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State of Apocalyptic Nature: A Contract with Gaia

April 15, 2019

State of Apocalyptic Nature: A Contract with Gaia

As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes.

The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended. – Hegel

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and most recently Rawls have all been exemplary practitioners of contract theory.

As is well known, all four of these political theorists began with a particular conception of the state of nature or put into other words man’s original existential situation prior to all forms of government or social contract.

In each case, the state of nature is pre-historical because pre-political.

How each thinker viewed man’s primary condition dictated the course of their further arguments concerning humanity’s fundamental political decisions and actions.

This profound intellectual tradition led most famously to the political beliefs and institutions that founded the United States (at least in theory if not in future practice) and later supplied the world, in part through the consequences of the French Revolution, with today’s democratic principles and ideals especially as they relate to Universal Human Rights.

Although, practically speaking, the fruits of contract theory have by no means been fully applied they nonetheless have provided and arguably still provide the intellectual and spiritual resources for critical projects of reform and even revolution.

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Declare a Green War Now!

January 29, 2019

Declare a Green War Now!

Struggle has brought man into being.

Struggle against nature, against other humans, within himself.

Today it is no different.

The task now set before us is gargantuan transformation. Nothing less is required than changing humanity’s social and economic relationship to the planet.

The good news is that more and more people are aware and willing to pay the price of necessary change.

While some look to the stars to usher in a new age, others realize that the stars are still too far away. And in any case, there certainly will not be enough time to reach them if we do not fundamentally transform relationships here on earth.

Ironically, the much feared outbreak of World War Three has already begun; the planet has long since declared war on mankind.

Thus, it is time to declare a national emergency and to take the necessary steps to combat our present inimical, unsustainable state of technology and organization.

A defining feature of humanity has been the nature of its use of earth’s resources. In a sense, the history of man has been the story of the unfolding of the changing energy making regimes under which he has lived. We have lived through wood, coal, oil, and uranium. Now we seek the establishment of a new energy regime consisting of wind, sun, water, and (someday hopefully) fusion. We have the technological, organizational, and economic means to successfully accomplish this epochal transformation. What is momentarily lacking is an acute global political will.

Protest and publication of the issues at stake must increase as they indeed do on an almost daily basis. Political organization on a local, national, and global scale is both essential and practical given our new means of media.

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Slip of the Imperial Mask

January 10, 2019

Slip of the Imperial Mask

O’Reilly then said about Putin: “But he’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”

Trump responded: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”–Feb 4, 2017

I remember the day well. It was the day when the leader “of the free world” gave a hint of the true state of affairs in that allegedly “free” world.

To this day I’m not sure why he said it. Why would Trump give free ideological ammunition against his own empire? Certainly not out of a feeling of remorse or some sense of historical justice. More likely then it was perhaps as a thinly veiled threat to those, worldwide, who would seek to oppose him? Something like: “You know what we are and we’re so powerful that we no longer even fear publicly telling you up front about it”.

Yes, on that day President Trump punctured the still pervasive “myth of American innocence”.A topic which has been profusely written about by Noam Chomsky among others.

American hands are dirty. They drip with blood. They are an Orwellian power continuously existing through totalitarian contradictions. Their carefully constructed mask of freedom, hides the most insidious forms of slavery.

But they are not alone. To maintain an Empire one needs allies. And these they have in abundance. They are not just the globalized elites who rule the world but any who manage to benefit and prosper through their rule. Thus American Empire is not just an elite phenomenon but, crucially, a class cutting one. Witness the recent election and massive support for Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, a cliched American puppet that doesn’t even seek to hide that fact egoistically trumpeting his facsimile to Trump. Even here in once radicalized Brazil, Empire is no longer afraid to proudly speak its name.

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Thinking about American Totalitarianism

January 1, 2019

Thinking about American Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism evolves.

Yet what remains the same through time is the attempt at total control.

Today, control is veiled not overt.

Control weaves its way both totally and surgically into our everyday lives.

Totally, in the master narrative it weaves about “living in a democracy”.

Today, no one lives in a true democracy.

Elections, parties, political personalities are all fraudulent constructions hiding real power.

The media and the entertainment industry are focused on creating a consumerist-nationalist imaginary where shopping and waving the flag are effective daily remedies to ward off any uncomfortable existential doubts.

Both business and the nation still reign in the hearts and minds of millions as the “true Gods”.

The revolution of the “multitude” is far, far away.

Empire, American Empire, is neither setting, fading, or waning. On the contrary, its tentacles stretch throughout every conceivable path and production of biopower.

The expansion of American power that began in earnest after the Great War has continued unabated.

The world is more American now than it has ever been.

Surgically, America through its unrivaled mastery of technology, organization, and capital can pick and choose the actors and actions it wills to manipulate or eliminate.

American global networks of surveillance and suppression have grown and deepened. The threat of world revolution and terror are convenient stories to both mobilize and mesmerize the multitude.

A Hitler and/or a Bin-Laden will always conveniently appear when needed.

Consumption, in all its forms, is the only ideology and it is highly effective since it is based on basic biological processes. The pleasure centers of the brain have lent themselves to the construction of a life of bodily gratification. Thus the ideological celebration of the body has become the new ideological prison of the mind. Nietzsche’s “last man” is the middling subject of our present day totalitarianism.

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The New Politics of Climate Change

October 19, 2018

The New Politics of Climate Change

As climate change accelerates, the political environment will start to boil. It’s happening already.

More and more ordinary people are beginning to connect the dots between extreme weather, rising climate related death tolls, collapsing ecosystems, refugee/resource crises, and other grave anomalies.

The political outcome of all this will either be a reactionary or progressive response.

On the reactionary side, the tendency will be to put up strong national defenses and seek out convenient sacrificial lambs such as migrants and refugees. It will attempt a screeching halt to cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and globalism.

On the progressive side, either some of the old parties will broadly transform themselves or new parties, such as the Greens, will seize new ground. Here the tendency would ideally be to aggressively endeavor to bring about a rapid phase of global/local decarbonization combined with generously funded technological-ecological innovation whether geoengineered or otherwise.

Whether we choose the former or the latter, will in large part be due to whoever has the greater political will as well as the power to transform that will into effective organizations.

In Europe, particularly in Germany, the Green party is beginning to show that something like this can and might be done effectively.

In the United States, both mainstream parties have yet to show a serious concern, other than mouthing platitudes, about the potential catastrophic threat to long term health and wealth.

Due to the two-party system in the United States, the Greens have a formidable barrier to political entry to confront. However, either a shake up in their party leadership or, better yet, a defection of a major political figure (such as Bernie Sanders) to their camp would definitely help their cause.

But if the US Greens are ever to have a chance at power of any kind, now is the time for action.

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Axiom of Uncertainty

July 11, 2018

Axiom of Uncertainty

It’s simple. Given that there might well be an absolute nature/structure of the universe and our perhaps fundamentally limited cognitive position/abilities within it can we be certain that we can be sure about the true nature of anything? Can there be fundamental forces, matter, and material relationships of which we will never know?

While unanswerable in principle, the mere possibility of such an epistemological situation has many consequences.

Firstly, it considerably lets out the air out of our current secular hubris.

Science and technology have given us what is perhaps a false impression of our own cognitive and technical omnipotence. While we rightly marvel at what we have achieved during the last five centuries, it does not necessarily give us the right to think that we can, even theoretically, master and understand all that there is.

Would it be so far fetched to think that the human mind, both as it is now and will be in the future, will always be limited in what it can know?

Although we cannot even judge the actual probability of such a proposition it should nevertheless give us pause while constructing brash anthropocentric scenarios which inflate our own importance within the universe.

If we stop to consider the possible theoretical implications of this axiom of uncertainty we will quickly realize that we may never know more than a part, even just a small part of existence past, present, and future.

Of course that does not mean we should stop trying to know all we can.

On the other hand, it does mean that we should be far more circumspect when offering explanations about everything whether scientific, political, or religious.

In each of these domains, we may, it might turn out, be far off the mark.

Yet, the deeper point is that according to the above axiom we can never know for sure.

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A Failing Nation

June 28, 2018

A Failing Nation

What are the necessary elements for the success of a modern nation state?

According to one justifiably popular and well-written book, Why Nations Fail, it all has to do with inclusive political and economic institutions which foster technological change which in turn leads to increasing prosperity for the many.

Two key aspects upholding such institutions are a strong centralized state and the rule of law. Without these two, a nation cannot hope to advance socially, politically, or economically.

The negative of this rosy picture are nations which maintain and promote extractive political and economic institutions which serve the interests of a narrow elite.

Both cases, the inclusive and the extractive, tend to reinforce themselves through time by a process known as institutional drift. This is an historical tendency for institutions to maintain, strengthen, and reproduce themselves over time similar to the biological processes involved in genetic drift.

Importantly the authors also take the time to mention Robert Michel’s seminal idea concerning the iron law of oligarchy which explains the historically documented tendency that large, complex organizations of any kind (democratic, socialist, conservative) fall under the sway of a small elite exercising absolute if cosmetically hidden power.

Our authors optimistically suggest that this law is not destiny and can be sufficiently controlled by ever expanding democratic institutions in civil society.

Opposed to this buoyant idea of increasing mass prosperity and political participation is Francis Fukuyama’s discussion of Neo-Paternalism in his thought provoking magnum opus The Origins of Political Order.

In short, much like the earlier Michel, Fukuyama sees present day democracies drifting towards ever more nepotistic patterns of behavior where elites seize power and reward and distribute the fruits of that power to their close associates within their networks of influence.

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Kafka Warned Us

September 7, 2017

Kafka Warned Us

Photo by Sébastien Bertrand | CC BY 2.0

Kafka’s The Trial can be read in retrospect as a prelude to the Twentieth/Twenty-First century. Although probably not written as prophecy, Kafka’s short unfinished book nevertheless provides a road map to the terrors of the current Surveillance State.

As readers of CounterPunch are all too familiar, modern man, as a single individual, is at the mercy of the modern state and those who, lurking in semi-secrecy, direct it.

Kafka’s The Trial superbly conveys the unease of our current existential situation.

Early one morning, The Trial’s main protagonist, Joseph K, awakes to find that, totally unexpectedly, he has been arrested. Throughout the book he endeavors to find the reason for his arrest without any definite success.

However, what he does discover is a vast semi-secret bureaucracy/organizaton whose inner workings and outward displays of power and decision making remain opaque at best.

Initally, Joseph K, believes that he lives in a “Rechtsstaat” (a state where the rule of law is respected) and thus where it is expected that all civilized norms and laws are upheld.

Yet, he soon comes to see that he has lived in a state of fundamental error and illusion about the true nature of his existence.

What appeared to him as a well ordered and just state is, all of a sudden, revealed to be a capricious omnipotent octopus capable of strangling (in this case literally) anyone deemed to be, for whatever reason, expendable.

All law is suspended or, at least, made a mockery of. All that remains are the inner, turgid demands of power.

Joseph K. is convinced of his innocence. But his conviction is no match for the monolithic power that stands against him. He is eventually crushed, if not by his enemy’s repetitive legal machinations, then by his fatalistic far-reaching administrative power.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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