Breaking Your Chains

So we must have busted right through the wall. In forty feet, during the time to cover all most all of the article, we we lost 100 mph but the wall didn’t stop us. Yet, probably. Likely the engine was stripped away and we are coasting to a stop. Casualties are still likely even though the wall was kinda flimsy.

Seriously though Ian, the spiritual stuff is helping keep me sane. Thanks.

When the inventor of Mormonism Joseph smith got his call the ‘ angel told him that all religions were wrong and he would make the right one.
well Ian you did him one better by not only religion all wrong but everything you thought you knew is garbage, everything that you thought was right or wrong is garbage and you are going to lead us to happy ,healthy lives. can’t wait.

Things happen when we least expect them.

The simplest rule of the mind is that everything in it is stuff given to you by other people. Your religion, your nationality, your love of sports, whatever… it’s all conditioning and while it isn’t precisely all garbage, it’s close to it. You didn’t choose it, but you think it is “you”. You think your personality is you, or that you are American or Chinese or Hindu or Christian or Jewish.

I would go further and say there is nothing “in” the mind. It is not a container of thoughts. The mind is simply a thought happening right now and “you” are that to which it appears.

If you want to stop being sick, and a vector for sickness, start by just resting and examining the contents of your consciousness as they come and go.

And be ready to be really unhappy, as you realize you’re a slave.

When it’s realized that “you” are not actually a localized independent entity who “has” thoughts, who is there to be unhappy?

Following from what Ian is saying, it occurs to me that the people who are harmed by the inculcated consciousness we inherit have the greatest motivation to change.

You fight because you think there is something worth fighting for, not because you think you are going to win.

On inequality, the Census report for 2017 on Poverty and Income is out. The top 20% got 51.5% of the income share, meaning the bottom 80% got 48.5%. This is the same as in 2016. The income share of the bottom 80% peaked in 1968, if memory serves at 57.4%. There are two important caveats. First, things like food stamps and housing subsidies are not figured in for those at the bottom. But for those at the top, and this is really big, capital gains are not counted into their income. Second, income and wealth are not the same thing. Many Americans do not accumulate much wealth because their expenses consume their income. If they do, it is in the form of a home, but fewer Americans can afford one. For the rich, their wealth increases exponentially. They have large positive excesses between their income and their expenses. These accumulate, compound in investments, and are taxed at lower rates or not at all if they are hidden.

Mike:
I’ve read the flatlander theory before. He’s not wrong, by any means. Our adaptability, once a blessing, is now a curse. But, we’ve adapted before and we’ll adapt again. The rub is, the only thing that breaks through our flatlander mentality is serious pain.

Ian’s been over this time and again. We’ll change, but it will be extraordinarily painful. This isn’t good or bad. It just seems to be the human condition. It goes back to the insights about psych I talk about on here all the time. The human mind is really nothing more than a glorifies simplification machine. It hates to work hard and rationality is hard work. Much easier to rely on heuristics for day to day functioning.

Well at some point you have to say “enough” when it comes to the problems of the world. I used to think people were sheep and to some extent I still do but at the same time I understand that it makes perfect sense to not think deeply about all of the issues we discuss on this blog. Most people have almost zero ability to impact the world in any significant way so it doesn’t make sense to make yourself miserable over these issues. That is why most people just deal with their own personal problems and don’t think deeply about big issues. It is not because they are stupid but because they are practical.

I have noticed that many radicals become very cynical and unhappy due to burnout. There is the real risk of becoming a nihilist after seeing most of your causes fail miserably. I am pretty cynical but I don’t think that everything is lost or that all activism is a waste. Sure, most people will never influence the world or even their town but there are some people who do make a difference. However, it is likely that we will have to go through some very bad times for things to get better. The relatively egalitarian world of the post-war era was only possible after the disasters of the Great Depression and World War II created a brief culture of solidarity in the West. I think something similar will have to happen to us.

Please note that I am not downing the content of this blog. This is one of the very few blogs that I find worth reading. I am just saying that most people are not like us and that is not necessarily a bad thing. I understand why many people don’t want to be bothered with issues like climate change and inequality.

“The rub is, the only thing that breaks through our flatlander mentality is serious pain.

Ian’s been over this time and again. We’ll change, but it will be extraordinarily painful.”

To pull this together with the depressing points Hugh is making, our communities have been arranged so that those in a position to set policy for the rest of us are insulated from the pain, so their decisions keep getting worse.

@Willy,

When most of the people actually around you, whom you can see and who can see you, drift into a deep and prolonged survival crisis and survive very poorly, and they all see you surviving much better; some of them might well ask what you are doing to survive better. If at that point you have specific advice and assistance to give them, they may well put it to use to enhance their own survivalizing.

That will only work if y0u begin up-survival-readying your own physical life and situation now, of course. Living up there in Redoubtistan puts you in a good physical area and an okay semi-permissive social headspace to begin survival-readying yourself now so you can be a visible inspiration and good example to any survival-seekers later.

The envious will of course seek to make your life as bad and precarious as their lives will be. So part of the survivalist’s art is looking poor in public. ( I have been mistaken for homeless on four separate occasions by people who had never met eachother. Two of those people were themselves homeless at the time. So camouflage in plain sight is possible).

Many interesting comments.

Individualism seems to be some sort of inchoate theme. Which leads me to throw out as a heuristic that maybe the problem is that thinking is social and we keep trying to think individually.

I know that we have individual brains and maybe we experience problem-solving insight sometimes as if we are isolated, but we are deeply, profoundly social and politics is society “thinking”. Or, maybe remove the scare quotes, because realistically all thinking is social. Distributed, of course, but the true locus of thought is society, where we are constructing a virtual reality within which we can coordinate our activity.

The pathology of political society is in the self-righteous cruelty and stupidity that manifests in the information processing relationship between leaders and followers.

Ian has frequently drawn attention to various aspects of how polities have historically failed to manage hierarchy, or used the emergence of deep hierarchy to effectively make permanent improvements to human welfare. It is interesting to me that the official theory and ideology of society in our own time — neoclassical economics and neoliberalism — make a concerted effort to ignore the hierarchical organization of the political economy in favor of a counterfactual narrative of “markets”. The body politic may be thinking, but it resists collective self-awareness mightily and individual self-awareness is no remedy, apparently.

When I was in my teens, it occurred to me that almost everything I thought I knew came from someone else – parents, teachers, books, media (in those days it was magazines and radio – my youth predated TV, fortunately). I began to systematically examine my beliefs to see which made sense from my own experiences or logically deduced from what I saw. I do this reexamination every few years, always finding what I call “cockleburs”, the irritating things that cling unnoticed. Sometimes they are newly-acquired because I was too lazy to examine the facts before accepting them and sometimes they seem to date back to childhood. Mental housekeeping is an unending task and the house is never 100% clean.

Living in Greenwich Village in the ’60s, drugs were part of the daily milieu but never really appealed to me. I was interested in LSD as a way to investigate the mind and read about everything available, from beatniks, hippies, psychologists and scientists. I was roundly ridiculed for stating that it would be possible to take it and have no effect. My friends were eagerly looking forward to me having my mind blown. So I took it. And it had no effect, even at a higher dose than normal. Having established to my satisfaction that I was in control of the experience, I took it several times more and allowed it to present different views of external reality. But I never assumed that the views presented were any more valid than the views without the drug. I didn’t use it to investigate the world. I used it to investigate my mind. It did facilitate getting to new mental states, but once that had happened, I found I no longer needed it as a crutch to achieve those mental states. I stopped using it.

What I learned is that the Mind is the final frontier and we will never completely master it. It is grossly misunderstood and has been since the ancient Greeks first began writing about it.

When I ski, or when I quickly descend the rocky scree on a hillside, I do not precisely control every move. I pick spots in advance and make tiny adjustments to my movement, ending up where I need to be without ever moving forcefully. Whether we like it or not, our thinking is mostly responding to what we think. We cannot directly control our thinking (although there are ways suspend it, at least temporarily), but we can guide our thinking, nudge it one way or another, gently apply a purpose to it and thus influence the thinking and its resulting behavior.

@someofparts,

Thank you for the link to these videos. It looks this man is/will be very real and very knowledgeable. Every video would be worth watching.

For myself, I hope that survival will be possible within a community . . . hopefully a sizeable community, of fellow co-survivors. The deepest into survivalism I will ever get will be suburban slum neo-peasant subsistence neo-village survivalism. If my choices narrow down to live-alone-in-the-woods or die, death seems more likely.

If Ian Welsh circles back in future comments to eco-vironmental topics that offer an opening for relevant comments with relevant links, I will offer some. If many people offered some such links when relevant, and they were all as high quality as the link you have offered, word might spread and more people would come here perhaps.

someofparts —

Myself and the USFS recreation crew that I led from ’06-’12 rebuilt this cabin around ‘08 after a fire burned it down in the late 90’s.

http://boundarycountylive.com/images/11_West_Fork_Cabin_1.jpg

Oh, and gang. Get a set of these: https://www.foxfire.org/shop/category/books/

When the lights go out, we won’t be watching youtube.

When I was young I had a chance to spend some time around groups that were loosely modeled on the Diggers. They had a little newsletter that I delivered on foot to households around the city. I wanted to send a copy of the paper to friends back in my hometown but no one was allowed to do that. They felt that the moment information became impersonal or second-hand, it became subject to distortion. I think they had a point which the passage of time has only served to vindicate.

The Frankfurt school was not able to change the direction of mass history in the short term either, but they kept the lights on and the conversation alive.

This website does that too, like a lighthouse. You can’t stop the storm or save everyone from the rocks, but plenty of people you never hear from see the light and find their way to safety because of it.

You people just flat amaze me; flatland hypothesis?
Your house is burning down for Christ sake!

@ MojaveWolf

Fear not, amigo, I am still alive, but have retired from online commenting. I do still read Ian’s work and the comments, but I cannot justify the effort of dealing with some here. There are some voices here that I value highly, but others, easily identifiable and much more numerous, just make me feel like vomiting.

When I consider the small readership here that is capable of rational interaction, and the offensive (to me) aspects of some of the recent moderation decisions, I have no good answer to the self-query of, “What is the fucking point, anyway?”

In a society obviously awash in lies and manipulative bullshit, reality checkers SHOULD be in high demand, but they are not. Instead, they are universally rejected and attacked by the willingly deluded on both sides of the partisan political spectrum.

“My team has to win” is all the ‘ethics’ that most folks require, apparently. Sadly. That alone bears full testament to the level of dysfunction that currently shapes our world. I cannot delude myself any longer into believing I can help anyone sort anything out.

So, now I’m just a silent observer of the unfolding madness. Putting my personal energy into different things. More selfish things.

I sense and empathize with Ian’s despair. His work is very good, but his cause of restoring some sense of rationality to the public dialogue is already a lost one, according to all the available evidence.

So I am out.

The problem is that so few, anywhere, are willing to be realitychecked. Yet so many have been successfully persuaded to believe in unreality. I’d hope that all the best realitycheckers know how these things work, and are able to gather together many disciples, as could Jesus with all the children sitting at his feet (assuming that’s your style of unreality).

“Even if it’s too late, I’d think some basic wisdom about dealing with post-apolcalyptic gangs might be useful.”

Basic wisdom:
1. gtfo of any urban environment.
2. gtfo of any urban environment.
3. if in doubt, return to step 1.

Yay! Hello Reality Checker!

I am glad you are still around and in reasonably good health. =)

You had spoken about possibly not commenting online anymore, so I was hoping that was all; good to hear that it is, and that this is working out well for you. It certainly can be a timesink and an energysink, & I’ve cut back a great deal myself.

Can’t think of any good way to stay in touch, since I’m not about to put my email up here, but if you ever want to drop a line I do have a livejournal I barely use anymore (7 posts in the past year, most recently a bit over two months ago; generally only talk about frivolous stuff, not politics) or you can set up your own account to send direct messages, tho I warn you LJ is nearly dead; it was hurt by the advent of twitter and facebook, then the (possible) coup de grace was administered by the “OMGRussia!” hysteria, as the vast majority of (very leftwing, heavily creative-type) people still there abandoned the platform in protest because it had been bought out by a Russian company a couple of years ago, which of course, like all things Russian, was directly responsible for the election of Trump and the horrifying defeat by cheating of Saint Hillary. I wish I was joking but I’m not even exaggerating (except I don’t think anyone called her Saint Hillary).

At least it’s free (or possibly it’s not and I was grandfathered in by having a free acount, I’m not sure).

This would also go for Willy (or anyone else who felt like it; I’m very gregarious and friendly for a hot-tempered semi-reclusive misanthrope)(my somewhat hostile-sounding profile notwithstanding; I tend to redo it only when something has greatly annoyed me). I remember he said he twice tried to write a long reply to a comment of mine in a Mandos thread a while back that got eaten by the software and gave up; I’m still curious (I think it had to do with my observations on the political culture in DC during brief exposure).

Again, don’t expect anything profound over there or you will be disappointed; I think my last years + worth of entries were all pop culture related.

@Willy — Have you ever read Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything”? It has a couple of chapters dealing with things like The Heartland Institute and where the funding for the AGW denialism comes from and how they try to manipulate discourse (with a frightening amount of success).

On the same token, re: “greed + Jesus”, as someone who used to be very devout myself, I never understood things like “the Prosperity Gospel” or how there were all these supposedly fundamentalist Christians who were also Ayn Rand acolytes. Rand’s writing is MUCH more akin to The Satanic Bible (this is a real thing) than to the Gospels or the New Testament. (to spare anyone reading either Rand or Levay, they both advocate selfishness as the way to personal uplift, if you want a quickie oversimplified shorthand). Rand thinks altruism and self-sacrifice is the great evil. Jesus is all about the self-sacrifice for the good of others. Literally, in his case. Yet people manage to convince themselves that they are good followers of both.

I’m just starting to study the history of the Western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans. Right away I have been intrigued by how varied and complicated the cultures were, but especially how very, very long they were around before our ancestors showed up. So why could populous, complex cultures rise and fall for so many centuries with no peril to the planet until the dawn of industrialization? My guess is that the technology IS the problem. Human culture, meanwhile, is no better or worse than it has ever been. It just is not capable of using this technology without killing itself. Kind of like letting a toddler drive a car. The child is a perfectly normal youngster, but people will get killed if you let it drive.

I don’t think propaganda is especially puzzling either. Seems like it’s a body of practices that have been refined and improved over the last couple of centuries. There are plenty of books that teach a person how it works and how to wield it for one’s own purposes. The fact that it does work is very unpleasant and contravenes plenty of our favorite ideas about who humans are and how we think, but I don’t believe learning how to catapult it onto people is mysterious or even difficult.

Yes. I didn’t mean to suggest that the natives were wiped out by our technology instead of our germs. Instead I was just speculating that if those natives had possessed the industrial processes we deploy, they would have ruined themselves with them just as we are doing. My point was that any human culture would abuse such tools to its own detriment.

@Mohave Wolf,
Thanks, I will read that if I ever get the time. Robert Reich has some short videos, maybe made with the time-challenged in mind, about reaching the other side regarding issues we all have in common. His primary rule is to not provoke tribalism which quickly deafens ears.

I’m hoping any ‘antidotes’ will scale (translate?) well. For example successfully dealing with office sociopaths or bully bosses may involve similar techniques to managing corrupt global PTB and the toxic national cultures they promote.

IMO Jesus is right about happiness and fulfillment not requiring cash prizes. My father the minister was far happier in his little house on the prairie surrounded by good friends and family than he is now in a pricy (because of skyrocketing values) west coast home trying to keep up with his ‘successful’ prosperity gospel wingnut son-in-law. Dad inherited money from his father and spent it all on extravagant trips overseas, then bragged to his mostly poor congregation that these were blessings from Jesus. Bad mistake. Where his prairie congregation had grown fueled by fellowship, his current one has died. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if prosperity gospel is the way it works then why aren’t all priests, monks and nuns driving Mercedes and sporting bling? BTW, the in-law is average in every way except for his considerable talents in the art of charm and nepotism, usually involving his fellow megachurch members, which he then credits Jesus for. I haven’t done any studies, but the limited evidence suggests that the hopelessly poor become disenchanted, excluded, then eventually leave that church.

Rand was right about misguided power limiting personal potentials (she might’ve been permanently scarred by what her father went through in the USSR). But like Marx, she completely ignored who all power games tend to reward. Unchecked concentrated power eventually always goes vicious and corrupt. Nice guys really do finish last because they don’t have nearly as many weapons they’re willing to use, as the bad guys do. And giving complete freedom to the successful selfish, again, leads to misguided power limiting personal potentials. The road to hell is paved with good intentions co-opted by lying sons of bitches.

I’d think that somewhere between the two (or best of the two, well-regulated) is a best fit solution that fits most people. Personally, I would study, then euthanize psychopaths.

Domestically, the Constitutional power is found in the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: “The Congress shall have Power … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”

Internationally, the Constitutional power derives from Article VI, Clause 2: “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

I like Peter. He’s my poster boy for old school thinking. Very old school.

One would hope that Peter’s preachings would involve more than just Stalinic fire and brimstone with all the shaming and shunning. The youth of today are far more political, secular, and dare I say, astute about their futures, then those from his generation. Probably because of all the pressures their parents didn’t have. Socioeconomically, the youth of today want what the Norse countries have. Hell, they’ll settle for Japan or even what their Western parents had post WWII. They know the way things are heading isn’t the way they want to go.

Peter, I really think they got the warnings about Stalinist totalitarianism the first time they heard about them back in middle school. They may have even seen the old “Don’t you wanna be a Pepper too!” commercials on Youtube and thought: “WTF”? I would think your energies would be better spent trying to restore capitalism to a more honestly competitive state, before any violent totalitarian-inducing mob revolts really do happen.

@Mike

A least you admit that the US is leading the world in reducing CO2 emissions while the collective is failing to meet their goals. Most of the offshoring of our heavy industry occured decades ago and are you really claiming that our 4.2% GDP growth rate is economic contraction? Much of our reduction of CO2 emmissions is due to the replacement of old coal fired generators with fracked natural gas fired turbines along with improvements in efficiency. These are market driven changes that improve profits while keeping costs to consumers lower everywhere except the Peoples Republic of California.

Oops. that should read: Of course, the US population increased by 66 million from 259.487 million in January 1994 to now 325.71 million.

@Web

You’re projecting, generalizing and exaggerating all in one statement, counselor. Industrial activity of any type produces some pollution but it is minimised by current regulation and best practices. Hydraulic fracturing has been used in the oil industry for over 50 years on conventional shallow wells without major groundwater contamination problems and today’s fracking of very deep tight oil and gas production wells hasn’t produced any major increase in this problem. These wells do produce huge amounts of saline water from deep aquifers but a new industry is developing to recycle this contaminated water for reuse in fracking new wells insted of using fresh water. After decades of observation I have come to view the increase in CO2 and moderate GW as more positive than negative changes in our environment. If market forces in the US moderate these changes and increase profits while limiting consumer costs this is also a positive development and it’s fun to mock the collectivists who fail to meet their goals while pushing CAGW alarmism.

Excellent post. Know Thyself. The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You……