Dystopian Dissonance

Damn It All to Hell

JOE BLOW and GO BACK TO SLEEP AMERICA ©2020 Dwayne Booth (aka MR. FISH)

The weaponization of semiotics as an application of semiotic engineering is explained in an earlier post, “Bernays Sauce” (February 24, 2020). Simply put, weaponized semiotics is the scientific and technological foundation framework of 21st century ‘PSYOP’ — psychological operations “to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In this post, I’ll dig into the dystopian dissonance of USAmerican mythology and civil religion created by semiotic engineering, and how it traps us in a Hobson’s Choice which, if taken, literally will damn everything all to hell on Earth.

What is a “Hobson’s Choice?” It’s “a free choice in which only one thing is offered. Because a person may refuse to accept what is offered, the two options are taking it or taking nothing. In other words, one may ‘take it or leave it.’”

Example: you’re taken hostage by two thugs wearing masks (one wears a red bandana, the other a blue one). You find yourself bound and gagged in a chair facing the two thugs, still wearing their red and blue bandanas over their faces. One is pointing a M1911 .45 pistol at your left eye, the other aims a 9mm Beretta directly at your right eye. One of them says, “Choose!”

Is this really a choice? Yes, and no. It wouldn’t much matter which thug you chose to fire the pistol in their hand, you’d really only be choosing the same thing either way. The differences between the two ‘options’ are irrelevant to the outcome — point-blank gunshot to the head, through one eye or the other. So, no, it really is not a choice in any reasonable sense of the concept.

But there is a third option: refuse to choose, say nothing, force the choice back onto the two thugs. You may end up with two gunshots to the head, one through each eye, but here again, the only real material difference, perhaps, would be in the range and volume of blood spatter and gore resulting from two point-blank mortal wounds to the head instead of just one.

This is a blatant and vivid example of a Hobson’s choice. In this post, I contend that the juxtaposition of the two MR. FISH drawings of Biden and Trump at the beginning illustrates the actual Hobson’s choice USAmerican voters face in Circus2020 if Sanders is not the Democratic nominee for POTUS46. In that illustration, Biden appears as the non- or anti-Sanders nominee. As the incumbent POTUS45, Trump is of course another non- and anti-Sanders nominee.

The ‘take it or leave it’ nature of the choice is clear in the red- and blue-masked thugs with guns example — quite obviously a Hobson’s choice. In the JOE BLOW vs. GO BACK TO SLEEP AMERICA (Trump) illustration, however, the dilemma may not be equally clearly a Hobson’s example. Two key areas of confusion or doubt exist:

1. How are Trump and Biden the ‘take it or leave it’ choice? The red- and blue-masked thugs in the example are both gun-toting murderous thugs and the differences between them are irrelevant to the outcome of choosing either one over the other. How does this apply to Biden and Trump?

2. If Sanders were the Democratic (Socialist) nominee, wouldn’t he be just another thug wearing a different mask (pale blue or perhaps in rainbow colors) and holding a different gun (a .38 Special, say)?

Readers of this blog know I am an ardent Sanders advocate and supporter. To be sure, see previous posts, “The Circus2020 McCarthyism Bandwagon: Red-Baiting Will Continue Until Rationality is Defeated” (February 19, 2020) and “Stakeholder Capitalism v Truthteller Realism: Three-Card Monte at Davos 2020” (February 4, 2020). I’ve also made it abundantly clear that I regard the rapacious perverted love of wealth embraced by the fascist oligarch cabal and their praetorian corporatocracy — the 1% — as the root of all evil in the 21st century. To be sure, in addition to the previous posts just cited, see also as long ago as “Revolutionary Iconoclasm: Final Countdown?” (October 27, 2016) a month before Circus2016, and more recently, “Capitalist Fatuity: 21st Century Addiction to the Fix Being In” (April 3, 2019) and “Whither Hence? Where and How from Here and Now to Then and There?” (January 10, 2020).

From this perspective and position, the differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump are trivial, irrelevant, and meaningless. Both are malevolent minions of that 1%’s wealth and power that affords their neoliberal globalist rule and control — i.e., the fascist inverted totalitarianism and deep state tyranny that oppresses the other 99% of us and exploits us to death while driving us en mass to extinction by deliberate extermination. This is why Biden and Trump represent one and only one Hobson ‘take it’ option: both stand for exactly the same 1% fascist despotism — if either of them becomes POTUS in November, the 1% fascist capitalism and praetorian corporatocracy that has been status quo business as usual for the last half-century or longer will proceed unabated. This answers question #1 above.[1]

Bernie Sanders is the polar opposite of a fascist capitalist. He wears no masks of any form, hue, or disguise. He stands for a people’s movement in revolution against the rapacity, fascism, tyranny, and despotic evil that are the heart and soul of both Biden and Trump. The only weapons he carries are truth about 21st century reality and the courage to be a leader from that platform when Biden and Trump stand for the same permanent lies of USAmerican mythology and civil religion, namely, that ours continues to a nation, society, and culture wholly committed to liberty and justice for all, a land of the free and home of the brave, an economy of free markets and equal opportunity, and a sanctuary for refugees, the impoverished and oppressed of the world. None of these myths are even remotely true in 21st century reality, if they ever were true at all, precisely because the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and other founding creeds, articles, and doctrines have been systematically destroyed by that 1% and the toxicity of their vile ideologies and lies. Sanders clearly and fully grasps this tragic truth and ruinous reality of the depths of depravity and pits of perversion into which USAmerica has fallen, and he knows who the gun-toting thugs are behind those masks and the truth and reality that they stand for exactly the same evil ‘take it’ Hobson alternative. His one goal in life as a POTUS candidate is to bring that tyranny down with a people’s peaceful revolution. This answers question #2 above.

But the crux of the matter is this: if refusing to choose between the red-masked thug with the M1911 .45 vs. the blue-masked thug with the 9mm Beretta is the ‘leave it’ Hobson option in that example, what is the ‘leave it’ option in the situations where Trump is opposed by a Democrat other than Sanders in Circus2020 come November? What ‘refusal to choose’ option exists in the Circus2020 Grand Finale come November?

This is where the permanent lies of USAmerican mythology and civil religion rain down like cluster bombs in a drone attack. The ‘leave it’ option in a Circus2020 presidential national election that does not have Sanders on the ballot is simple — it’s abstention! Yes, that’s right. The refusal to vote red for Republican Trump or blue for any Democratic candidate other than Sanders is the only genuinely rational alternative when faced with that Hobson’s choice where the ‘take it’ false choice is no choice at all, but fascist capitalism and praetorian corporatocracy through and through to the core. Both candidates are conjoined evil twins merely disguised in different costumes.[2]

I’ll only respond to one of the most obvious repugnant objections to this ‘no vote at all — leave it’ Hobson choice: “you’ll have no right complain about the outcome and what happens after the election if you don’t vote.”

This is a steaming rancid pile of equum stercore (horse shit): pure dystopian dissonance generated by the permanent lies of the civil religion built on USAmerican mythology. The tragedy is that vast numbers of Democrats — including a plurality if not a majority of disgruntled Sanders supporters — will swallow this horse shit as if it were a gourmet banquet and actually vote for the fascist capitalists and their praetorian corporatocracy, ensuring the juggernaut of bloodthirsty genocidal slaughter, economic rape, and ecocidal ruination they leave in their wake will continue to accelerate on its doomsday journey across the event horizon of Round 6 of Mass Extinction Level Events on Earth (‘MELEE-R6’).[3]

TIME TO REBEL and RADICAL EVIL ©2019 Dwayne Booth (aka MR. FISH)

More than a decade ago, internationally recognized speaker, award-winning scientist, and the world’s leading authority on abrupt climate change leading to near-term human extinction (NTHE), Dr. Guy McPherson identified MELEE-R6 due to abrupt climate change as the onrushing truth and reality of the 21st century. According to his analyses, the root cause of NTHE is the catch-22 of human extinction, aka the “McPherson Paradox.” In technical and scientific terms, that catch-22 is known as the “aerosol masking effect” or “global dimming:”[4]

Civilization is a heat engine that is in the process of killing all life on Earth. Unfortunately, turning off the civilization loved by techno-nerdites and those of us born into relative privilege destroys most complex life on the planet, even faster than keeping it running ….
Industrial civilization is a heat engine driving us to extinction. Turning off industrial civilization, or even reducing industrial activity by a relatively minor amount, causes loss of habitat for humans even faster than keeping industrial civilization running. Thus, the Catch-22 that has come to be known as the McPherson Paradox: With respect to industrial civilization, we are damned if we do, and we are damned if we don’t.

Permanent lies of weaponized semiotic engineering obfuscate the truth and reality of McPherson’s paradox in a semiosic Fata Morgana of dystopian dissonance. MELEE-R6 catch-22 truth and reality forming McPherson’s paradox are displaced by the rapacity and mendacity of delusional denial and magical thinking firmly rooted in USAmerican mythology and civil religion.

If by impossibly long odds Sanders were to become the Democratic Circus2020 nominee, and then by the slimmest of chances he were to actually win the November Circus2020 grand finale of the national election, would a Sanders-led administration — even with Democratic majorities in Congress (an even more unlikely state of the Union by 2022) —be capable of pulling humanity and the planet we inhabit back from the event horizon of MELEE-R6? Most probably not. We surely won’t “go gentle” and indeed we will “rage, rage against the dying of the light” since MELEE-R6 will not be in any sense a “good night.”[5]

Despite our desperate hope that there’s a Hobson’s ‘leave it’ choice as a way out of MELEE-R6 and NTHE, there is no such option. McPherson is dead right (pun intended) in claiming, “Acceptance of abrupt climate change leading to near-term human extinction is optional; participation, however, is mandatory.”[6]

Is there any balm in Gilead or light in the black-hole sucking darkness of the MELEE-R6 NTHE that is already upon us all and the planet we call home, brought by the omnicidal 1% in the blasphemous name and incarnate evil of our USAmerican mythology and the fanatic and fantastic religiosity of its civil religion? Those who discern the Hobson’s choice of Circus2020 without Sanders, and those who discern the signs of MELEE-R6 and NTHE as McPherson does, at least will have the comfort of knowing the truth and seeing the light of reality as we self-destruct into oblivion.[7]

In the event of Sanders’ diabolical elimination from candidacy, only those who will have taken the rationally radical abstention ‘leave it’ Hobson option by refusing to vote in favor of 1%’s fascism will have seen it all coming, damning all of us and everything else to hell on Earth. Those others whose dystopian dissonance will have lured them into the ‘take it’ Hobson alternative thus will have forced themselves into an abrupt awakening from their semiotic stupidity and stupor to face an insufferably manifest MELEE-R6 and the personal NTHE of their own being and presence here on Earth. In all probability, this will transpire before the mythical “rough beast” of Circus2024 slouches onward toward Bethlehem to be born.[8]

The end signs! Are we getting the message yet? As for the already walking dead who fail to see the truth and reality of MELEE-R6 and NTHE, or the radical rationality of the ‘leave it’ course of action as the juggernaut of Circus2020 rolls over them and us alike and we all have no choice but to ‘take it,’ finally, “Fuck thém. I wish you God.”[9]

Notes

References cited in the main body of this post (via hyperlinks) and in the notes below are generally the grounds of or provide background for the philosophical, scientific, political, and other dimensions and aspects of my views. Resources available online from amazon may be seen on my public list, THE END SIGNS References.

[1] On inverted totalitarianism, see Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Introduction by Chris Hedges (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008 Kindle Edition). On American fascism, see Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America (New York, NY: Free Press, 2006 Kindle Edition); Chris Hedges, “Fascism in the Age of Trump,” Youtube video (Dec 1. 2017); cf. Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (Forbidden Bookshelf Book 18), Introduction by Chris Hedges, Mark Crispin Miller, ed. (New York, NY: Open Road Media, 2015 Kindle Edition); James M. Collier and Kenneth F. Collier, Votescam: The Stealing of America (Forbidden Bookshelf Book 15), (New York, NY: Open Road Media, 2015 Kindle Edition); Henry Giroux, “Neoliberal Fascism and the Echoes of History,” Truthdig (Aug 02, 2018); and Arthur Haberman, “The American Version of Fascism Is Alive and Prospering,” in The (Toronto) Star (July 26, 2019).

[2] A Facebook exchange with Kyle Droski II after this post was published here reminded me that there is actually another equally rational ‘leave it’ alternative — i.e., using the ‘write-in’ vote option to vote for anyone you like, yourself, your spouse, your favorite mentor or superhero or other fantasy character, or of course and best case, Bernie Sanders. The ways those write-in votes are handled varies from state-to-state, however. In areas where write-ins qualify as a voice to be heard and taken seriously, nevertheless, a massive BERN write-in would be worthwhile. I suppose my initial bias favored abstention in opposition to the utterly corrupted electoral process in its entirety, but a BERN write-in is an intriguing Hobson’s ‘leave it’ alternative. Here’s an interesting reference: “What About Write-Ins?” on electoral-vote.com. According to their about page Electoral-Vote.com was founded in 2004 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum (The Votemaster), a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit. The purpose of the website is to closely track state polling for a clearer picture on election polls. Electoral-Vote has their own established methodology. Along with polling, the website also reports on political news. The Media Bias Fact Check assessment of the Netherlands-based blog rates it as “Left biased” and “High” on factual reporting.

[3] MR. FISH’S TIME TO REBEL illustrates the article by Chris Hedges, “Time to Rebel” in Truthdig (October 7, 2019), and his RADICAL EVIL accompanies Chris Hedges, “The Age of Radical Evil” in Truthdig (October 14, 2019).

[4] Guy McPherson, Only Love Remains: Dancing at the Edge of Extinction (Woodthrush Productions. Kindle Edition), pp. 7-8. A longer but still brief explanation of the McPherson Paradox appears in the book between the two paragraphs quoted here. That omitted paragraph reads:

As most people know, industrial civilization puts into the atmosphere greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and about 40 others. These greenhouse gases (GHG) act as “blankets” to hold the heat provided by the sun close to Earth. Very inconveniently, industrial activity also produces particulates, (otherwise known as pollutants) that ironically serve as an “umbrella” above the blanket of GHG and thus, in a bizarre twist of fate, protect the planet from incoming sunlight that might further warm those gasses. According to a paper by Levy and colleagues that appeared in the 20 May 2013 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, these particulates are cooling the planet and, with as little as a 35% reduction in industrial activity, the global average temperature of Earth will skyrocket by 1 degree Celsius. Because this change will occur in about 6 weeks, far too rapidly for humans and most other complex organisms to keep pace, I cannot imagine we will long survive such an event. In other words, industrial activity constantly puts these "dimming" particulates into the atmosphere, most notably by burning coal high in sulfur. The particulates constantly fall out, very rapidly, while the GHG remain locked in blanket status and are constantly being added to as well. If we stop burning coal and other fossil fuels, the skies clear up, the GHG warm much more rapidly, and the global average temperature of Earth thus heats up far too quickly for adaptation.

[5] The quoted snippets are from Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (1947, 1952).

[6] McPherson, Only Love Remains, p. xii.

[7] “Balm in Gilead” is a Scripture reference, Jeremiah 8:22.

[8] Quoted snippets are from William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1919, 1920).

[9] The quoted snippet is the last line of Les Murray, The Last Hellos (1996).

Bernays Sauce

The Weaponization of Semiotics

FINAL MEAL by MR. FISH (Dwayne Booth) ©2020[1]

I’m still a carnivore. A slice from a nearly rare chateaubriand or filet mignon with a generous pour-over of Béarnaise sauce, served with a fine vintage Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon is my favorite meal. Finished with a chocolate mousse and raspberry sauce dessert and I’m happy as a pig in slop, as they say in the bluegrass foothills of Appalachia where I was born and reared.

As MELEE-R6 (Mass Extinction Level Events on Earth – Round 6) continues advancing unabated, actually accelerating and intensifying by the hour, my inclination to go vegan will probably go in the opposite direction. If morbid obesity weren’t so damned uncomfortable, I’d live there just for the gourmand indulgence of it all.[2]

But I want to focus on an entirely different kind of ‘Bernays sauce’ here. Together with the 99% of the 7.8 billion of us on the planet, we are all are being relentlessly cognitively waterboarded 24x7 every day with a very different and categorically more toxic spice of life than that savory red meat homophonic pour-over.

Signs and Cognition

Recall that ‘semiotics’ is the study, theory, or science of signs and this blog is framed by the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) who pioneered and founded the field in its modern and contemporary forms.[3] In his earlier writings, at least, Peirce sought to identify cognition with sign-processing (semiosis) and contemporary biosemiotics certainly has firm grounding in this premise. In my doctoral dissertation last year (March 2019), on the basis of this semiotic conception of cognition, I argue from Peircean semiotics that we humans possess not just sentient ‘right-brain’ and sapient ‘left-brain’ cognition, but a third ‘transcient’ brain state and mental modality based in the corpus callosum.[4]

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist mention the corpus callosum’s role in cognition as a sort of ‘traffic cop’ or ‘overseer’ of sensory signals and ideational signs. I take that concept a few steps further to envision it as a distinct category of semiosic mentality that precedes our perceptual awareness and supersedes our conceptual consciousness. As such, its semiosic dynamics literally compose and conduct the symphony of our cognitive being and presence in reality – subliminally, transcendentally, and simultaneously. I chose the term ‘transcient’ to refer to this semiosic category together with sentient and sapient categories of human cognition.[5]

Here’s the thing, and you need to let this truth and reality fully sink into your heart and mind before you read further: if transcient semiosis can be controlled by outside interference, then cognitive awareness and consciousness can be engineered before they are manifested in the human brain and mind.   

Bernays Sauce

Propaganda is a cognitive toxin. It has been around in primitive forms for millennia, at least as far back as empires began training their armies to enjoy slaughtering their fellow human beings living out their presence. But it became scientifically weaponized in the early 20th century when Sigmund Freud’s double nephew Edward Bernays (1891-1995) pioneered its refinement during the Woodrow Wilson presidency as the means to sell the Great War to the country’s unwitting citizenry.

During and after WWII, Bernays took propaganda to the next insidious level, re-packaging and re-branding it as ‘public relations.’ Semiotic engineering thus became scientifically weaponized and we the people have been us the sheeple ever since. ‘Bernays Sauce’ has become a semiosic poison keeping us zealously and rapaciously death-marching in our tightly controlled consumer formation from the stockyard pens we are deluded into knowing as the comforts of our ‘home sweet home’ straight into the shearing shed and slaughterhouse of fascist capitalism. From its nefarious beginnings, Bernays sauce was conceived, contrived, and concocted to serve exactly the vile maxim and vicious cycle of that evil tyranny, and it is USAmerican to its core.[6]

The toxicity of Bernays sauce cannot be overstated and the extent of its perfusion and infusion in 21st century human being and presence on Earth cannot be overemphasized. As a corrosive agent for dissolving human cognition, compared to all its pre-Bernays predecessors, its toxicity is rather like that of fluoroantimonic acid – 20 quintillion times stronger than sulfuric acid! The real efficacy of it lies in its imperceptibility – it forms our sensory and conceptual cognition for us before they become awareness and consciousness in our own presence of mind, preceding our own self-awareness and self-consciousness. Metaphorically speaking, in terms of human cognitive powers, this is rather like traveling faster than the speed of light – as if the darkness of deception and delusion can be established and entrenched in our minds faster than the light of truth and reality can get there to dispel it.

Are we powerless against semiotic engineering? Not entirely. But our self-defense against it calls for a complete and fundamental shift in our perceptual awareness and in our conceptual consciousness. Both of these modes of being present in truth and reality must be diligently maintained simultaneously: we must know what the signs are telling us even as we perceive them through our senses, even before we pause to give them even a first thought. At the same time, we must cultivate insight into how those signs are being transformed into thoughts and ideas in our analytic, linguistic, logical, sapient mind where all our thinking is derivative of those sentient impressions that we acquire simply by being present in the world.    

It’s the challenge of the ages – the perennial conundrum of being the apex predator cognitive species on the planet. To prevail against semiotic engineering, we must regain understanding and control of our own semiosis even as it’s happening within us, in the resonant harmonies of our sentience and sapience as composed, orchestrated, and conducted by our transcience.

Put more simply, I’ll have my truth and reality uncooked and raw, if you please, and hold the Bernays sauce or I’ll never return to this establishment. No, never mind the wine list, thank you – I brought my own vintage.

NOTES

[1] This FINAL MEAL image by MR. FISH (Dwayne Booth) is used here by permission. It also happens to appear with a recent article which resonates quite strongly with the same theme as this blog post, Chris Hedges, “The Disaster of Utopian Engineering,” Truthdig (Jan 28, 2020).

[2] See related blog post about the Bernays Sauce of semiosic engineering at work in “MELEE-R6.” Its deployment in the PR-Propaganda wars of Circus2020, especially with respect to McCarthyism and Red-baiting, is exposed in “The Circus2020 McCarthyism Bandwagon (Feb 19, 2020), ”Stakeholder Capitalism v Truthteller Realism (Feb 4, 2020),“ and “Making Ends Meet (June 2, 2019).”   

[3] Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is also considered, especially in Europe, to have pioneered and founded the field of ‘semiology.’ As far as we know neither semiotician knew of the other’s work in the field, despite their being alive at the same time working on the same ideas. Since everything Saussure had to say about signs is encompassed within Peirce’s vastly more far-reaching, incisive, and profound theory of signs, however, I prefer Peirce’s account by default. For a brilliant and still seminal biography of Peirce that also offers an excellent introduction to his theory of signs, see Joseph Brent, C. S. Peirce: A Life. Another excellent and shorter read for an insightful introduction to Peirce is Dan Everett, “The American Aristotle.” For a more thorough study of Peirce’s semiotics, see Thomas A. Sebeok, Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics or Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce (J. Buchler, ed.). An excellent introductory overview of semiotics emphasizing its visual elements is provided in David Crow, Visible Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics in the Visual Arts, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Fairchild Books, 2015). 

[4] My dissertation, “The End Signs! Are We Getting the Message?” is available online from researchgate.net. I only recommend it to left-brain masochists who savor reading academic tomes overstuffed with abstruse concepts and arcane language. A follow-up rewrite is in progress as my attempt to retell the same story to a wider audience in a friendlier vernacular (target publication date June 21, 2020).

[5] Cf. Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight and Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. Taylor also has a TED talk telling her story, and there’s an animated video of McGilchrist’s story as well.

[6] A recent documentary vividly exposes the truth and reality of the history of ‘Bernays sauce’ and its evolution to become the semiotic engineering that permeates human cognition in the 21st century – see Propaganda: The Manufacture of Consent (Icarus Films, January 24, 2020), featuring Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges. Other films on the same cognitive toxicity of our times include The Great Hack (2019), PsyWar (2010), and Zeitgeist (2011). A classic work on this topic is the “propaganda model” by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). A short animation illustrates the mechanisms at work in the Herman and Chomsky propaganda model, “Noam Chomsky – the 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine” (2017). Another clip, “Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann – Woodrow Wilson’s Brains of Propaganda,” also features Chomsky explaining the role of Walter Lippmann in shaping the techniques and the advance of ‘public relations.’ Chomsky’s 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, draws its title from Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion. Also see these Wikipedia articles, “Edward Bernays,” “George Creel,” “Committee on Public Information,” and “Walter Lippmann.” Cf. Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power (2017); Chomsky, Who Rules the World? (2017); Wolin and Hedges, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2017); Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour (2018); Hedges, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress (2013); and Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Illusion (2010).

MELEE-R6

What Would Hobson Do?

Figure 1: Illustration by MR.FISH (Dwayne Booth) ©2019

[[ NOTE: ‘MELEE-R6’ is an acronym mnemonic for ‘Mass Extinction Level Events on Earth – Round 6,’ i.e., the existential truth and reality we face today as the anthropogenic threat to survival of life on Earth. Cf. “Holocene extinction (Wikipedia);” “Are we in the sixth mass extinction on Earth? The signs are all there (ABC News).” The subtitle refers to the logical notion of a “Hobson’s Choice (Wikipedia)” – i.e., a free choice but with only one thing offered. Since refusal to accept what’s offered is one option, the two options are taking it or taking nothing. In other words, one may "take it or leave it." Except with MELEE-R6, we’re getting the same annihilation outcome whether we choose or not. ]]

As I’ve grown more fully engaged and deeply involved with the Deep Adaptation movement on its website and in Facebook and LinkedIn social media, I’m both encouraged and saddened by the experience.[1] On one hand, we appear to be alongside other existential crisis movements, including Extinction Rebellion (XR), Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, et al. (and still counting).[2]

On the other hand, at the same time, we seem to be slipping into the same sorts of old paradigms, old ideologies, old habits, and old reflexive actions that are actually elements of the root causes of MELEE-R6 itself. Many hours of deep philosophical discussion and empirical dialogue would be needed to fully explain my views and concerns. This blog post primarily focuses on my roles within the Deep Adaptation Forum Professions Network (DAFPN) community in particular, but more generally, it serves as a morbid and mortal case study of being present in the same pit of cognitive (semiotic) MELEE-R6 darkness and dissonance overwhelming us all.

Telescope Teddy was Wrong

In addition to being famous for offering the pithy advice of, “speaking softly and carrying a big stick,” POTUS25 Theodore Roosevelt was nicknamed “Telescope Teddy” because, when out West in 1900, he had all his rifles fitted with small telescopes for long-distance shooting. He apparently insisted on seeing all his targets up close and personal to maximize his chances of shooting to kill. He is also quoted as having said, “If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” In our current situation as humans being present on Earth in the 21st century, however, he was quite wrong – thanks to our own brute stupidity and evil genius, nature has us seized by the balls, but our hearts and minds are incapable of following. We just don’t get it – we’re sign-blinded by pain, fear, rage, grief, and agonizing futility. We know, as Guy McPherson observes, “nature bats last,” all rules of game and order are the cosmic causal laws of her well-ordered universe. Bottom of the 9th … score = nature Aleph-Nought / humankind absolute zero .[3]

We don’t seem to be capable of keeping our hearts saturated in and our minds wrapped around the fact that humanity has never before been in anything remotely resembling MELEE-R6 truth and reality. All the bets we’re used to making are off – and the brutal truth and reality are that we’re all, already, all-in for our very survival as a species.  

What Would Jesus Say?

I'm not in any way proselytizing or evangelizing Christianity as it’s commonly understood, but seen from an apologetic explanatory perspective, a metaphor in Mark goes to the heart of our challenge in facing MELEE-R6 both generally and within DAF especially (Mark 2:18-22 NIV):

No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.

The world as we’ve known it is an ‘old garment’ and an ‘old wineskin.’ 'Pragmatism’ as we’ve reflexively conceived and applied it – and corresponding notions of strategic analysis, planning, systems, logistics, institutions, etc. – is an ‘old garment’ and ‘old wineskin’ developed by fascist corporatocracy and weaponized technocracy for profit. MELEE-R6 is the toxic vinegar now souring in those old ideological paradigmatic wineskins, and we’re stuck with nothing else at hand or in view as old or new cloth, wine, patch, or new wineskin, nor any salvific Gilead balm or panacea to be had (Jeremiah 8:22; 22:6; 46:2,11).[4]  

As things now stand globally, locally, and in DAF, I fear we haven’t even begun weaving new fabric or fermenting new wine. The ideas of ‘weaving’ and ‘fermenting’ per se are mired in paradigms that either never should have come to pass at all or should by now at least be long past gone. Worse, we barely know what the ‘threads’ and ‘fruits’ are to begin with when we seek and strive to confront MELEE-R6 in all its truth and reality and abruptly adapt enough and rightly to preserve a viable remnant of humanity through and beyond it.

Meanwhile, perhaps desperately most afraid of doing nothing, we reflexively turn to what we do ‘know’ – but that may well be more likely a fatal misstep across the event horizon of our doom than a light to our path and lamp to our feet in the cognitive dissonance and darkness of MELEE-R6. An example, I think, is seen in the ease with which we turn to and find comfort and confidence in such techniques, approaches, and tools as SMART goals, SWOT analyses, and the like, in our DAF discussions and actions, or worse, spiritual narcissism that seems to be spreading virally in reflexive response to the desperately morbid and horrifically mortal reality we’ve brought upon ourselves.

Similarly, while the core aspects of the ‘permaculture’ idea appear to be quite well-founded, the concomitant shift to ‘systems thinking’ strikes me as being self-defeating for those same sorts of reasons. ‘Systems’ and ‘systems analysis, strategy, and planning’ within current ‘permaculture’ actions or movements are likely to be grounded in the same old-garment old-wineskin long past gone ways of thinking and paradigms permeating human being and presence in the world today. It isn’t so much that Joanna Macy’s “Active Hope” Buddhist sangha, general ecological systems theory, and “Work that Reconnects” approach and practices are wrong or wide of the mark. It’s simply that it’s too little, too late, and too far past cautionary principle redemption to make a significant difference for the survival of life on Earth as we know it today.

The Delusion of Rational Science and Our Identity Crisis

“But,” you and others may object, “the very science that confirms the present truth and reality of MELEE-R6 itself is the product of that sort of systems thinking.” I can only reply, “Yes – and that very science provided the theoretical and technological ways and means through which the crises of MELEE-R6 were created and continue to accelerate through the present and into the future. How genuinely rational is any such science? More to the point, how ethical or moral is it?” At the end of the day, nevertheless, I’m still Diogenes looking for an honest scientist who will own up to the fact that modern scientistic scientism created MELEE-R6 as the indentured servant of the fascist capitalism whose wealth and power created, rule, and control the world as we know it. [NOTE: ‘fascist capitalism’ is simply the modern name and hashtag du jour for the evils of egregious vanity and avarice that wax and wane throughout human history.]

Please understand – I struggle against these same reflexive ideological tendencies all day every day in all that I do. We all do. Some are in denial, some rage in fury, some suffocate in despair, and some few have been able to accept, acknowledge, and adapt through a fragile and tenuous new identity. Yet the depth and breadth of MELEE-R6 truth and reality and the destiny and legacy they have in store for whatever may in the end remain of humanity are entirely beyond the pale of our meager comprehension. ‘What do to’ or perhaps more to the point ‘who to be’ are the existential crisis questions whose answers still elude us in that darkness and distance of mystery and madness. If our 21st century scientistic scientism is indeed an irrationally unsound, existentially absurd, and irreal worldview, how do we answer? The very idea of preparing for the inconceivable is the shaggy dog gallows humor of our times.

For me, the meaning and purpose of who I am and what I do are found in healing and prophecy. By that I mean, creatively imagining ways to heal myself and others from the pandemic spread and oppression of solastalgia.[5] By ‘prophecy’ I mean being present – transparently as myself and for others – as  a futurist, philosopher, scout, guide, and mentor who happens to be somewhat skilled in reading the signs of what was, what is, and what is to come … in other words, a semiotician who heals with truth about reality.

Be Real, Tell Truth, Mind Misery, and Succor Suffering

As anyone who has experienced any major invasive surgery will attest, recovery is an incredibly painful ordeal. For some, the treatment of heart disease provided by coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) or arduous regimens of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery for cancer, for example, can seem to be far worse than the diseases they treat. Likewise, the massive doses of truth and reality as treatment for solastalgia, and recovery through denial, rage, despair, acceptance, and regeneration can be excruciating as the old self is put to death so a new self may emerge.

Who will we be? Whoever that is, ready or not, here we are and there we’re going. What will we do? Die. Most likely far sooner than hoped or expected and in ways we’ve never dreamed possible. MELEE-R6 is Hobson’s Choice with a fatal vengeance – ‘leave it’ is no longer an option. All that’s left is to take it as it comes.

NOTES
https://www.deepadaptation.info/

[1] See Deep Adaptation Forum & Professions Network website; Positive Deep Adaptation Facebook group (private); Deep Adaptation LinkedIn group.   

[2] See the Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future websites. Hundreds of climate activism movements are rapidly become thousands. The trend should be in the opposite direction – the many must become one movement with one heart, one accord, and one voice if it is to have even a marginal chance of making a true and real difference. But apparently we humans are incapable of resonant harmony on that universal scale, which is certainly part of the MELEE-R6 problem.

[3] Guy R. McPherson is an American scientist, professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. He is known for the idea of Near-Term Human Extinction (NTHE), a term he coined about the likelihood of human extinction by 2030 (Wikipedia). The heading of his eponymous website and blog is, “Nature Bats Last: Our days are numbered. Passionately pursue a life of excellence.”

[4] “There Is a Balm in Gilead” (Wikipedia); refers to Old Testament Scripture, while the lyrics of the traditional African American spiritual refer to the New Testament story of salvation through Jesus Christ. The Balm of Gilead is interpreted as a spiritual medicine that is able to heal Israel (and sinners in general). In the Old Testament, the balm of Gilead is taken most directly from Jeremiah chapter 8 v. 22: "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wounds of my [God's] people?" (Another allusion can also be found in Jeremiah chapter 46, v. 2 and 11: “This is the message (of the Lord) against the army of Pharaoh Neco … Go up to Gilead and get balm, O Virgin Daughter of Egypt, but you multiply remedies in vain; here is no healing for you” (cf. Jeremiah 22:6.).

[5] The term ‘solastalgia (Wikipedia)’ refers to a neologism describing mental or existential distress caused by environmental change. In many cases this is in reference to global climate change, but more localized events such as volcanic eruptions, drought or destructive mining techniques can cause it as well. Coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005[2], it was formed by combing the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain). Differing from mere homesickness, solastalgia refers to distress specifically caused by environmental change. In 2015, the medical journal The Lancet included solastalgia as a contributing concept to the impact of Climate Change on Human Health and Wellbeing (cf. Nick Watts, W Neil Adger, et al., "Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health," The Lancet, 386 (10006), 1861–1914.

Making Ends Meet

The Permanent Lie of Capitalism v. Socialism

THE EVILUTION WILL BE TELEVISED ©2019 and MEG VS SOCIALISM ©2020 by MR. FISH (Dwayne Booth)

Logically, Socialism v. Capitalism is a false dilemma. As cultural memes, they are diametrically opposed political paradigms at the polar extremes of a spectrum of governance and polity. Yet in reality beneath that social fabric and fabrication, each one rests upon a social contract (or lack thereof) and its ethical ground and moral foundation (or lack thereof). Despite all the noise and appearances to the contrary, political, cultural, economic, social, and other tensions, conflicts, strife, and enmity between capitalists and socialists in 21st century reality are rarely or never about ethical grounds and moral foundations.

The primary purpose of this bogus ideological Maginot Line is hidden, as it serves the political interests and aspirations of both sides equally well. Beneath the public bellicosity and pitched battles between them, each of them, throughout most of political history, has become a permanent lie concealing the underlying truth of totalitarian reality.

The Prince of Evil, the Ruler of this World, knows his reign is coming to an end. That is not a Christian-only statement. There is a ‘prince’ of evil who is ‘ruler’ of reality in our world and his ‘name’ is fascist capitalism. In its Christian sense, the opening sentence of this paragraph is clearly stated in Scripture. All theism aside, fascist capitalism is the reigning vicious cycle of wealth and power and the vile and evil maxim of “all for me none for you” in unrestrained rapacity on Earth today. The USAmerican reality v. myth dynamic is simply illustrated:

The Reality and Myth of USAmerican Fascist Capitalism

Hell hath no fury like Mother Nature scorned. Fascist Capitalism started ravaging her at least 200 years ago if not much further back into misnamed sentient and sapient human history. Throughout the 1900s, especially in post-WWII years, the brutal abuse expanded exponentially and intensified beyond tolerance, as nations queued up for their turns at her. Facing self-inflicted global suicide, the 0.00…1% cabal of philosophical zombies is now sleepwalking into catastrophe, while growing numbers of their like empty-minded automata awaken to Mother Nature’s reality. The ultra-elite fascist capitalist cabal dreams and wet dreams day and night, fueled by fatuous futility, oblivious to two increasingly self-evident truths: #1, the universe — where Mother Nature is the lawmaker — is and always has been totally aware and conscious of our being and presence; #2, she has a perfectly tuned moral compass and a flawlessly ethical bearing under those laws that human being and presence on Earth have violated with unfettered abandon and intentional malice for a very long time.(1)

USAmerican Fascist Capitalism isn’t the first fascism in human history. It just took USAmerican capitalism to be the first to secure global fascist reach and grasp, search and destroy, with overwhelming shock and awe. Evidence mounts by the hour that it will be the last ever, however. An ecocidal and genocidal force majeure unto itself, it's rabid insanity knows no bounds.

Socialism has its own equally blackened heart of fascism as a precursor to the USAmerican brand:

The Reality and Myth of Soviet Socialist Fascism

Nazi Fascism is another nefariously infamous example, which turns out, as a matter of historical fact, to have been covertly sown and reaped by capitalist cabals in all the nations involved in WWII:

The Reality and Myth of Third Reich Fascism

The most vitally important element of the three diagrams above is the small ‘S-curve’ in the middle of the two-headed arrow between Good and Evil. In that twist of the path between the opposites, human will and intention may go unethically and amorally awry into Evil or rationally and righteously for the Good. Bent on evil, the dark path is a slippery slope into the black-hole pit of an inverted bell (‘well’) curve. In the sort of extreme Fascist Capitalism suffusing 21st century reality on Earth today, the trail back to the S-curve is either lost or deliberately barricaded. The ideological seduction into Fascist Capitalism takes many forms, with such delusions as, ‘The lesser evil for the greater good,” which is pandemic in Western utilitarianism and pragmatism that pass for ethics and morality since Industrial Revolution began two centuries ago,(2)

‘Capitalism v. Socialism’ is semiotically engineered cognitive dissonance exploited by fascists to imprint reflexive mass behaviors and individual ideas and emotions purely for capital profit and gain. The intents, purposes, and ends thus served are the vile maxim and vicious cycle ensuring tyrannous concentration of power, wealth, rule, and control in the 0.00…1% oligarchic cabal of Evil kleptocrats ripping it from Nature, Earth, and everything they provided for the Good of humankind. The ethical ground and moral foundation is apolitical in that sense:

• Good is benevolent, philanthropic, altruistic, resonant, harmonious, relational, and communal.

• Evil is malevolent, misanthropic, rapacious, dissonant, discordant, divisive, and disintegrated.

Fascism is Evil. Fascist Capitalism and Fascist Socialism are Evil twins. Either or both could be (or truly, once could have been) Good. But humankind has already raped Mother Nature beyond any tipping point of no return or hope of redemption. Secular rapists of Nature or feral enemies of Christ, it’s all the same. Evil by any political name is a permanent lie we’d all rather believe than face 21st century truth and reality. The sixth mass — this time Anthropocene, i.e., human-caused — extinction already has us in its death grip and we literally have Hell to pay for our sins against Nature, ourselves, Christ, or all three.

P. S. An Extinction Rebellion podcast directly relevant to this posts’s topic.

Notes

(1) The laws of nature are universal empirical facts of reality and life. #1 and #2 are rapidly evolving scientific hypotheses, becoming increasingly desirable if not indispensable for rationally realistic cosmology. This post assumes both their scientific veracity.and their Christian reality.

(2) Every normal distribution bell curve and its abnormal inverted well curve consists of a pair of reverse-image S-curves. Left to right, a normal distribution bell curve shows rise and fall, which the change in the slopes of the curves clearly depict. An abnormal well curve distribution, by contrast, express a fall and rise from left to right. The Adizes Corporate Lifecycle is normal distribution bell-curve model of ‘Good’ growth and prosperity emerging, rising, peaking, falling, and declining into self-destruction. When the initial and precipitating conditions of that ‘Good’ growth are displaced or subverted by ‘Evil’ Fascist Capitalism, the entire curve is inverted in to the abnormal well-curve distribution. What had been growth and prosperity become concentration of wealth, power, rule, and control in the hands of the 0.00...1% few at the expense of the 99.99…% of Earth’s biomass and all non-living resources as well. The tyranny is absolute in the pit of that well, and climbing back up and out, desperate for a do-over is an apocalyptic death march. Humanity en masse embraces the ‘Good’ growth-and-prosperity permanent lie of Fascist capitalism. In truth and reality, the rape of Mother Nature the rapacious pillaging of her resources continues … a sleepwalk into catastrophe under a global suicide pact (World Economic Forum, i.e., WEF: Global Risk Report 2019, p. 15; UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “Opening Remarks,” 2011).

Rehashing the Basics

Yoni and Terry revisit the topics of Peirce's semiotics and Jewish PaRDeS (Peshat, Remez, Derash, Sod).

Yoni's SemioBytes blog posts are here.

Highly recommended reading:
Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, revised edition, Foreword by Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), paperback.

In a letter to his admirer and friend Chicago Judge Francis Russell in November 1904, Peirce wrote:

… whatever I amount to is due to two things, first, a perseverance like that of a wasp in a bottle & 2nd to the happy accident that I early hit upon a METHOD of thinking, which any intelligent person could master, and which I am so far from having exhausted it that I leave it about where I found it,— a great reservoir from which ideas of a certain kind might be drawn for many generations.

Peirce’s life story is an American tragedy and a disgraceful chapter in the history of academia. Brent’s biography began as his 1960 UCLA doctoral dissertation in history. Upon completion, however, it was relegated to obscurity by Harvard, who had acquired Peirce’s writing shortly after his death in 1914. They refused to allow publication of quotes Brent’s treatise contained from Peirce’s correspondence and other materials. The work languished in academic twilight until 1990, when Thomas Sebeok stumbled across an obscure reference to it, tracked it down, got in touch with Brent, and motivated him to revise, expand, and publish it. Its first edition appeared in 1993, and this 1998 enlarged and revised second edition stands as the definitive biography of America’s indisputably greatest philosopher.

Brent’s biography is a masterpiece for at least two reasons: his telling of the tragic tale of Peirce’s life is as brilliant and insightful as it is historically factual and detailed. His explications of Peirce’s astonishingly profound philosophy are as lucid and incisive as they are honest and inviting. No scholarly inquiry into the story of Peirce can be complete or cogent without plumbing the depths of Brent’s telling of it

As for “rehashing the basics” in our SemioBytes podblog episode of that title, while reading Brent’s biography I was blessed to discover that the most basic notion in Peirce’s philosophy is his fundamental trichotomy of categories. Anyone familiar with Immanuel Kant’s four triads of synthetic a priori categories as “pure concepts of the understanding” will have a sense of just what Peirce accomplished in distilling Kant’s dozen down to just three triads of categories (a total of nine) with no loss of metaphysical, phenomenological, transcendental, or logical power whatsoever. The three classes forming the triad are Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. A simple illustration, borrowed from Brent (p. 333):

Mathematically and logically, triads cannot be reduced to dyads nor dyands to monads. But any more complicated thing can be reduced to a triad:

Peirce’s method involved using this categorical trichotomy as the “reservoir” from which to draw the triadic character of everything. As Brent explained, Peirce discovered this method in 1867 and it permeated his work thereafter.

Perhaps best known of all the triads Peirce generated from this fundamental one is the three kinds of signs: icons, indexes, and symbols. Each sign type manifests all three of those basic aspects of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Icons, for example, are First as mere extant things, even if only possibly so — the monadic dot above is simply itself. Its Secondness lies in its dyadic relationship to the other dot based on similarity or likeness, proximity or alignment, etc. Its Thirdness emerges in its concurrent correlation with the other two. When we interpret the images as a bullethole, a buttonhole, and a billiard rack or equilateral triangle, say, we are semiotically giving those iconic, indexical, and symbolic categories their cognitive roles as objects, representations, and interpretations, respectively, in our own thinking. That is the essence of sign-processing, or semiosis.

Of course that is all a bit too arcane and abstract. Brent provides a more palpable and familiar illustration (p. 333):

The effort to understand Peirce on the categories sometimes gives one the giddy feeling of learning how to waltz—ONE, two, three; ONE, two, three; ONE, two, three…. The broken repetition of rhythm also resembles the mechanical gait of an insect (perhaps a wasp?). But, finally, the sheer beauty of the dancing categories evokes nothing so much as the chaotic and recursive fractal images of Benoit Mandelbrot plunging deeply into the microcosm and always reflecting lovely and minutely differing variations of themselves. There is also a close similarity to the dancing trinities of Christian and Hindu theology, a connection which Peirce recognized. For example, in the Christian Trinity, God the Father is Firstness, God the Son is Secondness, and God the Holy Ghost is Thirdness.

Brent chose Peirce’s self-description for the closing chapter of his book, “The Wasp in the Bottle.” As something or other of an itinerant philosopher in my own life from the inside of my own bottle, I resonate quite harmoniously with Brent’s observations (p. 335):

The image he created of himself as an angry wasp trapped in a bottle … seems wonderfully apt as a description of the Secondness of Peirce’s experience of life, but it also has broader meaning. The image clearly expresses the human condition: we are trapped behind a pane of metaphysical glass which we can see through darkly by means of the senses, but which distorts the reality see glancing beyond it. Peirce’s picture of himself as the furious wasp buzzing ominously but impotently about the cramped confines of his pellucid bottle, futilely jabbing at the slick glass with his stinger, pragmatism, in a lifelong attempt to penetrate the riddle and escape with the secret of the universe, only to die humiliated and unrewarded, seems to be no more than a metaphor for the unreasonable state in which we find ourselves.

Awaken to Signs

Awaken. 
Signs are everything everywhere.
Creation is semiosis. Cognition is semiosis. Cosmos is semiosis. 
Discern the signs. 

The idea of an 'awakening to signs' emerged from interaction with fellow members of the 15th cohort of the Doctor of Ministry Program, Semiotics and Future Studies, Dr. Leonard I. Sweet, Lead Mentor. Our group is the DMIN SFS15 Cohort at Portland (PDX) Seminary of George Fox University. 

A discussion thread arose on an officially unaffiliated separate FB group site for SFS15 Cohort members around the idea of a 'church of signs.' All-too-familiar concern about the theological anatomy of such a church surfaced almost immediately: what vision, purpose, mission, ministry, etc. would it embrace, if any? My interest quickly faded.

I've since recalled that, where I come from, church life is birthed through Spiritual awakening and revival. It begins in the singular manifestation of the Presence and Being of the Person of the Holy Spirit, by His Divine Will, not by our profane desires. He becomes manifest singularity in the wide open wild chaos of the present fallen world. His Being and Presence are imminently instantiated within the frenzy and chaos, yet in some miraculously mysterious way, simultaneously entirely beyond it. 

The last Great Awakening of Spirit in America was Cane Ridge, at the beginning of the 1800s, in the bluegrass Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky, near Lexington. I was born on the first day of summer just under 150 years later in Richmond ... most of a day's journey then, an hour's drive today.  

Yet I've come in life to sense Cane Ridge Blood coursing through me -- in heart, soul, mind, and strength. I pray that it flows freely again soon than later and beyond merely myself with new Awakening and Revival, globally ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning in fresh seasons manifesting the Spirit's Being and Presence for every human. 

Cane Ridge and other Great Awakenings erupted in such divine manifestations. Open-air campsite gatherings swelled to encircled them; tents were pitched and Koinonia reigned, if only for a season. We eventually embraced our modern human notion of 'community,' thus letting the ancient 'Koinonia' from whence it came slip away unnoticed. We erect opulent commemorative 'church' Ebenezers today in memory of those seasons ... monuments to what was here then but has now passed on and away to other manifest singularity.  

In the 1st century, 'Ekklisía' referred to the Koinonia of Christ followers and the Holy Spirit Being Presence within and among them. In the 21st century, 'church' refers to the 'community' of nominal Christians for whom the manifest singularity of Spirit Being and Presence in Truth as Reality ('Aletheia') is a forgotten state in a foreign land beyond navigation and recall.   

To be awakened to the Being and Presence of the Spirit is to discern where and when He is manifest within and beyond yourself, then join and follow Him wherever and whenever He goes. We utterly fail to read the signs in which we're immersed. We're fish who don't know water when we're wet and fowl who don't know wind when we fly. Only when we're desperately parched and plummeting do we awaken or die.      

Breathe and live. Listen and hear. Look and see.
Touch and feel. Taste and savor.
Reason and discern.
Awaken fully to all the signs. 

Dead Ahead

Here's the thing about cruise control: it's fine as long as the weather is nice and the roads are straight and dry and there's little traffic or none. It also helps if you're set no more than 10% above the legal speed limit, the vehicle is running smoothly, and there are no breakdowns, flat tires, etc. while you're disengaged if not actually asleep at the wheel. It's actually pretty nice, comfortable, even reassuring and relaxing ... unless and until. 

The subtle but crucial fact is that cruise control is out of control. The urgency of that fact can explode into reality far more quickly than you can react and act to regain control, escape danger, and emerge unscathed, or at least alive. All it takes is an oily patch, a spring shower, a scampering creature, or any of countless other immediately spontaneous events that suddenly bring the truth of 'too late' into the terror of helpless awareness right there and then.  

"It's only acceleration and braking," you say, "I'm still in control, navigating, piloting, deciding, planning, and I can instantly seize full control back anytime." Perhaps so. At least unless and until your late-model vehicle's antilock braking and traction control systems lose their minds and put you into spinout the very moment your path crosses that oily patch, which neither you nor your cruise control saw coming. 

The root problem is that, even at our very cognitive best, actual and potential causal chains of events always exceed our awareness and knowledge in the here and now. The more we convince ourselves we're in control -- and especially when we deregulate, delegate, and relegate control over to others (including machines) -- the less we're actually in control and the more vulnerable we are, the more risk we take, and the more dire the consequences of wrong action or inaction become. 

Until an automatic sensor lights up a dashboard signal for us, we drivers rarely or never think about internal combustion, engines and drive trains, hydraulics and mechanics, and all the rest that places our vehicular domicile and transport in our hands at the pushes of all sorts of buttons. If that light happens to switch off as spontaneously as it switched on, we're relieved and content to convince ourselves the signal was the problem and it corrected itself.  

21st century existence is life in the cognitive fast lane and at least 99% of all 7 billion (and counting) of us have our sentient and sapient cruise controls active and set for max velocity (plus at least 10%) by default. We abdicate the design and engineering of our experience and our understanding, thus relinquishing control of our own identities and self-control. We no more think about nurturing the well-being of our bodies and minds -- the viability and reliability of our experiences and the clarity and rationality of our thoughts -- than we do about the workings of internal combustion, engines and drive trains, hydraulics and mechanics, and all the rest that keeps our vehicles rolling on. If it feels good we consume, imbibe, and indulge. If it feels right, we strongly believe, firmly commit, and reject every otherwise. As long as we feel fine and right in the here and now it's all good. 

Unless and until. If and when our existence implodes or our lives coast or crawl to a dissonant halt, we're suddenly so, like, totally astonished, and like, so completely shocked that everything could go so, like, uh, awful bad and wrong when we thought it was all, like, just so awesome. Did I miss an upgrade? What new apps for this do I need? Where's the system reboot button? How do I instantly restore who I am and what it all means and what it's all about and get it all back on track to awesome? 

How do we get back to cognitive cruise control? Where's my personal pod and cocoon in the matrix of irreality where we abdicate all responsibility and control over everything having to do with philosophy, logic, and analytic, reflective, introspective awareness, knowledge, and understanding? You know, all that hard stuff that's too much trouble to bother with, and none of it really matters anyway! 

Whew! What a relief! For a second there, I so thought I was, like, really in, like, trouble, y'know? 

Go Away! I don't need you! Just give me my blue pill and leave me alone! 

Don't worry! Be happy! Pill and chill! Artificially superintelligent machine cognition is right around the technomagical corner, everywhere always all ways in total control for everyone, just dead ahead.  

Who Am I?

Who am I? How did I get here? Why am I here? Where am I going? What does it all mean?

Whenever any or all of these questions percolate into our consciousness, we’re experiencing a moment of philosophical (or at least existential) angst. Existential philosophy is just one way to answer such questions.

I am not an existentialist. I’m an intensional realist. It’s taken over 50 years to fully figure that out and the journey continues. So don’t bother wrestling with what it means. The point is, you must come to grips with philosophical angst on your own and in your own terms. The cure for it is found in answers to those questions and all the others like them (Science? Religion?). Every potential answer and cure is philosophical.

Unfortunately, philosophies are like those tube-shaped sacs attached to and opening into the lower end of our large intestines – our appendixes. Each of us has one,  but most of us never think about it. For many of us it’s been preventively removed so it won't get infected and kill us, or it’s been snipped out in an emergency because it was already going that way. Think of this as a philosophectomy. Like an appendectomy, the great thing about a philosophectomy is never having to worry or think about it again. But be assured -- unless you've undergone a philosophectomy, you do have a philosophy whether you ever know or think about it or not. 

For nearly everyone else, it's probably a close call between the last time you thought about your physical appendix and its philosophical sibling. Neither of them serves any real purpose or has any worthwhile meaning, so best to just leave it hanging there until it gets in the way, which hopefully will be never.  

Unlike an appendectomy, which leaves only a barely visible scar these days, post-op philosophectomy recovery never really ends. Questions like those above tend to haunt us long after the operation, like phantom sensations of an amputated limb.

We philosophers seem to be rare and strange genetic aberrations with our (philosophical) appendages attached somewhere in our brains, with some weird connection to our guts as well. Removal is physically impossible and psychologically fatal, so we may as well use it to figure out what everything is all about.

Who Are We?

Let’s start with homo sapiens – Latin for ‘wise man,’ the one and only extant human species, capable of analytic, creative, and inspired thought and reason. But this isn’t the whole story. We’re also homo sentiens – Latin for ‘feeling man’, where feeling has two different meanings, namely, our five senses of vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, but we also have emotions, including fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, trust, anticipation, and surprise. Put the sapience and sentience together, and ipso facto abracadabra – there we have us – homo cognitio!

“So I’m a cognitive human,” you say, “that’s so old news, like, so yesterday.” Fine. Let’s drill a bit deeper. What's the essence of our cognition that differentiates us as unique? If that’s why we’re the crown of creation or the baddest beast in the gene pool, how does this ‘cognition’ work? So, like, glad you asked!

It’s very complicated to fully understand, but the Facebook boil-down goes something like this. We have physical bodies (with brains) for feeling, cognitively connected to our metaphysical (no body) minds for thinking. Our body/mind presence is immersed in a universe soaked in causation. The laws that govern causality generate the sensations our bodies and brains filter and sort to produce thoughts and ideas in our minds. This causal connection between our body/mind selves and the immediate and local contexts of our experience in the universe is a medium of signal communication. Just as analog and digital signals are transmitted and received through time, space, and matter as audio and video, for instance, causal signals are transmitted and received between each of us and those local causal contexts, including among other homo cognitio causal agents who may also be present.

The theory of what those signals are and how they work was conceived and worked out by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). It’s called ‘semiotics,’ for the study or theory of signs. If you'd like to have an encounter with an incredibly hyperactive and prolific philosophical appendix, give his writings a try sometime.

The point is, as I see it, once all is said and done, the best answer to, “Who are we?” is, homo semioticus. That’s the best label for the class containing each of the 7 billion (and counting) of us alive today, and all who passed before. The true beauty of being a member of that class is, each of us is absolutely unique as a sign-processing entity!

In other words, I myself am the one and only me that experiences and knows myself and the world from my point of view. What a blessing, right? But what a curse if we're wrong, or worse, if we can’t find ways to fully and meaningfully share with others, hey? 

Next question, next time: “How did I get here?” or, “Who’s to blame for me?” Meanwhile, give a bit of thought to re-growing your philosophical appendix if you’ve had a philosophectomy. Like the lizard’s tail or the sea star’s arms, philosophy is inevitably regenerative -- the darn thing will keep growing back even without you knowing it. The trick to healthy regeneration is, you must choose to take it over and keep willing it to happen and doing the work to nurture the growth. It's like the difference between kudzu in the wild and bonsai on display: nobody ever said it would be easy. But as a last resort, philosophectomy is always an easy out.

Slow down -- look at least twice ....