It all does seem to exist on a continuum, doesn't it?
It's like a reordering of civic life/international community with very vague memories of 20th century history, gleaned quickly from the Internet or movies, as a guide.
Love this invitation Rhyd. I’ll contribute with another invitation, evacuate immediately from all social media. Avoid any news reports that smell off. Do a deep dive into your own confirmation bias. Go into the woods if you can and watch moss grow. Read more poetry. Dance in the kitchen while you make dinner. Hug more people. Make more eye contact. Boycott screens and establish a rich inner life. Practice gratitude. Forgive yourself.
I'm in agreement about the economic sanctions. It only hurts those who don't have easy access to money. I wonder about where folks will place blame though - I feel like in Canada or the US, people would be more inclined to blame their own leadership rather than foreign leadership, but of course there's always divide.
I'm struggling with some of the undertones referring to the convoy and emergencies act - I know you've written about the convoy before. From where I'm sitting and the history behind the group that was leading the convoy, there was significant risk of a violent coup to justify action after weeks of inaction. Was it over the top? Yes, for sure. Was there other options? I'm not sure.
I'm also not one to follow "populist morality" especially when it comes to government restrictions, but when there's significant evidence to back the action that government it taking, would that action not be justified? Is opposition for the sake of opposition, especially in the case of public health, not a risk in itself?
Just some thoughts. Thanks as always for your perspective as it almost always unearths some re-evaluation of personal opinions ;)
From a conversation with a psychic friend who recently dreamed about Putin, Russia, Ukraine, and the embodiment/goddess of the land, who is naked and trapped in Putin's house: the house is rickety, the electrical wiring is dangerous, Putin wants to have sex with her but he is scared and has erectile dysfunction. She both fears him and has compassion for him, because the electrical circuits could blow up the whole house and everyone in it, including Putin himself. We are on a knife's edge and we must try to hold the balance. Don't let it tip.
very nice metaphor for what is happening. I agree with you. There is a powerful energy/force/event moving through the world's human population (and as well through all our kindred species). ALL of us feel it, how we respond to it differs depending on a great many factors, from where we live in the world to our individual characters to our particular cultural myths. We are like elephants feeling the tsunami coming and heading for higher ground. Only in our case we have no idea where higher ground is, so people seize on whatever they can that they feel will make them safe. They are looking to restore intelligible order to the world around them. And the fault for what is happening lies elsewhere of course, so if only THOSE people would change in THIS way, all would be find.
But it won't of course. Because the underlying foundation of human civilization has been undone. Earth is not an inexhaustible resource for extraction by unrestrained corporations. Nor is Earth an amusement park for our enjoyment. Earth is in fact a nonlinear, self-organizing, emergent life form which we destabilize at our peril. And we have destabilized it past the point of no return.
When any non-linear living system begins to destabilize (from planets, to local ecosystems, to individual organ systems, they send out a signal. And those signals are felt with a part of us far deeper than the rational mind. We still have that capacity, just as elephants and other life forms do. We FEEL the signal but it doesn't fit into either rationalist or monotheist myth structures. (Well, except for end time narratives as Pat Robertson recently reminded the world.)
We live in a time when the majority of people in the western world believe that it is possible to rationally control both nature and civilization, to rationally control and direct human behavior, including our own. But nature is not rational, nor is it irrational. It is nonrational. Rational behavior is based on a set of assumptions that are accepted as foundational. From there rational decisions are made. But IF those assumptions are inaccurate to the real world, that is the world that underlies the virtual world of our civilization, eventually rational behavior will destabilize the foundational, real world itself. What is built on top of that, that is, civilization, destabilizes and eventually collapses.
That is what is happening now. Earth ecosystems all over the world have passed tipping points. Some wiser part of us knows it, feels the signal being given off by Earth itself. And people panic because rationality is failing. The paradigm used for the past two thousands years (monotheistic/rational) is collapsing because it is not accurate to the real world. (Most people do not realize that rationalists and their priests, scientists, are the most powerful of all the protestant sects; there is little difference in their cosmology.) And as John Ralston Saul put it (in Voltaire's Bastards: The Tyranny of Reason in the West) when their belief system and patterns of behavior fail, in that system, the belief is that you simply did not apply it STRONGLY enough and so the interventions are escalated in an attempt to reassert control. All that does is escalate systemic collapse. The more technological and rationalist mechanisms are forced on nonlinear systems in collapse, the faster and more complex the collapse.
So, your metaphor here is absolutely perfect. Everyone of us is touching (or being touched by) the elephant and everyone of us is describing the territory we are experiencing. Some of us have a very wide gaze, some more narrow. Nonetheless, none are complete. Standing back, however, as you have done here, reveals that the underlying dynamic is identical no matter who is doing the describing or promoting any particular response to what they are perceiving.
We are in a time when old systems are collapsing. Nothing is going to stop that process. The people we have depended on to run things, to be good governors, have failed in their job; they have failed us and our children and their children. As Aldo Leopold once said, "The first step in intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts." But instead they dissected the world to make all the stuff in which we are drowning, most of it from hydrocarbon modification (plastics to pharmaceuticals to food). People have been urging a different course for centuries but have been denigrated for doing so (unscientific, unchristian, anti-progress, anthropomorphizers). But all their warnings are now manifest, we are surrounded by collapse everywhere we look.
Earth systems change from the bottom up, all the kindred species in ecosystems working to solve their part of the problem utilizing their own unique genius. And that is what we need now, for humans to do the same. People such as you who write this blog, people like Greta, Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, and on and on and on. And slowly a new way will come into the world.
But it is not going to be easy or safe or fun. Grief will be our companion on the journey, it is not something we can deal with and move on (as Lesley Head put it). Still, there must be those among whom we can weep and still be counted as warriors (adrienne rich). We, as Bill Mollison once put it, are members of a community unbounded by geography or time . . . or species. I have hope, but no optimism (false hope). Hope is a faith that comes from life itself, in the emergence of new generations of all our kindred species. For life, as Jeff Goldblum once immortalized it, finds a way.
The NY Times had a good timely article today on Auden's incredible poem Musee Des Beaux Arts at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/06/books/auden-musee-des-beaux-arts.html. I, for one, often feel a strong disconnect as I go about my rather comfortable daily life and then come home to see pictures of children dead in the streets of Ukraine or more chaos in Afghanistan. I also know that staying connected and aware of all this suffering is vastly important. I weave between the two. Thank you for keeping this conversation going.
In a crisis, Americans seem to have a need to _do_ something — or be _seen_ to be doing something. This leads to busybody gestures with no foresight about their consequences.
I appreciate how you connect each of these things: the COVID response and Russian war response.
One part of the elephant seems to be the desire for control for safety's/happiness' sake - perhaps a safe, carbon neutral utopia where people can pursue whatever makes them happy (so long as it fits the accepted happiness narrative) with complete freedom. That may be the draw of the the Metaverse. Let us transcend our bodies and become gods, each one of us. The globe must come together on this - eradicate carbon emissions and hunger (and perhaps many good things that we can pretend to ignore). And we will all be "free."
Russia (and China) don't accept or fit this vision. Nationalists don't fit this vision.
The logical end of liberal humanism is at hand - I am my own god and I shall have no other god before me. Therefore, I will surround myself with like-minded gods who will not tread on my autonomy and will in fact enforce it on others.
Divisions in belief raise questions and discourage my god-ward trajectory - so all divisions must be stamped out, by whatever force necessary. And since this freedom will be "good" for all, anyone who stands in the way of it must be a monster. Silencing them, destroying them, is a gift to humanity.
These are the beginnings of my thoughts on a part of the elephant that I'm blindly feeling. I appreciate your thoughts!
Time is like an accordion for the heart...expanding and contracting with joy and pain. It all feels quite surreal, indeed. Memories of the pain of past wars on the faces of grandparents, uncles and fathers-- keep popping up for me these days. Thanks for the phrase "Intersectional Imperialism"-- it's spot on. Punishment for any divergence from or difference of opinion will be enforced no matter what. I can't help but feel like the Woke missed the chance to do their homework for humanity but the sane in-betweeners still haven't found their backbones again either. Who DESERVES punishment exactly? Who are we to say? This, that. Either, or. Wrong, right. It certainly feels like we've spent an eternity playing out that boring story.
I feel angry at leftists for focusing on Putin instead of NATO'S provocations that led to this war. Many leftists seem okay with ignoring the history of the proxy gov that was installed in 2014, the fascist elements that continued to grow, and the people who have died in Donbass, while virtue signaling their anti-war position. If leftists are truly anti-war, shouldn't they be holding NATO/US accountable? I think they should, and this is not what I am seeing. Putin demonization is everywhere.
i'm starting to get some serious pre-WWI vibes from our all-panic-all-the-time zeitgeist. what is it about new centuries, do they not really get going until everyone picks a side and decides that mass hysteria and mass murder are just the thing to get the blood flowing? (in both senses)
how many pre-WWI intellectuals, artists, journalists etc thought a nice, quick and easy war would provide glory and "meaning" and re-energize their societies with all that rich martial anger and energy? it seems that humans are so desperate to attach themselves to a historical cause (what Ernest Becker called an "immortality project") that they'd rather watch the world burn than face their own ultimate irrelevance.
or maybe this is just how new worlds are born, atop a mountain of skulls and bones from the previous world?
Here in NZ we're still experiencing government mandates and other measures. There was a protest that grew into a freedom village camped on parliament grounds for 3 weeks until the police came in with riot gear and tear gas and cleared everybody out. About a week before that there'd been articles put out by law experts saying there was nothing legally keeping them from doing so, essentially softening up public awareness for when it happened.
I recently moved out of the house I'd been living in, the friend I was there with is still trying to find somewhere else. Things with the owners were just getting worse quite quickly. Someone I know was visiting family over the weekend, their step-dad came home drunk, started a fight and put my friend in hospital. All of which is to say that it feels like War - as an energy or a being - is entering the world more and more at this time.
Some friends of mine suffered a miscarriage earlier this year, a little girl who would have received so much love. And since then, and more and more with what's happening in Ukraine, I've been wondering what to do with it I guess, with the fact that we live in a world where these things happen, where this level of pain and suffering takes place. I don't feel like there's an answer, but I do feel like it's up to us (to those of us able to, ie living in relative health and safety) to find ways to thrive, to experience and bring more joy into the world, to live lives of beauty, in the midst of a world where these things happen.
I like - and am learning more about - what Bayo Akomolafe says about making sanctuary, finding places and ways to create mutual flourishing in the world. I also like what Gordon White says about praying peace, being peace in a sense first and then praying it / offering it to/ for the world. And what Connor Habib has to say about not allowing War into our field, denying its right to exist I think he says.
At any rate I feel like in the midst of all this pain taking place, even though seeing it causes us pain also, I feel like what we're called to do is to move through that pain back to heart coherence, back to peace and joy and to make the world a better place in the ways that we can, even if just by not allowing more War into our world.
The big issue of our generation is meaning. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and Tarski's Indefinability Theorem proved that all systems of meaning are based on unproveable assumptions- base premises we can't prove without relation to other base premises.
This knowledge- that Truth is seated in the deep mind or the soul or instinct or experience- has not been made very public. Most are still taught that mathematics is a discipline of facts. 2+2=4. In mathematics, however, the statement 2+2=4 is begging the question. What is 2? What is plus? What is equals? What do they mean? And the most rigorous logic shows that the base concepts of numbers and sets and operations are somewhat beyond the scope of logic. There's a reason so many mathematicians go nuts- Godel starved himself, Kaczynski mailed bombs. True logic requires questioning everything.
I believe the fundamental point of religion and culture is to establish base premises for life. One thing I've learned as I've aged is that an abundance of choices makes people very upset. People want to choose between several good options: do you want your tooth pulled on Tuesday or Friday? People do not want to be faced with an open ended like "what appointment time would you like?" And that's a question that doesn't even call into question the meaning of time or day of the week. We need to limit the endless possibilities of every second to make sense of life. And religion and culture help us there. Logically consistent systems can be built on both the premise that everything is alive and that matter is not alive.
My point here is that almost every problem I see in society is surrounded by a crisis of meaning. Everyone who is thinking is totally confused as to what is Russian or Western propaganda. The convoy situation is similarly confusing. Vaccines can be a matter of public health or of bodily autonomy depending on viewpoint. The left is in a crisis over what it means to be a woman, or a trans person, or even homosexual (same sex or same gender attraction? Is asexual a sexuality in need of protection? Is self-id enough or does there need to be some criteria to be trans?)
Social media plays into this by creating accepted definitions. "A woman has two x chromosomes" becomes hate speech by declaring the definition of woman to be "anyone who identifies as a woman". Wokeness concentrates on language, but definitions are larger than language. Any word created to describe people with intellectual disabilities inevitably becomes a slur within a generation. Languages all around the world use different words with different backgrounds or connotations to denote feminine/ female humans, but they all know who cooks and changes diapers. A Spanish speaker and and English speaker can use different slurs for Native Americans or Blacks yet the oppression is one. I'm sure every European language has slurs for the Roma and the Jews but these are not separate oppressions born out of the oppressors language in each country but a general oppression of a group defined by something beyond language.
The effort to exterminate harmful language is a broader campaign against meanings that are deemed unacceptable. This is why I am so afraid of the Metaverse and its monopoly on meaning. In a few decisions, people are seen as "terrorists" or "freedom fighters".
Strange recommendation- the last book of the Eragon series- Inheritance. It's a young adult fantasy series but I would say the end is worthy philosophy for those interested in the power of meaning and the understanding of the body that negates (self-) deception.
I think those that have planned this little economic attack have forgotten warning of "Beware of unintended consequences." This will have consequences for decades or even generations to come.
Appreciate all the comments, including to get off social media. I do consult Twitter, but only scientific/medical Twitter by those ph.d.s & MDs who questioned the SARS-COV-2 narrative - who interestingly often also are questioning the Ukraine Russian narrative. At beginning of 2020 was reading Jordan Hall & others on how we are living through a collapse of sensemaking, and then I became very aware of the Western oligarchs (who the Right call globalists, who do seem as autocratic to me as Putin, they with their transhumanism, AI, digital identity, and 4th Industrial Rev.) who think they will control the future of the world. Gordon White talks about a "dominant of wider inclusion," as the antidote? or real place we're in, a concept from Charles Fort. Bayo Akomolafe says something like what if how we respond to the crisis is a part of the crisis? I understand people's aversion to Vladimir Putin, but I wish they'd see Victoria Nuland, Ihor Kolomoysky, and the US neocons as just as worthy of aversion, instead of ignoring or accepting them as necessary figures.
Yeah, I walk back the 'wokeism is harmless bullshit that will blow over'.
It all does seem to exist on a continuum, doesn't it?
It's like a reordering of civic life/international community with very vague memories of 20th century history, gleaned quickly from the Internet or movies, as a guide.
Love this invitation Rhyd. I’ll contribute with another invitation, evacuate immediately from all social media. Avoid any news reports that smell off. Do a deep dive into your own confirmation bias. Go into the woods if you can and watch moss grow. Read more poetry. Dance in the kitchen while you make dinner. Hug more people. Make more eye contact. Boycott screens and establish a rich inner life. Practice gratitude. Forgive yourself.
I'm in agreement about the economic sanctions. It only hurts those who don't have easy access to money. I wonder about where folks will place blame though - I feel like in Canada or the US, people would be more inclined to blame their own leadership rather than foreign leadership, but of course there's always divide.
I'm struggling with some of the undertones referring to the convoy and emergencies act - I know you've written about the convoy before. From where I'm sitting and the history behind the group that was leading the convoy, there was significant risk of a violent coup to justify action after weeks of inaction. Was it over the top? Yes, for sure. Was there other options? I'm not sure.
I'm also not one to follow "populist morality" especially when it comes to government restrictions, but when there's significant evidence to back the action that government it taking, would that action not be justified? Is opposition for the sake of opposition, especially in the case of public health, not a risk in itself?
Just some thoughts. Thanks as always for your perspective as it almost always unearths some re-evaluation of personal opinions ;)
From a conversation with a psychic friend who recently dreamed about Putin, Russia, Ukraine, and the embodiment/goddess of the land, who is naked and trapped in Putin's house: the house is rickety, the electrical wiring is dangerous, Putin wants to have sex with her but he is scared and has erectile dysfunction. She both fears him and has compassion for him, because the electrical circuits could blow up the whole house and everyone in it, including Putin himself. We are on a knife's edge and we must try to hold the balance. Don't let it tip.
very nice metaphor for what is happening. I agree with you. There is a powerful energy/force/event moving through the world's human population (and as well through all our kindred species). ALL of us feel it, how we respond to it differs depending on a great many factors, from where we live in the world to our individual characters to our particular cultural myths. We are like elephants feeling the tsunami coming and heading for higher ground. Only in our case we have no idea where higher ground is, so people seize on whatever they can that they feel will make them safe. They are looking to restore intelligible order to the world around them. And the fault for what is happening lies elsewhere of course, so if only THOSE people would change in THIS way, all would be find.
But it won't of course. Because the underlying foundation of human civilization has been undone. Earth is not an inexhaustible resource for extraction by unrestrained corporations. Nor is Earth an amusement park for our enjoyment. Earth is in fact a nonlinear, self-organizing, emergent life form which we destabilize at our peril. And we have destabilized it past the point of no return.
When any non-linear living system begins to destabilize (from planets, to local ecosystems, to individual organ systems, they send out a signal. And those signals are felt with a part of us far deeper than the rational mind. We still have that capacity, just as elephants and other life forms do. We FEEL the signal but it doesn't fit into either rationalist or monotheist myth structures. (Well, except for end time narratives as Pat Robertson recently reminded the world.)
We live in a time when the majority of people in the western world believe that it is possible to rationally control both nature and civilization, to rationally control and direct human behavior, including our own. But nature is not rational, nor is it irrational. It is nonrational. Rational behavior is based on a set of assumptions that are accepted as foundational. From there rational decisions are made. But IF those assumptions are inaccurate to the real world, that is the world that underlies the virtual world of our civilization, eventually rational behavior will destabilize the foundational, real world itself. What is built on top of that, that is, civilization, destabilizes and eventually collapses.
That is what is happening now. Earth ecosystems all over the world have passed tipping points. Some wiser part of us knows it, feels the signal being given off by Earth itself. And people panic because rationality is failing. The paradigm used for the past two thousands years (monotheistic/rational) is collapsing because it is not accurate to the real world. (Most people do not realize that rationalists and their priests, scientists, are the most powerful of all the protestant sects; there is little difference in their cosmology.) And as John Ralston Saul put it (in Voltaire's Bastards: The Tyranny of Reason in the West) when their belief system and patterns of behavior fail, in that system, the belief is that you simply did not apply it STRONGLY enough and so the interventions are escalated in an attempt to reassert control. All that does is escalate systemic collapse. The more technological and rationalist mechanisms are forced on nonlinear systems in collapse, the faster and more complex the collapse.
So, your metaphor here is absolutely perfect. Everyone of us is touching (or being touched by) the elephant and everyone of us is describing the territory we are experiencing. Some of us have a very wide gaze, some more narrow. Nonetheless, none are complete. Standing back, however, as you have done here, reveals that the underlying dynamic is identical no matter who is doing the describing or promoting any particular response to what they are perceiving.
We are in a time when old systems are collapsing. Nothing is going to stop that process. The people we have depended on to run things, to be good governors, have failed in their job; they have failed us and our children and their children. As Aldo Leopold once said, "The first step in intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts." But instead they dissected the world to make all the stuff in which we are drowning, most of it from hydrocarbon modification (plastics to pharmaceuticals to food). People have been urging a different course for centuries but have been denigrated for doing so (unscientific, unchristian, anti-progress, anthropomorphizers). But all their warnings are now manifest, we are surrounded by collapse everywhere we look.
Earth systems change from the bottom up, all the kindred species in ecosystems working to solve their part of the problem utilizing their own unique genius. And that is what we need now, for humans to do the same. People such as you who write this blog, people like Greta, Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, and on and on and on. And slowly a new way will come into the world.
But it is not going to be easy or safe or fun. Grief will be our companion on the journey, it is not something we can deal with and move on (as Lesley Head put it). Still, there must be those among whom we can weep and still be counted as warriors (adrienne rich). We, as Bill Mollison once put it, are members of a community unbounded by geography or time . . . or species. I have hope, but no optimism (false hope). Hope is a faith that comes from life itself, in the emergence of new generations of all our kindred species. For life, as Jeff Goldblum once immortalized it, finds a way.
The NY Times had a good timely article today on Auden's incredible poem Musee Des Beaux Arts at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/06/books/auden-musee-des-beaux-arts.html. I, for one, often feel a strong disconnect as I go about my rather comfortable daily life and then come home to see pictures of children dead in the streets of Ukraine or more chaos in Afghanistan. I also know that staying connected and aware of all this suffering is vastly important. I weave between the two. Thank you for keeping this conversation going.
In a crisis, Americans seem to have a need to _do_ something — or be _seen_ to be doing something. This leads to busybody gestures with no foresight about their consequences.
I appreciate how you connect each of these things: the COVID response and Russian war response.
One part of the elephant seems to be the desire for control for safety's/happiness' sake - perhaps a safe, carbon neutral utopia where people can pursue whatever makes them happy (so long as it fits the accepted happiness narrative) with complete freedom. That may be the draw of the the Metaverse. Let us transcend our bodies and become gods, each one of us. The globe must come together on this - eradicate carbon emissions and hunger (and perhaps many good things that we can pretend to ignore). And we will all be "free."
Russia (and China) don't accept or fit this vision. Nationalists don't fit this vision.
The logical end of liberal humanism is at hand - I am my own god and I shall have no other god before me. Therefore, I will surround myself with like-minded gods who will not tread on my autonomy and will in fact enforce it on others.
Divisions in belief raise questions and discourage my god-ward trajectory - so all divisions must be stamped out, by whatever force necessary. And since this freedom will be "good" for all, anyone who stands in the way of it must be a monster. Silencing them, destroying them, is a gift to humanity.
These are the beginnings of my thoughts on a part of the elephant that I'm blindly feeling. I appreciate your thoughts!
Time is like an accordion for the heart...expanding and contracting with joy and pain. It all feels quite surreal, indeed. Memories of the pain of past wars on the faces of grandparents, uncles and fathers-- keep popping up for me these days. Thanks for the phrase "Intersectional Imperialism"-- it's spot on. Punishment for any divergence from or difference of opinion will be enforced no matter what. I can't help but feel like the Woke missed the chance to do their homework for humanity but the sane in-betweeners still haven't found their backbones again either. Who DESERVES punishment exactly? Who are we to say? This, that. Either, or. Wrong, right. It certainly feels like we've spent an eternity playing out that boring story.
I feel angry at leftists for focusing on Putin instead of NATO'S provocations that led to this war. Many leftists seem okay with ignoring the history of the proxy gov that was installed in 2014, the fascist elements that continued to grow, and the people who have died in Donbass, while virtue signaling their anti-war position. If leftists are truly anti-war, shouldn't they be holding NATO/US accountable? I think they should, and this is not what I am seeing. Putin demonization is everywhere.
i'm starting to get some serious pre-WWI vibes from our all-panic-all-the-time zeitgeist. what is it about new centuries, do they not really get going until everyone picks a side and decides that mass hysteria and mass murder are just the thing to get the blood flowing? (in both senses)
how many pre-WWI intellectuals, artists, journalists etc thought a nice, quick and easy war would provide glory and "meaning" and re-energize their societies with all that rich martial anger and energy? it seems that humans are so desperate to attach themselves to a historical cause (what Ernest Becker called an "immortality project") that they'd rather watch the world burn than face their own ultimate irrelevance.
or maybe this is just how new worlds are born, atop a mountain of skulls and bones from the previous world?
Here in NZ we're still experiencing government mandates and other measures. There was a protest that grew into a freedom village camped on parliament grounds for 3 weeks until the police came in with riot gear and tear gas and cleared everybody out. About a week before that there'd been articles put out by law experts saying there was nothing legally keeping them from doing so, essentially softening up public awareness for when it happened.
I recently moved out of the house I'd been living in, the friend I was there with is still trying to find somewhere else. Things with the owners were just getting worse quite quickly. Someone I know was visiting family over the weekend, their step-dad came home drunk, started a fight and put my friend in hospital. All of which is to say that it feels like War - as an energy or a being - is entering the world more and more at this time.
Some friends of mine suffered a miscarriage earlier this year, a little girl who would have received so much love. And since then, and more and more with what's happening in Ukraine, I've been wondering what to do with it I guess, with the fact that we live in a world where these things happen, where this level of pain and suffering takes place. I don't feel like there's an answer, but I do feel like it's up to us (to those of us able to, ie living in relative health and safety) to find ways to thrive, to experience and bring more joy into the world, to live lives of beauty, in the midst of a world where these things happen.
I like - and am learning more about - what Bayo Akomolafe says about making sanctuary, finding places and ways to create mutual flourishing in the world. I also like what Gordon White says about praying peace, being peace in a sense first and then praying it / offering it to/ for the world. And what Connor Habib has to say about not allowing War into our field, denying its right to exist I think he says.
At any rate I feel like in the midst of all this pain taking place, even though seeing it causes us pain also, I feel like what we're called to do is to move through that pain back to heart coherence, back to peace and joy and to make the world a better place in the ways that we can, even if just by not allowing more War into our world.
The big issue of our generation is meaning. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and Tarski's Indefinability Theorem proved that all systems of meaning are based on unproveable assumptions- base premises we can't prove without relation to other base premises.
This knowledge- that Truth is seated in the deep mind or the soul or instinct or experience- has not been made very public. Most are still taught that mathematics is a discipline of facts. 2+2=4. In mathematics, however, the statement 2+2=4 is begging the question. What is 2? What is plus? What is equals? What do they mean? And the most rigorous logic shows that the base concepts of numbers and sets and operations are somewhat beyond the scope of logic. There's a reason so many mathematicians go nuts- Godel starved himself, Kaczynski mailed bombs. True logic requires questioning everything.
I believe the fundamental point of religion and culture is to establish base premises for life. One thing I've learned as I've aged is that an abundance of choices makes people very upset. People want to choose between several good options: do you want your tooth pulled on Tuesday or Friday? People do not want to be faced with an open ended like "what appointment time would you like?" And that's a question that doesn't even call into question the meaning of time or day of the week. We need to limit the endless possibilities of every second to make sense of life. And religion and culture help us there. Logically consistent systems can be built on both the premise that everything is alive and that matter is not alive.
My point here is that almost every problem I see in society is surrounded by a crisis of meaning. Everyone who is thinking is totally confused as to what is Russian or Western propaganda. The convoy situation is similarly confusing. Vaccines can be a matter of public health or of bodily autonomy depending on viewpoint. The left is in a crisis over what it means to be a woman, or a trans person, or even homosexual (same sex or same gender attraction? Is asexual a sexuality in need of protection? Is self-id enough or does there need to be some criteria to be trans?)
Social media plays into this by creating accepted definitions. "A woman has two x chromosomes" becomes hate speech by declaring the definition of woman to be "anyone who identifies as a woman". Wokeness concentrates on language, but definitions are larger than language. Any word created to describe people with intellectual disabilities inevitably becomes a slur within a generation. Languages all around the world use different words with different backgrounds or connotations to denote feminine/ female humans, but they all know who cooks and changes diapers. A Spanish speaker and and English speaker can use different slurs for Native Americans or Blacks yet the oppression is one. I'm sure every European language has slurs for the Roma and the Jews but these are not separate oppressions born out of the oppressors language in each country but a general oppression of a group defined by something beyond language.
The effort to exterminate harmful language is a broader campaign against meanings that are deemed unacceptable. This is why I am so afraid of the Metaverse and its monopoly on meaning. In a few decisions, people are seen as "terrorists" or "freedom fighters".
Strange recommendation- the last book of the Eragon series- Inheritance. It's a young adult fantasy series but I would say the end is worthy philosophy for those interested in the power of meaning and the understanding of the body that negates (self-) deception.
I think those that have planned this little economic attack have forgotten warning of "Beware of unintended consequences." This will have consequences for decades or even generations to come.
Appreciate all the comments, including to get off social media. I do consult Twitter, but only scientific/medical Twitter by those ph.d.s & MDs who questioned the SARS-COV-2 narrative - who interestingly often also are questioning the Ukraine Russian narrative. At beginning of 2020 was reading Jordan Hall & others on how we are living through a collapse of sensemaking, and then I became very aware of the Western oligarchs (who the Right call globalists, who do seem as autocratic to me as Putin, they with their transhumanism, AI, digital identity, and 4th Industrial Rev.) who think they will control the future of the world. Gordon White talks about a "dominant of wider inclusion," as the antidote? or real place we're in, a concept from Charles Fort. Bayo Akomolafe says something like what if how we respond to the crisis is a part of the crisis? I understand people's aversion to Vladimir Putin, but I wish they'd see Victoria Nuland, Ihor Kolomoysky, and the US neocons as just as worthy of aversion, instead of ignoring or accepting them as necessary figures.