A Radical Revolution of Values (..the time has come...)_

OneLove 
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Musings

Certain thoughts are prayers. 

There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body,

the soul is on its knees.

—Victor Hugo

OneLove

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Musings

“The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively”
― Bob Marley

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OneLove
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Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream

 

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(This one is for some people that I know who choose to remain imprisoned in their comfort & colossal ignorance. Truly, I am tired of trying to make you understand how the system is rigged. Hopefully, this impressive presentation will put a fucking clue in your thick-ass heads)
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OneLove
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The Martin Most Don't Know

We all know MLK as the Gandhian pacifist who stood on the side of the vilified & rejected, but what is not promoted as much (for obvious reasons) is MLK as Anti-War Rebel. He was pretty much marked for death after his anti-Vietnam speech at the Riverside Baptist church in 1967. Unlike most in leadership today (including Pres. Obama), he was no coward - he knew the monster he was up against, stared it down & paid the consequences. Take a listen to Dr Jared Ball's perspective on how the discourse of MLK has become sanitized by those who would much rather not have the public be too aware of MLK's blistering critique of systemic forces that covers the world in darkness....

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OneLove
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Remembering David Foster Wallace

If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on .

(Taken from from Wallace’s famous Kenyon College commencement address, the only public talk he ever gave on his views of life, which was eventually adapted into a slim book titled This Is Water)

Think outside the matrix.... 
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OneLove
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Stuck On Stupid

By the late 60s the music charts were filled with songs featuring social and political content. During the Vietnam War, hundreds of anti-war songs were released and more than 70 made it to the Billboard charts, with 14 occupying a spot in the top 10. Artists expressed compassion and empathy towards the plight of others, and they were propelled to the top by an equally empathetic audience. Then... 

 Listening to the radio in these times is a constant WTF is this?! Where did the originality go? I'm kinda tired of the self-referential, over-hyped, hyper-sexualized & grossly materialistic music that is polluting our airwaves. There is so much that is wrong in our world yet our most popular musicians choose to say nothing of substance unlike the musicians of generations past. Shit like "Sexy & I know It" is as deep as it will go as long as big media corporations control what is released and promoted....& as long as some of our artists stay stuck on stupid.
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OneLove
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Poet's Nook: "Touchscreen" by Marshall Davis Jones

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 Introducing the new Apple I person complete with multitouch
doesn’t it feel good to touch?
doesn’t it feel good to touch?

compatible with your iPod and your iPad
doesn’t it feel good to touch?
doesn’t it feel good to touch?
your life is an app
your strife is an app
your wife is an app
doesn’t it feel good to touch?
doesn’t it feel good to touch?

my world has become so digital
I have forgotten what that feels like 
it was difficult to connect when friends formed cliques
now it’s even more difficult to connect
now that clicks form friends
But who am I to judge
I face Facebook
more than books face me
hoping to
book face-to-faces
update my status
420 spaces
to prove I’m still breathing
failure to do this daily
means my whole web wide world would forget that I exist
but with 3000 friends online
only five I can count in real life
why wouldn’t I spend more time in a world where there are more people that ‘like’ me
Wouldn’t you?
Here, it doesn’t matter
if I’m an amateur person
as long as I have a ‘pro’ file
my smile is 50% genuine
50% genuine HD
You would need Blu-rays to read what is really me
but I’m not that focused
10 tabs open
hopin’
my problems are resolved with a 1500 by 1600 resolution
provin’ there is an error in this evolution
doubled over we used to sit in treetops
till we swung down to stand upright
then someone slipped a disc
now we’re doubled over at desktops from the garden of Eden
to the branches of Macintosh
apple picking has always come at a great cost
iPod iMac iPhone iChat
I can do all of these things without making eye contact
We used to sprint to pick and store blackberries
now we run to the sprint store to pick Blackberries
it’s scary
can’t hear the sound of mother nature speaking over all this tweeting
and our ability to feel along with it is fleeting
You’d think these headphone jacks inject into flesh
the way we connect to disconnect
power on
till we are powerless
they have us love drugged
Like e-pills
so we E*TRADE
email
e-motion
like e-commerce
because now money can buy love
for 995 a month
click
to proceed to checkout
click
to x out where our hearts once where
click
I’ve uploaded this hug I hope she gets it
click
I’m spending time with my wife I hope she’s logged in
click
I’m holding my daughter over a Skype conference call while she’s crying in the crib in the next room
click
so when my phone goes off of my hip iTouch iTouch iTouch and iTouch because in a world
Where laughter is never heard
And voices are only read
we’re so desperate to feel
that we hope our Technologic can reverse the universe
until the screens touch us back
and maybe one day they will
when our technology is advanced enough …
to make us human again

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Powerful..When history books are written 30 years from now about the present time we are in, it will be clear to the reader that the times were indeed dark on every level....

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 OneLove
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The Myth of Human Progress by Chris Hedges

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
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The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.Illustration by Mr. Fish 
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Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.
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“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”
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“If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”
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Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.
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Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.
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“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”
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And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.
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“Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said. “There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun—would disappear.”
“We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring,” Wright said. “It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.”
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“If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea,” Wright said.
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OneLove
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The Responsibility of Privilege

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This is a great interview. Since reading "Necessary Illusions" many moons ago, I have been a fan of his books. Like Slavoj Zizek & Cornel West, he tells it like it is.

Absorb..
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OneLove
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The Hula Hoop Theory of History by Morris Berman

Above all, no zeal.
– Talleyrand

There is a curious rhythm to human affairs, or perhaps more specifically, to Western history.  Some movement or idea comes along, and everyone gets swept up in its wake.  This is it, then; this is the Answer we’ve been looking for.  All of those previous answers were wrong; now, at long last, we’re on the right track.  In the fullness of time, of course, this shiny new idea loses its luster, betrays us, or even results in the death of millions.  So apparently, we were deceived.  But wait: here’s the true new idea, the one we should have followed all along.  This is the Answer we’ve been looking for.  Etc.
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The American writer, Eric Hoffer, described this syndrome roughly sixty years ago in a book that also generated a lot of zeal (for a short time, anyway), The True Believer.  People convert quite easily, observed Hoffer; they switch from one ism to another, from Catholicism to Marxism to whatever is next on the horizon.  The belief system runs its course, then another one takes its place.  What is significant is the energy involved, not the particular target, which could be anything, really.  For what drives this engine is the need for psychological reassurance, for Meaning with a capital M–a comprehensive system of belief that explains everything.  There is a feeling, largely unacknowledged, that without this we are lost; that life would have no purpose, and history no meaning; that both (as Shakespeare put it) would amount to little more than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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I call this the Hula Hoop Theory of History, but one could also label it the Pet Rock Theory, or any other craze that grabs our attention for a week or a century.  It has a lot in common with the skeptical thinking of the sixteenth-century philosopher Montaigne, who had a great influence on Eric Hoffer, among others.  In his Essays, Montaigne pointed out that the new sciences of Copernicus and Paracelsus claimed that the ancient sciences of Aristotle and Ptolemy were false.  But how long, he argued, before some future scientist comes along, and says the same thing about Copernicus and Paracelsus?  Do we ever really know the truth once and for all?

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One might also call this the Drunken Sailor Theory of History, I suppose.  Reflecting on the first flush of the French Revolution, William Wordsworth wrote: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.”  After Robespierre, the Terror, and the rivers of blood that flowed through the streets of Paris, however, a sober Talleyrand could only comment that what the human race needed, above anything else, was to stay clear of zeal.  The path from bliss to barbarism may not be linear, but it does seem to be fairly common, historically speaking.
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The latest treatise in the Montaigne-Hoffer school of history is that of the British scholar John Gray, Black Mass.  Gray draws liberally on the work of the American historian Carl Becker, whose Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) has never been surpassed as an analysis of modernity.  Becker claimed that the notion of redemption that lay at the heart of Christianity was recast by the philosophers of the French Enlightenment in terms of progress, or secular salvation.  Enlightenment utopianism, in a word, was the transformation of Christian eschatology into the belief in the perfectibility of man–heaven on earth, as it were.  This would be the Second Coming, the defeat of ignorance and evil (= sin) by means of reliable knowledge, science and technology in particular.
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In Gray’s view, the modern “secular fundamentalisms”–Jacobinism, Bolshevism, Fascism, and most recently, globalization–followed directly from this transformation.  The result has been satanic–a black or inverted mass (i.e., one recited backwards)–in that these pseudo-religions have all caused a world of harm.  The one idea common to all of them is that progress and perfectibility are within our grasp, and can be attained through an historical process whereby true knowledge will defeat ignorance (evil).  Thus the world, and our psyches, are saved, no less in the modern secular world than they were claimed to be in the medieval Christian one, because history itself is imbued with Meaning.
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Sad to say, the first three of these secular religions proved, in the fullness of time, not to be the Answer but rather the God that failed; and globalization (Thomas Friedman and his devotees notwithstanding) is in the process of going the same route, revealing itself to be a “false dawn.”  Of course, says Gray, once globalization and neoliberalism are finally exposed for what they are, and take their proper place on the scrap heap of history, it will hardly be the case that we shall abandon notions of progress, utopia, and Meaning in history.  Not a chance.  We in the West will have to find another hula hoop, another pet rock, because as a Christian civilization we are simply unable to live without the myth of redemption.  Hence, he concludes, the “cycle of order and anarchy will never end.” The tragedy is that we “prefer the romance of a meaningless quest to coping with difficulties that can never be finally overcome.”  Hence, “the violence of faith looks set to shape the coming century.”
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At the present time, it’s not clear what the next hula hoop will be; but I’m not sure it matters all that much.  If the Montaigne-Hoffer-Gray school of historical analysis is correct, what is certain is that there will be no derailing the zeal in advance, no stopping the next ideological-religious binge at the second martini, so to speak.  The word “some” has very little meaning in the world of secular fundamentalism; for us, it’s all or nothing.  “Man cannot make a worm,” wrote Montaigne, “yet he will make gods by the dozen.”
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For it is all a kind of shamanism, in a way, an attempt to become whole through magic.  We are all broken, after all; that is why the promise of redemption has such a powerful hold on us.  “I am he who puts together,” declared one Mazatec shaman, some years ago.  It finally  comes down to a (misguided) attempt at healing, which is reinforced by tribal practice (commonly known as groupthink).  I recall attending a conference on postmodernism in the 1990s and being struck by how similar the lectures were, in form, to those of Communist Party members of the 1930s.  The “holy names” were different–one cited de Man and Derrida instead of Marx and Lenin–but the glazed eyes and the mantra-like repetition of politically approved phrases were very much the same.  Truth be told, I have observed the same hypnotic behavior at all types of academic conferences, from feminism to computer science.  You watch, you listen, and you wonder: When will we finally wake up?  And you know the horrible truth: never.  In effect, we shall continue to erect statues to Napoleon, but never, or rarely, to Montaigne.  This much is clear.
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Which brings me to what I consider the bottom line, namely the structure of the brain.  The frontal lobes, the large neocortex that governs rational thinking and logical processes, is a relative latecomer on the scene, in evolutionary terms.  The limbic system, which is the center of impulse and emotion, has been around much longer.  The conflict between the two is perhaps best illustrated by the case of the alcoholic sitting at a bar, staring at a frosty stein of beer in front of him.  The neocortex says No; the limbic system says Go.  Statistically, most drunks die of alcohol poisoning or cirrhosis of the liver; very few escape from the siren song of the limbic brain.  As Goethe once put it, “the world is not logical; it is psycho-logical.”  And that is to put it quite mildly, it seems to me.
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We will not escape the ravages of climate change; we shall not avoid the economic and ecological disasters that are integral to global capitalism; not be able to avert an oil crisis, an energy crisis, or a food and water crisis that will become extreme when the world population finally arrives at 10 or 11 billion, by mid-century.  These things are not going to be resolved by reason, by the neocortex, no matter how many articles are published on these subjects in learned journals or popular magazines.  And they certainly can’t be resolved by the limbic brain, whose function is indulgence, not restraint.  Hence, it is a fair guess that we shall start doing things differently only when there is no other choice; and even then, we shall undoubtedly cast our efforts in the form of a shiny new and improved hula hoop, the belief system that will finally be the true one, after all of those false starts; the one we should have been following all along.  What to call it?  Catastrophism, perhaps.  You can consider this the founding document.
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OneLove
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The Great Bell Chant

(Read by Thich Nath Hanh, chanted by brother Phap Niem - Quite a beautiful, meditative piece)
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