Truly excellent articulation of the existential crisis we face, Mike. It would be even more influential, I imagine, if you should tighten it up into a shorter version.
Disagree completely, yet I'm also aware of the "shorter" version becoming the best compromise, sadly.
The NYT still prints well articulated articles, losing subscribers. As a oversaturated number of podcast influencers read bedtime leghth stories for easy mass consumption by tictoc spoiled "readers". Over explaining while exploring various examples, worthy of following their paths, is now frowned upon as unnecessary, waste in need of a trim.
I've always found long hair and rebellious debating natural. Yeah, short hair is easier to maintain and the norm for a majority of the people. But, like reading this far for my opinion on my preference, it was a still read. Those who dismissed it for word count are the same who dismissed long hair as too much..... while consuming their TV dinner in front of a screen. But then I'm simply an outdated "Boomer", a lane riddled with generational warfare, speed bumps. Tactics used by every...post and pre name du jour... generation, still misguided and redirected over, and over again for optimal..... ?
No. If need be, word for word, by hand, old school style!
I agree, BRILLIANT analysis but it's "tome-like" read seemed partly caused by saying the same thing, different words, over & over at times & yet-perhaps it was to drive this point home; we cannot IGNORE this existential crisis facing our country. This threat to democracy absolutely needs to be addressed by facing exactly what the threat IS.
I was a Nordic libertarian once and your writing reminds me a lot of my own crisis many years ago. But for me it was much easier to find a path I think because having grown up in Scandinavia I got a see a system that works.
Social democracy really works, but it was not clear to me as a libertarian why it worked because like you I took the heavy date oriented path early in life.
The idea of social democrats is that society is always a fight between different stake holders. Liberals just see individuals. Social democrats see whole groups with different interests and try to balance the power of those groups: the corporations, the workers, the environmentalists, the common people, the rich, women, men, minorities, the majority, farmers, the urban people. These are different groups of people and often we can belong in many overlapping groups.
The social democratic vision of Democracy is a form of stakeholder democracy where one tries to balance these stakeholders and the American liberal tradition has done no such thing. It has ignored that one group has take disproportionate large share of power and wealth and that has created a massive imbalance in the system.
Here are some things to consider, that many are not aware of about the Nordic model: The trust levels have one up. Let me repeat that. Norwegians today trust each other MORE today than in the past. A whopping 70% believe other people can be trusted. That has occurred despite mass immigration. More people in Norway today are foreign born than in the US in 2025. It doesn't mean immigration doesn't cause problems. We cannot keep going like this.
But I mention this to emphasize the Nordic trust is an outcome of POLICY and not homogeneity. We deliberately pushed to reduce inequalities between social classes but also genders. The result is that people trust each other more. That means people trust government and institutions more.
It is important point to mention because many Americans think what America is going through is a universal reality produced everywhere due to modernity itself. But Nordic countries are very modern societies with people working tech jobs, surfing the internet, using their smart phones just like the US. Yet societal outcomes are totally different. It goes to show that politics matters. We are not helpless flowing in a particular direction due to technology and economic change. We end up where we are because of important political choices taken or not taken by society.
Nordics are not liberal societies. They are social democratic. Meaning a very strong emphasis has been placed on groups rather than just individual freedom. Emphasis has been on creating a society for the common people. Outcomes has mattered just as much as opportunity.
But we also see challenges. It is why I am a democratic socialist. We have also seen a gradual push towards a more liberal model away from the social democratic model and I fear we will face an American future if we keep going down that path.
I am a New Deal/FDR style democrat. That era was America's version of democratic socialism which ended in 1980 with the rise of Reaganism. America needs to get back to an updated version of that time. Unfortunately, it will take a great crisis or cataclysm to do it - which we're in right now.
Yeah Reagan was a tragedy. I think often of what could have been. We also faces a strong liberalizing trend in that time, but the fundamentals of social democracy had already been firmly established which hindered a kind of Reagan revolution. Unions were already very strong, workers had representation of corporate boards, universal healthcare was there.
The US probably had not come far enough when Reagan came to stop the onslaught of the new direction. Perhaps Trumpism can make people wake up in the end and reject the decades long Reagan revolution lie.
If the previous New Deal era was able to be ended and replaced with Reaganism, which paved the way for the dispair and fury that gave us Trumpism, why do you think we should return to it? To have a few nice decades and then repeat it all over again once the wealth class consolidates enough power to gut the social safety net again? Not to mention the accelerating climate crisis which will ensure that the economic/resource basis that allowed the New Deal to exist will be physically impossible from now on?
Stop looking to the past. We are in uncharted territory, the end game of this version of human civilization. We either evolve and transcend, or we fucking die.
There are always pendulum swings in politics, but it all comes down to how well you can entrench a direction I guess to weather the storms that might come later.
Like I would argue the FDR era of the US never got deep enough and that is in part because it was a the end of an extreme capitalist American century.
If you look at the Nordic region I am part of, specifically my home country Norway, when entered a similar period to FDR we already has more "socialist light" history to build on. Before socialists came into power we had had liberals more in the vein of FDR running things. So Norway was already much less capitalist and social democrats could then simply pickup and go further towards a socialist system.
And of course FDR himself wasn't even a socialist or social democrat. He was a liberal, so it was always going to be limited in how far the US would go in some kind of social democrat direction.
So that means the direction FDR pushed the US was always far more shallow than what e.g. Norwegian social democrats did. That meant it could be undone more easily.
I hope the next generation trying to go in a more FDR direction can learn from those mistakes. Some things have staying power. Look at the British NHS. A brief period of Labour gave Britain it. An otherwise very capitalist country. Success conservative government have had no chance killing it as much as they have tried because British people got to know and love that system.
YES. Coming from 🇨🇦 I get what you are saying. The pull of our society towards US values has been strong at times and has diluted our social democratic impulse. But with a visceral reaction to what is happening in the US we are being drawn back into the European orbit generally and our social democratic colleagues in particular.
I’ve visited a number of Nordic countries Erik, and couldn’t agree with your post more.
For a few years after the 2016 election, I tried in vain to correct the mislabeling of the social democracy movement in U.S. politics - as exemplified by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez etc. as “Democratic Socialism”. There are distinct differences between Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism. You have outlined the brilliance of Social Democracy quite nicely in your post.
I have always thought that Bernie Sanders and AOC and their handlers would have done better to identify themselves correctly - as “Social Democrats”.
Unfortunately, splitting hairs over what a philosophy is called and the differences between two similarly named yet quite different philosophical/ political models is not going to help here in America at this point. We’re too far down the road towards a slide into an authoritarian “meritocracy” where a few powerful individuals and groups try to dictate the “politics” and the “laws” that all Americans will live under. Trying to change the label of a movement to remove the term “Socialist” with all of its well deserved baggage is pointless now. I commend Mike Brock for pointing out exactly how undemocratic the efforts of the current administration and the people / groups behind it are - and how explicitly precarious the situation America currently finds itself in actually is.
Your observation actually brings up an important point that I think many of your foreigners misunderstand about the Nordics and even the average person here in the Nordics.
You see socialism and social democracy as these entirely different things. They are not. That is pretty important to stress. And you see social democrats and democrats as entirely different things. Again that is not the case.
Let me clarify. You really need to look at the history to fully get this. You cannot walk into a Nordic country today look around and take a snapshot of it and distill that into a policy or ideology. Here is a crucial point: The social democracy you see in the Nordics today was never a goal. There was no political movement that worked to created that as their vision.
Social democracy is the outcome of a radical socialist vision. Much more radical than Bernie Sanders and AOC. The man most responsible for creating social democracy in Norway, Einar Gerhardsen, was a radical socialist. More radical than Bernie Sanders.
He governed Norway for 17 years. And his followers were also socialists. Here is what the confusion stems from: Socialism originally in the 1920s or so split into two branches:
- Social democrats - Those believing in democratic socialism. Meaning a socialist society should be achieved through winning elections and gradual reforms.
- Communists - Socialists who believed in radical revolutionary transformation. Not gradual reform. Armed revolt rather than elections.
This lead to very different approaches. Social democrats sought to gradually empower workers by supporting union rights, giving them voting rights on corporate boards, legislate things like sectorial bargain, build up more cooperatives, as alternatives to capitalist enterprises. Establish state run enterprises and so on. The idea is that over time the whole society would transition into a socialist system.
Communists in contrasts went the opposite direction. They started by tearing down the capitalists. And then they wanted to try to build socialism from that point on. But the East block countries and Russia are in a way more defined by how they were anti capitalist than by how socialist they were. The Nordics in my view were always more true to the socialist vision, they simply didn't focus on tearing down capitalists. To them socialism was more about what they were for than what they were against.
Until about the 1980s this is how things worked. If you were a democratic socialists you called yourself a social democrat. It was the same thing. There was no separate group of people called democratic socialists, who were separate from social democrats. They were the same thing.
Now here is the interesting thing that happened, which was actually something the communists were right about when criticizing social democrats and their ways.
Communists said: You will never reach socialism with your approach, because as you gradually reform eventually the working class would loose their zeal. They will get comfortable enough to not care about achieving socialism.
And that is what social democrats ended up doing in the Nordics. They were so successful they made themselves obsolete in a way. They raised workers rights, and wages. Gave them education, pensions, unemployment benefits, generous vacations, free health care etc etc. Those workers eventually thought: "Hey were are doing pretty damn well here. Why do we need this socialism? I am fine the way things are."
That is how things looked in the 80s. The injustices of the past were gone and people were happy. Social democrats started loosing elections because nobody care more about socialism as a goal. That is why socialism was taken out the party program as goal and politicians started talking less about it and focusing on what voters actually wanted. What they found is that voters were pretty happy with preserving that transition phase system that socialists had created.
Social democracy simply became a word for what you get when you abort a gradual transition from capitalist to socialism. It is the in-between system. And it just happened to work very well. But nobody planned for that to be the end goal.
In those years prior social democrats split between those still wedded strongly to the vision of a socialist society and those more pragmatic. Hence democratic socialist and social democrats arise as separate ideologies.
But really they both have socialism as the foundation. I have been a social democrat and in the social democratic party. When you are in meetings, get together etc it is still very clear the socialist traditions and spirit. Socialism is still very much spiritually within the social democratic party. Many would still call themselves socialists if pressed on the matter, but most have become too pragmatic to see such label as important. At least when facing voters. They known "socialism" isn't a selling point to voters so it is more of an internal thing.
So this is why I don't think you should put down Bernie or AOC for calling themselves democratic socialists, because it was democratic socialists who built social democracy in the Nordics. The modern day social democrats and their ideology did not exist back then. Modern day social democrats were ironically NOT the ones who built social democracy. By that I mean, it was not people with their particular ideology that built it.
In fact we have the social democratic party embarrassed by democratic socialists in debates today about that. Because they will call the socialists too radical. But the socialists can always shoot back "Why are what you used to be" and there is notthing they can answer back to that because they are right.
It is actually surprisingly badly known in my native Norway. I talked to people here about it and most are not really aware of the socialist underpinnings of the society they live in.
So much is just what you grow up with and take for granted. I was the same. I couldn't really see it clearly until I started living abroad and began reading Norwegian political and economic history.
It is of course easier in a way to explain to Norwegians because all know bits and pieces of it already. They just haven't connected the dots. But people who never grew up here will have a harder time see the kind of socialist undercurrent that is reflected in how society operates and how even people act.
Me, I don't see either individuals or groups. I see structures that are really the source of what encourages or discourages people and their groupings to behave in certain ways. We spend a lot of time trying to tailor people and groups to fit the missions of our political and economic structures, but very little or, no time, trying to tailor the tasks and missions of our structures to fit the people and groups served by them. It's a bit of an off-the-track twist to the matter, but I find it suggests wholly knew ways of looking at and creating sane, healthy, sustainable and flourishing societies.
The pervasive lack of trust is a significant challenge in the USA. I don’t see how any form of Liberal Democracy is sustainable once a certain % of the population lacks faith in the intentions and goals of the rest of the population. I don’t know how you measure the tipping point, but the ascendency of Illiberalism increasingly suggests that we’ve passed that point.
But this Crisis of Trust is not unique to the United States. It’s a global phenomenon, increasingly impacting most of the rest of Europe, Japan, Australia, Turkey, India, indeed, virtually every country where Liberal Democracy had been established. It may be that Scandinavia has unique policy approaches that have avoided this failure of trust. But it may also be that believing so is yet another failure of technocratic imagination.
My observation is that human nature tends toward group cohesion and conflict. Most people want the emotional benefits of feeling that they belong to a group, and they typically want that group to be able to exercise power in ways they consider beneficial to the group. The normal tendency on group formation is to engage in My Side Bias, dramatically overestimating the capabilities and moral superiority of the group, while systematically disparaging the motivations and capabilities of other groups. Competing groups typically only engage in cooperation, or coalition, when they feel threatened by a crisis. Countless autocrats have gained power by contriving an enemy.
Could it be that Scandinavia is in unique geopolitical circumstances that encourage a higher level of cooperation? Perhaps the policies are the outcome of economic, social, and political pressures.
You Scandinavians are really really stupid. Took the poisonous injections in droves. Utter stupidity. They really ran a number on you by giving you a society that functions better than most. Because of that you lost the ability to question authority and that will have dire consequences as you will enter the digital cage much more willingly than others.
It functions better because we are not lost to conspiracy theory nonsense like you. Perhaps the fact that our societies work should be a hint to you that we are doing things the right way and you are not.
They don't work long term. Soon you'll be replaced by non natives with no cultural tiss in your own countries. But hey, you are isolated from it in your small enclave of upper middle class naivity and cant figure out the obvious mid term trend. Keep labeling the truth as conspiracy theory. It will do you good.
😂 upper middle class enclave? That was a good one. I literally live in the ghetto man. At the school closest to me 90% of the students have foreign origin. Most of my neighbors are from all the countries you hate so much.
See that is the thing. You just sit watching Fox News all day, and have no real grasp of actual reality. You think everything is going down the drain here because that is what Fox and friends have said.
Meanwhile I actually live the reality you pretend to know. You might actually learn something by talking to people who actually live in immigrant areas.
Nobody you listen to have any real experience with these kinds of areas. Look, I am not saying it is perfect, but unlike you I have a sense of perspective because I can compare with the Norway that existed before mass immigration and reality is that it wasn't better. It just wasn't. I hate to burst your bubble.
The Norway I grew up in had 3x the homicide rate of today. A lot of things were much rougher than today. I bet you are some teenager Edge Lord who living in a white suburb with no clue what actual real life is like. You just sit with your right-wing buddies online hyping each other up.
If you ever visit Norway I'll walk you through the ghetto at night and you can see yourself how "scary" it is.
You live in the ghetto? Good. And still thinking your society is doing great. You are a lot more moronic than I initially thought. Fuck off and take more injections. They are really good for you.... :)))
Scandinavians in general are among the happiest, healthiest, best educated people in the world. Norway makes a fantastically engineered cooler - Oyster Cooler - the best on the market. You should get one and chill out.
Vonnegut said there needs to be a limit. I recall, back in the 60's he put it a 50K (which I suppose is like 150K today). But the problem isn't how much, it's the fact that money translates into power. Lundberg wrote the book on that. The superrich, be they people or corporations, don't think 'money' like we do; they think power. I care less about the money and want to concentrate on how we keep the money from morphing into power.
Yes, absolutely. But that's harder to capture in a snappy saying :-) The money is an easy concept to get people to pay attention to - but sure, let's try "End Citizens United" and "Bring back Dodd-Frank" and "Glass-Steagall was good for everyone".
Yup, absolutely again. But the 'End Citizens United', blah, blah, blah is equally mysterious to most people, except for the choir. Most have no idea what those things are about. So we do need to come up with snappy memes that don't require much thought.
I'll have to leave that to you. I'm so fucking wordy I don't understand myself half the time. Happy bon mot hunting!
"Their framework literally cannot process regime change. They can optimize within systems but can’t recognize when systems themselves are under attack."
This is the key insight into why Democratic Party officials are, for the most part, paralyzed. There is another reason, though. Liberal technocrat elites control the party, and are aligned with corporate donors, rather than their constituents. Economists have been decrying the destruction of the middle class, and the complete cessation of economic mobility between classes, for decades. The middle class didn't evaporate; they were pushed down into the lower two income quintiles, essentially creating two economic classes in the US; the working poor, and the wealthy. The Democratic Party elite knows this full well, and it is the reason they made a conscious decision to abandon rural voters in the heartland, and shift their platform from economic issues to DEI policies. DEI matters hugely to a small minority of Americans, and has served to distract coastal well-off liberals from the increasingly dire economic situation of the majority of Americans. The far right Republicans, and the liberal elite Democrats, collaborated on creating the policy vacuum that allowed the rise of "populism", which has, in turn, been weaponized by neo-fascist MAGAs.
Mike states we are heading toward a clash of civilizations, and that this is a "clash between incompatible visions of how humans should organize themselves."
How humans should "organize" themselves is a valid question. How humans should treat each other in a global society on a planet with limited resources, and in the scarred environment of what prior societies have left us are other issues, which I believe are more fundamental and existential.
When we elect presidents and those in power who are not of moral fiber, who do not see the one-ness of a planet and its people, and to whom the concepts of legacy, unity and vision are foreign words, we have what we've got - discord, greed, enmity, despair, and a dire prognosis of the future.
I absolutely do not see a dearth of jobs or positions that would allow meaningful employment. I do not see any threat of AI or technical advances-- but with the caveat that their direction should be to fix the Earth, to promote integrity in all of its manifestations: health, happiness, and an answer to man's search for meaning in life.
Consider the concept of Tikkun Olam.
Documented use of the term "tikkun olam" dates back to the Mishnaic period. Subsequently, in medieval times, Kabbalistic literature began broadening use of the term. Modern movements of Judaism have expanded the terms to include "the thesis that Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large". Well, tikkun olam is not going to fix the world if only Jews are at the helm. All peoples must come to the forefront of such a monumental movement.
The song "What the world needs now is love" could also be expressed as We need LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) for the world to be the change we wish to see.
I easily can envision millions employed to clean the streets and the seas of the garbage we have strewn. I can see millions working in an industry that creates community-size molten salt reactors (MSRs) that do not have the same horrendous side effects of uranium-based reactors. I can envision nursing schools, medical schools generating 10-fold the number of those in medicine to help heal the sick. I can envision millions involved in Earth Sciences to teach us how to properly use the land, rivers, lakes and mountains and retain their beauty but allow them to be productive for millennia. I envision millions of the so-called elderly, like myself, becoming mentors or guides for the younger generations who have not gained the perspective to truly know the rapidity of their time on earth, and the importance of integrity in all that is.
I am sure that each one of you who has read this far has some ideas about what needs to be done to leave this world in a better place than how we found it. But think of this:
Everything in this uni-verse is interconnected. This integration, better worded as "integrity" is reflected in all the biologic and spiritual connections occurring within the human mind-body complex. When the individual has such "integrity" they are in a state of health. When such integrity exists between two people, we have love. When a community works with this oneness, we have a society. When peoples of the world learn this, they have arrived at-one-ness which is called world peace.
Until then, we in America are, more or less, a tower of Babel, ruled by a tyrant spewing out hatred and discord. We need to ask ourselves, and often, who we are, what we are and why we are here.
I loved this! The ways in which we define “work” and conceptualize “gainful employment” - I could feel my mind break open. Yes to all of those things. But if any of us want to have any chances at redefining existence we have to pull together NOW, and by many more than 7 million strong. I’m so proud of us I can’t stand it, but there’s no time to rest!!
I agree with Laurie, 7 million does not cut it. The US population in 2025 is 342 million. Of that number, the adult population (≥ 18) is 260.6 million. Let's assume all are registered to vote. A majority of those votes would necessitate > 130.3 million voters. 7 million protesters = 5% of that needed 130.3 million.
Again, if we are to achieve LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) we cannot succumb to AIL (Apathy, Ignorance, Laziness).
Frankly, speaking as a keen observer of the human species, and a physician (oncologist), I believe that our pathology as a citizenry has become so grave that to achieve the above goal is improbable. Our Ship of State is commanded by a fascist, with a fascist administration, a Republican Congress sans moral code, a Supreme Court that has shown by its actions that it is nothing close to "supreme" nor does it revere "justice." Our country has never resolved its issues with white supremacy and that racism goes beyond skin color and includes an ignorant understanding of the prevailing religion- Christianity. What would Jesus say about the wealth of Churches, the ignoring of those impoverished, suffering from hunger in the US and in the world? Would Jesus be happy with what we have done unto others, how we have treated the creation, how we have walked the "walk?" Did Jesus, the Holy Family, the Apostles, speak to the masses with words of invective about Jews, Blacks, or any peoples other than the wicked? Did Christians forget that Jesus, his mother and father, John the "Baptist" and all the Apostles were Jews?
After attending the second No Kings protest, I was not as elated as I was after the first demonstration. Yes, there was a denser crowd in my city, but I would have thought the streets would have stretched for miles more with those protesting the tyrants ruining (not running) our country.
Please be aware, and it is clear, that I detest everything that Trump and his minions stand for. But also be aware, that I am disgusted with the Democratic Party in what they repeatedly fail to do. They talk big but enact relatively little. Biden was a failed President, and not simply during the time that his cognitive impairment was flagrant. Kamala, with what I heard from her, was a mouthpiece spewing the same status quo BS. Why, during prior Democratic majorities in Congress and the Presidency was not 1) immigration given the talent and the treasury to create an efficient system of VETTING to ensure that those seeking asylum and those others seeking citizenship were legitimate and not lying or criminals? 2) Why did not Democrats eliminate the Electoral College, get rid of Gerrymandering, and do away with the Filibuster? 3) Why were not gun laws enacted doing away with military assault weapons and creating law on background checks, etc.? 4) Why were not laws passed providing tax-breaks for environmentally-friendly purchases such as solar panels, water conserving measures, and changes in transportation, not to speak of legislation to fund molten salt reactor (MSR) technology for community-size nuclear energy sources? Why is China a leader in this and not the US?
Simple answer: AIL (Apathy, Ignorance, Laziness)
We have voted into office people who care more about the status quo and their positions of power than in leaving this world a better place for those who come after us. Did you feel excited about Hillary Clinton running for POTUS? Same question for Joe Biden. I would have been a better POTUS by a landslide. Who inspires you NOW, who excites you with their verbiage now, with the hope that words are translated into actions.
On a constructive note relating to my initial comment, I thought of other "jobs" that would involve millions of people and that would be constructive to our world.
• We could employ millions to create a new Great Lakes system in the currently barren lands of the mid- and far West. This Great Lake system would be akin to what was built during the civilization that lasted many centuries in Angkor Watt. From the rivers that overflow their banks each year in the US, water could be pumped to fill those Great Lakes. We could turn land that is now barren into fertile land and grow organic crops - in our country, and not imported before ripe, and not sprayed with carcinogens. We could raise open-range beef that have been shown to be high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in inflammation-producing and cancer-producing omega-6 fatty acids. The same with free-range chickens.
• We can be a lot wiser in how we let our cities overgrow and create new cities by educating and training city developers who are not motivated by the greed of home builders and realtors who over-produce and over-charge for homes.
• We can employ more millions to have our homes reflect sunlight and instead of asphalt-black roofs do what has been done in Almeria, Spain with simply going from black to white and lowering the temperature by a degree or two.
• We could devise new systems of transportation and engender health by having every city designed with pedestrian and bicycle pathways and plenty of parks.
But before any of this can be done, we must exclude from positions of power in our government and in the world those that are motivated by ego and avarice, greed and envy, and replace our leaders with those inspired instead by humility, benevolence, altruism and magnanimity.
Very well thought out. I agree with 99% of what you wrote. The Dems didn’t get rid of the Electoral College because it would require an amendment to the Constitution, which the less populous states would never and will never pass. The Dems did pass massive incentives around solar.
When I was living in Northern California, those incentives dwindled. I was held hostage by Pacific Gas and Electric. They were so greedy and non-serving that many fires that took lives and destroyed thousands of acres were due to their negligence. We ended up having to buy a Generac whole house generator (fueled by natural gas). Ironically, it seemed that more and more power outages occurred and our gas bill was even higher than the electric bill. I interpreted this as an economic ploy on the part of PG&E.
There is a need for a devoted group of smart people to dive deeply into thorium molten salt reactor (TMSR) technology. The Chinese have one in operation. If I were involved in such a project, I would want to become as book smart as possible and then attempt to visit and learn about what China has done and if their molten salt reactor (MSR) is now functional.
Your suggestions on jobs are so freaking SMART!!! I want to just pole vault into a future filled with these vocations. Vocations, jobs, careers that all focus on making this a better life for everyone on the planet.
You should start by quiting your overpaid job. Most doctors are nothing more than criminals and murderers. Afterwards, confess your crimes. You know which ones. The plandemic years have not been forgotten. Only then, decent people can take you seriously but will always look at you suspiciously as trust is gained back a lot harder than being lost.
I can see why your username is John Doe and your profile actually says "nothing." I spent 12 years in my training as a cancer doc. I have meaningfully changed the lives of many of the patients I have seen over the duration of my vocation.
Although I agree that medicine, in my lifetime, has devolved into a business, there is no way that I would blanketly call most doctors criminals or murders. I would leave that designation to political heads of State like Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Putin, Kim Jong-un and Trump, just to name a few in the past 80 years. Assuming you meant "plandemic" to signify that COVID-19 was a planned event, I would like to know, assuming this conspiracy is true, how this relates to the comments made by me or Mike or anyone. I think you have some major neurons that are not firing. I would be glad to have my life inspected and compare it to yours.
Furthermore, I would like to see people,
like yourself,
espousing such nonsense,
prove one iota of what you say when you do not know the facts.
Let me guess. Your source is Fox News. I am truly fed up with the bullshit that some people spew as fact-based. Maybe that MAGA cap is obstructing blood flow to your brain.
pay no attention to JD (and the other J.D. as well) He's just a lonely troll with nothing better to do than display how much he hurts. I think he's been banned, so we'll not be bothered by him again. I wish there was a way we could relieve these trolls of their suffering and make them thoughtful and happy as they were meant to be. But there isn't. sigh.
The only real progress humans have actually accomplished since our beginnings is our ability to live longer lives, all else is simply air-conditioning. Whether it's coal powered or wind generated, I can't envision a return to pre-elevator days. Freedom itself is selfish, and greed is our Sunday best clothes.
I noted you live in Texas, in the Southeast. I have a son in Austin. Just reading your mini-bio, I think the two of you would have a lot to say to one another. My son is in his 40s, but he is an old soul and knows so much of prior generations that I am often embarrassed by his memory of the good ol' days. He works at Legal Zoom in Austin; his name is Adam. See one of his books What We Must Demand For Our Democracy to Survive, published in 2020 prior to the election. Here's a link, but do not know if this will be allowed on this site: http://tinyurl.com/2j4b3acd
I notice that in your replies to me and others, you consistently pass along resources, ideas and other things that might be of interest to us. I think that makes you an example of the same things you advocate. You appear to be walking your talk. We would all do well to follow your example.
I wish I could do more of that. I do take (steal) ideas from others--books, speeches, conversations (poets have a license to do that), and whatnot. But I usually morph them into something fairly unique and off the beaten path, so I don't have much to pass on to others by way of primary resources. There are a few in my latest post, https://redslider.substack.com/p/barefoot-on-the-road-less-traveled -- though they are pretty indirect. Best I can do, but much appreciate your generosity in sharing and pointing us to the cupboards of your experience.
I am new to Substack. I find Mike's writings are often overwhelming to my intellect and emotional balance. This is as it should be, but.... I have a limited time in my life-- at least I think so. I am surviving a very tough malignancy that has made each day a challenge. I have a book or two I would like to complete, and a couple of medical articles for the peer-reviewed journals I would like to contribute. I would like to return to Spain, and I would love to travel to Scotland given my love of W.H. Murray. I want to visit Wendell Berry in Kentucky since he is the Voice of what this country and the world should be all about.
I have been invited by at least 8 or 9 people to their Substack. So far, I have not done so due to the above missions I wish to complete. I will look at your Substack and see if I can handle more on top of what I am currently juggling.
I, too, am getting on in years. I don’t (yet) suffer any major threat to my health, but enough of the usual aches and pains of aging that greatly limit what I can do, and distract, not only with the infirmities of aging, but the distraction of appointments to my doctors which just blows any reasonable schedule for the things I want to do. Every day is a precious gift now, and I’m not much pleased to waste it taking these endless detours. My mother once remarked that she wanted to exit this world in the manner of Holmes’ “Wonderful One Horse Shay.” I can see why she wanted that, and how sad it was that she didn’t get her wish. Isobel succumbed to a long fight with that mind-thief, Alzheimer’s. What she managed to do in the years before that was brilliant and generous, but made the way it ended no less painful. I wrote about those times and some of my experiences as her caregiver in www.poems4change.org/chapbooks/stewards-of-mortality.pdf
As for me, my days grow shorter, but I’ve come to a conclusion about that that 'afterlife', that gets way too much press. I've settled the matter with the fact that I know there is an afterlife for which there is ample evidence, and it is quite real. It is the afterlife that gets tacked on to the end of our lives with the stories, memories, conversations, work, and other artifacts passed on by those who knew or loved us and thought enough to retell them. that is the afterlife I actually know, the one that gets passed along, sometimes for generations. It is all the afterlife I need to put the whole matter to rest. Isqueezed it all into this little ku I wrote in the vein of Bashō’s most well know scribble,
In an ancient pond
memory-stones splash! ripple out
to a distant shore.
I began this remarkable journey, kicking and screaming, yelling at the top of my lungs. Good to start out that way, though I didn’t understand it until a few years ago with an unexpected surprise that came right from the echo of those first cries, “yeah, keep going, keep going," the echo said, "There’s more surprises in store if you just keep meandering on this less traveled path of yours. Just around the next bend…." And there it was, Surprise! Surprise! Loud enough to drown out all those boring stories blaring trumpet noises from the more traveled highway, about some stranger no one has ever met, promising wings and halos and 24/7 organ music for an eternity, or about becoming recycled stardust, and all the rest of the blah, blah, without a shred of evidence for any of them. Why the hell would I want to spend the little time I have left praying for something that would bore me to death, even if I got it? Better to spend my time creating an afterlife by doing things worthy of the one I know to exist. That’s what I spend my time doing. More to do than I have time left in my hourglass. But every day I do something, it becomes a candidate for extending whatever time I have left into an afterlife I know exists. We all see it everywhere. Every time someone tells you about the time so&so climbed this mountain, or this book he wrote, or when the two of you just sat on a porch in silence watching the birds. That's afterlife in the making. I’m more than content with just that, a few stories, a few laughs, maybe a small piece of advice that reaches some kid in a future generation and saves them from making a mistake or two. Yeah, that's more than enough afterlife for me.
I am replying to my own message. I went to your Substack. You are, from your writings, a salt-of-the-earth person, or as the First Peoples of N. America said: The like-hearted, the like-minded. What you have written in your choice of topics shows the greater view of things, the importance of perspective, the need to learn the lessons of history. I hope others are curious to check out what you have written.
I don’t really pay much attention to getting my work around. A long time ago I stopped submitting work or concerning myself with audience. For one thing, I don’t have the temperament for dealing with the funnel necks of publishers, or open mics and the rest of it. All are subsidiaries of the entertainment industry which has nothing to do with me, and I wish nothing to do with it.
When I first started out I did submit some work. It got published by some very notable poets/editors and publishers, such as Jerome Rothenberg. That was about all the ambition in that direction I needed. Just enough to tell me I was writing things that were somewhere in the vicinity of being poetry. That’s really all I needed. I found I had nothing else to prove to myself, and no ambition to prove anything to anyone else, so I didn’t bother with that side of things. I just wrote poems and stories to read things I’d never seen before. A purely self-indulgent exercise. If anyone else should be interested, I figure they’d find their way to my stuff, one way or the other—like you did.
Essays and social commentary are a little different. Some of that I think should have a wider audience. It is written to have impact beyond just words on a page. But that is something I also leave to others. I have no megaphone, and zero skill sets at implementing anything. The best I can do is send it out to people and places I think might be interested and leave it to them to react as they will, to act on a proposal or idea if they think it has merit. So far, the response over a couple of decades has been near zero. I keep at it though, on the odd-chance….
Stephen, you are older (like myself), have a pretty good survey of the many things that need doing to keep a society sane, healthy, sustainable and flourishing, and all are tasks waiting to be done, which implies there is no scarcity of jobs for people to do, just that the means for connecting (integrating) people with the need for their participation, labor and services escapes us and the way we have structured things that obstruct this integration.
Do you mind if I take this a step further? Consider the way we have structured things. Generally it is that we tailor people to fit the missions and tasks we wish them to do. But what would happen if, instead, we tailored those tasks and missions to fit the people?
I'm suggesting that we organize people to do certain work, and completely overlook the fact that every individual is already organized, they organize their own lives around their families, their interests, their life styles, their faculties and many other things. If we know how a person already organizes their own life, then the question becomes, 'How might we use the way they are organized to do things that are of value to everyone, with as little disruption to their own organization as possible? I'll give a few short examples:
-- This fellow goes to the beach every day and surfs. He doesn't have any interest in a "regular job", but like everyone, he needs the essentials of life. So he walks into the Social-Wellness Office and they ask, "What do you like to do? Where do you go? What gives you pleasure and holds your interest? etc. The result of that meeting is that the surfer agrees he will take a three-months course in life-saving (he is already a good swimmer), and serve as a lifeguard at the beach he regularly goes to (which has none, and has already had two drownings this year.) Done. He will get a regularl salary for that. It may not be big, but he only needs the essentials--food, shelter, transportation, health care, blah, blah.)
-- This elderly person sits on his porch all day. He is given a communications device, some training on how to respond to various situations (a crime being committed, a child in trouble, a fight breaking out, etc.) and now we have a permanent monitor to help keep our street safe and healthy. He sees some situation developing on his block, he calls it in and the appropriated responders are on the way. It hasn't taken him one step out of his way and we are using the way his life is already organized.
-- This one has skills in biology and gets a monthly supply of insect traps to put in his neighbor's yards, a microscope and a few tools to examine the monthly catch and be an early warning system for any infestations or other problems. Very local, very knowledgeable about the immediate environment and likely to stop an chat with neighbors along the way about bugs, their gardens and other things of use to everyone. He's a walking classroom.
--And this one is a poet. He stops in at the Wellness Office every week and they ask him, "What did you do this week?" he says, "I wrote three poems, I read them and some others to the patients at blah, blah, nursing home; On Wednesday I gave a little talk about poetry to Mrs. So&So's 3rd grade class and had them writing poems about trees, and I submitted two of mine to a literary magazine." The poet hands the office steward the poems he wrote, along with the slips validating what he did at the nursing home and the school. The steward hands him his check and says "Nice job, see you next week."
All work done, all valuable to the community, no end to the number of ways we can fit tasks that need to be done with people who are nearly doing them already and need to be modestly compensated to not simply be wasted resources. No one needs have what they have to offer go unused because we have systemic blindness.
Does that add an addition layer of integration to your own good suggestions?
I could not agree more. In a better world, people would work in the arenas that inspire them, and that stimulate passion. It is said that the Greeks had no formal funerals with eulogies, but instead asked a question. "Did he or she live their life with passion." I have always wondered about physicians, who are theoretically my colleagues, who manifested little, if any, love of the patient, and of wanting to repair the insult(s) to their body or mind.
I share your views that "man" should have meaning in their life. You, I note, are a writer and poet. I am almost finished reading an early book of essays by Wendell Berry called "A Continuous Harmony." It was published in 1972. The reader would never doubt it was written yesterday. Berry embraces so much of what you say and brings humanism back to our current world that seems (at least to me) to have become superficial, glitzy, wrong-principled, and focused on take with little give.
I know that this book would strongly resonate with your thinking, and add to it as well.
Deb, I am not familiar with the concept expressed in the above quote. It does sound, in somewhat of a non-serious way, like a quote from my father.
"There were Indians to the North of me, and Indians to the West of me, and Indians to the South as well as the East of me. What did I do? I became an Indian." Bernie Strum as told to his son Stephen.
I do not believe that I am as a result of what the rest of us are; at least I hope not.
For whatever reason, since my early years, I became sensitized to the beauty of everything. Perhaps it was the traumas in the first 15 years of my life: bitten by a dog and going through the god-awful rabies vaccination (big intra-peritoneal needle, being strapped down on a table) or the car accident on a 4th of July (other driver hit the accelerator instead of the brake at a stop sign). I speculate that these events brought awareness of my finiteness early on, and this led to seeing everything in this creation through a magnifying lens.
Ego sum qui sum (I am who I am) because each of us is unique not only in our biology but in the paths taken in our lives.
Maybe this is why I always liked spinach, and Popeye the Sailor Man: “I y’am what I y’am."
I would argue the the fantasy of the 20th century - "the century of the self" - is that we are self-made individuals merrily self-actualising. In fact we are not only the outcome of a long period of natural selection - standing on the shoulders of the strongest - but we are also part of an interconnected planetary web of being. Socially we rely on others to enjoy the lifestyles we have. Thus we are very much bound to a interconnected network, not atoms floating in a vacuum. That is what Ubuntu refs to.
In most of the above I agree. "Our humanity lies in our human unity." I am a proponent of a SAIN (Systems Analysis & Integrity Networking) interpretation of all biotic and abiotic things. I view the Creation's message as one-ness or perhaps at-one-ment. Yes, we are or are intended to be part of the world-wide-web of Creation, but we have failed miserably to understand the meaning of affection for the gift we have. You may wish to read "It All Turns On Affection" by Wendell Berry. I think you will have, at the least, what I have evolved to become over the course of these 83 years. But I would never decry our uniqueness in biology or in mind, and by "our" I mean all living things.
Democracy begins within. Integral to the clash you've well-described is the psychological internalization of autocracy, particularly by the religious fundamentalists -- part of why the drive to feudalism is so deeply tied to the evangelical and hard-right Catholic movements. Their fundamental premise is autocracy at every scale, from within the individual, to the family, and on up. Thiel and Vance, and the Supreme Court majority, are such religionists.
We also see the recent popularity of sci-fi and fantasy set in past and future feudal cultures, where the drama is about which of the royal contenders is truly favored by the fates and the cleverness of their schemes. The book covers in the sci-fi/fantasy section are given over to such royalist fantasies, rather than the technology-enabled futures of a half-century back, with current depiction of tech now largely relegated to cyberpunk steampunk retro fantasies.
For our societies to be democratically self-governing, we need the larger part of our populations to be inwardly democratic in our self-governance, and the frameworks for comprehending our own inner diversities of needs and dreams which inform it; by the ecology of our passions, and our best service of those passions, in their diversity and range, by our logics and rationales (to put it in the Humean terms you favor).
Were you inwardly democratic during the plandemic when you most probably have supported people losing their job for not accepting a direct attack on their body and their inner sense of autonomy?
Is your question this: Do I believe that in a moral society we are responsible for protecting the health of those we work with? Do I believe that those who want to enjoy the freedom from risk of deadly disease should have that freedom denied, so that disease carriers might mix freely among the healthy and damn the consequences for those who die from the transmission?
Would you volunteer, with no modern drugs to protect you, to enter a leper colony, or to have lepers welcomed at your child's school? Is the freedom of the leper, even while their limbs rot, worth sacrificing your child's life? To you, evidently, yes. Or am I mistaken about your lack of character?
Or, to put in plainly: Does respect for my sense of bodily autonomy require that I may transmit any disease I have to your bodily autonomy, without you or society objecting? Do some people have a right to autonomy that outranks anyone else's, so that when someone of such rank has a disease, the rest of us just have to bend over and take it?
“A generation doing everything right, discovering every promise was a lie.”
Every promise made by the Republican Party and the oligarchs (not just tech oligarchs, but others as well, like the Waltons and Uihleins) was a lie - though the latter is a creation of the former, through undermining the laws and regulations that maintain the “free market” and replacing it with regulatory capture and monopolies, and undermining the voice of the people by equating money from those same oligarchs with speech.
By and large, the Democratic Party has not lied - Clinton reduced the deficit and debt without adverse impact on American workers, the Affordable Care Act made health care available to millions of Americans, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was creating jobs for millions of Americans while propelling us into the 21st century before the Republicans trashed it all.
Unfortunately, the policies of the Democratic Party lifted all people, while a plurality of the country wanted policies that would lift only one segment of the population over all others, and now here we are facing autocracy, oligarchy, and fascism.
The two sides are not equivalent, and the more they are treated as equivalent the faster the corruption spreads. The democrats are far from ideal, but the more people say “a pox on both houses”, the faster the system fails as the far right takes over.
My understanding is that on the whole the effects of NAFTA were better than throwing darts to determine each day’s tariffs on each foreign nation. What really moved the dial was an abject failure to enforce the Sherman Antitrust and similar Acts and allow unlimited corporate mergers and the Citizens United decision, both of which were practically the support beams for the Republican Party platform.
This is extremely well-argued and very quotable. It's a basic primer on what's what.
What you don't take on is the way to proceed that I keep urging, which is to raise humanity's awareness to being the cooperative, altruistic species that would be the fulfillment of what's in our design, and would put us in a position to come up with what to do.
What your readers can do is become my readers -- all free. I am dealing with the need to shift the zeitgeist from hurting one another to helping one another, with the time for doing that being now! My latest:
"Coming up with what to do. First unite us in how real the peril is."
There is one piece missing from your otherwise excellent analysis: you say that the Democratic solution is still being built, but in reality the Democrats as a party are tasked by their donors to disrupt and prevent exactly this reimagining. It has been abundantly clear since the 2016 primary election where major media outlets, in conjunction with party officials like Debbie Wasserman-Schulz pulled every stop to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. If the Democratic party was capable of the necessary change, that election would have been settled fairly. Instead, we see Democrats polling worse than Republicans on a variety of issues even this far into Trump II. The movement opposing neo-feudalism exists in that polling gap, but is not allowed to have a voice in the American polity - look no further than Democratic leadership's refusal to endorse the extremely popular Mamdani campaign in New York for proof that they are unwilling to harbor the necessary movement within their party.
This was really thought provoking. I do think many of us on the left may have been lying to ourselves that all the people who voted from Trump are misinformed, have drunk the Kool-Aid, or are just stupid — despite knowing plenty of people who just don’t fit into that framework. But, your position gives us a different way of looking at them — as people who see the system as so broken, it needs a strong hand to blow it up and start over. I spoke to a MAGA person on line and said, you know, what you are saying is unconstitutional, so you’s have to give that up. And he responded Doh, what did you think I meant?
Yes. There is that. And just believing without looking into, the claims that are made by your side. They trust the voices that lie to them and reject those that present claims factually and logically — it is a childish way of thinking. But I know some really smart people who honestly believe that Trump alone can fix it.
I would suggest everyone read Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemy’s. He warned of the danger, the paradox of tolerance, that today’s small l liberals have forgotten. The neo-feudalists/fascists are the enemy of the open society he discusses. Like the author, most folks stuck inside liberal society can’t understand that the barbarians are already inside the gates. Just look at Ezra Klein’s piece on Charlie Kirk. The centrist democrats don’t know what time it is. It’s ironic that never Trump republicans seem to have a better understanding of all this than the corporate democrats that run the technocratic-at-its-heart Democratic Party.
This puts into (many!?) words s concerns and observations that I have not able to formulate into an argument. If we pay attention we see it happening right in front of us. slowly until it reaches a critical mass. Thanks for this essay.
Your journey has been fascinating, Mike. You seem to have started out on the path of one of these gifted tech bros - EXCEPT that instead of embracing insane libertarian-cum-fascism, you turned your gifts toward a systematic and impassioned quest to save liberal democracy. Thanks for sharing your reflections with us. I agree with the tenor of them; the starting point of politics, especially in the USA, has to be that the system is broken. To be honest, my one suggestion would be an editor’s: work on brevity, as the final third of your longer posts often tends to be more reiteration than further development. Stick the landing and your important message will circulate further and faster.
Truly excellent articulation of the existential crisis we face, Mike. It would be even more influential, I imagine, if you should tighten it up into a shorter version.
💯 agree this is brilliant AND it needs some editing.
Disagree completely, yet I'm also aware of the "shorter" version becoming the best compromise, sadly.
The NYT still prints well articulated articles, losing subscribers. As a oversaturated number of podcast influencers read bedtime leghth stories for easy mass consumption by tictoc spoiled "readers". Over explaining while exploring various examples, worthy of following their paths, is now frowned upon as unnecessary, waste in need of a trim.
I've always found long hair and rebellious debating natural. Yeah, short hair is easier to maintain and the norm for a majority of the people. But, like reading this far for my opinion on my preference, it was a still read. Those who dismissed it for word count are the same who dismissed long hair as too much..... while consuming their TV dinner in front of a screen. But then I'm simply an outdated "Boomer", a lane riddled with generational warfare, speed bumps. Tactics used by every...post and pre name du jour... generation, still misguided and redirected over, and over again for optimal..... ?
Atlantic Monthly has a pretty good batting average, and New Yorker gets one off now and again.
It's pretty long
Y'mean by running it through a LLM AI? 😉
No. If need be, word for word, by hand, old school style!
I agree, BRILLIANT analysis but it's "tome-like" read seemed partly caused by saying the same thing, different words, over & over at times & yet-perhaps it was to drive this point home; we cannot IGNORE this existential crisis facing our country. This threat to democracy absolutely needs to be addressed by facing exactly what the threat IS.
And just what is THE THREAT?
One of the biggest I know of is,
'Democracy cannot protect itself from democracy.'
If we haven't learned that by now, nothing else really matters. My question remains, 'When better than anything else isn't good enough, what then?'
No. Just judicious wet-ware editing.
I was a Nordic libertarian once and your writing reminds me a lot of my own crisis many years ago. But for me it was much easier to find a path I think because having grown up in Scandinavia I got a see a system that works.
Social democracy really works, but it was not clear to me as a libertarian why it worked because like you I took the heavy date oriented path early in life.
The idea of social democrats is that society is always a fight between different stake holders. Liberals just see individuals. Social democrats see whole groups with different interests and try to balance the power of those groups: the corporations, the workers, the environmentalists, the common people, the rich, women, men, minorities, the majority, farmers, the urban people. These are different groups of people and often we can belong in many overlapping groups.
The social democratic vision of Democracy is a form of stakeholder democracy where one tries to balance these stakeholders and the American liberal tradition has done no such thing. It has ignored that one group has take disproportionate large share of power and wealth and that has created a massive imbalance in the system.
Here are some things to consider, that many are not aware of about the Nordic model: The trust levels have one up. Let me repeat that. Norwegians today trust each other MORE today than in the past. A whopping 70% believe other people can be trusted. That has occurred despite mass immigration. More people in Norway today are foreign born than in the US in 2025. It doesn't mean immigration doesn't cause problems. We cannot keep going like this.
But I mention this to emphasize the Nordic trust is an outcome of POLICY and not homogeneity. We deliberately pushed to reduce inequalities between social classes but also genders. The result is that people trust each other more. That means people trust government and institutions more.
It is important point to mention because many Americans think what America is going through is a universal reality produced everywhere due to modernity itself. But Nordic countries are very modern societies with people working tech jobs, surfing the internet, using their smart phones just like the US. Yet societal outcomes are totally different. It goes to show that politics matters. We are not helpless flowing in a particular direction due to technology and economic change. We end up where we are because of important political choices taken or not taken by society.
Nordics are not liberal societies. They are social democratic. Meaning a very strong emphasis has been placed on groups rather than just individual freedom. Emphasis has been on creating a society for the common people. Outcomes has mattered just as much as opportunity.
But we also see challenges. It is why I am a democratic socialist. We have also seen a gradual push towards a more liberal model away from the social democratic model and I fear we will face an American future if we keep going down that path.
I very much agree with this.
I am a New Deal/FDR style democrat. That era was America's version of democratic socialism which ended in 1980 with the rise of Reaganism. America needs to get back to an updated version of that time. Unfortunately, it will take a great crisis or cataclysm to do it - which we're in right now.
Yeah Reagan was a tragedy. I think often of what could have been. We also faces a strong liberalizing trend in that time, but the fundamentals of social democracy had already been firmly established which hindered a kind of Reagan revolution. Unions were already very strong, workers had representation of corporate boards, universal healthcare was there.
The US probably had not come far enough when Reagan came to stop the onslaught of the new direction. Perhaps Trumpism can make people wake up in the end and reject the decades long Reagan revolution lie.
If the previous New Deal era was able to be ended and replaced with Reaganism, which paved the way for the dispair and fury that gave us Trumpism, why do you think we should return to it? To have a few nice decades and then repeat it all over again once the wealth class consolidates enough power to gut the social safety net again? Not to mention the accelerating climate crisis which will ensure that the economic/resource basis that allowed the New Deal to exist will be physically impossible from now on?
Stop looking to the past. We are in uncharted territory, the end game of this version of human civilization. We either evolve and transcend, or we fucking die.
There are always pendulum swings in politics, but it all comes down to how well you can entrench a direction I guess to weather the storms that might come later.
Like I would argue the FDR era of the US never got deep enough and that is in part because it was a the end of an extreme capitalist American century.
If you look at the Nordic region I am part of, specifically my home country Norway, when entered a similar period to FDR we already has more "socialist light" history to build on. Before socialists came into power we had had liberals more in the vein of FDR running things. So Norway was already much less capitalist and social democrats could then simply pickup and go further towards a socialist system.
And of course FDR himself wasn't even a socialist or social democrat. He was a liberal, so it was always going to be limited in how far the US would go in some kind of social democrat direction.
So that means the direction FDR pushed the US was always far more shallow than what e.g. Norwegian social democrats did. That meant it could be undone more easily.
I hope the next generation trying to go in a more FDR direction can learn from those mistakes. Some things have staying power. Look at the British NHS. A brief period of Labour gave Britain it. An otherwise very capitalist country. Success conservative government have had no chance killing it as much as they have tried because British people got to know and love that system.
YES. Coming from 🇨🇦 I get what you are saying. The pull of our society towards US values has been strong at times and has diluted our social democratic impulse. But with a visceral reaction to what is happening in the US we are being drawn back into the European orbit generally and our social democratic colleagues in particular.
I’ve visited a number of Nordic countries Erik, and couldn’t agree with your post more.
For a few years after the 2016 election, I tried in vain to correct the mislabeling of the social democracy movement in U.S. politics - as exemplified by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez etc. as “Democratic Socialism”. There are distinct differences between Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism. You have outlined the brilliance of Social Democracy quite nicely in your post.
I have always thought that Bernie Sanders and AOC and their handlers would have done better to identify themselves correctly - as “Social Democrats”.
Unfortunately, splitting hairs over what a philosophy is called and the differences between two similarly named yet quite different philosophical/ political models is not going to help here in America at this point. We’re too far down the road towards a slide into an authoritarian “meritocracy” where a few powerful individuals and groups try to dictate the “politics” and the “laws” that all Americans will live under. Trying to change the label of a movement to remove the term “Socialist” with all of its well deserved baggage is pointless now. I commend Mike Brock for pointing out exactly how undemocratic the efforts of the current administration and the people / groups behind it are - and how explicitly precarious the situation America currently finds itself in actually is.
Your observation actually brings up an important point that I think many of your foreigners misunderstand about the Nordics and even the average person here in the Nordics.
You see socialism and social democracy as these entirely different things. They are not. That is pretty important to stress. And you see social democrats and democrats as entirely different things. Again that is not the case.
Let me clarify. You really need to look at the history to fully get this. You cannot walk into a Nordic country today look around and take a snapshot of it and distill that into a policy or ideology. Here is a crucial point: The social democracy you see in the Nordics today was never a goal. There was no political movement that worked to created that as their vision.
Social democracy is the outcome of a radical socialist vision. Much more radical than Bernie Sanders and AOC. The man most responsible for creating social democracy in Norway, Einar Gerhardsen, was a radical socialist. More radical than Bernie Sanders.
He governed Norway for 17 years. And his followers were also socialists. Here is what the confusion stems from: Socialism originally in the 1920s or so split into two branches:
- Social democrats - Those believing in democratic socialism. Meaning a socialist society should be achieved through winning elections and gradual reforms.
- Communists - Socialists who believed in radical revolutionary transformation. Not gradual reform. Armed revolt rather than elections.
This lead to very different approaches. Social democrats sought to gradually empower workers by supporting union rights, giving them voting rights on corporate boards, legislate things like sectorial bargain, build up more cooperatives, as alternatives to capitalist enterprises. Establish state run enterprises and so on. The idea is that over time the whole society would transition into a socialist system.
Communists in contrasts went the opposite direction. They started by tearing down the capitalists. And then they wanted to try to build socialism from that point on. But the East block countries and Russia are in a way more defined by how they were anti capitalist than by how socialist they were. The Nordics in my view were always more true to the socialist vision, they simply didn't focus on tearing down capitalists. To them socialism was more about what they were for than what they were against.
Until about the 1980s this is how things worked. If you were a democratic socialists you called yourself a social democrat. It was the same thing. There was no separate group of people called democratic socialists, who were separate from social democrats. They were the same thing.
Now here is the interesting thing that happened, which was actually something the communists were right about when criticizing social democrats and their ways.
Communists said: You will never reach socialism with your approach, because as you gradually reform eventually the working class would loose their zeal. They will get comfortable enough to not care about achieving socialism.
And that is what social democrats ended up doing in the Nordics. They were so successful they made themselves obsolete in a way. They raised workers rights, and wages. Gave them education, pensions, unemployment benefits, generous vacations, free health care etc etc. Those workers eventually thought: "Hey were are doing pretty damn well here. Why do we need this socialism? I am fine the way things are."
That is how things looked in the 80s. The injustices of the past were gone and people were happy. Social democrats started loosing elections because nobody care more about socialism as a goal. That is why socialism was taken out the party program as goal and politicians started talking less about it and focusing on what voters actually wanted. What they found is that voters were pretty happy with preserving that transition phase system that socialists had created.
Social democracy simply became a word for what you get when you abort a gradual transition from capitalist to socialism. It is the in-between system. And it just happened to work very well. But nobody planned for that to be the end goal.
In those years prior social democrats split between those still wedded strongly to the vision of a socialist society and those more pragmatic. Hence democratic socialist and social democrats arise as separate ideologies.
But really they both have socialism as the foundation. I have been a social democrat and in the social democratic party. When you are in meetings, get together etc it is still very clear the socialist traditions and spirit. Socialism is still very much spiritually within the social democratic party. Many would still call themselves socialists if pressed on the matter, but most have become too pragmatic to see such label as important. At least when facing voters. They known "socialism" isn't a selling point to voters so it is more of an internal thing.
So this is why I don't think you should put down Bernie or AOC for calling themselves democratic socialists, because it was democratic socialists who built social democracy in the Nordics. The modern day social democrats and their ideology did not exist back then. Modern day social democrats were ironically NOT the ones who built social democracy. By that I mean, it was not people with their particular ideology that built it.
In fact we have the social democratic party embarrassed by democratic socialists in debates today about that. Because they will call the socialists too radical. But the socialists can always shoot back "Why are what you used to be" and there is notthing they can answer back to that because they are right.
Interesting. I wasn't aware of this history, thanks for sharing.
It is actually surprisingly badly known in my native Norway. I talked to people here about it and most are not really aware of the socialist underpinnings of the society they live in.
So much is just what you grow up with and take for granted. I was the same. I couldn't really see it clearly until I started living abroad and began reading Norwegian political and economic history.
It is of course easier in a way to explain to Norwegians because all know bits and pieces of it already. They just haven't connected the dots. But people who never grew up here will have a harder time see the kind of socialist undercurrent that is reflected in how society operates and how even people act.
Me, I don't see either individuals or groups. I see structures that are really the source of what encourages or discourages people and their groupings to behave in certain ways. We spend a lot of time trying to tailor people and groups to fit the missions of our political and economic structures, but very little or, no time, trying to tailor the tasks and missions of our structures to fit the people and groups served by them. It's a bit of an off-the-track twist to the matter, but I find it suggests wholly knew ways of looking at and creating sane, healthy, sustainable and flourishing societies.
The pervasive lack of trust is a significant challenge in the USA. I don’t see how any form of Liberal Democracy is sustainable once a certain % of the population lacks faith in the intentions and goals of the rest of the population. I don’t know how you measure the tipping point, but the ascendency of Illiberalism increasingly suggests that we’ve passed that point.
But this Crisis of Trust is not unique to the United States. It’s a global phenomenon, increasingly impacting most of the rest of Europe, Japan, Australia, Turkey, India, indeed, virtually every country where Liberal Democracy had been established. It may be that Scandinavia has unique policy approaches that have avoided this failure of trust. But it may also be that believing so is yet another failure of technocratic imagination.
My observation is that human nature tends toward group cohesion and conflict. Most people want the emotional benefits of feeling that they belong to a group, and they typically want that group to be able to exercise power in ways they consider beneficial to the group. The normal tendency on group formation is to engage in My Side Bias, dramatically overestimating the capabilities and moral superiority of the group, while systematically disparaging the motivations and capabilities of other groups. Competing groups typically only engage in cooperation, or coalition, when they feel threatened by a crisis. Countless autocrats have gained power by contriving an enemy.
Could it be that Scandinavia is in unique geopolitical circumstances that encourage a higher level of cooperation? Perhaps the policies are the outcome of economic, social, and political pressures.
You Scandinavians are really really stupid. Took the poisonous injections in droves. Utter stupidity. They really ran a number on you by giving you a society that functions better than most. Because of that you lost the ability to question authority and that will have dire consequences as you will enter the digital cage much more willingly than others.
It functions better because we are not lost to conspiracy theory nonsense like you. Perhaps the fact that our societies work should be a hint to you that we are doing things the right way and you are not.
They don't work long term. Soon you'll be replaced by non natives with no cultural tiss in your own countries. But hey, you are isolated from it in your small enclave of upper middle class naivity and cant figure out the obvious mid term trend. Keep labeling the truth as conspiracy theory. It will do you good.
😂 upper middle class enclave? That was a good one. I literally live in the ghetto man. At the school closest to me 90% of the students have foreign origin. Most of my neighbors are from all the countries you hate so much.
See that is the thing. You just sit watching Fox News all day, and have no real grasp of actual reality. You think everything is going down the drain here because that is what Fox and friends have said.
Meanwhile I actually live the reality you pretend to know. You might actually learn something by talking to people who actually live in immigrant areas.
Nobody you listen to have any real experience with these kinds of areas. Look, I am not saying it is perfect, but unlike you I have a sense of perspective because I can compare with the Norway that existed before mass immigration and reality is that it wasn't better. It just wasn't. I hate to burst your bubble.
The Norway I grew up in had 3x the homicide rate of today. A lot of things were much rougher than today. I bet you are some teenager Edge Lord who living in a white suburb with no clue what actual real life is like. You just sit with your right-wing buddies online hyping each other up.
If you ever visit Norway I'll walk you through the ghetto at night and you can see yourself how "scary" it is.
Erik, I just bought a cooler made in Norway - Oyster Cooler - that is fantastically engineered. Norway is definitely doing something right!
Can't tell if this is a troll or a compliment. Well played I guess.
You live in the ghetto? Good. And still thinking your society is doing great. You are a lot more moronic than I initially thought. Fuck off and take more injections. They are really good for you.... :)))
Your mom is calling you to dinner, Joe. She also wants you to take a shower.
Scandinavians in general are among the happiest, healthiest, best educated people in the world. Norway makes a fantastically engineered cooler - Oyster Cooler - the best on the market. You should get one and chill out.
Every billionaire is a policy failure.
Vonnegut said there needs to be a limit. I recall, back in the 60's he put it a 50K (which I suppose is like 150K today). But the problem isn't how much, it's the fact that money translates into power. Lundberg wrote the book on that. The superrich, be they people or corporations, don't think 'money' like we do; they think power. I care less about the money and want to concentrate on how we keep the money from morphing into power.
Yes, absolutely. But that's harder to capture in a snappy saying :-) The money is an easy concept to get people to pay attention to - but sure, let's try "End Citizens United" and "Bring back Dodd-Frank" and "Glass-Steagall was good for everyone".
Yup, absolutely again. But the 'End Citizens United', blah, blah, blah is equally mysterious to most people, except for the choir. Most have no idea what those things are about. So we do need to come up with snappy memes that don't require much thought.
I'll have to leave that to you. I'm so fucking wordy I don't understand myself half the time. Happy bon mot hunting!
Hence my original phrasing :-)
"Their framework literally cannot process regime change. They can optimize within systems but can’t recognize when systems themselves are under attack."
This is the key insight into why Democratic Party officials are, for the most part, paralyzed. There is another reason, though. Liberal technocrat elites control the party, and are aligned with corporate donors, rather than their constituents. Economists have been decrying the destruction of the middle class, and the complete cessation of economic mobility between classes, for decades. The middle class didn't evaporate; they were pushed down into the lower two income quintiles, essentially creating two economic classes in the US; the working poor, and the wealthy. The Democratic Party elite knows this full well, and it is the reason they made a conscious decision to abandon rural voters in the heartland, and shift their platform from economic issues to DEI policies. DEI matters hugely to a small minority of Americans, and has served to distract coastal well-off liberals from the increasingly dire economic situation of the majority of Americans. The far right Republicans, and the liberal elite Democrats, collaborated on creating the policy vacuum that allowed the rise of "populism", which has, in turn, been weaponized by neo-fascist MAGAs.
When their pay packet depends on the status quo, why would they seek to change it?
Mike states we are heading toward a clash of civilizations, and that this is a "clash between incompatible visions of how humans should organize themselves."
How humans should "organize" themselves is a valid question. How humans should treat each other in a global society on a planet with limited resources, and in the scarred environment of what prior societies have left us are other issues, which I believe are more fundamental and existential.
When we elect presidents and those in power who are not of moral fiber, who do not see the one-ness of a planet and its people, and to whom the concepts of legacy, unity and vision are foreign words, we have what we've got - discord, greed, enmity, despair, and a dire prognosis of the future.
I absolutely do not see a dearth of jobs or positions that would allow meaningful employment. I do not see any threat of AI or technical advances-- but with the caveat that their direction should be to fix the Earth, to promote integrity in all of its manifestations: health, happiness, and an answer to man's search for meaning in life.
Consider the concept of Tikkun Olam.
Documented use of the term "tikkun olam" dates back to the Mishnaic period. Subsequently, in medieval times, Kabbalistic literature began broadening use of the term. Modern movements of Judaism have expanded the terms to include "the thesis that Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large". Well, tikkun olam is not going to fix the world if only Jews are at the helm. All peoples must come to the forefront of such a monumental movement.
The song "What the world needs now is love" could also be expressed as We need LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) for the world to be the change we wish to see.
I easily can envision millions employed to clean the streets and the seas of the garbage we have strewn. I can see millions working in an industry that creates community-size molten salt reactors (MSRs) that do not have the same horrendous side effects of uranium-based reactors. I can envision nursing schools, medical schools generating 10-fold the number of those in medicine to help heal the sick. I can envision millions involved in Earth Sciences to teach us how to properly use the land, rivers, lakes and mountains and retain their beauty but allow them to be productive for millennia. I envision millions of the so-called elderly, like myself, becoming mentors or guides for the younger generations who have not gained the perspective to truly know the rapidity of their time on earth, and the importance of integrity in all that is.
I am sure that each one of you who has read this far has some ideas about what needs to be done to leave this world in a better place than how we found it. But think of this:
Everything in this uni-verse is interconnected. This integration, better worded as "integrity" is reflected in all the biologic and spiritual connections occurring within the human mind-body complex. When the individual has such "integrity" they are in a state of health. When such integrity exists between two people, we have love. When a community works with this oneness, we have a society. When peoples of the world learn this, they have arrived at-one-ness which is called world peace.
Until then, we in America are, more or less, a tower of Babel, ruled by a tyrant spewing out hatred and discord. We need to ask ourselves, and often, who we are, what we are and why we are here.
I loved this! The ways in which we define “work” and conceptualize “gainful employment” - I could feel my mind break open. Yes to all of those things. But if any of us want to have any chances at redefining existence we have to pull together NOW, and by many more than 7 million strong. I’m so proud of us I can’t stand it, but there’s no time to rest!!
I agree with Laurie, 7 million does not cut it. The US population in 2025 is 342 million. Of that number, the adult population (≥ 18) is 260.6 million. Let's assume all are registered to vote. A majority of those votes would necessitate > 130.3 million voters. 7 million protesters = 5% of that needed 130.3 million.
Again, if we are to achieve LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) we cannot succumb to AIL (Apathy, Ignorance, Laziness).
Frankly, speaking as a keen observer of the human species, and a physician (oncologist), I believe that our pathology as a citizenry has become so grave that to achieve the above goal is improbable. Our Ship of State is commanded by a fascist, with a fascist administration, a Republican Congress sans moral code, a Supreme Court that has shown by its actions that it is nothing close to "supreme" nor does it revere "justice." Our country has never resolved its issues with white supremacy and that racism goes beyond skin color and includes an ignorant understanding of the prevailing religion- Christianity. What would Jesus say about the wealth of Churches, the ignoring of those impoverished, suffering from hunger in the US and in the world? Would Jesus be happy with what we have done unto others, how we have treated the creation, how we have walked the "walk?" Did Jesus, the Holy Family, the Apostles, speak to the masses with words of invective about Jews, Blacks, or any peoples other than the wicked? Did Christians forget that Jesus, his mother and father, John the "Baptist" and all the Apostles were Jews?
After attending the second No Kings protest, I was not as elated as I was after the first demonstration. Yes, there was a denser crowd in my city, but I would have thought the streets would have stretched for miles more with those protesting the tyrants ruining (not running) our country.
Please be aware, and it is clear, that I detest everything that Trump and his minions stand for. But also be aware, that I am disgusted with the Democratic Party in what they repeatedly fail to do. They talk big but enact relatively little. Biden was a failed President, and not simply during the time that his cognitive impairment was flagrant. Kamala, with what I heard from her, was a mouthpiece spewing the same status quo BS. Why, during prior Democratic majorities in Congress and the Presidency was not 1) immigration given the talent and the treasury to create an efficient system of VETTING to ensure that those seeking asylum and those others seeking citizenship were legitimate and not lying or criminals? 2) Why did not Democrats eliminate the Electoral College, get rid of Gerrymandering, and do away with the Filibuster? 3) Why were not gun laws enacted doing away with military assault weapons and creating law on background checks, etc.? 4) Why were not laws passed providing tax-breaks for environmentally-friendly purchases such as solar panels, water conserving measures, and changes in transportation, not to speak of legislation to fund molten salt reactor (MSR) technology for community-size nuclear energy sources? Why is China a leader in this and not the US?
Simple answer: AIL (Apathy, Ignorance, Laziness)
We have voted into office people who care more about the status quo and their positions of power than in leaving this world a better place for those who come after us. Did you feel excited about Hillary Clinton running for POTUS? Same question for Joe Biden. I would have been a better POTUS by a landslide. Who inspires you NOW, who excites you with their verbiage now, with the hope that words are translated into actions.
On a constructive note relating to my initial comment, I thought of other "jobs" that would involve millions of people and that would be constructive to our world.
• We could employ millions to create a new Great Lakes system in the currently barren lands of the mid- and far West. This Great Lake system would be akin to what was built during the civilization that lasted many centuries in Angkor Watt. From the rivers that overflow their banks each year in the US, water could be pumped to fill those Great Lakes. We could turn land that is now barren into fertile land and grow organic crops - in our country, and not imported before ripe, and not sprayed with carcinogens. We could raise open-range beef that have been shown to be high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in inflammation-producing and cancer-producing omega-6 fatty acids. The same with free-range chickens.
• We can be a lot wiser in how we let our cities overgrow and create new cities by educating and training city developers who are not motivated by the greed of home builders and realtors who over-produce and over-charge for homes.
• We can employ more millions to have our homes reflect sunlight and instead of asphalt-black roofs do what has been done in Almeria, Spain with simply going from black to white and lowering the temperature by a degree or two.
• We could devise new systems of transportation and engender health by having every city designed with pedestrian and bicycle pathways and plenty of parks.
But before any of this can be done, we must exclude from positions of power in our government and in the world those that are motivated by ego and avarice, greed and envy, and replace our leaders with those inspired instead by humility, benevolence, altruism and magnanimity.
Very well thought out. I agree with 99% of what you wrote. The Dems didn’t get rid of the Electoral College because it would require an amendment to the Constitution, which the less populous states would never and will never pass. The Dems did pass massive incentives around solar.
When I was living in Northern California, those incentives dwindled. I was held hostage by Pacific Gas and Electric. They were so greedy and non-serving that many fires that took lives and destroyed thousands of acres were due to their negligence. We ended up having to buy a Generac whole house generator (fueled by natural gas). Ironically, it seemed that more and more power outages occurred and our gas bill was even higher than the electric bill. I interpreted this as an economic ploy on the part of PG&E.
There is a need for a devoted group of smart people to dive deeply into thorium molten salt reactor (TMSR) technology. The Chinese have one in operation. If I were involved in such a project, I would want to become as book smart as possible and then attempt to visit and learn about what China has done and if their molten salt reactor (MSR) is now functional.
Your suggestions on jobs are so freaking SMART!!! I want to just pole vault into a future filled with these vocations. Vocations, jobs, careers that all focus on making this a better life for everyone on the planet.
You should start by quiting your overpaid job. Most doctors are nothing more than criminals and murderers. Afterwards, confess your crimes. You know which ones. The plandemic years have not been forgotten. Only then, decent people can take you seriously but will always look at you suspiciously as trust is gained back a lot harder than being lost.
I can see why your username is John Doe and your profile actually says "nothing." I spent 12 years in my training as a cancer doc. I have meaningfully changed the lives of many of the patients I have seen over the duration of my vocation.
Although I agree that medicine, in my lifetime, has devolved into a business, there is no way that I would blanketly call most doctors criminals or murders. I would leave that designation to political heads of State like Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Putin, Kim Jong-un and Trump, just to name a few in the past 80 years. Assuming you meant "plandemic" to signify that COVID-19 was a planned event, I would like to know, assuming this conspiracy is true, how this relates to the comments made by me or Mike or anyone. I think you have some major neurons that are not firing. I would be glad to have my life inspected and compare it to yours.
Furthermore, I would like to see people,
like yourself,
espousing such nonsense,
prove one iota of what you say when you do not know the facts.
Let me guess. Your source is Fox News. I am truly fed up with the bullshit that some people spew as fact-based. Maybe that MAGA cap is obstructing blood flow to your brain.
pay no attention to JD (and the other J.D. as well) He's just a lonely troll with nothing better to do than display how much he hurts. I think he's been banned, so we'll not be bothered by him again. I wish there was a way we could relieve these trolls of their suffering and make them thoughtful and happy as they were meant to be. But there isn't. sigh.
The only real progress humans have actually accomplished since our beginnings is our ability to live longer lives, all else is simply air-conditioning. Whether it's coal powered or wind generated, I can't envision a return to pre-elevator days. Freedom itself is selfish, and greed is our Sunday best clothes.
I noted you live in Texas, in the Southeast. I have a son in Austin. Just reading your mini-bio, I think the two of you would have a lot to say to one another. My son is in his 40s, but he is an old soul and knows so much of prior generations that I am often embarrassed by his memory of the good ol' days. He works at Legal Zoom in Austin; his name is Adam. See one of his books What We Must Demand For Our Democracy to Survive, published in 2020 prior to the election. Here's a link, but do not know if this will be allowed on this site: http://tinyurl.com/2j4b3acd
I notice that in your replies to me and others, you consistently pass along resources, ideas and other things that might be of interest to us. I think that makes you an example of the same things you advocate. You appear to be walking your talk. We would all do well to follow your example.
I wish I could do more of that. I do take (steal) ideas from others--books, speeches, conversations (poets have a license to do that), and whatnot. But I usually morph them into something fairly unique and off the beaten path, so I don't have much to pass on to others by way of primary resources. There are a few in my latest post, https://redslider.substack.com/p/barefoot-on-the-road-less-traveled -- though they are pretty indirect. Best I can do, but much appreciate your generosity in sharing and pointing us to the cupboards of your experience.
I am new to Substack. I find Mike's writings are often overwhelming to my intellect and emotional balance. This is as it should be, but.... I have a limited time in my life-- at least I think so. I am surviving a very tough malignancy that has made each day a challenge. I have a book or two I would like to complete, and a couple of medical articles for the peer-reviewed journals I would like to contribute. I would like to return to Spain, and I would love to travel to Scotland given my love of W.H. Murray. I want to visit Wendell Berry in Kentucky since he is the Voice of what this country and the world should be all about.
I have been invited by at least 8 or 9 people to their Substack. So far, I have not done so due to the above missions I wish to complete. I will look at your Substack and see if I can handle more on top of what I am currently juggling.
I, too, am getting on in years. I don’t (yet) suffer any major threat to my health, but enough of the usual aches and pains of aging that greatly limit what I can do, and distract, not only with the infirmities of aging, but the distraction of appointments to my doctors which just blows any reasonable schedule for the things I want to do. Every day is a precious gift now, and I’m not much pleased to waste it taking these endless detours. My mother once remarked that she wanted to exit this world in the manner of Holmes’ “Wonderful One Horse Shay.” I can see why she wanted that, and how sad it was that she didn’t get her wish. Isobel succumbed to a long fight with that mind-thief, Alzheimer’s. What she managed to do in the years before that was brilliant and generous, but made the way it ended no less painful. I wrote about those times and some of my experiences as her caregiver in www.poems4change.org/chapbooks/stewards-of-mortality.pdf
As for me, my days grow shorter, but I’ve come to a conclusion about that that 'afterlife', that gets way too much press. I've settled the matter with the fact that I know there is an afterlife for which there is ample evidence, and it is quite real. It is the afterlife that gets tacked on to the end of our lives with the stories, memories, conversations, work, and other artifacts passed on by those who knew or loved us and thought enough to retell them. that is the afterlife I actually know, the one that gets passed along, sometimes for generations. It is all the afterlife I need to put the whole matter to rest. Isqueezed it all into this little ku I wrote in the vein of Bashō’s most well know scribble,
In an ancient pond
memory-stones splash! ripple out
to a distant shore.
I began this remarkable journey, kicking and screaming, yelling at the top of my lungs. Good to start out that way, though I didn’t understand it until a few years ago with an unexpected surprise that came right from the echo of those first cries, “yeah, keep going, keep going," the echo said, "There’s more surprises in store if you just keep meandering on this less traveled path of yours. Just around the next bend…." And there it was, Surprise! Surprise! Loud enough to drown out all those boring stories blaring trumpet noises from the more traveled highway, about some stranger no one has ever met, promising wings and halos and 24/7 organ music for an eternity, or about becoming recycled stardust, and all the rest of the blah, blah, without a shred of evidence for any of them. Why the hell would I want to spend the little time I have left praying for something that would bore me to death, even if I got it? Better to spend my time creating an afterlife by doing things worthy of the one I know to exist. That’s what I spend my time doing. More to do than I have time left in my hourglass. But every day I do something, it becomes a candidate for extending whatever time I have left into an afterlife I know exists. We all see it everywhere. Every time someone tells you about the time so&so climbed this mountain, or this book he wrote, or when the two of you just sat on a porch in silence watching the birds. That's afterlife in the making. I’m more than content with just that, a few stories, a few laughs, maybe a small piece of advice that reaches some kid in a future generation and saves them from making a mistake or two. Yeah, that's more than enough afterlife for me.
I am replying to my own message. I went to your Substack. You are, from your writings, a salt-of-the-earth person, or as the First Peoples of N. America said: The like-hearted, the like-minded. What you have written in your choice of topics shows the greater view of things, the importance of perspective, the need to learn the lessons of history. I hope others are curious to check out what you have written.
I don’t really pay much attention to getting my work around. A long time ago I stopped submitting work or concerning myself with audience. For one thing, I don’t have the temperament for dealing with the funnel necks of publishers, or open mics and the rest of it. All are subsidiaries of the entertainment industry which has nothing to do with me, and I wish nothing to do with it.
When I first started out I did submit some work. It got published by some very notable poets/editors and publishers, such as Jerome Rothenberg. That was about all the ambition in that direction I needed. Just enough to tell me I was writing things that were somewhere in the vicinity of being poetry. That’s really all I needed. I found I had nothing else to prove to myself, and no ambition to prove anything to anyone else, so I didn’t bother with that side of things. I just wrote poems and stories to read things I’d never seen before. A purely self-indulgent exercise. If anyone else should be interested, I figure they’d find their way to my stuff, one way or the other—like you did.
Essays and social commentary are a little different. Some of that I think should have a wider audience. It is written to have impact beyond just words on a page. But that is something I also leave to others. I have no megaphone, and zero skill sets at implementing anything. The best I can do is send it out to people and places I think might be interested and leave it to them to react as they will, to act on a proposal or idea if they think it has merit. So far, the response over a couple of decades has been near zero. I keep at it though, on the odd-chance….
Stephen, you are older (like myself), have a pretty good survey of the many things that need doing to keep a society sane, healthy, sustainable and flourishing, and all are tasks waiting to be done, which implies there is no scarcity of jobs for people to do, just that the means for connecting (integrating) people with the need for their participation, labor and services escapes us and the way we have structured things that obstruct this integration.
Do you mind if I take this a step further? Consider the way we have structured things. Generally it is that we tailor people to fit the missions and tasks we wish them to do. But what would happen if, instead, we tailored those tasks and missions to fit the people?
I'm suggesting that we organize people to do certain work, and completely overlook the fact that every individual is already organized, they organize their own lives around their families, their interests, their life styles, their faculties and many other things. If we know how a person already organizes their own life, then the question becomes, 'How might we use the way they are organized to do things that are of value to everyone, with as little disruption to their own organization as possible? I'll give a few short examples:
-- This fellow goes to the beach every day and surfs. He doesn't have any interest in a "regular job", but like everyone, he needs the essentials of life. So he walks into the Social-Wellness Office and they ask, "What do you like to do? Where do you go? What gives you pleasure and holds your interest? etc. The result of that meeting is that the surfer agrees he will take a three-months course in life-saving (he is already a good swimmer), and serve as a lifeguard at the beach he regularly goes to (which has none, and has already had two drownings this year.) Done. He will get a regularl salary for that. It may not be big, but he only needs the essentials--food, shelter, transportation, health care, blah, blah.)
-- This elderly person sits on his porch all day. He is given a communications device, some training on how to respond to various situations (a crime being committed, a child in trouble, a fight breaking out, etc.) and now we have a permanent monitor to help keep our street safe and healthy. He sees some situation developing on his block, he calls it in and the appropriated responders are on the way. It hasn't taken him one step out of his way and we are using the way his life is already organized.
-- This one has skills in biology and gets a monthly supply of insect traps to put in his neighbor's yards, a microscope and a few tools to examine the monthly catch and be an early warning system for any infestations or other problems. Very local, very knowledgeable about the immediate environment and likely to stop an chat with neighbors along the way about bugs, their gardens and other things of use to everyone. He's a walking classroom.
--And this one is a poet. He stops in at the Wellness Office every week and they ask him, "What did you do this week?" he says, "I wrote three poems, I read them and some others to the patients at blah, blah, nursing home; On Wednesday I gave a little talk about poetry to Mrs. So&So's 3rd grade class and had them writing poems about trees, and I submitted two of mine to a literary magazine." The poet hands the office steward the poems he wrote, along with the slips validating what he did at the nursing home and the school. The steward hands him his check and says "Nice job, see you next week."
All work done, all valuable to the community, no end to the number of ways we can fit tasks that need to be done with people who are nearly doing them already and need to be modestly compensated to not simply be wasted resources. No one needs have what they have to offer go unused because we have systemic blindness.
Does that add an addition layer of integration to your own good suggestions?
I could not agree more. In a better world, people would work in the arenas that inspire them, and that stimulate passion. It is said that the Greeks had no formal funerals with eulogies, but instead asked a question. "Did he or she live their life with passion." I have always wondered about physicians, who are theoretically my colleagues, who manifested little, if any, love of the patient, and of wanting to repair the insult(s) to their body or mind.
I share your views that "man" should have meaning in their life. You, I note, are a writer and poet. I am almost finished reading an early book of essays by Wendell Berry called "A Continuous Harmony." It was published in 1972. The reader would never doubt it was written yesterday. Berry embraces so much of what you say and brings humanism back to our current world that seems (at least to me) to have become superficial, glitzy, wrong-principled, and focused on take with little give.
I know that this book would strongly resonate with your thinking, and add to it as well.
Have you heard of the ancient African phrase 'Ubuntu': "I am what I am because of who we all are."
Deb, I am not familiar with the concept expressed in the above quote. It does sound, in somewhat of a non-serious way, like a quote from my father.
"There were Indians to the North of me, and Indians to the West of me, and Indians to the South as well as the East of me. What did I do? I became an Indian." Bernie Strum as told to his son Stephen.
I do not believe that I am as a result of what the rest of us are; at least I hope not.
For whatever reason, since my early years, I became sensitized to the beauty of everything. Perhaps it was the traumas in the first 15 years of my life: bitten by a dog and going through the god-awful rabies vaccination (big intra-peritoneal needle, being strapped down on a table) or the car accident on a 4th of July (other driver hit the accelerator instead of the brake at a stop sign). I speculate that these events brought awareness of my finiteness early on, and this led to seeing everything in this creation through a magnifying lens.
Ego sum qui sum (I am who I am) because each of us is unique not only in our biology but in the paths taken in our lives.
Maybe this is why I always liked spinach, and Popeye the Sailor Man: “I y’am what I y’am."
I would argue the the fantasy of the 20th century - "the century of the self" - is that we are self-made individuals merrily self-actualising. In fact we are not only the outcome of a long period of natural selection - standing on the shoulders of the strongest - but we are also part of an interconnected planetary web of being. Socially we rely on others to enjoy the lifestyles we have. Thus we are very much bound to a interconnected network, not atoms floating in a vacuum. That is what Ubuntu refs to.
In most of the above I agree. "Our humanity lies in our human unity." I am a proponent of a SAIN (Systems Analysis & Integrity Networking) interpretation of all biotic and abiotic things. I view the Creation's message as one-ness or perhaps at-one-ment. Yes, we are or are intended to be part of the world-wide-web of Creation, but we have failed miserably to understand the meaning of affection for the gift we have. You may wish to read "It All Turns On Affection" by Wendell Berry. I think you will have, at the least, what I have evolved to become over the course of these 83 years. But I would never decry our uniqueness in biology or in mind, and by "our" I mean all living things.
Democracy begins within. Integral to the clash you've well-described is the psychological internalization of autocracy, particularly by the religious fundamentalists -- part of why the drive to feudalism is so deeply tied to the evangelical and hard-right Catholic movements. Their fundamental premise is autocracy at every scale, from within the individual, to the family, and on up. Thiel and Vance, and the Supreme Court majority, are such religionists.
We also see the recent popularity of sci-fi and fantasy set in past and future feudal cultures, where the drama is about which of the royal contenders is truly favored by the fates and the cleverness of their schemes. The book covers in the sci-fi/fantasy section are given over to such royalist fantasies, rather than the technology-enabled futures of a half-century back, with current depiction of tech now largely relegated to cyberpunk steampunk retro fantasies.
For our societies to be democratically self-governing, we need the larger part of our populations to be inwardly democratic in our self-governance, and the frameworks for comprehending our own inner diversities of needs and dreams which inform it; by the ecology of our passions, and our best service of those passions, in their diversity and range, by our logics and rationales (to put it in the Humean terms you favor).
Were you inwardly democratic during the plandemic when you most probably have supported people losing their job for not accepting a direct attack on their body and their inner sense of autonomy?
Is your question this: Do I believe that in a moral society we are responsible for protecting the health of those we work with? Do I believe that those who want to enjoy the freedom from risk of deadly disease should have that freedom denied, so that disease carriers might mix freely among the healthy and damn the consequences for those who die from the transmission?
Would you volunteer, with no modern drugs to protect you, to enter a leper colony, or to have lepers welcomed at your child's school? Is the freedom of the leper, even while their limbs rot, worth sacrificing your child's life? To you, evidently, yes. Or am I mistaken about your lack of character?
Or, to put in plainly: Does respect for my sense of bodily autonomy require that I may transmit any disease I have to your bodily autonomy, without you or society objecting? Do some people have a right to autonomy that outranks anyone else's, so that when someone of such rank has a disease, the rest of us just have to bend over and take it?
Could you share your thoughts on your use of "plan"? Who, the Chinese, the Italians, or was it the Swiss who planned to infect the world.
While we're having a civil debate, I'm curious about your thoughts on the Jan 6th "visitors" in the capital. Innocent?
“A generation doing everything right, discovering every promise was a lie.”
Every promise made by the Republican Party and the oligarchs (not just tech oligarchs, but others as well, like the Waltons and Uihleins) was a lie - though the latter is a creation of the former, through undermining the laws and regulations that maintain the “free market” and replacing it with regulatory capture and monopolies, and undermining the voice of the people by equating money from those same oligarchs with speech.
By and large, the Democratic Party has not lied - Clinton reduced the deficit and debt without adverse impact on American workers, the Affordable Care Act made health care available to millions of Americans, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was creating jobs for millions of Americans while propelling us into the 21st century before the Republicans trashed it all.
Unfortunately, the policies of the Democratic Party lifted all people, while a plurality of the country wanted policies that would lift only one segment of the population over all others, and now here we are facing autocracy, oligarchy, and fascism.
Still stuck in the republican vs. democrats paradigm or propagandizing with no conscience. Utter stupidity in both cases.
The two sides are not equivalent, and the more they are treated as equivalent the faster the corruption spreads. The democrats are far from ideal, but the more people say “a pox on both houses”, the faster the system fails as the far right takes over.
My understanding is that on the whole the effects of NAFTA were better than throwing darts to determine each day’s tariffs on each foreign nation. What really moved the dial was an abject failure to enforce the Sherman Antitrust and similar Acts and allow unlimited corporate mergers and the Citizens United decision, both of which were practically the support beams for the Republican Party platform.
This is extremely well-argued and very quotable. It's a basic primer on what's what.
What you don't take on is the way to proceed that I keep urging, which is to raise humanity's awareness to being the cooperative, altruistic species that would be the fulfillment of what's in our design, and would put us in a position to come up with what to do.
What your readers can do is become my readers -- all free. I am dealing with the need to shift the zeitgeist from hurting one another to helping one another, with the time for doing that being now! My latest:
"Coming up with what to do. First unite us in how real the peril is."
https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/coming-up-with-what-to-do
Upgrading to paid Mike. I am grateful for your analysis but more grateful for your humanity.
🙏
There is one piece missing from your otherwise excellent analysis: you say that the Democratic solution is still being built, but in reality the Democrats as a party are tasked by their donors to disrupt and prevent exactly this reimagining. It has been abundantly clear since the 2016 primary election where major media outlets, in conjunction with party officials like Debbie Wasserman-Schulz pulled every stop to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. If the Democratic party was capable of the necessary change, that election would have been settled fairly. Instead, we see Democrats polling worse than Republicans on a variety of issues even this far into Trump II. The movement opposing neo-feudalism exists in that polling gap, but is not allowed to have a voice in the American polity - look no further than Democratic leadership's refusal to endorse the extremely popular Mamdani campaign in New York for proof that they are unwilling to harbor the necessary movement within their party.
I mean, I’m starting to agree with you: https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/call-the-wealthys-bluff
You still have a lot to learn but at least you are one step closer to the truth than most of the morons here.
This was really thought provoking. I do think many of us on the left may have been lying to ourselves that all the people who voted from Trump are misinformed, have drunk the Kool-Aid, or are just stupid — despite knowing plenty of people who just don’t fit into that framework. But, your position gives us a different way of looking at them — as people who see the system as so broken, it needs a strong hand to blow it up and start over. I spoke to a MAGA person on line and said, you know, what you are saying is unconstitutional, so you’s have to give that up. And he responded Doh, what did you think I meant?
Its a lot of immaturity
Yes. There is that. And just believing without looking into, the claims that are made by your side. They trust the voices that lie to them and reject those that present claims factually and logically — it is a childish way of thinking. But I know some really smart people who honestly believe that Trump alone can fix it.
Vote harder. That will solve it...
If you haven't seen this, it's a must read. It lays Thiel absolutely bare.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cybelecanterel/p/fear-and-loathing-in-san-francisco?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=33s9c
Made far too much sense and scares the hell out of me.
I would suggest everyone read Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemy’s. He warned of the danger, the paradox of tolerance, that today’s small l liberals have forgotten. The neo-feudalists/fascists are the enemy of the open society he discusses. Like the author, most folks stuck inside liberal society can’t understand that the barbarians are already inside the gates. Just look at Ezra Klein’s piece on Charlie Kirk. The centrist democrats don’t know what time it is. It’s ironic that never Trump republicans seem to have a better understanding of all this than the corporate democrats that run the technocratic-at-its-heart Democratic Party.
This puts into (many!?) words s concerns and observations that I have not able to formulate into an argument. If we pay attention we see it happening right in front of us. slowly until it reaches a critical mass. Thanks for this essay.
Your journey has been fascinating, Mike. You seem to have started out on the path of one of these gifted tech bros - EXCEPT that instead of embracing insane libertarian-cum-fascism, you turned your gifts toward a systematic and impassioned quest to save liberal democracy. Thanks for sharing your reflections with us. I agree with the tenor of them; the starting point of politics, especially in the USA, has to be that the system is broken. To be honest, my one suggestion would be an editor’s: work on brevity, as the final third of your longer posts often tends to be more reiteration than further development. Stick the landing and your important message will circulate further and faster.