Given this post's title, i thought you were gonna go somewhere else. Or at least link your thinking to the nihilism of Louis XV's reputed statement "Après moi, le déluge." While scholars argue over the exact intent, it's generally used to express the kind of selfish nihilism of the rich and powerful and which, arguably, runs strongly through the likes of Trump and his obedient followers. And such an attitude exists in stark opposition to the mutualism you discuss and to which i would add the ethic we find expressed by the Haudenosaunee: "In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation..."
These ethics also contrast with Wilde's notion of "cultivated leisure" which i think a kind of utopian thinking that is, to say the least, unhelpful. You seem to imply an optimism about AI (if not also, by implication, automation more generally) leading to what Wilde imagines. And, while i agree entirely with freedom from drudgery (and the "bullshit jobs" that Graeber names well), i don't think it is puritanical to hold on to some notion of work though, in a different political-economic system , it may not be experienced as what today we mean by "work." I think of a story I'm fond of telling as well as Ursula K. Le Guin's remarkable work, Always Coming Home, in which she imagines an anarchist(y) post-apocalyptic civilization that could be a model for the mutualism to which you refer. And i'm a fan of both Kropotkin and Bookchin, so i'm with you, on that thinking. As for the story, it is a Jewish tale of some antiquity:
Once there was an old woman and a young woman who would walk each day through the shtetl. One day the old woman would carry turnips from the field and young woman would carry two buckets of water. On another day, the old woman would carry grains to make kasha and the young woman would carry cucumbers to make pickles. On another day, the old woman would carry her grandchild and the young woman would carry the clean clothes from the drying line. One day the young woman asked the old woman, “what is life’s greatest burden?” The old woman answered, “to have nothing to carry.”
There's a lot going on in this wee tale, not least of which is that it's characters are women. But it's the use of the "carry" that i actually think is its greatest significance and which echoes a word with which I grew up on the Scottish side of my family: bairn, meaning infants. If we remember that "carry" is also the term we use to describe a pregnant woman (carrying a child to term, as it were), then we can compare this to another common expression for the same: to bear (a child). It's this use that gives us the Scots word bairn. (It also finds it's way in a fascinating way into the word "different"). But it's this notion of women carrying that i think we can connect to an ethic of work that isn't the drudgery of capitalist industrialism but rather the necessary activity of living a good life. This ethic also shows up in the work of feminist economic geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham and also in the growing literature about "care" (not the wellness-industrial-complex notion of self-care, but about the care that we all must call upon in our lives and which only comes from each other, e.g. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence by The Care Collective - https://bit.ly/3XSUguO).
So, maybe not your intent, but your title led me to see the profoundly destructive nihilism (that lure of the void that villains, as you write, and dictators have embraced) that runs through both the autocrats/oligarchs and climate-breakdown denialists. I not only agree with you about the moribundity of capitalism but would go one step further than your concluding thought and say that it is already failing and that the rise in authoritarianism, white supremacism, climate change denialism, are the its death throes and, while it will try and take down everything with it, i see many thousands of points of resistance in the things you write about, in the rise of a politicized movement of care, in the many new organizational forms that activists are implementing, in community gardens (which i'm about to visit while walking our dog). Rock on!
I don't have a convenient list but will happily make one. As a teaser: prominent on any list will be The Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee and known simply by most people as Highlander (founded in 1932 by Myles Horton and a couple of his colleagues as the Highlander Folk School) https://highlandercenter.org/.
This is a terrible idea... But I keep imagining, if only we could crop dust the entire world in MDMA! 😂🤦♂️
I still have not read 'How Soon is Now' but I'm keen on Bookchin, and looking forward to this thread. I imagine a breakdown into bio-regionalism will be part of the transition. That may result in areas of techmo-feudalist authoritarianism, and others implementing regenerative practices, healing and transforming in line with an idealist paradigm.
I also find myself drawn to the idea that we are experiencing a civilizational rite of passage, a metamorphosis from one stage of being to another. In metamorphosis, the caterpillar completely breaks down inside the chrysalis, into a goo of undifferentiated cells. Then, certain cells - imaginal buds, which contain the dream of flight - begin flickering to life, organizing other cells around them. These are at first attacked by the other cells, but eventually they too are included into the emergent form, until the butterfly takes shape. We are in the throes of devastation, which I can only imagine will accelerate and intensify as our caterpillar civilization completely dissolves. We may all be swept into it. That knowledge has led me to a kind of contentment, feeling that any day could be my last, and it has also freed me to focus on what I am really passionate about. If the world is really and truly fucked, then why not live into the boldest and truest version of your life. Make amends. Heal your relations. Consider the impossible. This may be how the imaginal buds are born.
Thank you, Daniel, as always, a compelling article full of depth and substance. I personally doubt that having machines doing the grunt work will liberate the masses to enjoy life. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." Alternatively, having machines do the grunt work may free-up the masses to study The Arts; creativity is the essence of individuation, discovering and cultivating the inner genius, which Michael Meade has championed eloquently and faithfully to the ancient tradition. This might be comparable to the Education available in Scandinavian countries, which Michael Moore highlighted in "Where To Invade Next". Their system is individually focused on what the young girl or boy wants to be when they grow up, and they are mentored to learn everything they'll need to know to do just that. Our Public Education evolved from a factory model that prepares workers for the daily grind: how to line-up, sit quietly, and follow orders. I don't mean to blame teachers, or anyone, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. But as we arrive at the point kairos moment, it's high time we look for more appropriate educational models, as well as the meaning of life. Perhaps the meaning of life will have to borrow some elements of the ancient world's models, i.e.- the meaning of life is preparing for death and the interval between our next incarnations. Without a true and mythologically relevant viewpoint we can make some short sighted decisions, which I suspect a lot of us feel in our maturing adulthood and elder years. Joseph Campbell was calling for new mythology to meet the technological times, yet, I felt Star Wars was overly simplistic and for all its lip service to "The Force" really failed to grasp the TAO. I felt Darth Vader should have been pulverized by a piece of the planet he'd blown up to smithereens in Episode 1; not receive absolution for taking off his helmet and seeing the errors of his ways. The destruction of whole enlightened planetary communities must entail some karmic debt. I thought Darth Vader symbolized AI personified, and once he started kneeling to a dark wizard with more evil powers, I felt the story had lost its bearings. So, not a suitable mythology for modern times.
My sense is we need a scientifically grounded mythology that uses dramatic narrative, personifies elemental and natural forces, and provides moral lessons, correctives, and profound common sense, like Aesop's Fables, or Ancient Egyptian Mythology, which is surprisingly astute and sophisticated in ways that belie the anthropological assumption about their naivete'. I champion my belief that the earth is an embryonic star, in utero, and we are akin to cells of the growing celestial being of light, undergoing the dramatic evolutionary stages that we see in human embryonic development. I.e.- about 4 billion years of evolution in 9 months. The next phase of human evolution is to discover and emulate a pattern for society and civilization to emerge and take hole on the surface of planet earth which fosters ecological health of whole cosmic organism. A mythology which reckognizes and PREPARES FOR the reality of catastrophic climate change, whether it be by comet impact, super-volcanic eruption, or human-related climate change; any civilization's days are numbered, and the great work is leaving a mark of our intellectual and technological achievements, for the survivors of this round.
Love this. I’m incorporating similarly ideas to your embryonic earth star concept into a novel I’m working on. It’s about half written, called Ayahuasca Star Child.
My belief is that machines won’t free up humans, as work tends to fill the space opened, so machines will actually make us work more, though we may prefer the working conditions. Machines will speed up work so we can do even more. Like email, which was also supposed to “free up time.” Humans like working, after all.
But machines and ai will allow us to reach new conclusions and discover new things.
Regarding the cure for capitalism or the other myriad isms that sicken us I want to refer back in another time of chaos. In China @ 400 BC in a period called the waring states time many great thinkers arose . One teacher Mo Zi , tried to diagnosis and prescribe a cure for what was harming humanity. Have you read his essay on universal love ? If not here it is. It dove tails perfectly with Steiner's necessity for brotherly love and universal empathy. https://confuciusinstitute.unl.edu/Basic%20Writings%20of%20Mo%20Tzu.pdf
I appreciate this comment, love and universal empathy is the answer, especially during natural catastrophes when communities come together and realize what matters.
I loved "How Soon is Now"! I'm skeptical that socialism is viable as a fundamental solution, because of the inherency and inescapable efficiency of markets. Markets are so inherent that every socialist/communist system has had, at least, a black market. And they're so efficient that I think there may always be places in the world that are experimenting with markets. (One wonders what it might be like for some larger consensus of nations to try to abolish all private ownership in, say, UAE, for instance.) And then wherever free-market havens exist, it seems clear to me they will attract entrepreneurs, who I would, I imagine,. be likely to produce goods and services that aroused the envy of the more avaricious people in the socialist systems -- like with the USSR, all over again.
It does seem to me that there might be some sense in trying to exert greater control over capitalism, though -- perhaps by controlling consolidations of wealth, expanding anti-trust laws -- maybe using AI to help write better regulation? I wonder, too, if it wouldn't be helpful to expand the occasions under which governments temporarily nationalize industries if they're misbehaving -- not unlike the US did with General Motors, and some of the banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis? But I think that latter practice is not likely to become common any time soon.
Ultimately, as I'd say repeatedly, one of my main go-tos for understanding lasting social change is the spread of Christianity, particularly in the West. "Christendom" ended up with a lot of blood on its hands, but it also ended up creating societies that were significant improvements on the Roman Empire in many important ways -- and doing so out of Christian ideology. It's worth noting, for example, that capitalism only really took off in Europe after the Reformation -- when a major fracturing of the churches left more people in the gaps and, arguably, the social stigma against greed weakened in the process.
I'm not suggesting that imperial approaches to dogmatic religion are the solution, I think they're a problem. But I think it's worth thinking about creating institutional "conveyor belts," as Ken Wilber puts it -- i.e., institutions that help people move from thinking based in self-interest, tribalism, and acquisitiveness into thinking that is more aperspectival, generous, and focused on cultivating the best in us and in our systems -- perhaps anarchic, wiki-fied, decentralized systems as you're alluding to, Daniel. In that vein, I think things like your online courses (which I greatly enjoy) may actually be exemplary of what we need -- and maybe prototypic of other institutions that will follow? Also things like Jordan Peterson's new university and such. (Though we'll see how that one goes.)
It seems clear to me that we're going to do climate reform the hard way. Losing infrastructure, smashing lives, losing lives -- both human and nonhuman. I'm not sure that can be avoided at this point. And it's too easy to be glib about the tragedy of that. But also, all that pain may have the socially valuable function of spurring more action -- in the difficult directions that it needs to occur, which seem to me to ultimately be toward changes in our personal interior climates, and in the communities we build as our interior climates change, and which we build to help our interior climates change.
Also, I always feel a little bit guilty when I disagree with a post like this -- like I'm being a gadfly. So I want to acknowledge that you're assembling the first, cogent argument here, and generously hosting the discussion. And I'm not! So thank you! :D
Its kinda funny but everyone with a good idea on how to turn things around (including you) remind me of that line from the movie, Mean Girls, when one of the characters tries to make a catch phrase out of the word "fetch" (as in "That's so fetch"). At one point the main mean girl turns around and says "stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen!". Not that you (and the others) should stop trying to come up with an alternative way for the horrors of today's world to unfold. I just don't think it's going to happen :(
Daniel, no time to read your article but a brief scan of it shouted “Jeremy Rifkin, the Third Industrial Revolution”…the YouTube is “dated” chronologically (6 yrs old) but amazing in its scope, imho. Watching it turned many of my preconceptions of AI upside down for a new look, and gave me hope for the gift economy…maybe check it out…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA….
Hello Daniel. You seem to think that eliminating individual property will be a solution to all of our problems. But if we look at history, whenever we’ve tried that, what we end up with in pretty short order is an elite that controls access to the communal property, leading pretty consistently to dictatorships and totalitarian systems who retain only the rhetoric of equality and fairness. Communist Russia comes to mind first, but of course there are lots of other examples. So it really doesn’t matter if you have individual ownership of wealth or communal ownership of wealth, either way an elite develops that ends up controlling the resources.
So a better issue to explore is how elites form and what to do about them. Either figure out ways to keep elites from forming (which I think is impossible) or how to keep elites from gobbling up too much control over resources.
You also mention that many traditional societies of the past were able to live without private property. Probably true, but they still had elites who often brutally controlled resources and created lots of inequality.
Also, the problem with usufruct is who gets to decide what using resources productively means. Again we have the problem of elites. Even if they start out with the best of intentions, pretty soon you have a strongman or a group that makes up rules that benefit them, under the guise of egalitarianism or usufruct or any other concept you want to substitute for it. We've seen so many examples of this throughout history.
So I don’t have any solutions to offer, but what I do want to suggest is asking a different set of questions that would put us on a more productive path forward. Thanks!
thanks for writing but I feel you are wrong. Most indigenous cultures did not have property right as we have, and certainly didn't have land title, etc. Even into modern times. When Helena Hodge went to Ladakh in the 70s, the Tibetan Buddhist people there didn't have titles to their lands but would rebuild each other's houses in case of a fire. Read about the Iroquois in NYC - they did have some sense of property rights passed through the female line (definitely the best idea). But other cultures didn't really have an idea of private property or land ownership yet worked very well for many hundreds even thousands of years.
BTW Jean Jacques Rousseau reached the same conclusion in his greatest work, "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality". And Oscar Wilde figured it out in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" too.
Clearly, our current capitalism-based system is a dead end. It is logically, and mathematically impossible to infinitely grow anything. Period. Especially an economic system that is based on a resource-extractive model. Consciously and intentionally transitioning to a more sustainable and humane model is ideal, but, in my view, unlikely. The entrenched power-elite have no inherent motivation to foster, or even allow, such a change to take place. Sadly, the most likely scenario is collapse. What follows will be determined by the survivors, and will, hopefully be something better.
“Follow the money?” Disaster capitalism? Hurricane Helene, feels energetically similar to events that happened Lahaina Hawaii (and also similarities to Paradise CA) in terms of a once in a century catastrophes, I noticed that strategically valuable land in both Hawaii and North Carolina got hit hard and many people trying to sort out all the anomalies of a storm/hurricane intensifying and were also speculating, was it natural or man-manipulated that the hurricane diverting from its path or accelerated in intensity?
What jumps out is the word "anomalous," in so many of these situations, is it just extreme weather, and yet in Maui, flash drought and anomalous 85 MPH winds perfectly timed to create an unprecedented inferno from Dora 500 miles away.
I am remembering that both for Lahaina and now North Carolina, that locals just didn’t want to sell their property to developers – I remember reading at the time, in Lahaina’s case or you couldn’t build the smart city infrastructure in Laihana unless there were certain conditions (do not remember my course, my apologies). However - just google:“Hawaii wildfires, no evidence fires set to create 15 minute smart city” or “directed energy weapon and other false claims go viral,” and yet if you look this up, there was something called AFRL Directed Energy Directorate on Maui that locals talked about: https://afresearchlab.com/technology/air-force-maui-optical-and-supercomputing-amos-site/
You get a different story if you look at local first hand accounts, then mainstream legacy media reports. if you ask locals who were in Lahaina a year ago, they observed “anomalies” mentioning how could Dora do that damage if it was 500 miles away, How do fires jump over water to burn boats? (of course politic fact will say fires can hop) Why was there no warning with one of the best warning systems in the world here on the islands? Why was the best real-estate in Hawaii destroyed? When is it time to ask questions?” Obviously poor land management played in this catastrophe, and corporate diverting of water for sugar canes, away from indigenous Lahaina.
Smart tech also was a problem, From another local post, “Hawaiian Electric was busy installing smart meters while neglecting fire-risk mitigation. Strangely, satellite images show the fires all began at the same time. Is that even possible? There were so many failures schools closed and children were sent home. Many parents remained at work, and because the warning sirens didn't go off, many children were burned alive in their own homes.
According to Gov. Josh Green, the warning sirens may have been "immobilized" by heat from the fire, but the exact cause for the failure is still under investigation. However, Maui also has a cellphone alert system. You may recall Maui residents received a false alert on their phones about an inbound missile threat five years ago. Even if the sirens had been destroyed by fire, why wasn't a cellphone alert dispatched?
In Lahaina, most of the buildings were destroyed, including many of the homes of its 13,000 residents, many of whom are indigenous and have lived there for generations.
Fast forward to this year. I’m heartbroken over Asheville because I have friends and I was just in North Carolina a few months ago visiting Asheville, Boon, and shocked to see the extreme devastation, I will admit that I’m a person who is very interested when things “don’t add up,” and I’m very interested in “coincidences.” I also "follow the money." Kings mountain in North Carolina has one of the largest lithium deposits. I’m also shocked to learn North Carolina has a town called Spruce Pines – and locals say the residents wouldn’t sell their land for the tech developers who already made deals, A tiny town just got slammed by Helene. It could massively disrupt the tech industr. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helene-quartz-microchips-solar-panels-spruce-pine
Does the modern economy rests on a single road in North Carolina where Helene collapsed most bridges to Spruce Pine, NC?
Every crystalline silicon photovoltaic module and semiconductor chip made in the world today relies on this mining district in North Carolina.
Wow, obvious huge financial interests in North Carolina. Obviously our earth is out of balance, and our solutions which are capital-based are also out of balance – I will admit we are so advanced in our technology, but we don’t even understand where our tech is sourced, nor the supply chain, and sometimes yesterday’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s proven science.
No landlines North Carolina? The ones that remain aren't POTS but rely on power? Gone is the resilience of a phone system to withstand natural disasters and power outages –cell towers go down with hurricanes and wildfires, and when the power is out, people’s only resource in California for connectivity was to go to the home of the person who had an old school phone that did not require power – and that landline also offered internet.
"A review of alerts issued by the county and Paradise police in the hours after the fire started on Nov. 8 shows that, inexplicably, no evacuation orders were issued by the county to one 6-square-mile swath of the city. Another 4-mile stretch of town received merely a warning; the actual order to flee came more than seven hours later, long after homes were reduced to ashes."
Yes, big business and disaster capitalism may even leverage concerns with the climate crisis to promote solutions that make things worse Just see a 2017 solution from telecom, “When disaster strikes, flying cell towers could aid. Base stations carried by drones would form an ad hoc network and connect first responders."
I am concerned about the focus on cell towers as opposed to more resilient options such as buried fiberoptics that withstand natural disasters better. People are desperate after a disaster especially when they lose their lifeline and connectivity. Yes Elon Musk offering Starlink in North Carolina, but I fiberoptics infrastructure may be the sustainable solution, especially given the holes punched in the ozone layer from the Starlink rockets. People worry that cell towers next to homes will be seen as the answer, when better options exist, not knowing about mold interaction nor health issues they had previously avoided without the tech. EMFs stimulate the release of mycotoxins: EMFs may also trigger the mold spores floating around in your body to release more mycotoxins and increase toxic burdens.
“With the recent hurricane that blew through Florida we all have learned a few things about electric vehicles and electric bicycles and their batteries. When they get wet… they explode like a bomb! Via: Rich Fields
With the recent hurricane that blew through Florida we all have learned a few things about electric vehicles and electric bicycles and their batteries. When they get wet… they explode like a bomb! The attached photo is a next door neighbor’s Electric Vehicle. There are dozens of these torched cars around our area.
It’s torched because the batteries exploded because the rising water got the batteries wet (that simple) and it could happen to you or a loved one.
Christine and I are displaced from our house (it was completely flooded) and are staying with friends. Their electric bicycles (4 of them) have all exploded in the last two days. Each time almost setting their home on fire. Stay away from these electric vehicles and the electric bikes."
thanks for this complex post... a lot of information. I do not know if these storms were somehow orchestrated by technologies such as HAARP, but I find it doubtful that this would be part of an insidious plan. I could be wrong however. It reminds me of the theories that the Iraq war was really a cover to recover the Star Gate and information on ancient aliens... Who knows at this point? Different timeless? "Quantum jumping?"
Hi Daniel, I would have liked your comment, but substack wouldn't let me! Very interesting question was the iraq war really a cover for a star gate? I have no idea, but there was an article on this, I think there is a lot we don't know: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/nibiru-iraq-bush-blair-wmd-18850291
To ask if Capitalism will fail is imo equal to asking if greed and self-interest will ever end. How do you envision either one of these taking place? Are we not already moving toward Oscar Wilde's ideal of greater leisure with the approach of digital currency, guaranteed annual incomes and social credit scores administered by the state (based on desired conformities). Will these solve anything really? I suspect that our problems have little to do with external systems, and more with internal spiritual processes and deeply engrained social conditioning, that serve the exploiters, owners and would be rulers of humanity. It is the bound and chained mind that is the ultimate capital sought by them. For me nationalism and sources of identity based on anything other than our common humanity, is a far greater enemy and obstacle to human progress and survival than Capitalism. My reading of Steiner is that the solution to our situation is greater empathy for every other human being equal to what we feel for ourselves or our families. He calls for also for a greater cosmopolitanism.
Here are some notes based on an anthroposophical essay on the spirit/ Michaelic and task of our times:
1) Living thinking –thinking and feeling that has an inquisitive attentiveness that presses on to essences, beings, and ideals. It is thinking in higher form which departs from dead facts into living activity not a thing but a deed. Asking: Who or what lies behind the words? What thoughts are Michaelic? Why do we seek? To know the spiritual foundation of things? Living thoughts are imbued with will and burn with a fiery, indomitable force within us. , Ideal = a standard of beauty, perfection of excellence (followed, aimed for) Ideals transcend concepts
2) Universality -Cosmopolitanism – fusion of cultures, preparing the soil for seeds that will eventually lead to Philadelphia of brotherly love , New Jerusalem ideal community
Cosmopolitanism= common to the world , an ideology that all ethnic groups belong to a single community based on shared morality. The universal in the human being. Every thought or activity that serves only individual groups or nations, like nationalism tribalism is sub-Michael .
We embrace and forgive all peoples and nations seeing them as important essential facets of our picture of humanity. That means Islamic nations, Christian nations, Socialist nations, third world nations etc. Our individual uniqueness, our God given self is the gift to all of humanity and humanity in all its sufferings and successes is the gift to our unique selves. Our individuality is not for ourselves but for the whole. This is not selfish individualism. Our individuality our unfallen, divine spark shared in common with all humanity . When we see this aspect of each other we practice of Christ and Michaelic activity and seeing. When we act on this we are imbued with God’s will forces.
3 ) Mirroring the highest in each other.
Being able to see the profound price, pain and suffering individuals must endure for being who they are and having to fit in, to incarnate the self. In our age we are left alone to discover ourselves. The world does not offer a home for the soul of the individual seeking self-realization, in birthing their unique gift to humanity. Our loneliness is for a lack of spirit recognition and spirit acknowledgment. The world does not offer a home for the soul of the individual seeking self-realization, in birthing their unique gift to humanity. Our loneliness is for a lack of spirit recognition and spirit acknowledgment.
Who has really recognized us? Who has seen our deepest nature? By whom have we been truly acknowledged? Can you see and feel the cry of the spirit, the seeking soul within your family members, your classmates, or co-workers? Can you see beyond the soul sicknesses in those around you to he hungering individual who is, in his or her more or less enlightened way, seeking for the fulfillment only the spirit can bring? Can you have compassion for souls in diverse conditions of soul and spirit sickness? Do you and I believe in our neighbor?
Do we hold the individuals around us captive to their pasts?
Do they belong to the wrong political party, religion, or social class?
Have we seen them fail countless times?
Do we think them hopeless and never able to progress or change?
Do we ally ourselves with the adversary of our soul’s progress?
Do we acknowledge the Buddha nature or Christ within them? If we do we will not lose hope for them, we will not hold them to their past sins. We will forgive them and be the person that helps them see the next step forward on their path. If so, then you can mirror the highest in the other and are a co-worker with Michael .When we are recognized by another on the level of spirit we naturally awaken to our latent potential and connect more surely with our unique life purposes. “We all know when we have been seen by others”. Our ability to see and be seen is the essential element in affirming each individual is monumental for the successful support of Michael’s activity in the World. Without it there will be very little spiritual progress"
4) Reverse ritual - transforming cosmic intelligence through human intelligence and experience
"In our journey of reclaiming cosmic wisdom transformed by human intelligence Parzival is our guide. He teaches us to approach our knightly tasks as profound acts of egoic inwardness. The fool, the diamond in the rough who became the Grail King by “piloting a paradigm shift”. He entered the World of Knighthood in a novel way, with innocence, clumsiness, and ignorance. All his realizations/ initiations are through trial and error. In contrast the old order of knighthood sparkled and dazzled but was inwardly corrupt. The new order appears chaotic and but is internally “diamantine” blundering without refinement Attracted by shining knights ,he follows them without proper clothing or arms, without the usual training , he is initiated through all he encounters on his journey with the knights, cuts and polishes him and achieves the grail. “he gets bad advice, meets good and bad people, denounces god the four years later surrenders to God’s will , he stumbles on steadfastly , blunder after blunder he suffers , acquires his own armor He encounters all the pitfalls encountered on the path of consciousness’ soul toward spirit self “Each person he meets , each situation he encounters is significant’
“The path Parzival opened for us is not as much a path as an anti-path. It begs us to follow the solitary path each of us is called to blaze by the unique nature of our individuality, which is required for personal development in the consciousness-soul age in which we live.
This will never be achieved by adhering to outer authorities, no matter how enlightened they may be.” The mores of which were defined by the church or state have lost their power over us.
“The moral imperative of our time and the future lies in our power to redefine reality, to live true to what we know as soul and spiritual beings , as knowers of ourselves, no longer beholden to the knowledge experts of the past. We should approach his story with the “right questions” and “persevere with them” (Just as he did) One question is What is the difference between human and cosmic intelligence? Cosmic intelligence once transmitted becomes “earthly”. Any wisdom that can be applied mechanistically and is expressed as outer law is earthed Cosmic intelligence.
Human intelligence is cosmic intelligence transformed by human experience, into inner guiding principles which are written through and through with compassion, mercy and understanding. They are lifted back up to Cosmos. Christ Jesus enlightened the whole of the hierarchal spiritual world by choosing to enter into human experience of suffering and death. The spiritual cosmos was ignorant of the majestic nature of the human dramas apart from the example of Christ. Doing so he elevated our suffering, made of prayer of them, made death not an end but the ultimate victory and a new beginning.
The spiritual world waits for humanity to complete the task Jesus Christ began- uplifting cosmic intelligence by transforming it into human intelligence. This is what Steiner calls the Reverse Ritual.”
I can only hope that someone has a good answer that isn’t delusional, or self aggrandizing. My current suspicion is the interconnected and interoceptive potential of the quantum… or something like that. Spooky action at a distance.
As Martin Prechtel elegantly reminds us regularly, If the earth is sick, we shall be too. We have lost our memory of how to live well with the Earth. We cannot live well with each other until we figure out how to again live in Right Relation with the earth. Thats it. Top priority. Lets get to work. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira offers excellent advice. I would love for you to have her on for an interview. Her book Hospicing Modernity is essential reading.
I sense an evolution in consciousness and a 20'th monkey type of advent will be antecedent to a shift out of the corruptions of capitalism and into a care economy and government in service to the greatest good for all. Life and the failures of capitalism seem to be the teacher. https://richardflyer.substack.com/s/birthing-the-symbiotic-age-new-book Have you checked out Symbiotic Culture and Richard Flyer? Influenced by Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne and the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka - I am in the process of investigating this.
I agree “that Capitalism is a moribund system, destined to fail, and we should get to work designing an alternative based on principles of social ecology and mutual aid.”
How I can imagine this would work would be if there is a major global economic collapse or global youth revolutions or some horrific disaster that threatens both rich and poor. Yes, extremes could awaken people into action.
Until then, I am happy to be living in Mexico 🇲🇽 where we now have a leftist female president…an environmental scientist educated in Berkeley and Stanford...where the legislature is 50/50 men and women…that could have an effect on the collective and President Kamala. At least that’s my dream! 🙏🏻
Given this post's title, i thought you were gonna go somewhere else. Or at least link your thinking to the nihilism of Louis XV's reputed statement "Après moi, le déluge." While scholars argue over the exact intent, it's generally used to express the kind of selfish nihilism of the rich and powerful and which, arguably, runs strongly through the likes of Trump and his obedient followers. And such an attitude exists in stark opposition to the mutualism you discuss and to which i would add the ethic we find expressed by the Haudenosaunee: "In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation..."
These ethics also contrast with Wilde's notion of "cultivated leisure" which i think a kind of utopian thinking that is, to say the least, unhelpful. You seem to imply an optimism about AI (if not also, by implication, automation more generally) leading to what Wilde imagines. And, while i agree entirely with freedom from drudgery (and the "bullshit jobs" that Graeber names well), i don't think it is puritanical to hold on to some notion of work though, in a different political-economic system , it may not be experienced as what today we mean by "work." I think of a story I'm fond of telling as well as Ursula K. Le Guin's remarkable work, Always Coming Home, in which she imagines an anarchist(y) post-apocalyptic civilization that could be a model for the mutualism to which you refer. And i'm a fan of both Kropotkin and Bookchin, so i'm with you, on that thinking. As for the story, it is a Jewish tale of some antiquity:
Once there was an old woman and a young woman who would walk each day through the shtetl. One day the old woman would carry turnips from the field and young woman would carry two buckets of water. On another day, the old woman would carry grains to make kasha and the young woman would carry cucumbers to make pickles. On another day, the old woman would carry her grandchild and the young woman would carry the clean clothes from the drying line. One day the young woman asked the old woman, “what is life’s greatest burden?” The old woman answered, “to have nothing to carry.”
There's a lot going on in this wee tale, not least of which is that it's characters are women. But it's the use of the "carry" that i actually think is its greatest significance and which echoes a word with which I grew up on the Scottish side of my family: bairn, meaning infants. If we remember that "carry" is also the term we use to describe a pregnant woman (carrying a child to term, as it were), then we can compare this to another common expression for the same: to bear (a child). It's this use that gives us the Scots word bairn. (It also finds it's way in a fascinating way into the word "different"). But it's this notion of women carrying that i think we can connect to an ethic of work that isn't the drudgery of capitalist industrialism but rather the necessary activity of living a good life. This ethic also shows up in the work of feminist economic geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham and also in the growing literature about "care" (not the wellness-industrial-complex notion of self-care, but about the care that we all must call upon in our lives and which only comes from each other, e.g. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence by The Care Collective - https://bit.ly/3XSUguO).
So, maybe not your intent, but your title led me to see the profoundly destructive nihilism (that lure of the void that villains, as you write, and dictators have embraced) that runs through both the autocrats/oligarchs and climate-breakdown denialists. I not only agree with you about the moribundity of capitalism but would go one step further than your concluding thought and say that it is already failing and that the rise in authoritarianism, white supremacism, climate change denialism, are the its death throes and, while it will try and take down everything with it, i see many thousands of points of resistance in the things you write about, in the rise of a politicized movement of care, in the many new organizational forms that activists are implementing, in community gardens (which i'm about to visit while walking our dog). Rock on!
thank you... would be interested in a list of the orgs of resistance/activism that inspire you.
I don't have a convenient list but will happily make one. As a teaser: prominent on any list will be The Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee and known simply by most people as Highlander (founded in 1932 by Myles Horton and a couple of his colleagues as the Highlander Folk School) https://highlandercenter.org/.
This is a terrible idea... But I keep imagining, if only we could crop dust the entire world in MDMA! 😂🤦♂️
I still have not read 'How Soon is Now' but I'm keen on Bookchin, and looking forward to this thread. I imagine a breakdown into bio-regionalism will be part of the transition. That may result in areas of techmo-feudalist authoritarianism, and others implementing regenerative practices, healing and transforming in line with an idealist paradigm.
I also find myself drawn to the idea that we are experiencing a civilizational rite of passage, a metamorphosis from one stage of being to another. In metamorphosis, the caterpillar completely breaks down inside the chrysalis, into a goo of undifferentiated cells. Then, certain cells - imaginal buds, which contain the dream of flight - begin flickering to life, organizing other cells around them. These are at first attacked by the other cells, but eventually they too are included into the emergent form, until the butterfly takes shape. We are in the throes of devastation, which I can only imagine will accelerate and intensify as our caterpillar civilization completely dissolves. We may all be swept into it. That knowledge has led me to a kind of contentment, feeling that any day could be my last, and it has also freed me to focus on what I am really passionate about. If the world is really and truly fucked, then why not live into the boldest and truest version of your life. Make amends. Heal your relations. Consider the impossible. This may be how the imaginal buds are born.
Beautiful! Why not?
Thank you, Daniel, as always, a compelling article full of depth and substance. I personally doubt that having machines doing the grunt work will liberate the masses to enjoy life. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." Alternatively, having machines do the grunt work may free-up the masses to study The Arts; creativity is the essence of individuation, discovering and cultivating the inner genius, which Michael Meade has championed eloquently and faithfully to the ancient tradition. This might be comparable to the Education available in Scandinavian countries, which Michael Moore highlighted in "Where To Invade Next". Their system is individually focused on what the young girl or boy wants to be when they grow up, and they are mentored to learn everything they'll need to know to do just that. Our Public Education evolved from a factory model that prepares workers for the daily grind: how to line-up, sit quietly, and follow orders. I don't mean to blame teachers, or anyone, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. But as we arrive at the point kairos moment, it's high time we look for more appropriate educational models, as well as the meaning of life. Perhaps the meaning of life will have to borrow some elements of the ancient world's models, i.e.- the meaning of life is preparing for death and the interval between our next incarnations. Without a true and mythologically relevant viewpoint we can make some short sighted decisions, which I suspect a lot of us feel in our maturing adulthood and elder years. Joseph Campbell was calling for new mythology to meet the technological times, yet, I felt Star Wars was overly simplistic and for all its lip service to "The Force" really failed to grasp the TAO. I felt Darth Vader should have been pulverized by a piece of the planet he'd blown up to smithereens in Episode 1; not receive absolution for taking off his helmet and seeing the errors of his ways. The destruction of whole enlightened planetary communities must entail some karmic debt. I thought Darth Vader symbolized AI personified, and once he started kneeling to a dark wizard with more evil powers, I felt the story had lost its bearings. So, not a suitable mythology for modern times.
My sense is we need a scientifically grounded mythology that uses dramatic narrative, personifies elemental and natural forces, and provides moral lessons, correctives, and profound common sense, like Aesop's Fables, or Ancient Egyptian Mythology, which is surprisingly astute and sophisticated in ways that belie the anthropological assumption about their naivete'. I champion my belief that the earth is an embryonic star, in utero, and we are akin to cells of the growing celestial being of light, undergoing the dramatic evolutionary stages that we see in human embryonic development. I.e.- about 4 billion years of evolution in 9 months. The next phase of human evolution is to discover and emulate a pattern for society and civilization to emerge and take hole on the surface of planet earth which fosters ecological health of whole cosmic organism. A mythology which reckognizes and PREPARES FOR the reality of catastrophic climate change, whether it be by comet impact, super-volcanic eruption, or human-related climate change; any civilization's days are numbered, and the great work is leaving a mark of our intellectual and technological achievements, for the survivors of this round.
quite a comment! Almost an epic sci fi film in itself. - D
Love this. I’m incorporating similarly ideas to your embryonic earth star concept into a novel I’m working on. It’s about half written, called Ayahuasca Star Child.
My belief is that machines won’t free up humans, as work tends to fill the space opened, so machines will actually make us work more, though we may prefer the working conditions. Machines will speed up work so we can do even more. Like email, which was also supposed to “free up time.” Humans like working, after all.
But machines and ai will allow us to reach new conclusions and discover new things.
Regarding the cure for capitalism or the other myriad isms that sicken us I want to refer back in another time of chaos. In China @ 400 BC in a period called the waring states time many great thinkers arose . One teacher Mo Zi , tried to diagnosis and prescribe a cure for what was harming humanity. Have you read his essay on universal love ? If not here it is. It dove tails perfectly with Steiner's necessity for brotherly love and universal empathy. https://confuciusinstitute.unl.edu/Basic%20Writings%20of%20Mo%20Tzu.pdf
I love Mo Zi's essay on universal love! Reminder that nothing ever really changes.
I appreciate this comment, love and universal empathy is the answer, especially during natural catastrophes when communities come together and realize what matters.
I loved "How Soon is Now"! I'm skeptical that socialism is viable as a fundamental solution, because of the inherency and inescapable efficiency of markets. Markets are so inherent that every socialist/communist system has had, at least, a black market. And they're so efficient that I think there may always be places in the world that are experimenting with markets. (One wonders what it might be like for some larger consensus of nations to try to abolish all private ownership in, say, UAE, for instance.) And then wherever free-market havens exist, it seems clear to me they will attract entrepreneurs, who I would, I imagine,. be likely to produce goods and services that aroused the envy of the more avaricious people in the socialist systems -- like with the USSR, all over again.
It does seem to me that there might be some sense in trying to exert greater control over capitalism, though -- perhaps by controlling consolidations of wealth, expanding anti-trust laws -- maybe using AI to help write better regulation? I wonder, too, if it wouldn't be helpful to expand the occasions under which governments temporarily nationalize industries if they're misbehaving -- not unlike the US did with General Motors, and some of the banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis? But I think that latter practice is not likely to become common any time soon.
Ultimately, as I'd say repeatedly, one of my main go-tos for understanding lasting social change is the spread of Christianity, particularly in the West. "Christendom" ended up with a lot of blood on its hands, but it also ended up creating societies that were significant improvements on the Roman Empire in many important ways -- and doing so out of Christian ideology. It's worth noting, for example, that capitalism only really took off in Europe after the Reformation -- when a major fracturing of the churches left more people in the gaps and, arguably, the social stigma against greed weakened in the process.
I'm not suggesting that imperial approaches to dogmatic religion are the solution, I think they're a problem. But I think it's worth thinking about creating institutional "conveyor belts," as Ken Wilber puts it -- i.e., institutions that help people move from thinking based in self-interest, tribalism, and acquisitiveness into thinking that is more aperspectival, generous, and focused on cultivating the best in us and in our systems -- perhaps anarchic, wiki-fied, decentralized systems as you're alluding to, Daniel. In that vein, I think things like your online courses (which I greatly enjoy) may actually be exemplary of what we need -- and maybe prototypic of other institutions that will follow? Also things like Jordan Peterson's new university and such. (Though we'll see how that one goes.)
It seems clear to me that we're going to do climate reform the hard way. Losing infrastructure, smashing lives, losing lives -- both human and nonhuman. I'm not sure that can be avoided at this point. And it's too easy to be glib about the tragedy of that. But also, all that pain may have the socially valuable function of spurring more action -- in the difficult directions that it needs to occur, which seem to me to ultimately be toward changes in our personal interior climates, and in the communities we build as our interior climates change, and which we build to help our interior climates change.
Also, I always feel a little bit guilty when I disagree with a post like this -- like I'm being a gadfly. So I want to acknowledge that you're assembling the first, cogent argument here, and generously hosting the discussion. And I'm not! So thank you! :D
Its kinda funny but everyone with a good idea on how to turn things around (including you) remind me of that line from the movie, Mean Girls, when one of the characters tries to make a catch phrase out of the word "fetch" (as in "That's so fetch"). At one point the main mean girl turns around and says "stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen!". Not that you (and the others) should stop trying to come up with an alternative way for the horrors of today's world to unfold. I just don't think it's going to happen :(
I tend to agree.
But fetch happened
Daniel, no time to read your article but a brief scan of it shouted “Jeremy Rifkin, the Third Industrial Revolution”…the YouTube is “dated” chronologically (6 yrs old) but amazing in its scope, imho. Watching it turned many of my preconceptions of AI upside down for a new look, and gave me hope for the gift economy…maybe check it out…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA….
thanks for your always insightful view
Hello Daniel. You seem to think that eliminating individual property will be a solution to all of our problems. But if we look at history, whenever we’ve tried that, what we end up with in pretty short order is an elite that controls access to the communal property, leading pretty consistently to dictatorships and totalitarian systems who retain only the rhetoric of equality and fairness. Communist Russia comes to mind first, but of course there are lots of other examples. So it really doesn’t matter if you have individual ownership of wealth or communal ownership of wealth, either way an elite develops that ends up controlling the resources.
So a better issue to explore is how elites form and what to do about them. Either figure out ways to keep elites from forming (which I think is impossible) or how to keep elites from gobbling up too much control over resources.
You also mention that many traditional societies of the past were able to live without private property. Probably true, but they still had elites who often brutally controlled resources and created lots of inequality.
Also, the problem with usufruct is who gets to decide what using resources productively means. Again we have the problem of elites. Even if they start out with the best of intentions, pretty soon you have a strongman or a group that makes up rules that benefit them, under the guise of egalitarianism or usufruct or any other concept you want to substitute for it. We've seen so many examples of this throughout history.
So I don’t have any solutions to offer, but what I do want to suggest is asking a different set of questions that would put us on a more productive path forward. Thanks!
thanks for writing but I feel you are wrong. Most indigenous cultures did not have property right as we have, and certainly didn't have land title, etc. Even into modern times. When Helena Hodge went to Ladakh in the 70s, the Tibetan Buddhist people there didn't have titles to their lands but would rebuild each other's houses in case of a fire. Read about the Iroquois in NYC - they did have some sense of property rights passed through the female line (definitely the best idea). But other cultures didn't really have an idea of private property or land ownership yet worked very well for many hundreds even thousands of years.
BTW Jean Jacques Rousseau reached the same conclusion in his greatest work, "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality". And Oscar Wilde figured it out in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" too.
Clearly, our current capitalism-based system is a dead end. It is logically, and mathematically impossible to infinitely grow anything. Period. Especially an economic system that is based on a resource-extractive model. Consciously and intentionally transitioning to a more sustainable and humane model is ideal, but, in my view, unlikely. The entrenched power-elite have no inherent motivation to foster, or even allow, such a change to take place. Sadly, the most likely scenario is collapse. What follows will be determined by the survivors, and will, hopefully be something better.
“Follow the money?” Disaster capitalism? Hurricane Helene, feels energetically similar to events that happened Lahaina Hawaii (and also similarities to Paradise CA) in terms of a once in a century catastrophes, I noticed that strategically valuable land in both Hawaii and North Carolina got hit hard and many people trying to sort out all the anomalies of a storm/hurricane intensifying and were also speculating, was it natural or man-manipulated that the hurricane diverting from its path or accelerated in intensity?
What jumps out is the word "anomalous," in so many of these situations, is it just extreme weather, and yet in Maui, flash drought and anomalous 85 MPH winds perfectly timed to create an unprecedented inferno from Dora 500 miles away.
I am remembering that both for Lahaina and now North Carolina, that locals just didn’t want to sell their property to developers – I remember reading at the time, in Lahaina’s case or you couldn’t build the smart city infrastructure in Laihana unless there were certain conditions (do not remember my course, my apologies). However - just google:“Hawaii wildfires, no evidence fires set to create 15 minute smart city” or “directed energy weapon and other false claims go viral,” and yet if you look this up, there was something called AFRL Directed Energy Directorate on Maui that locals talked about: https://afresearchlab.com/technology/air-force-maui-optical-and-supercomputing-amos-site/
You get a different story if you look at local first hand accounts, then mainstream legacy media reports. if you ask locals who were in Lahaina a year ago, they observed “anomalies” mentioning how could Dora do that damage if it was 500 miles away, How do fires jump over water to burn boats? (of course politic fact will say fires can hop) Why was there no warning with one of the best warning systems in the world here on the islands? Why was the best real-estate in Hawaii destroyed? When is it time to ask questions?” Obviously poor land management played in this catastrophe, and corporate diverting of water for sugar canes, away from indigenous Lahaina.
Smart tech also was a problem, From another local post, “Hawaiian Electric was busy installing smart meters while neglecting fire-risk mitigation. Strangely, satellite images show the fires all began at the same time. Is that even possible? There were so many failures schools closed and children were sent home. Many parents remained at work, and because the warning sirens didn't go off, many children were burned alive in their own homes.
According to Gov. Josh Green, the warning sirens may have been "immobilized" by heat from the fire, but the exact cause for the failure is still under investigation. However, Maui also has a cellphone alert system. You may recall Maui residents received a false alert on their phones about an inbound missile threat five years ago. Even if the sirens had been destroyed by fire, why wasn't a cellphone alert dispatched?
In Lahaina, most of the buildings were destroyed, including many of the homes of its 13,000 residents, many of whom are indigenous and have lived there for generations.
A year later, federal investigators still won’t say what caused the Lahaina fire. https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/09/federal-investigators-still-wont-say-what-caused-the-lahaina-fire/
I remember reading testimonies that talked about "anomolies" why did cars burn, but trees didn't https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn-gxPBSmi8
Our electric grid didn't work with Hurricane Dora, perhaps it needed to be underground, not above ground as a simple solution? Now we seem to think that even more advance tech such as AI is the solution in Maui . Our default is always now more tech –and we sell the public on the solution to problems that might actually be caused by too much tech. https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/08/the-lahaina-burn-zone-is-coming-back-to-life-how-to-keep-it-safe-is-a-work-in-progress/
Fast forward to this year. I’m heartbroken over Asheville because I have friends and I was just in North Carolina a few months ago visiting Asheville, Boon, and shocked to see the extreme devastation, I will admit that I’m a person who is very interested when things “don’t add up,” and I’m very interested in “coincidences.” I also "follow the money." Kings mountain in North Carolina has one of the largest lithium deposits. I’m also shocked to learn North Carolina has a town called Spruce Pines – and locals say the residents wouldn’t sell their land for the tech developers who already made deals, A tiny town just got slammed by Helene. It could massively disrupt the tech industr. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helene-quartz-microchips-solar-panels-spruce-pine
Does the modern economy rests on a single road in North Carolina where Helene collapsed most bridges to Spruce Pine, NC?
WIRED also speaks about the super secret sand that makes your phone possible comes from this obscure town in the Appelecian mountains, https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pure-silicon/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFpKfdleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHQwU7QrC7_7bFbyMXTk3EuBXofv3Mvq6JXNTB28Fcq3bkfu633YPZPf7MA_aem_ij6n6E67moMXONqmkMXETw
Every crystalline silicon photovoltaic module and semiconductor chip made in the world today relies on this mining district in North Carolina.
Wow, obvious huge financial interests in North Carolina. Obviously our earth is out of balance, and our solutions which are capital-based are also out of balance – I will admit we are so advanced in our technology, but we don’t even understand where our tech is sourced, nor the supply chain, and sometimes yesterday’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s proven science.
No landlines North Carolina? The ones that remain aren't POTS but rely on power? Gone is the resilience of a phone system to withstand natural disasters and power outages –cell towers go down with hurricanes and wildfires, and when the power is out, people’s only resource in California for connectivity was to go to the home of the person who had an old school phone that did not require power – and that landline also offered internet.
Paradise California like Lahaina “inexplicably” did not get alerts on cell phones, but the landlines worked fine for people to be reached outside of Paradise to be warned of the fire, and lives were saved on the landlines. See: https://insider.govtech.com/california/news/camp-fire-aftermath-technology-the-thing-i-trust-most-failed.html
"A review of alerts issued by the county and Paradise police in the hours after the fire started on Nov. 8 shows that, inexplicably, no evacuation orders were issued by the county to one 6-square-mile swath of the city. Another 4-mile stretch of town received merely a warning; the actual order to flee came more than seven hours later, long after homes were reduced to ashes."
Yes, big business and disaster capitalism may even leverage concerns with the climate crisis to promote solutions that make things worse Just see a 2017 solution from telecom, “When disaster strikes, flying cell towers could aid. Base stations carried by drones would form an ad hoc network and connect first responders."
I am concerned about the focus on cell towers as opposed to more resilient options such as buried fiberoptics that withstand natural disasters better. People are desperate after a disaster especially when they lose their lifeline and connectivity. Yes Elon Musk offering Starlink in North Carolina, but I fiberoptics infrastructure may be the sustainable solution, especially given the holes punched in the ozone layer from the Starlink rockets. People worry that cell towers next to homes will be seen as the answer, when better options exist, not knowing about mold interaction nor health issues they had previously avoided without the tech. EMFs stimulate the release of mycotoxins: EMFs may also trigger the mold spores floating around in your body to release more mycotoxins and increase toxic burdens.
https://www.jillcarnahan.com/2021/10/16/struggling-with-mold-illness-how-emfs-could-be-making-your-symptoms-worse/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9695996/
I just saw this post on FB about EVs blowing up during a storm. Facebook link. https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=8706581932719309&set=a.550296121681305
“With the recent hurricane that blew through Florida we all have learned a few things about electric vehicles and electric bicycles and their batteries. When they get wet… they explode like a bomb! Via: Rich Fields
With the recent hurricane that blew through Florida we all have learned a few things about electric vehicles and electric bicycles and their batteries. When they get wet… they explode like a bomb! The attached photo is a next door neighbor’s Electric Vehicle. There are dozens of these torched cars around our area.
It’s torched because the batteries exploded because the rising water got the batteries wet (that simple) and it could happen to you or a loved one.
Christine and I are displaced from our house (it was completely flooded) and are staying with friends. Their electric bicycles (4 of them) have all exploded in the last two days. Each time almost setting their home on fire. Stay away from these electric vehicles and the electric bikes."
thanks for this complex post... a lot of information. I do not know if these storms were somehow orchestrated by technologies such as HAARP, but I find it doubtful that this would be part of an insidious plan. I could be wrong however. It reminds me of the theories that the Iraq war was really a cover to recover the Star Gate and information on ancient aliens... Who knows at this point? Different timeless? "Quantum jumping?"
Hi Daniel, I would have liked your comment, but substack wouldn't let me! Very interesting question was the iraq war really a cover for a star gate? I have no idea, but there was an article on this, I think there is a lot we don't know: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/nibiru-iraq-bush-blair-wmd-18850291
To ask if Capitalism will fail is imo equal to asking if greed and self-interest will ever end. How do you envision either one of these taking place? Are we not already moving toward Oscar Wilde's ideal of greater leisure with the approach of digital currency, guaranteed annual incomes and social credit scores administered by the state (based on desired conformities). Will these solve anything really? I suspect that our problems have little to do with external systems, and more with internal spiritual processes and deeply engrained social conditioning, that serve the exploiters, owners and would be rulers of humanity. It is the bound and chained mind that is the ultimate capital sought by them. For me nationalism and sources of identity based on anything other than our common humanity, is a far greater enemy and obstacle to human progress and survival than Capitalism. My reading of Steiner is that the solution to our situation is greater empathy for every other human being equal to what we feel for ourselves or our families. He calls for also for a greater cosmopolitanism.
Here are some notes based on an anthroposophical essay on the spirit/ Michaelic and task of our times:
1) Living thinking –thinking and feeling that has an inquisitive attentiveness that presses on to essences, beings, and ideals. It is thinking in higher form which departs from dead facts into living activity not a thing but a deed. Asking: Who or what lies behind the words? What thoughts are Michaelic? Why do we seek? To know the spiritual foundation of things? Living thoughts are imbued with will and burn with a fiery, indomitable force within us. , Ideal = a standard of beauty, perfection of excellence (followed, aimed for) Ideals transcend concepts
2) Universality -Cosmopolitanism – fusion of cultures, preparing the soil for seeds that will eventually lead to Philadelphia of brotherly love , New Jerusalem ideal community
Cosmopolitanism= common to the world , an ideology that all ethnic groups belong to a single community based on shared morality. The universal in the human being. Every thought or activity that serves only individual groups or nations, like nationalism tribalism is sub-Michael .
We embrace and forgive all peoples and nations seeing them as important essential facets of our picture of humanity. That means Islamic nations, Christian nations, Socialist nations, third world nations etc. Our individual uniqueness, our God given self is the gift to all of humanity and humanity in all its sufferings and successes is the gift to our unique selves. Our individuality is not for ourselves but for the whole. This is not selfish individualism. Our individuality our unfallen, divine spark shared in common with all humanity . When we see this aspect of each other we practice of Christ and Michaelic activity and seeing. When we act on this we are imbued with God’s will forces.
3 ) Mirroring the highest in each other.
Being able to see the profound price, pain and suffering individuals must endure for being who they are and having to fit in, to incarnate the self. In our age we are left alone to discover ourselves. The world does not offer a home for the soul of the individual seeking self-realization, in birthing their unique gift to humanity. Our loneliness is for a lack of spirit recognition and spirit acknowledgment. The world does not offer a home for the soul of the individual seeking self-realization, in birthing their unique gift to humanity. Our loneliness is for a lack of spirit recognition and spirit acknowledgment.
Who has really recognized us? Who has seen our deepest nature? By whom have we been truly acknowledged? Can you see and feel the cry of the spirit, the seeking soul within your family members, your classmates, or co-workers? Can you see beyond the soul sicknesses in those around you to he hungering individual who is, in his or her more or less enlightened way, seeking for the fulfillment only the spirit can bring? Can you have compassion for souls in diverse conditions of soul and spirit sickness? Do you and I believe in our neighbor?
Do we hold the individuals around us captive to their pasts?
Do they belong to the wrong political party, religion, or social class?
Have we seen them fail countless times?
Do we think them hopeless and never able to progress or change?
Do we ally ourselves with the adversary of our soul’s progress?
Do we acknowledge the Buddha nature or Christ within them? If we do we will not lose hope for them, we will not hold them to their past sins. We will forgive them and be the person that helps them see the next step forward on their path. If so, then you can mirror the highest in the other and are a co-worker with Michael .When we are recognized by another on the level of spirit we naturally awaken to our latent potential and connect more surely with our unique life purposes. “We all know when we have been seen by others”. Our ability to see and be seen is the essential element in affirming each individual is monumental for the successful support of Michael’s activity in the World. Without it there will be very little spiritual progress"
4) Reverse ritual - transforming cosmic intelligence through human intelligence and experience
"In our journey of reclaiming cosmic wisdom transformed by human intelligence Parzival is our guide. He teaches us to approach our knightly tasks as profound acts of egoic inwardness. The fool, the diamond in the rough who became the Grail King by “piloting a paradigm shift”. He entered the World of Knighthood in a novel way, with innocence, clumsiness, and ignorance. All his realizations/ initiations are through trial and error. In contrast the old order of knighthood sparkled and dazzled but was inwardly corrupt. The new order appears chaotic and but is internally “diamantine” blundering without refinement Attracted by shining knights ,he follows them without proper clothing or arms, without the usual training , he is initiated through all he encounters on his journey with the knights, cuts and polishes him and achieves the grail. “he gets bad advice, meets good and bad people, denounces god the four years later surrenders to God’s will , he stumbles on steadfastly , blunder after blunder he suffers , acquires his own armor He encounters all the pitfalls encountered on the path of consciousness’ soul toward spirit self “Each person he meets , each situation he encounters is significant’
“The path Parzival opened for us is not as much a path as an anti-path. It begs us to follow the solitary path each of us is called to blaze by the unique nature of our individuality, which is required for personal development in the consciousness-soul age in which we live.
This will never be achieved by adhering to outer authorities, no matter how enlightened they may be.” The mores of which were defined by the church or state have lost their power over us.
“The moral imperative of our time and the future lies in our power to redefine reality, to live true to what we know as soul and spiritual beings , as knowers of ourselves, no longer beholden to the knowledge experts of the past. We should approach his story with the “right questions” and “persevere with them” (Just as he did) One question is What is the difference between human and cosmic intelligence? Cosmic intelligence once transmitted becomes “earthly”. Any wisdom that can be applied mechanistically and is expressed as outer law is earthed Cosmic intelligence.
Human intelligence is cosmic intelligence transformed by human experience, into inner guiding principles which are written through and through with compassion, mercy and understanding. They are lifted back up to Cosmos. Christ Jesus enlightened the whole of the hierarchal spiritual world by choosing to enter into human experience of suffering and death. The spiritual cosmos was ignorant of the majestic nature of the human dramas apart from the example of Christ. Doing so he elevated our suffering, made of prayer of them, made death not an end but the ultimate victory and a new beginning.
The spiritual world waits for humanity to complete the task Jesus Christ began- uplifting cosmic intelligence by transforming it into human intelligence. This is what Steiner calls the Reverse Ritual.”
I can only hope that someone has a good answer that isn’t delusional, or self aggrandizing. My current suspicion is the interconnected and interoceptive potential of the quantum… or something like that. Spooky action at a distance.
As Martin Prechtel elegantly reminds us regularly, If the earth is sick, we shall be too. We have lost our memory of how to live well with the Earth. We cannot live well with each other until we figure out how to again live in Right Relation with the earth. Thats it. Top priority. Lets get to work. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira offers excellent advice. I would love for you to have her on for an interview. Her book Hospicing Modernity is essential reading.
Amen to this! Nate Hagens has a great interview with Vanessa on his podcast.
I sense an evolution in consciousness and a 20'th monkey type of advent will be antecedent to a shift out of the corruptions of capitalism and into a care economy and government in service to the greatest good for all. Life and the failures of capitalism seem to be the teacher. https://richardflyer.substack.com/s/birthing-the-symbiotic-age-new-book Have you checked out Symbiotic Culture and Richard Flyer? Influenced by Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne and the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka - I am in the process of investigating this.
I agree “that Capitalism is a moribund system, destined to fail, and we should get to work designing an alternative based on principles of social ecology and mutual aid.”
How I can imagine this would work would be if there is a major global economic collapse or global youth revolutions or some horrific disaster that threatens both rich and poor. Yes, extremes could awaken people into action.
Until then, I am happy to be living in Mexico 🇲🇽 where we now have a leftist female president…an environmental scientist educated in Berkeley and Stanford...where the legislature is 50/50 men and women…that could have an effect on the collective and President Kamala. At least that’s my dream! 🙏🏻
Dane Wiginton explains to Col. Douglas Magregor how geo engineering may be in hurricanes. https://x.com/ococreport/status/1843018301523554474?s=43