Radical Love

Are you ready for it?

To be honest, I have not read this book yet, but I get the vibe!

A perplexing study in contrasts: While my life continues to be relatively smooth sailing — I feel wiser, mellower, more at peace than ever, my heart kinder and more full of love — the world seems to be disintegrating into chaos, cacophony, horror. I wonder how many reading this are experiencing this same odd paradox? Please let me know in the comments.

In my heart, I am a devotee of Satish Kumar. He speaks my language when he says: “The whole cosmos is my country. The whole planet is my home. Nature is my nationality. Love is my religion.”

Daily, the ecological crisis spins further out of our control. A group of relatively moderate, non-doomer-ish, climate scientists just issued a new report that begins: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.” But you won’t learn much about this on the front page of The New York Times, let alone The Wall Street Journal, or Fox.

The most critical news impacting our immediate future as well as our children’s future — not to mention the future of most life on Earth — is tragically under-reported. I am embarrassed, almost ashamed, to delve into the overwhelming specificity of what’s happening now. The approaching collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s currents. The acceleration of warming beyond the doomsayer’s predictions. Shocking decline in wildlife populations. Burning down of the Amazon. I guess you know this — I hope you do.

Meanwhile, in America, 47% of the voting population supports Donald Trump, who won’t admit anthropogenic climate change is real and seems to be experiencing rapid cognitive decline. But perhaps not quite fast enough to save us from accelerated destruction at the hands of nightmarish Christian extremists and soulless technocrats.

This morning, I learned that Kroger, a retail company with hundreds of supermarkets, intends to introduce Electronic Shelving Labels (ESLs) which “may result in Kroger deploying dynamic pricing for goods, increasing the price of essential goods on shelves based on real time conditions and inventory.” According to Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, in a letter to the company’s CEO:

Additionally, through a partnership with Microsoft, I understand that Kroger is intending to place cameras at its digital displays, using facial recognition technology to determine gender and age of customers captured on camera to present targeted advertisements to display on ESLs. Studies have shown that facial recognition technology is flawed and can lead to discrimination in predominantly Black and brown communities The racial biases of facial recognition technology are well-documented and should not be extended into our grocery stores.

ESLs will allow Kroger to use customer data to build personalized profiles of each customer to determine the maximum price of goods customers are willing to pay. Kroger's use of facial recognition technology and surge pricing is concerning when we are bearing growing complaints about the rising cost of groceries at big retailers.

It is abundantly clear that corporations, amp-ed up on the latest gadgets, will keep squeezing the last drops of profit out of all of us while our living planet dies.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, armed militia are apparently hunting FEMA workers trying to provide emergency aid. “Recovery efforts in areas of North Carolina affected by Hurricane Helene are being disrupted by reports of militia activity targeting FEMA workers,” Rolling Stone reports. Inundated with algorithmic brain rot from Elon Musk’s Twitter, many locals assume FEMA is working for Deep State / Biden, coming to take away their homes.

I continue to reflect on Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who have thrown their vast wealth and hypertrophied intellects behind the effort to Make America Great Again by helping Opus Dei and the Heritage Foundation take dictatorial control, subjecting women’s bodies to their caprices, threatening to imprison and kill dissenters. I recommend, again, this useful Elon Musk dossier, “Elon Musk: King of the Dark Enlightenment,” with many links. I am still working my way through it — for example learning about the systemic harassment of black workers at Tesla plants and Musk’s belief that “Empathy is not an asset” when you want to conquer the world. Yesterday, I also listened to a long podcast interview with his father, Errol, a sadistic narcissist, which did make me feel somewhat sorry for the guy. Musk may be nothing more than a narcissistic extension of Errol, who still enjoys belittling him.

Both Musk and Thiel are followers of the TESCREAL philosophy, which you can read about here and here. TESCREAL is an acronym standing for “Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism." According to Timmit Gebru and Emile P Torres in “The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence” from First Monday:

The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can and should be built, researchers are working to create “safe AGI” that is “beneficial for all of humanity.” We argue that, unlike systems with specific applications which can be evaluated following standard engineering principles, undefined systems like “AGI” cannot be appropriately tested for safety. Why, then, is building AGI often framed as an unquestioned goal in the field of AI? … We argue that the normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power, while using the language of “safety” and “benefiting humanity” to evade accountability.

I was intrigued to discover that Musk’s Canadian grandfather was a member of the peculiar Technocracy Inc movement, founded in New York City in 1933, which promoted “a radical restructuring of political, social and economic life in Canada and the United States, with science as its central operating principle.” In the future envisioned by Technocracy Inc: “There would be no politicians, business people, money or income inequality. … There would be no countries called Canada or the United States, either – just one giant continental land mass called the Technate, a techno-utopia run by engineers and other “experts” in their fields.”

Musk and Thiel have deep connections to the Dark Enlightenment movement, whose main intellectual figures are Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land. As The New Republic reports:

In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, reporter Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit.. Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.

Yarvin has proposed, tongue in cheek, to take the “nonproductive” people — the homeless, the underclass, poor minorities, and so on — and “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.” He continued this hilarious thought experiment:

The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.

Both Yarvin and Land end up advocating, in their clever and loquacious ways, for absolute technological dictatorship. As Land notes, “political freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and effective.” Land is definitely the kind of writer I can enjoy as a theorist and fantastist. He wrote a book, The Thirst for Annihilation, on one of my literary heroes, Georges Bataille. But his political philosophy is very bleak and inhuman.

In The Dark Enlightenment, Land writes:

For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression. Predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, it conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.

For the record, I vehemently disagree with this idea of creating a technocratic dictatorship, particularly one based on Christian fanaticism. If Trump/Vance/Theil/Musk/Heritage/Opus Dei do win this upcoming election, we will see them try to do it. There are likely to be horrifying consequences all around.

In How Soon Is Now, I proposed an alternative approach: We could repurpose the Internet to be a living learning laboratory, use social networks to support people in becoming well-resourced and fully participatory agents of their local bioregions, building a nonhierarchical planetary democracy based on mutual aid. But hey, that’s just me.

You know what? I don’t have time to hate on Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Land, or Yarvin at this stage in my life. I feel very sad, very sorry for them that they have lost their way in a quest for worldly power. The power will never satisfy them. Never address their childhood wounds and deep dissociative traumas.

Feeling the pain of the world this morning, I will listen to my guru Satish Kumar. I will try to follow, however imperfectly, his practice of radical love:

First, I’d like to talk a little bit about radical love. The idea of radical love comes from Jainism because, in our world, either you’re a loving, kind, and beautiful person, but you think radical activism—demonstrating and protesting—isn’t useful, so you stay away from it. Or, you’re a radical activist—Extinction Rebellion, Stop the Oil—you protest against anything, but there’s no loving heart in it. In my book Radical Love, I argue that you need to be both a loving, kind, compassionate person and a radical, transformative change-maker.

For example, Mahatma Gandhi was very much influenced by Jainism. One of his teachers was Jain, and his mother was half-Jain. This idea of combining radicalism and activism with a loving heart, compassion, and kindness is crucial. They are not opposites; they go together. That’s one aspect of radical love: combining these two.

The second aspect is that there are two kinds of love: moderate love and radical love. Moderate love is when you love somebody you like, someone who agrees with you, or someone who loves you back. That’s good love, moderate love. We all try to practice it as much as we can. Even moderate love is not easy—love between husband and wife, between parents and children, or between teachers and students—it’s not always there. These relationships are often practical but lacking in love. However, radical love is about loving someone you don’t like, someone you don’t agree with, or someone who doesn’t love you back. It’s love without expectation, and that’s radical love.

In our modern world, we need to practice radical love. Technology has advanced so much—on your smartphone, you can connect with the world, with many speakers, teachers, music, and books. But while technology has moved forward, humanity has not. We’re still fighting wars, like the one in Ukraine. There’s still animosity between countries, and so much narrow-mindedness. Blacks don’t like whites; whites don’t like blacks; Hindus and Muslims don’t get along. Our world desperately needs radical love so that we can realize we are one humanity.

Let’s say this together: “The whole cosmos is my country.” The whole planet is my home. Nature is my nationality. Love is my religion. That’s radical love.