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let the unknowable be as it is,
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on collective narcissism

excerpt follows

Robert Scheer – “I’m half Jewish and half German” – points out that high culture didn’t stop Germany from sliding into fascism:

… they still had the best music, and they had the best science, and they had all of this in Germany. And it didn’t save them at all, it didn’t help them at all. And I have always found that very depressing when I apply it to the United States. 

CH: Well, because I think that the problem was that—I mean, just as under Stalinism, there was a war against culture, replaced with faux culture. You know, the whole attack on Jewish science was part of Nazism and Stalinism. So you’re right, except that it shows how swiftly a society that reaches those cultural heights can be reoriented towards barbarism. And I would argue that that is one of the fundamental dangers in the United States, is the war we’ve made on our own culture. The Nazis made, had a huge movie industry, and they didn’t make—they made some horrible propaganda films. But most of it was fluff, was garbage, was Hollywood-type entertainment. And you know, mindless entertainment; spectacle. Spectacle—fascists do spectacle very well. Stalin did spectacle very well. And that creates a kind of cultural milieu where people lose the capacity to think critically and self-reflect, which is what authentic culture is about; that capacity to get you to look within yourself, look within your society. And it’s replaced with this collective narcissism, which has been on display at this convention. And that’s very dangerous. And we’ve seen Trump ride that collective narcissism, and exploit it through right-wing populism, and do what proto-fascist movements always do, which is direct a legitimate rage and a cultural narcissism towards the vulnerable. Undocumented workers, Muslims, homosexuals, you know, on and on and on. So the destruction of culture is a key component—actually, my first book, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” and the wars that I covered, noted that a culture that goes to war destroys its own culture before it destroys the culture of the enemy.

RS: But basic to that manipulative concept, obscuring your own responsibility—the denial of, say, Jesus, who may not have existed but it was attributed to him in Luke, of the Good Samaritan—trying to understand the other, and that the other also has a soul, and so forth. Obliterating that, making people throwaway people, whether they’re the people you deal with in jail, or the people we’re bombing. As the Democratic convention is going on, a Democratic president is randomly killing people with drones and what have you. And you even had Madeleine Albright get up there to a standing ovation—I was stunned—and she’s a woman who at one point defended the bombing, starvation, actually, in Iraq, and you know, this is the price you pay. And I was thinking about that; essential to this whole narrative is that idea that Reagan pushed—he wasn’t the first, but the Germans had it too—that you are the city on the hill. You are the place that God is watching.

CH: Right. Well, that’s what the collective narcissism is about. And with collective narcissism, means you externalize evil. So every moralist—I mean, having covered war, I know how thin that line is between victim and victimizer. I know how easily people can be seduced into carrying out atrocity; I’ve seen it in every war I’ve covered. And I think the best break against that is understanding those dark forces within all of us, and the capacity we all have for evil. That’s what makes Primo Levi such a great writer about the Holocaust. And so collective narcissism essentially says we—it creates a binary world, as you correctly point out, where other human beings embody evil, and when we eradicate them, we have eradicated evil. And that, of course, propels a society into committing atrocious acts of evil in the name of good. And that’s what the Nazis did, and I would argue that’s what we do in the Middle East; that’s what we do in this vast system of mass incarceration; that’s what we do in our internal colonies; that’s what we do to our poor.

RS: And that’s what we do in our foreign policy. And there is a common theme that we saw at both the Republican and Democratic conventions. And it was surprising to me how much they had in common in this respect: that we are the aggrieved. It’s like the people in Germany after World War I, who became convinced that they had been victimized by the rest of the world. Right, whether it was Jewish bankers in New York, or it was the French, or the Allies, or what have you. And it was interesting, we’re recording this at the point when Barack Obama’s going to speak at the convention tonight. But last night, listening to the speeches, they had you know, first responders; 9/11 was a big theme, because after all, Hillary Clinton, senator from New York, and she had the credentials of having been around during 9/11 and so forth. And it was all about, you know, this—first of all, sort of a continuation of the idea that no other people in the world have ever been attacked in this way. Right? You know, we are a nation—

CH: Well, it’s the—you know, all of these societies that descend into this, I think what you correctly called barbarism, sanctify their own victimhood. This is what’s killed Israel. And you sanctify your—once you sanctify your victimhood, it’s beyond understanding. And it gives you a license, or you believe it gives you a license, to do anything

[full audio and transcript]

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Garrison Keillor: Prophet

Garrison Keillor:

I recall when I was a little boy going to the volunteer fire department Fourth of July picnic. My family doesn’t remember this at all, but they have very poor memories.

…

I got the beans on my plate and I had the bun and I had just put the wiener in the bun and I was just squeezing the ketchup and the air turned white. And it was snowing.

Snow was falling and everybody was amazed and then somebody said, “Oh no”, they said, “it’s fluff from the cottonwood trees.  It’s just seeds coming down from the cottonwood trees.”

And so that was that. But then I looked down at my plate and there was nothing there. Now cottonwood fluff does not melt. Seeds don’t just disappear. It was snow on the Fourth of July. A snow flurry hit Lake Wobegon on the Fourth of July when I was a boy, but if you talk to anybody, including my family, who was at the Volunteer Fire Department Bean Feed that day in 1951 on the Fourth of July, they will tell you that was fluff from the cottonwood trees that came down. I was the only one who knew the truth. A terrible responsibility for a child and one more reason to leave town, you know. There were too many things that I was the only one that knew them.

…

Stunning thought, but when God sends snow down on the Fourth of July, that indicates to me that he is talking to us in a loud voice, and apparently I was the only one who saw this and therefore the only one who might have a hunch what God was trying to tell us. But I turned down the privilege. Thank you very much, no thank you. To be a prophet was too much for me then and it’s too much for me now. To be a prophet is hard work anytime and anyplace, but you never want to do it in a town of less than 2,000 population. If you live there and if you come from there. To stand and to tell people the truth that they have been successfully avoiding is not a pleasant business in a small town.

Back in 1918 in my town, back when the streets were lined with flags and when school children sat for hours of deadly nonsense about glory and honor and how this war would be the war to end all wars, this war would usher in a New World Order. Sat and listened to this. There was a man sat on a bench outside a grocery store and turned to the man next to him and said, “I wish they’d take the flags down. I don’t think there’s any glory in this war. It’s just a bunch of politicians.” And the word got around town of this man's remarks, this slur on our country ... and people would not speak to him again for a long time.

…

You have become a scourge. You have become a prophet, and it’s time to time to hit the road, Jack. You gotta get out of this town. Well, that never happened to me and I’m not going to have it ever happen to me. That’s what God was offering me when he had the snow fall on the Fourth of July and I saw it. He was saying, “Witness to people about this. Reveal the truth of this and be a prophet.” I said, “No thank you, I don’t want it.” He said, “This will be a great service to people you love, to tell them the truth.” I said, “Well they’re not going to thank me for it. I know that for sure. People hurt prophets. They throw sharp things at them. They rip the clothes off them and they make them sit for long periods of time in uncomfortable positions on top of sharp objects that are extremely flammable. That’s what they do to prophets. I don’t want that. I don’t want any pain whatsoever. I don’t ever want to experience any pain. Minor dentistry is more than enough for me. So, no thank you. I don’t want to be a prophet and tell the truth. What can I do that’s the opposite of that?”

And so I got into this line of work: telling lies. And I’ve never regretted it, which is a terrible thing to say in front of children. To say that you’ve spent your life telling lies, but I have and I’ve had a wonderful time, and I have been very well rewarded for this, and I have been congratulated by all sorts of people, including members of the clergy. Whereas if I had been prophet and told the truth, I would be broke and I would be unhappy myself and I would be despised and I would be condemned from most pulpits in the country. No thanks, I don’t really care for that.

…

No, it’s not that I don’t know what a prophet would say, you see. I do. It’s not for lack of a message. I’m not interested in saying it. If there were a prophet, of course, a prophet would tell us that America is a country that God has blessed so much, we have not suffered as other people have. We don’t know what suffering is like. We have not known war in our country since 1865. That experience of war in 1865 was so horrible in this country, the Civil War, that we did not lift our hand against anybody for years and years after that. But over the years we’ve become so prosperous, and we have developed technology that allows us to deliver war to other people, and it never falls on us.

We have no idea what war is like in this country. Our soldiers know, but when they come back to tell us, we don’t know what they’re talking about. We don’t know what war is like in this country, and so it behooves us to be careful. And to rain down death on people and then to gloat over it is not becoming in God’s eyes. This is not good. To rain down destruction from this country, which knows so little suffering that our own navels become the source of our suffering is not pleasant or good in God’s eyes. We should be very careful, very careful. This is what a prophet would say, I think.

But who wants to say it? Because prophets have an approval rating of about five percent, only in some places. No, I'd rather be in my line of work.

[partial transcript, based on copy here]

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one option

Scott Santens:

What underlies a question like this is that it’s okay to force people to work by withholding what they need to live, in order to force them to work for us. And at the same time, because they are forced, we don’t even pay them enough to meet their basic needs that we are withholding to force them to work.

What is a good word to describe this?

…

My favorite story is Garrison Frazier. It’s a story I first learned about from Karl Widerquist, and included in this article. He was a freed slave and chosen as the spokesperson for other freed slaves. He was asked about slavery and how he could be truly free from ever being enslaved again.

Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom… The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor…”

This is to say that without owning a minimum amount of land, it is not possible to truly live by your own labor. One must have this ability in order to not be forced to work for others. If you can’t grow your own food or build your own house, you can’t live by your own hands. This option must exist. But does it make any sense in this day and age to give everyone land? How would we even accomplish this? How would it be universal and equal in quantity and quality? What if some land didn’t grow food? How would this work in cities where our markets have created the dense populations of labor required for them to exist?

Universal basic income is how …

[link to full article]

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People have long been coerced to work by denying them access to resources that let them survive otherwise. The shorthand for this is “enclosure of the commons,” that is, fencing people off from what they can use to sustain themselves. The image of the engraving in the tweet embedded below is of forcible enclosure and expulsion, from Commoning, a Resilience post by Brian Davey.

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selling war: “it works the same in any country”

Hitler and Goering, Berlin, 16 March 1938 (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2004-1202-504) / CC BY-SA 3.0 de, (wikimedia)

eight years later, in Nuremberg:

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“the pain you feel is capitalism dying”

Samuel Alexander wrote:

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climate troll vaporized by Katie Mack



Short bio:
Dr Katherine (Katie) Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist. Her work focuses on finding new ways to learn about the early universe and fundamental physics using astronomical observations, probing the building blocks of nature by examining the cosmos on the largest scales. Throughout her career as a researcher at Caltech, Princeton, Cambridge, and now Melbourne University, she has studied dark matter, black holes, cosmic strings, and the formation of the first galaxies in the Universe. Katie is also an active online science communicator and is passionate about science outreach. As a science writer, she has been published by Slate, Sky & Telescope, Time.com, the Economist tech blog "Babbage", and other popular publications.

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being well

see footnote

being well is doing well by doing nothing more than need be done to be and let be*

if you know that already, you also may know this:

All we know is stories. Some are helpful, some not. None are reality. Reality is not a story. Reality is what is. And this is beyond words.

that said, want nothing, be well, tweet or retweet this, and otherwise spread the word – paradox alert! – however you want to

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image: juvenile barn swallow being fed – Magnus Kjaergaard [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons
*with loving-kindness, compassion, empathic joy, and equanimity

there is no other …

there is no other being than this being: all that is happening now

thoughts of past and future and of whatever else is thought are in the mind, recalled – or not – only in this moment, the present

there only ever is this moment, the present, this being: all that is happening now

nothing is other than this

no one is

there is no other being

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want nothing, be well