A Republic -- If You Can Keep It . . .

"Why, let the stricken deer go weep,

The hart ungalled play;

For some must watch, while some must sleep:

So runs the world away."

-Hamlet

So that this nation shall not perish from the Earth -- what is required today?

It is the same as it always has been, although now the stakes are ever higher.  The weapons can destroy worlds.  The emperor can scry your very innermost thoughts.  This nation determines the fate of all others.  Indeed, the stakes are ever more higher.

An awake citizenry.  It sounds so simple, yet it is the hardest task any philosopher has ever faced.  How to make a perfect society, the recipe is simple, perfect citizens.  Plato's Republic sought to do it with justice.  As the just man had the just city within his soul, so the Republic leaned ever towards perfection.

But, alas, it is not so easy.  Easily manipulated are hoi polloi.  And those most manipulated become most confrontational, most violent, most assured in their own folly.  Those who work evil against the just state use them easily.

And so forever the just man is in an unjust society.  So Machiavelli thought the only way was for one just man to become okay with being unjust in certain circumstances, so that there could be some justice somewhere.

But today something much, much more is needed:

1.  Critical Thinking Citizenry.  It is most critical that there be citizens able to think critically about those that seek to dominate them.  And this is far more subtle than you may think.  The millionaire pundits on AM radio and the whores on Fox News may mouth the words, but they are actually subverting true critical thinking.  They do this by an appeal to raw emotions like fear.  Pure fear, unabashed fear, primal fear.  The thought that if you don't do something, you and your family are in danger.  This is the talk about "security" and the now well-known appeal to "Terrorism," "security," and blatant xenophobia.  So not only must you think critically, but you must especially beware of those who want to appear as if they are thinking and acting critically, when in fact they are agents of the status quo and the current power structure.

2.  Liberal Arts Studies.  The best and most effective critical thinking has, at its basis, the liberal arts education.  By looking into different ways of thinking itself, and looking at historical and philosophical epistemologies, one can avoid being trapped by sophistry.  Recently, Conservatives such as the former governor, now under indictment, Rick Perry, who was a C-student and a member of a paramilitary organization, sought to undo the liberal arts education and higher learning by rooting it out in favor of results-based and monied interests wherein students would be educated simply to fill cogs in Big Corporate's machine.  These are not people who question power structures or modes of thought.  These are those people who have been lobotomized for easier manufactured consent.

3.  Power Structures and Money.  The greatest attack on democracy in the world today is not a small militia in the Middle East.  It is not the influx of immigrants from south of the border.  It is not a hare-brained conspiracy theory about the government taking individual liberties or the right to free exercise of religion.  The greatest attack on democracy is its transformation to a plutocracy.  When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned decades of jurisprudence and election campaign finance law, it ushered in the change from one person = one vote to one dollar = one vote.  Or, perhaps, many dollars = many votes.  This has allowed the last round of elections to be corrupted by massive expenditures in mass media (and even social media) to inveigh against candidates and measures that most benefit the common good -- the most people receiving the most benefit.

4.  Race and Religion.  These are the major pivot points that the overly empowered use to subjugate and divide the many.  It is critical to always notice how these fault lines fall across the political and societal landscape.  It is often a subtle and default means of creating a herd mentality.  It sometimes necessarily runs  counter and counteracts critical thinking, number one, above. 

These are four of the most critical means of preserving the Republic.

The Right's Cognitive Dissonance

The Right's Cognitive Dissonance:

1.  Talking about religious freedom but concomitantly establishing religious intolerance.  They want to blur the line between religion and State and continually attack the Founders who insisted on the First Amendment's separation of Church and State.  You cannot have religious freedom without a secular state. 

Otherwise, every religion competes for hegemony, attempting to establish a monopoly wherein it is institutionalized by the government and by the state.  All Western monotheistic religions contain this mission. 

The "Great Commission" of Christianity requires that the literal constructionists and Christian fundamentalists establish a "Christian nation" and to convert other peoples and nations of the world to their own faith, sometimes using violence, as history shows.  The same is true of Islam.


2.  Talking about free markets but concomitantly establishing ingrained and vested monopolies by extreme wealth.  They support massive corporate domination of government and necessary regulations, and allow the 1% of extreme wealth to take over government services for their own profit and aggrandizement, even when it is not feasible in cases such as the environment, and even when it is less efficient than that provided by the government.

3.  Talking about protecting liberty but concomitantly actively and illegally "detaining" over 200 individuals in Cuba in cages for over a decade, in some cases, without even a hearing, the barest notion of due process, all in the name of "security."

4.  Talking about government taking away liberties and concomitantly causing the extraordinary dispossession  of liberty by a small, massively capitalized elite.

 Behold, this is the Right's cognitive dissonance.

Quantum of Solace

British physicist Stephen Hawking once made a bet with another physicist that we would never discover the Higgs Boson, also known as the "God particle," because it was the one missing link in the Standard Model that would make everything else make sense.  It was assigned the task of giving all things mass.  So it was something of an all-or-nothing proposition:  Find the Higgs Boson and everything falls into place, or don't find it, and everything is still lacking in any singular sense of order.

Then Hawking theorized something else, and it was reported just yesterday.  He believes that the Higgs Boson and the field it occupies is set at, or contains, a set amount of energy.  This very specific setting has it perched between two opposing contingencies.  If it acquires more energy, then everything spins out of control.  If it loses energy, then everything spins out of control.  It may also somehow "tunnel" from one trough in the energy graph to a lower trough, thereby neither gaining or losing energy in the conventional sense, but everything spins out of control nevertheless.

This spinning out of control creates a super vacuum that begins expanding at the speed of light until it consumes the universe.  For you and me, sitting in our homes on a little insignificant rock, third one from an insignificant star, out on a spiral arm in an insignificant galaxy, which is also out on the fringe of an insignificant supercluster of galaxies, we would never see it coming.

We would be literally annihilated in a instant.  The expanding vacuum would have hit us at the speed of light, so there would be no warning.  In fact, no warning would be possible.  To make Hawking's theory even more tantalizing, this vacuum disturbance may have already occurred somewhere and is expanding -- it just hasn't hit us yet.

And what is striking about this entire expanding theory is not just its subject matter.  What is striking is the ability of theory to expand outside of known contingencies to explain (or create) another possibility.  There are possibilities that are not yet known, but that must be theorized and (if possible) tried.  Theory builds upon theory, and other realms of possibility can come into being to explain something that was limited before.  These are possibilities that are not yet immediately readily apparent.

Could the same be true for problems we face today as a people?  Could the same be true for problems we face today as a civilization?  Could the same be true for problems we face today as economists, politicians, social scientists?

In the 1970's and 80's, we saw the massive destruction of the Earth's ozone layer.  When scientists investigated the cause of the problem, it was discovered to be chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's).  These chemicals were used as a coolant in various applications by consumers and industry.  When they escaped into the environment, they destroyed the delicate layer of O3 that loomed in the upper reaches of the atmosphere and that reflected dangerous ultraviolet spectrum rays from the Sun.

So government regulators sprang into action.  This was a time before the Republican party was hellbent on killing anything that prevented the wholesale and free use of the environment as an externality by their donors, Big Energy and Big Mining.  They were able to pass actual bans on CFC's -- something that the Republican party as agent of Big Energy and Big Mining would never, ever allow -- and get other nations to join.  Many thought that, even though the bans were accomplished, there was still too much damage already done to the ozone layer.  At most, its destruction could be slowed, but never stopped.

A report that came out eviscerated those concerns.  The ozone layer, almost as a living, breathing, organic thing, has not just ceased being depleted.  It is slowly -- every slowly -- beginning to recover itself.  This shocked environmentalists and politicians alike.  And it shows, most importantly, that there is another realm of possibility outside that in which we currently operate.  Things may actually work.  There are some actions we can take, and they may be successful.  All is not necessarily lost.

These days, this, at least, can give us some quantum of solace.

The Dumbing Down of America -- The Great Experiment

"I've always believed that the mind is the best weapon. "  -- John Rambo

Recently, an article appeared called "America Dumbs Down," discussing the attack on intellectuals, intelligentsia and the tradition of the "Brain Trust" in America.

In every aspect of American popular culture and society, hyper religion and extremist fundamentalism have taken the place of rational thought, expertise and the hegemony of reason.  Superstition and snake oil have supplanted cognition and science.  The ultimate degradation of the Middle and Lower Classes has taken place.  America undergoes an overhaul.

One of the reasons why the U.S.'s entry into World War II was so critical was its educated work force.  The Middle Class in the U.S. enjoyed the benefits of a free public education.  This allowed the U.S. to mobilize faster than any other nation on Earth.  It also meant that U.S. troops would be outfitted with the greatest weapon of all.  The Golden Age of American History may be attributed, in large part, to this particular utopian dream realized from sea to shining sea.

And ever since that time, it has been under attack.  Because the uber-wealthy never needed an over-educated working class.  They are better served by the hyper-religious, jingoistic and hyper-nationalist ideologues that sublimate their economic distress into  more war or a hatred of foreigners and minorities.  And so very few of them will be able to discern this trap.

It is the reason for the Liberal Arts education.  And this is also now under great attack, especially from the Republican Party and its uber-wealthy agents, Rick Perry, and his attack on higher education in Texas and other parts of the U.S.  A Liberal Arts education allows its recipient to see society with an understanding of its power structure and with its class underpinnings.  Without it, and without the critical and theoretical mindset it engenders, one really is lost in the shadows on the wall. 

The ability to distinguish and differentiate between things that a preacher says about fiery places and what actually happened on a specific date and time are lost.  Even perhaps more importantly, the ability to draw lessons and knowledge from those two things is unattainable.  The non-Liberal Arts educated individual is, in some sense, a buffoon, and imbecile, left to be led around by the nose without any sense as to what is really going on around him or her.

And so that is the goal of Rick Perry and the other imbeciles -- to create and more easily manage a large populace that will do what it is told when it is told, and will not question why or what it receives in exchange.  It is a better labor class, but not the anachronism of dirty factory workers. 

No, these are armies of people wearing slacks and oxford shirts, speeding to their cubicles in the morning, listening to Christian Contemporary as they work, and then rushing back home in their SUV's to listen to the 21st Century version of the Old Time Gospel hour, the latest "bible-based" church on any of dozen media to choose from.  This is your Labor for the 21st century, here to manage your assets and operate the machinery that operates the machinery.  Karl Marx had it right, but he was just off by a century or two. 

So education has to change.  Lobotomize the Middle Class.  Remove its voice and its ability to question and to see what you are doing to it, then have your way with them.  But this is critical -- you must not let them find out.  Change higher education to fanciful and glittering trade and vocational education.  Begin the lowering of the Ivory Tower into the depths of Hell, and invert it. 

No more inquiry.  Take away their greatest weapon.  We learned that lesson watching the campuses in the 1960's go up.  Sure, you can call it a university, but it is really no more than an idiot garden. 

And the game plays on.

The Etymology of the Word "Terror"

Fascinating, isn't it?  A word that once simply described a human emotion has morphed into a psychological and sociological phenomenon.  It isn't really deconstructed.  It isn't really defined.  But when mass media and social media converge on your mind with this term -- make no mistake about it -- you know exactly what to think, you know exactly what to fear.  And, in some sense, you know that you are not allowed to question.

To question leads, for the questioner, to being ostracized.  Or worse -- even attacked.  Because the fear response is so integral and so powerful, that the mind of the viewer goes into a different mode.  One where remote and even extremely unlikely and attenuated potentialities are viewed as an immediate, clear and present danger threat.  It is almost as if there is an assailant just outside the door trying to get in.  The level of emotional fear is that palpable.

And there are other aspects to this new version of "terror."  CNN runs a byline that says, "FEAR OF HOMEGROWN TERROR."  It is the same word, but now it means something else.  And it still connotes the fear response that forces people from the rational side of their brain to the flight or fight response side of the brain.  But now it means some kind of movement or apparatus.  It could be a large group of people or a very small group of people.  It may be a militia or a rag-tag group of fighters of some sort.  Often times, however, it is simply a group of people with a certain ideology. 

Which leads to the question -- why is a government with a First Amendment to its Constitution pursuing people because of their ideology?  Once you take away the fear response that comes into play with the word "terror," the question is unavoidable.  The whole purpose behind John Locke and John Stuart Mill and the Enlightenment and the First Amendment is that good ideas will win out and bad ideas will fade in the open marketplace of ideas.  But when Government picks and chooses what should and shouldn't be known, that marketplace is defeated, and inquiry and knowledge are lost.  Bad ideas may actually win out.  And who is it, exactly, with this ideology that trumps the Constitution?  It is always vague and nothing is ever specific about it.

Which gets us to the last part of the word "terror."  Not only does it short-circuit the reasoning functions of the brain when broadcast ubiquitously by mass media and social media, and not only is it used to describe some malingering force that could exist, but you cannot know exactly who, where or why it is.  That is for the adults, and you are to be treated like a child.  The government suddenly knows better than you what is better for you.  Now I don't need to tell you that this is an abortion of free government and the ideals it represents, outlined above.  But once you have short-circuited people's mind to the fear channel, the rational side that would alert them to this strange alter-ego government goes quiet, it goes silent.

You cannot know where exactly they are, so they could be right behind you.  That's pretty terrifying, right?  And they may actually be someone you know, but who is concealing their true identity.  That's even more fearful and leads to social paranoia.  The Crucible exemplified the society tearing itself apart in fear as everyone becomes a suspected witch.  And the more the witch denies that she is a witch, the more likely she is a witch.  Because that is what witches do.  The terror is so terrifying that you simply wouldn't understand it, is the meme.

And in this, there is some truth.  Because once the word has activated the dog whistle fear receptors, you lose your conventional understanding.  You lose the faculties that you use every day to question things suggested to you to ascertain for yourself whether or not something really is (or really isn't) bad for you.  It is what you do your entire adult life.  But with "terror," you are no longer allowed.  Someone must make those decisions for you.

So now that you understand what is going on with the word "terror," and now that you understand what it does when you hear it, what are you going to do about it?

Helter-Skelter

In his book, Helter-Skelter, the prosecutor in the Charles Manson "family" murders, Vincent Bugliosi, recall the insane metaphysics that drove some drug-crazed and lost California kids to begin committing some of the most gruesome and notorious murders in American history.

Bugliosi borrowed the title from a Beatles' song that appears on an album released without cover art or a title, and that has come to be known as "The White Album."  The song itself is also famous for a claim that it is the first ever use of harmonic "feedback" sound, intentionally, as part of music.

But Bugliosi's book (novel?) captures, perhaps inadvertently, his readers with a far more insidious and nefarious grand design scheme, something that he borrows from the twisted mind of none other than Charles Manson himself.  The term "Helter-Skelter" was to describe an apocalyptic, eschatological war.  But not just any war -- a war over resources or borders, for example -- but a race war.  And that thought caught on in the 1960's and continued through the demographic changes America is experiencing to this day.

But it has been, at least thus far, a cold war.  A "cold" Helter-Skelter -- where battles are pitched not in massive numbers of troops and movements, but in small skirmishes, using proxies, much like the United States and the Soviet Union waged (or perhaps, continue to wage) for years in their own Cold War.  And it is deeply ideological.

Make no mistake about it, Charles Manson was crazy.  But he may have been on to something, at least in the sense of ideological forces, money and power forming alliances and struggling to mold society each in their own way.  This war, at least, seems far more interesting than one that is openly and actually violent.

So who are our warring powers today?  Well, clearly, there is an effort underway by the extraordinarily wealthy to preserve that wealth.  The past 30 years has seen the consolidation of the super wealthy on a massive scale.  Part of it is the consolidation, through mergers and acquisitions, of many corporations in America that once operated independently.

When aligned under the same ownership, they all began singing the same tune.  They all began serving the same master.  This became ultimately apparent when the media companies began being acquired by industry.  Then came the wars, and President Eisenhower's farewell address flickered across once-dead black-and-white television screens again, although this time lost in the recesses of You Tube.

The military-industrial-media complex was just one arm of the extraordinarily wealthy to serve a unified ends -- the ends of their owners.  Only now the owners owned all of them, up and down the supply chain, and across different industries.  There are, undoubtedly, other arms as well.  The prison building industry and some of the entertainment industries play an equally important, and far more subtle, role in the goals of the super wealthy.

And what are their goals?  That's easy.  To continue to consolidate and preserve that wealth, and to keep the pieces in place necessary to continue amalgamating more wealth.  And where is this "more wealth" to come from?  Well, it can only really come from the public sector, or the Middle and Lower Class can be squeezed even further to get more from them.

We have seen the attack on government waged in vitriolic, banshee-screaming tones.  Foot soldiers have somehow perceived that the government, the only entity able to stand up to the uber-wealthy, is somehow taking something from them, and so it is declared the enemy.  There is little to offer them but pity.  And much of it.

And what the Middle and Lower class are all tapped out? What then can you take from them, squeeze out of them further?  Well, that's an easy one as well.  All men have labor, John Locke chimes in.  So you make them work more and harder and for less.  And, in this way, you can squeeze even more wealth out of those who really have little to none.

And so you use the military-industrial-media complex, and you use the entertainment industry, to get as much labor out of them as possible.  And you hone all of these things for that one goal. Now the drums of war are beating again.  Now (again) we have the greatest threat ever to walk the Earth looming over the homeland.  We are worried we "may get hit again."  Eerily, the workers fall into line.  " Tell me, tell me. tell me the answer  . . . "

Over and against the extraordinarily wealthy, there is another movement.  It is a reaction to the massive amalgamation of wealth taking place.  But it is divided, still searching for its compass.  It is parts of the U.S. Middle Class and Lower Class trying to unite ideologically to counter their extraordinary dispossession at the hands of the uber-wealthy.  It largely comes in the form of a reactionary, Rightist, militia-type mobilization, with the "Don't Tread of Me" flags reappearing.

But its attention is diverted from the uber-wealthy to the scapegoat they have erected to deflect attention.  So this reactionary movement of the common man becomes an anti-government orgy.  The anger that would normally be reserved and directed at those who took from them is instead focused on a non-sentient administration of society's goods and needs.  Ironically, it may be the only thing that could counter the uber-wealthy.  But they have that cut off as well.

And this movement of the common man pitches back and forth, struggling internally to understand who is its enemy.  "Do you know the enemy?" is the Green Day song so appropos.  It has formed into "Patriot" groups and Tea Party organizations.  But it still can't seem to get clear in its mind who it is standing over it.  Like the primitive beast, it holds the sides of its heads and moans.  The noise is too loud to focus.  The diversion is complete.  The uber-wealthy are safe.

For now.

A Farewell to Protesting

Let's interview Lao Tsu, author (in case you didn't know) of The Art of War.  Let's ask him about this business going on in Ferguson and in Gaza.  Let's get to the bottom of this and, more importantly, try to judge and determine its effectiveness.

So a repressed group of people -- repressed economically, restrained physically and geographically, and with a long history of being murdered by "police" or "defense" forces with no due process result, decide they have had enough.

But stop right there.  They have actually had enough for decades, if not centuries, by now.  So what is this "enough" that they have had now?  Why now?

How did things get so bad that they reached this boiling point -- when emotions overtake cool and calculated reason, and the repressed begins destroying the only little bit that they have as resources, and which would otherwise be used against the oppressor.

And the idea would be that you use what little resources you have to assemble and consolidate a power base.  Get Friedrich Nietzche on the phone.  Page Niccolo Machiavelli.  You begin to gather strength through internal networking, generating economic power the old fashioned way -- you work and you work hard.  And don't forget education.  Then you begin to enter politics. 

This isn't a new recipe.  It is time-tested.  And you organize your community to then use laws to protect yourselves, instead of going out in the street and breaking the laws that the oppressor has already set up to confine you.

But the most important thing is cooperation.  If you don't have that, all is lost.

So let's go back to Lao Tsu.  What does marching around in the streets, breaking stuff, and throwing things accomplish?  Is there some value to a physical threat?  Or does that simply extract concessions in the short term that soon dissipate and leave the same status quo. 

In fact, wouldn't that be the best way for the oppressor to keep the oppressed in their place?  Let them blow up every once in a while, but slowly keep moving the walls in on them, a la Gaza.  In that sense, protesting is actually destructive to the real cause, to real change.

Let us bid a farewell to protesting.