Extinction Capitalism, Part One: Our Imaginative Poverty

Posted on July 10, 2021 by Dave Pollard


image by greentumble.com

In his articles and books, Richard Manning describes high-maintenance monoculture, which has prevailed in much of the world since the early days of civilization, as “catastrophic agriculture”. He uses that term not because of its impact on the environment, but because of what it requires humans to do to maintain it — precipitate an endless series of simulated, unnatural ecological catastrophes (in the form of poisoning crops with toxins to kill pests and weeds, addition of unnatural fertilizers, elimination of complementary crops in favour of a single crop, and using unnatural amounts of water).

The result is a very fragile system, dependent both on a high degree of weather stability and on constant human (and now machine) interventions, to “force” the soil and the monoculture crops to produce a maximal amount of one specialized type of human (and human-consumed animal) food. Most gardeners today practice catastrophic agriculture, because they never learned any other way.

In similar terms, our current untrammelled hyper-capitalist economy might well be described as “catastrophic capitalism”. Artificial interventions in markets (like the 2008 bailouts, the vast and constant corporate subsidies of many industries, notably petrochemicals and the military, and the deliberate suppression of interest rates to encourage endless and reckless borrowing while punishing savers and those on fixed incomes) are now absolutely essential to “market growth” and hence global industrial capitalism’s continuance.

The result, again, is a desperately fragile system, with ghastly amounts of waste and inequality, leaving the system and its citizens utterly dependent on these artificial interventions, and requiring blind citizen/consumer obedience to enable them to continue, despite their destructiveness, unfairness and the massive suffering they cause.

This is what a culture (and a Ponzi scheme) does in its death throes. It desperately tries to perpetuate the existing system even when the costs vastly outweigh the advantages. The whole system is deemed “too big to fail” because knowledge of less dysfunctional systems has been lost and forgotten. History is replete with stories of the collapse of civilizations and societies that went “all in” on one way of doing things, even when that way of doing things was no longer viable, and even when it was utterly dysfunctional and self-destructive.

When systems of catastrophic agriculture begin to collapse, due to climate change, exhaustion of soils and water, or epidemic disease, the attempt to perpetuate such systems anyway might more accurately be called “Extinction Agriculture”. The Irish potato famine is one extreme example of what can happen. Complete dependence on a fragile and unsustainable system, with no viable replacement system available, will inevitably lead to the extinction of critical elements of the system and, as it collapses, the extinction of those dependent on it.

Similarly, our modern, fragile, unsustainable system of catastrophic (fragile, overextended, artificially supported, and perpetuated against all reason) capitalism, has now reached the stage it might accurately be called “Extinction Capitalism”. Like our modern industrial food system, it is killing us, and our planet, and still, ludicrously, we continue to support it.


image from XR, by Vladimir Morozov/akxmedia

Extinction Capitalism is, like other self-destroying systems, the result not only of forgetting possible alternatives to the prevailing but now dysfunctional system, but also of incapacity to imagine and hence create a more viable system.

I have argued that we live in an age of immense imaginative poverty. Imagination is a capacity that must be learned and practiced. Children were once encouraged to develop that capacity, but now the toys, games and media they are exposed to actively discourage and stunt the imagination, replacing it with rigid instructions and rules, preset boundaries and options, and a bunch of tech-induced visual thrills that make them passive consumers of the culture, primed for more kits, sequels and simplistic binary plots and precluded from considering any possibilities other than those the programmers, who suffer from similar imaginative poverty, have preconceived. Everything in our modern technology-obsessed culture is formulaic, constraining, artificially thrilling and relentlessly numbing.

That is not to say we are not creative. The detritus of human productivity that now weighs down our world came about because we have a predilection to make stuff, to create. But in a world of imaginative poverty, that creativity is derivative, replicative, devoid of novelty and originality, and lacking in any appreciation of the astonishing lessons that the natural world, outside our prosthetic human one, has to offer.

So instead of new ideas and possibilities inspired by practiced, collaborative, imaginative thinking, learning from the more-than-human world, we instead have a bunch of bored billionaires competing to see which of them can make or buy his way into outer space first. And numb, equally unimaginative media passively reporting on this competition and on other ‘celebrity’ activities.

And, instead of inventors and experimenters, we have dimwits running our political and technological systems, people who have never had an imaginative thought in their entire lives. As a result we have ever-more-derivative social media that offer all of the exploitativeness and none of the potential that global connectedness and collaboration might have offered, had it been imbued with imagination rather than simply harnessed for private profit.

So Facebook is a ghastly, dysfunctional, time-wasting replicator of unoriginal material, much of it deceptive or simply wrong, essentially a clone of an earlier tool that didn’t get big enough fast enough or ruthlessly enough to control the market. We are now its product, not its customers.

Amazon is just a private monopoly that did what a properly-run and properly-funded post office could have done much better, and could have run as a public utility for everyone’s benefit — had the 1% not conspired to starve public institutions in the interest of private “enterprise”.

And Twitter is just a pathetic, useless addiction — a machine for public masturbation, the ultimate manifestation of what Neil Postman called “amusing ourselves to death”.

So this is where we are, much like many previous civilizations that grew too large and too sclerotic to continue to function, and then collapsed, mostly unmourned. Most of our civilization’s citizens have developed a common and utterly useless specialty — we have become mindless, unimaginative, overweight, malnourished, placid obeyers of authority, unthinking consumers of more and more stuff that we don’t need, can’t afford, and which is killing our planet, and capable only of doing what we’re told, because we can’t imagine doing anything else. And this tragic state has not even made us happy.

Extinction Capitalism isn’t the cause of our disease, just the instrument of our execution. We are so busy looking at the barrage of messages and sparkly colours on all the pretty, irresistible screens we are surrounded with, that we can’t see the noose, slowly lowered and tightening around our necks. And the footing on the road ahead, especially when we’re not looking, is pretty precarious.

In Part Two I’ll speculate on where I think Extinction Capitalism is taking us over the next ten rocky years.

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

CoVid-19: What Do We Owe the Unvaccinated?

Posted on July 10, 2021 by Dave Pollard


IHME estimated final vaccination rates, as at July 2, 2021

Here in BC, and in Canada as a whole, 80% of the population 12+ has had a first vaccine shot, and 42% are fully inoculated. The second shot rate here is increasing quickly enough that by month-end, almost 80% of Canadians 12+ will be fully vaccinated.

In the US, which had a huge head-start in its vaccination program, new vaccinations have slowed to a crawl and only 70% of those 18+ have had a first shot, while 60% of those 18+ are fully inoculated. Most West Coast and Northern states have 80% vaccination rates, while rates in Southern and Central states are lagging at about half that level.

Anthony Fauci has declared that if he were in a “low-vaccination” area, he would find it prudent to continue to wear a mask wherever he went. Ex-FDA Director Scott Gottlieb says he expects 85% of the population will end up immune, with the choice being how that immunity is achieved: “We now have our choice in terms of how we acquire that immunity; you can acquire it through vaccination or you’re going to end up acquiring it through natural infection.”

IHME data suggests that 40% of Americans have already been infected, and another 5% will likely be infected before “herd immunity” slowly kicks in. That means slightly more — 45% to 40% — of Americans will have acquired their immunity the hard way, with the commensurate risk (to themselves and to the society as a whole) of lifelong, perhaps debilitating, CoVid symptoms. By contrast, in Canada, only 12% will have been infected before “herd immunity” is reached, versus 73% or more who will get immunity from vaccination. That’s a huge difference.

In much of the world, vaccination has barely begun, and citizens in many struggling nations are dependent on their seeming natural immunity to novel coronaviruses, the reasons for which are not yet well understood, but which is a huge blessing for the world, saving perhaps 50 million lives that would otherwise have been lost.

So now what? Once you’ve been fully vaccinated, what do you do if you travel to a “low-vaccination” area? And what do we, as nations with access to adequate vaccines, owe to those without such access? Globally CoVid-19 remains the third leading cause of weekly deaths — 20,000 new deaths/day per IHME estimates, and dropping only very slowly. Although personal risk of catching the disease once fully vaccinated is generally very low, that risk is significantly greater in areas where lots of people, especially if they’re unmasked, are currently infected. And those risks have grown due to the high transmissibility of some of the new variants.

Mask-wearing in the US and UK has plummeted to 25% or less, while it remains at 70% or more in the rest of the Americas and most of SW Europe, South and East Asia. Australia faces a new risk: With one of the lowest infection rates to date due to its Go For Zero strategy, it’s now hugely vulnerable to the new variants because of slow vaccination rates and vaccine hesitancy.

So, as the chart above suggests, even if you’re fully vaccinated, you might want to stay clear of the Southern and Central US states, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, France and Australia, where your risk is, while still low, much higher than in most of the rest of the world.

And, as the chart below suggests, you might also want to stay clear of two additional areas whose citizens want to be vaccinated but who don’t have access to vaccines, so their people are still dying, some would say needlessly, at high rates: South America and Southern Africa.


IHME estimated actual daily CoVid-19 deaths per million people, as at July 2, 2021

These latter two areas are the ones where, if more affluent nations quickly airlifted them large shipments of vaccines, (a) the citizens would use them and (b) many lives could still be saved. Not much point in sending them to places where vaccine hesitancy is high.

What do we owe those who are unvaccinated or vaccine-hesitant due to ignorance, paranoia, social repression, or misinformation and propaganda?

Well, many more people die of diseases caused by poor diet than from infectious diseases, even during most pandemics — likely five times the number dying from CoVid-19 during this current waning period. These poor-nutrition diseases include most heart and lung diseases, respiratory, brain function, autoimmune, and digestive system diseases. Most of the deaths from these diseases, around the world, in countries rich and poor, could be prevented by simply eating a healthy diet. Due to a combination of lack of access to nutritious food, misinformation from Big Ag, and our cultivated modern addiction to deadly foods, preventing such deaths is probably systemically impossible.

Massive and growing inequality, and the amorality of capitalism, suggest that such deaths will become increasingly more common, even as we grow more and more certain of their insidious causes. And that, as with vaccines, all the education in the world, and all the effort to fight misinformation and disinformation, won’t make much difference at all.

We’re all doing our best, and this, sad to say, is the result. This is the reality of a civilization in its final stages of decline.

Posted in Collapse Watch, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

A Reckoning With Our Inhumanity

Posted on July 4, 2021 by Dave Pollard


child prisoners of the Kamloops Roman Catholic Indian Residential School, which operated 1890-1960; 215 children’s bodies have been found through ground-penetrating radar photographs on the grounds of this “school” alone; photo by Library and Archives Canada

My friend PS Pirro recently wrote a post called ‘Hiding the Dead’, cataloguing some of the stories of how our species, with official sanction and impunity, has regularly murdered, and anonymously and unceremoniously buried, its most powerless — notably indigenous peoples, “slaves”, “minorities”, police detainees, prisoners of war, inmates of “detention centres” and other institutions, the poor and sick, and women and children.

The recent discovery, using new ground-penetrating radar technology, of the unmarked remains of thousands of young children torn from their homes and forced to live in brutal conditions in religious brainwashing “residential schools” —  their bones found right beneath the “school” grounds — is just the latest example.

We are also, seemingly, taking the first, wobbly steps towards reckoning with the legacies of slavery, apartheid, caste-ism in all its variations, and genocide, and the long-ignored questions of reparations, and “truth and reconciliation” are now being asked more openly, with long-suppressed outrage.

I wrote in response to Peggy’s post:

Perhaps the big surprise to me is not that these atrocities were happening and we never knew (because we didn’t want to know, didn’t want to believe it was true), but rather that now, when everything around us is in free fall, we are for some reason suddenly willing to start to acknowledge that they happened. The interesting question to me is “Why now?”

As extreme weather events, pandemics, wildfires, infrastructure collapses, proxy wars over land and resources, water shortages, and inequality all continue to accelerate towards inevitable economic, ecological and civilizational collapse, this would seem an odd time to be reflecting upon past and continuing injustices.

But is it? Is our global civilization culture now recognizing, and sensing instinctively, that these are end times for our culture if not our species, and beginning a kind of death-bed repentance for what we have done that has led to the point we’re now at?

Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking on my part, but my sense is that this is what is happening — a reckoning with our inhumanity as our tyrannical reign draws to a close.

In The Waste Land, Eliot writes: “Shall I at least set my lands in order? | London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down”, an allusion to the biblical proclamation “Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live,” and to the song about a bridge that falls down despite all attempts to prop it up. I’ve known quite a few people (including many politicians) who have, late in life, acknowledged that while it is too late or they are now incapable of correcting their errors, they admit quite remarkably and ruefully to their folly.

And yes, it is mostly too late to undo, mitigate or make amends for these egregious behaviours. The damage is done and cannot be undone. We will be hard put to make use of what remains of our shattering civilization’s remains* to prevent extreme hardship to the 7.8 billion people completely dependent on our vulnerable global systems for their survival, let alone atone financially to those who have been oppressed in past and continue to be so today.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t reckon with it, and admit to it. We can still tell the truth, admit our culpability, and genuinely grieve for the victims (human and more-than-human) of our ill-advised, run-amok civilization — even including ourselves in that list of victims to some extent. To admit culpability is not to admit intention to do harm, regardless of what the $^%# lawyers might tell you. “We were really doing what we thought was best”, is not an excuse, but it is an explanation.

We can at least attempt to understand why we were so misguided as to believe our atrocious behaviour was “best”, and convey that to its victims. We can at least listen to what that behaviour has caused for its victims, and acknowledge its truth, and attempt to learn from it. What matters most is the listening, the acknowledgement, and the learning.

And, while short of making reparations, there are opportunities for restoration — to return some of the lands and property that were egregiously stolen to their owners and their heirs. That is the least we can do.

A death-bed repentance is not necessarily a plea for forgiveness or even understanding. It may even be a completely selfish act. But once we give up the belief that we can and must “progress” forward, and that we dare not admit the weakness of past errors for fear of retribution, we can at least come to grips with what we’ve done more fully and honestly. There is some evidence, in the ruins of past civilizations, that such a broad-culture acknowledgement of what went wrong (perhaps in the hope future generations would not repeat the errors) has been made and documented.

I would like to see our global industrial civilization culture create such an acknowledgement, a collective, full and truthful reckoning of our mostly-unintentional folly. When our feeble and useless attempts to mitigate climate, ecological and economic collapse utterly fail in the next few decades, such an acknowledgement may be all that is left of use to those our crumbled civilization leaves behind.

At the end of her post, PS introduces her word of the day: Procrustean, named after a mythical ancient Greek abuser who stretched or amputated his victims to fit his torture bed. The word means “violently making conformable to standard, producing uniformity by deforming force or mutilation.”

PS concludes brilliantly by summing up the true meaning of this word: “We made your bed. Go lie in it”.

Xenophobia, which is now the lifeblood of conservative politicians just about everywhere, means “fear of what is strange or different”. In times of great upheaval, change happens faster and becomes strange and different more quickly. There is therefore much more for xenophobes to fear.

That is what, I think, is happening now. We are not a very resilient or naturally adaptable species. We are physically suited to a very narrow range of ecosystems and ways of living, so whenever we move outside that comfort zone, our approach is to conquer, to destroy, to terraform, to make the world and its “strangers” fit what we want, and live in a fragile, prosthetic world of our own making, rather than adapting ourselves to the world and its “strangers”. We want them to lie in our Procrustean bed.

That is perhaps why, since our species left our birthplace in the trees of the tropics, we have become so violent, war-mongering, territorial and destructive, everywhere we go and in everything we do. We desperately have to make the world “fit” to our narrow definition of what is liveable, right and good.

But I don’t think that’s our true nature. I don’t believe our slow, chisel-toothed, clawless species was ever meant to stray beyond our homes in the trees, to leave behind our bonobo-like passive, easy, lethargic lifestyle, or our ancient vegan diet (there is evidence that for our first million years, the largest single component of the human diet was — figs). Our modern human behaviours are a sudden aberration.

We are, as I keep saying, not well. So yes, we are cruel, but that is a symptom of our disease, not our genes. And this disease is rapidly burning itself, and us, out. I would like to believe that we could one day acknowledge that, and leave our reckoning with our inhumanity, with at least a trace of humility, as our epitaph.

* As an aside, I am increasingly convinced that we are quickly heading towards a war between the richest 1% (and their propagandized lackeys), and the rest of us. As our crisis deepens, it is inconceivable that the current obscene level of inequality can hold. During the Great Depression, taxes on the rich and on corporations jumped to 90% to finance the various New Deals that redistributed wealth dramatically when it was needed. We’re going to see that in the next decade or so, I am convinced. It’s not going to be easy, or pleasant. And this war has already begun.

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

What We Think We Know, and Who We Think We Love

Posted on June 25, 2021 by Dave Pollard


image from piqsels, CC0

The human brain is an amazing instrument. Brains didn’t evolve to be the “command centre” of the body. Rather, they evolved as a “feature detection system“, a “lookout” for the benefit of the 30 trillion cells that make up the various organs of the body. But at some point, estimated to be about 3-4,000 years ago, human brains apparently evolved the capacity to integrate their sensemaking activities (responding to signals perceived by the senses) with their imagining activities (creating/ conceptualizing mental images). This integration, or ‘entanglement’, of brain activities was necessary for what we call ‘consciousness’, the experience of having a separate self. It was only then that the brain was able to imagine that what it imagined made sense — and especially that its idea of the self and everything else as real and separate was ‘true’.

This was the beginning of the idea of knowledge. Until then, like what we disparagingly call ‘unconscious’ species, we reacted intuitively, based on conditioned responses. Until then we were unable to abstract anything, including our sense of self as something separate from everything else. We were completely functional, and thrived, without the need for this ‘consciousness’. We didn’t ‘know’ anything. What we now think of as ‘our’ memories were, until then, simply storage devices for information that informed our instincts — fast orange thing => tiger, flee, freeze, or fight.

What’s amazing is how perfectly we functioned for a million years without the need for any of the abstractions that came along with the invention of the self — the idea of time, past, present and future, and space, here, there, subject, object, meaning, purpose, cause, effect, causality, continuity, life and death. We lived full-on in the natural world without the veil of separation and invented models of reality. We knew nothing because there was no need to know.

And now, we think we know almost everything, that we are on the cusp of a ‘grand unifying theory of everything’ that will explain everything that is and predict everything that happens. But we are caught in a loop of our own knowing. What we are coming closer to knowing is not anything to do with reality, but rather the minutiae, the details of a seemingly-flawless representation of reality that ‘we’ can then use to do anything that can be done. Thanks to our big, complex, abstracting brains, we have become so enamoured of our imagined, ever-more complicated and seemingly precise mental map of the world, that we have utterly lost sight of the territory that the map was intended to depict. We can no longer see what is.

So this imagined knowledge we are so proud of is actually an affliction, a psychosomatic misunderstanding of what our patterning brain is depicting. It’s more than just an idea, though — because it ‘makes sense’ of everything the body we presume to inhabit does, our sense of selfhood and separation is a fully embodied illusion. There is something in the modern human brain that, beginning from a very young age, muddles perception and conception and grabs on to the sudden emergence of the self as something real and separate, and, simultaneously, everything ‘else’ as real and separate, too.

Perhaps we grasp on to this illusion because the human brain, too idle and too smart for its own good, has evolved to want to know. And the appeal of the model of the separate self at the centre of its universe, and everything else in relation to that self, is just too compelling to resist. So the young child builds its whole epistemology, its whole ‘separate’ identity, on the false foundations of selfhood, separateness, ‘real’ time and ‘real’ space.

What we think we know is inseparable from what we believe. Why do we want to believe, and how do we ‘decide’ what we believe? We believe what we want to believe is true — what makes us feel better, safer, more secure, more reassured, what ‘fits’ with what we’ve already ‘decided’ is true, worthy of belief. We believe what other people we trust persistently and consistently tell us is true (ie what they believe). We believe what our perceptions tell us, as filtered through the sense-making of everything we’ve come to believe that our perceptions ‘tell us’, what they ‘mean’.

So our knowledge, our beliefs, are just collections of what seems to ‘fit’ with our other beliefs, which are what we have been conditioned by others, and by our seeming experiences, to believe to be true, to be what ‘really’ happened and what is ‘really’ happening now.

Juggling all this, all the time, and having to reconstruct it from nothing every morning when ‘we’ awake, is exhausting, so soon enough we want to be reassured what we believe is true, and become less and less inclined to question what we (want to) believe we know to be true. What we think is true, what we think we know, what we believe, and what we want to believe, are one and the same. And collectively these things we want to believe constitute our ‘story of me’. And, as it’s all constructed on a map, a representation of reality, and not on the territory (the ‘real’ reality), the ‘story of me’ is a complete fiction.

No wonder so much of our life is spent looking for reassurance — in relationships, online, in our reading of the so-called ‘news’. This threadbare story is constantly coming apart at the seams, and there is something deep inside each of us that knows something is terribly wrong, something is missing, this story doesn’t quite hang together right.

So we believe there are things we must do to be a ‘good’ person, to make ‘the story of me’ a better story. We believe we have some control over our destiny, and pretty much full control over what we do or don’t do. We believe we are responsible for our behaviours, and so are others, and we judge ourselves and others accordingly. We believe in good and evil, and are often willing to fight and die for what we believe. We believe in progress — that not only is time real, but it is advancing toward a time that will inevitably be better, if not for us and our friends and loved ones, then for our descendants and theirs.

It’s not surprising that we believe all this — it’s the only way we’ve found of making sense of everything, since the moment the idea of our selfhood and separation occurred to us. These beliefs constitute us and help us cope with challenges. But they’re all a story, and ‘we’ are hopelessly caught up in it.

And the story isn’t just our separateness. It’s everything we believe. The story of evolution and of humans emerging with a sense of self and separation is just another story, an appearance. There is no time, no continuity, and no causality that would enable the story of evolution to be true.

And the story of creatures, human and more-than-human, being conditioned to do what they do is also just a story, an appearance, a trying to make sense of what does not make sense (or have to make sense). There is no time or causality in which conditioning can occur. Everything we know and believe to be true is a story, make-believe, unreal, impossible, fiction, made up from nothing. A series of dots and shadows close enough together and in an appropriate order for a pattern-making brain to say: Aha! I see what’s happening! When we do not. Cannot.

And then it gets even more preposterous. We think we know, believe, want to believe, that we know our selves, and other people. When we, our selves, are just inventions of the brain, nothing more than the made-up-as-we-go-along ‘story of me’. The characters whose bodies we presume to inhabit will do what they will do, and the illusory ‘we’ will have no say in it, other than to rationalize what was done as ‘our’ decision and then pass judgement on its wisdom. This is insane behaviour, an earnest meaning-making of fantasies, dreams and hallucinations, but it’s all ‘we’ can do.

And it’s not even ‘us’ doing this rationalization. It’s an autonomous flinching of the brain and body, random thoughts and feelings, that ‘we’, the invention of that brain and body, ludicrously take ownership of.

Why do we think we know ourselves? Probably because of an apparent lifetime of experience apparently rationalizing and trying to make sense of the pattern of the character’s apparent actions. To admit we don’t know ourselves is the ultimate confession of failure, of lack of will, of lack of self-control, of dangerous ignorance. We want to believe we know ourselves because we are afraid to admit (mostly to ourselves) that we know nothing. What are we there for, if not to know, and to act sensibly on that knowledge? What is the ‘story of me’ if we know nothing of ourselves?

And of course we then extend that self-knowledge to the pretension that we know others as well — their motivations, their feelings, their beliefs, their ‘story’. As bad as this is in our judgements of public figures, it’s even more fanciful, and more dangerous, when we presume to know those we love.

Talk to people whose marriages have broken up after decades and it’s pretty clear we don’t and can’t know the first thing about anyone else. We fall in love with, and love, who we want to believe another person is. Our ‘story of them’ is even more fictional than our ‘story of us’. We want to believe we know them for the same reason we want to believe our selves — it would be an admission of inattentiveness, of insensitivity, of laziness and narcissism to admit that we really know nothing about someone we feel we love. And if we don’t know them, that suggests they don’t know us, which makes us feel precarious, vulnerable, foolish.

That’s not to take anything away from falling in love. It’s probably as close as most of us get to briefly overcoming our obsession with our selves, and it’s as awesome as it is terrifying. But it’s chemical, not divine — another (apparent) evolutionary trick to get us together to procreate and keep us together to nurture. We know the ones we love even less than we know our selves. And we don’t know our selves at all.

And then there are all the other treacherous stories we tell ourselves — about what might be in the (non-existent) future, and about what was, or might have been, in the (non-existent) past. These are the worst fictions of all, filling us with absurd dread, hope, grief, shame, regret, nostalgia and rage that never ceases, for no reason. The worst symptoms of the disease of self and separation.

Why do we make up stories of what never was, or what might have been? The love that might have bloomed. Or what might have happened “if only”. All those other stories that so fill us with paralyzing and intoxicating emotions. We make them up, perhaps, because they’re no more real, no less fiction, than the ‘story of me’ we are constantly attempting to cobble together and steer. We are story-tellers, all, especially the stories we tell our selves.

There is, as I’m sure you’re tired of hearing me say, no cure or treatment for this affliction. Ironically, my main reason (I think, or I want to believe) for harping on this useless and frustrating possibility is that I think it’s better to know than to continue to believe a lie. ‘I’ can’t know that there’s no ‘me’, no ‘you’, no time or space or causality or death or purpose or meaning. But there’s something inside that went off when I first heard this message, this possibility. It was like being let in on a huge cosmic joke that is so profound it can’t really be understood. But still, it resonates.

And I have no choice but to think about it aloud on these pages and wonder if this is the ultimate ‘knowing’ — that there is nothing to know, and no one to know it.

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

Links of the Month: June 2021

Posted on June 20, 2021 by Dave Pollard


A very early cartoon from Poorly Drawn Lines

Consistent with my rewrite of my latest CoVid-19 article, I’m going to try to make my LOTM write-ups more factual and less editorial, or at least less judgemental. I’m also merging the CoVid-19 Corner back into the Politics and Economics As Usual section, and discontinuing the Radical Non-Duality section, since I’m sure you hear more than enough from me on that topic in my other posts.

COLLAPSE WATCH


global emissions data per David Hughes from a new report for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, published also in the Tyee and Resilience in an article by Andrew Nikiforuk ; the dotted black line shows what “net zero by 2050” would entail

“Net Zero” is unattainable: Andrew Nikiforuk explains why the idea of achieving “net zero” emissions by 2050 (needed to reduce global warming to 2ºC) is just propaganda, achievable neither politically nor technologically. Any talk of averting runaway climate change now, he explains, is just wishful thinking. The International Energy Agency agrees with the data but they still believe: “The world needs to pivot from getting 80 per cent of its total energy supply from fossil fuels in 2021 to getting just 20 per cent from fossil fuels by 2050. That means there needs to be no new investment or expansion in fossil fuels, and companies need to focus completely on how to reduce emissions from existing projects.” I hope “the world” is listening.

Expedition says “tipping point” is now: A consortium of 300 scientists studying arctic melting said it may well be too late to prevent runaway climate change, no matter what we do, even if the tech miracles that Andrew discusses and the “world pivot” the IEA says is needed were to come about. A spokesman said: “The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far… And one can essentially ask if we haven’t already stepped on this mine and already set off the beginning of the explosion.”  That’s scientist-speak for “we’re fucked, but please don’t fire me for saying so.”

LIVING BETTER


Image: Barney with his green life jacket, from the following Tiny Love Story in the NYT (thanks to Larry Sheehy for the link):

The Last Biscuit: “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.” — Shuly Xóchitl Cawood  (You can read how she crafted this story here.)

Spain pilots 4-day workweek: A plan to subsidize businesses making the shift ushers in the possibility this could become a national and global trend. Thanks to Tree Bressen for the link.

Canadian English, eh?: Katherine Barber, the editor of the Oxford Canadian English dictionary and champion of Canadian terms and spellings, has just died. The book is discontinued, but it’s still available to view online.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


cartoon by Greg Perry in the Toronto Star

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Propaganda: Short takes:

CoVid-19: Short takes:

Inequality and Caste-ism: Short takes:

FUN AND INSPIRATION


from the Not Another Science Cat FB group

Why do cats love boxes?: A scholarly study, sort of.

Beaverton headlines of the month:

    • Ottawa Senators fans allege years of false imprisonment with Eugene Melnyk (ask a hockey fan to explain if you don’t get this)
    • Heroic cat bravely saves owner from being in bathroom alone
    • Health Canada research suggests side effects from trying to use Ontario’s vaccine booking system are worse than side effects of the vaccine

These guys can dance: A new bird species struts its stuff in mind-blowing fashion.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


The prison of the self: another great cartoon by Michael Leunig

From PS Pirro:

Padlock

I found the keys in the junk drawer
along with the post-its and bottle caps
and other reminders of days I must have
lived through while I waited for the world
to change, knowing it could not, that it
could only always be what it is, the sum
of all its parts, trees and beetles and milkweed
and kissing bugs, the people who loved,
the people who would never love, the train
I rode to the end of the tracks, the dog I met
there who followed me home, we shared a
package of hot dogs from the quickmart
as I rummaged through the lost voices
and empty refrains of too many seasons
spent in the same place, the lock on the shed
is rusted now but perhaps one of these keys
will fit and the tumbler will turn and the
shank will lift and the door will swing open,
perhaps it’s not too late to step inside, find
what was lost, all those ways I meant to be.

From Euan Semple:

Fitting In

We are all pretending to be something we’re not.
We fit in to our parents’ expectations when we’re toddlers.
We fit in to the norms of our peers at school, or conform to the role of our idealised heroic loner.
We fit in to the roles expected of us as adults – husband, parent, dependable worker, boss.

But none of this is who we are.

The real us is the bit that knows that this process of inculturation is happening, that watches it taking over our lives, that regrets the pretence.

From me, in a letter to John Whiting:

Zeynep Tüfekçi has explained that the problem with social media is that the original customers (the users) have essentially become the product, and the vendors (corporations that buy ads and user data) have become the actual customers. So for users to complain about Facebook’s service is akin to McDonald’s hamburgers complaining to the patty-flippers about how they’re being served to the public. “Just shut up and get in the bun.”

From Chris Corrigan: “The difference between critical thinkers and conspiracy theorists is that critical thinkers look for evidence to disprove their beliefs and conspiracy theorists look for evidence to confirm their beliefs”.

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

Seventy

Posted on June 18, 2021 by Dave Pollard

Old friends | Sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes | On the high shoes | Of the old friends

Old friends | Winter companions the old men
Lost in their overcoats | Waiting for the sunset
The sounds of the city | Sifting through trees
Settle like dust | On the shoulders | Of the old friends

Can you imagine us | Years from today | Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange | To be seventy

— Paul Simon

On Tuesday I turn 70. The actuaries say that, thanks to my good diet and exercise program, and the fact my life is relatively low-stress, I have about 17 years left. Sounds about right.

Even before I discovered radical non-duality, I had no fear of dying. It’s pain and suffering I’m afraid of, and the ravages of Alzheimer’s, which runs in the family, and which the Trudeau government won’t let me use as a reason for medically assisted death when that time comes. The thing I worry most about is how those I leave behind will cope without me. They’re certain to take my death far harder than I will.

As I wrote recently, I am more equanimous than I used to be, though still annoyingly inattentive, unobservant, and insensitive, and a frustratingly slow learner. My sense is that we don’t notice the changes we go through, they happen so gradually, so we actually become much more different over time than we realize.

I wrote: “Perhaps I am less my self than I thought.” In radical non-duality, that statement is tautologically false, but somehow it seems not a bad description of where I’ve come to. I have long been conditioned to overreact emotionally to unpleasant surprises and hence to handle stress badly, but somehow being aware of that propensity takes away some of its former intensity and dysfunction.

The colour photo in my right sidebar, a Zoom selfie from a couple of months ago, seems to depict me better than any other portrait over these 70 years. Though the fact that it’s flattering may bias my thinking; I have always been terribly vain.

So I have no advice for anyone on how to live. Worse than that, Everything I have learned suggests that ‘we’ have absolutely no say over what these conditioned bodies we presume to occupy will or won’t actually do. Even worse than that, there is actually no ‘we’ to do or not do anything. The idea of a separate self, the idea of separate things that ‘really’ exist in ‘real’ space and time, the idea that there is birth, life or death as a ‘real’ event, the ideas of free will and control and meaning and purpose and agency and continuity — all of these ideas are just mental constructs, the desperate human sense-making brain doing what it does, trying to extract meaning from what has absolutely no meaning.

And even worse than that, all of these invented ideas are wrong, a complete psychosomatic misunderstanding of the nature of reality, a complete misperception and misconception of what the apparent waves and particles and chemicals that seem to reach the senses of the body and which our brains translate into meaning, actually represent.

In short, we live in a delusional, hallucinated reality that our senses invented, and now believe that created reality to be absolutely and exclusively the true reality.

It’s a really neat trick our brains have played on us, all in the hoped-for interest of greater evolutionary adaptation and fitness — to create this artificial representation of reality, invent ‘dimensions’ of space and time in which to place everything that is sensed, as ‘objects’, and then, the coup de grace, to create the concept of a ‘self’, a homunculus seated inside this idea of a separate body, as the absolute centre of all these objects — as the one and only ‘subject’.

Why do we believe this is all real, so fervently, if it is not? Because the mental model that is the ‘self’ is in a closed loop of its own making. It’s the only reality ‘we’ know, or can know. The ‘natural reality’ that is seen in infancy is very quickly forgotten, much like everything else from that fuzzy time when nothing ‘made sense’. And all the other afflicted selves we meet furiously reinforce the validity of this shared delusion, since it’s the only reality they can know, too.

Science can now show compellingly that not only is there no time, no space, no self, etc but that having a self is completely unnecessary to the functioning of the human and has no effect whatsoever on what the human, who you think of as you, apparently actually does.

Wild creatures, not afflicted with this disease of large abstracting brains, have evolved to do what they do, brilliantly, with the same sensory inputs we have, and probably the same sensations of pain, ecstasy etc but without the use or need for a conceptualized separate self. They ‘make sense’ of what is apparently happening, and their conditioning takes care of the rest, perfectly well, instinctively, without any need for the abstractions of self and separation. That is why their lives, except in brief moments of fight/flight/flee stress, are characterized by equanimity and enthusiasm, not the chronic dread, anxiety, shame, guilt, rage, grief and hopelessness that our sad species ‘lives’ with.

My sense is that some people ‘recover’ from the disease of the self — the self just vanishes without reason and its absence is never noticed. Perhaps the entrenched ‘default’ pathways of the brain that created and reinforced the sense of self are suddenly disrupted. I think for most of us there are ‘glimpses’ when the self is simply not present, but when the self later ‘returns’ it is unable to make sense of them and so disregards them. And I suspect that at the moment of death — which is, after all, not a moment since there is no time and no death — this is suddenly, obviously seen, though not by the self.

So my illusory life of 70 years has, like everything else, no meaning, no purpose, no trajectory. Nothing matters. I can’t of course ‘know’ this — my self gets in the way. Everything matters to it. But as soon as I heard this message, which conformed to so many of my other subversive beliefs, experiences, and learnings, there was a resonance, a quiet unprovable certainty that this is what is really, already, timelessly, but ‘only’ apparently happening.

Perhaps it’s convenient, this utterly equanimous sense of what is — contrary to what we’ve all always believed — the truth, arriving at a time when my lifetime of struggle is nearing an end and can be seen as meaningless and unnecessary. It’s not like I had, or have, any choice.

So maybe, in the course of the next 17 years or so, we’ll find ourselves, you and I, sitting, like bookends, at the ends of the same park bench. If so, I will greet you but countenance no talk of health or politics or spirituality. I will be watching the birds, learning from them. They know what is going on. They are under no illusion.

How terribly strange.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

CoVid-19: Light at the End of the Tunnel

Posted on June 17, 2021 by Dave Pollard

Note: Michael Dowd’s comment on the original version of this article has prompted me to “mark up” the article to remove judgements and stick to what we know. I’ve tried to do that, below, with the additions/changes noted in a separate colour and the deletions noted by strikeouts. Really interesting exercise! Thanks Michael!


U of Washington’s IHME institute’s estimated actual CoVid-19 death toll and infection numbers by jurisdiction. Estimated deaths are 150-250% higher than “reported” numbers, and estimated infections are 2-15x “reported” case numbers.

In North America at least, it would seem that we’ve vaccinated just enough people just fast enough to keep ahead of the variants, and the consensus is that future infections and deaths here will be sufficiently low to allow us to reopen just about everything this summer.

That may not be possible happen in much of the world, though it seems likely that, due to most unvaccinated countries’ citizens’ much stronger immune systems, and their bodies’ experienced capacity fighting off viral infections, most of the damage even in those countries has now been done.

The carnage is enormous: ghastly, and that’s only made worse by the fact it was entirely preventable, and entirely mitigatable even once the pandemic hit. Ten million deaths worldwide, a million Americans, dying often horrible deaths. And the long-term ravages of the disease on the bodies of those infected we can’t yet even guess at.

As the chart at left above shows, one out of every 300 Americans died from the disease, and one out of 600 of the world’s people will die before it’s over. Average life expectancy for all citizens dropped by over a year in the US and half a year in Canada. The death rate in much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia was half again as high as even the horrific US rate.

Had we never pursued followed the advice of virologists and epidemiologists and banned factory farming, exotic species harvesting, and invasion of the world’s last wilderness areas, we wouldn’t be worrying about pandemics at all: As recently as 50 years ago, before these activities became widespread abhorrent behaviours exploded and became global, many health experts were predicting the end of deaths from infectious disease. But over the past 30 years pandemics have spiked and are expected to continue to accelerate. We are doing nothing to prevent The next one, which may be worse — perhaps even an order of magnitude more deadly make this one look like an easy dress rehearsal.

And pursuing a Once the pandemic was declared, had we all followed the advice of public health experts with a “go for zero” policy when the next pandemic hits instead of the ad hoc approaches most countries used with CoVid-19, could reduce fatalities by an order of magnitude. , as Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and some other countries did, the total death toll would have been a small fraction, perhaps less than 10%, of the number that have died from this horrible plague. Instead, we let ignorant, self-interested politicians waffle back and forth on policies for fighting the pandemic, opening and partly closing and then opening again.

As the chart above right shows, as a result of our doddering about 40% of Americans got the disease, and while many were asymptomatic, that means that more Americans developed their immunity by contracting the disease (with its unknown future damage to their bodies) than got their immunity from vaccination. The US was more than half-way to herd immunity before the vaccines that might have saved so many lives arrived. So a million Americans died, for no reason.


IHME estimated cumulative death tolls per 100,000 people to date.  Some of the ‘orange’ areas have lost nearly 1% of their entire population and over 10% of their senior population to the pandemic.

The overall global data looks similar — due to unavailability of vaccines in struggling nations, the global infection rate, currently 28%, is likely to hit 40% as well. Fortunately for many of those countries, which have little or no hospital capacity to deal with the disease, their infection fatality rate (IFR) looks to be much lower than it has been in the Americas and Europe.

In Canada, only about 11% of the population were infected and the fatality rate here (42,000 CoVid-19 deaths) was only 1/3 of the American rate, so thanks to a bit more diligence on our part, we saved tens of thousands of lives, but now we are depending much more on vaccination for protection; still, only 60% of Canadians have received their first dose, and only 10% their second dose, so we’re not out of the woods yet. And the needless death of 42,000 Canadians is nothing to brag about.

So we could have prevented this, and future pandemics. And we could have nipped them in the bud once we knew they were in circulation. But we didn’t. And we won’t next time.

Not much else to say. Maybe, hopefully, we’ve learned something. We’ll see.

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

Never Felt Safe

Posted on June 16, 2021 by Dave Pollard

I‘ve been simultaneously reading two books of essays, largely autobiographical, whose authors’ courage at admitting the truth about themselves is disarming, even startling. Melissa Faliveno’s Tomboyland describes growing up in rural Wisconsin and evolving as a queer feminist; here are a few excerpts from this amazing writer (photo above from her website):

I tell her I think this is a cultural thing, a midwestern thing. And maybe what I mean is it’s a class thing. It’s something I think about often, having grown up in a small town — where you do your best to hide your pain, where if you let it go a whole town will know. Talking about your problems I think is something reserved for the upper classes, the educated classes, for families in which a life of the mind is more important than a life of work, and of the body, and of the land. Where my friend Sue comes from, and where I come from — generations of farm families with little money and many mouths to feed — we don’t have time for the kind of trouble that dwells in the brains or heart. We learn this from the stories of our forbears, who were more concerned with the kind of trouble a drought could bring, or whether the crops would yield. We don’t have the tools — the language, the education, the resources — to say some things aloud, to deal in the daylight with our problems. So we keep them to ourselves, and we carry them with us.

In a small midwestern town, darkness gets buried like a secret. I came from a place that kept silence like a curse, a people who stuck to their silence like work. In a place where the land is both fertile and hard, lush and alive then brutally cold — a land we work with our hands until they’re hard, a land that decides our fate no matter the toil — we are silent about our hopes. We are silent about our fears. We are silent about money, unless we think someone has too much. We are silent, most of all, about our bodies, our desires and our pain. In my family, we sat in our silence; we steeped and stewed in it; we kept it packed inside.

•••

“It seems like our job is to figure out what to do with our grief,” my friend Jules says. “Like, do you just drag it behind you? Do you figure out a different way to relate to it? Do you use it to fuel something? Do you make it your own?” No one I ever knew had used the word grief like Jules did. I’d only ever heard the word within the context of death. Jules, instead, talked about grief as if it was just a part of life, that it was something we carried.

“How do I carry it with me?” she says. “Because you can’t cut it off and you can’t leave it behind. I think that might actually become a defining feature of a person — how you relate to your grief and what you do with it. I think we need to expand the definitions of grief. Sometimes you get angry, and sometimes you get sad, and sometimes you profoundly mourn something. And I wish it was more a conversation in general, so it would be seen as a normal part of living, as opposed to the way you’re broken. The reasons I didn’t want kids were all selfish. I didn’t want to watch their hearts break, and I didn’t want to watch them struggle, and I didn’t want my heart to be broken by watching them go through the same things I went through, or things I don’t even know about now — I didn’t want to feel the pain… My mother had such a picture in her mind of what a good mom was, and she tried to do it, but she really didn’t have the ability because no one fucking does.”

•••

“Is there anywhere you feel you can be your full self?” I ask Jules.

“No! Never! I don’t think I’ve ever been my full self anywhere. I don’t even think that’s a thing.”

We laugh, because we understand that on some level the idea of a whole self seems like the dream of a much younger person, who has yet to make the hardest decisions — the kind that thrust a person down one path instead of another; the kind that are immutable. We laugh because we both know now it’s not possible. But as we part ways that night, and I watch the blinking tail-light of her bike disappear into the darkness, I grieve the person who used to think it was.

Vlogbrother John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of transcriptions of his podcast, which mixes astonishing bits of historical and scientific research with brilliant quotes you’ve never heard, jaw-dropping insights into human nature,  and raw admissions of his struggles to cope with everything from being bullied and beaten up in childhood in Orlando, to his OCD, which has driven him close to the point of madness throughout the current pandemic.

In one essay John (photo above from his website) quotes Amy Krouse Rosenthal‘s words of wisdom: Pay attention to what you pay attention to, and then he adds:

Marvelling at the perfection of [a dying leaf his son had shared with him] I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply; our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

In another essay he wonders what moths, irresistibly drawn to all forms of human-made lights, will do when our species has gone: Will they be drawn to the moon? In another, he reveals the astonishing fact that practically all the penicillin ever dispensed descends from the mold on a single cantaloupe, found by accident by bacteriologist Mary Hunt in a grocery store in Peoria in 1942 during the search for sources for what was then a rare antibiotic.

Listen to his podcast on Wonder and Sunsets and it will make you cry with knowing how broken and amazing our sad species is. You can feel the pain he carries in his gentle, fragile, yet reassuring voice.

I love these two books, but there are moments in them I cannot endure — they are simply overwhelming in their self-awareness and their brutal honesty about their narrators, and the human condition.

Over the last decade, with a lot of help, I have finally started to pick away at all the gunk that has been so layered over who I think I am to the point I became unrecognizable, even to me. The insufferable arrogance that I once displayed, largely as a defence mechanism of course, has yielded at least a bit to an awareness that my whole life, and the bulk of the decisions I have made, to do, and not do, things, has been driven almost entirely by fear.

In 2016 I tried to set aside all the self-serving delusional nonsense in my bios and identify the true “story of me”:

My whole life I have been bewildered, unable to really make sense of anything, just muddling my way through, and I have often been quite fearful and socially anxious as a result. I have put great effort into many things but have nothing much to show for it. I’ve had some interesting insights, but nothing that’s of much practical use to anyone. I have been generous, but only when I could easily afford to be. I’ve been very lucky. I have become more joyful and fun-loving, but more pessimistic, more curious, and more skeptical about everything, even whether we as separate ‘selves’ actually exist.

Lost, scared and bewildered, that’s me. Maybe a lot of other people, too, but who am I to say?

And as a result I am just unable to open myself to, and really empathize with, the enormous suffering, sorrow and anguish that dominates so much of so many people’s lives. It hurts too much. It shuts me down. I become catatonic, dysfunctional.

So now I’ve reached this perilous and awkward stage where I’m very content exploring “how the world really works” but am increasingly averse to learning any more about what it means to be a human in times of immense struggle, precarity and danger. I am, most of the time, more contented than I have ever been, less distraught. But that’s in part because I no longer share the anguish of my human colleagues over our personal and collective tragedies and unhappinesses. I can’t face them. I know I’m no use to the world broken, and if I allowed the colossal awfulness of things to affect me as it affects them, I would be forever broken. I could never heal.

That means, then, that I can’t care much about the profound suffering of others. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s that I can’t. It’s too much to bear. It’s so much easier and more tempting to contemplate, and to believe, that the self, and all suffering, is just the affliction of the brain’s misunderstanding of, and disconnection from, what’s really happening, which is actually utterly ‘impersonal’.

All my life I have believed that life should not be so hard and so terrible as it seems to be for the human species. All my life, I have never felt safe. We are not well, I have come to believe, none of us in this mad global cancerous ‘civilized’ human culture, and our severe illness is having a catastrophic effect on our world and on each other.

In her book, Melissa writes: “To live well is to speak one’s truth — even if that truth is just a question.”

So I guess my question is: What’s wrong with us? How and why did we get this way? Why, when wild creatures live lives filled almost entirely with moments of equanimity and moments of enthusiasm, are human lives so filled with dread, anxiety, violence, misery, destruction, anger, shame, and grief — and yet we don’t sensibly just remove ourselves from Gaia’s gene pool and end the suffering. Instead, we invent after-lives that will ‘redeem’ our lifelong unhappiness and misery, we make it illegal to end our own lives peacefully, and we bring yet more human babies into the world with the insane belief that it will somehow be better for them!

And we convince ourselves that there’s nothing wrong with how we live, and that things will inexorably get better, when all the evidence shows the opposite to be true.

What’s wrong with us? I care, but I can’t care. I know, I sense, I remember the anguish and dread and hopelessness and emptiness and self-loathing and gnawing terror that I suspect all but the most inured, psychopathic humans feel much or most of their lives. I’m sorry. I know I can’t fix it, but it’s much worse than that: There’s nothing to fix. That’s not to deny the feelings, and the damage that they do to us. It’s to say we are all deluded about what’s really going on, starting with the belief that we’re apart and separate and have control over what these seeming bodies we feel ourselves inside do, and don’t do.

When I’ve met with people suffering from dementia, the nurses told me not to argue with them, and not to ‘agree’ with their ravings either, but just be present with them and acknowledge that what they see, hear, and fear, is completely real for them, though it “obviously” is not real. I wonder whether that’s exactly what might be called for in all our dealings with all our fellow humans, all of us coping with the ghastly affliction of having and being an endlessly-suffering, tormented, unsatisfiable self.

There is no cure for this affliction, though *%#$ knows we try enough substances to try to medicate ourselves to endure the pain another day. And we all have it, this affliction, save a handful who have no selves but mostly don’t know what they’re missing, and who function just fine without them.

I remember the childlike wonder, long before wonder became something manufactured by corporations and packaged in theme parks. When there are glimpses here, I remember. Suddenly it’s obvious, that this ubiquitous human madness, this ghastly psychosomatic misunderstanding of what the brain has invented, is covering up the stunning, simple wonder of everything being already everything, weightless, without importance. Nothing needed, nothing that must be done.

But then I am back, forgetting, making conceptual nonsense from perceptual sensations. Judging, assigning meaning, taking things personally. Getting angry, ashamed, terrified. Lost, scared and bewildered again. It helps a bit to know it’s all a hallucination, a misunderstanding. But it doesn’t change anything. Just as our lungs cannot decide to stop breathing, I can never let go.

I ache with Melissa’s and John’s struggles and sorrows, and cheer for their accomplishments, their small victories, their moments of sheer joy. But I recognize their lives are, like their books, just stories, fictions, like all our lives are. Their stories are smart, compelling, insightful, and articulate. I feel like I know them, like I really would like to know them in the time I have left to know anything.

But they are still just stories. If only we could get past our stories, lose our selves and just be! But of course, that’s just a story too.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Switching from Feedburner to Follow.It

Posted on June 15, 2021 by Dave Pollard

Google is abandoning its free RSS-to-email service Feedburner (that I’ve used for a decade) in two weeks.

My brother Alan (thank you!) has arranged to transition my blog’s subscription service to Follow.It and that transition starts today.

If you’re an email subscriber to my blog posts, you may receive two copies of my blog articles for a couple of days. Sorry for the hassle, but please don’t unsubscribe — I will turn off the old Feedburner service very soon. If you don’t want to continue to receive emails with my new articles, it’s easy enough to unsubscribe from Follow.It . Hopefully the change will be, as they say, relatively seamless.

Here’s a link to follow.it in case you’d like to personalize the way you receive How to Save the World articles by email through their service.

I also apologize for the ads at the bottom of Follow.it emails, which I hope to eliminate by upgrading to their premium service.

Fingers crossed and thanks for subscribing!

 

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 4 Comments

Bowen Birds

Posted on June 12, 2021 by Dave Pollard

A few recent photos I’ve taken on Bowen: Great blue herons, crows, mergansers and geese. The 6th photo was a battle royal between a crow and a really pissed off crab; the crow won. The final photo is of course not a bird, just a little guy resting yesterday in our back yard.

If you want to see more Bowen Birds, here’s my whole collection.

Posted in Creative Works | Comments Off on Bowen Birds