“Any Awareness Your Ideology Isn’t Working Gets Shoved Aside…” John Michael Greer

“[I]f the ideology you’ve embraced tells you that you have to believe completely in it for it to work, any awareness that it’s not working gets shoved aside as an obstacle to success.”

John Michael Greer: The Long Descent (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society, 2008).

Pp 63

“Are the three-dimensional archipelagos of apartheid-style splintering, connection, fortification, and militarization, so palpable in Gaza and the West Bank, a grim exemplar of the future? Will the blurring of internal and external archipelagos of exception fatally ‘unbundle’ the role of nation-states as the key economic and fiscal building blocks of global capitalism? Will affluent cities and sectors of cities gradually secede and de-link from the residualized territories and people surrounding them – in a generalized version of the exploitative, tightly controlled relationship of, say, Singapore and its hinterlands in Malaysia and Indonesia? Will transnational structures of policing, surveillance and law enforcement continue to strengthen, to the extent that they eclipse or swallow the legacies of national security states? How will the splintering, fragmentation and polarization enforced by the new military urbanism be reflected in, and sustained by, the politics, civil societies and landscapes of the word’s burgeoning cities? Whither the ideas of national citizenship in such a context?”

Stephen Graham: Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. (New York: Nation Books 2009)

pp. 143

“As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the cor- porate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race re- quires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon cor- ruption of that system, it is up to the individu- als to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the pro-

cess is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assem- bled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an ille- gal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Execu- tives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and dis- crimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming sys- tem through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, con- finement, and cruel treatment of countless ani- mals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip em- ployees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut work- ers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the

culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have de- liberately declined to recall faulty products en- dangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have pro- duced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or pro- vide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to mur- der prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the tor- ture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass

destruction in order to receive government contracts.

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to ad- dress the problems we face, and generate solu- tions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard! Occupy Wall Street”

— October 4 

GUERRILLA COMICS: A Light Went Off In My Head

We of a certain age and generational experience know the expression “A light went on in my head.” We even remember a little cartoon bubble drawn over a head, with a little light bulb in it and jagged rays around it, depicting in cartoon a light, literally, going on, in a head. We may actually have “changed” actual “bulbs,” as some of us have “changed” actual “tires.” A light going off may have been depicted differently.

Now, lights bulbs may be going off in our heads all the time. All sorts of things may have been going off in our heads. We suspect that this is what is happening when things get a bit dimmer, our speech gets a little fuzzier, and the thought we were just shaping evaporates, and we just know we’re not getting it back. We also think we have some idea what we experience when flash-bulbs go off in our heads. Maybe the woman meant a flash-bulb. That’s scary, though. I’m not sure I would be talking about that on NPR. Flash-bulbs did used to “go off,” you know. Not like digitally, or whatever. Like when gunshots ”go off. ” In our heads. You know?

“The Obama Administration Is At The Charity Of The Powers That Be:” Jonathan Schell

“The Obama administration exhibited its overall signature flaw in caricature: It is embedded with (let’s say this straight: in bed with) the powers that be. Well meaning, it begins by taking those powers –the commanding heights of society- as given, immovable. Then it starts to bargain. (On healthcare, it begins with Big Pharma, o finance with Wall Street, on war with the top generals –above all David Petrraeus.) Then when the administration is duly handed its half- or quarter-loaf – the stripped-down healthcare plan, the eviscerated financial regulations, the soft date for withdrawal from Afghanistan bought with the surge in troop levels- it’s at the charity of these powers.”

Jonathan Schell. The Revolutionary Moment. In The Nation, 21 February 2011

If you are a “True Believer” in centrism, what is the nature of your beliefs? What about your doubts? Centrism may not really exist. Moderation may be an illusion.

What do centrists positively and affirmatively believe? Maybe not much more than that we should all (or mostly) vote for them. Or maybe they genuinely believe that we should avoid any organized and consistent policies. We have seen what this means. But often so-called “moderation” is a posture assumed for deception. To conceal a deeper purpose- conservative and extreme.

“[It is] bogus “objectivity” or bland centrism that always locates truth equidistant from two points…”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason. Pantheon Books, New York. 2008. pp xvi.

A “midpoint” between two differing perspectives, narratives or points of view lacks even theoretical meaning.  Contradictory and antagonistic convictions do not invent some kind of “center.” Moderation is not an articulable and defensible belief, or genuine ethical stance. Nor is it a coherent policy, of substance in itself.

At the “center” of any apparent conflict or controversy, there is not even a valid opinion. Such a “place” is vacuous, a vacuum. Any “thing” there could be an accident or coincidence, or a distracting (diversionary?) illusion. Or an epistemological falsity, a tautological error and a failure of reason.

The “center” is an imaginary “place” where nothing happens and nothing matters. It contributes nothing to momentum, strength or resistance. The principle of the Moment of Inertia is an interesting metaphor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia

“Not only basic knowledge but the ability to think critically are required to understand the factual errors (as distinct from differences of opinion) that generally provide the foundation for policies at the far ends of the political spectrum.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason. Pantheon Books, New York. 2008. pp. 298

Have we simply lost our clarity of shared language about our public affairs? Are we bewildered and benighted due to imprecision? Intellectual sloppiness? A failure to consult our dictionaries? If so, this alone is a bad thing. At best, confusion immobilizes and diminishes us.

But this is much more than a semantic problem, or a matter of confused and murky definitions. Remember that the right wing seeks to cloud our words and our reason, and to silence and paralyze us all. They steal away the power of our language. Let’s not abet them with uncertainty and insecurity about what we know to be true and what we know to be wrong.

Definitions For A New World Order:

“Independent” = Uncomprehending

“Common Sense” = Uneducated and uninformed

To be sure, the fearsome matters before us are complex and easily confused. The richer, more nuanced and multi-dimensional our dialogue is the more understanding we will share.

The languages of art, music and architecture startle, amuse and enlighten. Poetry and literature titillate and provoke. Each of these is a whole, evolving, ineffable and organic living thing. They can be sublime, transforming and transcending. Or they can be very bad. But maybe they can be wrong only insofar as they are covert ideological projects.

“LEXICOGRAPHER, n.  A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.”

Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary (The Peter Pauper Press 1958) Pp 36

We strive to be anything but dogmatic stiflers of the multi-dimensionality and nuance of plastic language. Metaphor and irony add greatly to the art of communication. Certainly they contribute manifold dimensions of meaning to our conversation about who we are to be.

Integrity demands our dogged pursuit of what we- and our words- truly and completely mean. When we must understand one another, words really matter. In dire times, we owe ourselves, and one another, their certain and precise use. We can only recover the means to really understand one another with intellectual rigor and honesty.

Surely we each have a unique social position, experience and subjectivity. But mutual respect for cultural and ethical differences does not excuse us to simply invent our own private languages from our respective “experiences.”

“Moreover, the much lionized American centrists, sometimes known as moderates, are in no way immune to the overwhelming pull of belief systems that treat evidence as a tiresome stumbling-block to deeper, instinctive “ways of knowing.””

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason. Pantheon Books, New York. 2008. Pp 211

When we truly need our terms, we must not condone the proliferation of invented, idiosyncratic usage. Indiscipline can do us great harm when we are the targets of bad intentions, covert dogma, dissembling sophistry and quasi-mystical cant. We do no disservice by aspiring to precision and clarity.

Maybe we are just uncomfortable. About wholesale injustice and violence undertaken in our names, by our governments and those who hijack them. Living among others who embrace it may make us anxious. We may be afraid to resist. Afraid to be victims ourselves. On the other hand, living among people who oppose it may make us uncomfortable. Afraid to appear weak.

So we may just be… uncomfortable. Does this distract us (or excuse us) from what really should discomfit us most? Real convictions- about wrongs, injustices and horrors- are often decidedly disquieting. Openly acknowledging and opposing our personal and collective injustices to others is challenging. It may even be personally risky.

For some of us, to acknowledge the wrongs we jointly do to our fellows and all living things is literally inconceivable. What we do, and what we believe, just must be honorable and justified. When we are dishonorable, our perceptions of ourselves are too discordant. To admit and confront the violence and injustice in which we are all implicated strains us too much. Our impulses to exceptionalism, nationalism and violence are strongest when we are a part of a polity that is doing some significant evil.

Our integrity and our honesty confront us. We should honor, embrace and heed this sort of irritant. Our greatest discomfiture should be our failures to resist racism, intolerance, oppression and violence. There is no dishonor in honesty.  No-one is innocent.

Even shared, honorable beliefs don’t centripetally “pull” toward some kind of pole of ethical gravity. People are drawn toward one another by like beliefs and commitments. Individuals are drawn toward appropriate collective action.

Nor do disparate, divergent beliefs “pull” toward one another. Repulsion –repellence- cannot “pull” us diametrically into the middle of a spectrum of beliefs. No more than beliefs themselves can.

Fear has a “pull” though. But neither is this specie of “discomfort” a coherent belief or a common conviction- or any kind of “center.”

Such a middle is an illusion or a manipulative invention. It is the absence and negation of conviction and belief. It is not “reason.” Here there are no common beliefs. Only a seething, irrational, pre-cortical fear, and a directionless immobility. Inertia. And fear begets anger.

Here is begotten extremism. Or rather, an incoherent patchwork of extremisms: divergent, hostile and irrational. This vertiginous, centrifugal vortex is where mobs are mobilized.

This is not a trivial point. We know it is a deliberate, fear-mongering strategy of both the politically crass and those who are motivated by fear. They exploit and profit by this. The only thing attractive in this “center” is the delusion of comfort and safety. Repugnance is not a virtue. Revulsion is not attraction. There is nothing “attractive” about it.

“Centrism” plays a more sophisticated game than just inciting and exploiting a blunt fear of danger. It plays upon the anxieties of those who yearn to be among the judges and not among the judged.

Those who are afraid to be judged deficient in their knowledge, education, wisdom, tolerance and humanity. To be deemed of inferior class, uneducated and uninformed. Outsiders, mocked and reviled, marginal and vulnerable. To be judged… extreme.

“The real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason. Pantheon Books, New York. 2008. Pp 211

False tolerance is dangerous. When must we challenge the falsely tolerant? When is compromise irresponsible? Is there no such thing as responsible moderation? Do inclusivity and collective responsibility oblige us to sometimes say no? To not only confront but to censure the theft of our public conversation? This is a dilemma of democratic inclusion. Unambiguously, though, it illuminates an obligation to recover our language.

“We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.

Daniel Gilbert. In The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007.  Dave Eggers (Ed.) Houghton Mifflin, New York: 2007. pp129-30.

Public commitment to inclusivity obliges us to tolerate the anti-democratic polemics of the hateful, the destructive, the intolerant.

“Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.”

Harris, Sam: The End Of Faith. 2004: W.W. Norton, New York. pp. 202

“One of the researches most urgently needed is into the whole problem of compromise and noncompromise. I am dangerously and mistakenly much against compromise: “my kind never gets anything done.”  The (self-styled) “Realists” are quite as dangerously ready to compromise. They seem never sufficiently aware of the danger; they much to quickly and easily respect the compromise and come to rest in it. I would suppose that nothing is necessarily wrong with compromise in itself, except that those who are easy enough to make it are easy enough to relax into and accept it, and that it thus inevitably becomes fatal.  Or more nearly, the essence of the trouble is that compromise is held to be a virtue itself.”

James Agee: From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Cited in Robert Coles: Teaching Stories. Modern Library, New York: 2004. Pp. 233.

So-called moderate “centrism” disguises itself as reasoned, grounded and pragmatic. It camouflages itself as practical and principled.  It pretends to a paternalistic toleration of differences and a sympathetic understanding of multiple perspectives.

It claims to acknowledge, accommodate and even honor positions that it identifies as, well, extreme. Relative to itself.  It paints all that is thusly “extreme” as fundamentally immature and lacking its tolerance, wisdom and superiority. Its practitioners pretend to indulgent and paternalistic care for our well-being.  They claim to patiently –indulgently- represent the interests that they betray.

They smugly presume to define and validate “solid ground” by naming a sort of “middle ground” among competing claims, and calling it “common ground.” They arrogantly claim moral ground by defining all else that lies around it, as far as the eye can see, as “extreme.” And somehow immoral.

This is not complicated. “Moderation,” as a false episteme, endorses the rejection, without serious consideration or analysis, of everything anyone -especially another  “extremist-“ might call extreme.

By positing other positions as extreme, as unbalanced or incomplete in basis or reason, it POSITS EXACTLY NOTHING. It is vacuous. In principle and in fact, it actually logically requires the rejection of… everything. Every affirmative assertion, every conclusion, every truth. Every single valid epistemological stance. It is a vast, comprehensive tautological error.

The opposites of stances don’t seem to be anti-stances, but rather opposing stances. But the opposite of taking a stance could be an absence of stances, a void of convictions. It isn’t overtly opposed to actual, identifiable principles or mores, but it isn’t a nullity. It may be appear to be amoral, but it is truly gravely immoral.

Centrism is not a measured, sober and calculated response to complex and consequential human situations. It is not a sound basis for anything. It is not reasoned, or even real. It is certainly not a valid (or useful) opinion. It is not, in itself, a policy or policies. It is actually ruinous to purposive, coherent public policy. It underwrites pallid, vacuous, directionless inertia.

However, it is political, we must admit. It is the fictive, deceptive posture of political “realists” and opportunists. It camouflages the covert dogma, hypocritical dishonesty and reactionary agendas of conservatives. It is where the fearful and the fanatical seek false comfort among the fearful and fanatical. Cynical, opportunistic operators and predators range among them, inflaming and exploiting them and betraying us all. In this sense it is a “political” position.

But it is not a real “position.” It has no real coordinates in the world. It is actually locatable and given discursive meaning only by being exterior to the coordinates of real, grounded truths. There is no “there” in the center of this metaphoric geography, this compass, that can be found by any honest geography, or any honest geographer. It is also the intersection of apathy, passivity and inaction. A true “moment of inertia.”

ONLY A STRONGLY POLARIZED MORAL COMPASS WILL ALLOW US TO NAVIGATE SURELY.

This false moderation is worse than merely sanctimonious, paternalistic and dismissive. We should fear this phenomenon. It is not only an amoral absence of ethical convictions and beliefs. It is the very epitome –the epicenter- of intolerance and oppression. To mistake it for a morally grounded stance –much less a position on an issue- is worse than intellectually slovenly. It is beyond sloppy, epistemologically erroneous, and irresponsible. It is beyond moral weakness to mistake it for an ethos or screed.

Remember that the right wing will subvert and anaesthetize our power to act. They steal away our common good and our common welfare. They plunder our societies and our ecosystem. They radically endanger the very survival of a functioning civilization and a recognizable planet on which living things may dwell.

Our proposition is that for us to fail to commit and to act, under cover of false, sanctimonious morality –whether our own or others’- is immoral.  It does wholesale damage to the operations of ethics and mores in the world. It gives protective cover to evil. It exposes us all to abuse, violence and anti-democratic tyranny.

We all become flaccid civilian “human shields,” cloaking the fear and cynicism of the supposedly “neutral.” And the incendiary, apocalyptic and blind impulses of all manner of extremists. We complicitly legitimize and give inadvertent comfort to anti-democratic extremists by putting all claims on some kind of fictive “common ground.” If we submit, if we fail to resist, we admit, abet and expose ourselves to the spread of fundamentalist extremisms and their consequences. Is that immoral?

Supposed “neutrality” can be a fearful delusion. Or it can glorify smug, triumphal and sanctimonious superiority. It makes knuckleheaded ignorance infinitely more powerful than reason or ethical conviction or truth. It confounds and paralyzes serious contemplation of matters of ethical gravity. The true natures of ideas and ideological conflicts are trivialized and debased..…and finally erased. We are numbed and mesmerized. Finally, speech is silenced. This is how we know it is a deliberate, furtive strategy of the right wing. And that it is perilous.

When there is nothing moderate about the horrors you oppose, how can you be a “moderate?”

Most of us are not “somewhere in the center.” Most of us are chickenshit, or lazy. Probably both.

(end)

WHEN THERE IS NOTHING MODERATE ABOUT THE HORRORS YOU OPPOSE, HOW CAN YOU BE A “MODERATE?”

“Choose From A Selection Of Lavishly Advertised And Colorfully Marketed Candidates:” John Michael Greer.

“[M]ost people in North America made the consumer economy their model for political participation. A consumer’s role in the economic process is limited to choosing from a selection of lavishly advertised and colorfully marketed products provided by industry. In the same way, most people in the industrial world embraced political systems in which all they had to do was choose from a selection of lavishly advertised and colorfully marketed candidates provided by the major parties.”

John Michael Greer: The Long Descent (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society, 2008).

Pp 149