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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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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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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

Abenomics enters new phase

In early August, Abenomics entered a new phase as the government detailed a fiscal stimulus package of 28 trillion yen (US$265.3 billion), roughly six per cent of Japan’s economy.

Compare with $100 billion as reported in the July 31 post on this topic, infrastructure: finance as everyone’s business


two-thirds of all Canadians back a guaranteed income of $30,000

Pierre Trudeau and Richard Nixon flirted with guaranteed minimum
income plans. Canadians of 2016 skeptical about cost

As many as 67 per cent of respondents backed a guaranteed income set at $30,000, provided that the payment would “replace most or all other forms of government assistance.”

However, nearly as many (66 per cent) said they would not be willing to pay more taxes to support such a program, and 59 per cent said it would be too expensive to implement. 

A further 63 per cent said it would “discourage people from working.” Among Conservative voters, this sentiment jumped to 74 per cent of respondents. But even in the NDP camp respondents were split 50-50.

Finland will soon be debuting a plan to pay every citizen $1,100 per month, and scrap all other benefit programs.

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a good death: “the kind most people would choose”

Nino Sekopet, an extraordinary end-of-life counsellor, on the questions he most often faces

from the article the tweet links to:

A Dutch actress with terminal cancer came to see Sekopet, along with her son. She was unflinchingly realistic and decided that in order to avoid lots of “bulls–t,” she wanted to end her life with VSED. Their conversation was almost buoyant with laughter, simply because that’s where that family was. “That’s a very light, almost funny, cheerful death that’s stayed with me,” Sekopet says.

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lightly edited copy from DWD Canada:

  • It is legal to end your own life in Canada and has been since suicide was removed from the Criminal Code in 1972
  • You have the right to refuse any and all treatment, even if refusal might hasten your death
  • You have the right to stop treatment after it has started. Ethically and legally, there is no distinction between discontinuing treatment and refusing it in the first place
  • In Canada, nutrition and hydration by tube is considered medical treatment. You have the right to refuse or stop it
  • You also have the right to turn down food or drink and the right to refuse to be fed or given drinks by others
  • The above is referred to as Voluntary Stopping of Eating and Drinking (VSED) and is supported by many palliative care providers

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Be sure to choose palliative care that includes informed use of glycerin swabs to relieve thirst, and so on. With no fluid intake you are likely to lose consciousness in a week or so and – without intervention – never regain it. Please read this Guardian piece: 'It was a good death, the kind most people would choose' (Sophie Mackenzie on why her family backed her mother's decision to stop eating and drinking when faced with terminal cancer).

from this page on the DWD Canada website:

Document your wishes. When it comes to end-of-life decisions, what you've put in writing will carry more weight than something you've mentioned in passing. Clear, written instructions will also make it easier for your substitute decision-maker to act on your wishes. So write them down! You can use the forms in our Advance Care Planning Kit or have a lawyer or notary draw up your documents. It's up to you.

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want nothing, be well

image credited in a related post: want nothing

may all want nothing but that all want nothing

wanting anything – wanting something to be or not to be – is dukkha;
nirvana is needing nothing and wanting nothing, not even this:
that all want nothing

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want nothing, be well

want nothing … other than that all want nothing;
be well: do no more than need be done to be and let be*

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*with loving-kindness, compassion, empathic joy, and equanimity