Today, more than 23 years, eight trillion dollars, and a million dead since 9/11, America has never been more insecure at home and had less power, credibility and moral authority abroad. “The U.S. is no longer the world’s policeman who will enforce the international rules based order,” one dispirited U.S. government official wrote me in 2023 after the Biden administration abandoned the 100 million dollar Airbase 201 in Niger. “We’ve instead turned into the fat middle aged crossing guard, standing there in a neon vest, flapping our arms and yelling at the side of the road for cars to slow down.”
A world where power is not justified, only exercised.
Where no one even remotely claims to speak for humanity.”
I just finished watching Ken Burns’ documentary on the American Revolution and its bleak description of the chaos of the clash of Renaissance humanist philosophy with the embedded class structure of ancient feudalism. The acute suffering of the population could,only be justified by a moral imperative inspiring focus and dedication transcending even the fear of death - “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Today, I look around for a spark of that brave moral enthusiasm and I only see signs of diseases of despair. Our government’s sadistic and cruel use of power is exactly that naked immoral misuse of power you describe. Your cynical descriptions of the immorality of the modern world’s power structures illustrates how deep this cancer has spread.
This brings up the question of how does a philosophical seed of clarity take root and prevail against harsh odds? Or, do the barbarians sack Rome again leaving only ruins and nostalgia? Are there any hints of change agents formulating clarity midst the fogs of war and inertia?
“We hold these truths to be self evident…” What evidence of Truth do you see?
There is a growing resistance and slowly, but surely, leaders are emerging. Perhaps you carrying the understanding that life robed of agency under the digital boot of neo-feudal techno-fascism sucks more than fighting the good fight.
Graeber and Wengrow (Dawn of Everything) note the extraordinary exchange between the Wendat ("Huron") Kandiaronk and the western intelligentsia. We have forgotten that human intelligence can be positive, and lost our contact with Nature.
You might be interested in the work of Philip Shepherd and his book, Radical Wholeness. He describes how we have essentially two "minds" - our rational head-mind and our intutive, sensual gut-mind. The two are linked by the vagus nerve and optimally should work in harmony. Sadly, we have created a tyranny of the head-mind and a shaming of the gut-senses and intuition. We can return to our bodies and reclaim our full integrity and wisdom. https://embodiedpresent.com/pages/radical-wholeness-book?srsltid=AfmBOop8iaDS3sBdvvNGTYRuJlnoKzQmiXMFoVmmDRJKCmCzqw6BDad6
"The better angels of our nature" refers to the positive, moral, and compassionate aspects of human character, such as empathy, kindness, and reason, that can guide us away from conflict and towards cooperation. The phrase was popularized by Abraham Lincoln in his 1861 first inaugural address as an appeal to these virtues during a time of national crisis.
Yes, we can be open and receptive to a full range of experiences, but we need some sort of anchor or compass point to be capable of making decisions and being assertive. The psychologist in me knows that prolonged despair and hoplessness does not summon our "better angels" but calls forth demons of fear. Mike's warning about the threat of moral bankruptcy and the resulting violence is very real. We, again, are in a period of national and international crisis and the status quo is not sufficient to meet the challenges.
I am intimately involved with a certain NY family who paved the way for the UN, CFR and the BMGF. You have NO IDEA how the cake is already baked. Like I said. Try to find the Joy in the last years of quasi-freedom.
Trying to decode this. Your "certain NY family" has switched recipes? Or are you implying the UN was itself a false front for more sinister undertakings?
A great step forward, Mike. Now, let's move on with a little imagination, a firm grip on our nature (or have we lost that entirely?). "Civilization" is over. We can return to a modest relationship with Nature, efficient and humble. First, shed the hubris, the arrogance, the presumption, using emotional maturity to measure intelligence, and fortifying Nature with every contact.
The masses are awakening. The massive population of indigenous people worldwide, ie those who got colonized and lost their voices for a time, are rising. They are all of us. They hold whatever human wisdom remains post this long running theft of land and resources by a cruel few who know nothing of humanity themselves. Those who transacted on human lives, livelihoods and homelands as if those were their birthright can destroy us all, it is true, but they can’t live without us. By globalizing and centralizing and focusing on a handful of techno masters of the universe, their machine is vulnerable. Now they must jostle with each other for? What exactly? To become the Surveillor to outdo all other surveillors? All that is valuable is in the masses. We Can live without them.
Omg, Mike, you speak so deeply to my cynical, misanthropic soul!! 🙂This is fantastic big-picture insight. I’m seeing the hazy contours of some grand mirroring of Marx’s (philosophically borrowed) critique of the division of labor leading to alienation at the national/regional level—societies trapped in their roles and unfree to just be and adapt.
"What was once a republic is rapidly becoming Lockheed Martin with a national anthem."
Sometimes I feel like the American government has been reduced to cargo cult politics; they imitate the actions of politicians of the past without understanding the meaning behind the actions, and then wait for the rewards to arrive.
Feels like the whole planet got sorted into cosmic job titles nobody applied for. America’s out here selling missiles like Girl Scout cookies, China is the world’s haunted Costco, and Europe is basically a HOA with better cheese.
But you’re right: the part that should keep us up at night is how normal the absurd has started to feel. When civilization forgets what it’s for, it doesn’t collapse, it drifts. Then one day you look around and realize humanity outsourced its soul for store credit.
A very accurate description Mike of what we have evolved into at this point of our evolution. May it be a wake up call too many to reach for the highest we are capable of.
See where that got us. The Enlightenment was a consequence of contact with native Americans (Wendat luminary Kandiaronk), but they could not bear to give them credit, instead inverting their reading to reflect their own troubled thinking and casting aspersions on "mere natives" and their hard-won understanding from a thousand years of American turbulence. They could have used a life in Nature and an ensuing adulthood of community debate with elders. A world of difference from the European experience. A new civilization will not be a push-button result of our expectations. Let's discover where naivete lies.
Please do more research on the Enlightenment, Charley. Yes, there was Native American influence on social ideas. But the science side of it was entirely European and Arabic. And the social side was largely based in the rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts, kept through the "Dark Ages" in monasteries and by Arab intellectuals.
I am familiar, and I do appreciate the context in which these bits emerged. As much as I might appreciate the Enlightenment, however, the context is telling. This was not a movement shared by people generally, but an intellectual exercise bound by privilege. I think that with the aspirational shift drawn up in American Founding documents, inspired and grounded in close relation with native Americans, we have embarked on a new path. Commentary on its incompleteness fill libraries, but it is definitely time to turn a corner on intellectual hubris and get back to our native intelligence. Indigenous people around the globe have demonstrated a sophistication our hubris does not understand and cannot stomach. Time to move on, to escape the 6th Mass Extinction.
Ukraine as a NATO puppet state? What, in your mind, is the problem with NATO? You object to having an alliance against Russia? There are good arguments about various US military actions. But against anything NATO has done? My dad knew the retired Supreme Allied Commander of the late '50s and early '60s, who was strongly against the Viet Nam war and excessive CEO compensation (being, in military retirement, a CEO himself). Ukraine is less a threat to Russia than Cuba is to the US. NATO, unlike Russia, has never launched an offensive war.
Pete, What's wrong with this statement? "The NATO war on Yugoslavia, known as Operation Allied Force, was a 78-day air campaign from March to June 1999, launched by NATO to halt the humanitarian catastrophe and ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by Serbian forces under President Milošević." You find Milošević's well-documented atrocities something we should have tolerated?
The claim that NATO promised no expansion is false. The only promise was that NATO troops would not be staged in East Germany after German unification.
Basically in your analysis we should have let the atrocities in Yugoslavia continue because they were against Muslims, while you also hold that we should object to the current atrocities -- against Muslims -- by Israel. And the excuse for tolerating genocide in Yugoslavia is that some Muslims there were involved in the opiate trade. The genocide in Yugoslavia was not a police action against a specific criminal syndicate. It was ethnic cleansing. By your logic if the Northern Italians were to launch a campaign to eradicate all Sicilians (whom they view as not really Italian) we should welcome that, since many Sicilians are in a criminal syndicate involved in the opiate trade. My wife being Sicilian, I for one would strongly object to doing nothing. My brother's wife being Muslim, I'm also for what NATO did in Yugoslavia, and against of course Israel's genocide.
Today, more than 23 years, eight trillion dollars, and a million dead since 9/11, America has never been more insecure at home and had less power, credibility and moral authority abroad. “The U.S. is no longer the world’s policeman who will enforce the international rules based order,” one dispirited U.S. government official wrote me in 2023 after the Biden administration abandoned the 100 million dollar Airbase 201 in Niger. “We’ve instead turned into the fat middle aged crossing guard, standing there in a neon vest, flapping our arms and yelling at the side of the road for cars to slow down.”
No global power speaks for humanity. Tragically it seems that the voices who do are “blowin’ in the wind.”
“So here is the reality, stripped of euphemism:
We are not drifting into a multipolar world.
We are congealing into an amoral one.
A world where power is not justified, only exercised.
Where no one even remotely claims to speak for humanity.”
I just finished watching Ken Burns’ documentary on the American Revolution and its bleak description of the chaos of the clash of Renaissance humanist philosophy with the embedded class structure of ancient feudalism. The acute suffering of the population could,only be justified by a moral imperative inspiring focus and dedication transcending even the fear of death - “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Today, I look around for a spark of that brave moral enthusiasm and I only see signs of diseases of despair. Our government’s sadistic and cruel use of power is exactly that naked immoral misuse of power you describe. Your cynical descriptions of the immorality of the modern world’s power structures illustrates how deep this cancer has spread.
This brings up the question of how does a philosophical seed of clarity take root and prevail against harsh odds? Or, do the barbarians sack Rome again leaving only ruins and nostalgia? Are there any hints of change agents formulating clarity midst the fogs of war and inertia?
“We hold these truths to be self evident…” What evidence of Truth do you see?
There is a growing resistance and slowly, but surely, leaders are emerging. Perhaps you carrying the understanding that life robed of agency under the digital boot of neo-feudal techno-fascism sucks more than fighting the good fight.
Graeber and Wengrow (Dawn of Everything) note the extraordinary exchange between the Wendat ("Huron") Kandiaronk and the western intelligentsia. We have forgotten that human intelligence can be positive, and lost our contact with Nature.
You might be interested in the work of Philip Shepherd and his book, Radical Wholeness. He describes how we have essentially two "minds" - our rational head-mind and our intutive, sensual gut-mind. The two are linked by the vagus nerve and optimally should work in harmony. Sadly, we have created a tyranny of the head-mind and a shaming of the gut-senses and intuition. We can return to our bodies and reclaim our full integrity and wisdom. https://embodiedpresent.com/pages/radical-wholeness-book?srsltid=AfmBOop8iaDS3sBdvvNGTYRuJlnoKzQmiXMFoVmmDRJKCmCzqw6BDad6
No. There are no hints. Prepare. Try to find Joy on a day to day basis while you can.
"The better angels of our nature" refers to the positive, moral, and compassionate aspects of human character, such as empathy, kindness, and reason, that can guide us away from conflict and towards cooperation. The phrase was popularized by Abraham Lincoln in his 1861 first inaugural address as an appeal to these virtues during a time of national crisis.
Yes, we can be open and receptive to a full range of experiences, but we need some sort of anchor or compass point to be capable of making decisions and being assertive. The psychologist in me knows that prolonged despair and hoplessness does not summon our "better angels" but calls forth demons of fear. Mike's warning about the threat of moral bankruptcy and the resulting violence is very real. We, again, are in a period of national and international crisis and the status quo is not sufficient to meet the challenges.
I am intimately involved with a certain NY family who paved the way for the UN, CFR and the BMGF. You have NO IDEA how the cake is already baked. Like I said. Try to find the Joy in the last years of quasi-freedom.
Trying to decode this. Your "certain NY family" has switched recipes? Or are you implying the UN was itself a false front for more sinister undertakings?
Nope, this old hippie is going down fighting. The ostrich approach does not work for me.
A great step forward, Mike. Now, let's move on with a little imagination, a firm grip on our nature (or have we lost that entirely?). "Civilization" is over. We can return to a modest relationship with Nature, efficient and humble. First, shed the hubris, the arrogance, the presumption, using emotional maturity to measure intelligence, and fortifying Nature with every contact.
Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau would argue quite forcefully that this is a naive view.
The masses are awakening. The massive population of indigenous people worldwide, ie those who got colonized and lost their voices for a time, are rising. They are all of us. They hold whatever human wisdom remains post this long running theft of land and resources by a cruel few who know nothing of humanity themselves. Those who transacted on human lives, livelihoods and homelands as if those were their birthright can destroy us all, it is true, but they can’t live without us. By globalizing and centralizing and focusing on a handful of techno masters of the universe, their machine is vulnerable. Now they must jostle with each other for? What exactly? To become the Surveillor to outdo all other surveillors? All that is valuable is in the masses. We Can live without them.
Omg, Mike, you speak so deeply to my cynical, misanthropic soul!! 🙂This is fantastic big-picture insight. I’m seeing the hazy contours of some grand mirroring of Marx’s (philosophically borrowed) critique of the division of labor leading to alienation at the national/regional level—societies trapped in their roles and unfree to just be and adapt.
Well, I am no cynic. I am romantic, writing in a cynical frame, so as to shame everyone.
Don’t worry, I don’t believe anyone thinks you’re a closet cynic 🙂 It’s hard to be a romantic in a world increasingly run by cynics. Keep it up!
Mike, I totally relate.
"What was once a republic is rapidly becoming Lockheed Martin with a national anthem."
Sometimes I feel like the American government has been reduced to cargo cult politics; they imitate the actions of politicians of the past without understanding the meaning behind the actions, and then wait for the rewards to arrive.
Feels like the whole planet got sorted into cosmic job titles nobody applied for. America’s out here selling missiles like Girl Scout cookies, China is the world’s haunted Costco, and Europe is basically a HOA with better cheese.
But you’re right: the part that should keep us up at night is how normal the absurd has started to feel. When civilization forgets what it’s for, it doesn’t collapse, it drifts. Then one day you look around and realize humanity outsourced its soul for store credit.
Blessed be the ones still looking for a center.
A very accurate description Mike of what we have evolved into at this point of our evolution. May it be a wake up call too many to reach for the highest we are capable of.
See where that got us. The Enlightenment was a consequence of contact with native Americans (Wendat luminary Kandiaronk), but they could not bear to give them credit, instead inverting their reading to reflect their own troubled thinking and casting aspersions on "mere natives" and their hard-won understanding from a thousand years of American turbulence. They could have used a life in Nature and an ensuing adulthood of community debate with elders. A world of difference from the European experience. A new civilization will not be a push-button result of our expectations. Let's discover where naivete lies.
Please do more research on the Enlightenment, Charley. Yes, there was Native American influence on social ideas. But the science side of it was entirely European and Arabic. And the social side was largely based in the rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts, kept through the "Dark Ages" in monasteries and by Arab intellectuals.
I am familiar, and I do appreciate the context in which these bits emerged. As much as I might appreciate the Enlightenment, however, the context is telling. This was not a movement shared by people generally, but an intellectual exercise bound by privilege. I think that with the aspirational shift drawn up in American Founding documents, inspired and grounded in close relation with native Americans, we have embarked on a new path. Commentary on its incompleteness fill libraries, but it is definitely time to turn a corner on intellectual hubris and get back to our native intelligence. Indigenous people around the globe have demonstrated a sophistication our hubris does not understand and cannot stomach. Time to move on, to escape the 6th Mass Extinction.
I have no idea what the hell 3I-Atlas really is. Maybe it’s the “meaning” restoration event. Who knows?
Not to mention the overarching mediocrity that such transactional nations produces.
Ukraine as a NATO puppet state? What, in your mind, is the problem with NATO? You object to having an alliance against Russia? There are good arguments about various US military actions. But against anything NATO has done? My dad knew the retired Supreme Allied Commander of the late '50s and early '60s, who was strongly against the Viet Nam war and excessive CEO compensation (being, in military retirement, a CEO himself). Ukraine is less a threat to Russia than Cuba is to the US. NATO, unlike Russia, has never launched an offensive war.
Pete, What's wrong with this statement? "The NATO war on Yugoslavia, known as Operation Allied Force, was a 78-day air campaign from March to June 1999, launched by NATO to halt the humanitarian catastrophe and ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians by Serbian forces under President Milošević." You find Milošević's well-documented atrocities something we should have tolerated?
The claim that NATO promised no expansion is false. The only promise was that NATO troops would not be staged in East Germany after German unification.
Basically in your analysis we should have let the atrocities in Yugoslavia continue because they were against Muslims, while you also hold that we should object to the current atrocities -- against Muslims -- by Israel. And the excuse for tolerating genocide in Yugoslavia is that some Muslims there were involved in the opiate trade. The genocide in Yugoslavia was not a police action against a specific criminal syndicate. It was ethnic cleansing. By your logic if the Northern Italians were to launch a campaign to eradicate all Sicilians (whom they view as not really Italian) we should welcome that, since many Sicilians are in a criminal syndicate involved in the opiate trade. My wife being Sicilian, I for one would strongly object to doing nothing. My brother's wife being Muslim, I'm also for what NATO did in Yugoslavia, and against of course Israel's genocide.