how to save the world

US Election Voting: I Was Wrong, Sort Of

Posted on November 14, 2024 by Dave Pollard

As I admitted in my edit to my November 7th post, the chart in that post was materially wrong, because it failed to acknowledge that there were still millions of uncounted votes several days after the election. And my conclusion, that Trump’s total popular vote was actually lower than in 2020, and that perhaps as many as 14 million young (age 18-29) people had stayed away from the polls in 2024 after voting in 2020, were both consequently incorrect.

The charts above and below, I think, rectify those errors as much as possible. The sources for this data are as follows:

Voting age demographics: US Government Federal Register
Total US population: US Census Bureau
Total votes cast for president, by candidate as of November 13: AP via Wikipedia
% of estimated total votes already counted (96.5%) as of November 13: AP via Wikipedia
Youth (age 18-29) vote, as a percentage of all ballots cast, and % for each candidate: NPR and CIRCLE via USA Today (CIRCLE is a research organization based at Tufts University that did extensive exit polling)
Note that “turnout” calculations are based on % of voters of voting age, not on number of “registered” voters.

There may still be errors in my analysis, or in the data from the above sources, but the numbers from the various sources do now seem to “add up”.

So here’s what I think these charts and the above-referenced reports say:

The votes (and non-votes) of young (age 18-29) people did not appear to make a difference in the 2024 presidential outcome. And their votes might well have altered the electoral college (and Senate) results in 2020, but not the Democrats’ plurality in the 2020 presidential vote.
Young people however did “stay away in droves” in 2024. Their participation rate in the 2024 election (based on two sources) plunged from about 51% to about 41% — ie by about 5 million votes. If you assess a non-vote to be a vote against all candidates, then “none of the above” was the choice of more young people than all of the candidates combined.
Older (age 30+) people had almost exactly the same (62% vs 63%) turnout/participation rate in 2024 as in 2020.
Had young people showed up in the same numbers and voted the same way in 2024 as in 2020, that would have resulted in a Harris presidency. But they did neither. The young people who did vote shifted their votes towards the Republicans to almost exactly the same degree as older voters. And yes, this was most noticeable in young white men’s votes (52% Trump to 27% Harris in 2024) but was marked in all other demographics of young voters as well. For example, more young white women (43% vs 40%) voted for Trump than Harris.
Young people asked for the issue that most influenced their vote cited the economy/jobs (40%), abortion (13%), immigration (11%), health care (9%), climate change (8%), crime (5%), gun policy (5%), racism (5%), and foreign policy (4%).
Young people also said, when asked which candidate could “best handle the situation in the Middle East”, their answer was Trump (45%), Harris (32%), Either (6%), and Neither (17%).

I think the results pretty much speak for themselves. To me, they were dismaying but not at all surprising. Most Americans, young and old, still do not realize what is going on in the world (and they are far from unique in that). They are angry, fearful, and distrustful (understandably, and they are far from unique in that either).

As everything continues to fall apart, this is where we are, now.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | Leave a comment

What We Refuse to Believe

Posted on November 12, 2024 by Dave Pollard

Much has been written about the denial, by many if not most of the world’s people, that climate collapse is accelerating, and that it will irrevocably precipitate or intensify and quicken the collapse of our entire global human civilization, with catastrophic consequences possibly including the extinction of most or all life on the planet, including human life.

But the inevitability of climate collapse is just one obvious example of humans refusing to believe what they don’t want to believe.

Here’s a summary of why I think this is so prevalent:

Our behaviours (what we do) are strictly the product of (i) our biological conditioning (what our ‘instincts’ tell us to do), (ii) our cultural conditioning (others’ behaviours — what they say and do), and (iii) the circumstances of the moment. ‘We’ have no say in any of it.
Our beliefs (what we think) are the product of the above three conditioning factors, plus (iv) our rationalization (how we ‘make sense’ of things, and what we want to, and refuse to, believe, and (v) our own behaviours, which need to be justified and rationalized.

We may think that our beliefs influence or even determine our behaviours, such as when we cast a ballot, but this has it exactly backwards: We vote, based on our cultural and biological conditioning. Then, afterwards, our beliefs shift to reflect that conditioning, subject to our insistence on believing what we want to believe and our refusal to believe what we don’t want to believe.

So our behaviours don’t reflect our beliefs at all — our beliefs reflect and rationalize our (and others’) behaviours.

So person A votes for the Democrats, based on the conditioning of others they trust and care about (ie what they say and do, including their political statements and actions), and on their biological conditioning (which may eg lead them to have a propensity to prefer gentler candidates). Then their beliefs shift to support and justify that behaviour. That might include believing that the Democrats’ platforms and candidates are closely aligned with their thinking (even if they’re not), and refusing to believe that the Democrats are really supporting Israel’s genocide, or even that there is a genocide. That’s how they might be ‘conditioned’ to think.

And likewise, person B votes for the Republicans, based on the conditioning of others they trust and care about (ie what they say and do, including their political statements and actions), and on their biological conditioning (which may eg lead them to have a propensity to prefer more aggressive candidates). Then their beliefs shift to support and justify that behaviour. That might include believing that the Republicans’ platforms and candidates are closely aligned with their thinking (even if they’re not), and refusing to believe that the Republicans are really supporting large military and corporate interests that are actually working against their interests. That’s how they might be ‘conditioned’ to think.

In either case, the primarily emotion-driven behaviour comes first, and then the intellectually rationalized belief follows. That’s how our brains, I would suggest, apparently work. Sometimes this produces an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance, such as when we’re asked to vote “strategically” for the “lesser evil”. But even then, whether we vote for the “lesser evil”, or for a third party, or don’t vote at all, we will rationalize that ‘decision’ as being the most sensible, so we don’t feel (so) bad about what we did. Or we’ll reason that we made a mistake (and blame ourselves or someone else for it), and rationalize that our mistake was due to misinformation, or haste, or over-emotionalism, or a mental lapse, and pledge to do ‘better’ next time.

But there was no ‘decision’ that needed to be rationalized. The way we vote is how we are conditioned to vote, and has nothing to do with making a ‘decision’.

You might protest that I’m just trying too hard here to make a counter-intuitive argument — that our behaviours ‘precede’ and influence our beliefs, but not the other way around. But I’m actually trying to explain what we apparently think and do from the perspective (which I find increasingly persuasive) that we have no free will, and that there is no little homunculus ‘self’ inside us that actually makes any decisions at all.

If I’m correct in this, it would seem at first glance to have enormous implications, especially for a world whose global human civilization is rapidly falling apart. But perhaps not!

Going back to what we ‘refuse to believe’, if our beliefs don’t influence our actions, why should we care if they’re flawed or erroneous?

We don’t want to believe everything’s falling apart. That in our failing economic systems there is already no longer enough to go around, and it’s soon and inevitably going to get much worse. We don’t want to believe our political systems are so corrupted and dysfunctional that they are beyond repair, or that the rich and powerful are desperately hoarding what they have and picking over the remaining crumbs before our governments go bankrupt, or go rogue, or both, and simply cease to function. We don’t want to believe that our ecological systems are collapsing like dominos, leaving us with what will soon be a catastrophic shortage of water, energy, arable soils, and livable habitat. And, of course, we don’t want to believe that amidst all these accelerating crises, we are actively engaged in genocides and nuclear sabre-rattling that one US government advisory group estimated has a 50% chance of leading us to global nuclear war.

So we simply won’t believe that those things can or will be true, most of us. It’s too painful, and shameful, to ponder. And our refusal to believe in the possibility of collapse, massive genocide or nuclear annihilation will make absolutely no difference to anything. It is our actions (and inactions) that have (already) brought us over the edge of the precipice to collapse and to the brink of nuclear obliteration, actions and inactions that were and will continue to be entirely conditioned, no one’s ‘fault’. And there is nothing ‘we’ can do about it.

Of course, some of us will take some small actions that will locally, at least for a while, make our ecological or economic or political or social systems seemingly a little better. That’s our conditioning; we have no choice but to do those things.

But the endgame is already determined, and might have been locked in millennia ago, and it doesn’t take a genius to look at the hockey-stick graphs of overshoot to see where we are headed, if we don’t blow ourselves to bits first.

If that idea fills you with anger, blame, grief and fear (or disbelief), that’s completely understandable. But it won’t change anything. Our bodies have been conditioning us for a million years or more to take actions that seemingly maximize pleasure and minimize pain, and that conditioning has brought us to where we are now. No one to blame. Couldn’t have gone any other way. If the world is ending… might as well enjoy what’s left while it lasts.

If your conditioning lets you do so.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 13 Comments

What Is Apparently Happening

Posted on November 10, 2024 by Dave Pollard

(No, this post is not about the US election. It’s about the absence of free will and the illusion of the self. And no, apparently I’m not going to stop writing about this.)

Here is what seems to be happening, to the ‘self’ that is called Dave:

I am thirsty, so I decide to make tea.
I’m feeling lazy, so I choose to lie down on the couch with a book, intending to reread some sections that an online friend has suggested I take a second look at.
I elect to look out the window at the forest and the mountains beyond, and smile.
I decide to underline sections of the book that I hadn’t paid attention to before, planning to incorporate some of them into the blog post you are currently reading.
I opt to listen to an audio version of a post by a blogger whose writing I usually enjoy, but today I find it annoying.
I decide to turn it off and to listen instead to music from my playlist. Inspired by the music, I consciously get up, walk to the window, and, still staring at the mountains with a new dusting of snow, start to dance to the music.

I actually have no choice in any of that. There is not actually any little homunculus ‘me’ deciding or doing anything.

Here’s what is actually (but only apparently) happening:

The molecules and organs of this complicity of trillions of cells called a ‘body’, conditioned by physical symptoms and signals of thirst and mild fatigue, apparently activate the ‘body’ to prepare a cup of tea, and then to stretch out on the couch.
Something ancient in this apparent ‘body’ (I know not what) seemingly compels (conditions) it to write yet another blog post, and a prompt from an online friend compels (conditions) it to reread some sections of a favourite book, to incorporate into this blog post.
These eyes are inexorably drawn to the view out the window. Chemicals (endorphins etc) flow to ‘reward’ doing so as a ‘pleasant’ feeling.
This book-reading likewise seems to provoke a flow of chemicals to ‘reward’ doing so as a ‘pleasant’ feeling. I underline the passages that evoke this chemical flow. The new ‘understanding’, to the extent it is consistent with the brain’s pre-existing beliefs and worldview (part of its conceptual model of reality) is incorporated into the model.
The audio is parsed by this brain to try to make sense and meaning of it, but instead there is cognitive dissonance. Mild feelings of anger and fear (“Have I been wrong about this writer’s writing, and sensibleness, all along?”) seemingly arise. They in turn seem to bring up feelings of dread, disappointment, sadness, hopelessness, and shame. The views and information expressed in the audio are not added to the brain’s pre-existing beliefs and worldview; they are instead seemingly ‘parked’ in a part of the brain that stores similar dubious but not entirely discarded ideas and information.
The unpleasant feelings from the audio (a kind of “pain”) provoke a flow of chemicals (cortisol etc) in the body compelling it to turn off the audio and instead turn on music that has evoked pleasant feelings in past. The pleasant feelings that then result, combined with a certain restlessness about the disturbing audio content that the ‘body’ seemingly wants to ‘shake off’, apparently provoke a chemical flow (adrenaline etc) to the body to get up off the couch, sing along, and dance to the rhythm of the music.

What is the difference between these two “explanations” of what has happened?

In the second explanation, there is no “me”, no “self”, nothing being “decided”, and no choice or agency in any conscious sense, no intention, and nothing being ‘done’ by any ‘one’. Nor is there a need for any of these things.
Instead, in the second explanation, everything that appears to be happening is either (a) happening as a result of instinctual and/or conditioned prompts by the entire complicity of trillions of cells that seemingly comprise this ‘body’, or (b) happening for no discernible or necessary reason at all (ie the apparent instinctual and conditioned behaviours are just an invented story to try to make sense of what does not, and need not, make sense).
In the second explanation, nothing within the brain’s (imagined) conceptual model of reality, including its supposed beliefs and worldview, has any bearing whatsoever on the apparent behaviour of the ‘body’. The model is seemingly altered by the conditioning, but the only apparent effect of the changes to the model is the simultaneous provocation of chemically-induced feelings (elation, distress) arising from confirmation of, or dissonance with, the pre-existing model and its component beliefs and worldview.

In other words, the conceptual model of reality in the human brain, including its component beliefs and worldview and its sense of ‘self’ at the centre of the model, which are entirely a product of the brain’s imagination, is like a one-way mirror that allows conditioning signals to enter, but no ‘light’ to exit. The model does not affect our apparent behaviour, it only rationalizes it after the fact, and emits ‘heat’ from its one-way reflective surface in the form of elation or distress. The model itself is entirely impotent, entirely reflective. Accordingly, it is probably the perfect incubator for trauma and mental illness.

So why have it? Since this model is apparently unique to humans (it seemingly requires advanced abstract language as its scaffolding), it would seem to be useless, unnecessary, and often stressful. Perhaps, as I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s just an evolutionary experiment that, because of its slowness, imprecision and complexity, turned out to be a bad idea (especially when the human brain evolved to become entangled, blurring its capacity to separate fact from imagined fiction).

But since nothing has evolved yet to make better use of the extra ‘room’ in the human brain, most of us still have it, still furiously processing our conditioned actions and reactions, and trying, hopelessly, to make sense of everything. And suffering from the enormous stress of thinking it’s real, and ‘we’ are real, and have choice and agency and free will and responsibility, and are often royally fucking up accordingly.

John Gray, in his 2006 book Straw Dogs, writes, describing the illusion of free will and self as “The Deception”:

‘Self’-awareness is as much a disability as a power. Very often we are at our most skilful when we are least self-aware… In the earliest art there are traces of what the senses ‘showed’ before they were overlaid by ‘conscious awareness’…

There are many reasons for rejecting the idea of free will, some of them decisive… [And] recent cognitive science and ancient Buddhist teachings are at one in viewing this ordinary sense of self as illusive… [Citing RA Brooks:] “Each activity connects perception to action directly. It is only the observer of the creature who imputes a central representation or central control. The creature itself has none: It is a collection of competing behaviours. Out of the local chaos of their interactions there emerges, in the eye of the observer, a coherent pattern of behaviour.”…

We find in ourselves, as Francisco Varela puts it “a self-less or virtual self: a coherent global pattern that emerges from the activity of simple local components, which seems to be centrally located, but is nowhere to be found”…

We labour under an error. We act in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not…

We are all bundles of sensations. The unified, continuous self that we encounter in everyday experience belongs in maya [Enc. Brit: “Maya originally denoted the magic power with which a god can make human beings believe in what turns out to be an illusion. By extension, it later came to mean the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real.”] We are programmed to perceive identity in ourselves, when in truth there is only change. We are hardwired for the illusion of self…

We acquire a sense of ourselves by our parents speaking to us in infancy; our memories are strung together by many bodily continuities, but also by our names; we contrive shifting histories of ourselves in a fitful interior monologue; we form a conception of having a lifetime ahead of us by using language to construct a variety of possible futures. By using language we have invented a fictive self, which we project into the past and the future — and even beyond the grave. The self we imagine surviving death is a phantom even in life…

The ‘I’ is a thing of the moment and yet our lives are ruled by it. We cannot rid ourselves of this inexistent thing. In our normal awareness of the present moment the sensation of selfhood is unshakable. This is the primordial human error, in virtue of which we pass our lives as if in a dream… In order to help us live, the mind [self] censors [veils] the senses; but as a result we inhabit a world of shadows… [citing Gunaratana:] “We tune out 99 percent of the sensory stimuli we actually receive, and we solidify the remainder into discrete mental objects. Then we react to those mental objects in programmed, habitual ways”… There is no self, and no awakening from the dream of self.

John’s assertions have since been corroborated by research in several branches of science, and their underlying philosophy has now become, if not mainstream, at least more seriously considered and debated. Of course, this is all just a story too, and nothing and no story is needed for everything to be exactly as it is, for no reason.

We are trapped, all of ‘us’, in what radical non-dualist Kenneth Madden describes as the closed loop of the self. The room with the one-way mirror, and with no escape.

And everything that this apparent body has seemingly been conditioned to write, above, is of absolutely no ‘use’. What has been written here might have some small impact on someone’s beliefs besides my own. But that’s just useless stuff in the mirror-room model of reality taking up extra space in human brains. It will have no more impact on anyone’s behaviour than a post-game show analysis will impact the outcome of the game.

Still, there is no choice or control over any of it, and no choice or free will over anything we do, or don’t do, from acts of self-sacrifice to acts of genocide. It’s all conditioning.

Or, at least for now, that’s ‘my’ story.

Thanks to Kipp in NZ for inspiring this post and providing feedback on it, though these thoughts and ideas are strictly my own. For those who might be interested in listening to (an apparent) someone talk about how everything appears when the sense of self and separation apparently falls away, this video by Andreas Müller might give you a flavour for the ‘message’ of radical non-duality, and perhaps a sense of why this illusory ‘Dave’ finds this message so compelling.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 1 Comment

Five Things That Most Differentiate Your Country’s Citizens

Posted on November 7, 2024 by Dave Pollard

Change in popular vote for president, per ZeroHedge via Moon of Alabama; (see discussion of this chart below)

EDIT Nov 8: 2024 tallies in the above chart are incomplete, and may not be complete for days yet. Apparently almost half of California’s ballots have yet to be counted, per AP. Really? The latest count today is 74M to 69M. When we get final numbers I may well have to admit that my interpretation of the popular vote results, below, was wrong. Stay tuned.

I have been asking a number of online friends and colleagues a question inspired by a website that asked a similar question. My version of the question is:

What are five things (characteristics, qualities, customs) that you think most differentiate the people and culture of your (birth, current or adopted) country from those of any other country?

An American photographer’s reply on the above-noted website prompted my curiosity about this question. His answer for Americans was:

a lack of curiosity (eg they tend to not travel outside the ‘west’, sometimes leading to xenophobia),
a cult of individuality (eg my right not to get vaccinated trumps my fellow citizens’ right to protection against pandemic disease)
anti-intellectualism
a seeming preference for quantity over quality (more and bigger = better)
enduring cultural diversity

My tentative answer to this question for Canadians is:

a propensity to define ourselves as a nation by how we’re different from Americans (often: humbler, smarter, politer, better informed, meeker)
a kind of disingenuous politeness (not as bad as “sorry not sorry”, but inclined to be cursory); there’s even a joke about the “Canadian sorry”, an example of which is that when someone carelessly bumps into us, we apologize for being in their way
anxiety about being sucked into American culture (and even political union); Americans own most Canadian corporations, land, resources, and energy rights, and US media represent about 80% of our media ‘watching time’
a lack of critical thinking capacity, and a lack of imagination (we’re like the US in this, I think, but unlike most of the rest of the world)
conflict aversion, and a persistent willingness to compromise and seek peaceful resolution of issues

All of this is conditioned behaviour, and since we’re not all conditioned the same way, these “five things” lists are inevitably generalizations. What I like about them, though, is that they force me to recognize exactly how our conditioning compels our behaviour. That’s useful for understanding that behaviour, rather than ascribing it to exceptionalist “attitudes” or national “character flaws”.

So, it’s hard to be curious about another country if you’ve never visited it, never learned anything about it, never met anyone from that country, and are inundated with xenophobic propaganda distributed to try to manipulate you through fear. And it’s hard to engender a trust for public servants and for public services designed to benefit, as much as possible, all citizens equally and fairly, when your experience is that your and your community’s problems and challenges are seemingly endlessly ignored, while “others” seem to get all the service, and when local politicians play on that sense of zero-sum-game unfairness for partisan political gain.

Canadians’ conflict aversion, I think, stems from the realization, learned the hard way as a vast and vulnerable country at the mercy of more powerful countries and the vagaries of harsh weather, that in almost every conflict, there are no winners, only losers, and an appreciation that on most subjects there are no simple and right answers, that “everyone has a piece of the truth”. And our lack of critical thinking and imaginative capacity, I think, stems from the fact we no longer much practice doing these things (in the workplace, in our education system, or in our leisure time) — rigid work processes that offer employees no leeway, insistence that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers that will affect your school grades if you challenge them, and games with strict constraints and narrow options, condition us to blandly accept and do what we’re told, and preclude us from imagining any other possible ways to do things.

I showed the chart at the top of this page to a few people I know, and I was flabbergasted by the responses. One person said it proved that the 2020 election was in fact ‘stolen’ by the Democrats. A couple of others said it proved that the Republicans’ 2024 efforts to suppress the vote and disenfranchise Democratic voters had obviously been enormously successful.

When I looked at it, neither conspiracy theory came to mind. What came to mind was a question: What happened to cause 14 million 2020 Democratic voters to stay home in 2024, and who were they? And also how can Trump’s loss of 2 million 2020 Republican voters be explained? Having heard evidence that women apparently voted in record numbers, the loss of 14 million Democratic voters is even more perplexing. The only answer I can proffer, until we see some data on the voter demographics, is that young people, who showed up in extraordinary, unprecedented numbers in 2020 (and again in 2022), stayed away in droves.

I am astonished that nobody is talking about this, and its implications, if true, for the future of a Democratic Party that offers nothing to young, justifiably anxious voters, except the same endless legacy of corporate fealty, war-mongering, divisiveness and xenophobia, genocide, sabre-rattling with nuclear powers, and destruction of our ecosystems and climate, while completely ignoring the soaring precarity and dread about the future of citizens under 30 years of age.

But then, that’s my conditioning. As the child of a real journalist (not one of the press release transcribers and opinion-blurters that pass for journalists today), I was conditioned not to jump to conclusions, to search for a reasonable explanation not a quick and hysterical judgemental one, and to try to understand what is going on, and why.

Everything around us is falling apart. That is no one’s “fault”. Complex systems and civilizations inevitably collapse once they cease to be sustainable and responsive to their members. That’s where we are. The signs are everywhere. I despair to think how that collapse is going to unfold if we don’t show more signs of calm, of reason, and of a genuine desire to understand and deal with the crises of the moment, rather than succumbing to entrained infantile ranting, fear-mongering, hate-mongering, simplistic good vs evil thinking, and knee-jerk violence. But if that’s how we’re going to behave, I want to understand that, too. And I kind of understand it. We can’t help ourselves. But it’s going to make our future much harder to navigate, and to survive.

Back, then, to my “five things” question. I’d love to hear some more answers to this question, as long as they’re about your own country or a country you know well.

Because thoughtful answers to this question will probably take some time, you are welcome to email me your “five things” answers, using the email address on my home page’s right sidebar. Or post them in the comments, if you prefer. I won’t publish them, but if I get enough replies I might broadly summarize what I’ve heard, without disclosing the identity of the respondents. I think it’s a great question.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Dave’s US Election Day Thoughts

Posted on November 5, 2024 by Dave Pollard

photo posted on Katelyn Jetelina’s post today (link below); not sure if she was the photographer or not

I‘m starting this “diary entry” on November 3rd, and will publish it late on US election day, November 5th. I promise not to make changes to what I’ve written, even if my take on the event turns out to be completely off.

November 3rd, 9pm PT

Here are my meritless predictions for the US election “outcome”:

This election reminds me very much of the 1968 election. The incumbent Democratic Party president ‘chose’ not to run for re-election. Democrats fiercely rebuffed the challenge from anti-war “progressives” in their ranks. The Democratic National Committee gifted the outgoing president’s delegates to their chosen war-monger candidate, the incumbent Vice-President, rather than requiring him to compete in primaries. The Democratic National Committee, demonstrating staggering incompetence and insensitivity to voters’ opinions, positioned their bland candidate as the “lesser evil” to those who opposed the war. [Whether or not the parallels will continue is anyone’s guess. In 1968 the “greater evil” won. Both he and his running mate were of dubious mental stability, but they easily won re-election four years later. The president was finally impeached; his vice-president resigned in disgrace.]
I am guessing that there will be no major new bombings of Iran, or events of similar possible destabilizing nature, right before the election. The genocidal war criminals in Israel know better than to bite the hand that feeds them, or the hand they expect to feed them for the next four years.
I expect the street violence will begin no later than election day. There will be outbursts, attacks, arrests, shootings, accusations of wrongdoing, wild rumours etc. mostly but not exclusively from red states. Why wait until Jan. 6th or Jan. 20th next year if you’re determined to foment a revolution?
My guess is that the presidency will be decided by which candidate wins in Pennsylvania, but that the presidency won’t be declared until days or weeks after election day, and perhaps not even until after the scheduled inauguration day January 20th, due to legal suits, recounts, court rulings etc.
Kamala Harris will narrowly win the “popular vote” for president, for all that matters in the crazy American electoral system.
I suspect that the Senate will switch to Republican control and the House to Democratic control.
I think it’s inevitable that there will be huge demonstrations, no matter who wins, or who is leading at any point; some of those demonstrations will be violent. But I don’t think there will be an insurrection (not a real one anyway) or a “color revolution” to reverse the voters’ “official” decision.
Even in the doubtful case that the final winners are relatively clear, the US government is almost sure to be paralyzed, probably well into 2025. As has been repeatedly shown, all three branches of the US government are dysfunctional, with presidential decrees (“executive orders”) often used to circumvent the paralysis. The top political issue of 2025 is likely to be around the president’s (mis-)use of these “executive orders”.

Just in case anyone cares, if I were an American I would vote for Jill Stein for president, even if I were in a “swing state” where my vote actually mattered. I like to sleep at night with a clear conscience. Down-ballot, depending on the state, I’d vote selectively for a few candidates who likewise have demonstrated that they have a conscience; none of them, I suspect, would be Republicans. The rest of my ballot would be left blank.

November 5th, 1pm PT

Just read Lyz Lenz’s fascinating review of the demographics of early voters (53% of registered women voters voted before election day vs 44% of registered men voters), producing a plea from the revolting Musk that “men must vote!”. And some surveys suggest that women’s determination to protect their rights and freedoms will, alone, make the difference in this election. Will be interesting to see.

Briahna Joy Gray, on the other hand, says that until voters stand up and refuse to vote for either genocide party, the only rights and freedoms that government will protect are those of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, and all the rest will be just more divisive posturing and lip service.

November 5th, 3pm PT

Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina forwards an excellent list of links on how to cope with election (and other political) stresses, and how to talk to people you disagree with (and to kids) about political issues. And, as a public servant, she reminds us that whatever happens we can count on our valiant public health workers to continue to do their best, despite the efforts of so many to sow distrust. And, she adds, as the image above reminds us, the real work of trying to get governments to actually do what the citizens want, starts again tomorrow. No matter who ‘wins’ the pageant.

As I read the above, it occurred to me how absurd it is that we would possibly believe it makes sense to vote for one single person to ‘lead’ a country. What a dumb idea! Setting ourselves up for failure. What we should be voting on is a set of policies and platforms that reflect our consensus on the priorities we currently face. Then the elected ‘representatives’ would be charged with drafting legislation (remember when they actually did that, before this was turned over to lobby groups?) to implement those policies and platforms.

And then we could have a Citizens’ Assembly (consisting of citizens selected at random for a fixed short term), charged with ensuring this legislation is entirely consistent with the citizen-approved policies and platforms — and vetoing all laws that are inconsistent with these policies and platforms. And a fixed-term judiciary likewise selected by the Citizens’ Assembly charged solely with ensuring that this legislation is consistent with the country’s constitution and bill of rights. And of course we would have training and competency testing for all these essential positions.

Well, we can dream about such a system, anyway.

Oh, and I was just reminded that Democrats tend more to vote in advance and by mail, though those votes are often the last to be tallied on election night, so we’re perfectly set up for an early Republican lead and then a swing toward the Democrats as the night wears on. Like last time.

November 5th, 8pm PT

It’s not looking good for the Democrats, but as per the caveat above, it’s still not over. What’s surprising, to me, is that Trump is up by six million votes in the popular vote count, with 2/3 of the expected 150-160 million total votes counted. I suppose that could still change. Will there be a late blue shift in 3-4 swing states again, caused by the propensity of Democrats to vote early and by mail, and hence have their ballots counted (much) later on election night?

November 5th, 11pm PT

It may be too early to say for sure, but with 80% of the expected votes counted, Trump remains up by five million votes, and remains ahead in three key ‘northern’ states they thought he would likely lose. With the Senate lost (2 seat swing was all it took, and it may end up as a flip of 5), and the retaking of the House now seemingly out of reach, best bets would be on a Republican sweep.

Let the blame game begin. It’s hard to believe that the Democrats would actually believe that the voters would again overlook their National Committee’s (and its appointed candidates’) massively unpopular pro-war, pro-genocide, pro-Wall Street fervour. They apparently learned nothing from the 2016 rebellion of the “deplorables”, as the idiotic Democratic nominee called conservatives. Maybe this is what was needed for progressives to finally dump the Democrats and start a truly progressive party not beholden to the rich, the war-mongers, and Wall Street. In the meantime, we can only hope that the US government remains as sclerotic and incapable of getting anything done, as it has been for the last 40 years.

Oh, and the votes for Jill Stein were not nearly enough in any state to make a difference, so don’t blame the Greens and those who voted for them!

And don’t blame “young people” either. Their votes carried the Democrats across the finish line in 2020 and 2022, and the fact they’re no longer willing to support a party beholden to the rich, the war-mongers, and Wall Street, is not something anyone can hold against them. We’ve fucked up their world, and they owe us nothing. Bet you’ll see a significant drop in their participation rate in this year’s election.

Maybe time for a combined Women’s March and Peace March?

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 5 Comments

Homelessness: A Predicament Not a Problem

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Dave Pollard

Tim Morgan’s chart comparing the ‘real’ economy (in aggregate; the per capita picture is even worse) — the amount of affordable real goods and services our economic system produces — with the fraudulent, fake “financial” GDP economy. A significant part of the latter is the wildly inflated “value” of people’s homes, which have been perverted from an essential human good and need, to a Ponzi scheme — a vehicle for unsustainable speculative capital gain.

Simple and complicated “problems” have “solutions” — it’s just a matter of figuring out which solutions are workable, and applying them. Your freezer is broken — you can diagram the diagnostic and rectification process, or just ask an “expert”, and the problem will soon be solved.

Almost everything that happens in human, social, and biological/ecological systems, however, is complex, not merely complicated. There are an infinite number of variables. The complete situation can never be completely “known”. There are many “feedback loops”, some knowable, some not, that will affect any attempt to intervene in that system. The system is therefore largely unpredictable.

In many cases, the system is so complex that when something undesirable occurs, it is not a “problem” with a “solution”; it is a predicament. Predicaments have outcomes, not solutions. Sometimes, to a greater or lesser extent, you can intervene to influence those outcomes, but you cannot know whether, or to what degree, your intervention will improve or perhaps worsen the situation. In same cases, no workable intervention is available; in those cases, your only alternative is to adapt to the predicament. If you can’t change the situation, you have to change yourself to accommodate it.

The current, rapidly-advancing collapse of our economic, ecological and political systems — sometimes called the ‘metacrisis’ or ‘polycrisis’, is a predicament. Climate collapse is a piece of that predicament. The collapse of the current economic and political ‘world order’, occurring in an environment of unsustainable economic activity, unsustainable levels of debt, unsustainable levels of inequality, and unsustainable levels of political coercion, aggression and violence, is another piece of that predicament.

Humans intuitively dislike complexity — they want things to be simple and controllable. And they hate predicaments. This is especially true for conservatives, since predicaments upset their simplistic good/bad right/wrong worldview, and it’s true for politicians of every stripe, since predicaments are no-win situations for people whose livelihoods depend on convincing supporters that they have all the answers, when predicaments have no solutions.

Over the past 60 years or so, conservatives and neoliberals achieved a rare consensus on what was then a serious problem, but not yet a predicament: homelessness — the unavailability of safe, affordable housing for a growing proportion of the population in a growing number of places.

The consensus was basically to put total faith in the “free market” of supply and demand to “work out” the best possible number and types of housing for the population. Governments would largely get out of the expensive and politically-risky business of building affordable (subsidized) housing, and instead “help” the private sector to navigate the market to produce the right number of homes at the right price. They would do this largely by guaranteeing mortgages.

As anyone who had a real understanding of market forces could readily have predicted, this consensus has made the problem of affordable housing catastrophically worse. They have taken a problem and so mismanaged it that it has become a predicament. This is mostly the product of their collective incompetence and ignorance, rather than malice or greed.

What exactly is this slice of the polycrisis predicament about? There are many who believe the answer is just to build more homes — that if we do so, the supply/demand curve of the “market” will take care of the “problem”. But as Cory Doctorow has explained, this presumes that the people with the “demand” can afford the “supply” — which an ever-increasing proportion of the population cannot.

In an unregulated “market” with massive inequality of wealth, rather than excess empty homes sitting vacant until the lack of “demand” forces prices down, what happens is that those with tons of excess capital and income buy up these homes to shrink the “supply”, which then forces prices up, not down. Many such speculators are content for the homes to sit empty, because they don’t trust “tenants” to look after them, and because they expect to benefit from ever-increasing capital appreciation of property, which is, thanks to corporate lobbying, taxed at much lower rates than workers’ wages, when it’s taxed at all.

Cory writes:

Using public funds to subsidize cheaper housing is like using public funds to pay for food stamps for working people whose wages are too low to keep them from starving. Sure, we should do that: no one should be without a home and no one should be hungry. But if working people can’t afford shelter and food, then we have a wage problem, not a supply problem… Both things can be true: we [can] have a wage problem and we [can] have (many, localized) supply problems. Both of these problems deserve our attention, and neither is acceptable in a civilized society.

Substitute the word “predicament” for the word “problem” and I think Cory has it exactly right. In some of Vancouver’s ultra-wealthy neighbourhoods, for example, more than half of the residents own multiple homes — an average of three each. Why? Because it’s been safer and more lucrative to speculate with real estate purchases than stock market or commodity purchases. They can afford to let these homes sit empty. The government has tried to tax “vacant” properties and to limit “short-term” (Airbnb etc) rentals to move these homes into the long-term rental market, but, other than trying to oust the government and replace it with a no-speculation-tax conservative government, the owners aren’t budging. “Illegal” short-term rentals have exploded. Legal and illegal schemes are being used to “hide” vacant homes from regulators’ attention.

Basically, the conservative/neoliberal consensus to leave this “problem” to the “market” has turned this problem into a predicament. While “average” incomes are often, on paper, sufficient to buy “average”-priced homes, the reality is that most citizens’ much-lower median incomes are not nearly sufficient to buy the vast majority of homes on the market.

So 75% of those working in Vancouver, for example, can’t get close to affording the $2M+ price-tag (and $4k/month rents) on liveable, 2+-bedroom homes for their families. They often have to commute for two hours every day to and from their workplace from still-overpriced homes and rental units in distant suburbs and exurbs. And Vancouver’s not that unusual. Half of adults across Canada recently surveyed said they were “worried” about their ability to continue to afford housing for their families, and many of them said they were only a paycheque or two from being out on the street — homeless.

As a recent Tyee report explains, this isn’t just a problem for renters. Across Canada, 2/3 of homeowners with mortgages are reporting financial precarity — never-ending challenges meeting their monthly expenses.

Describing this predicament-creation, the Tyee authors explain:

Today’s housing crisis extends beyond unaffordable homes and supply shortages. It’s rooted in a deeply financialized housing system that idealizes home ownership and treats homes as financial assets instead of social goods.

Essentially, the conservative/neoliberal consensus is that the only way to keep your head above water today is to speculate in the housing market: Don’t rent: Buy whatever you can afford, leverage it to the hilt with debt (that the government will “guarantee”), and then gamble that your home will appreciate in value and that your mortgage costs will decrease in value. The governments will do what they can to keep prices high and increasing, knowing that middle-class (and debt-encumbered) property owners are absolutely counting on that. And “affordability” be damned.

To further dissuade citizens who want to rent, and who refuse to get on the real-estate-will-go-up-in-value-forever speculative bandwagon, governments, while nominally capping rent increases, leave a giant loophole, allowing rental units that “become vacant” (often because tenants go broke, or are driven out or renovicted, or have to move to new job locations), the rent can be immediately “re-priced” to “market” (often twice the rent-capped rate). The mechanism to close this loophole is called “vacancy control“, but to my knowledge it has not been implemented anywhere. The lobby opposing it is wealthy and powerful.

Canada’s federal government (neoliberals) have even admitted that they’re counting on most Canadians getting on this bandwagon, and that they fully intend their “interventions” in the housing crisis to encourage speculative housing price increases and, hence, encourage that gambling behaviour.

And thus we get to the crux of the predicament: We are now being forced to gamble on the future “market” value of the homes we live in, because our ‘real’ economy is now in a permanent state of decline. We have more and more people seeking to work in an economy where less and less of any real value is being produced (because the resources need to produce things are becoming scarcer and costlier, to the point that, barring massive subsidies, most people can’t afford to pay what these ‘real’ products cost).

As wages for all but the richest 10% have stagnated, we have obscured the huge cost increases faced by most citizens for essential goods and services by offshoring labour and environmental costs to China and the Global South, and by conning people into believing that having a house with a huge mortgage, and two cars (to commute both wage-earners to work) with massive consumer debts, is somehow better than living debt free with a net worth that is more than zero.

This con is what the Tyee authors call the “financialization” of the economy — a smoke-and-mirrors game of measuring prosperity by average (not median) GDP, when most of what gets ‘counted’ as GDP is appreciation of financial assets that actually have little or no underlying value in a permanently declining economy. Governments, corporations, and conservative and neoliberal “think tanks” are counting on the majority never understanding this con — because it covers up the predicament that, as Tim Morgan has painstakingly explained, our economy is in the early stages of a permanent collapse from which there is no escape. (The chart at the top of this post illustrates this “inflection” from ‘real’ growth to collapse.)

We cannot ‘will’ “solutions” to the polycrisis predicament into existence. Predicaments do not have solutions. Sooner or later, when the smoke of the con game and the obfuscation by conservatives and neoliberals clears, we are going to realize that we are headed quickly towards the permanent collapse of our economy, and the need to adapt ourselves to a much simpler, much more local, subsistence, salvage and scavenger economy.

In the meantime, more and more of us are going to be living in a state of permanent economic and financial precarity, and, since we have hitched our housing policies to the financialized economy and its market of gamblers and speculators, more and more of us, starting with tenants and then moving to home “owners” with large mortgages, are also going to find ourselves in a state of housing precarity.

As Tim and others have noted, the governments, corporations, and developers that have pushed the housing crisis from problem to predicament, thought they were doing the right thing. They’ve realized that, as our economy teeters at its inflexion point, they have fewer and fewer levers at their disposal to stem the coming collapse.

They did the only thing they thought they could do, and hoped for the best. We will all live with the consequences. And, as with all aspects of the polycrisis, the consequences are likely to be dire.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

The Nine Circles of Radical Non-Duality

Posted on November 1, 2024 by Dave Pollard

This is not an explanation or defence of radical non-duality. If you’re looking for that, please check out this introductory essay, this summary, this FAQ, or, for an explanation of why (I believe) we have no free will and how our behaviour is conditioned, check out Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined or Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s The Secret History of Kindness.
This article is an attempt to articulate the astonishing message of radical non-duality, from the relatively accessible “there is no free will”, to the mind-boggling “there is nothing actually happening”, step by step.

image above from Gustave Doré’s illustration of Dante’s Inferno, in the public domain per wikimedia

The first “circle of hell” in The Inferno is Limbo, where “virtuous pagans” are “punished only in that they are separated from divine love”. That could be, I suppose, both a blessing and a curse. As I wrote in an earlier essay:

Limbo is not a spiritual place. It is hard to overestimate how a dramatic shift in your worldview messes with your mind, and colours everything you think, do, and believe. This is especially challenging when this new worldview differs sharply both from what you actually perceive to be true, and what everyone around you perceives, believes, and presumes to be true.

Such is my sense of the acceptance that we have no “free will”, and that everything we do, and everything we believe, is biologically and/or culturally conditioned, given the circumstances of the moment.

This acceptance, at least when I think about it, precludes me from crediting anyone for anything they do “successfully”, and from blaming anyone for anything they do, even when it seemingly has “predictable” or unpredicted disastrous or horrific consequences. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry, or scared, or sad. As Robert Sapolsky, whose book Determined cemented my belief that we have no free will, put it, the mere fact that we ‘know’ with near absolute certainty that there is no free will, doesn’t prevent our conditioning leading to behaviours and beliefs that suggest we do.

It’s harder to imagine anything closer to a “first circle of hell” than that. Such a belief renders moot most of one’s opinions on our legal and incarceration systems, and most of our thoughts on ethics and what constitutes “a good life”. And it reveals many powerful human emotions like hatred, shame, jealousy, grief, envy, anxiety, regret, and dread, to be both unfounded and even a bit absurd — even when we have no choice but to (continue to) feel those emotions. Even worse, it renders our apparent ‘misbehaviours’ — including wars, genocides, horrific abuses and other atrocities, more or less inevitable. Given our conditioning and the circumstances, they are the only things that could have happened, and will happen in the future.

When someone you care about talks with you, seeking reassurance that their assessment of blame and culpability for what has happened is warranted, along with their call for commensurate punishments, how can you then respond? If you reply “I understand how you would feel that way”, you’re going to get a stony response, or worse. They want you to condemn or condone. If you don’t believe in free will, you can’t reasonably do either. And the fact that you may be able to explain why the ‘wrongdoers’ might understandably have done what they did will only deepen the outrage of the ‘wronged’ or outraged person, and be taken as condoning the ‘wrongdoers’ actions.

Hell indeed. Be prepared to be accused of cruel insensitivity, dissociation or “spiritual bypassing” for your lack of empathy. Or accused of ‘not caring’. Or a host of other sins of commission and omission. Have you no shame? (Especially, of course, if you are the perceived ‘wrongdoer’.)

Once you’ve entered the ‘first circle of radical non-duality’, by accepting the absolute absence of free will (and not just the ‘compatibilist’ nonsense that tries to say we kinda have it and kinda don’t), you just might find, as I have, that it’s a one-way journey, and the only steps ahead are down.

This is a rather whimsical list of the ‘nine circles’ of radical non-duality, but I’ve found it useful — some of the people I know have stopped at the first ‘circle’, while others I know (probably myself included) have found themselves in the massively cognitively-dissonant third circle. Meanwhile, several of the ‘speakers’ I’ve met and come to know over the past eight years seemingly just dropped straight down through the nine circles, and now see every part of this seemingly ‘radical’ message as completely obvious. And during my rare and brief glimpses, it was completely obvious ‘here’, too.

So here are the nine circles, as best as I’ve been able to delineate and ‘navigate’ them, at least intuitively and intellectually. And just to restate: While I do trust the ‘messengers’ (listed in part on my right sidebar), I make no pretence to actually ‘seeing’ that this is unquestionably obvious or ‘true’. The separate ‘me’ seems to be ‘still’ very much here and separate and moving through time and space, alongside everything else we think of as ‘real’:

There is no free will, no choice, no agency, and no responsibility in and for what we do. Everything we do is completely biologically and culturally conditioned given the circumstances of the moment.
There is no ‘self’. No little homunculus making decisions and taking charge of the body the ‘self’ presumes to inhabit. The self is an illusory invention of the brain, created as the centre of a model of its perceived ‘reality’, to try to ‘make sense’ of the signals it is receiving.
There is no ‘one’, and no relationship. If there is no self, no ‘you’, then clearly there is no ‘one’ else either. Just more parts of the brain’s illusory model. This is where I am now, I think, intellectually stuck — what I have described as being on the ‘crag’ overlooking the ‘chasm’ of the following ‘circles’:
There is no space, no separation, no distance — no thing. Everything that appears is just that — an appearance. It’s not real, not solid. Of course it appears real, since it’s the only reality of which our brains can conceive. Things, subject and object, are the only way we can make sense of the world. They are the essential scaffolding of our (apparent) brain’s model of reality. Once the human brain conceives of its self as real, it immediately has to conjure up everything else in the universe as real, too — to imagine it into reality, to fill the ‘model’.
There is no time, no consequence, no continuity, and no causality. Putting things in a time ‘sequence’ and ascribing cause-effect relationship to them is just a categorization scheme of the brain in its sense-making model. The brain invented time because conceiving of everything happening all at once is impossible for it to process.
There is nothing happening. There is no time and no space for anything to be happening ‘in’.
There is no knowledge and no truth. There can be apparent ‘know-how’, but when there is no thing and nothing happening, nothing can be ‘known’ and nothing can be ‘true’.
There is no meaning or purpose to anything. No gods, no trajectory, no intention. No reason for anything.
There is nothing needed for everything to be exactly as it (apparently) is. No need for free will. No need for selves, others, or relationships. No need for space or separation or separate things. No need for time or causality or consequence. No need for anything to be happening. No need to have or find knowledge or truth. No need for meaning or purpose or reason. No need for anything or any thing.

To those who have, for no reason, found themselves in the terrifying situation of having their apparent brain’s model of ‘reality’ seemingly dissolve, all of the above is simply obvious. Not to ‘them’ since there is no ‘them’. Just obvious, beyond doubt. ‘They’ aren’t trying to convince us of anything. This is not a brilliantly clever philosophical mind trick (frankly, a couple of ‘them’ are not clever enough to pull one off). It’s certainly not a money-maker, and doesn’t bring any popularity or fame. (Guys with a well-meaning and well-honed traditional non-duality schtick like Eckhart Tolle, who will, for a fee, teach you how to become ‘enlightened’ like them, have audiences ten of thousands of times larger.)

I have no clue as to why I am attracted to this message, or why it seems to resonate intuitively and intellectually so much. It’s useless. It makes no sense. It’s definitely not a popular subject in everyday conversations. But even if I’m just sitting now in circle three, there’s something about it. Maybe it’s the glimpses. Maybe it’s the fact that some of the things that just didn’t seem to make any sense to me, now (with considerable effort) seem to make some sense from the perspective of accepting that there is no free will, no self, and no ‘one’ behind what is seemingly happening. That acceptance, that appreciation, offers no solace, no answers, no new ideas on what we might do (if we could just ‘condition each other’ a certain way).

But through decades of searching for a better understanding, it’s the ‘best’ I’ve come up with so far. It’s not as if I’ve had any choice in the matter.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 4 Comments

That Expression Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Dave Pollard

This is #35 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.

photo from pxhere, public domain cc0

This week I’ve been wandering around our neighbourhood pretending to be deaf.

Many languages are spoken in the streets and malls and cafés here. Most of these languages I do not know. And of course it is generally rude to sidle close enough to people to be able to hear clearly what they’re saying (this is a very noisy city), even if their language happened to be one that I knew.

So I’m trying to focus my attention this week on what I see (body language, facial expressions, behaviours) rather than what I hear. Especially since I think people say a lot of things in order to get attention, appreciation, or reassurance, rather than because they actually believe (or act on) what they say.

So by pretending I can’t hear, and pretending that all the people I see aren’t actually saying anything, just murmuring to themselves, I can focus on non-verbal signals.

But before I go any further, a caveat: Tons of books and articles have been written on how to “read” body language. Like other “self-help” books, they try to simplify an extremely complex subject. The more I observe of non-verbal communication, the more persuaded I am that, except in the most obvious cases, we can only guess at what the body language we observe is actually trying to convey, or to conceal. Still, to me, it’s fascinating.

…..

A young woman pushes her baby carriage over beside the table next to me in the café, and promptly leaves the little girl inside it alone to go and place her order. I’m the closest person to her, so I suddenly have her full attention. Or more accurately, she has mine. She looks at me directly, and then shifts her gaze, after about three seconds, up and to the right, before bringing it back to me. It’s comical to observe, and I can’t help but smile. She immediately beams back at me. Now she repeats the behaviour with a woman at the table the second closest to hers. The other woman smiles, too, and the baby beams back and then puts her hands together, fingers and palms connected. Now, she swings around and attempts to climb down from the carriage, but mom arrives in time to stop this maneuver. Game over.

My dog was a master at reading faces and body language, even when the signals were unsure or contradictory. Once, just before I’d decided to take her for a walk, I came in from the car wearing a halloween mask, walked towards her with a lurch, and made scary movements with my hands, to see how she’d respond. Unperturbed, she went and retrieved her leash. She could read my intention to take her for a walk just from the signals, and/or the chemicals, my body was sending. The rest of the nonsense was simply ignored as noise.

…..

Sometimes when you watch body language, it’s like you’re living in the Land of Nods. There are all kinds of different nods to be noticed, including nods that are either accidentally or deliberately ambiguous in ‘meaning’. There are gentle (‘non-committal acknowledging’?) nods, nods followed by a little head tilt (‘maybe’?), repeated (‘understanding’ or ‘encouraging’?) nods, and enthusiastic (‘agreeing’ or ‘OK got that get on with it’?) nods.

Then there are the partial nods, the ones that stop at the bottom when the nodder then looks up at the speaker (often over the tops of their glasses). And there are the nods (‘are you sure’?) accompanied by raised eyebrows. And sometimes the accompanying movement of the eyes, or the placement of the hands during the nod, suggests a more complex and nuanced response.

It’s a generalization, but it seems that women are more inclined to nod (and to interpret a nod from other women) as meaning they hear and understand what is being said, rather than that they necessarily agree. And, for whatever reason, women seem to nod slightly faster and more shallowly than men.

…..

I watch as two men in the café are talking animatedly about something. One of them exhibits a behaviour I’ve observed before: As he listens, he raises his head slightly and then turns his head slightly to the right, and then gazes up and to the right (‘I’m considering what you’re saying’?)

ChatGPT tells me that gazing up and to the left often means the listener is recalling information from the past and considering what is being said analytically in that context, while gazing up and to the right often means the listener is thinking creatively or imaginatively about what is being said, and its possible implications. Pointing with their head and eyes at the hemisphere of their brain they want to access in their consideration. Seems a bit far-fetched, but when I’ve observed my own behaviour, it’s always up and to the right, and I must admit that my consideration of new ideas is generally imaginative — trying to appreciate why the speaker believes what they’re saying.

…..

A younger couple sitting opposite each other in the café are mimicking each other with a behaviour I have seen most often as a young male display: They are slouched slightly backward in their chairs, and, regardless of who is talking, they are mostly looking at each other (their faces are pointed towards each other) but their eyelids are partly closed and their gaze is slightly downcast (‘I’m cool’?) There doesn’t seem to be any antipathy or stress between them — they smile slightly from time to time. Gestures of self-soothing or boredom? Non-committal signalling? Or are they hiding something from each other? Or reluctant to admit something to themselves? Or just being polite to avoid the appearance of staring?

The ubiquity of laptop and phone screens has changed the calculus of the downward gaze during conversations, I think. If your downward gaze could be interpreted as keeping ‘half an eye’ on your screen, it would understandably be considered rude, though this couple don’t have screens or phones in eye-shot. And in conversations where you’re working on something together, and using screens for your collaboration, the downward gaze at the screen is normal and expected.

It seems clear to me that, especially in crowded, very public places (like buses), phones and tablets can be used in a distancing, self-soothing way, a way to create a safe, personal ‘space’ for oneself and safely and ‘politely’ remove the need to interact with strangers. If that’s the case, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

…..

OK, so now I have to confess that, since I caught sight of myself smiling at people in the elevator a couple of months ago, and seeing how awful and insincere my smile looked in the elevator mirror, I’m been watching my own body languages, as well as others’. When I’m in front of a mirror, I close my eyes, make a face that I think expresses X, and then open my eyes and am (usually) astonished that my expression actually conveys something very different. And on Zoom calls, I watch my own expression and not just those of the other faces on the call.

It’s pretty discouraging. I can now appreciate how people who are ‘watching’ my facial and body language can end up misunderstanding, or being confused about, what I’m saying. When I think I’m conveying a friendly smile, I’m actually displaying something of a grimace. When I think I’m conveying a thoughtful expression, I’m actually displaying a distracted, clueless one. And when I think I’m conveying an intelligent, ‘together’ expression (mouth slightly ajar), I’m actually displaying an unhappy, anxious one. And yet… when I am totally focused on precisely what words I’m using to articulate some thought or idea or information, I’m told, my face looks suddenly relaxed, animated, and enthused. When ‘I’ get out of the way and forget who ‘I’ am and who I am pretending to be, the real Dave seems to show through.

That’s sobering enough that I’m now trying to give everyone else I talk with considerably more leeway for confusing body language, and to focus instead on what they’re saying, instead of judging how they seem to be saying it. Hence the title of this post. In fact, it sometimes seems to help rather than hinder when I close my eyes when I’m listening. Of course, that runs the risk of seeming rude, or uninterested. So, of course, I nod while I do it.

…..

On the street, a couple are weaving their way quickly through groups of people walking in the opposite direction, and talking intently as they go. He is looking intently at his phone, apparently ‘navigating’ them toward a particular destination following directions from the screen, while she has her arm on his wrist and is ‘navigating’ him as they walk, so they don’t collide with others, or with traffic. Multitasking, binary style.

I watch others on the street as they silently ‘negotiate’ their interactions with others. What occurs to me is that some people’s behaviour suggests they want to be seen by others (a relative ‘loudness’ in their dress, their movements, their voices), some people’s behaviour suggests they don’t want to be seen by anyone (that kind of glazed, unfocused straight ahead look at the spaces ‘between’ or right ‘through’ people), and still others want to be seen by certain people and don’t want to be seen by everyone else (so you see sudden changes in the style, direction and duration of their gaze).

There have been studies that suggest that three seconds (precisely the length of the baby’s gaze toward me) is the ‘ideal’ length of time to hold one’s gaze. Much shorter than that can be taken as ‘rejection’, and much longer than that can be taken as ‘obsession’, either of which can be taken as rude. I watch one woman look at, and then quickly away from, most of the people she passes, and then look for (about) three seconds at one man, and then look away, and then immediately look back at him for another few seconds. It happened too quickly, and clearly unconsciously, for anything to come from this, but I had to smile as I observed it. There would clearly seem to be something to the expression “worth a second look”.

And if my observations are correct, it seems to me that the “three-second rule” should be qualified to consider the distance between the ‘gazers’ — the farther the ‘gazers’ are apart, the longer the tolerable and polite ‘gazing time’, it seems to me, is likely to be.

…..

Another thing I see, both in the café and now as I board the Skytrain, is what might be called a real-space version of ‘musical chairs’. In both places there is a kind of ‘jockeying’ for seats. People want their own space and as much privacy as their place can reasonably offer, so they pick seats that leave some space between them and others. Some do this quite aggressively (or perhaps fearfully), using parcels, backpacks, elbows, and crossed legs to block seats beside them. And on the Skytrain, you see the usual ‘manspreading’, conveying fear and hostility; in my experience, this is never oblivious or accidental.

At each table of the café, you can see the taking of space seemingly in order to try to optimize the pleasantness of each person’s experience. Some people will move their chairs to be closer to, or farther from, others who they do, or don’t want to converse with, or to be overheard by. (If you’ve been in food ‘courts’, you’ve probably unconsciously been annoyed that the chairs are fixed in position, so you can’t move or orient them the way you would like.) At square tables, some will quietly maneuver to sit beside the person they’re with, or conversely, to sit opposite who they’re with. I once watched a couple shift their positions this way several times (unconsciously or ‘subtly’ I’m not sure) — him moving beside her and her then moving across from him, like a chess game, or a ballet.

…..

Back in the café, I’m looking at hands. I watch where people place their fingers when they’re listening. There are several ‘head-cradling’ postures that people use (my portrait photo on my blog home page, taken during a Zoom call, demonstrates one) — there’s the fist(s) under the chin posture (‘rapt’ or ‘tired’?), the thumb(s) under the chin and the fingers up the side of the face posture (‘pensive’?), the elbows on the table and both hands holding the sides of the face posture (‘adoring’, or ‘impatient’, or even ‘annoyed’?), the both hands up the sides of the nose posture (‘distressed’?), the fingers but not palms against one side of the face (‘attentive’ or ‘skeptical’?), and the one hand on the forehead partially shielding the eyes (‘guarded’ or ‘concealing’?). Most of these, I think, require considering what other body language is being exhibited, to interpret. But they’re very common displays, as we discovered when, in the early days of CoVid-19, we were advised to avoid touching our faces. Hard to do!

I watch a couple conversing at a table by the window. They both have large lattes, in the wonderful, big, heavy mugs that really require two hands to drink from safely. What I notice, though, is that as each raises their mug to drink, their facial expressions suddenly become more dynamic, and then, when their hands are back in ‘play’, their facial expressions become more placid. Is this just energy looking for a way out, that will employ one form of expression to do so when another is unavailable? (As an inveterate foot-jiggler, I also notice the guy’s feet jiggle more when his hands are ‘tied up’).

A woman conversing with a much younger woman is displaying what might be called a ‘hand tent’ — fingertips together in front of her, palms apart, in an inverted ‘V’. ChatGPT says this display “suggests confidence, authority, or a sense of self-assuredness” and elaborates: “This gesture is often seen in high-stakes conversations, presentations, or negotiations, where displaying confidence is advantageous. When paired with a relaxed demeanour, it tends to convey a balanced and calm authority.” I’ve tried it, and it’s fun to watch the responses.

I’m intrigued that, in all the time I’ve spent in this café, I’ve almost never seen the classic older-white-male ‘antler’ display (hands on the back of the head, elbows out). I saw this all the time in my workplace, and was often guilty of doing it myself (my excuse is that I was ‘just stretching and relaxing my muscles’). It is clearly a ‘power’ display in most cases. Maybe the reason I haven’t seen it much lately is just that older white males are a minority in this café. And maybe the reason I don’t display it often any more (I don’t think!) is because power is much less important to me than it was in my competitive, anxious work years.

And then of course, there’s the other classic hand display — crossed arms. This too seems to have several ‘flavours’: There’s the protective crossed arms (a kind of “self-hug”), the impatient or angry crossed arms, and the ‘I’m not quite sure what to do with my hands’ crossed arms.

And there seem to be three kinds of people when it comes to expressing things with their hands: Those who often use their hands to punctuate (or, sometimes, contradict or obscure) what they’re saying, those who mostly keep their hands in their laps or otherwise inert, and those whose hands seem to be all over the place, as if they were untamed creatures with minds of their own. Though it seems hand movements can be infectious — I just watched a man who kept his hands quietly in place while the guy he was talking with was gesticulating wildly as they talked. And after about twenty minutes, the former’s ‘quiet’ hands suddenly sprang to life, and from that point on I was sure they were going to knock their drinks off the table with their movements.

Two other observations, from yesterday’s café visit: Women talking with other women seem to use their hands the most, and the most expressively, while mixed-gender couples (other than those obviously romantically involved) seem to use their hands the least. And: Women in the café touch their hair a lot more than men do. And no, I have no idea what that means, if anything.

…..

As usual, the majority of the people in the café today not only have their screens out, they are actively absorbed looking at them. That’s less true of the people in face-to-face conversation with others, of course. But I’m starting to suspect that those screen-gazers are much less oblivious to others around them, and what those others are doing, than one might expect. This seems, naturally enough, especially true for the women screen-gazers, who have probably experienced a lot more moments of social insecurity than the men. I don’t know how I ‘know’ this, or even whether it’s actually true. It’s just a kind of instinctive sense I get. I do notice that the people who seem more taken aback when their screen-gazing is suddenly interrupted (eg by noise or movement at adjacent tables) appear to be mostly men. Women’s radar is always out, in the background of their attention, because, perhaps, to be safe, it has to be.

…..

I sense that there are two conflicting fears that often lurk behind many of our non-verbal signals (and maybe to some extent all of our communications). The first is the fear of being misunderstood. This fear is understandable — misunderstandings can have crucial, even deadly consequences. If our non-verbal signals can somehow compensate for our verbal incoherence, surely that’s a good thing.

The second of these is the fear of being understood all too well. Conveying a harsh truth, especially to someone who’s vulnerable or whom we really care about, can be devastating. Sometimes, people are just not ready to hear terrible truths. Sometimes, the world is not ready to hear terrible truths. Sometimes, as desperately as you want to tell the truth, and the listener says they want to hear it, that truth is just too terrible to tell.

This can be especially challenging when you and/or the listener are adamant that the truth is always the best thing to say. So sometimes there may be a temptation to use non-verbal signals to cushion, or even quietly undermine or conceal, a terrible truth-telling. Or, if spoken truth-telling is too harsh, there may be a temptation to use the non-verbal signals to tell the real truth instead. But man, this is difficult to navigate!

…..

And there seems to be something about our culture(s) that makes not knowing and not having an opinion on everything, somehow shameful. That would seem to be a relatively modern phenomenon, and I’m not sure it’s a healthy one. It’s almost as if your admission that you don’t know about something, or don’t have an opinion about it, it means that you don’t care about what’s going on in the world. There seems to be a prevailing (and dubious) belief that we all have a lot more agency than we actually have, and a lot more agency than we had before we had access to so much information.

I think this manifests itself in the way in which we communicate non-verbally. There are, I think, a million silent ways to say “I don’t know”. There is of course, the classic shrug, which is cleverly ambiguous — If you’re ashamed to admit you don’t know, the shrug could equally mean you don’t care, or that you don’t have a strong opinion either way because you appreciate the complexity of the subject. I catch myself shrugging often, usually with other ‘qualifying’ gestures — the head tilt, the raised eyebrows, the upraised hands. After forty years in the work world in which my job and reputation depended on me ‘knowing’, I have finally realized that “I don’t know” is usually the most honest, useful, refreshing answer I can give to just about any question.

…..

Babies and dogs, of course, can read our non-verbal signals far better than we befuddled human adults can. They probably also convey what they want us to ‘hear’ with non-verbal signals that we will never attain (re-attain?) the competence to understand, since we are now so dependent on our awful, imprecise, abstract, deceiving languages. And for babies and dogs, the default, silent answer to almost every question is “I don’t know”.

We should be so wise.

Posted in Creative Works, Month-End Reflections, Our Culture / Ourselves | Leave a comment

The Origins of Shame

Posted on October 25, 2024 by Dave Pollard

(right-click and open the image in a separate window/tab to view a more legible version)

Throughout my life, I have been dimly aware of situations where people I knew only casually (usually neighbours, or friends of friends or their families) acted in ways that were disturbing, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. These were almost all women and children. In retrospect, it is absolutely clear that they were being abused, generally (but not always) by a male adult in their family, or by a boyfriend. In every case, I was far from alone in sensing that something was wrong — friends and neighbours and coworkers talk, after all. And yet I did nothing. The others who knew, or “should have known”, or “thought they might know”, likewise did nothing.

Thinking back on the incidents where this was clear, but I was (in some cases seemingly willingly) oblivious, I now feel considerable shame. I might have made a difference, I tell myself. But I wasn’t absolutely sure, and I convinced myself it “wasn’t my business anyway”. What was (is?) wrong with me, that I did so?

Had I seen direct evidence of abuse, perhaps, I would have done something. The victims in some cases seemed almost complicit in the crimes of abuse — making up dubious stories to explain an ‘injury’ or some bizarre, obviously traumatized behaviour. And what if I had the story all wrong, and there was actually no abuse? Much safer to say nothing, do nothing, convince myself that there was probably a perfectly reasonable explanation. To believe what I wanted to believe, and the truth be damned.

This same pattern of horror, abuse, denial and silence is evident in how we do, or do not, make ‘sense’ of what is happening in the world. We know atrocities are being committed, but “if everyone was doing their job”, we tell ourselves, they’d be sussed out and punished, with the perpetrators prevented from doing it again.

But we really know that’s not true. We kind of know that billions of people are being neglected and in many cases systematically abused or oppressed simply by virtue of being poor, or sick, or mentally incapacitated, or incarcerated, or uneducated, or ignorant, or homeless, or having the ‘wrong’ skin colour, religion, belief system, ethnicity or appearance. “Not our fault, not our problem”, we tell ourselves. Someone else’s job to fix that. Or else it’s “just a shame” that it can’t be fixed, since no system is ever perfect. Or it’s the gods’ will. Or karma. Anything to avoid feeling bad about it happening. And especially anything to avoid feeling shame.

So far I’ve been talking about three “flavours” of shame — (1) the shame felt by those who, through no fault of their own, are struggling with illness, poverty, homelessness, prejudice or oppression (and in part blaming themselves); (2) the shame felt by individuals personally abused by others, who feel trapped and helpless about their situation (and in part blame themselves); and (3) the shame felt by those who have some sense that their ignorance, fear, or inaction has contributed to others’ suffering.

This third “flavour” of shame haunts us on many levels. We ‘kind of know’, for example, that the western Empire (among other actors) has, for at least six centuries, directly and indirectly overthrown, assassinated, couped, bribed, bombed, tortured, starved, stolen, murdered, ‘disappeared’, oppressed, genocided, sanctioned, besieged, embargoed, financed brutal regimes and wars, and committed countless other atrocities against the people of at least a hundred countries, all in the interest of keeping our political and economic ‘friends’ in power, and their vassal states frightened and obedient. Or, at least, we think it’s possible that the Empire has been behind all these atrocities. But we’re not sure. We damned well don’t want to be sure. We want to be able to say: “Not our fault, not our problem.” Or at least “We didn’t know.”

And if we were to be honest, we really don’t want to know about these atrocities. What’s the point in knowing? It’s just easier to convince ourselves that our governments would never do anything like that. Must have been a few “bad actors”.

Because if we were ever forced to face the truth that these atrocities have gone on and continue to go on unabated, and we had just shrugged and done nothing, or asserted “we didn’t know”, we would, surely, have to feel overwhelmingly ashamed.

For all his incoherence and stupidity, Trump and his right-wing counterparts in other countries have been masterful at redirecting the growing sense of personal shame that so many have felt about their lot (notably those struggling in impoverished rural areas, rust belts and small towns in many countries) into blame, as Arlie Hochschild has explained. Anger is much easier on the soul than shame. Someone else is at fault, not me.

For those of us privileged to have had a liberal education and the time and resources and freedom to make use of it, this third “flavour” of shame has a different nuance. We try to insist that no one told us, but at the same time ask ourselves how could we not have known? Much easier to say no, that can’t be true, or we would have known. Even the most extreme examples of western-enabled malfeasance, like the Pinochet regime in Chile, still has its apologists and its defenders and deniers. So, today, does the genocide of the Netanyahu regime in Palestine and Lebanon. So, too, do the endless atrocities committed against confined and abused animals in factory farms. So, too, of course, does the destruction of our planet’s ecosystems and its once-stable climate. That can’t be true, or we would have known.

I have always prided myself on being more aware of what is happening in the world (mostly thanks to following a few dogged truth-tellers like Noam Chomsky, and a few courageous whistle-blowers) than almost everyone I know. Still, I am increasingly finding myself saying no, that can’t be true, or I would have known. Recently I reproduced Palestinian Lena Khalaf Tuffaha‘s gut-wrenching poem about receiving a call in the middle of the night from anonymous IDF soldiers telling her her home would be blown up in 58 seconds, so she had better leave. It was published in 2017. “That can’t be right”, I said to myself. “The genocide only started last year.” And then I found similar reports that date back to the 1990s, the 1980s, the 1970s, before I stopped looking. This genocide and apartheid has been going on since before the end of WW2. Since before I was born. How could I not have known?

Shame is not easy for anyone to contend with. It’s like a worm; it can eat you up, alive, from the inside. Worse, it seems to be an affliction with no cure. I recently related the story of a man with an armload of pro-Palestine protest signs in my apartment building’s elevator a few months ago who, when I nodded support to him and asked what kept him going every day, replied “I have lost 55 family members in the war so far”.

When he told me this, I was filled with a kind of amorphous sense of shame. Surely there is something I (and ‘we’) should have done, should be doing, could be doing? When I tell this story to people I know (mostly those who insist the genocide and apartheid are “overblown” or “justifiable”), all conversation kind of spontaneously ceases. The tactic of denial is foreclosed. The cognitive dissonance between this little data point and the mountain of beliefs that they have gathered around themselves assuring them “that can’t be right”, is paralyzing. And in goes the awful worm.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has just written a book called The Message that describes what he saw during his recent visit to Palestine and Israel, and in which he admits to some shame that he didn’t know what was going on there. He has been assailed by both right-wing critics and by neoliberal supporters and their media reps, because his book dares to tell them truths they don’t want to hear. In a recent interview he said:

The thing that I’ve thought a lot more about is the fact that you have a class of low-information journalists, certainly when it comes to Palestine and Israel, and perhaps the world. And I say that as somebody who was among them. These people are not low-information because they’re bad people or even necessarily incurious people. But there is tremendous pressure not to have this conversation.

Why is there so much pressure “not to have this conversation”? I would argue it’s for the same reason we are unwilling to have conversations about our personal and cultural “failures”, and about all the past and ongoing atrocities being carried out ‘in our name’ but never disclosed by governments or the media: because it would result in an outpouring of shame.

Reluctance “to have this conversation” must be especially acute for members of the press who have had every opportunity to learn and to tell the truth about international atrocities, but have done neither. How could we be so wrong? Who can we blame for this deception? Surely not ourselves.

Cara Marianna has been writing from Palestine and Israel, and has stayed longer and heard and seen what is going on. She’s telling the same stories. The ones you don’t see and hear and read in the mainstream media. Because we’re in a way just like the media: When it comes to this kind of news “there is tremendous pressure not to have this conversation”. We don’t want to know that horrible things have been going on, supported by our governments and our media and, in their ignorance, by our fellow citizens.

We don’t want to feel shame.

What is it about shame, that seemingly uniquely human emotion that so perverts us? All three ‘flavours’ of shame are awful, and the behaviours that accompany them have horrific consequences — lives destroyed and irreparably damaged, massive trauma, cultures destroyed and perverted, and entire nations destroyed amid an endless litany of treacherous lies, angry wars, terrible secrets, and oppressive silence.

Where does shame come from? And is there anything that can be “done about it”?

I drew the chart at the top of this post to try to understand where shame comes from, and why we find it so incapacitating and awful to deal with.

It suggests that shame starts with a situation (black squares) in which either we are personally suffering (left panel) or some person or group we know is suffering (right panel).

There are three ways we can ‘deal with’ this knowledge: (1) We can tell ourselves a story that it is to some degree our own fault or responsibility; (2) We can tell ourselves a story that it is not our fault or responsibility; or (3) We can deny the situation is true. (We can also assert that both we, and others, are partly at fault or partly responsible for doing something to address the situation.)

In the first case, we are inevitably going to feel shame, like the personal shame we feel over our inaction in a familial abuse situation, or the collective shame (also called “species shame”) many of us feel over the ongoing genocide in Palestine and Lebanon.

In the second case, we are likely going to redirect the potential feeling of shame into blame and anger against the “others” we hold responsible for the suffering, as Trump has done over the economic struggles of rural areas, small towns, and rust belts in the US. Whether that redirection is helpful or comforting or not will depend on the circumstances.

In the third case, our feelings might be complex: We might be able to “back-burner” our concerns for awhile, but the very fact we’ve acknowledged the possibility that the situation might be as awful as described will likely make denial an unsustainable proposition, and we might well feel shame along with the helplessness, quiet dread, and other feelings that such situations will often provoke until we can move past our denial.

I would suggest that which of these three judgements and “stories” are our response to any situation, and hence whether we feel shame about that situation or not, depends entirely on how we have been conditioned, mostly by our culture, to respond to such situations. To that extent, none of the three judgement responses is “correct” or “better” than any other. One response might be better as a coping mechanism for some people, but a worse coping mechanism for others. And none of them is a personal “choice”.

Does shame have any value? Not if our behaviour is entirely conditioned. It reflects how we feel about our behaviour, but it doesn’t determine or affect our behaviour. I would assert that no one does what they do out of shame; rather, shame is their reflection on what they have done, or not done. If I go out and protest the genocide tomorrow, when I did not today, it’s not because I felt shame. It’s because others’ conditioning of me (with new knowledge, evidence, and useful arguments), or because the circumstances have changed (eg when the sheer horrific extent of the genocide, and its potential consequences becomes undeniable), that my behaviour will change. Along with infusing me with a large dose of shame.

So I would argue that shame, like other uniquely-human emotions, is quite useless, and very unhealthy. Wild creatures don’t feel shame, and they don’t need it. It’s just another unfortunate consequence of being ‘too smart for our own good’, of having a brain that is obsessed with making judgements and telling ourselves and each other stories to try to ‘make sense’ of what is happening.

But, as with those other uniquely-human emotions (like hatred, envy, dread, chronic anxiety, and regret) we have no choice but to feel them when we do.

And, sadly, for this there is no cure.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Canada: A Collapse Scorecard

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Dave Pollard

Photo of Harold Gosney’s sculpture of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from Humber Museums Partnership on flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). From left to right, the horsemen are Famine, Disease, Death, and War. The renaming shown above is my own alteration, not part of Harold’s or the Museum’s vision, and strictly my own conceit — I would argue that the ‘original’ four horsemen are all, today, products (consequences) of corporatism, incompetence, propaganda and imperialism.

Over the past decade, Canada has clearly become, like a lot of places, a harder, less trusting, less tolerant, angrier and more fearful place to live. It’s easy to blame this on the government or other ‘polarizing’ influences, but I think these are all symptoms of global system collapse, which is starting to undermine and defeat everything we try to do, including all the things we have long prided ourselves for doing so well in this country. Everything is starting to fall apart, and we’re starting to come apart too.

I thought it might be useful to create a “scorecard” of where we stand now, in Canada, in terms of major system collapse, and civilizational collapse. Just my opinion of course. Scores of F represent failure, meaning my sense is that these systems are failing badly, and may well be the first to collapse.

In this scorecard, a ✓ indicates something that is working reasonably well,
while a ⚠️ indicates something that is not working well at all, and is contributing to the system’s failure.

Political systems: Score: D
✓ 3rd parties and independent candidates can still win elections in Canada
⚠️ the undemocratic FPTP system means a party with only 30-40% of votes, loathed by the other 60-70%, can often win a ‘majority’ of seats
⚠️ money has an enormous and undemocratic influence on politics; governments do what their corporate lobbyists and donors wish, not what most voters want
⚠️ incompetence is rife in our political systems; most politicians and most senior admin people in government do not have the basic skills needed to do their jobs competently
⚠️ most elected officials, most senior admin people in government, and most citizens are ignorant of the essential lessons of history that should inform political decisions
⚠️ there is increasing censorship and huge amounts of propaganda being used to subvert and distort citizens’ knowledge on essential issues
⚠️ far too much money is spent on defence, and not enough on essential public services

Personal freedoms: Score: B
✓ protesting in Canada is mostly legal, though this freedom is being threatened
✓ the level of surveillance of citizen activity and behaviour remains tolerable, though this is changing, especially surveillance by foreign corporations and governments
✓ we are extraordinarily privileged to be free from the imminent threat of war or invasion
⚠️ freedom of speech is being repressed by starving those expressing anti-corporate and ‘unpopular’ opinions from the mainstream media, and by censoring and ‘demonetizing’ such opinions in the oligopolistic social media

Economic/Business/Trade systems: Score: D
✓ Canada’s per-capita productivity ranks among the highest in the world, though this is masked by US corporate owners’ use of transfer and ‘management’ fees to eliminate reported Canadian profits (and avoid paying any Canadian taxes)
⚠️ foreign (mostly US) control dominates most of Canada’s resource and manufacturing industries, so that we are largely not in control of our own destiny
⚠️ there are massive and quickly-growing inequalities of wealth/income in Canada, distorting markets and preventing many Canadians from supporting Canadian businesses and paying for essential goods and services
⚠️ there is a gigantic concentration of power among 2-3 companies in almost all sectors of the Canadian economy, producing egregious and exploitative pricing even for essential products and services, and contributing to bloat and inefficiencies in these companies
⚠️ Canada’s corporate sector is vastly under-regulated, often amounting to ‘self-regulation’ or no regulation at all, resulting in corporate malfeasance and environmental destruction that is often not even detected
⚠️ the enshittification of everything (not just online products and services) is as prevalent in Canada as anywhere else, and Canadians (for lack of domestic alternatives) buy a huge percentage of their products and services from enshittified American and other foreign companies
⚠️ incompetence is rife among almost all the major ‘players’ in our economic system: lawmakers, regulators, corporations and their lawyers, and producers and consumers, leading to poor products and services, and their providers not being held to account
⚠️ we are heavily dependent on both imports and exports, often over long distances using heavily subsidized transportation, to keep our citizens supplied with essential goods and services, and to maintain a supportable balance of payments; none of this is sustainable

Financial/Tax systems: Score: D
⚠️ Canada’s financial systems have been deregulated in lockstep with US systems, leading to similar dysfunction: reckless lending, oligopolies and price-fixing, under-regulated and incompetently regulated fiscal and monetary policies, usurious interest charges, and other abuses
⚠️ the value of the Canadian dollar is at the mercy of currency speculators who undervalue it by about 30% because of the “exorbitant privilege” afforded to the US dollar in which most of our international trade is conducted (those speculators make up the vast majority of currency exchange transactions)
⚠️ our tax system has been distorted by conservative governments and corporate lobbyists to overwhelmingly favour rich taxpayers, who pay lower taxes on their ‘investment’ income than workers do on their wage income, and have all kinds of tax loopholes and access to foreign tax havens to evade paying even close to their fair share of Canadian taxes

Health/Food systems: Score: D
✓ basic health services are affordable to almost all Canadians
⚠️ Canadians overwhelmingly eat a nutritionally poor and unhealthy diet, thanks to food industry lobbying and irresponsible marketing, and nutritious, healthy foods are notoriously less affordable than junk foods
⚠️ Canada has essentially no illness prevention programs and strategies; all health money is spent on treatments and on maintaining aging dysfunctional institutional infrastructure
⚠️ wait times are growing impossibly long for some health services, and restrictions of services are ever-growing (eg the system doesn’t pay for dental, physical therapy, prescriptions, or psychological health care)
⚠️ the current system produces too many specialist surgeons and not enough GPs, so as many as half of Canadians cannot find a family doctor
⚠️ the health system as a whole is absurdly underfunded
⚠️ conservative lobby groups are working furiously to get the government to allow and subsidize privatized health services
⚠️ Canada’s health systems are horrifically inflexible and un-innovative (just ask any patient who’s had to wade through the bureaucracy)
⚠️ Canada’s food system is overwhelmingly dependent on a small number of big corporations that dominate food supply chains, and it is dependent on massive food imports
⚠️ the affordability of animal-source foods (meat, dairy, eggs) is now heavily dependent on the barbarous, unsustainable, dangerous and inhumane processes of ‘factory farming’
⚠️ Public Health initiatives are drastically underfunded and are no longer fully supported by the public due to conservative groups’ huge mis- and disinformation campaigns; thanks to that, we are completely unprepared to deal with the next pandemic

Education systems: Score: F
⚠️ most Canadians exhibit a serious lack of critical thinking, effective oral and written communication, ability to do real research, and other essential skills that were once an important part of our education system
⚠️ most Canadians are completely ignorant of Canadian and world history and how our systems actually work (or are supposed to)
⚠️ our education systems are seriously underfunded, and have failed to introduce any significant innovations for decades, so a large proportion of ‘education’ money is spent on buildings and administration
⚠️ our university education systems are in particularly bad shape, mostly serving as holding tanks for unemployable young people, and subsidized by providing substandard services to foreign students at massively inflated prices

Media/Information systems: Score: F
⚠️ almost all Canadian mainstream media are controlled by right wing corporations
⚠️ Canadians’ access to accurate, useful, complete information has been significantly destroyed by the advent of ‘social’ media that reward misinformation and sensationalism
⚠️ an increasing amount of censorship, propaganda, and misinformation is being perpetrated by the tightly-controlled mainstream media
⚠️ almost all local independent media have folded, or been bought up and shut down

Housing systems: Score: F
⚠️ safe housing is completely unaffordable for a significant (~10%) proportion of Canadians, and decent housing near their workplaces and other preferred living places is unaffordable for the large majority of Canadians
⚠️ there is evidence that, particularly in some lucrative sectors, Canada’s construction and real estate ‘development’ industry is significantly controlled by organized crime
⚠️ the quality of new Canadian housing continues to deteriorate as profiteers in the wildly overheated housing market cut costs and use lawyers to evade responsibility for shoddy work
⚠️ Canada’s governments of all stripes have demonstrated consistent cowardice to provide the massive amounts of affordable, quality public housing that Canadians need, since that would require dramatically raising taxes on the rich to pay for it
⚠️ there are completely inadequate disincentives for citizens to buy homes on price-rise speculation and leave them vacant or use them for short-term rentals, and then flip them

Social Security systems: Score: C
✓ the benefits paid to sick, unemployed and senior Canadians are mostly sufficient, though barely, at least for the most needy
⚠️ these benefits have not been increased commensurate with recent cost increases
⚠️ these benefits are under threat from conservative governments and lobbyists, who say they are “unaffordable” (which they soon may be, thanks to conservatives’ tax cuts for the rich)

Transportation systems: Score: C
✓ some parts of most communities’ public transport systems work well
⚠️ these systems are underfunded and plagued with cost overruns and delays, thanks substantially to inability to play hardball with contractors, which are largely under-regulated and oligopolistic
⚠️ incompetence is also evident in many transportation ‘megaprojects’ — poorly designed, poorly costed, poorly built (lots of constant expensive repairs), and administratively overburdened

Sci-Tech/Innovation capacities: Score: D
✓ Canada continues to have more than our share of people and companies developing new and innovative products and services, and doing important research, but far less than was the case a generation ago
⚠️ foreign control of most large corporations means that their research and innovation work is done in the parent company’s country, not in Canada
⚠️ science, technology and innovation are extremely underfunded, and much of the money that is spent for these activities is wasted, because administrators don’t have the competencies needed to assess them properly

Social/Community systems and capacities: Score: F
⚠️ the last two decades has seen a continuing erosion of trust of Canadians in their neighbours, in local non-profits and community organizations, and in public institutions, for some of the same reasons mentioned earlier
⚠️ this period has also seen the atomization of neighbourhoods, as people have to constantly move in search of affordable housing, leading to a situation where many Canadians don’t know any of their neighbours and participate in no local community activities (except perhaps for their children’s sports)
⚠️ in short, we no longer have real communities in large swaths of the country; and it takes time and practice to learn how to build and sustain communities

Arts/Culture/Imagination systems and capacities: Score: D
✓ in popular music and in popular fiction, at least, Canada continues to produce more than its share of outstanding, internationally recognized and award-winning works of art
⚠️ as in many countries, Canada is now plagued with what would seem an epidemic of imaginative poverty; Canadians are so unpracticed they can’t imagine living any way other than they do, or how anyone who doesn’t believe what they do could possibly do so
⚠️ because our culture is so dominated by the US (American programming makes up ~80% of most Canadians’ media consumption), and since Canadians largely define ourselves by how we differ from Americans, we arguably don’t even have a Canadian culture any more (Aurélien has made a similar argument about some European cultures)

Energy systems: Score: D
✓ we are resource rich in energy, including hydroelectric power, far more than most countries
⚠️ Canada’s energy sector is the most ecologically destructive on the planet, on a per-capita basis, but much of our economy and trade balance depends on its continued operation, which is completely unsustainable
⚠️ we are overly dependent on non-renewable sources of energy, and we are rapacious consumers of energy per-capita
⚠️ climate change is already taking its toll on hydroelectric power, as glaciers dry up and rains become unpredictable; we had to import hydrocarbon energy in each of the last two years because our hydro dams couldn’t provide us with enough, and we have largely used up all the potential areas for new hydro power

Ecological systems: Score: F
✓ we are rich in freshwater resources
⚠️ Canada has relatively little arable land to sustain us if food imports cease to be available, but has a lot of threatened, fragile land — glaciers (with their enormous store of fresh water), permafrost, and boreal forest, for example — the loss of which will have enormous negative consequences for the entire planet in terms of climate collapse and other aspects of ecological collapse
⚠️ we are an obvious destination for the hundreds of millions of Western Hemisphere climate refugees we will see moving north in the coming decades, particular from the western US, but we have none of the systems or resources needed to handle the influx

You’re probably tired of hearing me say this, but I don’t blame anyone, Canadian or not, for the deteriorating and failing quality of many of our systems. We’re all doing our best. This is what collapse looks like: It’s what happens when the systems get so big and unwieldy that no amount of ‘reform’ and tinkering can prevent them from getting worse to the point they just collapse, and have to be abandoned. History is replete with examples of this, though this collapse is certain to be global and more devastating than any that has preceded it.

Of course this is all just my opinion, based on 70+ years of living in this country and 20+ years studying systems theory, complexity theory, and the history of civilizational collapse. But as I have prepared and edited this scorecard, and tried hard to balance the pluses and minuses, I’ve had an increasingly sinking feeling that the world has witnessed these kinds of system failures before, and it has never ended well.

We can’t ‘fix’ these systems as they fall apart. The best we can do is get out from under them so they don’t crush us as they fall. Our current dependence on them will be our undoing, which is why I am so concerned at our imaginative poverty, as we strive to slowly replace the collapsed systems with new, radically relocalized systems that actually work to our communities’ benefit. We have time to do that adaptation — collapse is likely to continue in fits and starts for a few decades yet before all these systems must be completely abandoned. The question is: Will we have acquired, by then, the capacities needed to adapt? About that I am much less certain.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 6 Comments

US Election Voting: I Was Wrong, Sort Of

What We Refuse to Believe

What Is Apparently Happening

Five Things That Most Differentiate Your Country’s Citizens

Dave’s US Election Day Thoughts

Homelessness: A Predicament Not a Problem

The Nine Circles of Radical Non-Duality

That Expression Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

The Origins of Shame

Canada: A Collapse Scorecard

Navigation

Get new posts by email:

Collapsniks

Radical Non-Duality

Essential Reading

Archive by Category

My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts

My Other Sites

November 2024
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Oct
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30