Another 'essay' that can be inserted within several threads.
https://runesoup.com/2021/02/how-to-shi ... nes-fools/
This is from Charles’s To Reason With A Madman:
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/to ... -a-madman/In a functioning democracy, the two sides could argue the question of whether the election was stolen by drawing evidence from mutually acceptable sources of fact. Today no such source exists. Most of the media has constellated into separate and mutually exclusive ecosystems, each the domain of a political faction, making it impossible to have a debate. All that’s left, as you may have experienced, is a shouting match. Without debate, one must resort to other means to achieve victory in politics: force rather than persuasion.
This is one reason why I think democracy is over. (Whether we ever had it, or how much of it, is another question.)
Suppose I wanted to persuade a far right Trump-supporting reader that claims of election fraud are baseless. I could cite reports and fact-checks on CNN or the New York Times or Wikipedia, but none of those are credible to that person, who assumes, with quite some justification, that these publications are biased against Trump. The same is true if you are a Biden supporter and I try to persuade you of massive election fraud. Evidence for that is only to be found in right-wing publications that you will dismiss out of hand as unreliable.
Let me save the indignant reader some time and write your scathing critique of the above for you. “Charles, you are establishing a false equivalency here that is shockingly ignorant of certain indisputable facts. Fact one! Fact two! Fact three! Here are the links. You are doing a disservice to the public by even broaching the possibility that the other side is worth listening to.”
When even one side believes that, we are no longer in a democracy. My point here isn’t to hold both sides equal. My point is that no conversation is happening, or can happen. We are past democracy now. Democracy depends on a certain level of civic trust, a willingness to decide the disposition of power through peaceful, fair elections informed by an objective press. It requires a willingness to engage in conversation or at least debate. It requires that a substantial majority hold something – democracy itself – to be more important than victory. Otherwise we are in a state either of civil war or, if one side is dominant, a state of authoritarianism and rebellion.
At this point it is clear which side has the upper hand.
...As I’ve been saying for years, this is simply what happens now. We are at that point in the timeline. And that sentiment is in the air, especially for cycle realists.
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So where do you think we are in the cycle? Do you think we are a few more online yelling matches away from a return to neoliberal normalcy? That the mechanisms of empire you are complicit in and ignore so you can pretend to be a good person whir back into action and all those brave heroes who saved civilisation by watching Netflix and scolding the working class for a year will have Chelsea Handler personally pull them onto streets that ring with the glorious sounds of SNL audience laughter (?), while the smell of vegan cronuts lingers joyously in the air and multi-ethnic fiestas erupt around every correct-thinking white person? (Good luck with those tomatoes, babes.)
Or do you think we are past the point where discourse -of any kind- is not only useless but actively accelerating the moment? Let me say it again. What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis? Back to Charles:As a writer who has for the last twenty years upheld countercultural views on many issues, I face a dilemma. The evidence I can cite to buttress my views is fading from the knowledge commons. The sources I might use to undermine dominant narratives are illegitimate precisely because they undermine dominant narratives. The guardians of the internet enforce this illegitimacy through a million means: algorithmic suppression, tendentious search term autofill, demonetizing dissident channels, flagging dissenting views as “false,” canceling accounts, censoring citizen journalists, and so on.
The resulting epistemic bubble leaves the average citizen just as much in unreality as someone who believes Trump is still President. The cult-like character of QAnon and the far right is plain to see. What is less obvious (especially to those within it) is the increasingly cult-like character of the mainstream. What else can we call it but a cult, when it controls information, punishes dissent, spies on its members and controls their physical movements, lacks transparency and accountability in leadership, prescribes what its members should say, think, and feel, encourages them to denounce and spy on each other, and upholds a polarized us-versus-them mentality? I am certainly not saying that everything the mainstream media, science, and academia say is wrong. However, when powerful interests control information they can lock reality out of the picture and bring the public to believe absurdities.
Perhaps that is what culture does generally. “Culture” comes from the same linguistic root as “cult.” It generates a shared reality, by conditioning perception, patterning belief, and directing creation. What is different today is that entrenched forces are desperately trying to maintain a reality that no longer fits the consciousness of the public, which is rapidly moving out of the Age of Separation. The proliferation of cults and conspiracy theories mirrors the increasingly unhinged absurdity of official reality and the lies and propaganda that maintain it.
We are past the moment of discursive intervention because any deviation from the corporate-state narrative -which was the business of magic and witchcraft for one and a half thousand years of European history- is now deemed to be an act of terrorism. That is what Charles is saying in the last line.
Recently as a writer I have had the feeling of trying to reason a madman out of his madness. If you’ve ever tried to reason with a QAnon, you know what I’m talking about as I try to reason with the public mind. I don’t mean to uphold myself as the one sane individual in a world gone mad (thereby demonstrating my own insanity), but rather to speak to a sense I’m sure many readers share: that the world has gone crazy. That our society has spun off into unreality, lost itself in an illusion. Hope as we might to assign the madness to a small and deplorable subset of society, it is in fact a general condition.
As a society, we are asked to accept the unacceptable: the wars, the prisons, the deliberate famine in Yemen, the evictions, the land grabs, the domestic abuse, the racial violence, the child abuse, the ripoffs, the confinement meat factories, the soil destruction, the ecocide, the beheadings, the torture, the rape, the extreme inequality, the persecution of whistleblowers…. On some level, we are all aware that it is crazy to proceed with life as if all this were not happening. To live as if reality were not real – that is the essence of insanity.
Also pushed to the margins of official reality is much of the wonderful healing and creative power of human beings and other-than-human beings. Ironically, if I bring up some examples of these extraordinary technologies, for example in the areas of medicine, agriculture, or energy, I invite accusations of being “unrealistic.” I wonder if the reader, like I do, has direct experience of phenomena that are not officially real?
I am much tempted to try to make the case the modern society is confined to a narrow unreality, but this is precisely the problem. Any examples I invoke from beyond acceptable political, medical, scientific, or psychological (un)reality automatically discredit my argument and make me a suspect character to anyone who does not already agree with me.
For several years now and more acutely since about May of last year, I have been talking about the complete epistemic failure of western civilisation. ...Rockefeller medicine has failed epistemologically. Politics has failed epistemologically. Finance has failed epistemologically. Until people realise that for themselves -and it might be bitcoin at $50K, it might be the walls around the Capitol, it might be double-masking, it might be the patently false dietary advice we all receive- then they are Charles’s madmen.
But there will come a moment when we move from a world of madmen to a world of men pretending to be mad. This has been obvious to me for a while and was recently the source of some financially-motivated bad faith attacks and the usual neoliberal histrionics anyone still using social media has come to expect. Which proved the exact point I was making. (But good luck with those tomatoes, everyone.)
And, lo. Charles is there too.The more successful they are in controlling reality, the more unreal it becomes, until we reach the extreme where everyone pretends to believe but no one really does. We are not there yet, but we are fast approaching it. We are not yet at the state of late Soviet Russia, when virtually no one took Pravda and Izvestia at face value. The unreality of official reality is not yet so complete, nor is the censorship of unofficial realities. We are still at the stage of repressed alienation, where many harbor a vague sense of living in a VR matrix, a show, a pantomime. What is repressed tends to come out in extreme and distorted form; for example, conspiracy theories that the earth is flat, that the earth is hollow, that Chinese troops are massing on the US border, that the world is run by baby-eating Satanists, and so on. Such beliefs are symptoms of locking people in a matrix of lies and telling them it is real. The more tightly the authorities control information in an attempt to preserve official reality, the more virulent and widespread the conspiracy theories will become. Already, the canon of “authoritative sources” is shrinking to the point where US foreign policy critics, Israeli/Palestinian peace activists, vaccine skeptics, holistic health researchers, and ordinary dissidents like myself risk exile to the same internet ghettos as full-bore conspiracy theorists. Indeed, to a large extent we dine at the same table. What choice is there, when mainstream journalism is derelict in its duty to vigorously challenge power, than to draw from citizen journalists, independent researchers, and anecdotal sources to make sense of the world?
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I have been writing for nearly 20 years about the defining mythology of civilization that I call the Story of Separation and its consequences: the Program of Control, the mindset of reductionism, the war on the Other, the polarization of society. Obviously, my essays and books have not redeemed my naive ambition to prevent the very circumstances we face today. I must confess to weariness. I am tired of explaining phenomena like Brexit, the Trump election, QAnon, and the Capitol riot as symptoms of a much deeper malady than mere racism or cultism or stupidity or insanity. I know how to write that essay. I would expose hidden assumptions various sides share and the questions few are asking. I would propose how the tools of peace and compassion might reveal the underlying causes of the affair. I would preempt accusations of false equivalency, both-sidesism, and spiritual bypassing by describing how compassion enables us to transcend the endless war on the symptom to address root causes. I would describe how the War on Evil has led to the current situation, how the Program of Control creates more and more virulent forms of that which it tries to stamp out, because it cannot see the full set of conditions that produce its enemies. These conditions, I would explain, include at their core a profound dispossession stemming from the breakdown of defining myths and systems. Finally I would describe how a different mythology of wholeness, ecology, and interbeing would motivate a new politics.
Over five years I’ve made my case for peace and compassion – not as moral imperatives but as practical necessities. I have little new to say about the current internecine strife in my country. I could take the basic conceptual tools of my previous work and apply it to the present situation, but instead I am taking a pause, listening to what might be underneath the exhaustion and feeling of futility.
Charles’s creative project has many of the characteristics of making sanctuary. It is done at the scene of the crime -which is the complete discursive failure we are living through. It is done as an experiment -which this also is. It is ‘a modest move made in the face of daunting challenges.’ Where it might not (yet) be, is that making sanctuary is an experiment that involves the more-than-human more than it does the human. Making sanctuary is primarily not human work, but a coming to terms with the forces and beings around us that are involved and implicated in what we are experiencing. To centre the human in the act of making sanctuary disqualifies one from using the term. It falls back into discursive solutionism. Here is an excerpt from Dr Akomolafe’s essay:The key point to nail here is: nothing transforms on its own. We need a theory of change that decenters humans as the driver of transformation, and which resituates human becomings within racial complexities, geometaphysical events and ideological formulas. We need sensuous demise – where demise is the gifting of properties to another. In this case, our demise might involve a double-move of falling into the matrixial womb of our unfettered animality and allowing the inhuman world to rise to the luxurious sentience and agency we reserved exclusively for ourselves. We need a shared humiliation, a coming down to earth, a different politics.
http://www.emergencenetwork.org/a-rehea ... sanctuary/
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