“For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge. To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological, and humanist ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions. They are products of a moral void. They lack clarity about themselves and their culture. They can fathom only their own personal troubles. They do not see their own bases or the causes of their own frustrations. They are blind to the gaping inadequacies in our economic, social, and political structure and do not grasp that these structures, which they have been taught to serve, must be radically modified or even abolished to stave off disaster. They have been rendered mute and ineffectual. “What we cannot speak about” Ludwig Wittgenstein warned “we must pass over in silence.”― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
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The global corporate experiment has failed. Existence on earth is in rapid decline on every level of life organization.
The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade and disappear; the climates and oceans destabilize without connection; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes rise endangering life systems on all planes in synergistic despoliation; the world’s forests, meadows and fisheries are cumulatively destroyed by the profit drivers of globalization; food pollinators, songbirds, coral reefs and large animals crash in unconnected response; public sectors and services are defunded and privatized as tax evasion by the rich multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling junk and wastes; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world’s biggest killer; the global financial system issues money out of control while collapsing in productive investment; the vocational future of the next generations is erased across the world; official lies and corruption are normalized as public relations. All the trends are one-way, degenerate, and undeniable.
Yet where are the dots joined across domains? The common cause is taboo to name. ‘Overpopulation’ is the stock explanation. But it blinkers out the causal mechanism altogether – transnational corporate resource extractions, wastes, pollutions, and depletions of life-carrying capacities everywhere. It is not ‘doubling world populations’ that poison and hollow out the world. The majority poor control only a fraction of the earth resources. What drives the end-game is exponentially multiplying money demand and commodities with ever more wastes. They more than double every decade, but global population rates halve as the damages still escalate. That educated people can go on blinkering out the actual causal mechanism while blaming the majority poor reveals the derangement of this ruling value system.
Not even prophets like Chris Hedges decode it. Journalists are trained not to. Not even moral philosophers question the system worship masked as ‘the free market”. Freedom means no accountability to human and world life, while competition means competing to externalize all costs onto the lives of citizens and environments. The value driver behind it all is no more questioned than the Almighty. It can do no wrong. But one underlying lock-step of false equations propels this unnamed war on the world through its mutations and metastases:
Rationality = Self-Maximizing Choice
= Always More Money-Value for the Self is Good
= Self-Multiplying Sequences of Ever More Money to the Top as the Ruling Growth System
= All Else is Disposable Means to this Multiplying Pathogenic Growth
Over the past year, I have been trying to come to terms with the fake “realities” of our time. It appears that we now live in an age of deception and illusions and in an age of insanity on a global scale. We are beginning to appreciate that many of our chronic physical, mental, and social diseases are “normal” adaptations to abnormal circumstances, be they due to mutagenic genetic inheritances, life-despoiling environmental exposures or unhealthy lifestyle choices forced upon us by life-disabling social determinants. Unbelievably, most of these “abnormalities” have been enabled and sustained by our institutions of governance that have put the primacy of money-value over and above that of life value! As a result of this perpetual war on the value of life, we end up legitimizing and normalizing dysfunctional and pathological thinking and behaviour, and as a result we are oblivious to the damage we are doing to ourselves, our communities and our planet, even when the evidence of our maladaptive behaviours are “hidden” right there in plain sight. Even worse, we end up celebrating the “wisdom” of psychopaths whom we chose as stewards of our institutions. These “wise psychopaths” have maintained their priviledge by mastering the science and art of perception managment as they have endeavoured and continue to do so by cognitively framing our collective false perceptions into their “true reality”.
Prime example of this phenomenon is President Trump who fought fire with fire and successfully navigated the inauthentic landscape of the American economy and political narrative (“fake news”) with his new brand of inauthenticity dubbed “alternative facts.” How did we get here, and why do we find it so difficult to collectively make a course correction to this misguided narrative of dysfunctionality? And why is it so difficult to break out of this invisible prison which goes by many names, be it regulating or ruling group mind, incestuous amplification effect or consensus trance? Is it because our perceptions have been biased over the history of our uncivil “civilization” to cohere with the whims and fancies of the colluding, corruptible and corrupting ruling class and their courtiers? Is it because to do otherwise, would at best lead to cognitive dissonance, or being caged, or at worst, being put to death? But this by itself, although necessary is not sufficient, as for this fake reality to persist even in this age of “enlightenment” would suggest that a deeper and darker infrastructure that appears to be unthinkable, unspeakable and untouchable, are calling all the shots and is responsible for our unconscious enslavement or should I say our endarkenment.
This dark and deep infrastructure that debases all life and masquerades as “intelligence” was revealed this week in two articles that brought to the collective conscious via alternative media the interlocking global central planners and the enforcers of this most dysfunctional and pathological system of life control, destruction and deception.
The central global planners of the ruling class are the system of central banks that enable and facilitate the creation of credit by the private transnational banking industrial complexes to enhance their power, privilege and control via credit guidance and allocation, so as to maximize the extraction of wealth by the ruling class. And by their courtiers and retainers of politicians, lawyers and accountants, they deprive the majority of the world population of access to their universal human life necessities that could be more readily provided by credit creation by local, community and public banks. (Please see: Shifting from Central Planning to a Decentralised Economy: Do we Need Central Banks? – Professor Werner)
In order for this system to undermine the sovereignty of nations and the life-interests of the governed, this offensive system had to be defended and protected by a globalized “intelligence security system” that enforces the diktats of this centrally-planned banking cartel. Their covert activities have run the gamut of actors from economic hitmen, to political assassins to warmongers so as to change regimes that stood up against this dysfunctional and pathological system of life-deception and deprivation! Unless their activities are brought to the surface of awareness, appreciation and understanding, our ignorance of their deep and dark interconnected clandestine activities would continue to be our liability and their ultimate asset. (Please see: EXPOSED: CIA – The Swamp Monsters: Three Factions of the CIA that Control the World | The Millennium Report)
So our world is currently in a tailspin of political instability, and some are predicting that if our cultural mindset of illusion and deception remain on course, we are looking for major social upheavals in the near future that pale in comparison to that of the Trump ascendency and Brexit vote. (Please see: Peter Turchin: Entering the Age of Instability after Trump – Evonomics, and A Quantitative Prediction for Political Violence in the 2020s – Peter Turchin). Two articles by academic researchers on global geopolitics that have succinctly summarized the state of affairs that are at play as a result of Trump’s presidency can be found here: Trump’s “Russia Connection”, Behind America’s Perpetual Wars | Global Research – Prof John McMurtry, and Trump’s Declaration of War – PaulCraigRoberts.org.
As you can see, that which was unthinkable needs to be thought out clearly, that which was unspeakable needs to be discussed in the highways and byways of the collective human consciousness and those institutions which were thought to be untouchable need to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground-bottom up. This can only happen via a Global Truth and Reconciliation Exercise where we admit that our political and economic institutions based on life-blind rules of extractive economic growth have done more harm than good as they were based on a rule of law that was market-protecting but life-destroying, and in which the quality of our lives were sacrificed on the altar of market efficiency and expediency. We have the cognitive apparatus to reframe the re-construction of this life economy based on Prof John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology from first principles, and a theory of change to guide the backcasting of the long term goals of peaceful, prosperous partnership of people and planet to identify activities, indicators and outcomes to guide us during this momentous transition.
Since we need a fully integrated and fully life-coherent system to ensure that this life-economy is corruptible by no one, accessible and shared by everyone, it would by necessity have to be a global integrity system that is fully accountable and transparent and trustworthy and based on good governance principles by one and all for once and all.
Adapted from: https://bsahely.com/2017/01/16/the-national-integrity-system/
In the next few blogs, I hope to highlight the life-grounded approach to this Copernican shift where the regulating syntax of our perceptions and discourse are now life-valued and harmonizes with the life-ground of our planet, the integrity of the source of our nourishment – the soil, and the integrity of our life-regulating and guidance systems that has been revealed to us by the latest understanding of the neurobiology that underpins our decision-making capabilities.
This would no longer be based on fake values, fake ideologies, fake religion, fake education, fake currencies, fake news or fake policies. As the primary axiom of value is life-grounded, then all of our social constructs will be based on a one and only true reality that is governed and regulated by a fully life-coherent and integrated rationality. The shadows of our central-planned banking system and our deceptive “intelligence” community would need to be rehabilitated where our newly life-valued credit creation systems and “wisdom” community no longer enslave and deceive us but become our emancipators and liberators in this brave new world waiting to be reborn. These are our true enemies that can be rehabilitated as friends in the making.
The documentary that served as the inspiration for this article is Dirt! The Movie which convinced me that the life-ground that was explicated by Prof John McMurtry’s life work on Life-Value Onto-Axiology has a physical reality of which we must constantly be cognizant, of which we must constantly articulate in all of our discourse, and for which we must be eternally vigilant and protect, lest we grow out of touch with its life-giving reality that sustains all of life on this planet, without which we could not have been here.
