In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called “Heretics” Mr. Chesterton writes these words: ‘There are some people–and I am one of them–who think that the most important and practical thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemey’s numbers, but still more important to know enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them.'”
This is the first paragraph to his excellent series of lectures packaged as “Pragmatism”. I adore and admire James on many levels, but first and foremost because he is sincerely trying to solve real problems, and is thus able to offer clarity of exposition and thought.
Our enemies are those of civilization. Our enemies are those who want a complete break from the cultural history–and in some cases the very existence–of the human race; who want to reject all the solutions which have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to the problems of existence: who we are, what to do and why, and how to understand our universe.
Evolutionarily, it seems obvious that we need and crave answers to these questions. Existentially–introspectively–it is even more obvious.
We are told, by the dominant culture in the Academy–I am here reifying, with in my view regrettably little deviation from the actual reality, the sum output of both the Arts and Sciences of universities the world over–that we are unimportant animals who somehow achieved consciousness through a process of random change, combined with random environmental circumstances favoring that adaptation, across many millions or billions of years.
We are told our consciousness has no inherent value, that it ends with the cessation of those electrochemical reactions we call “life”, and that as we gaze out into a universe with stars cast about like grains of sand on a beach, there is really no reason not to feel an endless aloneness and sadness (which of course are instincts arising from our hereditary social instinct, itself conducive to survival: nothing more.)
These “facts”, as they are called, create in many individuals substantial psychological reactions away from the “self”–which cannot well contemplate its final destruction absent mediating and ameliorating considerations–to a “society”, which insensibly acquires a sort of ontological firmness that quiets such minds.
“I survive”, it can tell itself, in the “life” of society. If I improve society, I survive in that improvement.
Then some wonder about the survival of humanity itself. Logically, self evolved, self sustaining chemical processes which need food, shelter, and society to survive are vastly inferior in their capacity for life than, say, virus colonies, or better yet, Earth–Gaia–herself. If “I” am equal to dirt, if I came from and will return to dirt, then why not see my–secure my–future in the future of Earth? No humanity at all is needed in this vision, and in fact detracts from it somewhat.
These people exist, and I think there are some in high positions in the Obama Administration.
Roughly, this worldview, based upon conflating life on this planet, in this dimension, with existence outright, which sees and feels no connection with the notions of our forebears of heavens and hells, and transmigration (a belief found the world over), is what is fucking everything up.
Concretely, who are these people? I will offer what can only be a guess, but one which makes sense, and seems not to conflict with any observable reality:
1) The Power Elite. I will differentiate two types:
A) the merely greedy. Here I would include JP Morgan Chase, the people who run the Fed, the people who run the European Central Bank, and the Bank of International Settlements, which few have heard of, but which is the place all the money-creators sit down to discuss what they–perhaps 100 people–are going to do with the global economy (and who do so in secret, with ZERO accountability to any government or–God forbid–the people who are affected by their decisions.) Compared to a pure hunger for power, mere greed is practically a virtue.
B) The political and greedy. This would include George Soros, the Rockefellers, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and most of the people who we think would be part of the Bilderbergs. Paranoia aside, the so-called Bilderburg group clearly 1) exists; 2) consists in the power elite; and 3) meets in complete secrecy.
Does George Soros continue to amass wealth? Of course. Is he an atheist? Duh. I sincerely doubt one person of genuine religious commitment of any sort can be found among the 500 most powerful people in the world, and honestly I think I would include the Pope in that assessment. No honest Christian could sit comfortably on a throne, with hundreds or thousands of tons of stolen gold under it. Christ himself would probably kick him in the balls, even before contemplating the role of the Church in massive pedophilia.
The fact that all these people buy into the world view I described above is of enormous consequence. These are the people whose psychopathologies push them into de facto sociopathy, and who I term Cultural Sadeists. They are few in number, but enormously important because they have large quantities of money, and an obsession with a global government, and global power. They do not recognize our common culture as any sort of restraint on their behavior, and do not consider decency to be an important consideration in their quest to “save the world”, either from disaster, or from humanity itself.
Lenin and Stalin (and all their offspring the world over), of course, considered their work of utmost intrinsic importance: they were forging a new world order, the next age of humanity, a golden age, the perfection of science as applied to human social organization and individual human behavior.
That hundreds of millions died painful deaths for nothing seems lost on those who have nothing else to live for.
2) The foot soldiers. These are the academics and those working in the media who were influenced by academics. Most of these people, in my personal experience. are somewhat neurotic, and in constant search of experiences. They want to “live life”, because they believe this is all they get. They (in most cases) truly believe that their views are consistent with compassion and decency. They love the same animal rescue stories, and stories of profound compassion that the rest of us do.
They love their puppies, do their best to raise good kids (if they take the momentous political decision of choosing to reproduce), but are constrained by their lack of a genuinely positive vision of the future. They don’t see this, of course, because it, again, is all they have.
They work hard to further what they view as the cause of human progress, but are forced to reject on an unconscious level all those who tell them they truly are working for nothing, and that the end result of all their efforts will be famine and misery, and the empowerment of the very sorts of people they thought they were opposing.
3) The compliant. This is your neighbor who has been taught to view those who oppose Obama as racist, who genuinely believes we can spend our way into prosperity, and who genuinely believes you can have something for nothing. These are the kids who believe Bernie Sanders when he says that we can have free healthcare, free universities, much higher minimum wages, and all without any consequences of importance. These are the people who think the Greeks have done anything but bring ruin on themselves for acting like self important, self indulgent children. These are the people who do not remember that Chavez promised the Venezuelans the same things. These are the people who do not know that these promises have been made many times, that many nations have listened to this siren call, and all eventually either fallen into ruin, or changed paths.
So what to do? Me, I dream of a revolution of sorts, but not a violent one. I dream particularly of our university level kids starting to ask fundamental questions about the dominant metaphysics.
Example 1: I would like to see Biology students replicate the long term successes of Cleve Backster, and then start to ask honest, SCIENTIFIC questions about what it all means. To be clear, he was a man of impeccable professional integrity, who demonstrated his results for anyone who asked over the course of decades.
This might actually be a good case study of the power of negative hallucination–which we might call the triumph of prejudice over empiricism–at work.
We read in his obituary: “Scientists, however, were less convinced. No one could reproduce Backster’s results.”
We read in the Wikipedia article:
Backster’s “Primary Perception” theory was a subject of the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters.[18] After all human and environmental stimuli that could alter the results were removed, they reproduced Backster’s experiments with the dracaena plant, yoghurt, saliva and eggs. After getting negative results, they performed a final experiment using an EEGinstrument, which is more sensitive than a polygraph, connected it to a plant to check whether it would “see” eggs being catapulted randomly into boiling water. The instrument registered no change in the plant and the myth was considered as busted in that episode.
Here is the actual episode. Forward, if you are in a hurry, to roughly 3:45. Keep in mind, that plants have no nervous systems, therefore it is simply POSTULATED that they cannot react systemically.
First, they spray it with a fire extinguisher. HUGE reaction. Not what would be anticipated in an orthodox scientific model, which cannot easily explain that result.
Much more telling, one of the researchers, after establishing a good baseline, just THINKS about hurting the plant: again, HUGE reaction.
In their words: “I’m not saying I believe this, but it’s hard to dispute the ink”, and “It boggles the mind”.
To recover their world view, they then successfully fail to replicate a set of experiments where he himself often failed, and call it a day. They call the whole series of experiments a failure, despite the fact that it clearly wasn’t. They produced results inexplicable within current biophysical paradigms.
You can WATCH it. You can see it. This is EXACTLY what Backster–who if you read his book was clearly a meticulous, very careful researcher, who was not contracted by top law enforcement agencies for continuous training because he was flighty or in the least unreliable (his actual field was lie detection)–reported across decades and thousands of experiments.
If you take this one example as illustrative, this is what has been done both with ALL his work, and all that challenging dominant paradigms generally.
In the most unscientific fashion imaginable, his work is either “debunked” at a theoretical level, which simply asserts his results are impossible; or, when replication is attempted, positive results are ignored–as here–or his own experimental framework is not followed, which is categorically antithetical to the spirit and methods of actual replication.
He details at length all the games people played with his work, and shows exactly where the people who claimed to be unable to replicated his work did not follow his protocols. And replication was only attempted in one series of experiments, in my understanding, by the Establishment, prior to his entire universe of discovery being swept under the rug (with a huge sigh of relief: those tasked with refuting his heresy did a superficially acceptable job; had he been an academic, they simply could have found a pretext to fire him.)
Why? That is not science. That is not truth-seeking.
Field concepts have never been refuted. They have merely been found unnecessary, and ignored.
Here is an interesting article: http://www.marcobischof.com/media/art/art_3d141900af22a/Holistic%20Biophysics.doc
I would encourage any readers I may have who are working in the fields of physics, biochemistry, or biology to read it.
This, to me, is high reality. Regrettably, mundane reality–the one within which I pay my bills and meet my responsibilities–calls.
Net: what we need truly is a “revolution in consciousness”, a phrase which, if I could get a nickel every time it is used would made me rich in short order. What I mean is not that we need to start dropping acid (or its modern day analogue, Ayuahuasca ), but that we need to start taking science SERIOUSLY.
You don’t need to be hippy-dippy to be curious. You don’t have to smell of patchouli and like the Grateful Dead (I don’t, but I did dream I met Jerry Garcia the other day, as well as Robin Williams) to do HONEST, SERIOUS, scientifically rigorous research.
I make token efforts from time to time to get Marco Bischoff’s Biophotonen translated to English. It is quite expensive, and he won’t answer any of my emails. That would be a nice project for some forward-thinking, genuinely ideologically diverse university press.
I meant to say more. And I will. But not at this moment. I must live for the time being in the world of Time.
Last word: I have been feeling that we need to rekindle the exploratory spirit of the 1960’s. We–this is my feeling, and I am a psychic sponge–assume we live in a stale period where the best you can hope for is a great idea and a great start-up, and the leisure to spend your life learning Japanese archery, or going on tours of places like Armenia or Nepal.
No: DREAM BIG. Dream of changing the world, not by helping orphans somewhere, typically ones created by bad public policy, or wars in which one or more parties are either radical Islamists or some variant of Communist.
Dream of a peaceful world, one in which we KNOW that we are connected on an energetic level with all of creation. Dream of a world where you don’t die, where everything you do and see and experience and feel and accomplish aggregates, where you stay with you, where you can look forward to unending growth and security.
Everything that can be said about the political failings of Socialism has been said, and most of it was said well 70 years ago. There is no lack of verbiage. There is no lack of books. What is lacking is receptivity, and the core problem there is that Socialism is a good answer to the problems of dis-individuation created by inaccurate, scientifically impeachable, and just plain WRONG accounts of the nature of reality.
Correcting these manifest, indefensible errors is where the emphasis must be placed. And they must be corrected WITHIN the “Academy”. We need bold, original, fearless spirits to risk ridicule and being ostracised. We need “menschen” (which self evidently includes women, in whom I actually place slightly more trust).
And to be clear, I see no return to orthodox Christianity, or any other religion. There are many positives embedded in the practices, and symbology, and social forms created by religions, but what I am preaching is liberation, not confinement. What I am preaching is the merger of the best insights of our past, with our present technological capabilities.
I may be preaching to the wind. If so: wind, please carry my words as far as you can, in whatever form you can.