progress and economic growth have driven property from balanced patterns of use, compensation and replenishment to the assumption of more and more private ownership; so that today we claim we can not only own the contents of our pockets and immediate living space, but we can own the land, the water, the air, living things, DNA, chemical processes and ideas. And we have even added a specialized instrument of private ownership called the corporate collective to own in even greater amounts and with greater force. This is sin.

4) Excess and Wealth

Excess has almost always been a sin in almost every culture. Yet, in our present condition the application of Sins 5 and 6 (censorship and repression) have led the way in justifying excess, usually claiming envy as the reason of objecting to wealth. This is quite simply sin supporting sin.

Excess is a sin because it perpetuates the sins of property, is the product of growth and can only be justified by dishonest and coercive means. But, primarily it is a sin because it damages the human relationship to the planet and to each other.

Ultimately the excess of wealth (both private and societal) can only be extracted from the universal commons and it can only be extracted by the coercion of one human entity by another. It is difficult to say who is harmed more in the existential sense, the miner who must dig or starve, yet retains some vestige of specieshood or the owner who believes in the madness of his right of power to steal the life and labor of the miner and the product of the land. It is, of course, not difficult to see who lives in the greatest distress of the moment.

5) Censorship

It is obvious to many that we must not speak of dangerous, harmful and distressing things. To do so would bring upset and disruption to our settled lives: speak the Devil’s words and call the Devil.

There is, as there always is, a major difficulty: How are we, or who is, to decide? We are ultimately faced with this simple choice: freedom of speech with only the most limited restrictions or speech controlled by whoever can wrest power over its methods and topics.

Control of speech is control of idea, is control of possibility. And yet we cannot live in a world without design, a world that limits and organizes possibility. The probability of glucose moving through a cell membrane in controlled by insulin, which is controlled by a dozen other conditions of the organism. We can expect nothing less for a super-organism collective like human societies. But there the analogy fails; the process by which biological evolution designs physiological function leaves out nothing. Every force and movement of the natural world gets its say without inhibition because it is exists in the total reality. Again, we can have nothing less for our collective social order.

Lying is a special form of censorship that denies access to a factual basis for action, but lying should be no more reviled than demanding that the truth of another’s understanding not be spoken.

This is an especially dangerous sin as new and powerful forms of human super-organism are demanding and receiving the power to censor speech that challenges their domination by controlling the means of speech and using that means to control the topics of speech.

6) Repression

The rejection of one identifiable racial, ethnic, language, cultural or behavioral group by another is one of the oldest human actions. When there was space and available niches, this was less sin and more signal to spread the species around. It even served certain other useful functions by reducing the spread of disease and supplying gene pools from which vigorous crosses could test the genetic waters.²

But today and for some many hundreds of years the repression of one group by another as been in the service of quite other forces: economic and political power. Billions of human lives have been lived out in the greatest of distress – truly painful, brutal and short because of the sin of repression.

Life has never had a guarantee – or so is my belief – but to assign beforehand that billions of lives will be lived in horror and pain is a sin. And this is a sin that is likely to continue to increase dramatically as it has over the last few thousand years. Never have so many lived such deprived and devastated lives as in today’s moment.

Two hundred years ago there were one billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in deep poverty at the advancing edge of European expansion and industrialization and in islands of industrial servitude. One hundred years ago there where two billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in the deepest poverty as the first world nations were converting the rest of the world into their larder. Today there are almost 7 billion, nearly half of whom live at the edge of survival. Local sustaining practices have been so damaged and demonized that even those who are not in immediate peril today are but one global economic decision away from dust.

7) Religious Piety

Religion is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Its supporting structures and designs are deep in our origins, but it has become a chimera, a crossing with politics, economics and the institutional super-organism. Religion is a developmentally dysfunctional entity demanding the privilege of an infant while having the strength of a powerful adult.

In its origin religion was the combined effect of the Stories that integrated human action within the environment and the instinctual emotional connections to environment and community. It gave strength to the adaptations that formed the basis of human success. It did not create the behaviors, but responded to them as the collected Stories that organized the behavior of a group, carrying them through space and time.

Devotion to religious story has become the central madness of our time and one of the greatest inhibitions to our survival. There were in the past many thousands of religions because there were thousands of situations in which people lived. Since religion’s function is to define a way of life, then it must be completely connected to immediate and sustaining reality – it used to be! Now religions are devoted to the remains of Stories that once had some relational meaning, but are no longer connected to reality. This makes the Stories of religion easy prey for any entity to use as devices of censorship and repression.

Summary

These are the sins that we need to “hold in our hearts” as unacceptable. These are the sins that are devastating our world. 30 years ago drunk driving was a laughing matter (even as people were killed), but became a matter of scorn and rejection as people incorporated into their habits of thought, into their lists of sins, driving drunk. We need to see these seven sins in the same way. Just as with the original seven deadly sins a small number of people are empowered by them if allowed, but if enough people reject those behaviors, actively reject them, they will be weakened and more of us may begin to see them for what they are.

1. It is an irony of our time that those who claim to champion individual freedom are really speaking for the institutional collective and the individual’s subservience to it, while those who are accused of socialist “collectivism” see the collective in service of the individual.
2. Cultural habits combining with instinctual behaviors associated with incest created complex rules that often involved either males or females moving from one group to another.

My transition to political radicalism — going to the root of problems, recognizing that dramatic and fundamental change in the way society is organized is necessary if there is to be a decent human future — involved a lot of pain, in two different ways.

The first concerned the process of coming to know about the pain of the world. I had never been a naïve person who thought the world was a happy place, but like many people who have privilege (in my case, being white, male, a U.S. citizen, and economically secure, though never wealthy) I was able to remain ignorant of the depth of the routine suffering in the world. I was able to ignore how white supremacy, patriarchy, U.S. imperialism, and a predatory capitalist economic system routinely destroy the bodies and spirits of millions of people around the world. When I made a conscious choice to stop ignoring those realities — in my case, when I returned to a university for graduate education with the time to read and study — the process of coming to know about that pain was wrenching. But I found myself wanting to know more.

Why would someone with privilege press to know more about the pain of the world when that knowledge creates tension and emotional turmoil? In my case, coming to understand that the world’s pain is the product of profoundly unjust social systems helped me understand a different kind of personal pain I had been struggling with. Most of my life I had felt like a bit of a freak, like someone out of step with the culture around him. There’s nothing dramatically wrong with me physically or psychologically, but I always struggled to fit in. I had always had a lingering sense that I didn’t want what others around me seemed to want. Because of my privilege, the world offered me a lot, and I am grateful for much of what I have — work I have usually enjoyed, an adequate income, relative safety. But I could never figure out how to be normal — how to kick back with the guys; how to get excited about sports, television, or the latest hit music; how to care about what kind of car I drove. In many ways I had it made, on the surface, but that sense of being out of step always dragged me down.

The best way to deal with our individual struggles is to put them in a larger context. That means both understanding the forces that shape our world as well as placing our problems in perspective. Becoming radicalized politically allowed me to see that I was suffering because I didn’t want to fit into a world shaped by unjust systems; the problem wasn’t my values and desires but the pathology of those systems. That didn’t solve all my personal problems, but it sure helped. Radical politics also helped me understand more clearly how others were suffering much more than I; it shook me out of my self-absorption. Both realizations led me to want to continue the search for more knowledge and understanding about how this all worked, and to commit as much time and energy as I had to movements for social justice.

The paradox is that since I have immersed myself in the pain of the world, I have been able to find new joy. I still understand that the world is not a happy place, and to be truly alive we must face what my friend Jim Koplin calls the “sense of profound grief” that comes with looking honestly at the world. As the writer Wendell Berry has put it, we live on “the human estate of grief and joy.”¹ Grief is inevitable, and it is only through an honest embrace of the grief that real joy is possible. The conventional world tries to sell us many pleasures, but it offers us little joy. That’s because the conventional world is also trying to sell us many ways to numb our pain, which keeps us from that grief. So long as we are out of touch with the grief, we are unable to feel the joy. We are left only with the desperate search for pleasure and a panicked scramble to avoid pain.

This process has, for me, been slow and gradual — there have been no epiphanies. I don’t believe in epiphanies, and I don’t trust people who claim to have epiphanies. I don’t think the deep understanding of the world that we strive for can come in a single moment. It comes from the long and painful struggle, with the world and with ourselves. Insight doesn’t magically descend upon us. We have to work for it, and that always takes time.

As the singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson (who also happens to be my partner) has put it, “Those are lost who/try to cross through/the sorrow fields too easily.”² To expand on her metaphor, we cross those fields not in search of a utopia somewhere ahead. Our life is that journey across those fields, facing the grief and celebrating the joy along the way.

1. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 106
2. “He Waits for Me,” from the CD Beautiful World, Red House Records, 2008]

You want proof? Of course you do; and quite right too. I’ll give you a little proof – little not because only a little exists, but because there is so much proof that even if I were to write a whole book on the subject I would still only be scratching the surface; and that’s if we only talk about the proven cases of deliberate outright lies our trusted leaders tell us; if we included the full catalogue of half truths, omissions and deceptions we could fill entire bookcases.

Try visiting your favourite on-line book store and typing the words “lies and history” into the search engine. When I did it 690 books were listed. O.K., some of them are duplicated or out of stock, and others are irrelevant to this subject, but you get the point.

Leaders cannot be trusted. The importance of this fact cannot be understated, as our entire society is founded upon the bedrock of trustworthy leadership. Now this is not to say that all leaders are untrustworthy, and certainly not that they are untrustworthy all of the time – but this just makes the problem worse, because we seldom know for certain when we’re being lied to, or intentionally deceived, until it’s too late.

When ordinary people are sacked from their jobs for misconduct – or even just a sniff of misconduct, it’s almost impossible for them to find re-employment in similar work on the assumption that they cannot fully be trusted. But when it happens in public office or corporate boardrooms it seems to serve as an important examination that’s been passed, an essential rite of passage confirming one’s suitability not only for re-employment, but promotion to properly high office. The biggest prizes are reserved for those special rising stars where misconduct is strongly suspected, but cannot be absolutely proven. Ideally these examinations should not attract too much public attention, but even if they do it doesn’t present anything like the same obstacle to one’s career as it would for millions of lesser mortals.

Once properly schooled our public and private sector leaders then assume their rightful places as master puppeteers. Many lead quite uneventful lives and may remain as sleepers throughout their careers and never be called upon to seriously betray the nation’s trust. However, sometimes they are required to exercise the skills for which they’ve already shown a talent, and which won for them their exalted position. They could be required to lead a largely unwilling nation into an illegal war, say – a task requiring reasonable acting abilities, a total disregard for the truth, and psychopathic quantities of inhumanity.

Such is the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s not a new situation – a brief examination of history from the people’s perspective quickly shows that our leaders have nearly always proven themselves completely worthy of total mistrust. So what can be done about it?

First, and most important of all, is simply recognising that basic truth: leaders cannot be trusted. This is not an easy step to take, because the implications are truly immense, but it is an essential step: we can only fix a problem once we actually realise we have a problem.

It’s worth repeating that very few leaders are untrustworthy all of the time. Many, perhaps most, don’t even know themselves they cannot be trusted. These comprise the junior and middle ranking leaders who form the essential glue to keep the whole rotten edifice standing upright. Most of the time this very substantial group sincerely believe in the rightness of what they’re doing for no better reason than they’ve been told to do it by someone who they suppose knows what’s going on. “Just following orders” – that famous defence that was rightly blown out of the water at Nuremberg. How many ordinary soldiers in how many wars would have gone “over the top” to their certain deaths for absolutely no reason whatsoever except for the fact that some poor brainwashed fool of a junior leader went over first shouting: “follow me chaps”?

Next, after accepting that leaders cannot be trusted, we need to think about a very important question: what do we actually need leaders for? What ‘value added’ to our lives do they supply? In all the time I’ve thought about this subject (and that’s quite a lot), the only answer I can come up with is that in times of crisis it’s pretty useful to have someone who knows what they’re doing directing or co-ordinating the actions of others. But how often do such crises occur? Unless you work in the emergency services, how often does a real crisis affect your daily life so badly that you actually need a leader telling you what to do? Providing you’ve been properly trained for your job, have the appropriate resources to hand, and have good lines of communication with equally well-provided colleagues, how much do you actually need to be led? Even in times of national emergencies it’s not actually leaders we need, but organisation. Even the greatest leader can achieve nothing without an organisation; but an organisation may function perfectly well without a leader in sight – it only needs well trained, properly resourced people with efficient lines of communication.

Leaders affect almost every aspect of our lives, and the first realisation that they cannot be trusted comes as something of a shock. However, this is more than compensated for with the realisation that we don’t actually need them anyway. Anarchists have been telling the world this for many years, but have singularly failed to get the message across. Not that it’s entirely their fault. Our leaders, some of whom are not very stupid, fully understand the considerable danger to their positions of a world that suddenly comprehends it no longer needs them. Consequently they employ the awesome forces at their disposal to poison the minds of the people to the powerful messages of anarchy. Indeed, the very mention of the word conjures up to most people images of mindless wild-eyed fanatics smashing up anything and everything in their way (individuals who are often paid agents rather than real anarchists anyway), not something that prizes noble virtues such as peace, freedom and equality.

Perhaps the most traditional “essential” function of leadership is decision-making. We are encouraged to believe that our leaders have two very special qualities to enable them to undertake this vital function. Firstly we’re conditioned to believing that our leaders have particular natural gifts that enable them to make extraordinarily inspired decisions – decisions that no ordinary person could ever hope to make. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we’re led to believe that our leaders always place our interests far above their own (the fact they must suffer lives of pampered luxury while the rest of humanity rubs along as best they can is no doubt some sort of penance they must endure for their noble self-sacrifice).

So let’s examine a little more closely this special duty of leaders: decision-making.

Firstly, consider the notion that they might have particular natural gifts and abilities. Undoubtedly there have been one or two leaders in the past with quite extraordinary personal abilities – but usually these talents have manifested themselves in the form of awesome ruthlessness and inhumanity. Upon closer examination, about the only notable quality of your average national leader, like some of Britain’s monarchs and certain American presidents for example, seems to be a quite spectacular lack of intelligence. Even the really bright ones seem unable to demonstrate an original thought they might once have had. How could such people possibly glide effortlessly from one inspirational decision to the next?

Then there’s the notion of self-sacrifice – the view that our leaders are driven only by the purest of ideals: to serve the greater good, a noble desire to do what’s best for us, the lowly mortals who gaze up with misty-eyed trusting awe at our saintly protectors. In other words we are conditioned to believing that the decision-making of our leaders can be wholly trusted because they always act in our best interests.

Armies are quite a good place to look for examples of leadership in practice; after all, they do epitomise the rigid hierarchical control model that is mirrored almost everywhere else in society. But there’s a bit of a problem. If military leaders (or their political masters) are so selfless in all their decision-making, why do they always locate themselves behind expensive desks in comfortable offices at very safe distances from any real danger? Why does their self-sacrifice on our behalf confine itself to sending ordinary people to distant deserts and frozen wastelands to kill and die for their own good? Why do our trusted leaders never lead from the front, or send their own sons and daughters to have a turn at getting up close and personal with death?

Directly related to the principle of self-sacrifice is what I call the payola-paradox. The private sector is the best exemplar of this (although the public sector is not far behind). The payola-paradox says that whilst all the best leaders will naturally be fully committed to self sacrifice, the best way for all that selflessness to be demonstrated is for them to accept top dollar – but the best way for workers to demonstrate their own self sacrifice is by working for nothing. So the greater a leader’s wealth, and the greater the workers’ poverty, the greater must be purity of decision-making and sacrifices everyone is making for the common good.

It’s cruel I know, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and mocking such high-principled self sacrifice just has to be done in order to make a pretty valid point: the only people our leaders truly serve, and have ever truly served, are themselves.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a little self interest; after all, it’s directly related to the survival instinct that’s common to every living thing. The real problems occur when the self interest of some individual, or class of individuals, is awarded grossly preferential weighting to the self interest of others (as it always has been).

So where are we? We’ve established that leaders cannot be trusted, and we’ve established the myth of perfect decision-making by self-sacrificing leaders; but the most significant point to take on board is that we don’t actually need leaders anyway. We’re perfectly capable of making our own decisions.

This is scary stuff; but consider it for a moment. What goes into making a good decision?

There are just three basic components: information, information and information.

First off, you need just the right amount of background information about any situation that requires a decision. This is best provided not by dozens of experts all repeating each other, but simply by two experts – who disagree with each other. Then you need the right consequential information about the possible results of any decision you might make – no chess player worth her salt ever makes a move without thinking about all the possible consequences; and finally you need a reliable means of informing relevant people about what the decision is. None of these components are, of themselves, difficult; but they are often made extremely difficult by devious people serving their own self-interested agendas.

It isn’t difficult to grasp the essential requirements of a good decision – it’s only taken me one paragraph to write it. So instead of being conditioned to rely on people we can never fully trust to make our decisions for us, why can’t we instead be conditioned to just make our own? And the decisions of government should be OUR decisions to make. After all, we pay for them – often with our lives.

Some would rightly argue that oftentimes group decisions need to be made; and that if a group of people is involved in anything it must be led. Not so. Groups need organised systems with a few key individuals providing specific communication functions, not leadership. Ah, but you need a leader to create the organisation. No you don’t. Groups are more than capable of organising themselves when there’s a real need to do so, as tens of thousands of rebel groups throughout history can testify.

But perhaps the most compelling argument for the failure of the principle of leadership, and why we have to abandon it, is this: the world is full of leaders, and look at the state of it. We have permanent war, ecological catastrophe, and a global economy that institutionalises massive poverty and obscene wealth for tiny all-powerful elites who, coincidentally, are the most strident advocates of leadership. Leadership is a failed experiment. The people, properly informed, must be free to manage the governments they pay for.

That’s the logic of power-over: One either dominates or eventually is dominated. The potential of a challenge from below means that no amount of power is enough; more always must be accumulated to ward off threats. Along the way, people pursuing these goals tend to justify the concentration of power as in the best interests of all; the enlightened ones with the power tell us that they will use it benevolently in the interests not just of themselves but also those less fortunate. All of human history argues against having faith in this power-seeking, with its accompanying hubris and self-delusion. But history is conveniently ignored by the powerful as they congratulate themselves on their vision and fortitude, while at the same time they work feverishly to propagandize the powerless, lest those below see the shell game for what it is and rebel.

It’s tempting to say that this power-over exercised on earth is illusory, that real power rests with God or on some other plane of existence. The problem, of course, is that the suffering caused by the exercise of power-over is not illusory and does not exist at some other level. It is felt by people and other living things in the here-and-now. The need to challenge power-seeking, domination, and injustice is not otherworldly but of this world. Still, it is not merely rhetorical to mark that power-over is dead power. It is ultimately the power of death, and also is a power that comes only to those whose souls are dead. The poet Muriel Rukeyser expressed clearly the nature of this power and why we should reject it:

Dead power is everywhere among us—in the forest, chopping down the songs; at night in the industrial landscape, wasting and stiffening a new life; in the streets of the city, throwing away the day. We wanted something different for our people: not to find ourselves an old, reactionary republic, full of ghost-fears, the fears of death and the fears of birth. We want something else. ³

We want something else, but our systems and institutions rarely provide it. Even the church itself, where we might assume we could find that “something else,” is mired in a domination/subordination dynamic. Much Christian theology is rooted in the idea that people are so inherently evil that we must subordinate ourselves to God, and then—convenient for church officials—to a calcified dogma and doctrine propagated by the church. It shouldn’t be surprising that this conception of Christianity coexists comfortably with the power-over exercised by the contemporary nation-state and corporation. These groups of elites—political, economic, religious—take for themselves the right to dominate in their arena, eyeing the other elites nervously, knowing they must collaborate with each other but always aware they also are in nervous competition in the struggle for primacy. Such is the nature of life, even for the ultra-privileged, in a power-over world.

We must give this kind of system its due: Clearly, a system based on power-over can be productive—it can extract resources from the earth and energy from people to produce a vast array of goods and services, which brings some benefits to some people. But just as clearly, such a system can never be truly creative—it cannot create a world in which all people flourish, create new ways of understanding, or create solutions to the problems power-over inevitably generates. Such flourishing, understanding, and problem-solving come not from power-over but from power-with, an understanding of power not based in assertions of independence and destructive dominance but in an embrace of interdependence and creative cooperation.

In a hyper-individualized society based on capitalism’s glorification of greed, it’s not surprising that an adolescent conception of selfish independence would define our political and economic institutions and dominate our cultural imagination. Of course the struggle for a certain kind of independence—being free from the imposition of power-over—is not a trivial matter; we see what inhumanity is possible when people are not truly free to act as individuals, and we know that independence at the personal level matters in our lives. Yet we all know that we are not independent beings but profoundly interdependent with each other, other organisms, and the non-living world. The task is to create a system that gives us freedom from the illegitimate authority that people and institutions attempt to impose on us, but recognizes our obligations to each other. One way to think through this is to imagine what a world would look like if power were not “over” but “with,” if we understood that our power can be magnified in collaboration with others.

Even in the midst of a capitalist economy structured on power-over, experiments in power-with go forward, such as worker cooperatives that are owned and controlled by members. The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives estimates that there are more than 300 such democratic workplaces in the United States, employing 3,500 people and generating about $400 million in annual revenues, mostly concentrated in the Northeast, West Coast and Upper Midwest. Worker cooperatives tend to create stable jobs, foster sustainable business practices, and support linkages among different segments of the community. The principles articulated by the federation capture the spirit behind, and organization of, cooperatives: voluntary and non-discriminatory open membership; control by members; equitable and democratic control of capital; commitment to education and training of members; cooperation with other cooperatives; and a commitment to sustainable community development.⁴

One exciting example of this model is Green Worker Cooperatives, which was established to incubate worker-owned and environmentally friendly cooperatives in the South Bronx. The first cooperative they launched, the ReBuilders Source, is a retail warehouse for surplus and salvaged building materials recovered from construction and demolition jobs. In the Green Worker Cooperatives’ own words:

Our approach is a response to high unemployment and decades of environmental racism. We don’t have the luxury to wait for new alternatives. That’s why we’re creating them. We believe that in order to address our environmental and economic problems we need new ways to earn a living that don’t require polluting the earth or exploiting human labor.⁵

For many, it’s Forhard to imagine working in institutions based on real cooperation because the society in which we live is structured on such a different notion. Yet if we think of experiences when we feel authentically most at home—not just our home with family, but with friends, in political groups, at church, in a community association—we typically feel powerful not because we can force people to do things or can ignore other people’s needs in our decisions; we feel powerful when we come together with others to create something we couldn’t have created alone.

Though it sounds paradoxical in this culture, this leads to an important insight:

We are most free when we are most bound to others.

When bonds are created under conditions of mutual respect and shared power, our freedom is deepened by such interdependence. Our strength is not sapped by these bonds but is enhanced by the emergent properties of collective human action. The individual efforts of numerous people cannot simply be added together and plugged into an equation to predict the outcome, but rather their simple actions come together in a collective result that is novel and irreducible. The most creative force does not come from a power, centralized either in one person or one institution and its bureaucracy, which imposes its will on others and treats people as inputs whose energy can be plugged into a formula for production. The most creative force comes from distributed power that channels the contributions of many into ends that people define collectively. This goes against the cultural icon of the heroic figure, who may enlist the help of others but, in the end, draws on a power that is individual and ultimately in conflict with other power in the world. Heroic figures typically are overrated, as those who are put in that role often understand. In Brecht’s play Galileo, the famed scientist’s assistant is devastated when Galileo recants his scientific beliefs under threat from the Inquisition. Andrea confronts Galileo: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo responds, “No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”⁶

1. The power-over/power-with distinction is usually credited to Mary Parker Follett, a theorist, political organizer, and social activist who wrote several influential books in the first half of the twentieth century. The terms are used today in a variety of academic, political, and business settings. I first encountered this term in discussions with feminist activists. For a review, see “Feminist Perspectives on Power,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 2005.
2. Quoted in Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 18-19.
3. Muriel Rukeyser, quoted in Adrienne Rich, What is Found There (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), page preceding preface. Originally published in The Life of Poetry (New York: Current Books, 1949).
4. United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, “About Worker Cooperatives.” See also, International Organization of Industrial, Artisan and Service Producers’ Cooperatives, “World Declaration on Cooperative Worker Ownership,” February 2004.
5. Green Worker Cooperative, “Advocating Zero Waste.”
6. Bertolt Brecht, Galileo (New York: Grove Press, 1940), p. 115.

The era of McCarthyism, one of many dark epochs of US history, clearly demonstrates that the political forces running the government were conservatism and right wing extremism. They are the very same elements that are tearing the nation and the world asunder today. Men like then Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and Ronald Reagan were manifestations of the syndrome of right wing extremism. Their fanatical neocon progeny are making the world a dangerous place today.

The McCarthy era was one of the most shameful of our young nation. Its value to the present, however, is that it permits a glimpse of the destructive forces that lurk behind the façade of democracy. These forces have always subverted the democratic process, discarded the will of the people, and run the nation for its own sinister purposes. This was a period in which liberal politics and progressivism, populist ideologies with socialist leanings, were openly under attack. In fact, liberals and progressives have been under constant assault in the US but rarely so openly and as blatantly as during McCarthyism.

Periodically, progressives, liberals, socialists and communists, were rounded up, divested of their constitutional rights, and imprisoned or executed. There were the notorious Palmer raids on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other revolutionary unions, the execution of organizers like Joe Hill, and the deportation of others, including Big Bill Haywood. Eugene Debs, a socialist union organizer, was imprisoned multiple times for his political views. The Haymarket Martyrs, who championed the cause of the eight hour work day, were hanged in Chicago for their anarchist ideology, framed for crimes they did not commit.

Rightly or wrongly, during the height of the civil rights marches of the 60s, Dr. King and his followers were associated with the Communist Party by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Functionalists have an extreme phobia of populist movements because, if successful, they would usurp their political power and disburse it among the people. In other words, neo-conservatives, and this includes virtually the entire Democratic Party of today, the neo-liberals, have an extreme fear of democracy.

Virtually all of today’s democrats do not deserve to be associated with the ideology of progressivism. Barely a handful of them are worthy of the liberal label. The traditional liberals, personified by the likes of Cynthia McKinney, were forced to leave the party. It is beyond absurd to think of President Obama as anything but a political conservative dressed in the garments of liberalism and masquerading as a man of the people. Obama’s voting record, his political appointments, the money trail, and his policy decisions reveal his true colors. So much for change we can believe in.

As significant as they are, such defining episodes of history are curiously absent from the narrative disseminated in the public education system. For most Americans, these episodes never happened. Indeed, anything that contradicts their obstinate belief in American democracy did not occur. Most Americans cannot wrap their languorous brains around these defining actions, and that is why current events, including 9-11, make so little sense to them: they lack historical context.

Indeed, as history attests, it has always been dangerous to be a progressive in this or any nation, and it still is. Since the people who wield the most political power were never struck down or divested of their ill-gotten influence, such episodes are certain to occur again. Imagine, if you can, a world in which polio had not been eradicated. This is why racism, sexism, and inequality, all characteristics of functionalist social theory, with its hybridized credo of neo- conservatism and neo-liberalism, flourish today; they were never eradicated and were allowed to spread.

Since the counter revolution ushered in during the interminably long Reagan years, it is wrongly perceived that progressivism in this nation is dead; that is wishful thinking on the part of the neocons and the corporate fascists who are running the show. The political left, occasionally a powerful revolutionary force for change in this nation, is currently disorganized and ineffectual, but it is not dead. And because it is not dead, it is likely to rise again in response to a future crisis. Some catalyzing event, such as an economic depression and massive job loss, is likely to revive it. This is arguably the only force capable of saving the republic, and much of the world, from self-annihilation.

Meanwhile, we must decide if it is worth salvaging.

I was fortunate, near the beginning of my journeys, to be instructed on this distinction: Do not ask if this person or that group might do an action; rather, ask if the action is done at all and how commonly, then take that as the basis for your answers to the particular. I think that we would have to agree that humans have regularly killed off other humans, both indirectly and directly, who stood in the way of attaining or maintaining a preferred life style.

Of course, that something can, or is even likely to, happen does not make it a certainty – especially when there are many other options. I would only point out that the horror of an action has seldom been an inhibition for very long. Other factors, such as efficacy and possibility, tend to dominate our choices.

My intention in making the argument is to excite an increased and refocused observation of events. If the tools for such a mass murder are made available, then the condition of possibility is met. If the totality of our situation is hopeless, then so is the condition of efficacy.

As a species, with the capacity to project events into the unknown future and thus change the future from the grubby confines of the present, we are not fixed in our trajectory; this is one of the great lessons of the Consciousness System of Order. It is a bit like the silly rhyme: ‘I shot an arrow into the air. It fell to earth, I know not where.’ But, if we have some knowledge of the lay of the land, we can have, at least, some idea about where our arrows might land and their possible consequences.

One of the paths into the mid-century and beyond would have all humans living with a primary concession to the biophysical reality of personal biological need: every person would supply, by their own hand, some significant part of their personal needs. Such a standard could, with yet another ‘invisible hand’ determine population goals, energy use levels and, to some extent, environmental impact levels. The intellectual support for this possibility is largely lacking in our present moment. There are bits in the kinder parts of major religions. Various philosophers have for thousands of years spoken to the value in living in close contact with the land – this is such a common part of human thought that it has become cliché. It is cliché because it is so simply and completely true.

The diametrically opposed possibility is something with which humanity has more recent experience: an elite parasitizing a slave-based economy (wage-slave based economy serves the same function and only modifies some of the technicalities of economic design). We have the “intellectual” arguments around this possibility, from Locke, Hume, Marx, Rand, Hayek, Galbraith and many others, and only arguments of this form are allowed to be considered for our present troubles. The organization and manipulation of power in a Mad world structure where all things increase at increasing rates and Reality is denied as a founding principle cannot sustain, but can produce a great amount of bizarre, conflicting opinion.

Ultimately, it is a question of whether the great depth of our Madness will carry us into a final conflict with biophysical reality – a madman flaying at imaginary demons while being tormented by a disinterested reality to which he is blind – or will we come again into the wind and the rain, into the seasons, cycles and other realities of earthly existence?

My sensible reason answers that the Madness will dominate the final days of this iteration of my species, that over the next 30 to 80 years we will cling to the most misguided and defeating self-referenced notions of reality until a tormented and enraged environment indiscriminately smites the living world – and we will still behave badly even in the ruins of our world.

But my capacity of imagination and wonder believes, in the way that the consciousness order designs impossible ‘possibilities,’ that we can come to see the madness and demand its retreat; the way that smokers now have to hide next to the dumpster in the back of the building. We will no longer hear that we respect wealth and see its virtues, but that we respect the real “self-sufficiency” of community life, and not the pathological individualism of the sociopath. We will no longer praise as progress the life denying objects that separate us from the work of directly sustaining, and therefore participating in and truly understanding, our lives. We will no longer raise to adulation those who are willing to do the most harm to all things, but condemn their actions and require that they be part of the sanity of sustaining their own existence with their own efforts. We will no longer accept a machinery of societal, economic and political control that claims superiority of idea, power and personal omniscience, but see such claims as self-servingly insane.

Just as it is “impossible” to comprehend how billions of people could be intentionally killed to sustain the present Madness, it is impossible to see how we might come to see the Madness with increasing clarity; and in seeing it find and act on ways to reject it. But ultimately we will end up doing one or the other.

(This is last in a series of four essays that that look at the forms of the choices that face us as we look toward this new century.)

2) We don’t have souls and don’t go anywhere but into the ground to be eaten by worms when we die. Let’s bravely acknowledge that fact.

3) Quit contending that global warming isn’t real. Except for discredited, charlatan “scientists” of the kind who promote Intelligent Design, the overwhelming majority of truly qualified experts agree that manmade greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet. Conservatives can’t bring themselves to admit that “liberals” and United Nations types could ever be correct about anything, so they nay-say, sit on their hands, and would allow their grandchildren (and ours) to ultimately perish, fearfully gasping for precious breath.

4) Nationalism sucks. Belief that one’s own country is better or more important than all others has generated massively destructive jingoism and xenophobia through the ages. Combined with religion, it’s been the chief cause of war for bloody centuries. Join me in pledging to never take up arms against anyone on bogus pretexts — or to imagine them inferior, “evil,” etc. — just because they live beyond the ocean, look strange, and have unfamiliar customs.

5) Let’s jettison monopoly capitalism, which is so parasitically harmful that it makes a starving vampire bat seem benign. If we the people took over the economy, democratically controlling it for public profit and common gain, we’d never get robbed at the gas pump again, pay an arm and a leg for medical care or prescription drugs, lose our homes to usurious mortgage thieves, or get sent off to die in meddling neocons’ criminal invasions abroad. Fire the boss! Become a fair-minded owner of America, along with your fellow workers and neighbors!

6) Stop bashing immigrants. Each of our own arriving ethnic groups was accused by existing nativists of stealing jobs, being a societal drain, having criminal and otherwise unsavory tendencies, or spreading disease, just as mostly Hispanic immigrants are condemned today. Such successive discrimination plainly benefited divide-and-conquer corporate profiteers. It was only when ethnicities, races, and genders united — understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all — that the overall U.S. working class made decisive advances and acquired a mutually better living standard.

7) Admit that nothing worthwhile comes from conservatism. It’s abject selfishness masquerading as a valid ideology. Its sole purpose is to perpetuate minority privilege attained through illegitimate power wielded against consequently suffering masses. Conservatives will never utter the word “justice,” for it’s a shattering indictment of their consistently exploitative role in human affairs. Everything good has been fiercely resisted by the political Right: abolishing slavery and child labor, gaining women’s suffrage, struggling to achieve racial equality, raising the minimum wage, implementing progressive taxation, establishing health and safety standards in the workplace and the community at large, just to name a few.

8) Accept that, while abortion isn’t pretty, it’s often necessary. Furthermore, only each female in each specific, unique circumstance has the right to determine what constitutes a legitimate abortion need. No male, or male-dominated institution, should interfere in this most personal and difficult choice. Before guys say one word about the supposed impropriety of terminating an unacceptable pregnancy, they should produce ironclad guarantees about controlling their reckless libidos and keeping their penises in their pants, if that’s where they’re told they should remain.

9) Repeat after me: “Better gay than grumpy.” The only problem with homosexuality is that some straights, insecure about their own orientation, get uptight over it. Most animal species engage in same-sex contact on a minority basis. Therefore it isn’t “unnatural,” just different, and entirely involuntary, like being left-handed rather than right. Besides, aren’t the last six words of the Pledge of Allegiance “with liberty and justice for all”? Quit being hypocrites and get aboard the freedom train!

10) To nurture the collective human spirit, which is quite different than a religious “soul,” think less about what you can personally acquire, in a material sense. Instead, join struggles for shared prosperity. Know that the greatest reward is giving a deprived child reason to laugh. Honor and guard our earthly home. Lie down beside a blade of grass and contemplate its simple magnificence. Then, when relentless age takes its final toll, buy the farm with a contented smile. You lived well. You did the right thing.

Feed those worms and help make that grass grow!

Which is to say that Mr. Lukacs sees signs of America’s decadence all around: academics who neither buy nor read books, the widespread decline of serious reading, “the rapid deterioration of attention, the nervous constriction of its span,” an “unwillingness to think,” the rise of pictorial culture (a new “Dark Ages of symbols, pictures, images, abstractions”), and, most ominously, the emergence of a militaristic political conservatism in the United States.

He notes: “In 1950 there was not one American public or political or academic or intellectual figure who declared himself a ‘conservative.’ By 1980 more Americans declared themselves ‘conservatives’ than ‘liberals.’” Accompanying this rise of political conservatism was a “militarization of the popular imagination” that abetted the replacement of normal patriotism with aggressive nationalism.

Relying upon such ugly nationalism, the President and Vice President who occupied the White House prior to the Obama administration believed “that going in Iraq and crushing its miserable dictator in a quick war would be popular, resounding to the great and enduring advantage to…[their] reputation and to the Republican Party’s dominance in the foreseeable future. There have been many American presidents who had chosen to go to war for different reasons: but I know of no [other] one who chose to go to war to enhance his popularity.”

Sick, but widespread, American nationalism also goes far to explain why the opinion elite, the mainstream news media and the misinformed public would lend their support to an unprovoked, illegal, and thus evil, war of aggression. It wasn’t the behavior one would expect from a civilized people.

(Writing about the fate of liberalism in the United States, Mr. Lukacs asserts, “Ten years after the 1960s it was just about dead. It belonged to the past; it had nothing more to achieve; it was exhausted. Its tasks had been done.” Unfortunately, Last Rites is silent about America’s recent economic collapse and the overwhelming decision by America’s voters to elect a liberal, Barack Obama, to direct its recovery and, perhaps, its transformation.)

Nevertheless, Last Rights leaves much to be desired, especially when compared with two recent and exceptionally thoughtful books by Mr. Lukacs — Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred and George Kennan: A Study in Character. Beyond the swan songs, it’s a watered-down goulash containing sketches of his life in Chester County, Pennsylvania, tender memories of his native Hungary and brief vignettes capturing the loving and lovely essence of each of his three wives. It also is weakly seasoned by Mr. Lukacs’ poorly reasoned epistemological “grand truth,” which he presents in Chapter One: “A Bad Fifteen Minutes.”

Knowledge, according to Mr. Lukacs, is neither objective nor subjective, but always personal and participant. “Every person has four relationships: with God, with himself, with other human beings, and with other living beings.” Moreover, our knowledge is participant, because there cannot be “a separation of the knower from the known.”

Although Mr. Lukacs acknowledges that matter existed before the human mind, its preexistence is meaningless, because “without the human mind we cannot think of its ‘existence’ at all. In this sense it may be argued that Mind preceded and may precede Matter (or: what we see and then call matter).”

Going further, Mr. Lukacs concludes: (1) “What happens is what people think happens.” Thus, he denies the possibility of “objective” history. Yet, inconsistently, he objects to those who define history as “the narration of actions worth remembering.” Worse, he insists, “every person is a historical person.” (How about the millions of persons over the ages, who have died without leaving a trace?)

Mr. Lukacs also insists, “The human mind intrudes into causality, into the relation of causes and effects.” For Mr. Lukacs, this conclusion — famously demonstrated by Heisenberg – leads to another: science is little more than a “probabilistic kind of knowledge with its own limits.”

Now, I also have doubts about science, and not only about quantum physics. We’ve yet to satisfactorily explain how life originated on earth. Moreover, my mind reels when I read that within the first one-thousandth of a second after the big bang, a particle smaller than an atom expanded instantaneously to the size of a galaxy.

Yet, “uncertainty” with regard to quantum physics, the origin of life or even the scientific working backward from the expanding universe to the big bang hardly justifies doubt about whether water is H2O and it certainly does not support Mr. Lukacs, when he asserts: “When I, a frail and fallible man, say that every morning the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west, I am not lying. I do not say that a Copernican or post-Copernican astronomer, stating the opposite, that the earth goes around the sun, is lying…But my commonsense experience about the sun and the earth is both prior to and more basic than any astronomer’s formula.”

Thus, when Mr. Lukacs further asserts, “the known and visible and measurable conditions of the universe are not anterior but consequent to our existence and to our consciousness,” he believes that he has eviscerated the “Copernican/Keplerian/Galilean/Cartesian/Newtonian discovery” that removed both man and the earth from the center of the universe. Yet, he’s accomplished no such thing. Newton’s law of universal gravitation continues to bring to earth every consciousness convinced that it can remain aloft forever. Moreover, the brick wall will have its say, notwithstanding the fearless consciousness of every man determined to run through it. In a word, the “known” demands due respect from the “knower.”

This has enormous implications for man’s freedom, a matter Mr. Lukacs barely mentions. Ask any technophobe who has suffered through the upgrade of a computer program and subsequently found himself compelled to learn new ways to accomplish the same old tasks. He’ll tell you that he felt like a helpless slave, subject to a new program (and, thus, the whims or insights of some distant technician). Yet, as the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev observed, virtually every type of “objectivized” knowledge poses such a threat to man’s freedom.

In his book, Slavery and Freedom, Berdyaev defined objectivized knowledge as “the most ‘objective’ in the sense of verified truth.” Thus, “the most objectivized knowledge is mathematical. It is the most universally binding and it is the concern of the whole of civilized mankind. But it is the most remote of all from human existence, from knowledge of the meaning and value of human existence.”

Before Mr. Lukacs, it was Berdyaev (following Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky) who asserted the primacy of the conscious subject over the created object. But, unlike Mr. Lukacs, Berdyaev also explained how the conscious subject often enslaves himself by falling “into the power of the exteriorization” — the objectivized knowledge — he has created.

(It was Dostoevsky’s famously rebellious “Underground man,” who boldly asserted man’s freedom, when he observed: “Consciousness…is infinitely higher than two times two.”)

Finally, Mr. Lukacs’ epistemological grand truth must be faulted for failing to subject his own Christian faith to the same “crucible of doubt” (as Dostoyevsky called it) that he employs to attack the claims made by science.

Crucible of doubt? Yes. Consider the work of Harold Bloom who asserts, in his book, Jesus and Yahweh: “There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews, unless (and it is unlikely) the General Epistle of James truly is by James his brother, rather than one of James’s followers.”

Crucible of doubt? Yes. Consider the story of the “virgin birth” found in Matthew and Luke. According to biblical scholar, Paula Fredriksen, “The tradition that Jesus’ mother was a virgin…draws on a prophecy available only in the Greek version of Isaiah 7:14: In the original Hebrew, the word that stands behind the Septuagint’s parthenos, “virgin,” is aalmah, “young girl.” [Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, p. 27].

Crucible of doubt? Yes. Consider the world’s foremost New Testament scholar, the late Thomas Metzger, who examined virtually all of the New Testament witnesses (sources) and tells us that “the last twelve verses of Mark (xvi. 9-20) are lacking in the two earliest parchment codices.” Thus, he concluded, “Mark was not responsible for the composition of the last twelve verses of the generally current form of the Gospel.” Yet, it is those twelve verses that tell us about the risen Jesus first appearing to Mary Magdalene and, subsequently, to the eleven – to whom he said “go into the world and preach the gospel to every creature.”

Crucible of doubt? Yes. Consider the exceptional work of America’s foremost Jesus historian, John Dominic Crossan. Writing in his book, The Birth of Christianity, Crossan informs us that that it was not at all unusual in the Greco-Roman world for humans to believe that a holy spirit or god could join with a human to produce offspring. Thus, back then, the story of the Holy Spirit and Mary had nothing on The Aeneid (the epic story in which the union of the Trojan, Anchises, with the goddess Aphrodite results in the birth of Aeneas), or the birth of the historical figure, Augustus, whose mother, Atia, supposedly was impregnated by Apollo. (Does anyone, today, actually believe that Apollo impregnated Atia?)

Concerning Jesus’ resurrection, Crossan notes that, even today, it’s not all uncommon for those grieving a recent death to feel an “intuitive, sometimes overwhelming ‘presence’ or ’spirit’ of the lost person.” Thus, when one considers the fact that people crucified around Jerusalem were rarely buried in private tombs — because “it was actually nonburial that made being crucified alive one of the three supreme penalties of Roman punishment” — there’s good reason to question pseudo-Mark’s claim that Mary Magdalene saw an empty tomb and was the first to see the risen Jesus. (Crossan even goes so far as to assert that Mark “created” the story of Jesus’ burial by Joseph of Arimathea.)

Crucible of doubt? Yes. New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, writing in Lost Christianities, notes the following contradictions within the Gospels: “Did Jesus die during the afternoon before the Passover meal was eaten, as in John (see 19:14), or during the morning afterwards, as in Mark (see 14:12, 22; 15:25)? Did Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt after Jesus’ birth as in Matthew (2:13-23), or did they return to Nazareth as in Luke (2:39)? Was Jairus’s daughter sick and dying when he came to ask Jesus for help as in Mark (6:23, 25), or had she already died, as in Matthew (9:18)? After Jesus’ resurrection, did the disciples stay in Jerusalem until he had ascended into heaven, as in Luke (24:1 – 52), or did they straightaway go to Galilee, as in Matthew (28:1 – 20)?”

If Mr. Lukacs is aware of such evidence, it hasn’t prevented him from asserting that “the coming of Christ to earth may have been the central event of the universe: that the most consequential event in the entire universe occurred here, on this earth two thousand years ago.”

Yet, beyond his failure to subject his Christian faith to the crucible of doubt he employs against the claims of science, Mr. Lukacs also knows that he is vulnerable to being hoisted by his own “grand truth” petard — which is why he feebly asserts: “But God is more than our invention. And to those who think that God is nothing but our invention my question is: Why? What makes human being s want such an invention? Is it not that a spark of God may exist within us?”

Such flaws in Last Rites render it a disappointing valedictory from such an erudite and accomplished gentleman.

I can smell it. The nation’s preachers are out in full force. First, there was President Obama telling us we needed to have a great race healing. Now, Attorney-General Eric Holder comes out to tell us we’re still segregated. We work together, but then we live and play by ourselves in segregated groups. We’re all cowards when it comes to race, says Holder.

Holder might have had a point and so might Obama had they spoken at any other time…and in any other way. But frankly the only segregation that really matters now is the segregation of the political class and its clients from the rest of us. It doesn’t matter which neighborhood you live in, black, white, brown or parti-colored – they all spell b-r-o-k-e the same way.

Barack Obama is a likeable guy. Not for one minute do I believe that he ’s doing anything but the best he can. He’s sincere.

That may just be the trouble. It seems to be the delusion of societies to think they lack precisely what they have too much of. C.S. Lewis said as much. Cultures awash with hedonism believe themselves puritanically repressed; societies long lost to any orthodoxy fear religious dogma; and now with race at the center of talk shows and college seminars, of gym etiquette and prison protocol, we’re told that more race-talk is what we need.

Is it?

Do we really need to spend more time spewing what we think of each other like inbred cousins on a Jerry Springer show? Jerry used to be my vacuum time, so I actually know how those things ended – in a scrum of tattoos and ripped shirts, fake hair and flying cusses.

If that’s togetherness, a bit of segregation might be more civil.

And a bit of proportion might be more sensible.

We can call it segregation today, but I wonder what people segregated a century ago would think about that. Students clustered in groups of their own choosing are not terrified men and women fleeing dogs and police batons.

Actually, you don’t need to go back a century. You can find the same thing today in prisons, at non-violent demonstrations, wherever people are rounded up and snatched out of their houses. The victims are black, brown and white. And they’re not where they are because we don’t talk enough about race in this country. They’re there because we don’t talk enough about the state.

I’m almost afraid to write this way because any criticism of the current shibboleths about race is apt to get you into trouble. Many people, for instance, think we should hear out any African-American voice on race, without dissent. It seems like the decent thing to do after their history of oppression in this country. So African-Americans get race and soul, much as Indians get non-violence and yoga, Native Americans get medicine-men and beads, the Chinese get martial arts and acupuncture…and the Irish get shamrocks, booze and dreadful childhoods.

This we call authentic. Lived experience makes for credibility, we tell ourselves.

Maybe so.

But from another perspective it looks a lot like segregation too. Intellectual segregation. If African Americans get to talk to us about race, and only race, then we don’t really have to listen to them on anything else. Conversation becomes a fairly predictable thing with each party trotting out the lines allowed to them…and the rest of us compelled to sit through it because we’ve learned that to question might taint us as bigots, haters, mean-spirited, bitter, resentful, and any of the carefully chosen buzz words that police the boundaries of polite discourse.

Mr. Holder worries about college students picking whom they want to sit next to at lunch. He wonders why we should be integrated at our workplaces but set apart in our play-time and in our living.

But that’s no mystery.

It’s precisely when we’re focused on things outside our group identities that those identities recede into the background. When someone’s throwing me a rope to get me out of a burning house, neither of us has much time for thinking about skin colors or nose shapes. We’re more interested in making sure we escape without being scorched to a crisp. Should we survive, we’ll feel kindly to each other. Our differences might even become a plus. If anything goes wrong, we might blame it on those differences. But at least, we’ll still focus on what we accomplished or didn’t accomplish as human beings.

What I mean is this: at work, in school, on a team, race recedes quite naturally into the background. If you doubt it, ask why integration took place first on the battle-field and on the sports-field.

It’s in our off-time, with no task at hand, that race begins to loom as a problem. And not only race. Gender, age, occupation, class, religion – any of these can become trouble. It usually takes some strong belief to paper over the trouble.

Now, in America religious beliefs are – at least, theoretically – banished from the public sphere. The rationale is that they’re too different to live together peaceably. And among political beliefs, the most American of them – the belief in individuals and free markets – is, at least theoretically, at odds with a strong notion of the public sphere. That tends to leave us more fragmented than smaller, more cohesive societies. That’s the way it is with multi-ethnic, multi-cultural empires

With common purpose absent, all that’s left to us is affirmation of process. Which is why constitutionality becomes paramount in America.

But even constitutionality can’t be unhinged entirely from common purpose or common meaning. Because, if there’s no point to a process, all things become equally point-less.

Or, to put it another way, equally point-ed; they are meant only to score points.

That is to say, a process devoid of an underlying common meaning tends to become purely and entirely political; it’s only rationale is to produce whatever results we want at the moment.

So, when we get rid of purpose, in sneaks production. Not production driven from the bottom by demand. This production is driven from the top, by planning.

And so you get the commissar. And the clients of the commissar.

You get the corporate-state.

In the corporate-state, getting what you want is all that matters, and the words by which you get what you want, the words by which you score points and keep score, are not conversations among citizens. They’re slogans intended to scatter the herd hither and thither or drive it from this point to that.

Words in the corporate-state become forms of coercion. We’re fed language whose purpose is less to bind us together in common humanity as it is to drive us where we cannot truthfully be led.

It is a language of fraud. It is propaganda.

It is the language of empire.

An empire that has to keep its white, black and brown citizens, its Christians, Jews and Muslims, its men and women, its poor, middling and rich, constantly focused on the most divisive things about them, in order to keep them from focusing on what might actually bring them together – the task at hand.

We may or may not be cowards about race, Mr. Holder. But we’re far bigger cowards about facing up to the way race is used in politics in this country today:

   as a red herring – to distract

   as a red rag – to goad

   as a red light – commanding us to stop and go no further.

No amount of preacher talk can hide that. No amount of cant about race should stop us from talking about the one thing we do need to talk more about: the nature and goal of the state power under which we live today.