This same strategy is being applied to perpetuate endless wars and manufacture consensus on who our "enemies" are. Of course, the designation of another country as an adversary is self-fulfilling, regardless of how amicable they in reality are toward us. Thus we never run out of countries to demonize and/or bomb, leaders to vilify and condemn, or government to destabilize and topple.
Yes -- thank you for reminding us of the connection between the othering that takes place within our country and the othering of peoples who are designated to be our "enemies".
Maybe it all begins with animals. Factory farming treats pigs and cows as though they were things, not living souls. We begin a process of numbing our empathy which slides down a slippery slope.
And, the so-called "medicines"? I'm not sure they have been as much "hastily tested" as deliberately designed poisons. At best, there are the motives of profit and compliance. At worst, population reduction and a mechanism to control and track people.
Yes, the mRNA shots and even the J&J alternative were all based on the spike protein, which they knew as early as June, 2020 was the toxic payload of the COVID bioweapon. Even before the "vaccines" were tested, there was reason to know that the technology was unsound. And the safety signals that arose during testing amounted to an alarm siren. The Pharma companies perpetrated a deadly fraud for profit. For the architects of the plandemic, there were more sinister motives that are harder to decipher. I don't think it was just population reduction, because the number of people poisoned by the shots has been a fraction of 1% of the world's population.
It is all aimed at profit and compliance. They profit, we comply. That's the construct. However, as in all human endeavors, this one will have its flaws and will eventually crash. As History runs in cycles the end of each cycle will give us the beginning of a new cycle, over and over again.
Missing from this essay is the role of Trump in sowing division. Trump was ushered into American politics in 2016 by Clinton Democrats, who saw him as the only Republican whom Hillary could beat. Much of Trump's rhetoric is divisive. On the other side, the Good People dismiss Trump supporters as "deplorables". Hatred of Trump is a loyalty test for inclusion in their community. https://mitteldorf.substack.com/p/trump-skepticism-vs-derangement
which I highly recommend to you as it ties in to your essay very well.
Some teasers:
-- "If I were to describe the current essence of western civilization, it would be ‘civilization without conscious thought.’ It moves unthinkingly forward in time through a narrow tunnel – perhaps toward its own destruction."
-- "IQ is dropping in the West"
-- "I have speculated that conscious thought, or self-aware thought, has been diminishing in the western world"
One of the hallmarks of our “Advanced Western Culture” is our collective worship of our Big Brains. And you and Charles Eisenstein are 2 or the most profoundly intelligent people that i’ve had the pleasure to read. And yet neither of you get it. At all. In his essay “Separation”, that evidently spawned your article, he gets off to a good start as he tries to diagnose where we went wrong:
“Who are you?” “You are a separate individual among other separate individuals in a universe that is separate from you as well.”
If he had stopped at this point and opened himself to the full implications of this statement then he might have found the courage to see the reality of the predicament we find ourselves in today. Because he had just stated our Root Problem. But instead he meandered along for 36 stirring but ultimately pointless chapters before ending with the (fitting) vision of a Sage blowing smoke into our eyes. His “book” is the poster child for our collective determination not to see that our Advanced Western Civilization was a radical experiment that was doomed to fail before it began.
Current anthropological consensuses is that anatomically modern homo sapiens have walked on Earth for at least 300k years. For 99.999% of our existence we have lived communally in small extended family bands or groups where everyone in the tribe personally knew every other member. And our human lives were based on intense interpersonal cooperation. Human life was tribal life - there was no other kind. To choose isolation and non-cooperation was to choose death. Which is why we are genetically hard-wired to cooperate with each other.
But having drawn the wrong conclusions from the era that we (modestly) refer to as The Enlightenment our ancestors took yet another wrong turn and began building the Way of Life that we currently suffer from today. A Civilization that’s freed us from the bonds to family and tribe that tied us together and gave meaning to life. A Civilization based on predatory capitalism where we’ve all been “encouraged” to become Free Agents who have no choice now but to compete with each other for the necessities of life. Which means that we’re now culturally hard-wired to compete against each other while still being instinctively hard-wired to cooperate. And we can’t understand why life seems so unsatisfying!
The plain, simple fact is that we’ve rationalized ourselves into a way of life that does not work, can not work and has never worked. We are just hairless primates - pretending to be gods. Pigs can’t fly. Fish can’t use bicycles and homo sapiens can only live satisfying lives by working together with their kin for the good of the tribe. Any other system is make believe.
I agree with everything you say, and I suspect that Charles does, too. (Except I'd say "culturally soft-wired" and "instinctively hard-wired".)
There's something we're not communicating, because I think my message and Charles's are in perfect alignment with what you're saying.
I agree that my style is overly intellectual, and it contradicts my message of wanting to transcend the logical mind.
Our mission in the present transformation is to return to our innate sense of belonging and identification with larger community -- perhaps not just our tribe but the full community of life.
I’ve long felt that our species greatest strength is our ability to create abstractions but that it’s also, perhaps, our greatest weakness as well. Because abstractions aren’t real - they’re just illusions. They can be very useful but they can also be delusional. And the line between illusion and delusion can be really hard to find. Especially if you don’t want to see which it is. So I feel “overly intellectual” is much less a practical problem than “overly abstract”.
For example when you say: “Our mission in the present transformation is to return to our innate sense of belonging and identification with larger community -- perhaps not just our tribe but the full community of life.” I find that i’m really skeptical that any such culture-wide transformation is possible. We simply have too much individual power and too many toys. I have a car and a stack of little green pieces of paper that enable me to get enough gasoline to drive across the county. I have multiple electronic devices that let me talk to people i’ll never meet. (like you). I take some of these little green pieces of paper to the store and they give me food so I don’t have to grow or find my own!
I’m sorry but the ‘transformation’ you’re calling for isn’t likely to be possible. We are emotional, deeply irrational creatures who simply aren’t capable of acting in our own best interests - let alone that of our species. IE: Elon Musk understands, on some level, that continuing to develop AI is a very dangerous path to take but, at the same time, he can’t help himself from pushing his own AI system to become more powerful. Sorry but we’re just chimps in funny suits.
I do know that today most of us lead pointless lives, empty of the enrichment that can only come from a life that’s woven into the web of life built together with your family, clan or tribe. But if we were to be able to ride the Wayback machine to a time when humans were living as evolution “designed” us to and we had the luxury of seeing the totality of their way of life then we’d notice their attitude towards the world they were immersed in. Academic anthropologists today refer to their view of the rest of the physical world as “animism” but that’s our cultural mythology talking. The ancients saw that they were just a small part of the rest of life. And that all of life depended on cooperation. All creatures - from mammoth to microscopic - were part of a ‘system’ of life and the early people instinctively understood that they were just another lifeform within that system. They didn’t have the excess power that corrupts us today.
So much brewing in my mind on your closing remarks. As I put my girls to bed, I was saying and writing it all in my head. Thank you for this— perhaps I’ll be brave enough to share. :)
This same strategy is being applied to perpetuate endless wars and manufacture consensus on who our "enemies" are. Of course, the designation of another country as an adversary is self-fulfilling, regardless of how amicable they in reality are toward us. Thus we never run out of countries to demonize and/or bomb, leaders to vilify and condemn, or government to destabilize and topple.
Yes -- thank you for reminding us of the connection between the othering that takes place within our country and the othering of peoples who are designated to be our "enemies".
Maybe it all begins with animals. Factory farming treats pigs and cows as though they were things, not living souls. We begin a process of numbing our empathy which slides down a slippery slope.
Thank you for making that connection!
Another good one, Josh.
To me, it seems that we even "other" ourselves.
And, the so-called "medicines"? I'm not sure they have been as much "hastily tested" as deliberately designed poisons. At best, there are the motives of profit and compliance. At worst, population reduction and a mechanism to control and track people.
Eh! Maybe I'm just cynical?
In any case, love to Philly!
Yes, the mRNA shots and even the J&J alternative were all based on the spike protein, which they knew as early as June, 2020 was the toxic payload of the COVID bioweapon. Even before the "vaccines" were tested, there was reason to know that the technology was unsound. And the safety signals that arose during testing amounted to an alarm siren. The Pharma companies perpetrated a deadly fraud for profit. For the architects of the plandemic, there were more sinister motives that are harder to decipher. I don't think it was just population reduction, because the number of people poisoned by the shots has been a fraction of 1% of the world's population.
It is all aimed at profit and compliance. They profit, we comply. That's the construct. However, as in all human endeavors, this one will have its flaws and will eventually crash. As History runs in cycles the end of each cycle will give us the beginning of a new cycle, over and over again.
Are we headed for more democracy, more equality at the end of the day?
Missing from this essay is the role of Trump in sowing division. Trump was ushered into American politics in 2016 by Clinton Democrats, who saw him as the only Republican whom Hillary could beat. Much of Trump's rhetoric is divisive. On the other side, the Good People dismiss Trump supporters as "deplorables". Hatred of Trump is a loyalty test for inclusion in their community. https://mitteldorf.substack.com/p/trump-skepticism-vs-derangement
Thanks Josh,
"Science" is a new purely-materialist religion, an inadequacy to humans.
There is naught to do but to be fully human...
:-/
Yes, just so. As you know, this is the subject of the book I'm writing.
Josh,
I just stumbled across this essay:
https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/is-consciousness-fading-in-modern
which I highly recommend to you as it ties in to your essay very well.
Some teasers:
-- "If I were to describe the current essence of western civilization, it would be ‘civilization without conscious thought.’ It moves unthinkingly forward in time through a narrow tunnel – perhaps toward its own destruction."
-- "IQ is dropping in the West"
-- "I have speculated that conscious thought, or self-aware thought, has been diminishing in the western world"
One of the hallmarks of our “Advanced Western Culture” is our collective worship of our Big Brains. And you and Charles Eisenstein are 2 or the most profoundly intelligent people that i’ve had the pleasure to read. And yet neither of you get it. At all. In his essay “Separation”, that evidently spawned your article, he gets off to a good start as he tries to diagnose where we went wrong:
“Who are you?” “You are a separate individual among other separate individuals in a universe that is separate from you as well.”
If he had stopped at this point and opened himself to the full implications of this statement then he might have found the courage to see the reality of the predicament we find ourselves in today. Because he had just stated our Root Problem. But instead he meandered along for 36 stirring but ultimately pointless chapters before ending with the (fitting) vision of a Sage blowing smoke into our eyes. His “book” is the poster child for our collective determination not to see that our Advanced Western Civilization was a radical experiment that was doomed to fail before it began.
Current anthropological consensuses is that anatomically modern homo sapiens have walked on Earth for at least 300k years. For 99.999% of our existence we have lived communally in small extended family bands or groups where everyone in the tribe personally knew every other member. And our human lives were based on intense interpersonal cooperation. Human life was tribal life - there was no other kind. To choose isolation and non-cooperation was to choose death. Which is why we are genetically hard-wired to cooperate with each other.
But having drawn the wrong conclusions from the era that we (modestly) refer to as The Enlightenment our ancestors took yet another wrong turn and began building the Way of Life that we currently suffer from today. A Civilization that’s freed us from the bonds to family and tribe that tied us together and gave meaning to life. A Civilization based on predatory capitalism where we’ve all been “encouraged” to become Free Agents who have no choice now but to compete with each other for the necessities of life. Which means that we’re now culturally hard-wired to compete against each other while still being instinctively hard-wired to cooperate. And we can’t understand why life seems so unsatisfying!
The plain, simple fact is that we’ve rationalized ourselves into a way of life that does not work, can not work and has never worked. We are just hairless primates - pretending to be gods. Pigs can’t fly. Fish can’t use bicycles and homo sapiens can only live satisfying lives by working together with their kin for the good of the tribe. Any other system is make believe.
Hi, Tom -
I agree with everything you say, and I suspect that Charles does, too. (Except I'd say "culturally soft-wired" and "instinctively hard-wired".)
There's something we're not communicating, because I think my message and Charles's are in perfect alignment with what you're saying.
I agree that my style is overly intellectual, and it contradicts my message of wanting to transcend the logical mind.
Our mission in the present transformation is to return to our innate sense of belonging and identification with larger community -- perhaps not just our tribe but the full community of life.
-- Josh
I’ve long felt that our species greatest strength is our ability to create abstractions but that it’s also, perhaps, our greatest weakness as well. Because abstractions aren’t real - they’re just illusions. They can be very useful but they can also be delusional. And the line between illusion and delusion can be really hard to find. Especially if you don’t want to see which it is. So I feel “overly intellectual” is much less a practical problem than “overly abstract”.
For example when you say: “Our mission in the present transformation is to return to our innate sense of belonging and identification with larger community -- perhaps not just our tribe but the full community of life.” I find that i’m really skeptical that any such culture-wide transformation is possible. We simply have too much individual power and too many toys. I have a car and a stack of little green pieces of paper that enable me to get enough gasoline to drive across the county. I have multiple electronic devices that let me talk to people i’ll never meet. (like you). I take some of these little green pieces of paper to the store and they give me food so I don’t have to grow or find my own!
I’m sorry but the ‘transformation’ you’re calling for isn’t likely to be possible. We are emotional, deeply irrational creatures who simply aren’t capable of acting in our own best interests - let alone that of our species. IE: Elon Musk understands, on some level, that continuing to develop AI is a very dangerous path to take but, at the same time, he can’t help himself from pushing his own AI system to become more powerful. Sorry but we’re just chimps in funny suits.
I do know that today most of us lead pointless lives, empty of the enrichment that can only come from a life that’s woven into the web of life built together with your family, clan or tribe. But if we were to be able to ride the Wayback machine to a time when humans were living as evolution “designed” us to and we had the luxury of seeing the totality of their way of life then we’d notice their attitude towards the world they were immersed in. Academic anthropologists today refer to their view of the rest of the physical world as “animism” but that’s our cultural mythology talking. The ancients saw that they were just a small part of the rest of life. And that all of life depended on cooperation. All creatures - from mammoth to microscopic - were part of a ‘system’ of life and the early people instinctively understood that they were just another lifeform within that system. They didn’t have the excess power that corrupts us today.
Yes, Josh. Nice piece. I think about this every waking minute of every day.
Your original poetry toward the end? Intriguing rhyme scheme 😎
So much brewing in my mind on your closing remarks. As I put my girls to bed, I was saying and writing it all in my head. Thank you for this— perhaps I’ll be brave enough to share. :)
Please do, Janna!