Sources of Conflict

The sources of conflict in the world.  Recent events in American public/political life inexorably bring to bear the United States’ relationship with the Great Bear, Russia.  Woe to the American politicians with the scent of dealing with Russia on them: Trump, Sessions, Tillerson.  Have you talked with Russia before?  Colluded with them?  Have you colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 Presidential election?

First a preface.  Basically it comes down to a state looking out for the best interests of its population and signing up to be a vassal state of the US which equals a reduction of benefits to your population.  Elites do quite well and the mass of people suffer.  Just look at Saudi Arabia and Israel.  One, Saudi Arabia, is a vassal that uses beheading as a form of capital punishment.  In the tradition of American influence abroad, a wealthy few make the deals and reap the rewards while the majority suffers – The Kingdom may provide a slight exception to this with subsidized housing and oil but this is easily countered – from a western p.o.v. – by the sad state of women’s rights in the kingdom.  On the other hand Israel, a state that receives aid and actually drives US foreign policy in the MENA.  Regardless of the different relationships between these two states and the US, we are not at war with either state.

What of Russia?  I’ll let Dave Smith speak here:

“There are interests that make a ton of money off us dominating parts of the world and Russia is a threat to that.  If there is someone in the Middle East who doesn’t want to trade oil in dollars, is there is someone who is not going along with our global hegemony which is brought on by force, Russia will support them.  China will support them.  Russia and China are the only real geopolitical enemies that the US has.  The official story is we like to spread democracy or that there’s human rights violations somewhere.  But you realize pretty quickly who we do business with and who we don’t – it’s really not based on human rights violations. If you do business with us you can be a dictator, you can be a kingdom like Saudi Arabia that is just brutally oppressive.  When you look around you realize it comes down to who plays ball.  And right at the heart of it is the petro-dollar.  And all the countries that we demonize and call terrorist nations, rogue nations are threats to stability.  It has nothing to do with human rights violations.  It has nothing to do with aggression on the part of that state.  It’s the ones who don’t want to participate in this kind of US, NATO, EU run world.  If you don’t want sell you oil in dollars, if you want to move towards gold you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

Just some food for thought.  It would be nice to move past the idea that we are ideologically opposed with the rulers of whatever foreign country.  It would be nice, if painful, to acknowledge the source of conflicts among nations and recognize how we do and don’t benefit from such interactions.

The Secret Economy: thoughts on the media, politics and societal control

The idea of heightened complexity in societies before they collapse and the idea that people today mask a helplessness when facing societal fragility by a misplaced concern about politics.

So, yeah, Holly and Jasun entered some interesting waters – the idea that there is a mechanism – inside people’s psychology/psyche/minds – that can be and are exploited: if an actor (like anywhere from a movie actor to a politician, to anybody behaving anywhere, anyway, anytime) acts in a certain way it pushes buttons in said psyche of the audience which elicits known responses.  Simply state, people act in a certain way to manipulate their audience.  But the interesting part of this as it relates to politics is the idea that there are subconscious cues/reactions.

Jasun referenced organizations that studied and subsequently tried to control these cues/reactions.  In order to control the direction society was/is going.  Call it an advanced study of human nature.  Or politicians and various other actors do not consciously push those manipulative buttons but are personally adept at subconsciously recognizing certain reactions by altering their act in whatever way.  As Holly said, a literalization of this adaptive technology already exists where people recognize what they want to recognize in actors and the actors provide a blank enough canvas to allow for people to place their hopes and dreams and wishes upon, the actors becoming that estranged or deceased family member we want to appeal to and receive adulation from.

The Sinclair Paradox

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

How should we relate to institutions like the American Beverage Institute and the Democratic National Committee?  My going answer right now is to be critical.  Always critique.  The groups from the ABA to the DNC are aligned with the tide: of course while reinforcing the tide and serving as the creators of the tide themselves.  You can consciously accept this tide – the force of history or whatever you want to call it – which invites all the contradictions and schizophrenia that I described in my last post.  Acceptance gets you 1) a fatter pay check, 2) a split psyche, and 3) a certificate honoring your contribution to the advancement of a shitty state of affairs.  (Could this simply be any college diploma? lol.)

The other reactions are passive acceptance and the critical approach (yeah!).  Boo for passive acceptance which equals ignorance.  No thanks.  The critical approach is the way to go.  There is some nuance to my so-called critical approach.  Just as there is active and passive acceptance of the “official” state of affairs, so too is there active and passive critical approaches to dealing with this state of affairs.

See where I’m going with this?  And this invites discernment.  If there are narratives offered that critique the state of affairs and provide a plan of action – how do you decide if you should follow whichever plan of action?

If you feel the need to combat the actions of the ABA, do you go and picket their board meetings, infiltrate bottling plants in order to set alight the sinister wells that tap into hell, the toxic high fructose slurries meeting their conflagratory ending outside of the human body?  No you don’t.  The correct thing to do is be aware of agendas, be aware of the relationship between the human body and the profit-motive, be aware of alternative – perhaps more traditional – pathways to a healthy diet.  This may mean simply having knowledge of nutrition yourself.  Or it may mean writing about it, sharing what you know (and thing: me, me, me!), even making documentaries.

How you deal with these issues involves sane and healthy choices just as dealing with the substances manufactured by such corporations requires making sane and healthy choices.  And goddamit, if everyone made sane and healthy choices then these corporations and committees would be smaller and wield less power.  This is not our world though.  Not our human nature.  Alas and onward.

Our National Religion: the character of the flock

What is our National Religion?  A cornerstone: what comes first to mind is a dependence on oil that in itself instigates, perpetuates and epitomizes schizophrenia in all of us.  The person that comes to worship in this national religion is a schizophrenic and this characterization is fair for almost all the people in our country.  Our relation to oil exemplifies this for a few simple reasons.

One is our reliance on oil not just for transportation but as a feedstock for omnipresent plastics.  Without it we would not have mega farms, nor would we have suburbs and supermarkets.  Yet, we live our lives unthinking of the miraculousness of this fuel source.  Indeed, we flippantly posit that some renewable alternative is either at hand or will be arriving on our doorsteps tomorrow.  Oil mediates most aspects of modern life yet most discussions of societal status quo and change leave it out.

The other big reason our relation to oil contributes to and exemplifies our schizophrenia is the role this vital substance plays in global affairs.  We may live our lives as though we – individual Americans – are innocent actors on the world stage: you see where this is going don’t you?  I know some people may minimize the effect oil has on our foreign policy but let’s face it, no strategic resources in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) then no US involvement: probably not even attempts to foster democracy (lol!).  Unawareness of this, at its worst perhaps, yields statements like “They hate us for our freedoms”.  Actually an even more severe utterance wrought by unawareness is “We need to take out ISIS to defend American freedoms”.  Lack of awareness of the concept of blowback is a hallmark of our schizophrenic state, where in one mind we accept or ignore any actions that destroy countries and create refugees, while in another mind we declare the need to accept these refugees into our western countries.  If the creation of refugees was part of the acceptance of refugees narrative then that might make sense, but as it stands it is as though the refugees appear from some apolitical nowhere place, a people to unselfishly embrace who have no connection to any US (or our allies) designs in MENA.

So, a national religion that is all too human.  A national religion subject to the whims and limits of people’s evolved capabilities of awareness.  A national religion that isn’t going away and that will continue to serve as a respectable creed for a people who want to have their cake and eat it too.