A Canadian’s Guide to Voting in the 2024 US Elections

This article is a satire. Though in points 6-8 I get a bit more serious.


Munch’s famous painting; CC0 / public domain

I am not a US citizen, and never have been, nor would I ever qualify to be one. That makes me perfectly unqualified to tell Americans how they should vote. Except for one thing: Canadians tend to read a lot more than Americans, and we also tend to define ourselves by how we are unlike Americans. If it weren’t for the US, it seems, we would have no national identity at all. We simply wouldn’t know who we are. So a surprising number of Canadians, as a result, seem to know more about what’s actually happening in the US than a surprising number of Americans.

In that spirit, and with that caveat, here is my ‘advice’ to beleaguered American voters, especially those voting for the first time:

  1. It can help to realize that you actually have no free will, so how (and if) you are going to vote is already determined by your conditioning, given whatever unimaginably horrific events may transpire between now and voting day. So please don’t get stressed about voting, since you have no choice about what you’ll do anyway. And whomever you vote for, or don’t vote for — they are going to fuck things up even more than they are already, with the best of intentions (usually), so it doesn’t really matter. Don’t beat yourself up over this.
  2. Canadians (like Europeans, and Americans who live in “deep blue” or “deep red” states) have a lot of experience with what is called “strategic voting”, also called “lesser of two evils” voting. Thanks to the absurd voting systems in use just about everywhere, in 90% of cases your vote simply doesn’t count, because the overwhelming majority of people in your constituency have always voted for the same party’s candidates for generations, and will do so again this year. In the other 10% of cases, you get to grit your teeth and vote for the candidate whose official platform is less obnoxious than the other’s. So you learn that voting is a negative experience, not a positive one. You get used to this.
  3. Voting in the US, as in most western nations, is more like a beauty pageant, or, even more accurately, like one of those singing contests like X-Factor or EuroVision. The election campaign is a performance, complete with all the trimmings. What the candidates say in their performances means nothing — their party machine has already written or vetted their speeches, and in any case their speeches and promises, and those made in their parties’ official ‘platform’, bear absolutely no resemblance to what their party, if it wins the pageant, will do in any case. So to protect yourself from disappointment, don’t believe anything that any of them says. If you doubt this, look at what Obama, who was President for eight years, promised to do, and compare this to what his administration actually did.
  4. In case it wasn’t already obvious, the decisions made by governments in ‘democratic’ western countries are not made by elected ‘representatives’. They are made by the administrations, who respond to lobbyists and other rich and powerful pressure groups. Most western nations, including the US (and Canada) are hence corpocracies — where regardless of which party is ‘elected’, the same corporate oligarchies, political lobbyists and moneyed interests will make all the decisions. In some cases these unelected groups even write the entire legislation on a particular issue (vetted by their lawyers), so the elected ‘government’ merely has to sign their ‘X’ at the bottom. In many cases, they will not have read, and will never read, most of the laws they have enacted.
  5. To make the election contest/pageant more interesting, parties will have the platform speeches delivered by a variety of diverse faces, and some of those speeches will directly contradict others, especially those speeches made locally rather than broadcast nationally, where the contradictions are more obvious. “You can announce that program here, but don’t talk about it in Kansas (or in Calgary)”. The objective is to create the impression that the party in question is more ‘diverse’ and hence more ‘representative’ than the other, so that it appears to offer a ‘bigger tent’ accommodating more views, including yours. This is important only if you’re one of the 10% of voters referred to in point 2 above. The ‘tent’ is taken down immediately after each election in any case.
  6. There can occasionally be interesting issues arising at the local/municipal level that can actually warrant your time and attention. Those with wealth and power are usually not terribly interested in local issues, so it can actually matter who wins these local elections. Unfortunately, most local issues, such as homelessness, public transportation, housing costs, and the public education system, are largely insoluble, as they are part of much larger, more complex systems in various stages of inevitable collapse. But decisions on public infrastructure, local environmental regulations, zoning, and local health services can make a difference, and it only takes a few minutes to assess whether or not candidates for local office are competent to make such decisions. It actually takes much more skill and experience to be a competent local administrator than to be a figurehead for a party at the state or national level. You have to know about how things actually work. Sadly, those that have these competencies tend to be rare and to burn out quickly.
  7. Finally, though, while whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all, probably won’t make any difference in the real material world, how you personally feel about your participation or non-participation in the process is, IMO, what’s most important. There is no point making the ‘most informed, logical, pragmatic’ choice on voting day, if you feel bad about having made that choice. Just as an example, if I were a woman voting in the upcoming US presidential election, my ‘head’ might say ‘my’ choice doesn’t make any difference whatsoever on the issues I care about, but my ‘heart’ might say I’m going to vote for one of the two women candidates anyway. Ultimately, your instincts are somewhat attuned to your conditioning, and they kind of ‘talk to’ and inform each other. Learning to trust your instincts these days is actually hard, because everything we learn tells us not to trust them. So if your instincts tell you you’ll feel better by doing X on voting day, no matter what the result, see if you can bring yourself to trust them.
  8. You may have no free will, but you can be influenced (conditioned) by others, and vice versa, especially through candid face-to-face conversations with people you trust about the agonizing process of exercising your ‘democratic’ privilege in 2024, and about how you both feel about the process. Whom you talk with, and the sincerity with which you talk about your deliberations, the process and its frustrations, one-on-one and in real time, between now and election day will probably have much more impact (and in ways you can never know) than the marks you do or do not place on the ballot yourself.

I am probably both too young and too old to be so jaded, and I know the above ‘advice’ is not very helpful, but as everything slowly falls apart, it’s the best I can offer. Good luck to you in any case. You’re going to need it.


Thanks to Siyavash Abdolrahimi for inspiring this post.

A postscript on referenda, propositions, initiatives and plebiscites: We don’t see these much in Canada, and the above ‘advice’ may not pertain so much to them. In some cases, initiatives can at least be useful in communicating citizen unhappiness to governments over the administration’s current positions. Where we’ve had them here, they have normally been either non-binding (and usually reneged on by the government even when they’ve passed) or they’ve been defeated by conservative lobby groups’ massive propaganda pushes. (The spuriously-grounded development of ‘recall’ initiatives in the US, used mainly by moneyed conservatives to oust leftists, has spread here to Alberta.) And if you’re fortunate enough to have local Citizens’ Assemblies/ Juries/ Initiative Review panels, their recommendations on (especially complex and contentious) initiatives are usually wise and worth heeding before you vote.

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Signs of Collapse: Broken Things


drawing by Chaz Hutton; thanks to Wendy Bandurski for the link

One of the costs of “efficiency” — making stuff faster and cheaper (and hence more profitably) — is that it requires a complex supporting infrastructure — international supply chains, trade agreements, subcontractors etc — and a ready, inexpensive supply of resources and labour. As long as the whole system hangs together, it’s fine. Problem is, the more complex it gets, the more fragile it becomes. All it takes is one little fly in the ointment — a trade sanction, a labour disruption, a war, a design flaw, a resource shortage, a pandemic, a skilled labour shortage, a sudden increase in oil or resource costs or just the cost of living — and everything can quickly fall apart.

Today’s massively complex, globalized systems are encountering many of these shocks on a regular basis. There is no resilience in these systems, no redundancy (that would be inefficient, and cut into profits). So now we are entering a period — common to all civilizational collapses — where nothing is working ‘properly’ anymore. More and more of our energies are consumed in ‘workarounds’, instead of how things are ‘supposed’ to work.

David Ehrenfeld, in his prescient book Beginning Again (1994), describes our civilization as a ragged flywheel, over-built, patched and rusty, spinning faster and faster and beginning to rattle and moan as it comes apart:

There goes a chunk — the sick and aged along with the huge apparatus of doctors, social workers, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, and manufacturers of sophisticated medical equipment, which service their clients at enormous cost but don’t help them very much.

There go the college students along with the VPs, provosts, deans and professors who have not prepared them for life in a changing world after formal schooling is over. There go the high school and elementary school students, along with the parents, administrators and frustrated teachers who have turned the majority of schools into costly, stagnant and violent babysitting services.

There go the lawyers and their hapless clients in a dust cloud of the ten billion codes, rules and regulations that were produced to organize and control an increasingly intricate, unorganizable and uncontrollable society.

There go the economists with their worthless pretentious predictions and systems, along with the unemployed, the impoverished and the displaced who reaped the consequences of theories and schemes with faulty premises and indecent objectives. There go the engineers, designers and technologists, along with the people stuck with the deadly buildings, roads, power plants, dams and machinery that are the experts’ monuments.

There go the advertising hucksters with their consumer goods, and there go the consumers, consumed with their consumption. And there go the media pundits and pollsters, along with all those unfortunates who wasted precious time listening to them explain why the flywheel could never come apart, or tell how to patch it even while increasing its crazy rate of spin.

The most terrifying thing about this disintegration for a society that believes in prediction and control will be the randomness of its violent consequences. The chaotic violence will include not only desperate ruthless struggles over the wealth that remains, but the last great violation of nature. What will make it worse is that, at least at the beginning, it will take place under a cloud of denial and cynical reassurances.

What we are seeing now, in the growing mountain of broken things that impede us everywhere, is the impact of those flying chunks of the overbuilt flywheel as it slowly comes apart. So we see:

  • An increasing number of power failures, lasting an increasingly long time. The higher prevalence of storms and the increasing unreliability of power sources (due to constraints at refineries, political and military interference, and droughts so severe and extended that many hydro-electric facilities have seen double-digit drops in their generating capacity) mean that more and more people are relying on back-up generators and getting used to just living with brownouts and blackouts. And as we’ve seen in hurricane situations, it turns out those back-up generators are mostly not properly maintained so they don’t work either.
  • Unrepairable and unavailable high-tech equipment, from medical machinery to laptops, due to growing global shortages of metals and other ‘rare earths’ essential to their construction and maintenance, and to shoddy, cost-cutting and under-regulated production processes.
  • Long waits for repairs to transportation equipment, elevators and escalators, and smaller machinery from hot tubs to boilers, due to “supply chain” problems that extend from manufacture to warehousing to transportation to installation.
  • Growing scarcity of service personnel competent to install and repair increasingly-complex technologies, leading to more frequent and longer breakdowns.
  • The collapse of aged public infrastructure, long past its scheduled replacement date, because there’s just no money in government coffers to fix all the broken roads, sewers, water lines, power lines, and decrepit public buildings from substations to hospitals to schools.
  • The corruption of the construction and housing industry and the abandonment by governments of their duty to regulate and supplement that industry to ensure safe, affordable housing for all. It’s just too expensive, now.
  • Construction projects that used to take months now take years, and cause enormous disruption during construction.
  • The collapse of our court systems due to infiltration by moneyed interests, bloated bureaucracy, and such long backups and delays that “justice delayed is justice denied”.
  • The “enshittification” of the internet as it devolves into an impenetrable, useless breeding ground for hysterical misinformation and a shoddy, fake flea-market junk marketing bazaar.
  • The deterioration of the ‘information’ media from a cadre of earnest investigative reporters to mere scribes for governments and ‘intelligence’ agencies.
  • The increasing unreliability (and lack of safety) of public transportation systems.
  • Our utterly broken health care and education systems.

Underlying this mountain of broken things are what I have called the Four Horsemen: Imperialism, Corporatism, Propaganda, and Incompetence, which are themselves symptoms of system collapse. When everything starts to fall apart, imperialists will inevitably attempt to hoard and control what is still intact and functioning, corporatists will attempt to supplant failing democracy with rule by an ‘enlightened’ elite (themselves), propaganda will be used to prevent the citizens from rising up against the ‘leaders’ who are seemingly allowing everything to fall apart, and incompetence will inevitably rise as declining standards of education combine with unwieldy growth in scale, size, and complexity of systems to the point no one knows how to do anything knowledgeably and effectively anymore.

The hot tub in the apartment I live in has been out of order for five months — the repair parts brought in after its previous breakdown broke less than a week after it resumed operation and have been on ‘back order’ since then. The boiler on the apartment building’s top floor has broken five times in the past three years, including three times in one month, causing enormous damage. It’s a large, relatively new apartment with three elevators and no ‘service’ elevators, but there always seems to be at least one elevator out of order, and on more than one occasion all three have been out of order. They are apparently on their fourth elevator contractor organization, each of which has blamed the previous contractor for incompetent work.

When I use the LRT system, I’m grateful for my good health — elevators and escalators are out of order more often than not, and while our relatively modern LRT trains are still functional, they are seriously overloaded at times and places, leading to frequent delays, and the passenger train, bus and ferry systems they connect to are largely dysfunctional.

I’ve stopped using most of the so-called ‘social media’ because they have simply ceased having any useful value, and they are seemingly only put up with by most users because those users have become dependent on them (for reasons Cory Doctorow has explained). And now that YouTube has installed highly-offensive ad-blocker blockers, I’m finally ready to give up on Google entirely.

I’ve also given up on the ‘traditional’ media, since the NYT, WaPo, New Yorker and Atlantic all became propaganda mouthpieces for the military-industrial complex. I actually grieve the loss of these once-intelligent and valuable publications. I still read the ‘headlines’ from the CBC, BBC, and NPR just to track what most western readers are being told is factual ‘news’, but the alt media I now read have already provided me with enough to be able to know what the mainstream ‘spin’ on the news of the day is. As for actual investigative reporting and calling-to-account the misdeeds of political and corporate organizations and ‘leaders’, they’re now just a nostalgic memory.

I am privileged in that so far I have access to ways to work around most of the broken things that affect my life. But I know better than to expect that to continue. Many in the Global South have gotten used to going for long periods without light, power, and even water. For most of us in the west, that’s going to be a rude awakening.

Our western comforts have come at a great cost — our total dependence on the fragile, crumbling systems of civilization. We will of course learn how to work around these increasingly broken systems, and in the longer term, how to supplant them with relocalized, small-scale systems that actually serve us. There will inevitably be a lot of pointless blame tossed around for why everything is falling apart, and what could be or should have been done about it.

So, mind the glass, ladies and gentlemen, and we’re going to have to take the fire stairs from now on. It’s only a minor inconvenience for us, so far, so carry on.

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Signs of Collapse: Organized Crime Takes Over Politics and Business

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the second of a series of articles on some of these signposts.


image by CaseyColton on DeviantArt — CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

One of the points the British-French historian Aurélien often makes about politics is that humans will naturally pledge allegiance to whichever body — legal or illegal — ‘best’ provides them with security and other social needs like health and education. That might see them supporting governments in functioning democracies (there are a few of those left), and autocratic leaders who aren’t too obviously self-serving, megalomanic, or corrupt.

But when these ‘official’ power blocs do not provide citizens with their basic needs, citizens are forced to turn to other power blocs that deliver, or at least offer, a little more support to cope with their daily struggles. In impoverished areas that governments ignore, and in areas where ‘official’ police forces either fail to ‘serve and protect’ or openly exploit the citizenry, organized crime may offer just enough more to gain the allegiance of local citizens.

Organized crime syndicates take many forms. The mafia-style oligarchies and warlord fiefdoms that now prevail in many ‘failed’ nations are the obvious examples. Give them your allegiance and, provided you pass the ‘tests’, they will look after you. Street gangs are another example. AIPAC’s Congress “babysitters” follow a classic mafia organizational model.

In parts of México, the Zapatistas became popular with citizens as an alternative support network after corrupt local governments had been taken over by drug and crime lords. And much of the vast ‘underground economy’ operates outside the law and the state and provides many people on the planet with what they need that the ‘official’ government can or will no longer provide, or never could.

Many parts of western economies are actually run on the basis of bribes, kickbacks and payoffs both to officials and to ‘unofficials’ who know how to get things done outside of the rules of law and the state, and who command tribute and fealty for doing so. For the most part, the few media that still do investigative reporting have neither the courage nor the resources to bring this illegal activity to light (they may risk death if they try, especially since ‘officials’ and cops are often in on it and, for a price, turn a blind eye to it). So these activities continue ‘under the official radar’, and as our political and economic systems continue to fall apart at an accelerating rate, these activities expand and flourish.

I would argue that corporate and political lobbies like the NRA, AIPAC, Big Pharma and many, many more, are really just different forms of organized crime syndicates that use variations of the ‘mafia model’ to seize power from our failing political and economic systems and exert it for their personal advantage. These organized crime syndicates influence and control a wide swath of our political and economic systems, even above and beyond ‘registered’ lobby groups, and none of them is elected by or responsible to citizens. Examples: political party machines, big corporations and their oligopolies and unregistered lobby groups, the military and ‘defence’ industries, the criminals that run the construction and housing industries, police unions, some politically-active churches, and judiciary bodies stacked with bribed flunkies, just to name a few.


cartoon by Farley Katz from the New Yorker

Oxford defines ‘organized crime’ as “illegal, unethical and coercive activities that are planned and controlled by powerful groups and carried out on a large scale”. By that definition, much of the political and economic activity in western nations is already conducted by organized crime syndicates. As collapse deepens, this is going to get worse, not better.

Once we see that the collapsing political and economic systems, organizations and institutions that governments put in place no longer serve us, where will we turn?

It will of course depend on our situation and location. Once collapse deepens to the point that ‘official’ exercise of power cannot continue (there won’t be enough tax revenues to fund services or to enforce laws), we can expect to see government devolving power to more local levels, or just abandoning the provision of services altogether (starting with the most expensive non-military ones — health, education and social services). With the exception of drugs, most organized crime syndicates will not be much interested in offering these increasingly unprofitable services, so it’s likely that most of us will just have to do without them, or learn to provide them to each other.

Corporate empires, dependent on continuous growth for their survival, artificially low interest rates, ever-growing consumer debt, and cheap energy resources, will collapse along with political ’empires’. Even the very rich will only be able to make do if their wealth is real assets — since stocks and other financial ‘paper’ assets will be worthless as the economy collapses — and if they also have the wherewithal to secure and manage those assets. More and more, as both government and ‘official’ corporate suppliers of goods and services collapse, the vacuum left will inevitably be filled by organized crime.

So in the short run, we are likely going to have to deal with organized crime syndicates of various types for a while as collapse deepens. Look at any of the Global South nations that are already well into collapse and you’ll get the picture. They’ve already learned who they have to pay and what they have to do to get what they need, and you won’t find that information in their government propaganda. In addition to dealing with the reality of ecological collapse and the possibility of becoming climate migrants ourselves, we will have to decide what exactly we can and cannot live without, and pay the appropriate organized crime syndicates when necessary to get what we need.

But in the longer run, we are likely to discover that because power requires wealth to sustain it, and as collapse enters its later stages where no one will have much wealth left, we will all be relatively powerless. It’s at that point, as has been seen in past civilizational collapses, and even in major depressions, that our society will once again become relatively democratic. We’ll all be in the same boat, so we’ll either work together to get what we need, or perish. The once-haughty financiers, arbiters and expensive intermediaries will find their expertise is worthless, and that they have nothing of value to offer to the once-lowly bicycle repair person in return for their services.

And then the hard work will begin of creating radically re-localized subsistence societies that work, uniquely in each location, given that location’s available resources and its citizens’ competencies and cultural conditioning. There will be no cheap easily-extractable energy left to power these new societies, so their economies are likely to be what Anna Tsing has called salvage and scavenger economies. We will learn to reuse and repurpose the waste, weeds, remnants and thrown-away junk of our brief experiment with rapacious industrial economy, to provide us with what we need, wherever we end up finding ourselves living. Societies that actually work well in this world of scarcity may well take centuries to evolve, and we’ll likely have to survive a lot of failed attempts before they do emerge.

In the meantime, it’s useful to recognize, even at this early stage of collapse for many of us, how much of our political and economic system has already fallen to various kinds of organized crime syndicates, many of them masquerading as ‘respectable’ and ‘responsible’ organizations. Given the vast inequalities of wealth and power that our systems have led to, this was inevitable. And as the scarcities get worse, this will inevitably worsen as well.

And then that, too, will pass.

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Signs of Collapse: Blaming It On Immigration

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the first of a series of articles on some of these signposts.


anti-immigration rioters try to storm a UK hotel that houses asylum-seekers; photo by Stringer/Reuters via PBS

The mainstream parties in most western countries have become decidedly more hostile to immigration and immigrants over the past 30 years, and especially over the past decade. But strangely, despite all the fear-mongering, the majority of citizens of these countries are seemingly much less opposed to new immigrants than their elected ‘representatives’.

Distress about immigration levels tends to rise during economic slowdowns, and those levels are not much different today than they were 30 years ago. The rather confused message of the pollsters seems to be:

  1. Citizens think immigration has been good for their country, but also think (as they did 30 years ago) that overall immigration levels are significantly too high.
  2. Citizens overwhelmingly believe their governments are mismanaging national immigration policy, but often for opposite reasons (eg letting in too many immigrants versus mistreatment of immigrants).
  3. Citizens tend to generally like current policies towards ‘legal’ immigration, but think more has to be done to reduce ‘illegal’ immigration. They’re very ambivalent about refugees, claiming to have sympathy for them but wanting their numbers “controlled”.
  4. Citizens seem far more concerned about future uncontrolled ‘floods’ of immigration than about historical numbers of immigrants. There is a very clear tone of fear in respondents’ answers that the back-up at borders will very soon become overwhelming and the government will have no mechanism to control the situation, so it will simply explode.
  5. Citizens want to “prioritize” (ie cherry-pick) immigrants who are wealthy or who are willing to do menial labour jobs. They are OK with temporary student visas, but don’t want those students to stay after their studies unless they fill jobs where there is a “high unmet demand” for their skills. The pollsters, of course, don’t blatantly ask respondents which countries their governments should allow more vs fewer immigrants in from, but the underlying racism is very clear in their answers when you read between the lines. Ukrainian refugees are welcome; Palestinians not so much.
  6. Many citizens seem to have a perception that immigrants are more likely than native-born citizens to be ‘associated’ with problems of crime and unemployment (though often “not their fault”), and with a perceived excessive demand on public services. This despite overwhelming evidence the opposite is the case. (They contribute far more in taxes and other payments to ‘the system’ than they take out of it.)

Historian and ex-senior public servant Aurélien has been hammering on what he considers to the root of the immigration “problem” in his essays: That neoliberal governments have tried to be “good guys” by allowing in large numbers of immigrants, but have utterly failed to provide immigrants with the support services (language, health, housing, security etc) that many immigrants need. So it’s largely governments that have created the “problem”, not the immigrants.

This problem is exacerbated because many of these essential services were already and are increasingly collapsing for native-born citizens in many western countries: Health services are dysfunctional, restricted, increasingly not available at all, and absurdly expensive (due to factors including bad management, unwieldy centralization and bureaucracy, and too many f***ing lawyers, Big Pharma and insurance companies gouging them).

The cowardice of governments to create affordable public housing on a massive scale (which would require sizeable new taxes on the rich), and to rein in the corrupt and price-gouging construction and real estate ‘development’ industry, means that housing affordability has become a “trigger point” for many people across the political spectrum. So now racist politicians exploit these triggers by blaming the problem on immigrants, and especially “illegal” immigrants and desperate refugees.

The education systems in many western countries are also failing for a whole series of reasons, and one of the consequences is that areas with the highest immigrant populations (which also tend to have higher-than-average family sizes) are often overburdened both in the numbers of people they have to serve, and in the needs for language classes to get immigrants who don’t speak the native language up to speed.

I confess that I’m not entirely onside with Aurélien’s preoccupation with the immigration “problem” — his tone suggests that sheer numbers, and the incapacity and/or unwillingness of some immigrants to accept and adapt to the local culture, are contributing to it. But whether this old ‘melting pot’ argument is valid or not, the upshot has been that many progressives and people who would call themselves leftists, seem to me increasingly belligerent towards immigrants, and towards the governments of their own countries and the countries driving the exodus, for somehow not preventing or “fixing” the problem, which has been around in many countries as long as those countries have existed.

So we see Biden/Harris out-trumping Trump in his border wall construction and expulsions, and similar anti-immigration rhetoric and actions among once-‘progressive’ parties in the UK, Canada, Europe and Australia.

I would argue that the immigration “problem” is not a problem of numbers, culture, or integration, but principally an unfixable predicament. Our political, economic, ecological, health, education and other systems were already and inevitably falling apart, even without the impact of an influx of new citizens. These systems are calcified, dysfunctional, overburdened, drowning in bureaucracy, overly centralized, and trying to do too much for too many with too few resources and flat or declining tax revenues due to steadily falling standards of living for 90% of the population (and absurdly low and ever-decreasing tax rates on the remaining 10%). The decline in the quality of our education, health and other systems has been going on, and accelerating, for decades. We are demanding more from civilization’s systems, and from the earth, than they can sustainably provide, and now we are seeing the consequences.

We are soon likely, some climate scientists say, to have to deal with two billion climate refugees. If our border management, transportation, health and social services systems haven’t already completely collapsed before this great migration arrives, then that migration will certainly finish the job.

This is, as many have explained, a predicament, not a problem. It doesn’t have ‘solutions’, it has outcomes, one of which is the acceleration of ongoing system collapse.

It may be that leftists, being more inclined to see government services as a good thing, as a part of the ’solution’, are growing increasingly bitter because government now seems helpless and incompetent to provide these services in a time of ever-growing need. This will come as no surprise to students of collapse and complexity. We’ve seen it coming for a long time. But it might explain why a lot of progressives, and the rapidly right-skewing politicians trying (very incompetently) to appeal to them, have become decidedly hawkish on the whole subject of immigration. Their rightward attitude shift mirrors somewhat their frustrated attitude towards another aspect of the predicament of collapse — the three connected epidemics of homelessness, substance addiction, and mental illness, playing out grotesquely in our streets everywhere.

There is no ‘solution’, but one approach we can take is to accept that massive migration from politically, economically and ecologically desolated areas to the few areas that have so far not seen much collapse, is an inevitability. As Warsan Shire put it: “No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land”. Our systems — all of them — are slowly falling apart anyway, and the great migration will accelerate collapse, but it didn’t cause it. Once we accept massive migration, and collapse, as inevitable, we can start the work, not of planning for it (since we cannot know how it will play out, and we may be among the migrants ourselves), but of starting to learn the many forgotten skills we will need to acquire to deal with both system collapse and a huge influx of refugees.

And the best source of a lot of those skills will be from the refugees and other migrants themselves — many of whom have already lived through collapse, and learned, as best they could, how to cope with it.

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Rain-Walking

This is #33 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.


Great Blue Heron; my own photo. I took this shot several years ago on Bowen Island; it’s not the heron I saw today, as I was camera-less on today’s walk.

Most of the people I see, today, as I wander about in the rain, are in a hurry. There is not much being said, and most of the rain-walkers are solo. I walk for an hour, bundled up, umbrella in hand, trying to just observe, to pay attention, and to do so without trying to ‘make sense’ of what I see and hear and smell and feel. Without trying to ‘think about’ what is being seen and heard and smelled and felt. This is very hard for a human to do. Especially one like me, obsessed with making sense of everything.

I have long described myself as a hedonist — someone who believes that our behaviour is driven by an innate tendency to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. But I’m neither a ‘psychological hedonist’ (since I don’t believe our behaviours are ‘motivated’ by our beliefs) nor an ‘ethical hedonist’ (because without free will, the idea that our behaviour is influenced by what we think we ‘should’ do, seems preposterous).

Instead, I’ve come to accept, at least for now, that our behaviour is completely conditioned, and that the ‘vehicle’ of that conditioning is that, through chemical inducements in the body, it increases feelings of pleasure and decreases feelings of pain. Hence, I eat some things and not others, I do some things and not others, I say some things (like the things I say on this blog) and not others. Those chemical inducements are not the ‘reasons’ for my behaviours. The reasoning is merely an after-the-fact rationalization, an explanation (etym.: ‘a spreading out’). And like any explanation, such as the one that was held for centuries about how the sun revolved around the earth, it is only tentative. And, like any explanation, it doesn’t matter. It changes nothing.

But it can bring a kind of ‘aha!’ pleasure. And that, perhaps, ‘explains’ why we are compelled to seek explanations. We want to know, plausibly, how and why things are. Each ‘aha’ brings with it a little dopamine rush. It brings us pleasure to think we might know. Even if there need not be a how or why. Even if there is no how or why.


What is clear as I walk is that most of the rain-walkers do not find the rain pleasurable. It is cold, damp and uncomfortable. It obscures our vision and can make walking and driving treacherous. Most of the people I see walking have been conditioned to do the things they are apparently doing despite the unpleasantness of the rain they must face to do them. At the moment, that would appear to be mostly shopping — buying things with the anticipation they will make themselves and others happier (ie they will bring them pleasure, or reduce their pain). It doesn’t matter if those things will actually increase pleasure or reduce pain. It doesn’t even matter whether or how or why they believe those things will increase (future) pleasure or reduce (future) pain. They have been conditioned to act as they do regardless.

They have no choice but to put up with the current unpleasantness of the rain in anticipation of the perceived future pleasure or reduced future pain that their hurried purchases will enable. When they hear their loved one say “we are out of Tylenol”, the chemicals of conditioning automatically spur the rush to the pharmacy, despite the rain. There is no choice involved. Even the apparent choice of what to wear and which pharmacy to go to is entirely conditioned.

So now, as I wander in the rain, protected by my attire (thanks to my conditioning) from the unpleasantness of the rain’s cold and dampness, I am trying to pay attention and see everything through this all-behaviour-is-purely-conditioned lens: There is no agency, no meaning, no ‘matter’ to the behaviours I witness, so there is no point thinking about those things, ‘making meaning’ where there need be none. Instead, I try to just witness, observe, what is apparently happening, without judgement or interpretation or sense-making. I try to take “mental pictures” without any accompanying explanatory text or captions of what is seen.


So:

As I walk down by the creek, the birds, which have been chirping cheerfully, suddenly grow quiet. I smell the petrichor — the scent the soil emits in the rain. The smell evokes certain memories, bitter-sweet, and prompts me to inhale deeply, and to smile.

A few moments later, I come upon a group of three men, of very different ages, with grizzled, stubbled faces. They are sitting on inverted white plastic pails, talking quietly, and smoking. They are partly sheltered from the rain by the trees surrounding the creek. One of them smiles, but it is a guarded smile. He is missing a lot of his teeth. I nod and smile back as I pass them. One of them says quietly, in an accent I cannot place: “Peace be on you”.

Further along the trail there’s a very handsome, fluffy orange and white cat sitting on one of the posts of a fence that separates a luxury condo building from the creek path. It watches me as I approach, and as I cautiously reach up to stroke it, it nudges its head up against my hand to encourage me. As I continue to skritch its head and neck, it deftly turns around on the fencepost. It then looks at me. I repeat the skritches. The cat continues to look at me. As I wave goodbye to it, to continue on my way, I notice at the foot of the fencepost an empty can of tuna, its lid peeled back.

A couple of minutes after that I see a great blue heron fishing in the creek. It is so still I almost walk right by it. If there is a model of attentiveness, the great blue is probably it. It moves as subtly and deliberately as a ninja. I sense its awareness of me, its readiness to flee if I stray off the manicured path. I give it as wide a berth as I can, and move as stealthily as this uncoordinated body can manage.

At this point I leave the lovely, sodden creekside trail park and cross over the busy street to the city centre lake and park. There is a multicultural festival taking place in the park today. The vendors of foods and crafts and the bandshell presenters seem completely unfazed by the rain and the very small, rain-drenched ‘crowds’. All I see are smiles and nods, and expressions of equanimity. I am drawn to a display and demonstration of Chinese hanfu costumes. Three women are wearing, and describing, three different styles of hanfu. The graceful movements of one of the women in particular are captivating. Every move of her hands, her head, and the huge fan that she effortlessly spreads and slides around her seems at once completely intuitive and painstakingly practiced. Her movements remind me of the moves of qi gong — the precision, the smoothness, like a gentle, constrained dance.

Like the movements of the heron I witnessed just moments earlier.

I wander over toward the bandshell. There is a woman speaking and singing in Korean (I can tell by the lilt), accompanied by flute and piano players, but the music is clearly western in style, and it’s definitely not K-Pop. It sounds more like the kind of hymn you’d hear in a western church. It seems an incongruous performance, but their small audience seems to enjoy it.

At the lake, I stop (as usual) to watch and listen to the ducks. The famous expression about rainy days being “nice weather for ducks” seems to be true, as the ducks don’t seem to be perturbed at all by the light rain, especially today as it’s not windy. I wrote about their remarkable waterproofing in a previous post. (The oil that helps waterproof the ducks’ feathers is found on their tail feathers; with herons this oil is secreted by the thin white ‘beard’ feathers you see in the photo above, on its front; a key purpose of waterbirds’ constant preening is to distribute this oil to their other feathers for waterproofing.)

As I’ve observed in past, the ducks sleep in a cluster, with those on the outside keeping their ‘outside’ eye (and the related part of the brain) open and awake, while those on the inside of the cluster have both eyes closed. Today, however, quite a few of the ducks are awake, rooting in the grass beside the lake.

Several of the ducks are doing something I’ve never observed before — they are tilting their head as if they were giving someone (perhaps me) the ‘evil eye’. I catch myself shrugging at them, ‘apologetically’: “What did I do?”.

One of the ducks is also repeatedly, and comically, blowing bubbles under the water, another behaviour I’ve never observed before.

In the corner of the park, a mother and her young daughter are sitting on a bench watching the fountain. They have Asian features and very dark complexions. Suddenly the little girl stands, turns to face the bench, and kicks up into a handstand position on the bench, her legs flexing. I raise my eyebrows, but the mother seems nonchalant about this. The two of them are chatting quietly, but I have no idea what they’re saying. And then the little girl slowly raises her left arm and grasps her mother’s wrist. I almost bump into another rain-walker as I watch this. Very carefully, the girl, who can’t be much older than kindergarten age, releases her grip on her mother’s wrist and balances on the bench by one hand alone. Then she adjusts her balance, returns to a two-handed handstand, eases her legs over her head, and then quickly places her feet on the top of the bench’s back, pushes her arms up, and propels herself over the bench’s back, landing, unsteadily, back on the ground. She runs back around to the front of the bench, apparently to try it again, but her mother motions her to sit, and points to the fountain.


I listen to my breath as I leave the park, headed back towards home. My breathing is slower, deeper than it normally is, despite the fairly quick pace I am moving at. I am no longer ‘fighting’ — resisting — the cold and dampness of the rain, its little stings on my exposed skin. There is, briefly, an eerie sense of kind of ‘melting into the rest of the world’. It’s as if my heart rate is slowing, and as if my ears are tuning into things they haven’t discerned before, or, rather, listening in a way they haven’t before. And yet there is a familiarity, a je ne sais quoi to it. There is a ‘brightness’ to everything I can’t describe. But it only lasts a moment. For a second, I was home. And now, I’m back.

Outside the café, seemingly oblivious to the rain, a couple sits drinking coffees, while a big shaggy dog lies curled around the legs of its people, and around the legs of the table. As I near the café, a much smaller dog, taking its people for a walk, wags its tail furiously as it races over to meet the huge dog, which also begins to wag its tail, almost lifting the table off the ground in the process. The humans quickly apologize to each other for the dogs’ behaviour. The big dog resettles under the table, sighing. The little dog keeps looking back, almost tripping over its leash as it does so.


And then I shake off my umbrella, and am cocooned into the warm interior of the café. My friend the barista has his playlist on over the café speakers, and I wave to him and start to sing along. I look around the room, pick out an empty table, and wonder: What are all these people doing here? What forces conspired to bring them all here, to this place, now?

And I smile, knowing there need not be any explanation, that even the explanation of ‘conditioning’ is just a story. This story has been going on, its strange, unwieldy, uncertain plot written, the lines given to the innumerable actors just in time to be delivered, for seemingly billions of years. It’s all just apparently happening, and this body I presume to inhabit just has a bit part in it. I feel something like gratefulness for it all, but gratefulness isn’t quite the right word. A slight frisson ripples through ‘my’ body.

Oh, excuse me, I’m being hailed. I’m on. Yes, I’m here. Salut! Salam! Nî hâo! Annyeong! Kon’nichiwa! Nice to see you!

Posted in Creative Works, Month-End Reflections | 2 Comments

The Whole World Isn’t Watching Anymore


screen shot from a recent Guardian video of anti-war protesters outside the DNC convention in Chicago this week

More than half a century go, I was one of millions of protesters and demonstrators against the ghastly and criminal war in Vietnam, a war propagated by racist ideological fanatics with the broad support of the US governments of both parties, the media, and, for a time, befuddled US citizens. A war in which unimaginable atrocities were committed by all sides. Some of those atrocities were captured by media cameras, or on film smuggled out of Vietnam by opponents of the war. As many as three million Vietnamese died, most of them civilians, women and children. Hundreds of thousands in neighbouring countries were also killed. Much of the land was bombed, ruined, or made unliveable by toxic chemical weapons.

Now we’re witnessing another set of anti-war protests, in Chicago, at another DNC nominating convention. And again, the media have come out in favour of the war, and hostile to the protesters.

In the 1968 protests, the mainstream media, including the NYT, painted the protests as violent acts of civil disobedience and supported the vicious crackdown by city and state police and military forces. The senior editor of the NYT during the protests, Abe Rosenthal, was, according to his then-assistant, “firmly against what he saw as shapeless anarchy swirling up from the streets.” This anti-protest climate culminated two years later in the run-amok shooting by the National Guard of student protesters at Kent State University. Four of the students died. The case against the murdering National Guards was thrown out “for lack of evidence”.

What’s interesting is that most of the criticism of the media coverage of the war was not about how slow they were to come around to opposing the war per se, but that the press coverage tended to convey the impression that the American occupying forces were losing to a much smaller and weaker Vietnamese ‘enemy’. The fear of conservatives seemed to be that Americans would only continue to support the war as long as they were winning. The morality of the war was not an issue to either the government or the critics of the media’s coverage.

In the 1960s, the media were still trying to figure out the novelty of how to cover a ‘televised’ war. Like today, pictures then carried far more weight than words, and the government, allowing the media to ’embed’ with US troops, didn’t realize that photos of young US troops engaging, getting injured, and killed in guerrilla war, would galvanize opposition to the war far more than the accompanying coverage of American ‘successes’ in the media would sustain support for it. It was the photos, I would argue, not the words that accompanied them, that turned the public against the war. The bewildered press were dragged along behind them.

The press had been and continued to be pro-war even as the startling pictures showing the horror of war appeared on their front pages. The then-prominent Time-Life group of companies was especially hawkish. But between 1966 and early 1971 public support for the war dropped from over 50% to 28%. The press were out of step with their readers.

At least they were until 1967 when the senior editor of the Time-Life group wrote an editorial calling the war “un-winnable”. Not immoral. Not criminal. Un-winnable.

Much of the decline in popular support for the war came after Nixon widened the war to begin massive bombing raids in Cambodia in April 1970. Even then, the main issue in the press was not whether the war was morally justified, but whether it was “winnable”. (Sound familiar? It was the prequel for Afghanistan.)

The collapse of support for the war came before Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in June 1971, showing the American war crimes in Vietnam and the orchestrated lies about its progress that went all the way up to the Presidential offices, and over several Republican and Democratic administrations.

Governments have never forgiven the NYT and the other media that (after an agonizing process during which some media decided to keep them secret) decided to publish the Pentagon Papers. The media have been very ambivalent about publishing ‘leaked’ information in the Snowden/Assange era, and media such as the Guardian have become openly hostile to ‘illegal’ leakers and other whistle-blowers. The government and intelligence community, of course, show no such ambivalence. The cost of being a whistle-blower has always been high, and can often include a death sentence.

The chant at the DNC convention in Chicago in 1968, as berserk cops and state military forces charged into crowds of protesters cracking every head they could reach, was “The whole world is watching.” The shocking photos of violence and death in Vietnam were echoed in photos and video of the police violence in the streets of Chicago.

But the coverage of the protests produced an unexpected result: Even as most Americans were quickly turning against the Vietnam War, a similar majority blamed the protesters and demonstrators for most of the violence in the police riots in Chicago. Investigations that overwhelmingly showed the opposite to be true could not change the public’s minds.

The spin doctors were taking note. They realized that the best way for administrations, cops, military, and the mainstream media to keep the public pro-war and pro-intervention was to turn the cameras around and focus on the protesters and their violence, instead of the violence on the war front. If need be, they could even infiltrate protest groups, yell obscenities, hate speech and threats, and commit visually spectacular (for the well-prepped media to capture) acts of arson and vandalism. “Outside agitators” could also be invented and blamed, to tap into the well-stoked fear of the xenophobic American public.

So what’s changed since 1968? Are we seeing, or will we see, a similar souring of citizen support for the genocide in Palestine (and the proxy war in Ukraine) that we saw towards the war in Vietnam (and later, for the war in Afghanistan)?

A number of things have changed, which might change the trajectory this time:

  1. The American war machine has learned that citizens don’t want American lives on the line. Endless, extravagantly expensive, socially traumatizing, arbitrary (killing and maiming mostly civilians, women and children), ecologically ruinous bombing campaigns are preferred over any activity that directly involves American casualties. It’s harder to support a war when everyone you know has lost a family member or friend in it.
  2. Cameras are now kept from filming the carnage of American acts of slaughter. Even if the US are ‘merely’ the suppliers of billions of dollars of bombs and other war munitions, Americans are no longer able to see the blood, bodies, diseases, starvation, or the broken survivors caused by their government’s wars, genocides, coups, invasions, embargoes, ‘intelligence’ operations and other acts of oppression and destruction, on their TV screens. Unlike 50 years ago, they now have to actively go and look for it, and most citizens, quite understandably, don’t want to.
  3. The US government no longer has a compulsory military draft (though there is some evidence it may restore it for the planned war against China). The automation and outsourcing of war to foreign proxies has enabled this. AI and drones are also now employed to further enable wars to be conducted without troops on the ground, or even in the air.
  4. The average age of the population of all western nations is much older than was the case 50 years ago. The age cohort most supportive of the ongoing genocide in Palestine is, ironically, the same cohort who, when they were young, were the most vocal protesters. Most young Americans continue to oppose the genocide (though they remain staunch supporters of the war in Ukraine, due I would argue to their ignorance of the history leading up to it, and the impact of the anti-Russian propaganda, including staged photos, which is all the news of the current war they are able to see in the media).
  5. Trust in the integrity of the media is even lower now than it was during the Vietnam War. This time, I would guess, the media may well turn against the genocide (as they finally get to see what’s happening first hand instead of through the filter of government-approved intelligence agencies) ahead of the citizenry, who, due to their distrust of everything they read, may well just entrench their current beliefs. I hope I’m wrong on this.
  6. The media know that their access to information, especially of the type that will ‘sell’ their products, now depends on having a good ‘relationship’ with government and intelligence agencies. It is now so dangerous to be a leaker or whistle-blower of government misconduct that it is increasingly unlikely that we’ll ever learn the truth about the Palestine genocide or the Ukraine war the way we did, all too late, about Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The media are hence now forced to be obedient scribes for governments and ‘intelligence sources’, or they’ll be cut off even from that news. And it’s not like any of them actually do any investigative reporting of their own anymore.

The net effect of these changes, I think, will be that government, military and intelligence subterfuge will continue to become more and more opaque, and hence that the public, kept in the dark and suspicious of everything they hear from governments and media anyway, will be more reluctant to take any stand on any war or atrocity, and will hence be more complacent, and more easily propagandized.

In short, wars are likely to get longer and bloodier, and citizens are likely to be less and less aware of what’s happening in them, to the point that they’re just so overwhelmed and bewildered that they turn it all off, and stop watching or reading the news at all. The military, of course, would like nothing better.

There is one caveat to that dismal prognosis, though, I think. It was when Nixon widened the Vietnam War to Cambodia and then Laos that many Americans turned against it. The war was then not only immoral, it was also clearly un-winnable. I see some echoes in Israel’s moves to widen its genocidal war in Palestine to encompass Lebanon, Syria, and of course Iran. This can’t be done without US and NATO support, at a staggering cost and risk. We are about to see how effective Israel is at provoking such a war, especially with its recent assassination bombings in Lebanon and Iran. And then we will see how gullible the US and NATO administrations are to being sucked into a wider war, as happened 50 years ago in Cambodia and Laos.

And then we’ll see whether the citizens of the countries that could enable such a wider war, one that could well blow up in all our faces, will finally say no to more war. That will only happen if they’re paying attention, and if they believe they have any say in it.

Fifty years ago, to some extent, the whole world was watching, and turning away from the obscene and useless wars of that time. If those in the Global South are watching now, I suspect it’s just because they’re wondering when it will be their turn to be bombed, coup’ed, invaded, sanctioned, or destroyed. I’m not sure many citizens in the US and NATO countries are watching at all.

We believed, fifty years ago, that outrage and protest could end a war.

I don’t think many believe that now.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

saudade

This is a work of fiction.


My radical non-dualist friends tell me that the feeling that arises, or remains, most intensely when the illusion of self and separation drops away, is not bliss, but rather something akin to sadness.

it’s the sense that nothing can be otherwise
than just how it apparently is —
not better (or worse),
not hopeful (or hopeless).

the dreams we have about how things might be
are smashed — with this feeling, this strange sense, that
there is no might, no maybe.

it’s not that this gives rise to some quiet, peaceful acceptance —
there is no volition, no agency, no free will.
there is no choice in this.
this is not what we were looking for.

it’s more the loss,
the end of something that was believed in,
and is seen to be no longer possible — worse,
it is seen to never have been.

in Portuguese there is an expression
saudades de te — more than just “I miss you”,
it’s deeper, more undone by what is terribly missing,
it’s about the absence, the overflowing emptiness.

how can we miss what was only a possibility,
something that, we thought, might,
some future day, fill an empty space,
or something that might have filled that space
in some nostalgic long ago invented past?

still, somehow, we can yearn (if only…!)
for what might be in some non-existent future,
or regret the loss of what might have been (if only…!)
in some non-existent past,
when all there is,
all there ever has been, or will be
is this.

but what then happens when it is seen
that there is nothing that can fill that empty space?
that there are no possibilities,
only what, always and relentlessly, just was, and is,

with no parole, no escape, ever, from this?
we don’t want this.

yet this is the feeling I feel now.

this feeling is not quite sadness,
not sorrow, nor longing, nor melancholy,
not wistfulness, nor grief,
not even the feeling of ‘missing’ something.

it’s not even just a thought, not even just an emotion —
it’s more embodied than that.
it is who we thought we were that has been lost,
though we were mistaken.
no one was ever there to be lost.

it is a deep feeling,
but not a feeling that is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ —
it brings no joy, no suffering.
it offers, and changes, nothing.

it is a feeling of emptiness, of loss,
but not at all an absence of feeling —
not depression, not indifference,
not a turning away, not an inuring,
not a resignation,
not a desensitizing or dissociation.

it defies definition, analysis, purpose, and meaning.
it respects no human conceits,
and needs no explanation.

it is a feeling for which there seems no word,
perhaps because it is not a ‘personal’ feeling at all,
not ‘my’ feeling,
not a feeling ‘about’ someone or something.

just a feeling,
solid, unshakeable
about everything.
about this.

somehow, I recognize it —
it is vaguely familiar; I have felt it before.

is this, I wonder
how the equanimity of wild creatures feels?

it seems to be growing, this strange feeling,
this emptying out of all the things
that could have, should have, might have been.

leaving only, astonishingly, wondrously, sadly
this everything.


afterword: Many learners of French, trying to understand the reflexive tense, try to translate “I miss you” literally, as “Je te manque”. But the correct translation is “Tu me manque” — literally “you are missing from me”. Likewise “Ça me manque” means “I miss it”. You aren’t doing the missing — it is.
image from Midjourney — not my prompt

Posted in Creative Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 2 Comments

How Can Our Behaviour Be Conditioned If There Is No ‘Us’?

Another tedious and laborious exploration of what has been called ‘radical non-duality’.


Dave’s four worldviews, 1951-date. My current beliefs are resting on a crag stretching out from worldview III towards worldview IV, but there is no bridging the chasm between them. 

One of the things I love about science is how every discovery raises a host of new questions and shows us how little we really know. And sadly, the sciences, perhaps because of their attempts at rigour, tend to attract a ton of people who just desperately aspire to know the truth about everything (a yearning for control, perhaps), and so elide and ignore facts that contradict their theories and opinions. The dogmatism of many scientists is both disheartening and annoying.

Unlike most scientists, I find delight in uncertainty, in ambiguity, in surprise, and even in that most uncomfortable of intellectual states, cognitive dissonance.

In previous articles I’ve written that I behave most often as if one set of things were true, while intuitively ‘feeling’ and intellectually ‘knowing’ that a very different set of things is true. So, for example, I am (at least for now) thoroughly convinced that we have no free will, and that all our behaviours are entirely biologically and culturally conditioned, given the circumstances of the moment. But still I frequently get enraged and distressed by others’ behaviour, and ‘blame’ them for it, even though I ‘know’ they have no choice in what they do. I might as well get angry at the wind and the rain. I (whatever that pronoun means) make sense of the world ‘as if’ I have free will.

One of the issues with our behaviour being entirely conditioned and us having no free will, is that it presupposes that there is someone or something that can be conditioned and can hence have free will in the first place. It’s not hard to argue that if we have no free will, then there cannot be any such thing as a self to have it. And vice versa. So if it’s not the ‘self’ that is conditioned, what is it?

My tentative answer has been that two things are conditioned in parallel: (i) ‘our’ bodies, or rather all the creatures that seemingly comprise them, whose conditioning determines our behaviours, and (ii) ‘our’ brain’s model of reality, including its invention and conception of the illusory ‘self’ in the centre of that model, whose conditioning determines our beliefs and worldview. And it would seem to follow that much of our suffering comes from hopelessly attempting to reconcile, justify, and rationalize these behaviours and beliefs as controllably ‘ours’, when they are purely conditioned. We have no say in them at all.

But I recognize that I’m on a very thin and wobbly crag with this answer, perched between the irreconcilable worldviews III and IV in the graphic above. They can’t both be right. Worldview III is somewhat useful, and defensible, with a lot of recent scientific evidence supporting it.

Worldview IV goes much further, however, asserting that there is no such thing as time (it’s just another mental construct, part of the brain’s mental model of reality, a categorization scheme for trying to make sense of things). Worse, since there’s no time, there’s no causality, and without ‘real’ time and causality, nothing can ‘condition’ anything else. The question of what, in the absence of a real ‘self’, is conditioned, thus becomes moot, since there cannot be ‘conditioning’.

There’s a certain elegance to this argument, which is eminently simple and totally internally consistent, and it has been made, very articulately, by a lot of people who assert that at some point what I call worldview IV just suddenly became obvious — their sense of ‘self’ and separation just disappeared, being seen as having always been illusory, as an enormous psychosomatic misunderstanding. They say it is obvious that there is nothing ‘real’, no time, no continuity, no causality, no ‘one’ and nothing separate from everything. These are bright people from many different cultures and backgrounds. This is not a theory or opinion they are espousing — they re just describing what’s obvious, what’s just seen ‘there’. You cannot explain the astonishing consistency and internal logic of what they’re saying as being some kind of collective delusion, cult, mental breakdown, or conspiracy. They have no axe to grind, no script to follow, no common background. They are not scientists, philosophers, or skilled orators. You couldn’t make up what they are saying. And while it’s completely unprovable, it’s also irrefutable.

And to me, for whatever reason, it makes enormous intellectual sense (it explains so much that no ‘theories’ or ‘philosophies’ can explain). And somehow it also has, for me, enormous intuitive appeal. It just feels right. It resonates with what have been called ‘glimpses’ where this was seen, and obvious, that have seemingly occurred throughout my life.

So I’ve asked several of them how they would answer the question that’s the title of this article. How can conditioned behaviour occur or exist when there is no time, no causality, no continuity, no ‘one’, and no thing separate? When there is no ‘room’ for anything to condition anything else, and no separate thing or ‘person’ to be conditioned?

Of course, having obsessed about this for nearly a decade now, I knew the answer already: Conditioning only appears to occur; it’s a story, made up by the apparent brain to try to make sense of everything, fit it into its model of reality. And the person behaving or believing things in accordance with that apparent conditioning is likewise just an appearance. It’s all just a show, a play of light. For no reason, and without purpose.

Trying to make sense of this — trying to bridge worldviews III and IV — is impossible. The underpinnings of both worldviews are recursive — they depend on the acceptance of certain incompatible assumptions. To accept worldview III (hard enough if you’ve spent your life accepting the orthodoxy of worldviews I or II), you have to accept certain foundational assumptions or beliefs about the nature of reality that are fundamental to that worldview and incompatible with any of the other three worldviews. And likewise for worldview IV. Sitting on the crag at the edge of worldview III, looking curiously across the chasm at worldview IV, is an uncomfortable and untenable place to be.

But I find it enchanting, joyful and endlessly fascinating. And I don’t have any expectations that I will be moving from here during the remains of my apparent life. Worldview IV would have it that the incompatibility of that worldview with the other three doesn’t matter, and doesn’t change anything. And worldview III would likely assert that while worldview IV might indeed be ‘valid’, it’s completely useless (it explains nothing that would help us to understand the world better, or make more sense of it), so there’s really no harm believing it, any more than it would be harmful (or useful) to believe in the existence of faeries. No one’s pushing me in either direction. It’s like an astonishing puzzle that I cannot hope to ever solve, but still find intriguing.

Perhaps our conditioning is real, and time and continuity and causality are real, in which case ‘we’ are mere observers, witnesses along for the ride, dogs barking at the actors on the stage and getting caught up in what is seemingly going on.

Perhaps what we perceive and conceive of as conditioning is just furious pattern-making in apparent brains, like seeing faces in the clouds, and it’s all just appearances without substance, meaning or consequence. All just a story. A dream.

In either case, there is nothing to be done.

And no one to do anything, anyway.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 6 Comments

Links of the Month: August 2024


Cartoon by Chaz Hutton at Instachaaz

Yes, this is normal. No, wait, I mean, this is normal. All perfectly understandable. Yes, that group is pure evil. And that group over there is obviously insane. We need to work on that, get back control over things. But otherwise, it all makes sense. Our recent behaviour was a bit deranged, and perhaps inappropriate in retrospect, but it made perfect sense at the time. We’re making progress all the time, with a few setbacks. Inevitably it will work out fine. The gods, the leaders, the smart ones, the rich ones, the powerful ones, they’re on our side. History is on our side. We just have to work through some rough patches, overcome some obstacles, banish some detractors. In the long run, we can’t lose. Stop being such a pessimist, a defeatist. We have to win. It’s manifest. It’s written in the stars.


COLLAPSE WATCH


The closest Environment Canada weather station to me is Pitt Meadows, BC, Canada. We are currently at 1.5ºC above preindustrial average temperature here; most of Canada is (already) 2-3ºC above preindustrial average. Thanks in part to El Niño, the average temperature here has been 11.5ºC over the past 12 months. As I write this, the hottest place in Canada is Hay River, in the Northwest Territories, at 61ºN latitude, where it’s 34ºC. Normal August high there is 19ºC. Chart from CBC Interactives.

Average earth temperature smashes records again: At 17.16ºC, the global average surface temperature on July 22 broke all previous records, eclipsing the previous record set just a year ago. (The planet as a whole is warmest in July because most of the land area, which heats faster than the ocean, is north of the equator. It’s also where 90% of the human population lives.)

How mutual aid will make a difference as collapse deepens: Firefighters and other government and public service agencies already coordinate their activities across borders, a well-organized system called “mutual aid”. But the term also refers to citizen self-organization programs, most famously the disaster planning and response programs of Central American nations that can’t afford government-sponsored programs, and the self-policing networks in cities where official police forces refuse to venture (or are bought off by organized crime). Political and economic collapse will require a massive mobilization of such citizen-run programs, so it’s never too early to study them to see how and where they do, and don’t, work.

Collapse is so ‘last year’: As more and more scientists — and people — are coming to accept the inevitability of near-term civilizational collapse, they are also (not unreasonably) coming to accept there is nothing that can be done about it. So evidence of collapse is increasingly not ‘news’ and not covered in the news anymore.


LIVING BETTER


from the memebrary

Calling corporate oligopolies to account for price-fixing: The American Prospect devotes an entire issue to the various schemes oligopolies use to circumvent the already-lax rules on price-fixing to gouge their customers.

The electrification of everything: Cory Doctorow explores the logistics, politics, economics, materials management, engineering, and thermodynamics that are driving our current energy systems, and concludes that a radical switch to almost entirely electricity-based energy would be “a gigantic task, but it’s a tractable one”. In theory it could be done. That almost makes it worse, knowing it won’t be, and not because of greed or evil, but simply because of inertia.

A mind-changing video on transphobia: The uproar and blizzard of misinformation surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s biology and her gold-medal-winning Olympic performance have produced far more heat than light. But where much of the controversy over participation of trans people in sports, and our treatment of trans people in general, is arguably ‘complicated’, and a balancing act, this particular case is a no-brainer. Imane is not trans. She is and always has been a woman according to all commonly-accepted definitions of womanhood. While I appreciate and agree with many of the concerns that radical feminists have expressed about incursions into the rights of, and equal opportunities for, women, and the degradation of the word ‘woman’ itself, I’m sorry but — to Derrick and all of the others piling on Imane — in this particular case you are simply wrong. And you are putting Imane’s life in jeopardy. And those doubling down on their attacks on her are making me rethink other aspects of my position on the whole thorny ‘TERF’ war between feminists and trans rights advocates.


POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


cartoon by Farley Katz from the New Yorker

Imperialism, Militarism & Fascism: Short takes:

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

Corpocracy & Unregulated Capitalism: Short takes:

Administrative Mismanagement & Incompetence: Short takes:

Pandemic Watch: Short takes:


FUN AND INSPIRATION


Cartoon by Paul Noth from the New Yorker

The trouble with heat pumps: … is that they only work optimally in some (mostly newer, well-insulated) homes, and only under some (non-extreme) weather conditions. They’re really popular with governments subsidizing them so they look like they’re doing something important about climate collapse, but their impact is, well, kinda lukewarm. 

Five things I’ve learned about America: Interesting take from a NY photographer on what he’s learned (somewhat to his dismay) about the people of his native country. To summarize, they are: lack of curiosity (leading to xenophobia), cult of individuality, anti-intellectualism, quantity over quality, and enduring diversity. Part of a series. Thanks to Annette Isaacson and Paul Heft for the link.

The re-indigenization of Canada’s place names: There is method in the chaos and conflict of renaming the many Canadian places named after racists and colonial malefactors. First Nations writer Robert Jago explains the process, and proposes a new, non-colonial name for British Columbia.

The process of enshittification: Andrew Nikiforuk explains Cory Doctorow’s thesis on why everything, especially the stuff produced by corporate oligopolies, just keeps getting worse and worse. Citing Joseph Tainter, he describes how all complex systems collapse when they can no longer afford the exponentially increasing costs of maintaining that complexity. He concludes: “Thank you, Cory Doctorow. We now have the perfect descriptor for how it feels to live in the twilight of an inattentive civilization that has sacrificed sanity for complexity.”

Why AI is financially non-viable: Yves Smith explains why getting AI systems to the point they actually do something useful, and well, will cost more than all its supporters can afford to invest in it. Not to mention using a staggering amount of energy.

Nice to have friends in high places: How the largest fraud in Germany’s history was abetted by those charged to prevent and prosecute it. You’ll have to use reader mode to work around the paywall. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

Time is an illusion: Sabine Hossenfelder explains why that’s so. And then Brian Greene explains, in more detail, how it’s so, and why we continue to behave as if it isn’t.

Seymour Loudermilk hates vegans: Yes, it’s a spoof. But I’d guess a lot of viewers (there are billboards all over the US) won’t get the joke.


THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


Cartoon by Grant Snider, from the memebrary

From Cory Doctorow (yes, him again) on Project 2025:

So we should be alarmed by the right’s agenda. We should be alarmed at how much ground it has gained, and how the right has stolen elections and Supreme Court seats to enshrine antimajoritarianism as a seemingly permanent fact of life, giving extremist minorities the power to impose their will on the rest of us, dooming us to a roasting planet, forced births, racist immiseration, and the most expensive, worst-performing health industry in the world.

From Daniel Schmachtenberger, on Reconnecting with the World:

Let’s consider a little kid who’s at the phase when they say, “What is that?” “What is that?” “What is that?” Right? They’re trying to understand, they’re trying to learn what all the things are, the anatomy of the universe. And that phase usually happens right before the phase where they say, why?, why?, why?, why?, why? – because then they’re trying to learn the mechanics, the dynamics of the universe.

So the kid says,“What is that?” And they point to a thing we call a tree.

But I don’t say “That’s a tree”, or more specifically, “That’s a spruce tree” or whatever, because that’s going to teach the kid a bunch of things: It’s going to teach them to just accept the default worldview and not think for themselves. It’s going to have them confuse the ground reality with a symbol. It’s going to have them think in generalizations, to understand what are trees and what are not trees, to generalize all of them and stop perceiving uniqueness.

So the kid says, “What is that?” And I’m like, “Let’s go closer.” And we go closer… And I’m like, “Touch it.” And “Touch the leaves” and then “Touch the flowers” and “Touch the bark” and, you know, “Touch all these parts.” And I’m like, “What does it feel like?”

And then “Smell it” and then “Notice the other little animals in it”… and, you know, just have them engage in that way.

And then I’d say, “Do you think the tree stops there? What about this moss that’s growing on it? Is that part of it – or is that not part of it? What about the the soil? Is that part of it or not part of it?”

And then I’m like, “What do you think it is to that squirrel? What do you think it is to that little bug? What do you think it is to itself?” And “What do you feel when you’re with it?”

And eventually I’ll say something like, “In English, we call this a tree. In Spanish, they call it arbole. And in this language, they call it this…” and all the different kinds of things. “But this particular one – notice that if we go look at this one, they’re different. And in fact, this one, there’s not another one in the entire universe quite like it. And it’s not even the same as it was yesterday, and it’ll be different tomorrow.”

So they’re learning that the only way to know it is to be with it fully, more presently in this moment.

So imagine if kids grew up that way (rather than “That’s a tree. Memorize its Latin name. Understand the botany associated with it” … blah, blah, blah…) They’re using much more of their whole self to understand reality in a much more full, rich way that understands that that same thing is different from every different perspective and in so many different contexts. And so if someone is perceiving – if they are supported to perceive – the uniqueness of everything and the interconnectivity of everything – that nothing is fungible and nothing is separable – then they get that nothing can be standardized without actually causing harm and nothing can be optimized at the expense of others without causing harm. They get that special uniqueness and interconnectivity of everything and they get “I am because we are” – the principle of Ubuntu – for a “we” that extends to the stars.

And then the hungry ghost desire is not the main thing that emerges. What emerges from that connection are awe and fulfillment and fascination and gratitude. And it’s actually the lack of that connection that leads to the hungry ghost place that hungers for more and more hits and progress.

The desires that do emerge are in connection with everything else that I’m connected with. When a desire emerges, I wonder will it be good for the tree? Is it bad for the tree? What about the squirrels in the tree? I just spent time communing with them. I love them. I wouldn’t want – and it wouldn’t be good for me – if acting on this desire hurt those squirrels.

Now, the desires that arise for people who are clear on their inner connectivity with everything, those desires can be pursued in a way that doesn’t harm anything because their own identity is not separate from everything – because their perception is clear.

From Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, on The Last Biscuit (from NYT Tiny Stories; read how she wrote this):

Before the city pool in Johnson City, Tenn., got drained at summer’s end, dogs could take a swim for five bucks. Sporting his green life jacket, Barney leapt in as if he weren’t tired, deaf, toothless. We stayed until no one else was left. It’s a small thing in life, a dog, but small is relative. I packed biscuits for our last trip to the vet. I sat on the floor in the lobby, feeding Barney biscuits one by one, and for a moment it seemed possible that we might never run out.


Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

“We’ll Coup Who We Want”


(right click to open chart in a new tab, or click here to view full size)

Given all the atrocities currently being committed by government administrations, ‘intelligence’ and ‘security’ forces, and NGOs, there’s not much room in the news cycles for coverage of the outrages being perpetrated by corporations. In fact, only four news sources, Lambert & Yves’ Naked Capitalism, The American Prospect, Yanis Varoufakis’ DiEM25, and Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic, seem to be covering corporate misdeeds much at all these days.

As I’ve reported before, if you look behind many government actions, you’ll quickly discover the machinations of the corporate oligopolies that actually prompted, funded, and propagandized them. As long as all eyes are focused on government follies, these corporations can continue to pursue their agenda of profit and wealth accumulation at any political, economic, and environmental cost, unreported and unopposed. The mentally damaged Elon “We’ll coup who we want” Musk is one of the few corporate czars stupid enough to bring unwanted attention to them.

The chart I developed, shown above, and the article I originally wrote about it, have actually attracted a bit of attention in corporate circles, perhaps because they come a little too close to the truth for comfort. They were censored from a venture capital newsgroup that had reposted them, after members complained it was “socialist nonsense”.

But the article’s thesis is basically simple, and pretty much irrefutable: The managers, directors and controlling shareholders will do pretty much anything, including lying and committing crimes (and helping orchestrate coups), (a) if they are confident they can get away with it, and (b) if it will further their objective of increasing their profits and wealth. As the book and film The Corporation explained, they are designed to behave in ways that we would clearly consider pathological. That design was not deliberately malicious. Rather, it was done to make the workings of corporations simple and unambiguous, and to remove obstructions from the corporation’s success. Just as with the latest applications of AI, of which the corporation was arguably the first iteration, the intention was good, but the unforeseen consequences dire. As John Gray famous wrote in Straw Dogs:

If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it. If it becomes possible to clone human beings, soldiers will be bred in whom normal human emotions are stunted or absent. Genetic engineering may enable centuries-old diseases to be eradicated. At the same time, it is likely to be the technology of choice in future genocides. Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can only do so because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies, but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags. Humanity’s worst crimes were made possible only by modern technology.

Corporations are, arguably, the most prevalent technology of recent centuries, driving almost every aspect of our economy and most of our political decisions and considerations. They are, by their unfortunate design, inherently undemocratic, unresponsive to reform, and ruthlessly corrupt.

The corporate model is ostensibly based on ‘free market competition’, but not for the sake of encouraging innovation and advancement. Rather, a fundamental objective of the corporation is to eliminate competition, because competition potentially inhibits endless profit growth. As the chart above illustrates, first you eliminate your competitors (smash them, buy them, shut them down), then you eliminate regulations, then you get the governments you effectively control to smash foreign competition, then you destabilize and undermine labour markets and legal protections to cow employees and deceive customers to accept whatever conditions the corporation imposes on them, and, finally, you work to dismantle governments (foreign and domestic) you no longer need, whose not-for-profit activities hamper your untrammelled expansion activities. This is just how corporations are designed. This is how they achieve the objectives in their corporate charters, and their legal obligations as set out in corporate law.

We ignore the major role that corporations are playing in the accelerating collapse of all the systems that comprise our civilization, at our peril. Even if theoretically we were somehow able to ‘reform’ our political systems to respond to the polycrisis we are facing, and make these systems genuinely answerable to and responsible and responsive to the informed needs of their electorates, collapse would continue unabated. Political power now resides almost entirely with corporations and their owners, managers and directors, not with anyone in elected office or government administrations.

A few examples of how this corporate control over all aspects of our political and economic lives is producing dysfunctional consequences:

  • The internet has become dysfunctional since it devolved largely into an oligopoly of five corporations: Google, Microsoft, X-twitter, Facebook, and Amazon. To these corporations, you are not the customer, you (and your wallet) are the product, being served up to their real customer, the advertisers and ‘sponsors’. These corporations are not interested in informing you or helping you obtain what you want and need. They are only interested in feeding you whatever crap their real customers — other corporate oligopolies and moneyed pressure groups and propaganda agencies — want you to see. They even forbid you to block this paid-for misinformation from your view. So their ‘products’ are now a mess of ads, propaganda, government and corporate misinformation, with much of what you really want to see already pre-censored, demonetized, or moved ‘below the fold’ where you’ll never see it. And their platforms are self-obsolescing, upselling, price-gouging, and cutting once-‘free’ services, so every year you have to pay more and more for less and less. And now, to prevent customers annoyingly complaining about paying for useless ‘upgrades’ and new ‘versions’, they are trying to ‘rent’ you products and services for a monthly, ever-increasing, fee, forever.
  • Corporations are using increasing levels of spyware to spy on, terrorize, and micro-manage employees.
  • Thanks to deregulation, oligopolies are now free to buy up and close down any potential new competitors, allowing them to collude openly to set prices. The so-called “market” no longer has any role in determining what you pay for anything. Oligopolies, from airlines to banks, can now add, and re-price, junk fees that provide absolutely no value to the customer, at will. Financial institutions and intermediaries can now set interest rates (with added junk fees) at rates that would once be illegal under (now deregulated) usury laws. And now, thanks to AI, it’s getting even worse: New surveillance tools monitoring what you buy, and when, are allowing corporations to use “surge pricing” and “surveillance pricing” to charge you more when you most urgently need something.

When you look for accurate, balanced information online, or when you are looking for unbiased reviews and ratings, or the lowest-price alternatives, or the resolution of a problem caused by a corporation, or a reasonable price for a quality product or service, you will quickly find: Oligopoly corporations are not your friends. 

You don’t like it, then, as Musk says “Deal with it.” And then, shut up and do what they tell you. They are not interested in what you want. They are interested only in what they can sell you, for as much as they can gouge you for it.

Yeah, I know, it’s hard to think about this in a world full of proxy wars, genocides, coups, embargoes, and other political outrages and machinations. But if you can, save a little bit of attention for what corporations, dutifully fulfilling their pathological mandates, are doing to all of us.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 2 Comments