Déjà Vu in Black and Blue

Takin’ a Lickin’ and Keepin’ on Lickin’

Folding the Circus2016-2020 Big Tent[1]

Folding the Circus2016-2020 Big Tent[1]

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.[2]

Three recent posts on this blog voiced my ardent support for Bernie Sanders as POTUS46 in 2020.[3] In all three, I plainly stated I felt Sanders was a long shot to win, at best. With ignominious departure from Circus2020 yesterday, today I struggle against “I told you so,” and I can’t help thinking of Yogi Berra’s now-famous aphorism – “It’s déjà vu all over again.” We the people are beaten black and blue yet again by the very same fascist capitalist elitist kleptocratic oligarch cabal and praetorian corporatocracy that made USAmerican ‘democracy’ a laughingstock in the very same way in Circus2016. It’s déjà vu black and blue all over again. It seems we the people are quite content to just keep on lickin’ the jackboots of the fascist thuggery running the world.

As global martial law lite enshrouds the planet, we pretend it’s a difference that makes no real difference, while trillions of fresh-minted dollars once again pour into the rapacious black hole coffers of that sociopathic omnicidal 1%. Toilet paper becomes a new gold standard of quality of life, as if we subliminally know just how explosively we’re shitting ourselves from here and now into oblivion already upon us. We swallow the permanent lies of USAmerican mythology upholding our civil religion and its scientismic dogmatism; we exude fanatic technophilia in a rampant plethora of rabid digitized rituals, lethargic pixelated liturgies, and self-serving pseudo-social sacraments enthralling us all to death without having ever really lived at all in truth and reality. We flatten a delusional statistical curve of pandemic viral vengeance thrown at us by the causal laws of nature we defy at every turn, as if God and Mother Nature were chattel we took captive through Enlightenment Rationality centuries ago to become Whipping Boy and House Whore to serve our sadistic nationalism and insatiable necrophilia.

We are presence undeserving of being; vile things of existential absurdity; apex predators who occupy substance to devour and destroy it from zenith to nadir without ever a second thought or a passing glance backward. There is only our ex nihilo nihil – our coming from nothing to be nothing and to become nothingness.

We are the virus. Hoist to our own extinction on the corona of our own creation. There lies the final justice, at last. The Circus has left the building and all we are is dust in the wind of its wake.[4]

All Over But the Cryin’ and Dyin’

All Over But the Cryin’ and Dyin’

Notes

[1] Drawings by Dwayne Booth (aka MR. FISH) – RESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (left), ©June 2016; BIDEN 2020 (right), ©March 2020. BIDEN 2020 accompanies Chris Hedges, “The One-Choice Election,” in TruthDig (now available in archive only due to fascist capitalist oppression), March 09, 2020.

[2] Final stanza in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “PROEM: The Day is Done,” in The Waif: A Collection of Poems, 5th ed. (Boston, MA: William D. Ticknor & Co., 1846), ix-xi.

[3] “Stakeholder Capitalism v Truthteller Realism: Three-Card Monte at Davos 2020” (February 4, 2020); “The Circus2020 McCarthyism Bandwagon: Red-Baiting Will Continue Until Rationality is Defeated” (February 19, 2020); “Dystopian Dissonance: Damn It All to Hell” (March 6, 2020).

[4] More MR. FISH: JOE BLOW, ©March 9, 2020; BERNED OUT, ©April 9, 2020.

Dystopian Dissonance

Damn It All to Hell

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

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)

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]

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).

The Circus2020 McCarthyism Bandwagon

Red-Baiting Will Continue Until Rationality is Defeated

TRACKING THE ELECTION (©2020) and TWO BALLS AND NO STRIKES (©2019) by MR FISH (aka Dwayne Booth, Cartooning from the Deep End)[1]

TRACKING THE ELECTION (©2020) and TWO BALLS AND NO STRIKES (©2019) by MR FISH
(aka Dwayne Booth, Cartooning from the Deep End)[1]

All too predictably, political debates, rants, and diatribes are increasingly ignited and fueled by divisive enmity about ‘capitalism vs. socialism.’ What is actually occurring, however, is entrapment: fascism, masquerading as free-market capitalism, is ruthlessly exploiting the irrationality and ignorance we the people seem incapable of overcoming in our understanding of political truth and reality. This mortal affliction of political myopia and the cognitive dissonance it manifests are widespread throughout the entire political spectrum and landscape, especially in USAmerica. With the rise of neoliberal globalism, moreover, it has spread pandemically around the world. While it is emotionally acute and intellectually chronic even among its fascist capitalist neoconservative ‘far-right’ victims, for whom it is a weapon of mass mental destruction, it is particularly disarming and disabling when it targets members and advocates of the so-called liberal or progressive ‘left.’

In his OtherWords article (February 12, 2020), “Who’s Afraid of Socialism?” Peter Certo, the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies, clearly exposes and explains this epidemic of sociopolitical cognitive dissonance:

For decades, Republicans have painted anyone left of Barry Goldwater as a “socialist.” Why? Because for a generation raised on the Cold War, “socialist” just seemed like a damaging label.

And, probably, it was.

You can tell, because many liberal-leaning figures internalized that fear. When Donald Trump vowed that “America will never be a socialist country,” for instance, no less than Senator Elizabeth Warren stood and applauded.

The sobering truth is that all political systems are capable of either great violence or social uplift. That’s why we need resilient social movements, whatever system we use — and why we’re poorly served by propaganda from any corner.

Fascism is the epitome and pinnacle of social, political, and economic violence. Ruling and controlling through ultra-elitist wealth and power, fascism rejects the very of idea of a social covenant or contract between the rulers and the ruled. Its sole purpose and prime directive are to serve the rapacious self-interests of the elite at any and all costs by any and all means. The false dilemma juxtaposition of ‘capitalism vs. socialism’ is a malevolent sociopolitical meme and malicious trope that lures and snares the unwitting in a deathtrap to become raw human resources. Our status is that of merely material socioeconomic externalities to be exploited to exhaustion and death.

My blog post, “Making Ends Meet” (June 2, 2019) sought to awaken people to this informal logical fallacy of ‘Red-baiting’ or ‘reductio ad Stalinum’ — a permanent lie and political con game of capitalism vs. socialism’ rhetoric. In a later blog post, “Stakeholder Capitalism v Truthteller Realism” (February 4, 2020), I sought to awaken people to the Three-Card Monte version of the same logical fallacy, permanent lie, and con game. Run by the Davos ultra-elite of the inner circle of the elite 1%, the World Economic Forum’s Founder and executive chairman Prof. Klaus Schwab hosted the 2020 50th Anniversary gala in Davos last month. In truth and reality the event was a celebratory dirge for humanity’s death march into onrushing anthropogenic Mass Extinction Level Events on Earth - Round 6 (‘MELEE-R6). With Drum Major Schwab in the ideological lead, the global economy paraded straight out of its jaded “state capitalism” and “shareholder capitalism” plundering past into its new bright and shiny future thing, “stakeholder capitalism.” All along, some would say, that Three-Card Monte lady in hiding turns out to be the Biblical Whore of Babylon — the truth and reality of pandemic fascism in all its savagely rapacious 21st century USAmerikan form.[2]

MR FISH’s “TRACKING THE ELECTION” (above) accompanies Chris Hedges’ Truthdig article, “The New Rules of the Game” (Feb 17, 2020) to illustrate the nefarious backroom offstage conspiratorial villainy working against the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. What FISH trenchantly illustrates as the Bloomberg & Biden “TWO BALLS AND A STRIKE” shtick will be a gaudy midway sideshow in a few caucus and primary stopovers as the Circus2020 Charade Parade rolls through to November. Hedges put it plainly:

If Sanders gets the nomination it will be due to the Keystone Cops ineptitude of the Democratic leadership, one that … replicates the ineptitude of the Republican elites in 2016. But this time there will be a crucial difference. The ruling elites, once divided between Trump and Hillary Clinton, with most of the elites preferring Clinton, will be united against Sanders. They will back Trump as the least worst. The corporate media will turn its venom, now directed at Trump, toward Sanders. The Democratic Party’s mask will come off. It will be open warfare between them and us.

At the end of the day, FISH’s illustrations and Hedges’ words are sending the same message: contrary to the adage usually attributed to POTUS16 Abraham Lincoln, it doesn’t matter how many people you can or can’t fool anytime or anywhere as long as you get away with fucking all of them over before they see it coming. The deadliest toxin in the venomous onslaught already attacking Sanders is the vile deception inherent in Red-baiting entrapment.[3]

Revived and revised from its earlier forms by paranoid sociopath Senator Joe McCarthy (1908-1957) and his wing-man Richard M. ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon (1913-1994), who would later become POTUS37, “Red baiting” was a Cold War political witch-hunt that institutionalized all forms of anti-socialism, anti-communism, etc., in the USAmurikun political way to this day. MR FISH’s “TRACKING THE ELECTION” drawing above appears in Truthdig to illustrate an article by Chris Hedges, “The New Rules of the Game (Feb 17, 2020).” In the opening paragraph of his article, Hedges writes, “Donald Trump, if he faces Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg, will continue to be an amalgamation of Adolf Hitler, Al Capone and the Antichrist.” He identifies eight blatant Red-baiting attacks on Sanders by the elites and their corporate presstitutes, then explains the rational understanding of political truth and reality these attacks are locked, loaded, and aimed to destroy:

Despite the hyperventilating by corporate shills such as (MSNBC commentator Chris) Matthews and (New York Times weekly columnist Thomas) Friedman, Sanders’ democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an accepted part of the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists and radical socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget, for “Medicare for All,” abolishing the death penalty, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as a revolutionary agenda.

As glaring evidence of just how far into the theater of the absurd this cacophony of propaganda has gone, consider the recent article by New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman, “Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist. But He Plays One on TV. That’s a Problem (Feb 13, 2020).” In his own commentary on Krugman’s hit piece on Sanders, former Massachusetts State Representative Tom Gallagher (“Paul Krugman on This Bernie Sanders and Socialism Thing,” Common Dreams, February 19, 2020) explains this absurdity:

The source of Krugman’s peculiar assertion that he understands Sanders’s political philosophy better than Sanders himself seems to be a strict equation of socialist politics with nationalization and central planning. What Sanders actually calls himself is a “democratic socialist”—a term that never appears in Krugman’s article—because he doesn’t believe that billionaires shouldn’t be running the show and the working people of the country should. Which is to say that our economy, like our government, should be subject to democratic control. At the core of socialism is the recognition that the nation and the entire world ultimately belong to us all, and we are all responsible for it all.

Odds are that if you search ‘sanders socialism’ on the web, the top results will heavily favor the anti-Sanders Red-baiting brigade of mainstream corporate meat-puppet presstitutes vomiting up a deluge of ad hominem and reductio ad Stalinem fallacious permanent lies in a tsunami of propaganda newspeak aimed at seducing us all into accepting the ruthless destruction of the Sanders 2020 campaign and all it stands for.

What do Sanders and his campaign ultimately stand for? If time remains for it to stand for anything at all, it stands for nothing less than the last desperate hope and slim chance humanity has to get a grip on reality in the 21st century and move rationally into the future. If it doesn’t happen here and now in USAmerica — despite our history of doing all and only exactly the worst and wrong things in the world — it’s the bottom of the ninth inning, we are not the home team, and the score is Nature infinity, humanity 0. As visionary climatologist Guy McPherson has been warning everyone he could reach for three decades, “Nature Bats Last” and she wrote the rules of the only game that matters in the end — the survival of the human species on Earth under the causal laws of the cosmos we inhabit.

Finally, if none of this or the other referenced materials on this blog and elsewhere are convincing, perhaps the views of arguably the most rational intellect of the past century will be more persuasive. In May 1949, Albert Einstein wrote “Why Socialism?” in the first issue of the socialist journal Monthly Review, and the article was reprinted in the journal in May 1998 and again in May 2009. In summary, Einstein argued as follows:[4]

According to Einstein, the profit motive of a capitalist society, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, leads to unnecessary cycles of booms and depressions, and ultimately encourages selfishness instead of cooperation. In addition, the educational system of such a society would be severely undermined because people will educate themselves only to advance their careers. This results in the "crippling of individuals" and the erosion of human creativity. Unrestrained competition in a capitalist society leads to a huge waste of labor and causes economic anarchy, which Einstein denounces as the real source of capitalism's "evil":

“The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.”

Einstein predicted that under such a capitalist society, political parties and politicians would be corrupted by financial contributions made by owners of large capital amounts, and the system "cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society". The essay concludes with Einstein's analysis on how to solve these problems through a planned economy:

“I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”

Einstein asserts that a planned economy that adjusts to production would guarantee a livelihood to every member of society:

“In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.”

In his final words, Einstein cautioned that "a planned economy is not yet socialism", since it may also be accompanied by an "all-powerful" bureaucracy that leads to the "complete enslavement of the individual".

Where are we now? Through the looking-glass from the actual world into an absurd world made to appear real by fascist capitalism. Its vaporous truth and delusional irreality are engineered and constructed to conceal totalitarian oligarchy and praetorian corporatocracy enslavement of humankind.[5] The real truth and reality thus obfuscated is the fascist heart of darkness kept beating to the new rhythms of a global economy “planned” according to Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism.” Red-baiting entrapment is merely a permanent top-10 number in the Circus2020 song and dance hit parade distracting us from the omnicidal extinction into which we’re being obliviously herded.

This evil scheme will work unless we overturn that malevolent bandwagon and keep them from getting away with the murder of everything — if it isn’t already too late.

_______________
NOTES

[1] The drawings by MR FISH won’t make sense to readers not familiar with a classic trope from the early days of silent film and with the vaudeville slapstick comedy of Abbott and Costello revived in the ‘talkies’ some years later. For background, take a few minutes to watch this video explaining the “damsel in distress” trope and this clip from the Abbot and Costello “Who’s on First?” routine. Then compare MR FISH’s “TRACKING THE ELECTION” and “TWO BALLS AND NO STRIKES” drawings to the images below. Will handsome cowboy hero billionaire Tom Steyer come to Sanders’ rescue in the nick of time? Not likely. Will the slapstick Circus2020 comedy of Bloomberg and Biden keep us from seeing the nefarious villainy behind the DNC-RNC curtains? Quite probably. BTW, I have it on impeccable authority (from the artist himself) that MR FISH did not stoop to photoshopping the archival images below for his drawings as they appear at the beginning of this post (used here by his permission). No, he spent many hours of meticulous focus and diligent concentration rendering them from scratch by hand to create them — they are realistic original drawings based on these early 20th century archival photographs. Prints of these and many other Booth drawings are available through his website, CLOWNCRACK.

“Damsel in Distress” silent movie trope and “Who’s On First?” Abbott & Costello routine

“Damsel in Distress” silent movie trope and “Who’s On First?” Abbott & Costello routine

[2] Schwab claims to have had his “stakeholder capitalism” epiphany nearly half a century ago: “stakeholder capitalism is quickly gaining ground …. I first described the concept back in 1971, and I created the World Economic Forum to help business and political leaders implement it …. Now (in 2020), others are finally coming to the ‘stakeholder’ table.” This leaves one wondering why it didn’t appear in the Davos limelight until now, or at least made explicit and more stridently promoted in his relatively recent book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York, NY: Currency, 2017).

[3] The adage is most familiar as, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time..” Its actual origin is uncertain, as it has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Jacques Abbadie, Denis Diderot, and even ‘Anonymous.’

[4] This summary quote is from the Wikipedia entry bearing Einstein’s article title, “Why Socialism?” The lines enclosed in quotation marks are from the original article as it appeared in the Monthly Review journal in May, 2009.

[5] The evil nature of the tyrannous corporatocracy referred to here is explicated in Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Introduction by Chris Hedges, new edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

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)

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

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

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 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).

Triadic Sortition?

Random Thoughts on a Viable XR Citizens’ Assembly

DOLLAR SIGN (c)2019 by MR. FISH

DOLLAR SIGN (c)2019 by MR. FISH

Random selection won't do, at lest not initially. In all honesty, through no real fault of their own, the citizenry at large is too ill-informed and contentious on the reality of the Anthropocene Extinction (AX) to deal with the Extinction Rebellion’s Citizen Assembly (XR-CA) roles and responsibilities rationally and univocally in confronting and engaging the oligarchy and corporatocracy of the fascist capitalism that must be overcome if humanity is to survive. Sad, but true. If we survive, those delusions and divisions may be overcome over time, but not in time to deal with the ongoing AX event.

As Roger Hallam suggests, however, some form of sortition is most promising. But the initial selections cannot be random. The scientific community within the XR, combined with prominent XR advocates and speakers like Hallam himself, ought to be the first 'pool' of Assembly candidates from which to draw the dozen members of the Assembly. But that alone won't do -- there must be some way to engage vox populi directly, in real-time, with a dozen drawn by lot from those key XR communities.(1)

Perhaps the best way to do this, while protecting the identities and privacy of individual citizens, is to set up a channel/group in the deep web, where those conditions are currently state-of-the-(clandestine)-art. The dark web may even be needed as well, if civil disobedience -- as deliberate breaking of the law -- is to be discussed, acted upon, and carried out. Nonviolent dissident action need not go above the deep web to the surface web or below to the dark web. The surface web should be almost entirely set aside for CA purposes. It's a global circus and carnival, teeming with noise lacking meaningful signal 99.99 ...% of the time. At most, a live-streamed channel of all gatherings and meetings of the Citizen's Assembly with the representatives of the actual members of the ultra-elite oligarchy should be broadcast on a surface web youtube or other free public channel (administered by deep and dark web XR staff).

As a 21st century XR coordinator and career technocrat, this strikes me as a plausible way to put up a Citizen's Assembly in three layers of communication that might actually work: from vox populi deep and dark through an assembly of a dozen XR spokespersons to the power and wealth regime who got us into this global suicide pact and have kept us sleepwalking into catastrophe for at least 30 years.

Local XR chapters could assist the citizenry in adapting to the deep and dark web apps in a TOR browser. This is about as close to live-streaming democracy as we may hope to get on current public tech. Two tactical issues: (1) who are the root and other system techs running the deep and dark internet of things for the citizenry? And, (2) how are fascist capitalists to be involved? For (2), each should have a voice boiling down to a vote just like very other citizen. But no more, no less. For (1), I confess I'm not sure how that could be secured from any and all human corruption and malware injections. My technosterone levels were never that high as a technocrat, and it has been draining away lately. but If there are any TOR and deep and dark web gurus in the XR community, I would look to them for guidance in implementing this three-layered sortition model sooner than later.(2)

In closing, finally, this must also be said. While presumably entirely fictitious, consider the sort of rebellion seen in such tech-fantasy as the Mr. Robot miniseries. The idea of having a black-ops elite cadre of super-hackers turning the world of fascist capitalism inside-out and upside-down is intriguing. Should events and actions of such kind be in the XR’s battle plan and technology arsenal? It goes beyond ‘mere’ civil disobedience, yes, and cases such as Julian Assange’s and Edward Snowden’s are public examples of deterrents, showing just how severe the consequences of such actions are.

What does ‘civil disobedience’ even mean, legally speaking (e.g., under the PATRIOT ACT), when laws are broken without compunction or consequence or they are simply superseded or suspended by fascist capitalist exigency? If dark web XR activism could nonviolently bring the World Bank, SWIFT, the IBS, the IMF, the Federal Reserve, etc. to their knees just one day a month for only a few seconds, the vile maxim and vicious cycle of power and wealth would be broken. It would be up to the Citizen’s Assembly to determine just how long and how severe those take-downs would need to be to seize full control of that power and wealth. Or until the instant extinction event of global WMD warfare is triggered to neutralize that power grab with extreme prejudice.

** CAVEAT: I'm brainstorming here. It's an out-of-the-box idea on how to envision Citizens' Assembly both operationally real and true to the XR declarations and demands at the same time, by leveraging resources that we have on hand already. I suspect the human problem is the more difficult ... my limited experience with the deep web, and I have none on the dark side (yet), seems to imply this may be a fairly straightforward model to implement on current tech. **

Notes

(1) A dozen is the right number. Like a jury, unanimity would be required. Like a hung jury, anything less than a unanimous verdict would rely on vox populi interaction to drive toward a unanimous verdict.

(2) Tactical question #(2) begs the question of what manner of containment should be imposed on the most egregious ecocidal capitalist and war criminals. I have some thoughts on this, but I would have to be talked down from my sadistic inclinations to share them. Despite being a Christian, mercy and grace for those vile sinners do not come easily to heart, soul, or mind for me. Dwayne Booth’s cartoon above, DOLLAR SIGN, seems to illustrate a fitting penance.

Capitalist Fatuity

21st Century Addiction to the Fix Being In

Disagreement is not an option (illustrations by Mr Fish, used by permission).

Disagreement is not an option (illustrations by Mr Fish, used by permission).

The rigging of black and open markets in the addiction industry has never been as entrenched or as flawed at the same time as at present. It feeds on annihilation and alienation oblivious to the reality it stalks, kills, and rapaciously consumes. Being human and humane as homo sapiens somehow moved beyond our very ken as such, at least in moral and rational community.[i]  

A minuscule and anonymous elite cabal rules the world through a 1% rapacious oligarchy and praetorian corporatocracy. The other 99% of us are the raw human resources externalized and exploited to death by that cabal and its minions. The top 9% of tht 99% form a fatuous aristocratic buffer between cabalistic corporatocracy and the vast underclass majority beneath them. Underclass suppression, repression, control, and rule are on the verge of more extinction-level-event facts in reality than they and their rulers know (or will openly confess, with apology). Both Kuhnian scientific and cultural revolutions are horrifically AWOL from the front of engagement.[ii]

Nonviolent rebellion is the only remaining freedom at hand. The horizon of the black hole of capitalist fatuity and futility has been crossed. It was a Rubicon into Anthropocene extinction (AX) and we are sleepwalking into catastrophe, already gone all-in for a global suicide pact. We must not fight tyranny expecting to win, we must fight tyranny because it is tyranny; because tyrants and dilettante aristocracy both must acknowledge that true nobility lies in the genetic and memetic reality of nonviolent rebellion.

Retribution is another matter. Justly carried out, isolation in exile seems an ethically right and  morally good penalty for tyranny. Done properly, in relatively comfortable solitude, but without human contact unless initiated by those other than the tyrant, and under severe restriction and with full spectrum monitoring. Hope dies; action begins.    

Stoic nonviolent courage is now the lifeblood of the only moral road to peaceful rebellion, and it flows in undercurrents of the good drawing the good. By apocalyptic ecocidal annihilation or by Christian Apocalyptic tribulation, or both, an End is coming. Still, we willfully deny or ignore its signs even as its reality is increasingly irrefutable and irreversible, as imminent as a minute, as irrefutable as it is inconceivable.   

Our false hope, blithe indifference, blind fear, raging anger, ephemeral love, and nihilistic hate are semiotically engineered as the realism we believe to be reality that’s true. What cowering fools we are to be bought in, sold out, held captive and enslaved to serve such infixed tyranny!

NOTES

[i] On statistical evidence, relevance, and rationality, I no longer speak for dogmatic advocates of the Bayesian Way. Instead, I stand on the probabilistic causal scientific realism from (Fetzer 1981) and Peircean pragmaticism more generally (especially phaneroscopy and cenoscopy).

[ii] Trust between aristocrats and their cabalistic patrons is a non-issue: patronage is simply an effete sign of brutal efficacy in bringing about opaque enslavement to tyrannous powers. Between aristocrats and the underclass they transcend, idolatry is currency and deceit the coin of the realm. Traitors to capitalist tyranny are subject to instant termination by rulers, used for show-and-tell control or disappeared with extreme prejudice by extraordinary rendition. 21st-century aristocracy is likely to be the worst possible status in the face of rebellion: stalked and hunted prey on one hand and deeply entrenched hatred at the other. A human and humane aristocracy must choose sides, betray neither, yet be an arbiter of what is and is not trustworthy. Aristocratic dereliction of class and human dignity chooses tyranny and seals its own doom. Aristocratic character is the choice to side with the oppressed – not just in case, but all-in whatever the case.   

Where Have All the Humans Gone?

Elitist Tyranny and The Mass Insanity of Modern Humanity

Excerpt from my DMin dissertation, The End Signs! Are We Getting the Message?
(Portland Seminary, Semiotics and Future Studies program, Lead Mentor Leonard Sweet, February 2019). The full dissertation is available online at Researchgate.net.)

LIFE ON EARTH is facing mass extinction – and this time it is humans rather than asteroids threatening near total wipe out of the planet’s creatures.

LIFE ON EARTH is facing mass extinction – and this time it is humans rather than asteroids threatening near total wipe out of the planet’s creatures.

We have already entered the sixth mass extinction in history. This time, we are the architects of our own demise. If humankind survives at all, 50-90% of us are doomed, nonetheless, sooner than later. Here is who the other 10% are. Some of them—the scientismic aristocracy—will be exempt (note #1). The survival chances for the rest of us are around 1.5-2% (see note 1 below):

The Wealth, Power, Force, and Control Nexus of Inverted Totalitarianism

The Wealth, Power, Force, and Control Nexus of Inverted Totalitarianism

The tiny ruling elite cabal already have an exit strategy and survival plan. My guesstimate is that it may have been conceived and set in motion in the 1970s. More likely, perhaps, it became a matter of ‘oligarchy emergency’ only recently, sometime around the mid-1990s. In that case, the elite cabal of rulers had (by choice or by sloth or apathy) ignored the Club of Rome’s 1972 dire report, The Limits to Growth: A Report for The Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. That 1972 report concluded, “Left unchecked, economic and population growth would deplete the planet’s resources and cause economic collapse around 2070.” In October 2018 the journal Nature cited a new 2018 report to the Club of Rome which concluded, “More than four decades later, the (1972) report’s main conclusions are still valid.”(2)   

The primary historical force on Earth for the past five centuries has been the development and exploitation of capitalism as the fuel and engine of economic growth. The prime directive now as always has been concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a ruling elite. As far as capitalism is concerned, the very idea of actually imposing the sorts of checks and balances on economic growth (i.e., capitalism) the Club of Rome may have had in mind is heresy, punishable by termination with extreme prejudice. The “vile maxim” identified by Adam Smith in 1776 and its wealth <> power “vicious cycle” corollary are the sole ethical principles of capitalism.  In that noxious pair of principles, the iniquitous tyranny of the 1% elite is grounded, rooted, nurtured, secured, sustained, and extended in perpetuity. They are the raison ďêtre (reason for existence) and the élan vital (life force) of the oligarchy at the head and heart of inverted totalitarianism in the 21st century. Its headquarters, command center, and hegemony are USAmerican to the core and its span of control is global.(3)

The benighted rapacity and stupidity of the ruling elite have driven humanity and Earth to the brink of existential doom, to the event horizon of our extinction as a living species. Evidence is already overwhelming and still mounting that we may have already run out of time. We are now far more likely than disappear as a form of earthly life than we are to survive. Many authoritative perspectives already confirm this reality. Here are a few: (4)

U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), Fourth National Climate Assessment, reporting to US President Donald Trump (POTUS45) in 2018: “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.”  

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon speaking to the 2011 World Economic Forum (WEF): “For most of the last century, economic growth was fueled by what seemed to be a certain truth: the abundance of natural resources. We mined our way to growth. We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences. Those days are gone…Over time, that model is a recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact.”

2019 World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Global Risk Report: “climate change is the biggest threat to the planet,” naming “extreme weather, natural disasters, man-made environmental disasters, loss of biodiversity, and failure to adapt to climate change as the chief perils to society …. it is in relation to the environment that the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe” (emphasis added).

John Mecklin, Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “Extraordinarily fast-paced advance across the full breadth of the world’s scientific and technological enterprise creates a new threat matrix where dangerous technologies may collide—with catastrophic results.”

The cover image for the November 2018 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists vividly portrays the brink-of-doom event-horizon-of-extinction we’ve reached, or perhaps already crossed over:

The Existential Threat Nexus Confronting Humanity

The Existential Threat Nexus Confronting Humanity

The Bulletin also maintains the ‘doomsday clock’ which is reset every January as an indicator of just how close we are to annihilation (‘midnight’ on the clock). As this chart shows, we entered the lowest point in the 1947-2018 history of the clock’s settings since the peak of the Cold War in 1953:

2018-2019 Doomsday Clocks and Graph Chart.jpg

The January 2018 2-minute setting was extended into 2019 by the Bulletin on January  24, 2019. The President and CEO of the Bulletin organization, Rachel Bronson, PhD, cautioned that, “there should be no comfort taken from the fact that the clock did not move forward over the past year.” Brown explained that the threat is at least as dire if not moreso, as indicated in her remarks about the “new abnormal:”(5)

As the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board prepared for its first set of Doomsday Clock discussions this fall (in 2018), it began referring to the current world security situation as a “new abnormal.” This new abnormal is a pernicious and dangerous departure from the time when the United States sought a leadership role in designing and supporting global agreements that advanced a safer and healthier planet. The new abnormal describes a moment in which fact is becoming indistinguishable from fiction, undermining our very abilities to develop and apply solutions to the big problems of our time. The new abnormal risks emboldening autocrats and lulling citizens around the world into a dangerous sense of anomie and political paralysis.

One week after the January 24 Bulletin announcement for 2019, on February 1, our POTUS45 (Trump) ended USAmerican participation in the INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) Treaty, one of the last nuclear arms control treaties with Russia dating back to the Cold-War Reagan era. Russia responded on February 2 by also backing out of the treaty. A new nuclear arms race was already under way and is now accelerating more swiftly with China entering the fray, having never participated in the treaty. The US Marine veteran intelligence officer who “was hand-picked to serve with the On Site Inspection Agency, responsible for carrying out the provisions of the INF Treaty,” Scott Ritter, proposes a more realistic 1-minute setting:

William Perry, former secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, helped unveil the 2019 iteration of the Doomsday Clock. In his remarks, he highlighted President Donald Trump’s declaration to withdraw from the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty as an indication of the collapsing relationship between the U.S. and Russia. “When you withdraw from treaties, you are losing this important vehicle of dialogue,” Perry observed. “My own judgment is, relative to a year ago, we are slightly worse off.”

I agree with Perry—the world is worse off today than it was a year ago. I disagree, however, with his use of the word “slightly” to describe the situation we face, and I dissent from the Bulletin’s decision to stay the hands of the Doomsday Clock. Humanity is sleepwalking toward global annihilation (emphasis added), furthered by a collective amnesia about the threat posed by nuclear weapons, especially in an environment void of meaningful arms control.(6)

William Perry’s remarks at the unveiling of the 2019 doomsday clock setting are reported in the January 24, 2019 edition of The Guardian. At that unveiling event, former governor of California Jerry Brown, new Executive Chairman of the Bulletin, commented:

We are like passengers on the Titanic, ignoring the iceberg ahead, enjoying the fine food and music …. It’s late and it’s getting later. We have to wake people up. And that’s what I intend to do!

Heir apparent to Sheldon Wolin’s prophetic political mantle, Chris Hedges is among the most astute observers of 21st century reality. New York Times foreign correspondent Pulitzer-winner, Harvard seminary MDiv graduate, ardent activist and strident speaker decrying the infamy of the ruling elite and the damnable tyranny they impose, Hedges pulls no punches in setting reality squarely before us:

Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could ever achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death. And decaying institutions, including the church, when consumed by fear, swiftly push those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from their ranks, rendering themselves obsolete.

The wisdom of Tillich and Niebuhr has been borne out in the precipitous decline of the liberal church and the seminaries and divinity schools that train religious scholars and clergy.(7)

I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I do know that the corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists. And this is a fight that in the face of the overwhelming forces against us requires that we follow those possessed by sublime madness, that we become stone catchers and find in acts of rebellion the sparks of life, an intrinsic meaning that lies outside the possibility of success. We must grasp the harshness of reality at the same time we refuse to allow this reality to paralyze us. People of all creeds and people of no creeds must take an absurd leap of faith to believe, despite all the empirical evidence around us, that the good draws to it the good. The fight for life goes somewhere—the Buddhists call it karma—and in these acts we make possible a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us.(8)

Assume the worst: it is too late to reverse this freefall into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history—this time caused by humankind and fatal to most if not all species of life, including our own. We then have very few choices and none of them will matter at the end of the day:

  • Denial: completely ignore and write off all the voices prophesying this imminent doom (including mine) and go on about life as if everything is fine—or it will all at least somehow turn out that way. This is one cadence in the death march we’re already on.

  • Futility #1: accept this doom as inevitable and just mark time until it’s over for all of us, eating, drinking, and being miserably or merrily delusional anyway. This is just another cadence in the same death march.

  • Futility #2: adopt Hedges’ perspective—fight the elitist fascist tyranny despite having no hope or chance of actually winning, simply because it is elitist fascist tyranny. This is the only way to break ranks from the death march and take a stand.

Futility #2 is exactly the sort of groundswell bootstrap activism Hedges calls us to embrace and become. One excellent first step is to join the Extinction Rebellion. I hope to see your name on their roster along with mine. (9)

Notes

(1)   The opening image under the title is from Stuart Winter, “Sixth MASS EXTINCTION Warning: HUMANS Threatening Near Total Wipe Out of Earth's Creatures,” Express (online), July 11, 2017, https://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/827266/Mass-extinction-events-Earth-sixth-human-population-endangered-species. The image below it is my visual interpretation of inverted totalitarianism as identified in Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) and Chris Hedges, “The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs,” Truthdig, February 11, 2018, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/deadly-rule-oligarchs/. Statistical groupings approximate the 1%-to-99% division that emerged from the Occupy Wall Street Movement and an article on the emergence of aristocracy in the 21st century. Cf. Noam Chomsky, Occupy, 2nd ed., Occupied Media Pamphlet Series (Westfield, NJ: Zuccotti Park Press, 2013); Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (New York: Itbooks, 2012), Kindle; Matthew Stewart, “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy,” The Atlantic, June 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/;

(2)   Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for The Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, 1st ed. (New York: Universe Books, 1972); Quirin Schiermeier, "Gloomy 1970s Predictions About Earth’s Fate Still Hold True," Nature, 18 October, 2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07117-2.

(3)   Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2017); Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016); Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault On Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2006);  Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, with a New Foreword by Wendy Brown (1960, reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Chris Hedges, “Apocalyptic Capitalism,” Truthdig, December 7, 2015, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/apocalyptic-capitalism/; Chris Hedges, “The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs,” Truthdig, February 11, 2018, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/deadly-rule-oligarchs/.

(4)   D. R. Reidmiller et al., eds., The Fourth National Climate Assessment: Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States (Washington, DC: U. S. Global Change Research Program, 2018), https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/; Associated Press, “Ban Ki-moon: World's Economic Model Is ‘Environmental Suicide’,” Guardian, January 28, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jan/28/ban-ki-moon-economic-model-environment; Anne C. Mulkern, “Climate Forecast: World Is 'Sleepwalking into Catastrophe',” Scientific American, January 17, 2019, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-forecast-world-is-sleepwalking-into-catastrophe/; World Economic Forum (WEF), "The Global Risks Report 2019" Geneva, CH: World Economic Forum, 2019, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2019.pdf; John Mecklin, “Introduction: The New Threat Matrix,” in “Existential Nexus: The Intersection of Technological Threats,” ed. Gayle Spinazze, special issue, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 74, no. 6 (November 1, 2018), 367, https://thebulletin.org/2018/11/introduction-the-new-threat-matrix/.

(5) Rachel Bronson, “Statement from the President and CEO,” in “A New Abnormal: It Is Still 2 Minutes to Midnight,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/#from-the-president.

(6)   David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, "U.S. Suspends Nuclear Arms Control Treaty With Russia", New York Times, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/us/politics/trump-inf-nuclear-treaty.html; Vladimir Soldatkin, "Russia Suspends Nuclear Arms Treaty After U.S. Says To Pull Out", Reuters, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-nuclear/russia-suspends-nuclear-arms-treaty-after-u-s-says-to-pull-out-idUSKCN1PR06T; Rachel Bronson, “2019 Doomsday Clock Statement,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://cdn.thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/2018%20Doomsday%20Clock%20Statement.pdf; Scott Ritter, “One Minute to Midnight,” Truthdig, February 12, 2019, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/one-minute-to-midnight/;  Scott Ritter, “Scott Ritter (Bio)”, Truthdig, accessed February 16, 2019, https://www.truthdig.com/author/scott_ritter/#author-bio.

(7)   Chris Hedges, “The Suicide of the Liberal Church,” Truthdig, January 25, 2016, https://www.
truthdig.com/articles/the-suicide-of-the-liberal-church/; Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: a Study in Ethics and Politics, Arkosh Politics (1932, reprint, Arkosh Publishing, 2017), loc. 3718, Kindle;

(8)   Chris Hedges, Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2015), 226. See also Chris Hedges, “Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us as a Society,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/why-mass-incarceration-defines-us-as-a-society-135793245/#.UKwDspaG6uk.twitter. “Stone catcher” is an oblique reference to John 8:3-8, esp. v. 7, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Hedges describes Bryan Stevenson as an “African American lawyer who has spent his life fighting for prisoners on death row.” An elderly black woman once identified Stevenson as a “stone catcher” in this sense. On return from attending an execution at an Alabama prison, Stevenson remarked to Hedges:

There is no such thing as being a Christian and not being a stone catcher …. But that is exhausting. You’re not going to catch them all. And it hurts. If it doesn’t make you sad to have to do that, then you don’t understand what it means to be engaged in an act of faith …. But if you have the right relationship to it, it is less of a burden, finally, than a blessing. It makes you feel stronger.

Hedges’ reference to “sublime madness” is from this passage in Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: a Study in Ethics and Politics, Arkosh Politics (1932; repr.: Arkosh Publishing, 2017), loc. 3718, Kindle:

We cannot build our individual ladders to heaven and leave the total human enterprise unredeemed of its excesses and corruptions.

In the task of that redemption the most effective agents will be men who have substituted some new illusions for the abandoned ones. The most important of these illusions is that the collective life of mankind can achieve perfect justice. It is a very valuable illusion for the moment; for justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and "spiritual wickedness in high places." The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms. It must therefore be brought under the control of reason. One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done.

(9) Chris Hedges interviews Extinction Rebellion cofounder Roger Hallam in two episodes of his “On Contact” show: On Contact: Civil Disobedience to Stop Ecocide - YouTube (Episode 1) and On Contact: Extinction Rebellion - YouTube (Episode 2). The Extinction Rebellion overview document is also online, together with numerous other informative and compelling materials, e.g., On Contact: Climate emergency with Dahr Jamail.