Signs of Collapse: Blaming It On Immigration

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Dave Pollard

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Collapse Watch | 11 Comments

Rain-Walking

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Dave Pollard

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Whole World Isn’t Watching Anymore

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Dave Pollard


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t think many believe that now.

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

saudade

Posted on August 19, 2024 by Dave Pollard

This is a work of fiction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

yet this is the feeling I feel now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

leaving only, astonishingly, wondrously, sadly
this everything.

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

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

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

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Dave Pollard

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In either case, there is nothing to be done.

And no one to do anything, anyway.

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

Links of the Month: August 2024

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Dave Pollard


Cartoon by Chaz Hutton at Instachaaz

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

COLLAPSE WATCH


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

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

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

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

LIVING BETTER


from the memebrary

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

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

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

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


cartoon by Farley Katz from the New Yorker

Imperialism, Militarism & Fascism: Short takes:

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

Corpocracy & Unregulated Capitalism: Short takes:

Administrative Mismanagement & Incompetence: Short takes:

Pandemic Watch: Short takes:

FUN AND INSPIRATION


Cartoon by Paul Noth from the New Yorker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


Cartoon by Grant Snider, from the memebrary

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

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

From Daniel Schmachtenberger, on Reconnecting with the World:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ll Coup Who We Want”

Posted on August 12, 2024 by Dave Pollard


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No One Knows How You Feel

Posted on August 10, 2024 by Dave Pollard

Those who have studied animals for a long time suggest that the emotional ‘landscape’ of non-human animals is different from that of humans. The ‘map’ above attempts to articulate what those differences are and how they might have arisen. It is based very roughly on emotion maps developed by educator/author Karla McLaren, but diverges substantially from her taxonomy.

My map differentiates three categories of emotions:

  1. Instinctive, universal emotions shared by all living creatures: Notably the ‘big 4’, Fear, Anger, Sadness, and Joy.
  2. ‘Judgemental’ emotions that I suspect are unique to humans: Those in the left shaded rectangle on the map, that I think require some moral judgement (or self-judgement) in order to be felt.
  3. ‘Natural’ emotions (in the right shaded rectangle) that I suspect are uniquely inaccessible to humans because we are biologically and culturally conditioned from birth to conceive of ourselves as ‘selves’, separate and apart from the rest of life and everything else on earth. I have argued that this sense of disconnection is the result of an evolutionary accident in the entanglement, unique to human brains, of our capacity to conceive and our capacity to perceive. The resultant confusion, which I’ve explained in my Entanglement Hypothesis posts, has created a ‘veil’ through which we see the world, which precludes us from feeling the emotions of equanimity (pure acceptance of what is, without judgement) and unconditional love. That unconditional love is very different from the ‘personal’ love that humans feel for ‘others’, which is conditional and laden with interminable judgements.

My sense (which is supported by most of the research I have read) is that wild creatures spend most of their lives in one or more of the three emotional states shown on the right side of the ‘map’ — joy/excitement, unconditional love, and equanimity. I have personally witnessed a lot of compelling evidence of animals instinctively expressing these emotions.

For wild creatures, I would argue, feelings of fear, anger/rage, and sorrow are both situational (prompted by others’ behaviours or external circumstances) and temporary. In healthy animals, in other words, these feelings are fleeting and relatively rare. The body’s reactions to these emotions are powerful and energy-diverting, to deal with the apparent crisis or danger that has given rise to them. Once the crisis has been dealt with and has passed, wild creatures, I think, return quickly to the ‘normal’ three emotional states of their existence: joy/excitement, unconditional love, and equanimity.

There is some evidence that, while wild creatures’ emotional lives are therefore ‘simpler’ than humans’, they actually feel their emotions more intensely than humans do, since their is no veil of judgement and rationalization tempering or qualifying their feelings.

The ‘judgemental’ emotions — those that require some kind of moral judgement or good/bad/causal rationalization in order to be felt — are, I believe, the crux of the problem of the human malaise and our endless dissatisfaction, suffering, and predilection to create misery for others. These emotions are, I would argue, extensions and entanglements of the three core instinctive emotions that all creatures feel under conditions of great stress: fear, anger/rage, and sorrow. They result from our brains’ obsession with ‘making meaning’ of our feelings, rather than just allowing our bodies to react to them the way wild creatures’ bodies do, in the ways that have been evolutionarily successful for billions of years. And they create a kind of inescapable feedback loop — the intellectual judgement provokes a judgemental emotion, which in turn provokes a further intellectual judgement to rationalize the feeling of that emotion, and so on.

That, combined with the fact that our species, in what we call ‘civilization’, has created a living environment in which stresses aren’t acute and temporary, but relentless and chronic, means that we spend most of our lives in a state of chronic stress and reactivity to that stress. And stress kills, in more ways than one.

Our human brains, unable to conceive differently, assume that we can ‘know’ what another person is feeling, and why they are feeling that way. It assumes that our mental models’ hopelessly simplistic assessments of truth and causality are both accurate and universally shared. This is a recipe for disaster. Not only can we not hope to ever understand what another person is feeling, or what ’caused’ that feeling, there is no one in ‘control’ of our or their feelings. We are all just acting out our conditioning, just as wild creatures do. Our judgements and assessments of the reasons (sheer evilness, insanity etc) for others’ behaviours are inevitably shallow, simplistic and fundamentally erroneous.

No surprise we are so fucked up as a species, wallowing in this chemical mass of self-reinforcing reactions and unfounded judgements for most of our lives.

The chemistry of our instinctive emotions, the ones we share with other creatures, has only recently become recently established. They are a consequence of millions of years of evolved biological conditioning. They have been essential to most creatures’ survival — though it should be noted that most of the species that have appeared on our planet are no longer with us.

We know even less about the chemistry of our judgemental, perhaps uniquely human, emotions. Even our words for these emotions are, mostly, of relatively recent vintage and very ambiguous in their meaning. The words anger and anxiety, for example, come from the same root, as do the words ire and err. The word hatred comes from a root word that originally meant sorrow, while the word sorrow comes from a root that originally meant sickness. The word guilt has no known root at all, and its history is a mystery. The words jealous and zealous once meant the same thing.

We really don’t know what is going on in our conditioned, chemically-driven bodies when fear gives way to chronic anxiety, or rage gives way to inextinguishable hatred. The former, instinctive emotions would seem to be obviously healthy and evolutionarily useful, while the latter, chronic, always-under-your-skin judgemental emotions would seem destructive (both to those feeling them and to the objects of their emotions) and inherently maladaptive and unhealthy.

That is why I believe these judgemental emotions are an evolutionary misstep. As cancers are to the physical realm, these judgemental feelings are, IMO, to the emotional realm. Good for nothing, harmful, and dangerous.

But that’s the thing about evolution: The things nature tries out, in the never-ending search for a better ‘fit’ with the environment and with other species, aren’t always good ideas. And it can take a long time (by our standards, anyway) for an evolutionary error to work its way through and be extinguished by subsequent evolutionary advances.

And I’m not saying that, were it not for these maladaptive judgemental emotions, the endgame we’re approaching for our civilization would have been any different. We are an easily-conditioned species, thanks to the suggestibility of our large and imaginative brains, our invention of abstract languages, and our understandable compulsion to band together and ‘join forces’ with others of our species. Our imaginations also magnify and amplify our capacity for violence. And we are, like many primates, a notably fierce species, ready, willing and able to kill when the opportunity arises. Our conditioning would most likely have led us to where we are even without the apparent evolutionary misstep that’s befallen our species.

So, the tragedy of our entangled brains is probably not the primary cause of the massive destruction we have unleashed on our planet.

But it is, I would argue, the primary cause of almost all of the suffering that we have, and continue to, put ourselves and our fellow humans through, as we struggle, bewildered, to try to make sense of our world, and of our feelings.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Is The West’s Growing Oppression a Portent?

Posted on August 8, 2024 by Dave Pollard


Last February, historian and educator Tarik Cyril Amar wrote one of the most pessimistic articles I’ve ever read. The gist of it is what he calls The Gaza Method, defined as:

The West’s evolving blueprint for controlling a poly-crisis world by mass-murdering and subjugating the poor, the rebellious, and those deemed “superfluous.”

His argument, that I am not proposing to either defend or criticize, is that Gaza, Ukraine, and the rest of the murderous ‘adventures’ of the west throughout the world over the past half-century are experiments to develop and hone a “method” for dealing with global chaos and anarchy as the collapse of our civilization accelerates over the coming decades.

The obvious question is: Whose method is this? Who is ‘behind’ its development and increasingly brutal application? It can’t be just a few “bad apples”, some insane small elite still stuck in the paranoia of the Cold War. But it also seems unlikely to be a more vast, deliberate conspiracy by the entire neoliberal “Deep State” preparing enthusiastically to genocide most of the world’s population to protect a small group of select, privileged survivors. (As much as the lunatic billionaire advocates of longtermism/”effective altruism”, and the nihilistic fans of The Rapture, might think this to be true.)

Tariq speculates that some of those ‘behind’ this method are insane, or bribed, or being blackmailed, but that for the most part this method is a simple rationalization for what the proponents of this method have already decided needs to be done, and is being done, and all the propaganda in the western media is designed to convince the majority of citizens that this rationalization is correct — that genocides, coups, torture prisons and other extreme acts of violence by collective and state actors are “normal” and hence rational responses to anything labelled “terror”.

If that’s the case, then, Tariq asks why those supporting and acceding to this method are behaving this way. This is his answer:

The West is in decline in a severely crisis-ridden world … Its “elites” … are adopting a Darwinistic … mindset. They will fight for what they hubristically see as their “garden” and against what they … dismiss as the “jungle” – that is, everyone else… Since they are in decline, however, their ability to conduct that fight is restricted: They have, for instance, already ruined their soft power [and] in particular, the West’s ability to cajole others through dependency and the international financial system is about to be lost. All of the above means that the West is left with one option: the hardest of powers: … military force. And that is where the Gaza Genocide precedent fulfills its most important function as method-setting and method-“normalizing.”

I have regularly argued in my articles that while there is an unprecedented concentration of power in our contemporary civilization, that power is not organized or single-minded. There is almost no agreement among those with the most power as to what ‘should’ be done to cope with the poly-crisis of collapse. And in any case, even if there were, there is no group powerful enough to ‘control the world’. Our civilization is simply too complex and has too many moving parts to be controlled by any group. Despite the concentration of power, what happens each moment is the collective result of eight billion people doing what they have been biologically and culturally conditioned to do. No one and no group is “in control”, or ever could be.

And yet there remains a possibility that Tariq has hit upon an important truth in his article: (1) It doesn’t matter whether control is illusory or not, if a large proportion of the rich and powerful believe they are in control (or that they could be, or are destined to be, in control), and (2) Even if these rich and powerful people do not consciously believe that genocide and similar atrocities are justified, necessary, and rationalizable, it may be sufficient that subconsciously they have reached this terrible conclusion.

Such is the arrogance of American (and western) exceptionalism that it is entirely conceivable to me that a disorganized group of rich and powerful westerners actually believes they can and must ‘control’ the rest of the world to navigate civilization’s collapse, in the ‘best interests of all’.

And it is equally conceivable to me that this same group would be willing to rationalize to themselves (and to the rest of the world via mainstream media and other propaganda tools) that anything they do to exercise that ‘control’ is justifiable — or else they wouldn’t be doing it.

I have argued (annoyingly, to some) that our beliefs don’t actually influence our behaviours — our beliefs are an after-the-fact rationalization of our behaviours, and nothing more. So when a wannabe-western-aligned state (Ukraine) launches a brutal civil war and bombing campaign against its eastern provinces after overthrowing (with western support) its duly-elected Russian-aligned government (2014), we have no choice but to rationalize that they must have been justified in doing so, and hence support them and otherwise behave accordingly.

And when a western-aligned state (Israel) launches a massive genocide to starve and exterminate two million civilian residents of the open-air concentration camp it has constructed in its illegally-occupied territories in Palestine, we have no choice but to rationalize that they must have been justified in doing so, and hence support them and otherwise behave accordingly.

Our behaviour is entirely conditioned by the behaviours of others. Our beliefs don’t enter into it, except to rationalize our behaviour afterwards.

This is not to say that our conditioning might not change. As with the situation in Vietnam, Afghanistan and many other western wars, coups and occupations, there can come a point where our behaviour may switch from supporting a western-aligned state to opposing it, or at least no longer supporting it. It takes a long time for our solidly-set conditioning to change, and it is hard to do, but it has happened, and it can happen. At that point, we must suddenly and uncomfortably rationalize why our previous behaviour was unsupportable (ie wrong, or worse — irrational). This is usually an exercise in convenient forgetting, and retroactively revising the history books.

So: Back to where we stand now. We are living in a civilization in its declining years, in an inevitable and accelerating state of collapse. Most of the world is aware that the west has been largely responsible for this collapse (which is already happening all around them in most of the Global South), a west which remains in denial and unwilling or unable to do anything about it, except make it worse. And a rich and powerful but hopelessly disorganized group in the west, rapidly losing power and influence as collapse worsens, but feeling like they are, or should be, or are destined to be, in control of the situation.

What is this rapidly-diminishing western group feeling? Shame, most of all. Helplessness. Anger (at themselves and especially at anyone they can convince themselves is ‘really’ to blame). Fear, of course — Collapse is going to be mighty ugly when it reaches them, and they kind of know their wealth and power and compounds aren’t going to protect them from it for long. And, inevitably, denial. This can’t be happening. Not on our watch. We need to stay in control. We need to act. We need to harden ourselves, to inure ourselves, because some really tough ‘decisions’ are going to be needed. After all, there’s not nearly enough to go around. Someone — lots of people — are going to have to do without.

Again, I don’t think this is happening uniformly among all of the rich and powerful westerners, as the nature of the poly-crisis predicament increasingly becomes impossible to ignore. And I don’t think, for the most part, it’s happening consciously. But I think anyone reasonably informed about the current reality (and the rich and powerful are, generally, reasonably informed) would have to be brain-dead not to intuitively sense, and emotionally sense, and hence realize, at least subconsciously, that the decades to come are going to be grim, for everyone.

Tariq’s argument is that the actions of ‘the west’ (the rich and powerful ‘tail’ wagging the bewildered, propagandized citizenry ‘dog’) portend future actions of oppression, subjugation, and ‘rationalized’, ‘justified’ mass murder becoming ‘normal’ as the situation worsens. I’ll leave it up to the reader to assess that argument, since I have been notoriously poor at predicting the future (and when I’ve been right, my timing has generally been way off).

I’m just trying to make sense of the current situation, which makes no sense to me at all. We are at a juncture where most of us, I think, at least subconsciously, ‘know’ that we must put aside our differences and work together, furiously, if we are to have any hope of even lessening the impact of collapse on humans and the more-than-human world. And I think we also ‘know’, at least subconsciously, that we’re not going to do that.

What we — all eight billion of us — will do instead, is anyone’s guess. Our behaviours may all be conditioned, but they are completely unpredictable. Tariq’s prediction may turn out to be correct (though possibly for all the wrong reasons). We’re just the witnesses, here at this turning point in our planet’s remarkable and mysterious evolution, chronicling it as we see it.

It’s all that we can do.

Thanks to Billmon at Moon of Alabama for linking to Tariq’s article. Image is from Midjourney AI, my own prompt.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 9 Comments

My Top Ten Tech Pet Peeves

Posted on August 5, 2024 by Dave Pollard


The latest weasel-y development from Amazon: If they discover (usually because of massive numbers of customer complaints) that a product on their site is fraudulent, rather than banning the vendor from the site (which might entail costly investigation and/or litigation) they put this innocuous message on the product listing. 

Something about technology that doesn’t work properly just sets me off. I know I’m overreacting, but that doesn’t stop me. I can fume about it for hours, and even for days if it’s not resolved. I just expect things to work, or to be simple to correct when they don’t. When you buy something, I’ve always believed, there’s an implicit contract that says you should get what you paid for, no delays, and no questions asked.

What’s worse, I know that it’s (usually) unfair to blame people and companies for these failings. Of course they’re trying to maximize profit, but they know that (unless there’s no competition) they can’t continue to provide shoddy products and crappy service and expect to stay in business. But that just makes it more maddening when things don’t work properly.

Here are my current ‘top 10’ most annoyingly dysfunctional technologies and tech-based companies and services:

  1. Amazon: The image above demonstrates how low Bezos & Co are willing to stoop to avoid incurring any costs involved in removing fraudulent products from their site. In some cases if you look for a product and sort the results “price: low to high” you will get page after page of these messages before you find something that is (possibly) legit. Behind the elegant ‘storefront’, Amazon has degenerated into a sleazy, unregulated, junky flea market, full of knock-offs pretending to be brand names, fly-by-night operators, and bizarrely-named companies trolling for customers that sell only junk, or repackaged used and damaged goods, or in some cases sell nothing at all. If you dare challenge why you never got that Amazon product (probably because it didn’t actually exist, and/or never shipped) they won’t investigate, just give you a refund. They’re too busy going after the many fraudsters claiming refunds for goods they did actually receive, to be bothered investigating the fraudsters ‘inside’ their ‘store’.
  2. Bluetooth: This ‘standard’ (it’s not a company) remains on my top 10 hate list because it still doesn’t work reliably most of the time. There is a much better ‘standard’ for wireless data transmission: It’s called wi-fi. But product makers won’t use it because it would make their products more expensive. There’s a thread on Reddit showing the multiple steps users need to follow to connect, ‘pair’, then ‘unpair’, then ‘re-pair’, and then ‘re-connect’ every time they try to use devices with the ghastly Bluetooth standard. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad, and true. And heaven help you if you need to go to the bathroom with your Bluetooth earbuds, out of direct line of sight of the transmitter.
  3. No-reply emails: These are the height of corporate irresponsibility. They always include bad news: Someone ‘may’ have tried to hack into your account. You ‘may’ have been affected by a data breach. And they always include some tedious steps that you have to do, immediately. Unhappy? “This is an unmonitored email address and replies to it will not be read.” So STFU and do what we told you.
  4. Junk fees: Initiated by the airline industry, these extra fees never provide any benefit whatsoever to the customer, and are usually used to disguise fake low-ball prices. Once they’ve sucked you in with the ‘base’ price, they then present you with dozens of wildly-overpriced ‘extras’ that are in fact basic necessities (seat selection, baggage allowance). Banks are notorious for these, which can run up to 25% surcharges for small withdrawals. Amazon makes the list again for these, allowing its courier services to add on junk “service charges” and “processing fees” greater than the price of the product, added on top of the stated ‘delivery’ charge and “grand total” price. If you don’t pay the extra junk fee, the courier (DHL is especially bad) will “destroy” the product.
  5. Synching tools: If you have multiple devices (like a laptop and phone) it’s useful to be able to sync content between them (for ease of use, and for backup). But the makers of software make no attempt to make this possible if your devices aren’t all from one manufacturer. My Google Messages for Mac can only “find my (Android) phone” if it’s right beside the Mac, not ‘asleep’, and open to the Messages app. And synching my Apple Music library with my Android phone is precarious, complicated, and never goes smoothly.
  6. Companies without email addresses or phone numbers: Big corporations that provide no way for customers to contact them, generally (if they have any support at all beyond the FAQ pages) use outsourced call centres that insulate management from customers and don’t empower the call centre staff to actually solve problems. This must be humiliating to the always-underpaid usually-third-world call centre staff, who have to constantly admit they can’t do anything to help you beyond what you can do yourself. “I’m sorry I’m not authorized to do that.” They basically act as human bots. Don’t want the corporation’s important management members to have to deal with the trifles of mere customers; they’re busy finding new ways to cut costs and raise prices.
  7. Small appliances designed to wear out: Some appliances (blenders and frothers notoriously) rarely last longer than the 1-2 year (overpriced) ‘extended’ warranty period, so they just add to the landfill. Fix-it folks I’ve spoken with say they can’t be fixed because the problems are in circuit boards or parts that simply wear out and can’t be replaced. Poor design.
  8. Everything DRM: If I buy a book, I can lend it to my friend. But I can’t do that with my e-book. In fact, I can’t even read it on another device that uses a different ‘reader’, or port it to a flash drive and read it on another device from there. Yeah, I know, Amazon again. I guess damn Bezos is too busy wrecking WaPo to pay attention to business.
  9. Microsoft Office: I bought it every time I got a new computer, because no one could tell me how to port it across so it would work. Now my latest version won’t work (upside-down text, constant crashes) because I’m told I have to buy a subscription, and pay again, every month. I use my free Mac equivalent software when it’s just for my own use, but so many people use Office that I have to use it when I get sent files, or else spend time constantly saving everything in two (not entirely compatible) formats.
  10. Ad-blocker blockers: If online ads actually worked, I could understand why the companies using them would object to blocking them. But not only have I never, ever bought any product or service that I saw an online ad for, I mentally ‘blacklist’ any vendors that waste my time serving me these ads. Ads and other forms of misinformation are destroying the internet. They should be moved to “shopping” pages only, where people who are actually looking to buy something can view them. What’s really excruciating is when they appear in the middle of a song or podcast. You really think I’m going to buy your product when you do that?

Some (dis-)honourable mentions:

  • 90% of the sites I visit, including news sites and for-profit organizations, are constantly begging for money; it’s absurd, and obscene
  • Apple Music’s non-configurability
  • Google’s “sunsetting” of every feature that was free
  • ChatGPT’s verbose, time-wasting attempts to answer questions requiring data <3 years old (“I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable response)
  • Coffee pods
  • Paywalls (especially the ones that only show up after you’ve seen the first paragraph of the story)
  • Email systems that don’t auto-detect and auto-delete spam and phishing (surely AI can at least get that right); especially egregious are systems like GMail that won’t let you block or blacklist paying PR company spammers like PRNewswire
  • “Our terms of service have changed. Click here to agree to the new terms.”
Posted in How the World Really Works, Using Weblogs and Technology | 8 Comments