tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51258762899340322812024-02-07T16:27:34.487-08:00ShumbaHeartReflections on creating communities of people in harmony with each other and with nature, and more.
See also: http://www.iotc-hub.orgMarc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comBlogger51125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-1729943320975310392015-02-12T14:06:00.000-08:002018-02-07T12:17:01.140-08:00Lincoln (2013): The Scapegoating of a President - A Film Review<br />
<b>Prefatory Note: </b><br />
<br />
I present this evaluation of the 2013 film, Lincoln, in an unfinished, draft form. I got a bit tangled up in my thoughts and, although I think the draft argument below is pretty much complete and rounded out, I never finished polishing things up, cleaning up the redundancy, tightening the organization. The part that remains in "draft notes" form is in a different typeface.<br />
<br />
My view was that the film's purpose was basically the cathartic one of letting audiences off the hook for comprising with crime and injustice. In the end, sentimentalizing a hero's tragic demise, the film distances us from our present responsibilities by blurring the clear line between strategical indirection and moral compromise. <b><br /></b><br />
<br />
<h2>
<b>The Assassination of Lincoln - Expiation for Our Sins through the Scapegoating of a President </b></h2>
Lincoln, the 2013 film, depicts a moral dilemma that might be characterized in this way: How do we take right action in a wrong world? A classic case of catharsis, the film seeks to cleanse us of the worldly pollution of which we partake. Perhaps like all works of of art, it provides us with a structure to organize our thoughts and feelings in a satisfying way. As we shall see, the film justifies the compromise of high ideals, or at least of egotistical attachment to such, in the ultimate service of high ideals. Does the end of the film attain to a spiritual cleansing, or does a soap-scum film remain after the shower? <br />
<br />
To summarize the plot: Lincoln, the President and Chief Executive, pushes the historic 13th Amendment through Congress, making vigorous use of half-truths and bribes to do so. He wins the necessary votes needed to get the measure passed, primarily by offering government appointments to lame-duck Congressmen. Though this behavior doesn't square with the predominant mythical view of "Honest Abe," Lincoln's backroom political huckstering appears petty and justifiable, excusable one might say, relative to the great and noble historical objective: The chance to abolish slavery forever from the land. This is an opportunity that cannot be lost.<br />
<br />
Through determination and dogged effort, and against the odds, Lincoln, with the aid of the henchmen-like accomplices he hires to do his dirty work, buys off the minimum number of Congressmen and the vote is won. The Amendment passes. The better course prevails. History is made. <br />
<br />
Yet, of course, the story does not end here -- we have another few minutes to go before the credits roll. In the wake of the great legal victory, the President is tragically assassinated. Although we feel great sadness, yet our hearts have been lifted high. Here the film ends. <br />
<br />
Classic catharsis. <br />
<br />
We can identify two great halves to this film, psychologically speaking and politically or socially speaking: One half of the story is the story of the President's achievement, and the presumed underlying noble ideals that drive it. The other part is the depiction of the unsavory socio-political environment in which he succeeds. The "system," the general public, the elected Representatives of the people, the principles by which the economy operates -- none of these are idealized. All are shown to be deeply tainted. In this environment, the soldiers fighting for their ideals lift their heads from the trenches at great risk. Try to fight the system, and it might assassinate you.<br />
<br />
The film's narrative seems constructed to tells us that not even the President -- nor any of us committed to the moral improvement of the nation -- can rely on free and open discussion, nor any presumed general goodness of the People or its elected representatives, for right principles and ideals to prevail. <br />
<br />
To the contrary, the film conveys that high commitments to noble, but unpopular and "radical" ideals -- like Thaddeus Stevens' counter-cultural commitment to enfranchising black people (not to mention his own interracial love relationship, revealed only at the film's very end) -- must be toned down and hidden from the world in order not to inflame the conservative fundamentalist temper, in order not to risk backlash which could possibly overturn the whole applecart. Stevens is something like a stand-in for today's conspiracy theorists or whistleblowers who, dare they impugn the status quo, risk ridicule and banishment, along with anyone who associates with them. <br />
<br />
Hence, in the end, the paragon of principle, Mr. Stevens, is ironically lionized for suppressing his beliefs that blacks should be entitled to vote. The right wingers' plan is to get Stevens to expressly link the proposed Amendment with an agenda to enfranchise blacks and deem them fully political equals to whites, an agenda they know is too radical to win support in the Congress. It's thanks to Stevens' strategic silence about his inner convictions that the right-wingers' plan gets no wind for its sails. Had Stevens admitted his support for black enfranchisement, the Amendment would have failed to win the necessary support. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 13.333333015441895px;">Expressions of radical conviction may jeopardize not only personal safety, but possibly any chance to make even minimal gains and improvements in the character and justice of the prevailing order. </span>Not standing up for what he believes in, not speaking his heart, in this case, earns the man a halo.<br />
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"> </span>This paradoxical compromise seems to be the core tension of the film. While the film simultaneously elevates Lincoln for his high commitments, and justifies his backroom dealing, it depicts a world that is deeply morally compromised. Idealists must be practical and sneaky, and not tell the whole truth to dirty ears. <br />
<br />
Now to realize any value in this film whatsoever, we need to understand that, through the lens of 1865, the film of course is speaking to who we are today, and the choices and political realities we face.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">This is not just 1865. It is
today. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Ultimately, just as any “story”
plays out on a group level the drama we experience in our personal psyches, the
backroom deals in this film are not just those of Lincoln – who’s actions we
rationalize, whose ultimate ideals we praise, and whose death we mourn – but our
own.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<essay -="" 2="" entirely="" from="" my="" nbsp="" not="" notes="" transcribed="" yet=""> </essay><br />
<br />
[What the psychologists call splitting - We kill Lincoln to
justify our complicity in supporting the unjust world, and we deify him to cleanse our souls. in the end,
have we changed the status quo? ]<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">The conundrum of how to take live
rightly in a world where human beings cannot be counted on to act for the good
of all, where economic activity is exploitative and committed to the
self-interest of some over the well-being of others, a paradoxical and viciously
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">This is a story that says
people, and our politics, cannot be trusted. There is no common vision. We need
manipulative, strategic leaders, we need to amass the critical number of votes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Those fighting for the good
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">The story is specifically
situated in a national political stage: the interactions of elected leaders,
the progress of the Civil War, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
the analogies should not be lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
compromises we watch these leaders making on the political stage of 1865 in
this 2013 film, are directly analogous to the compromises individuals are asked
to make in their personal and professional lives every day in our present world. We work for
companies, we work in an economy, we participate in public rituals, we support
candidates – at every moment allowing intolerable injustices to slide by, at
every moment compromising with our own higher ideals. We must to get along in
this unjust world, and we do not know how to fix it, so what else can we
do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> We live with daily compromise, we let the radicals who stick their necks out get assassinated, and we find ways to convince ourselves that we are clean, that, since our "deeper hearts" are pure, we are actually good people. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In such a system founded on a
rather base view of humanity, -- lacking knowledge of any better way -- <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>most human beings must continuously expiate their
complicity in the general sin, this sin of suppressing the deeper ideals of the
heart. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we do so by deifying its
angels after we kill them or let them die. We are reperforming and thereby
validating for ourselves the inner psychic drama self-consolation that follows
the suppression of our best impulses, our desires for love, justice, and
freedom and to live our life, not in submission to the unjust requirements of
the day, but according to our heart’s love and desire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">The Celebration, which I
wrote about on a previous occasion, was a film about a civilization that molests
its own children, and transforms all of its children into molesters of children – the inner
children within ourselves and the generations born to us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Lincoln: A film that is cathartic of our sadness, the sadness that derives from our assassinating our
loving nature, while revering that which we assassinate. A self that is split
between what it does and what it reveres, thereby creating a heaven that is not
of this world, and splitting faith and emotion from present action. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10pt;">As I watched the film, I noticed the film and myself “okaying” petty moral comprises, buying off the U.S. Representatives and
“deceiving” Congress, in service to the larger goal of ending slavery for all
time. I thought about taking this logic farther: I asked myself, would I be okay
with supporting a few murders and assassinations to accomplish the necessary goal — given the
greatness of the cause? And, if not, where would I draw the line? Could it
be that the people who assassinate Lincoln, offstage at the very end of the
film — people to whom we are never introduced and who’s perspective is never
explored — were acting from the basis of a similar rationale? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">The film does not explore this
and other moral ambiguities. In its morality, the film is rather black and
white. Against a mostly-hidden background of war, where
masses of anonymous soldiers fight and die, the elected representatives in the
House debate the proposed Amendment. There are three types of representative: The
negro-haters, who are bad. The anti-slavery people, who are good, if sometimes
a bit whacky – like the idealist Thaddeus Stevens. But even more importantly
are all the people in the middle. The film seems to frame the primary task of the
good leader as that of steering the recalcitrant, self-interested masses, by
hook or by crook, into service to the good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">This might well be the
fundamental message of the film: The assumption that human moral nature – at
least as represented by the bulk of politicians -- is inherently flaccid. We are creatures of the herd, given over to
practical expediency in the name of self-interest. In the herd, we will find
little or no source of moral inspiration or initiative. Given this overwhelming
collective proclivity, individual aspiration to something higher is a most
doubtful enterprise. The average human being opposes slavery and other wrongs,
but only the exceptional human being is willing to do something about it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Against this background of
mediocre humanity, extending even to his closest advisors, Abraham Lincoln is
the great leader, taking risks to steer the country towards achieving higher ideals,
charting a course for others to follow, albeit with resistance and needing to
be cajoled, badgered and ordered to fulfill their charge. To accomplish
important moral aims, one must not quibble about petty compromises. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Of course, these roles and
dynamics map onto our present day view of politics: Democrats and Republicans
fight the battle of the enlightened vs. unenlightened, while the good leaders
(if we elect the right ones) do their best to activate a disengaged,
self-interested populace and to get petty warring party operatives to
compromise on a shared course. Meanwhile, those progressives of us in the audience
just keep trying to earn little victories one step at a time to make the world
a better place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">That’s where, it seems to me,
the film overall intends to leave us. We applaud the great work and
determination of the good leader, Mr. Lincoln, but we are also left with a
rather low view of common humanity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In what ways does the present film serve as an analogue to and metaphor for our
present lived experience, as all films do?
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">The most striking statement
of the film is this: Civil War America is morally compromised, with the bulk of
the population committed to a tradition and an economy fundamentally unjust,
and even those with a sense that something is deeply wrong unwilling to resist
or take initiative for change. To undertake a task that would require
large-scale collaboration, yet failing to believe that the shared motive and
belief in the possibility of large-scale collaboration exists, we settle into a
belief in the mediocrity of humanity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Perhaps we are not too
removed from the conditions of 1865. Then, the economy – even much of the North
– was dependent on slavery. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Today, we are dependent on … corporations
for employment, masses of people are living compromised lives performing jobs they don’t want to
perform, they obviously don’t believe that individual human beings can wholly
commit themselves to, or take our primary bearings from, ideals, moral
initiative, right action and justice. Compromise is obviously what nature and
the real world require. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">And corporations depend on
cheap labor etc. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Humans can’t be counted on,
because we are at bottom self-interested. This belief is confirmed to us every
day in our observations of others -- or so it may seem, although I suspect our
judgment of others is rooted in our judgment of, and our desire to exculpate,
ourselves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Ultimately, the film leads us
to accept the great Lincoln’s compromises, in part because the film helps us to
validate and rationalize our own. It’s
like a vicious circle. We must
compromise, because we cannot count of human beings to do the right thing. Policy must be set and imposed from above. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Yes, we all go along with
what we know deep down is not really right, but that’s “nature,” the way the
world works; it’s our economic and moral reality. It’s sad. It’s sad, and it’s
an issue for us that won’t go away. Our psyches resist it. That’s why we need
to keep telling ourselves the story, over and over. So we create films like
Lincoln, and we pay to go watch stories like Lincoln. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">We need to keep telling
ourselves and each other a story of acceptance and of exculpation. It’s a story
that keeps us feeling better at the same time that we keep making the
compromise. A film like Lincoln helps to remind me that, despite the big pang
of compromise in our hearts, despite our low and mediocre view of human beings
in the collective, there are plenty of things to be glad for, things that can
distract us from that lasting dissatisfaction that keeps insistently knocking, and which is, after all, a sign of our secret inner moral goodness that perhaps in the end may save us. The committment to a good heart that will be recognized in an afterworld. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Even Thaddeus Stevens, the
radical, uncompromising idealist in the film, learns to tone it down. He learns
to make his compromises, and not to differentiate himself in public on the
basis of his higher ideals. And the film makes him out to be a hero for doing
so. Had Stevens’ inflamed the right wing
by insisting on his most radical ideals at the wrong moment, he could have
sabotaged the passage of the 13<sup>th</sup> Amendment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">At one point in the film the
right-wing Congressman accuses Thaddeus before the House: “You have stated the
radical idea in the past that negroes should be allowed to vote!!!” But
Thaddeus won’t cop at this moment to his crazy radical ideas. He knows better.
Best to tamp down our more radical thoughts, our hearts’ belief, in the name of
expediency. (Thaddeus is the film’s stand-in for the conspiracy-theory type.) And
even here the film reassures us, for of course we can make reassurances
whenever we need them: because, thanks to the benefit of historical hindsight,
we know that Thaddeus’ “radical” view in 1865 is no longer radical view today
in the post-1960s world, when equality and the right to vote has become
the norm. The film reassures us that, with time, the good will win out, truth
and progress march on. — You just have to keep doing things this way. Our
compromises are compatible with our ideals, in the long run. No use sacrificing
oneself going against the mainstream, especially when such sacrifice could be
hugely counterproductive. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">We emerge from the film
feeling that the world is imperfect, and we’re sad, but it’s okay, and overall
— we tell ourselves — the world is getting better. Our sadness that good people
like Lincoln are killed shows us that are hearts are still good. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">This is where the film ends. And yet, is its resolution successful? There
is a hope and yearning within us that won’t die. Yet we live in a world that
says we must accept our mediocrity. Does the film lay this tension to rest as
it lays Lincoln to rest? Is this
resolution psychologically healthy, or the sign of an unbalanced society? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">This is not a <span style="background-color: white;">film of deep psychological
exploration. No character crosses a gulf requiring psychic transformation. Interestingly,
the film refers to, but does not explore, Mary Todd Lincoln’s past mental
instability. Perhaps her psychic breakdowns indicate the psychic costs of the
compromise. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10pt;">Similarly, the degree to which the United States has bridged the deep
gulf between North and South, the Gulf of the Civil War, is ambiguous. There is
no sign of real integration between sides, only the policy imposed by the North
upon the South. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">Paradoxically, a film like
this, with its message of human mediocrity, also presupposes that all of us
have hearts that are moved by high ideals. And so the film is tinged with
sadness. It elicits those ideals, and lifts our hearts, only to re-enact the
drama of acceptance of less in the name of “reality.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In the end, President Lincoln
is assassinated. We are sad. Our sadness itself lets us know that, in a
compromised world, our hearts still pulse in response to the good and the
ideal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt;">In our acceptance, are we compromising
ourselves in some fundamental part of our being? Is our sadness over the
death of Lincoln, really our sadness for an assassinated part of ourselves?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-74028903912159177862015-02-12T13:08:00.002-08:002015-02-17T07:57:22.879-08:00Evolutionary Love II - We are Generating Past and Future in the Now<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Prefatory Note: </b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Here are two epiphanies, tentatively and roughly expressed. They are not honed into elegant statements. For now, this is what I've got. Thanks! </span></span><br />
<br />
<b>Theme: </b><br />
I claim that right here and right Now, “we,” each and all of us, on all the many levels from personal, to group and communal and simultaneously with all levels extending from our highest inspirational visions down to our very cells and dna -- and to the very atoms within them that are presently containing the original Chaos through the subatomic attractive-erotic forces of subparticle physics -- that we are always in an ongoing way generating the Cosmos, including our past and our future:<br />
<br />
I've come up with various versions of the statement below. These ought to be consolidated, pending increased clarity. <br />
<br />
<b>1. Creation in the Now:</b><br />
Evolutionary Time occurs through the progressive Containing of Chaos [1][2] and the corresponding progressive Expansion of the Cosmic Horizon through the ongoing Structural Development of the Evolutionary Process at every level of being. The Human Cosmos, the container that opens between Heaven and Earth, evolves [3] in the ever-present Now from which we generate the ever-extending past and the ever-extending future.[4] Proliferations of distinctions from multiple levels of being, multiple intelligences, at their points of congruence discover a Common Path through the Integral Heart (where all the levels of feeling in the body, along the spectrum of darkness to light, matter to spirit, intersect in the feelings conveyed by bodies and the feelings conveyed by thoughts – even thoughts have subtle feelings) and are brought into the circle or choir of Universal Care, and higher ascendancies of the Concert of Being in which all beings are destined to have a voice. <br />
<br />
1. (Chaos=the Big Bang, and Chaos' epiphenomenal presence at each level of Being, driven with each ascension to a deeper interior)<br />
2. (progressive containing occurs in the time dimension of going deeper
into the past, from now-to-past as we realize the story of who we are)<br />
3. (evolution of the container between Earth-and-Heaven)(occurs in the time-dimension of now-to-future)<br />
4. ever extending and ever expanding ... ever diversified and deeper <br />
<br />
1B. Another Version<br />
Evolutionary Time occurs through the progressive Containing of Chaos (the Big Bang) and the increasing loving intimacy of levels of Beings within the Cosmic feminine container, womb and matrix of all earthly life and activity, of Heaven and Earth. Evolutionary Time moves forward through spiraling cycles that are led forth through masculine bidirectional extensions in the domains of Past and Future, Unity and Difference, and Energy and Matter. Through the Intergral Heart of the Now, the Nexus reciprocally joining Masculine and Feminine, the masculine distinguishings/extendings/polar directionings, seek their harmonious resonances within the Circular Systemic cyclings of the Feminine, which is the point at which the Axes of being join the Matrix of Love, and generate Evolutionary Time and Movement. Through discovery of congruences between the workings of the masculine and feminine, the world arises to like a road to meet us, opening the path forward into a new, higher and more beautiful Cosmic architecture, on the road to the Celestial City.<br />
<br />
1C. Another <br />
Evolutionary Time occurs through the progressive Containing of Chaos
[1][2] and the corresponding progressive Expansion of the Cosmic Horizon
through the ongoing Structural Development of the Evolutionary Process <br />
<br />
<b>2. The Ankh = The Crucifix joined to the Madonna & Child Matrix, joining the Womb to the cross.</b><br />
<br />
I am seeng the Egyptian Ankh as a symbolic representation of the insights I'm attempting to articulate above. The Ankh is a kind of cross, with a Circle joined atop three "arms."<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir0XlDHn5jl5WkQATOOq28e10biA1id_7Jw78mpdEEie9H0XJkew_fBjtvn8kmbuqa3BaLlt3fTUQPxU-0MgjZ8l61JeEF4-dk0T4Doccbe-iPKsaI1sRQByTfLZBJ8_LqHDYhd53OSLGR/s1600/ankh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir0XlDHn5jl5WkQATOOq28e10biA1id_7Jw78mpdEEie9H0XJkew_fBjtvn8kmbuqa3BaLlt3fTUQPxU-0MgjZ8l61JeEF4-dk0T4Doccbe-iPKsaI1sRQByTfLZBJ8_LqHDYhd53OSLGR/s1600/ankh.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
A. The Circle (Feminine, dimensions of inner deepening and outer expansion -- spiraling out from the center, drawn forth by the masculine axes, I intuit)<br />
The womb-container-matrix of the ever-cycling Heart of Care<br />
<br />
<b>B. The Intersecting Bidirectional Linearities (Masculine)</b><br />
<ol>
<li>Past-Future (Front-Back, Stories, Principles and Plots) </li>
<li>Unity-Difference (Left-Right, Multiplication of qualities in distinguishing differences) </li>
<li>Form-Spirit, or Energy-Matter (Below-Above, Successive Operational Levels in a Founding Relation, ascending, and a Containing Relation, descending)</li>
</ol>
<br />
<b>Evolutionary Growth </b><br />
Proceeds as the feminine matrix deepens and expands in the dimensions of inner (within) and outer (horizonal sky). Follows the evolutionary
path within the womb-container-matrix of the cycling heart. With the extension of the (at least) three masculine bidirectional axes, realized at the
heart nexus where masculine meets feminine, evolution proceeds. <br />
<br />
<b>Lively Commentary - My Dialogue with Antoine:</b><br />
<br />
The following is derived from my correspondence with my friend Antoine about an earlier version of the above (I've lightly edited our original correspondence).<br />
<br />
Antoine's suggested rewordings of my original formulations of the above. Antoine's suggested changes are boldfaced. He also suggested some emphases, which are represented by underlines. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">I am loving your musings, Marc. Riffing off of your work I came up with these alternatives:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">1. Creation in the Now</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Evolutionary <u>Space-Time</u> is <u>contained</u> within the successive ordering of Chaos (the Big Bang) and the progressive Expanding of Cosmos (continuity unfolding) through the bidirectional dimension of time (Past and Future), <u>connected through the nexus</u> of the Spiraling of Spirit through the <u><i><b>Integral Heart</b></i> <i><b>of Now</b></i></u>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><br />2. The Ankh? (tentatively)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Growth (within the womb-matrix of the cycling heart) proceeds along three <b>(four?)</b> bidirectional axes <b>(or dialectical poles?)</b>:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Past-Future </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Unity-Difference</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Form-Spirit <b>(or structure-energy)</b></span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Masculine-Feminine (or action and embrace / outer and inner)</span></b><br />
<br />
<br />
On your suggested edits: <br />
<br />
#2. I thought about adding the masculine/feminine to my list of the bidirectional axes; for me, though, the masculine seems to be associated to the three axes which I named, while the feminine is associated with the “circle” or matrix. The nuclear generative power of masculine directiveness appreciates and deepens the circle, spiraling out from the center of care to extend its loving domain and embrace.<br />
Hence, interestingly, I also, with you, associated depth and expansion (your inner and outer) with the feminine principle. Yet I locate this depth and expansion in a circular domain that is in connected vital relation to, and yet somehow distinct from, the masculine domain of intersecting linearly extending bi-directionalities. Anyhow, that’s how I am seeing it. <br />
By the way I like your pairing, “structure-energy” as an alternative to my "form-spirit." I myself also saw a kind of equivalence between spirit and energy, form and structure. I'm not sure which I prefer, and welcome your thoughts.<br />
In support of all this reasoning and intuition, the symbol of the Egyptian Ankh came up for me: the Circle atop the three “arms” of a cross. I see the Ankh as a symbolic expression of the Circle-Matrix over the three bidirectional linearities. <br />
Very interestingly, it also occurs to me that:<br />
The Ankh can be seen as the joining of the “Mother and Child” (Madonna and Child) Matrix to the Crucifixional linearities, which pass into the Heart of Care (the Feminine Circle) at the integrative nexus of the intersection. <br />
Also interestingly, I notice that, historically speaking, with the introduction of the Christian cross, the circle on top is removed and transformed into a fourth straight line! This may suggest that the Christian tradition, as symbolized in the crucifix, effectively attempts to replace or effaceme Feminine circularity with masculine linearity. Could this transformation of the cross signify the world event that instituted engendered domination and submission, what we call patriarchy? <br />
Your idea of "dialectical poles” sounds interesting and generative. After thinking about it a bit, I think it might work, but I'm not sure what nuances you intend to introduce. I notice that, in my thinking, the masculine work of humanity is to extend the poles in both directions, developing opposites in the related distinction to one another. Is this a dialectic? Maybe so? Some symbolic images come up for me in thinking about these poles or directions: Moses parting the Red Sea (horizontal pole). Atlas holding up the Earth (ascending/descending pole). <br />
<br />
#1. <br />
My own view was showing me that the axis of past-generating, which I associate with the containing of Chaos, is an ongoing active happening in the now. So, in a subsequent edit, I intentionally chose not to say “contained” (past sense, completed) but “containing” (actively ongoing). <br />
Furthermore, I am also saying (by my choice of "containing" over "contained") that an epiphenomenal aura of chaos and
randomness remains with the move to each successive level, so that at
every level of being a new quality and sphere of liberation, of
spontaneity and freedom and unpredictableness is also opened, which also
introduces new dangers — and it is the work of this level to, as you
say, bring the new variables and inheritances into a new order. The chaos is never fully contained; the work of containing goes on, and remains energetically active even where it has been achieved. <br />
Speaking of order, I like your re-ordering of my phrase into “Integral Heart of Now.” <br />
I also like your emphasis on my "<i>successive</i> ordering," which, it occurs to me, also implies the <i>accessive</i> ordering in the other direction: up <i>and</i> down the bidirectional axis (or dialectical pole, in your words).<br />
Responding on your emphasis of connected through the nexus,” I like that and for me it illuminates a question that I had not focused on, which is the mysterious and magical “pipeline” or “transformative passageway,” as I am now seeing it, from the linear domain of the masculine bidirectional axes (or or d-poles) and the cycles of the feminine matrix.<br />
I intuit that the masculine directionality, driving back and delineating the past as it projects and clarifies the future, is what leads the feminine cycularity into an evolutionary spiraling forth, a repetition and recurrence that, in its caring spinning sustaining, brings something forth from the past, as it also, in moving forward, brings something forth from the future, and therefore launches a lineage of evolutionary growth in the present moment, ever connected with evolving past and future, so that the present is always structurally coupled with its context of past and future. The generative matrix is then something like the seed that draws energy from the heavens and nourishment from the earth, and in its cyclical nexusing-joining-integrating, it brings forth the tree, a new structuring of earth, sky, water and fire-sun, into a living organic unity.<br />
<br />
I am saying that, in the Now, right now, “we,” each and all of us (at levels from personal, to group, to communal, etc.) — on many simultaneous levels from our highest inspirational visions down to our very cells and dna and the very atoms within the cells and dna that are presently containing the original Chaos through the subatomic attractive-erotic forces of physics -- are actively generating the Cosmos, including the past and the future. Can we take responsibility for what we are doing, for whatever path we are generating, for our relationship to the ancestors, the children of the future, the earth and the sky, and to our fellow living beings in the theater of our existence? This comes back to my thoughts on developing, and ascending into, our Respons-ability, which also means coming into our own as who we are, Owning our selving and stepping into our Freedoming. <br />
<br />
Wow! Thank you Antoine! What new beauty of being with you shines forth for me! Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-5336811784353386052015-02-12T11:44:00.002-08:002015-02-12T15:17:59.846-08:00Evolutionary Love : A Creation Story<ul>
</ul>
<span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Prefatory Note:</b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The following streaming-consciousness outpouring on <b>Evolutionary Love</b> is only a rough scaffolding to hold some voluminous ideas. Yet I'm posting it in the interest of finding whom these thoughts might attract. I invite your resonances, insights, collaborating thoughts.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The title? I think Evolutionary Love works. I am tempted to add "and its cash value” to provoke curiousity, but I don’t get far enough in my line of thinking here to work my way back to my ultimate goal of explaining that! </span></span><br />
<br />
<b>Evolutionary Love</b><br />
<br />
<i> "My use of all my gains includes</i><br />
<i> Continual further gain." -- Harvey Jackins </i><b><br /></b><br />
<br />
I expect some to feel surprise on hearing the claim that “money,” rightly instituted, will one day liberate self-regenerating, reciprocally-energizing love for people and natural places all around the world. Rightly realized, money increases freely — without debt and without usury or interest, and as a true sign of real, underlying value — when human beings achieve congruence with one another and with the earth and cosmos, thereby increasing the human capacity to collaborate with others and with the biological and physical beings of the gifted creation, thereby walking together purposively in to adorn the world with beauty. The only backing that money ever really has is the collaborative capacity of the community to satisfy its shared dreams and desire, including the desire that all individiduals enjoy the liberty of their own self-development in a supportive human and natural context. I view this principle and ideal of congruence as defining the ever-attracting bountiful, inexhaustible horizon of our liberation. <br />
<br />
The generation of freedom, value and love or Eros begins at the Beginning. <br />
<br />
Even at the moment of the Big Bang, just prior to the time explored by subquantum and quantum physics, prior, that is, to the miraculous emergence of subquantum strings and then subatomic particles composed of those strings, the original Chaos was without law or form, and the first Great Dancings then began, when the diverse subquanta and their quanta children of various qualities and frequencies began to stabilize their interplay into regular dancing patterns, settling into recurring, recognizable rhythms and beats, which were one with their unnamed identities. These dances began because the strings and particles were attracted to one another. They were mysteriously attracted from out of the mysterious preferences that showed up in the grand initial utterly timeless and unpredictably random and shapeless spontaneity of Chaos. This Great Attraction, Eros, was therefore from the Beginning the generator of Law, and destined to be refined into ever more subtle patterns through the Great Chain of Being. <br />
<br />
These mysterious First Preferences were the first inklings of what much later, at higher meta-levels of being and in human times, would be experienced and named as the Erotic principle: the principle by which dancing partners — on whatever level of ontology, physical, chemical, biological, mammalian, human or spiritual, down and up the chain — find each other and come together into mutually pleasing grooves that the attracted partners then keep grooving on, and which they willingly sustain and conserve into the future, a form of proto-commitment to action. <br />
<br />
These “stabilizations,” Dances, or grooves were the first laws or principles — indeed from the much later emergent human perspective they were proto-institutions -- and they resolved, after some time, into regularities. But this resolution into regularities that could later be relied upon by the other higher orders of being that would later emerge, just as a man relies upon the earth, did not signify the complete disappearance of Chaos and Randomness. They did not signify the banishment of the Original Spontaneous Unpredictable Energy, neither in its terror nor in its creative potential. <br />
<br />
Instead, while through the dancing the particles there gradually resolved within the compass of the All the relatively stable world of Newtonian mechanics, Chaos and Randomness gave up none of their explosive potential — instead, they remain at the two horizons, dangerously accessible to the finest titrations. <br />
<br />
(N.B.: These explosive forces were at one point in later history to be tapped by human beings, a team of physicists, who in the 20th century unleashed nuclear forces into the living earthly environment, an environment which had been constructed on the foundation of the containment of these forces; that this earthly containment did not signify the elimination or complete abeyance of these great encompassing and underlying forces of Chaos, but only – i’m inspired to say – their relegation beyond the most distant horizons of immensity and smallness, is indicated by the fact that these physicists themselves, the nuclear scientists, spoke of the remote possibility that any nuclear explosion might unleash an uncontrollable chain reaction into the earthly environment). <br />
<br />
But back to our story. In time, the subatomic and atomic dancers locked into their seemingly-eternal dances, creating the Newtonian universe on the foundation of the quantum universe. Their dance became sure, strong and linear — at least speaking from the practical human perspective -- and led to a point of stabilization that gave realm to a very, very, very slow dimension of time, calculated in eons. So slow is this physical dimension of Being and Time, so stable and steady its grooving, that Newton and his successors deemed these dances “the Eternal Laws of Nature.” For all human intents and purposes, the universe and its laws are eternal, of another order of time altogether than we can comprehend. <br />
<br />
Now, in turned out that this logical and operational domain of Newtonian physics, a domain of great material and mechanical activity, would constitute the operational floor, at a later time, of a new dimension: the biological universe, or better, the domain of biological ecosystems, as we shall soon discuss.<br />
<br />
For now, we are speaking of the Uni-Verse, the Grand Systemic singular (uni-) and cycling-upon-itself (-versing) of the seemingly infinite, centerless and random Newtonian space, deathless and without biological life. The human phenomenal cosmos, as distinct from this eternal universe (or at least eternal from any practical human standpoint), is yet a long way from appearing on the scene. The Universe is as distinct from the Cosmos, our Home, as eternity is from mortality. <br />
<br />
The constituting principle of this domain of the physical universe — of the dancing that we named above — is the ongoing sustained consensual coordination of insentient matter in such a way as to reproduce the conditions of its ongoing self-reproduction. In a word, the ongoing dancing of mutually attracting particles.<br />
<br />
This underlying dynamic, a wordless (infant) drama, is what determines the soundness of all that humans, in the iterative adaptations of their theories of mechanical physics, attempt to name and represent as Newtonian Law, as the representable truths of science. Yet it is not science that gives the Law to the Universe; instead, it is the Universe that holds sway over all human models and representations. (The tacit, unspeakable dynamics of the physical universe under-stand human representation, and not the other way around.) <br />
<br />
At a later time, as we anticipated above, a new major epoch in the history of the world’s ontology was built on this physical foundation, this basis, this floor — which only became a floor when their emerged new actors to walk upon it.<br />
<br />
We are speaking of the epoch that begins with the astounding emergence of biological life, an event that was nothing short of miraculous, especially from within the perspective of the physical universe, because it is nowhere com-prehensible, but unfathomable and ungraspable, in physical terms. In other words, upon the foundational logic (or -ology) of Newtonian physics, biology eventually emerged, a new order of logic, a new dimension of dynamic relations among a new order of entities, which entities and relational dynamics could not be reduced to or understood according to the principles of physics. [Note: I say “biological” life because I am holding to a distinction that permits the physical universe also to be understood as “living,” as may be clear from my languagings.] <br />
<br />
Every new higher-order or meta-level domain emerges upon the opaque floor of the domain before it, a floor upon which the entities within the new domain blindly rely as they interact within their own theater. <br />
Atoms are totalities formed upon the floor of their subatomic components, and these subatomic components, on their own level, themselves interact on the floor supported by the sub-quantum string-level components. From the dance of atoms, molecules are born. These new totalities, dancing together with their kind, discover new, relatively-stable dancing grooves. The subatomic level, the atomic level, and, now, the chemical interactions at the molecular level forming a new lively, interactive domain*: The theater of molecular dynamics. In Chemistry, the dancers find an entirely new attractive chemistry, so to speak. That is, Eros expands into a new sphere. Important to understand: the domain of the newly emergent totalities above the floor of their subcomponents, does not intersect with the domain of the subcomponents. As Wittgenstein once noted, it is impossible through observations of the brain and/or nervous system and/or other biological subsystems for us to ever perceive the fundamentally higher order of being in which thoughts and perceptions arise. At best, what can be found are resonant correlations. [*N.B.: The development from atomic to molecular interaction is perhaps better described as a maturation within the same domain.]<br />
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Let us recount the story of the miraculous emergence of life. Within the new theater built upon the stage floor of atomic physics, a drama was set into motion among nonbiological entities, the molecules. These molecules began to interact and play with one another in their own physical and chemical dances and rituals of attraction, and repulsion, finding the most pleasing grooves and those most enchanting and stabilizing recurring rhythms that win strong commitments. The molecules are the new totalities, or higher-level entities, whose interactions as totalities (in dance and play) constitute the new domain or theater and, with it, a unique and unprecedented kind of dancing. A new level or subworld, really, of new song, movement and story-making comes into its own, creating, in the self-created theater, the dancing through the dancing. <br />
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At this higher level of dancing a new domain of Free Play emerges. New dance steps and grooves, of an entirely different order and quality, first become possible. The new tricks are all the rage. In amazing contrast, for instance, to the slower eonic (long-time) rhythms of the relatively-stabilized quantum and atomic dancings, the new dances of these molecules are much more Free, more Playful and Faster, relative to the dances now hidden in the subdomain, beneath the floor — a new range of diversity of Rhythms has emerged on the new layer of being: upon the slow, slow rhythms of silent immobile rock are heard new fast-stepping molecular ecologies, new instruments with utterly new qualities; the range of rhythms, timbres and colors grows; new plots and dramas unique to the lives of molecules begin to unfold with great drama. Each successive order of Being emerges as a space of new liberation founded upon the dance-floor of the prior ontological epoch. The world becomes more musical all the time. <br />
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All the while, it is important to understand that, even with the emergence of new theaters, each prior ontological epoch continues its dancing, its grooving, as before, and continues active below each floor. <br />
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The new molecular dancers of which we are speaking emerge as totalities, as entities in their own right witin their own unique domain, only within the field that opens up through their relation to the other molecular entities that interact with them on the same molecular level. Each molecular totality is thus by definition necessarily blind and insentient to the subdomain within which its components, the atoms and subatomic particles, interact. This is coherent with the metaphor of the floor as foundational basis: the floor limits, and is coincident with, the horizon of the theater of the actors in question. (It’s not just the floor, but both the near and far horizons, in fact, of the entire new theater of play.) But the actors play upon the material floor without being able to enter within its, to them, dark and closed domain, and they play within the compass of a horizon whose limits, likewise they can never reach. [Aside: This is analogous to the human experience of “phenomena,” the “surfaces” that appear to uninstrumentally-aided sense experience; when Kant spoke of the impossibility of knowing the underlying noumena, he was speaking of this same principle of the limit-horizon, at least with regard to the underlying foundational preconditions of experience; at this moment it is not apparent to me whether Kant considered the role of the outer horizonal preconditions of human experience. More about this to come below. ] <br />
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Just so, underneath or within the floor upon which the new molecular dancing happens, as it were, the components of the molecules (the “interior” of the molecules) continue to do their dancing as atoms and subatomic particles (and below that, perhaps, “strings,” the primordial violin strings of the Universe). <br />
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Here it is also critical to understand that each prior ontological epoch, while continuing with its dancing and grooving — thereby supporting the higher-orde entities dancing on the floor above them, in a non-intersecting, higher domain — also itself, and despite its titanic stability relative to the upper floors — remains open to the possibility of improvisation in its dancing. Each understanding floor retains some opening, even, to influence from the new dancing above, for as the container transforms -- even thought the domains of container-agents (totalities) and contained agents (subcomponents) remain non-intersecting — so does the environment of what is contained; that is, as the totalities refashion their dynamic with one another, they simultaneously refashion the upper context or wider horizon which partly defines the operational subdomain of the subcomponents. Maturana describes the same logic when he points out that, for example, when human beings conserve the newly emergent human relations of love in consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations that produce the conditions for the self-regeneration of the conditions of love, or, to simplify, when human beings conserve, or institutionalize in their practice, a particular dynamic, they create the possibility for everything around them to change in relation to that conserved dynamic or practice as a center and guide. (In the human domain, this is the outer horizon of ideals and our shared commitment to them.)<br />
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In other words, the newly discovered preferences of the dancers, if the dancers groove to them in the right key, become as spiritual guides to the underfloor entities, even though these guides are intangible and unreachable by them due to their being beyond the horizon, and these guides can lead or entice the lower entities into new rhythms, and towards those new possibilities of delicate adaptation, new orders of micro-harmonization, that are congruent (mutually harmonized) with the new rhythms of the dancers above. Hence, to give an example, a community that stabilizes its commitments to reciprocal love and develops institutions and rituals that stabilize and proliferate the genuine experience of love, building its collaborative capacity, creates an environment which favors evolutionary adaptations in the biology and in the physical landscape that are congruent with those institutions, practices and commitments. <br />
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To approach this from another perspective: In sum, each level remains actively nested within the higher orders, and each order continues to have its unique kind of influence on all of the others. The congruence of the orders with one another, the congruence of their music, is likely what has been referred to in times past as “the music of the spheres”; this music finds one expression, on the principle of the isomorphism of each of the nested systems with one another, in the Indian system of the ascending Chakras, which track the evolutionary growth of the spine, from the sacrum, or residual tail, into the abode of the gut and parasympathetic nervous system, up through heart and the sympathetic nervous system, and upwards again to the voice, to the speaking, conceptualizing and spiritual bodies or levels associated with the throat, forehead and crown/aura or outer horizon. [N.B.: I have not studied the Chakras, so my application of this analogy may be somewhat loose and imprecise]<br />
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We are still preparing to discuss the emergence of living beings within the theater of Newtonian physical space. Here, I borrow from Humberto Maturana his explanation of the constitutional principle of biological organisms. Maturana states that the living organism, on a molecular level, is constituted as a self-reproducing coordination of molecules that together keep reproducing the conditions of their own ongoing self-regeneration. [N.B.: [N.B.: I should check Maturana's exact wording, which I am here reproducing inexactly and inelegantly.] <br />
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Note: Initially, I suspected that this Maturanan principle describing the constitution and operation of biological entities on the molecular level did not apply to the underlying non-biological, physical entities (under the floor). However, I now seem to see that Maturana’s thesis describes is a more universal principle that applies at all levels through the principle of isomporphy of nested systems. [Note: However, this raises the question of what distinguishes living organisms from lower-order entities; in living organisms an autonomous automotive and emotive principle first appears; but I will address this elsewhere.]<br />
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Each ontological domain finds its stabilizing, organizing principle in the emergence of consensual coordinations (dancing grooves that reciprocally satisfy the inherent preferences of the autonomous subcomponents) that generate the ongoing conditions of their continued consensual coordination: this means reality can become reliable at each level in preparation to support the next. After enough dancing, the domain enters into a period of ongoing stabilization, permitting the emergence of higher level entitites on ints floor. So this principle of consensual coordination can apply not only to the biological level, where we are more used to speaking of “preferences,” but also to molecular, atomic and subatomic levels. “Inertia,” for example, can be described as the preference of a stationary object to stay at rest. An planetary orbit describes the “preference” of the planet to sustain its cyclical orbital trajectory. Etc. When we open to our hearts desires, our preferences will lead us where we want to go: “I learn by going where I have to go.” - Theodore Roethke.<br />
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To repeat: Consensual coordinations that produce their own ongoing self reproduction. [Note: This could be deemed a principle of “Agreement." When C.S. Peirce claimed that the purpose of Reason was to achieve Agreement, and in particular when he expanded this idea to his notion of Evolutionary Love, he more or less arrived to a very similar place to that which I am elucidating now.] <br />
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So to get back to the dancing of molecules — within the grand theater of molecular dynamics — from which, eventually, life emerges: a living organism emerges when a circle or collective of molecules joins together in such a way as to generate their own self-reproduction as a unity. This achievement (or musical discovery or unexpected type of agreement) gives birth to the conditions of emergence of an ongoing, autonomous self-motivating complex being with its own unique motive preferences, i.e. tastes and emotions, that guide it in its interactions withing the new environment, a "container" that emerges simultaneously with the emergence of the organism. The new organism exists in a new domain along with the other organisms that, as totalities or actors on the new stage floor (the earth), coinhabit the domain, giving rise to a new world or (if the term world is to be reserved for languaging organisms) or ecosystem. <br />
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By following its preferences within the limitations and peculiarities of its unique environment (preferences for the newly sensible and meaningful qualities, for example, of hotter, drier, colder or wetter, darker or lighter, etc., depending on the locality within which the organism finds itself) every organism is launched into an evolutionary lineage, itself developing in complex interactions with the developing evolutionary lineages of the other organisms within its growing ecological system. The organism subsequently develops in conjunction with its environment, and the environment and the organism favor (or prefer) adaptations that most reciprocally support the ecosystem. As all organisms happily conserve (sustain in ongoing repetition) those mutually-agreeable congruences (dances) that, in their play, they discover between themselves and their physical and creatural environment (the theater or ecosystem), a layered building up occurs, in which the evolutionary path of speciation tracks together with evolutionary changes in the ecosystem. Organisms and ecosystem co-constitute one another. <br />
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Now to jump way back, for a moment, to the thesis with which I began, that the invention of True Money (not the counterfeit that we currently call money, which now conserves a relational dynamic of deceit, theft, exploitation and domination/submission in our socio-bio-cultural ecosystem), True money (interest and debt free) will in the future represent (as it has briefly at times in the past) the discovery of a new order and potential for the development of cosmically-beneficial congruences — capable of reaching to and uniting ever-wider geographical regions and populations while simultaneuosly nourishing individuals and their local environments everywhere, linking local and global planetary health for the first time. True money, through the aforesaid principle of structural isomorphy, extends and participates in the same logic of value- generation and evolution that we are seeing in the evolutionary world architecture that we have been discussing. <br />
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Language is the human capacity for human beings to consensually coordinate their consensual coordinations— this capacity is acted out within the theater of languaging on the immediate floor of the long-developed and stabilized consensual coordinations of our not-yet-speaking animal ancestors, that is, made possible by and built upon the preferences of our animal ancestors (underbeings) to be social with one another and to live in communities in which they developed and made instincural certain practices of gentleness, kindness and love that ensured not only their survival, but more importantly, the pleasure of their being in community, by which actions they brought Eros into yet another and higher domain of accomplishment and institutionalization. On the floor of our emotional-relational instinctual-biologically encoded patterns of interaction, to which we remain nearly blind because we live in language and because these biological interactions go on at the very limit of our conceptual-linguistic experience, human beings emerge as languaging beings. As we know, emotions, when they enter the world of languaging where we as higher-order entities acknowledge them (even though they often determine what we are doing while they are unacknoweldged), become feelings; as we know, emotions when they are named become feelings, and then they become available to our coordinations with one another through reflection on what we are doing and through dialogue. In this way dialogue opens the domain of what C.S. Peirce called Evolutionary Love. <br />
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<b>Some Possible Subtitle(s) for this Post: </b><br />
<ul>
<li>A Creation Story </li>
<li>A Scientistic-Spiritualistic Creation Story</li>
<li>Integrally evolving consensual coordinations at all the levels of our intelligence. </li>
<li>Building on the congruences: From the deep singings of subquantum violins, to the overarching Hosannahs of the gilded heavenly
sphere. </li>
</ul>
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NOTE:<br />
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Alas, my friends who've made it this far: I’m running out of steam and haven’t made it back up to my starting place: the level of money and beyond. <br />
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Here are some early notes which may or may not contain substance not included above: <br />
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Then, of organisms with each other and with the environment: ecosystems, species differentiation - dynamically discovering new consensual (mutually pleasing) coordinations (recurring, "institutionalized", conserved practices) OF the totalities (higher level entities, at this level organisms structurally coupled with their environments) constituted by recursively consensually coordinating molecules. Each level generates its own domain and the diversity of its agency entities towards fulfillment of its sphere: subquantum diversity, atomic diversity, molecular diversity, biodiversity, cultural diversity, etc. The extension of diversity within each theater simultaneously develops and deepens connecting intimacy through increasing sensitivity and differentiation at both the level of the ground/floor and the sky/horizon, sensually and spiritually. Individuation and community grow each other. Oneness and difference move towards convergence. <br />
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Humans seeking to coordinate (integrally) all the many levels into mutual congruence (coordination). The heart is said to be the organ of integration of upper with lower levels.<br />
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Forgot to add image of the womb/matrix. The theater of humanness, the matrix of humanness, is the context of love. <br />
Also, the masculine principle brings the mother-child cycle forward from circular to forward-moving spiral (?)Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-34537427973466784832015-02-12T11:30:00.000-08:002015-02-17T07:57:32.933-08:00Esoteric Perambulations - Cosmic Evolution & Human Responsibility Nature - the larger ecosystem, Gaia, and it's many subecosystems, is the original gift economy, infant (non-speaking) and alive, sentient and vigorous with driving energy to grow and multiply.<br />
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Money (true money, not this usurious counterfeit that masquerades as money today, and which yet sometimes glints with the light of something higher), the exchange of true money ascended to its higher potential attains to conscious, humanly experience of the gift economy, happy and humanly munificent. <br />
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True money is not a commodity, nor is its exchange the exchange of commodities -- the deprivation of things from their sacred cosmicity. Such exchange is instead the experience of living collaboration, of trusting, streaming, reciprocal generosity in the growing of our collective gifts.<br />
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Interpersonal exchange will then be experienced in the context of the loving community which itself appreciates with every act of interpersonal appreciation. Every appreciation re-multiplies in mirroring reflections of self with self, with other and with community, with creatures and with earth and air. In this circular, recursive dynamic, gifting equals receiving in a self-regenerating, self-perpeting, accelerating cycles. <br />
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Through money, the ever-reciprocally-evolving dynamic of living organisms with one another and the environment (earth, water, air and fire-light), which drives the rich abundant increase of the biodiversity of nature, ascends on the basis of human languaging and symbol-making, into a higher sphere of potential. Within this sphere, the human ability to consensually coordinate the consensual coordinations of mutually beneficial interacting and exchanging -- the dynamics of the economic systems and underlying ecosystems in which we are embedded -- enters into a higher level of possibility, growing the potential domain of love to larger geographies and populations. Even today's debt-money, which has organized nations and armies to accomplish great feats of technology and culture, has shown, in twisted forth, a hint of true money's potential. <br />
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This potential has been historically diverted through private counterfeiting, manipulative masquerade, traitorious theft and dynamics of domination-submission. Yet the underlying potential remains alive and true, and we will find it and it will find us in the end. <br />
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We are speaking of the potential for congruence among all the levels of the Great System with one another, in the great Chain of Being, the Cosmic Chakra, the Spine of Creation, connecting and aligning in right health the earth, the living bodies (tooth, nail, gut, heart, breath, nerve, flesh, breath, arm, leg, voice and wing), with Sky and Sun and Stars and Cosmic Divinity.<br />
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We are at every level of our being, from the atoms within our cells and DNA, to our highest inspiring visions, generating both the past and the future from the everlasting Now, and our path rises up before us in the choices that emerge as we expand our awareness. The choices that we see and do not see condition our ability to respond, and liberate us into our own respons-ability.<br />
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<br />Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-23991408490925412912014-12-20T13:53:00.002-08:002014-12-20T14:47:04.729-08:00Heart Attack World - A New Theory of What Causes Heart AttacksAlternate title: How heart attack science is related to love. <br />
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I was drawn to this article, "<a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/12/17/real-cause-heart-attacks.aspx?e_cid=20141217Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20141217Z1&et_cid=DM62414&et_rid=766621351" target="_blank">The Real Cause of Heart Attacks</a>" (full url below in the notes*), and its accompanying video, even though it first looked to be rather scientific and technical. As I read it, I soon discovered that, at bottom, it's anything but.** <br />
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The article starts to show why and how the true human heart — understood in a way that embraces but radically recontextualizes everything science has to offer — is best understood, not as the biological “aorta,” the isolated organism, but instead as the larger social-relational context (community, friendships, loves) in which the heart itself, within the complex organism of the human being, is embedded and out of which it has evolved over the course of a few million years. <br />
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Our bodies <i>of course</i> respond to our experiences in the world. To the extent that we experience love, our paraympathetic nervous system is supported and engaged, and this produces within us chemicals that help to nourish and develop that nervous system and its associated organs, including the heart and brain and everything else, and how they are connected and communicate with each other.<br />
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But to the extent that the world we create and experience is stressful, threatening and anxiety-producing, then we primarily engage and develop our defensive, aggressive nervous system -- the sympathetic nervous system. We experience stress because our organisms evolved in adaptation to an environment that favored the development of the parasympathetic nervous system, and gave rise to human beings as loving, playful creatures. Our experience of stress suggests that the current environment -- the socio-cultural milieu of modern life and its particular underlying assumptions -- does not suit us, the creatures we had evolved to be. <br />
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One response to a stressful environment is adaptation. A stressful environment supports the increased development of the sympathetic nervous system and the suppression of the parasympathetic. We become more aggressive, and we seek to become more capable of tolerating stress. Given enough time, biological adaptation will favor the survival and propagation of more aggressive human beings to the extent of developing a new human species, with new and distinct traits that are more suited to the environment. This eventuality can be reinforced by a reciprocity between human beings and the environment: the human being in reaction to a hostile, threatening environment develops and enthrones assumptions, beliefs and expectations of competitiveness, aggressiveness, distrust, etc., and therefore develops and conserves habits, practices, tools and institutions that promote thriving and functioning within such an environment. These activities help to establish the undesirable environment as the basis of a way of living, i.e. establish a particular world and culture, with its assumptions and activities, as normal for human living. It's the logic of self-fulfilling prophecy. <br />
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Our western medicine (and our other institutions) are now behaving precisely in this way. The assumption of western medicine that the body is separate from and isolatable from its environment, even though the environment is obviously a kind of extension of the organism, having co-evolved with it, is itself precisely one such reactive assumption, a response to some kind of perceived threat. In the response, the image of the threat is conserved. Western medicine is generally organized on a kind of militaristic attack model: we attack viruses, bacteria, disease on an allopathic model. Alternative medicines are arising that instead seek to promote sources of health. For instance, homeopathic medicines. <br />
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At this moment, I want to say, simply, that we have the power to shape our environment. The environment is not objectively fixed. It is partly shaped by our own assumptions and choices. Our world, our environment, is largely an artifact of human choice, and we can change it. We do not have to adapt to it. We can take leadership and influence it to create the world we want to create. We carry within us a desire for love and cooperation which can become the platform for a new kind of healing medicine. <br />
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A wise medicine would seek to treat the environment as well as the organism since the two reciprocally condition each other. Thoughts and emotions — the health of the psyche — are primarily generated through our interactions, as biologically-whole totalities (i.e., individuals) in our social context, but medicine routinely claims, for instance, that “chemical imbalances” originating in the isolated organism at the level of the brain generate disturbed moods, thoughts and behaviors. This is upside down. The institutions, being reactive and sensitive to threat, and also infused with a dim guilt, are defensive and organized in denial. We can develop understanding and resolute cheerfullness to speak healing words to those in denial, to those who have turned against their own loving natures in reaction to threat and in adoption to the belief in hierarhical competitive culture.<br />
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I've now strayed far from the above-named article, and many of the specifics about it that interested me. Now I would like for a moment to return to the article itself and how it brought together several strands of thinking that are of interest to me – historical, dietary, economic, philosophical. The article: <br />
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1. Suggests that diets low in fats and high in grains (starchy carbohydrates) favor aggressive human behavior (medulla, reptile-brain activating behavior) - in part because they are heart unhealthy, even though the medical establishment prescribes this high-grain diet under the claim that it is the most healthy for the heart! <br />
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2. Indirectly associates aggressive behavior with the rise of agriculture and grains, which itself has been associated with the rise of patriarchy and hierarchical socio-political patterns (in brief, with the rise of farming 10,000 years ago came the rise of fenced private fields and agricultural harvests -- a premonition of of the enclosures of the early modern period and today’s private real estate system -- and the micro-beginnings of political subsidies for the products of large-scale agriculture. The products of industrial monoculture are mostly starchy grains — perhaps not coincidentally, or at least reinforcing the system in yet another way, these starchy grains happen to be the best, cheapest fuel for keeping large-scale heavy-laboring populations alive<br />
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3. Begins to suggest how the human species could morph into a new, more aggressive strain, homo aggressans, through constant, progressively self-reinforcing environmental conditioning — bolstered by theories and approaches favoring aggressive behavior and assuming innate aggressiveness over the loving behavior that is our heritage (a theme articulated by Humberto Maturana & Pille Bunnell)<br />
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4. Suggests that current medical practices and approach, together with industrial and dietary practices, heavily favor the development of homo aggressans — Hence the establishment promotes a high-carbohydrate, low fat diet as the most heart-healthy, even though this diet is precisely the most heart unhealthy. (A classic example of why Ivan Illich called western medicine iatrogenic.) Furthermore along these same lines, the article claims that the medicine/drug/hormone that most supports the parasympathetic nervous system (the loving, resting, imagining, creative part of the nervous system) is oubain, which while present in the environment is also produced by the body itself, in the kidneys (aside: thank you, Chinese medicine), and the production of oubain is inhibited by the #1 prescribed medication for the supposed prevention of heart-disease, statin drugs, which also inhibit sexual functioning and libido (drive towards sexual loving). <br />
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Many pieces seem to come together here, perhaps revealing the deeply interconnected and mutually self-reinforcing spokes of the larger world system -- including the spokes of agricultural and pharmacological economics, property law, medical diagnosis, diet, moral psychology, social institutions, politics ….<br />
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I’m getting this sense that industry, technology, diet, labor, socio-political patterns, science, psychology, etc. are all being shaped by and delicately influencing one another in support of this larger “world system” that seems to have been set on its trajectory by some terrible experience in human history — one that seems roughly coincident with the rise of agriculture. Perhaps it was some “wave” rather than a single experience, and perhaps it had multiple simultaneous origins -- an experience of a threat, of aggression, of competition, to which humanity responded reactively, defensively-aggressively, in a way that has been manifesting in self-propagating and self-reinforcing socio-industrial patterns for a long time, into the present.<br />
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The bad experience I'm conjecturing about may well have been very simple and gradual, rather than any sudden apocalypse. Perhaps as agricultural societies arose on the planet, and different communities each started to expand outward looking for more land to privately cultivate -- a farm being set apart and managed within the environment very much in the way that a scientific laboratory creates a controlled space for experimenation -- human beings quite naturally reacted in a push and pull way: Drawn to new possibilities of security and wealth (and patriarchal dependency) that agriculture made possible and/or supported, but also set into competition with one another because land is finite and widening agricultural empires started to encroach on each other's territories. Accustomed to living in small face-to-face village communities deeply attached to their individual cultural heritages, speaking different languages, villages may have started to come into competitive contact. These things are new and confusing and people try to adapt and invent new practices. TPerhaps this is the story we are still working out.<br />
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Democracy in the ancient and prehistoric worlds was mostly local village or tribal democracy, where people's everyday life and activity was lived with the whole community. Perhaps we are still trying to figure out a way to preserve all that is best of local democracy as we invent larger-scale systems. That is something like what the Romans were trying to conceive in a Republican Empire that preserved the autonomy of confederated localities. But the Republic fell and tyranny took over. That is what the Iroquois seemed to be working out with their democratic federal constitution that unified many tribes over a great extent of territory for hundreds of years, and influenced the American colonies. That is something like what inspired the New England village democracies to join together into a larger confederated democracy that would enhance and preserve, and not tyrannize, local individual and community and state freedoms. We are still trying to figure out how to have the benefits of widening technological-economic power while fostering and not eliminating the integrity, autonomy, respect and love among all individuals in and for their local environments. <br />
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* Here is the full URL of the article, <a href="http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/12/17/real-cause-heart-attacks.aspx?e_cid=20141217Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20141217Z1&et_cid=DM62414&et_rid=766621351" target="_blank">The Real Cause of Heart Attacks</a>: <br />
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/12/17/real-cause-heart-attacks.aspx?e_cid=20141217Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20141217Z1&et_cid=DM62414&et_rid=766621351
) <br />
Originary website for the article and video: <a href="http://heartattacknew.com/">http://heartattacknew.com</a> <br />
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**A note on our aptitude to be put off by "technical"
literature, be it in economics, medicine, politics, or other fields of
activity. This somnorific effect of technical jargon, which takes the
very energy out of our muscles and places us in a state of passivity and
uninterest, is an important thing to notice. It is not trivial! Our
modern-day
development of so many diverse technical specialties each with their own
jargons tends to disguise the underlying human,
non-technical assumptions -- always very simple and open to ordinary
human understanding, but obscured by technical details -- which give to
each specialty its fated direction of activity and determine its meaning
for humanity and the planet. Hence
our specializations themselves tend to keep us from reflecting on what
is most fundamental and what ties our various special activities
together,
determining the course and consequences of our civilization.)<br />
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<br />Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-47024068496320848072014-05-05T11:23:00.001-07:002014-05-05T11:30:10.262-07:00Hannah Arendt (A film directed by Margaretha von Trotta, 2013) I saw the film Hannah Arendt last August and recently rediscoved an email I wrote to a friend about my response to the film. Here it is: <br />
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The focus is on Arendt's analysis of the Eichmann trial, what became the book subtitled "The Banality of Evil," and the outrage her analysis triggered among those who saw her as defending Eichmann and/or blaming the victims. One source for the outrage was her criticism, in a small part of her analysis, of certain highly-placed Jews for their complicity in what happened. Beyond this, Arendt in fact extends the scope of responsibility for the holocaust to the entire technological world system. <br />
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I was interested in the portrayal of Arendt as a chain smoker with an almost film-noir style tough exterior and comportment. I found myself wondering what it might have been like had she been able to muster something different, i.e. without losing composure, to show tenderness and vulnerability in public.<br />
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There is something about the confident, hardened, arrogant intellectual that has become an unquestioned cliche, a model to emulate even — the brilliant defender of ideas, parrying all criticisms. For a woman intellectual in a world much more male-dominated than now, where respect must have been very hard-earned, emotional toughness and defensive alacrity were no doubt indispensable strengths. The dismissive stereotype of the emotional woman, culturally close at hand, was no doubt important to steer clear of. These norms no doubt made it nearly unthinkable for her to show publicly any grief or sadness in response to the rejection of her ideas, to the failure of her words, at least in some prominent quarters, to create connection and spontaneous transformation. <br />
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Yet I wanted to see her throw away her self-soothing cigarettes, drop her defenses and — while preserving all her conviction and rigor of thought — openly cry tears of sadness and speak her desire for a loving world. <br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt_%28film%29" target="_blank">Hannah Arendt (film) on Wikipedia</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/132849/hannah-arendt-guilty-pleasure" target="_blank">Review by J. Hoberman</a><br />
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<br />Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-37139774540188466472014-03-14T11:51:00.003-07:002014-03-14T11:54:20.673-07:00Continuing the conversation about the shift<div class="p1">
Hi Marc,</div>
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I'm finding much of your writing at the beginning of your letter too abstract for me to comprehend.</div>
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It seems that you're saying that our adherence to a "common" language is basically a tacit agreement, within which human beings are indirectly acknowledging their "common context" or "inherent interdependence" on each other to live. So we "create" reality, then, when we "act together," in accordance with our common context. </div>
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Maybe you’re on the right track. I can’t totally tell for sure. </div>
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Let me try this. </div>
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Two dogs meet at a corner. They engage in all kinds of reciprocal behaviors. I sniff you while you sniff me. Let’s chase each other. Etc. They can have a great time together, communicating and interacting. When this interaction falls into patterns that the dogs repeat together, when they develop “back and forth rhythms” and fall into enjoyment of those rhythms, they are finding a kind of “agreement” that I am calling consensual coordination. A lot of these rhythms, patterns of interaction with each other and the environment, are part of the evolutionary biology of the dog.</div>
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What dogs can’t do is plan to “do this again next week.” They aren’t able to jump to the meta-level in which they start relating their ways of relating with each other. That’s what language is: the consensual coordination <i>of</i> consensual coordination. </div>
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Our interactions as human beings at the dog level, the level of reciprocal interactions that are not languaged, makes the second level, the human level of languaging, possible. If human beings had not spent many generations hanging out together and developing a deep historical experience of such interaction, they never would have been able to develop language. Language is rooted in, and is a way of learning from and organizing and structuring these behavioral dynamics. Maturana writes that humanness has its origins in the biology of love, which is epitomized in the loving relationship between mother and child; this relationship is seen as the original matrix through which humans, and human languaging, is born -- mother and infant (non-speaking) child engage in reciprocal behaviors, creating a strong bond and shared experiences, i.e. consensual coordinations, which create a foundation for later consensual coordination of such consensual coordinations.</div>
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This is a very different view of language from the mainstream view, which says that language “represents” things: the view that the word “tree” simply represents or signifies a “tree.” Such representing is a very small part of language, rooted in a particular human relationship to things, but for a long time we’ve thought that it was the essence of it. This made us very good at developing a certain kind of knowledge, but it has left us with poor skills when it comes to developing healthy relationships with all peoples and our natural environment. </div>
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When we talk with each other, our language presupposes a cultural context, which consists of all the regular patterns of behavior, consensual coordinations of behavior, that our bodies are enmeshed in. We are enmeshed in these behaviors, not conceptually, but muscularly and emotionally. You say “close the window” and I move. You say “I love you,” and my body responds. Language is above all about behavioral coordinations, doings, not mere “representings” that can be judged as accurate or inaccurate, correct or incorrect. Representing is only one potential function of language, and it is always embedded in a context of doing from which the action of representing draws any meaning that it has, where meaning refers to purpose and consequences for the world. Much of our knowing in the technological age has been driven by the purpose of representing -- and increasing the means of control of what is represented. Yet as is becoming increasingly evident, our technology lacks direction. We aren't sure where we are going. We don't know how to attend to the negative consequences. </div>
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Our cultural context, all the tacit, foundational reciprocal “doings” that are going on that make up the human world that we are a part of, is historical and potentially changeable. It's malleable, because its all based on historically created behaviors. But it’s also what we rely on for our sense of reality. Imagine you want to throw a ball. You focus on the target and throw. All you are aware of in your mind is the target. But in order to focus on the target, you are relying on the backs of your eyeballs — however, you don’t notice this. What you “attend to” tacitly <i>relies</i> on what you “attend from” (to borrow from Michael Polanyi). </div>
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When someone says something that seems to “threaten” what we rely on, our instinctual response is denial and defensiveness. I.e., if someone starts to pull out from under our feet whatever we are standing on, we immediately react with fright and the attempt to shore up the platform. For this reason, humans standing tacitly on different platforms into arguments and talk past one another; they don’t know how to construct a way of conversing where both feel secure they are working together on making a stronger happier platform. (This is what the field of understanding group dynamics is all about; how dynamics are rooted in an underlying context or level different from the presenting issues and topics of discussion or "content.")</div>
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Of course, they can’t even get into the argument unless they already share a common cultural context that allows them to converse with one another in the first place. But this common cultural context that enables them to talk with one another is tacit and in their arguing with one another they lose sight of the commonalities that they might be “working on” together. </div>
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We construct a shared world through our interactions. Most language relies on this tacit (hidden) world without being aware of it. Language brings forth what is visible and acknowledged on the basis of something that can’t be made visible, but is only felt in very murky ways and is hard to discover. In most of our languaging, we never look at or question this underlying context of tacitly constructed consensual behaviors. </div>
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The common world is constructed on two levels: tacit consensual coordination in action, and consensual coordination of these consensual coordinations through languaging. The difficult thing to do is to change the tacit level. Language by itself — without action that is perceived as risk because it threatens the tacit dimension we rely upon — can’t do it. </div>
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Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-54386924018069763742014-03-13T16:02:00.003-07:002014-03-14T10:42:22.791-07:00Local and in Person, Represented and Global - From a Conversation with my Friend Louis<div class="p1">
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The sacred is one thing that interests me increasingly. The sacred is in one sense something very ordinary--something that all indigenous peoples seem to have a direct relationship with. Yet it is something that we moderns have lost touch with. At the fork in the road between older, indigenous ways of living and modern western rationalist ones, the west left the sacred behind. Sacredness is a key issue that comes up in the recurrent face-offs between western development and indigenous peoples attempting to preserve their lands and ancient ways of doing things. The sacred, I believe, comes into appearance when people can embrace a certain type of “human limitation” that the west believes it escaped with the invention of writing and the technologies that this invention made possible. </div>
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The “fork” in the road, I'm theorizing, occured when we went down the path of thinking that written language could fully capture “reality,” that the real could be “represented.” This fork in the road, according to the story I am piecing together from many different authors and personal experiences, can be located with Plato and the invention of the modern alphabet (see W. Ong, E. Havelock and I. Illich). The modern alphabet, invented around the time when Plato emerged, made it possible to de-localize or detemporalize language from in-the-moment oral speech through lasting representations; and this, in turn, made it possible at a whole new level to set up agreements, laws, models and representations as "truths"guiding or shaping how people related to their actual in-the-moment experiences over wide expanses of distance. This occurred in many forms: laws and policies could be promulgated across larger expanses of terrain much more readily and with much greater "standardization" than before possible. Thinkers and scientists, as well as engineers and artisans, could now across great expanses of distance develop and work on the same problems together, etc. </div>
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Writing is probably what made it possible for Plato to imagine an “ideal” conceptual realm that existed outside of time. It is what made it possible for science and technology to set up a domain for thinking that is outside of in-the-moment experience, and instead located in a lonely Cartesian three-dimensional “space,” void of everything, and where everything can be generated by mathematics — leading to computer modeling (representation) of everything. This "space" of the represented, including prominently “computer modeling,” is the space we have been increasingly living in for a very long time. Our world is becoming more “virtual" by the minute. </div>
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The great shift that is happening with the end of Western metaphysics, as it was announced by Nietzsche, can on one level be seen as our loss of total commitment to the Platonic divide between ideal-real and temporal experience, which I am equating with the divide between what can be “represented” and shared independently of local time and place, and what cannot. </div>
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One thing that has happened today is that this “shift,” talked about by more thinkers everywhere, has become “news” -- which means that everywhere there is talk about a shift that is really all pseudo-shift. That is an unfortunate complication. (It's also related to the very topic we are discussing. Two people who are using the same "language" -- i.e. the same words -- seem to be talking about the same "thing"; but a little direct experience can soon show that in fact they are not.) </div>
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If the fork in the road of which I'm speaking involved both a cultural commitment to truth as certainty of representation, and if going down this path at the same time involved a leaving behind of the sacred, then how does a re-contextualization of the representational within a larger picture include a new relationship to the sacred? That’s one way of posing the question. Heidegger’s claim that modernity was characterized by a “withdrawal of the gods” speaks to the same thing, I believe. And I think it’s in line with Heidegger’s thinking to say that, with the west's reconceptualization of truth as “certainty of representation,” the west put human beings -- as the ones who make the (artificial) representations -- in the center in a new way. We set up the human subject as the ground and arbiter of Being, Heidegger might say. We took the "path of objectivity," in Maturana's terms. </div>
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Once consequence of taking this path is that it gave rise to a class of expert "scientifically trained" professionals in the world, the masters (or priests) of representation, who have lorded it over all the “uneducated” of the world, usually put on a pedestal by the "uneducated" themselves. (These professinals include the economists and bankers who control economics based on their expert representations; money itself is a token, although not a representation – and this is probably one of the reasons that modern economists can’t “think” what money really is — they can only describe its current functioning in highly-sophisticated ways, because they are kind of like journalists and scientists who are limited to depicting what is "objectively," and so can’t generally tap the font of creativity that requires going into the imaginal realm, or that comes only when we can think of things in terms of dynamics and consequences and goals. Anyhow, this is going off track.) </div>
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So what happens when we go beyond truth as certainty of representation as the only or the primary way of creating human consensus? </div>
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We start to step off the platform of the representing subject. (For Arendt, this is the platform of homo faber.) And we start to valorize the platform of the vulnerable, experiencing subject. We start to open ourselves to the unknown and to the mysterious, instead of only validating our (aggressive) procedures for knowing. </div>
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When we open up like this, it’s like extending our arms and letting in the sky. All experience becomes legitimated, and our capacity to relate grows hugely. (We honor even the "uneducated for the capacity that they possess, a capacity that escapes the narrow criteria of valuation that the west has held to for centuries.) All of this opening up, letting in a wider expanse of experience, can have its scary components. What I expect we may discover: What will most hold us together in the overwhelming expanse is our proximity to one another and to local place. I.e., in some sense what will come to matter to us much more once again is our local community. And we will discover that our capacity for healthy local relations -- to our neighbors, to our friends, to local flora and fauna and geography, to our local civic experience -- will be the grounding source for health across wider expanses.</div>
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Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-88743365600412972472014-03-12T13:07:00.002-07:002014-03-12T15:25:39.002-07:00Paradigm Shift - A Letter to My Sister - Thoughts in Progress<div class="p1">
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Western thinking has long been based on the belief that reality could be represented conceptually. Plato, an acknowledged founder of the western rational tradition, proposed that concepts (ideas) were the ultimate reality, located in the heavenly realm of Truth, in opposition to the realm of matter, error and illusion: mere earth. </div>
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Our commitment to this paradigm is shifting. Perhaps starting with the Pragmatists in the U.S. (R.W. Emerson, C.S. Peirce and the culture that produced them) and Heidegger in Europe (who, through Nietzsche, was influenced by the Americans), a widening wave of thinkers is realizing that “reality” cannot be reduced to concepts. This is because any thing that we distinguish in words can only emerge as a thing or concept against a larger background that itself in its essence remains unwordable, a background that yet preexists as a condition for the possibility of forming any such concept or words. </div>
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For example, if I point out a “tree,” if I distinguish the concept “tree,” I imply and presuppose the whole world in which the tree is embedded, although all of that wider context remains in the background when I foreground the concept or object “Tree” in my languaging. We can "chase" the background by talking about it, but we can only do so through words that themselves always function only through their relation to an ever-tacit background. (This background has been called the "tacit dimension" by Polanyi, the "implicate order" by Bohm; I believe Heidegger may have called this context "world" on some occasions, although I'll have to check up on that.) </div>
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Aside: In naming this “background” (tacit dimension, implicate order, world, context), I do not mean to refer to an external reality independent from our experience. The background refers to the wider <i>experiential</i> context from out of which and against which we generate words and thoughts — while the notion of experience may imply some reality “external" to our experience, we have no access to such. Instead, we as human beings are able to explain any of our experiences only through other experiences, i.e. through the coherences that we discover among our diverse experiences (as Humberto Maturana has put it). So it does not make sense to refer to an objective “external reality." </div>
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Instead, rather than through an objective external reality, we create a common world -- i.e. a world that we can communicate in and act in together -- by coordinating our behaviors with one another in our daily living together through the coherences that we discover in our experiences with one another, which means by discovering “agreements" both through establishing habitual patterns of non-verbalized consensually-coordinated interaction, and in also developing -- on the foundation of this non-verbalized world of consensual coordinations -- express shared agreements and understandings through our conversations or languaging. This accounts for our sense that "reality" is something we <i>rely</i> upon, rely upon <i>together</i>, have a feel and sensitivity for, experience on the level of shared culture, and not as something we simply "think." </div>
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However, under the longstanding belief that, with sufficient (scientific-technological) rigour, reality could be captured in words and representations (models and the like), the west has created a complex array of specialized disciplines, each more and more isolated from each other and removed from common sense and from ordinary understanding. </div>
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What we are starting to realize is that what is omitted from the thinking and languaging of each of these specialized disciplines — the wider context from which they have distinguished themselves — is in fact the radically common world, the common context from which they developed and that holds them all together! And it is this common world that our specialized forms of discourse, all the professions and university departments are unable to think! As a result, common sense has been decaying precipitously in the world, and, because we are unable to think what we are <i>doing</i> relative to our <i>common</i> <i>context</i>, human harmony, scientific, political, economic and cultural, is threatened. </div>
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What the world needs to do is to rediscover the portal through which we can approach the future <i>together</i>, which portal I sometimes refer to as the generation of the commons (where I mean "commons" in a very broad sense). This means that our expert professionals in every discipline need to rediscover their link to the commons, and through that alone, to one another. By and large, we have trained our experts and leaders to pride themselves for the very distance they have achieved from the "merely common," the ordinary, the lay mind. "Progress" has been conceived, partly, as progress away from pejoratively "common" ignorance. "Educated" people have been valued over the supposed "uneducated" commoner. "High tech" excites more peole than low or no tech. And so on. But to rediscover the commons is to rediscover and re-experience our universal commonality as ordinary human beings, and it is only in this rediscovery that we can give meaning and direction, and collectively benefit from, the insights and learnings of all our separate disciplines. </div>
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We are starting to move out of an age that believed “truth” was the “correct or incorrect” representation of an external reality, a notion of truth that makes us very judgmental beings, too often acting under the supposition that there are right and wrong answers to everything and often pitting us against one another and ourselves. </div>
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A shift is happening as we begin to reconceive the purpose of “reason” and thought as that of bringing people into harmony with one another and nature (our common context), not merely through writing and other forms of representation (media, books, ideologies, sacred texts, etc.), but in actual in-person acting and living together. All thinking is doing.<br />
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As Hannah Arendt once said: There is a sense in which the brilliant expert physicists who created the nuclear bomb <i>knew</i> <i>what they were doing</i> in order to create an unimaginably destructive weapon, an extraordinary feat of engineering; but there is a deeper and wider sense in which they <i>did not realize</i> <i>what they were doing</i>. The essence of science is not scientific. The essence of technology, as Heidegger said, is nothing technological. Scientific-technological thinking that is committed to the notion of truth as certainty-of-representation is itself a doing, but what science and technology are really <i>doing</i> remains unthinkable to science and technology; this comes into appearance only when we consider science/technology within the wider context in which they are embedded, as are considering it here: One thing scientific-technological thinking is doing, as presently instituted, is fragmenting the world ever more while delegitimating what most fundamentally gives coherence to a beloved and fully human world embedded in a beloved nature. </div>
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C. S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, held that the “truth” of any proposition is in its consequences (not merely in its presumed correctness or incorrectness). Hence, for example, if the consequence of some people being republicans and some being democratics is constant fighting and failure to take shared responsibility for the world, then the “truth” of the republican and democratic propositions is not in the ideological “correctness” of either side, but in the dynamic of fighting that they are producing. </div>
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One dream of science was to harmonize the world by establishing objective truth that would compel everyone to agree (this is arguably the underlying non-scientific rationale that provided a context for science). To carry out this purpose, science put all its hope in truth understood as certainty of representation, and counted as “real” only what could be objectified through representation. This led not only to the fragmentation of the world into specialized professions and jargons as described above, but also to the rigorous exclusion of emotion, so-called "subjectivity," the felt experience of “the now,” etc., from the domain of scientific thinking -- except to the degree that could be objectified and captured in representations. This exclusion was concomitant to the exclusion of the wider, always inherently uncapturable context within which we live, whose relational richness and complexity will always by definition exceed the capacity of human beings to think it, rationalize it, capture it in representation, from the thoughts that we accredit. </div>
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As humanity wakens again to its dream and opens again to this wider, uncapturable context in which we are embedded, the great mystery in which we find ourselves and which exceeds us, we will hopefully adopt anew — in new ways and old — a common quest. </div>
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As humanity opens in this way, we open again to the incomparable gift that has been given us, wider than the sky, greater beyond all comparison to the things of our own making. </div>
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In completely unexpected ways, we open to the quest of harmonizing with one another and with nature.<br />
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We open again to what is called the spiritual, the domain of consensual resonance from which being-together in harmony emerges. In completely unexpected ways, we open again to the sacred. </div>
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Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-85162589998945774092014-03-09T16:40:00.000-07:002014-04-04T19:30:40.505-07:00Antichrist (2009), a film by Lars von Trier<div class="p1">
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After my favorable experience watching Lars von Trier's Melancholia (<a href="http://tognotti.blogspot.com/2014/01/melancholia-reflection-on-film-and-on.html" target="_blank">see here</a>), I decided to watch another von Trier film, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichrist_%28film%29" target="_blank"><i>Antichrist</i></a> (or, as represented in the title cards, <i>Anti</i> <i>Chris♀</i>). </div>
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The film includes some very intense and disturbing sexual violence, very graphically depicted, including excrutiating genital mutilation shown up close. It's not for the faint of heart. I found myself on several occasions averting or wanting to avert my eyes. It’s unusual to see a director willing to go this far. The graphic intensity makes it hard for me to recommend the film to anyone except certain select friends. I can't imagine anything more opposite to your generic "date film." </div>
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I’m trying to assess what the film overall means for me.<br />
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I'm intrigued on many levels, not least because of the medieval sensibility the film seems to achieve in its present-day refiguring of the Adam and Eve allegory. </div>
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The plot is simple: A husband and wife, the unnamed characters "He" and "She," travel to a remote, isolated cabin deep in the woods -- a place they call Eden. There the husband, a trained psychotherapist, intends to heal his wife of the disabling grief and pain from which she suffers due to the death of their young child. </div>
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Through the interactions between the couple and the mysterious surrounding natural environment, in an atmosphere evocative of horror films, the story explores and intensifies a deepening divide or conflict between He and She. The conflict variously manifests as one between intellect and emotion, control and chaos, human and nature, "normality" (to choose an intentionally ambiguous term) and incomprehensible evil. The dramatic exploration leads to ever darker places, and eventually brings the conflict to a horrific head. </div>
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In the end, there is a kind of resolution to the threat (I'm being vague here only because, in this instance, I'm choosing not to give away the ending). More precisely, the circumstances come to an apparent end through terrible means, but the deeper conflict, I believe, remains unresolved, with no solution evident. Indeed, the film arguably figures our Judaeo-Christian civilization as trapped within a repeating cycle of sin, dramatizing western humanity's failure to escape a profround historical, and possibly ineluctable, entanglement with evil. </div>
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As I have construed it, the film and its ambiguous epilogue leave us with several daunting questions: e.g., Will this cycle continue? Is the conflict depicted absolute, rooted in nature, or of our own making? Where is the locus of the evil? of patriarchy? of misogyny? What comes next in the human story? Can we rewrite, not just in words but through redeeming historical transformation, the tale of what happened in the Garden of Eden? <br />
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In AntiChrist, I think, von Trier dramatizes a dark human conflict with deep roots in our culture, going back at least as far as the stories told in our most sacred western text. It finally leaves its viewers in the excruciating position either of finding a resolution, despite no apparent way forward, or of remaining in its condemning grip and conceding its unbearable irresolvability. <br />
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In <i>Melancholia</i>, as I see it, and as I suggested in my earlier review, von Trier explores related and analogous conflicts, albeit differently, and ultimately locates and valorizes forces of potential renewal.<br />
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The films are coherent with one another. Only, the emergence of hope and a provisional new way forward came later. <br />
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Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-1658207745003468272014-02-21T10:46:00.000-08:002014-02-26T09:54:58.001-08:00Happy-Go-Lucky (2009), a film by Mike Leigh<br />
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Mike Leigh's <i>Happy-Go-Lucky</i> is an unusual film that I have grown increasingly fond of in these several days after watching it. </div>
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You might call it a character study of a woman who may appear to some a "silly airhead" (I'm quoting a family member's critical reaction 20 minutes into the film), but who proves over the course of the story, I believe, to be a portrait of psychological health: a person with strong boundaries, who is non-judgmental, non-reactive, compassionate, courageous, appropriately assertive, modest, unpretentious and just happy being herself. She keeps balanced and cheerful in the face of all the dysfunctional cultural dynamics around her. Her good cheer is not merely passive and adaptive: even if in modest ways, at critical moments, she takes a stand and proactively confronts others around her. Childlike and playful whenever she can, but a mature and forceful adult when circumstances require. </div>
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Need I say what an important achievement this is in our world today? One of the actors, giving his commentary on the film, calls the main character a living example of the laughing Buddha. I think that captures it well. </div>
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A special something about the film quite intrigues me, and I'm not sure that I can articulate what it is. What's coming up for me is an analogy to the curious fact that our mainstream news media today is so rarely able to report "good news." <i>If it bleeds, it leads</i>, goes the saying about our contemporary journalism. </div>
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This characteristic of our news media reflects, I think, something deeply characteristic about our culture's almost addicted focus on problems, on "what's wrong," on everything unhealthy and pathological. </div>
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Why do we seem to find health so boring? </div>
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Why does happiness in our world seem like something always out of reach -- most likely something that we haven't saved up enough money to buy yet, or something enjoyed by other people who unjustly have more wealth, privilege and power than we. But happiness as something already present, free, available to all? Boring, or perhaps not believable. </div>
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Are we an eternally-disgruntled, blaming, protesting people, perversely finding some self-validation, perhaps even some joy, in the calamity that happens to others? Why do stories of murder, war and bad behavior by celebrities sell so many newspapers? </div>
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To our negatively-oriented spirits, the central character in <i>Happy-Go-Lucky</i> may seem to have nothing of interest to offer. No spiky textures to chafe our excitement. </div>
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Nothing spiky, that is, unless we find her continual laughter and good humor something quite annoying. The first thing out of many a viewer's mouth after watching this film may be something like this: "The main character laughed too much. She was really annoying. She got on my nerves. She acts like a child, not an adult." The attitude behind such a statements, I think, will bring relief to such viewers -- because they have found a way to insert the character back into the mainstream negative framework, thus making her unthreatening and easily dismissed.<br />
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Yet that annoying tapping on our nerves may represent a suppressed, inner, more happy self that's trying to emerge, if only we weren't so fearful of the consequences of letting ourselves be happy, of breaking from social norms, of being okay and compassionate with ourselves and with others -- much like the character in question. Have you considered this: Why does the word "childish" have such negative connotations in our language? Perhaps we disgruntled adults would do well to bring more of the spirit of children back into our lives. </div>
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The main character in <i>Happy-Go-Lucky</i> might be perceived as a sort of "nothing" from one perspective (I say, intending to invoke the ideal state of "nothingness" as preached by the Zen Buddhists). She is nothing but resilient and adaptive poise, a model of composure and unfailingly generous good humor relative to all that life brings her way. </div>
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The world as it is currently structured and oriented, I grant, is deeply unjust. How do we respond to that? Can justice grow out of a negative and bitter reaction to injustice? (At least one character in the film models such a response.) Yet flowers need healthy soil to grow. How can we become happy and spread health in an unjust world, among dysfunctional social relations, exploitative economics and corrupt politics, where assaults are coming at us constantly from all directions? </div>
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For I believe that we can. All the shadows we see in our lives are only visible because of a surplus of illuminating light. The given abundance supersedes all human-generated scarcity. </div>
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A few lines of poetry come into my mind: </div>
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<i>"The light for all time shall outspeed the thunder crack." </i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i> - William Carlos Williams</i></span></div>
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<pre style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>"when you consider </i></span></pre>
<pre style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>the abundance </i></span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue</i></pre>
<pre style="background-color: white;"><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </i><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped</i></pre>
<pre style="background-color: white;"><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </i><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no</i></pre>
<pre style="background-color: white;"><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </i><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">way winces from its storms of generosity ... " </i></pre>
<pre style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i> - A. A. Ammons</i></span></pre>
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Perhaps the emergence of such a film indicates that our culture is finding new models of psychic and spiritual health in the face of social dysfunction, new exemplars of the kind of individual poise we must learn to join together in building a new world. </div>
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Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-65722667409412755552014-02-10T22:09:00.002-08:002014-03-07T10:58:25.990-08:00The Celebration (1998), directed by Thomas VinterbergAfter seeing "<i>Melancholia</i>," the subject of my prior post, I decided to watch "<i>The Celebration</i>" (Festen, 1998) the first of the "Dogme 95" films. It didn't have as strong an impact on me as <i>Melancholia</i>, though I thought it quite good and it gave rise in me to much reflection.<br />
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It's like <i>Melancholia</i> in some ways: e.g., a large extended family (about 40 people or so) gathers at a wealthy estate for a celebration, this time not for a wedding, but in honor of a father's 60th birthday. The father is a successful, wealthy businessman.<br />
Like <i>Melancholia</i>, this film that is nominally about a family event, in my opinion, actually makes a challenging analysis and critique of modern civilization. <br />
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The major event that the "<i>The Celebration</i>" turns on is the eldest son's shocking, open accusation of the father: When this eldest son stands in front of the entire gathering to make a toast to the patriarch, he surprisingly, yet also quite flatly and matter-of-factly, tells the story of how the father repeatedly molested him and his twin sister when the two were young children (the twin sister has recently committed suicide).<br />
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The whole family at first responds to this accusal -- or, rather, statement of fact -- with utter denial. First, the party behaves almost as if nothing had been said at all. Eventually, the son's claims are explicitly dismissed. The son is ridiculed and, finally, attacked and expelled from the house (only to return later). Even the mother, who had once witnessed the abuse with her own eyes, claims the son has mistaken imagination for reality. When a black man (the guest of another, rebellious sister) starts to defend the son, the entire party ridicules him by joining together, with a gusto quite painful to behold, in a racist song about black sambos. (With this, the film undeniably connects the family dynamic with the wider world.) <br />
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A main insight I had while watching the film was this: In the son's accusing the father of having fucked his children, the film intends to expose the authoritarianism - patriarchal, racist, coercive - that is at the core of our civilization and is its central sin, and to expose as well the patterns of denial by which this sin is both reenacted and kept in force. Moreover, and importantly, I think, the filmmakers intend molestation, despite its being an extreme form of abuse, to represent something that our culture typically does to its children -- that is, to virtually all of us -- ordinarily and every day, albeit in more and less subtle ways.<br />
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Molestation, I believe the film is saying, is only an extreme instance of an abusive relation between parents and children, between ruling authorities and oppressed or dependent subjects of all kinds, that epitomizes what is occurring in our families, our workplaces and in our civilization at large, and that has been at the center of our world story for a very long time. Molestation, the film says -- and as the son says at the family anniversay -- is our hidden truth.<br />
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Yet molestation seems so appalling and distant from our common experience: Why would a father molest his children? How ever could parents fuck their own sons and daughters? How can we possibly relate something so heinous to our everyday life? What is the emotional logic of molestation? As I posed these questions, I found myself at turns grasping and then losing my conceptual grasp of what I was asking. But eventually I became clearer that the answers may not be so far to seek.<br />
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The molester strangely entangles love, or a simulacrum of love, with an exertion of control. In molestation there occurs a strange and abusive mix of intimacy with an exercise of power over those who are vulnerable. Something of this strange mix is captured in the word "instruction," when we hear the sadistic parent, teacher or other authority figure speak of the "instruction" he or she "must" perform upon a child. A stereotype of the old-school Catholic nun, supposedly representing a God who loves us, strikes a ruler across the wayward pupil's knuckles.<br />
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Familiar experiences from my childhood arise: e.g. of my parents or teachers "disciplining" me, my siblings and my schoolmates -- blatantly or subtly shaming, coercing or rewarding us so that we would satisfy some perceived social or cultural imperative, achieve some perceived measure of success, and ranking us in relation to each other relative to its measure. They did these things, we were told (and we both wanted to believe them and did not believe them), "for our own good," "because they loved us," "because they cared about us," so we would "learn our lessons," "so we would be happy," so we would be "successful" and "steer the right course." "Sometimes you have to do things that you do not want to do," was a refrain often repeated to me when I was a child. I remember instances, too, of my re-performing such behavior on my younger siblings.<br />
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Molestation and its denial seem to happen at a crux of vulnerability, intimacy and power. The molester's assertion of control and intimacy are mixed up with a denial of his own vulnerability, a fantasy of certainty, a fundamental betrayal of some inner self, a wish to emulate the father. In seeking to vindicate the choices he or she has made in life, clinging to illusions of a higher authority -- the "good fathers" who say what we should and must be -- here in this most intimate and vulnerable relation to the self and to those close to him, the molester performs a victimizing ritual. A "truth," one that does not arise from nature, must be enacted, manufactured and imposed through a mix of coercive power and a claim of love (and the threat of its withdrawal). The performance, in the language of social constructivists, is how our hierarchical world and its social dynamic gets constituted in an assertion of power.<br />
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This is paradoxically a social act. For this assertion of power originates not simply with any one individual; rather, the individual participates in a socially-legitimated performance and its socially-supported denial. This shared performance creates our social artifice, sustains our culture of domination, and is at some deep level an act of belonging. It joins us as perpetrators and victims to the fathers and to the wider participant social world, all those who gather at our anniversaries to sustain this peculiar tradition of togetherness.<br />
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The film suggests that our present-day culture is molesting all of its children -- all of us are the children of our age -- just as it has molested and continues to molest, on the most visible level, people of color and other marginalized groups and nations. The educational system that drills and rams information into us as passive recipients, ranking all from top to bottom. The managers and officials who boss the ordinary laborers. The racist practices that grant some the top position and relegate others below. The financial and property systems that direct money and socially-created value to the ruling class through various means. The politicians who allow big business to have its way with us. The media and corporations who propagandize and market to us.<br />
The film says we are getting fucked all around by those who control us and yet who need and depend upon us, who ever orient themselves toward us, and who dominate us. The molestation from the top is repeated all the way down, and passed on through the generations. And the victims repeat the cycle of perpetration.<br />
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At the bottom, there are always the suicides. How does the logic of suicide appear in this context? As a special case of self-victimization? A heroic if tragic ending to the cycle? In "<i>The Celebration</i>," thanks to a suicide note that surfaces, the sister who killed herself speaks to the gathering from a strange and paradoxical place of tragic liberation.<br />
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In the current historical epoch of our dominant human culture, an epoch dating back thousands of years, we have accepted this imposed discipline over the experienced truth of our own inner, fundamentally loving, childlike, open and curious natures, and we have repeated the performance ritualistically as we have passed it on to others -- as we must once we have accepted it ourselves.<br />
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It is still rare and dangerous to publicly expose the hidden crime. Most are not ready to open themselves even to entertaining the possibility in thought. Our psychological safety, our belonging to a social world, has depended on our personal and public identification with the molesting fathers. To separate from this tradition is still to risk a terrifying isolation, expulsion and physical harm. Like the most domineering and abusive of the siblings in "The Celebration," there are many around who are poised almost desperately to defend the tradition against all imputation.<br />
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In general we hold to the tradition, I think, as we hold to our fathers and families, as we value loyalty and trust, familial and communal belonging, our cultural membership. The coercion is strangely entangled with love. We cannot easily sever ourselves from what we love and what shelters us, without risking shame over what we hold most sacred. Partly for this reason, most everyone complies with the drama, playing his or her supportive role in the birthday fête.<br />
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"<i>The Celebration</i>" tells the story of the favorite son who publicly reveals the truth. He does not take this risk entirely alone. Already around him the more wayward siblings in the film, including the now suicided sister, have begun tentatively and awkwardly to come together with one another, in league with the household servants, under a new set of norms and relationships, and around a new truth. To make such public risks worthwhile and meaningful, we need first to build and test a new platform of togetherness, we need to solidify new alliances, allegiances and support networks, new skills and practices, that are capable of delivering a new world into being.<br />
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Although the film puts forth a devastating analysis of our culture, such a critique is possible only from a position qualitatively different from than the one that is being exposed. Molestation and perverted love become visible as such only from a stance that knows and appreciates genuine respect and love. As the exposure of what is perverted intensifies, awareness of what is wholesome and healing also grows. <br />
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"<i>The Celebration</i>" is a story that means to evolve our human story, to take a step forward into a new historical epoch.<br />
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And so the "celebration" to which the title refers is finally not the father's 60th birthday celebration that brings the extended family together at the start of the film. No, the real <i>celebration</i> is the dancing in which the siblings spontaneously engage after the truth of the brother's accusation has finally broken through and has been heard by the gathering. <br />
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The real celebration happens with the dawning of the new era that emerges when the most racist and violent of the brothers -- the father's staunchest defender, who at first violently denies his elder brother's claim -- himself now rejects the father's story.<br />
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The real celebration begins when the father, who now admits his heinous crimes, is told to leave the breakfast table, so that the children-siblings now find themselves seated at a new table, in a new world where the central sin of the past has been brought into the light, and a new generation breathes a new atmosphere on a new morning.<br />
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The film chronicles the rite of passage that our new generations, born into a patriarchal culture, must pass through to start the earth anew.<br />
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<br />Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-36559367532491565572014-01-02T12:11:00.000-08:002014-04-04T19:27:16.314-07:00Melancholia - A reflection on the film and on living today<b>Melancholia (2011) -</b> A film by Lars von Trier<br />
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Somehow this film made an impact on me and is lingering in my thoughts and feelings. <br />
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The basic scenario is this: A large rogue planet, maybe 5 times the earth's size, enters the solar system. There are conflicting predictions whether this planet, called Melancholia, will pass close by the earth, thus providing a spectacular event in the sky, or whether it will actually hit the earth. Melancholia ultimately does impact the earth, head on, completely destroying it. <br />
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However, this story about the rogue planet does not really emerge until late in the film. <br />
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Part 1 begins with a hugely expensive wedding held at a fabulously wealthy country estate, where the bride's sister resides with her husband and child. The film starts with the bride being extremely late to her own wedding -- a wedding meticulously arranged by her sister and professional wedding planners. We watch the bride as she goes through a kind of gradual breakdown at the event, while various kinds of dysfunction are revealed among the family and guests. In sum, we watch the bride go through a deeply felt disillusionment with and rejection of everything in her culture and family.<br />
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Part 2 starts with the former bride in an almost catatonic state of deep depression. The failed wedding is long over. She is now staying at her sister's estate, starting on the road to a manner of recuperation, albeit not a return to her former self but to something very different, rooted in a different awareness and values. Little by little the story of the rogue planet emerges. The different characters respond in different ways. The sister's very wealthy husband is an excited amateur astronomer, who remains in optimistic denial about where the rogue planet is actually heading; he constantly reassures the others — until he finally realizes the truth and kills himself, alone. At the very end, as the planet Melancholia looms larger and larger in the heavens, blocking out the sky, the former bride rejects her sister's proposal of how to spend the last moments (on the patio, with wine and candles). Instead, together with the child, she fields long sticks in the woods. In the simple woods, in herself and in the child, she has found the only resources she needs to live a meaningful, authentic life. With the sticks, on the grass, she builds a spare, simple tepee-like structure. She calls it the magic cave. The characters enter it together. <br />
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I think the film affected me because I saw the whole story as figuring the state we are all in now on planet earth, or at least in the western world. A hollowness in our civilization. The west in decline. The optimists, the mainstream press and people and their leaders, in denial. The coming doom.<br />
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Yet somehow I'm comforted, because in accepting my powerlessness to avert what is coming -- be it the collapse of our world, or simply death itself -- I can perhaps better enjoy the simple beauty of the moment, and a sense of modest dignity and a happiness that comes from realizing that I am doing the work that I am earnestly doing for the sake of doing it and for the sake of the ideals, the people and the vision that it keeps me in company with, even if the outcome is not what I hope for, even if the world is doomed. I am building a magic cave, the best that I can. <br />
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UPDATE<br />
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I thought I'd add to my above review the somewhat more detailed analysis that I posted on the Film Quarterly site, and to which commenter "pekingthom" refers (thanks pekingthom!). For the Film Quarterly site, see: http://www.filmquarterly.org/2013/11/summer-2013-volume-66-number-4/<br />
- MT<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://www.filmquarterly.org/2012/01/lars-von-triers-melancholia-a-discussion/comment-page-1/#comment-23263"><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">January 4,
2014 at 10:32 pm</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;">The film first represents
Justine’s experience of the hollowness of western culture, the dysfunction of
family and work, the hollowness of modern cultural forms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;">Melancholia the planet
threatens earth, in part, as an analog for the doom facing the west which today
is in steep decline.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;">Justine’s painful loss of
the shared ideals that hold our culture together, her loss of belief in
mainstream western values, leads her to a deep depression, but ultimately also
to a place of renewal. Stripped of her attachments to cultural norms, refusing
to participate in John or Claire’s optimistic denials, Justine gradually comes
into touch once again with a natural inner strength. This is like Nietzsche’s
hero who sees the emptiness of the ideal realm, and revalues again the natural
strength of the “beast.” Justine’s regaining of contact with her authentic,
primordial self, connected to nature and authentic desire, is symbolized in one
instance by her taking jam from the jar hungrily and vigorously with her
fingers without concern for “propriety” of the spoon or knife, in another
instance by her lying naked on the river bank.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;"><br />
The deconstruction of her former identity, and the nearness to doom, enable Justine to come into contact again with an underlying vigor for life, an
appreciation of what really matters “on earth,” where ultimately nothing lasts, because we are all mortal.</span><br />
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She rejects Claire’s suggestion that their last moments be spent “on the patio”
with “a glass of wine and candles” and Beethoven’s ninth, because all of these
forms and “accessories,” these “ultimate commodities” of the western world, are
built on a denial of, and have been interposed between, the self and the
primordial authenticity of our condition. Authenticity has been replaced with
commodity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;"><br />
Instead, Justine opts to go into the woods with the child, in part symbolizing
her own renewed inner child, to find sticks. She builds a spare kind of
teepee structure, the “magic cave.” Justine chooses this “magic cave,”
constructed from plain sticks drawn straight from the simple woods, over the
wealthy setting of the castle, as a more true place to be. The magic cave
symbolizes a more healthy, more honest dwelling place for humanity, a dwelling
place for our living, which is also the place where we die.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;"><br />
I think it no accident that the magic cave is like a teepee. Melancholia the
planet is like the juggernaut of the west that came down upon and wiped out
indigenous peoples everywhere, including the Native American indians, and
replaced their way of life with something else: a materialist dream, rooted in
a blind industrialism that is ultimately destroying the planet and that leads
to the ugly social dysfunction manifested during the wedding party.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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This film is a rejection of those materialist values and an embrace of
something much more basic. Let us give up all the pretense. Let us embrace the
simple, the primitive. Let us face death together authentically. Let us enjoy
the gift we have been given of this earth. Death is coming, and yet we sell our
souls for corporate jobs so we can buy expensive real-estate, join golf
clubs, drive fancy cars and follow all the dreams that advertising can paint.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">- Marc Tognotti</span></div>
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<br />Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-90190134867324285132013-06-19T13:17:00.004-07:002014-01-02T13:07:41.139-08:00How Money Affects Morality - and How Morality Affects Money<span style="font-size: large;">The title of my post today reverses the title of an article in today's New York Times: <span style="font-size: small;">"How Money Affects Morality,"</span></span> by Eduardo Porter.<br />
<br />
Porter's NY Times article announces the results of a new university study, carefully-planned and executed through experiments with hundreds of people. This study shows that even "the simple idea of money changes the way we think – weakening every other social bond," and therefore gives rise to general cultural deterioration and institutional corruption. <br />
<br />
I'm sure the article is true. But the article is a little like talking about a rip in the upholstery when the car is headed at high speed towards a cliff. Two problems with the article's reasoning point to a much greater problem that faces us all today: <br />
<br />
1. First, the author's unquestioned but fundamental assumption is that money "is" a given, unitary thing with a single essence. But, in the same way that fruit isn't always apples, the money we use today is not the only kind of money that has existed or could exist. So-called "money" has existed in many different forms and has many different histories, and will exist in new forms in the future. There isn't just one "money," the same everywhere and at all times, which must be the same in the future as it is today. There have been many different monetary systems, even within modern democratic and industrial civilizations, each of which has produced "money" in a different way, and in doing so has created a different relational structure between people -- that is, in each instance has had quite different "moral consequences" for individuals and for society as a whole. Different kinds of money have different moral effects. Bernard Lietaer is one among many economists who have emphasized this point.<br />
<br />
Once we realize that money is a human artifact that can be differently constructed with different consequences, there opens up the possibility of thinking about money in a whole new way, and of entertaining different possibilities for what it might accomplish if we chose to make some changes.<br />
<br />
Lots of people in lots of places, in fact, are carrying out such thinking and experimenting all over the world today -- it's an area of great interest and activity, beneath the radar of mainstream news and politics. <br />
<br />
DIFFERENT MONETARY SYSTEMS HAVE DIFFERENT MORAL CONSEQUENCES<br />
<br />
What the author of the NYT blog incorrectly assumes is that modern, privately-issued, debt-based money "is" money. He is blind to the fact that money can be and has been something quite different. He doesn't understand, for example, what makes our particular form of money "privately issued" or "debt based," because he doesn't get that other, different currency systems have existed -- so these distinguishing terms have no meaning for him. <br />
<br />
(To give only the briefest example of some different monetary systems: First, of course, there is our present-day, debt-based monetary system, which is now used around the world and originated in monarchical Europe. But for a time America used some very different monetary systems, which sprang up out of the much more democratic culture arising in the American colonies. These were still in operation during the time of the American Revolution (and some of the principles that led to them were revived for a time by Abraham Lincoln when he issued the Greenback to fund the American Civil War). However, over time these alternate money systems and their underlying principles were done away with and all but forgotten through a
very interesting course of events and not a little manipulation by powerful interests. Because the ordinary population doesn't understand the monetary system, and because that system has been made to seem so complex that only professional economists could understand it, such powerful players have shaped our monetary system in ways that are detrimental to the population as a whole. It's this detrimental effect that the authors of the cited article and cited study are somewhat dimly bringing to awareness. -- The story I've been tracing in this aside has most recently been told by
Stephen Zarlenga and Ellen Brown, independent of one another, in their
books about money.)
<br />
<br />
2. As already implied above, a second and quite serious problem with the NYT article is that, in making the assumption that there is only one "money," the article serves to entrench our current monetary system, so in this sense the article serves the status quo and the moral decline that it complains of. <br />
<br />
ARCHITECTING NEW MONEY SYSTEMS: WHAT IS MONEY FOR? <br />
<br />
A basic question the article fails to ask is, What is money "for"? <br />
<br />
In today's system, money has become primarily a vehicle for building the power of a small elite. It's a vehicle for gathering up the labor energy of vast populations, and directing that energy to serve the leisure, fantasies, and egos of those privileged few who decide when to create money, whom to provide it to, and whom not to provide it to, and the terms of the deal.<br />
<br />
Ideally and in concept, however, money is a vehicle to facilitate mutual exchange in large populations and/or across vast distances, so that large populations, collectively, can benefit from the many dimensions of "surplus value" that can be generated through mutual collaboration.<br />
<br />
In a hypothetical world of isolated individuals, or of small isolated communities and their local resources, human effort can only achieve so much. But in modern times we have discovered that, through collaboration and specialization of work, we can produce much more, including large technologies, machineries and coordinating institutions through which this surplus value can be invested for the purpose of achieving additional orders of surplus value.<br />
<br />
THE MIRACLE OF COLLABORATION: PUBLIC VALUE <br />
<br />
And this surplus value is by logic and by all rights public, belonging to the community as a whole, not to any individuals or subgroups. However, this a logic that remains little understood, and instead our civilization goes forward in allowing a very few to take what should belong to all. <br />
<br />
To elaborate and explain a bit, let's say my private efforts and skills are worth x to me, and your private efforts are worth y to you. However, when you and I begin to collaborate and exchange — for example, when each of us specializes, each doing one part of a "joint" work more efficiently than any one can do alone, and thereby giving rise to a new domain of "common work" — a new order of value is created (as well as a new order of shared existence, common and collective). This new value is partly reflected in time and energy saved, but also in new creative possibilities unleashed. And this new or surplus value can be called "public" because it comes out of the collaboration itself, i.e. out of the mutual coordination of multiple parties (whether by express agreement or simply going along, which is tacit agreement) and not from any of the individuals in isolation. Hence this value properly belongs to all parties in the collaboration.<br />
<br />
It is fair that I should receive my x value — the private efforts I put in — and that you should receive your y value. It is also fair that every I and you should receive an equal share of the public or collaboration value, which fairly belongs to all of us. And that we should reckon nature and natural resources as a common value. In today's unjust world, an individual is unlikely to receive even the "x" or "y" value of his or her efforts; the public value, and the natural resource value, is almost wholly being taken by a few. Public value today is being privatized, and largely through the vehicle of the monetary system. <br />
<br />
(Side note: even my needs, for example the biology that demands food and shelter, are part of what gives a portion of value to your products; all human beings share certain common, fundamental needs -- hence this portion of the market value is also public, and includes this component of basic human needs, because they come from nature, and not from individual skill, learning, choice, will or effort. The need element in the market is a public value.) <br />
<br />
INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY HEALTH DEPENDS ON DISTINGUISHING THE PUBLIC FROM THE PRIVATE, SELF AND OTHER<br />
<br />
If we were able, in our cultural understanding, accurately to distinguish between what portion value is truly assignable to private, individual effort, what portion to common nature, and what portion to collectively produced, i.e. public or collaborative "surplus," we would be in a position to reward individual merit as individual merit ought to be rewarded, and more importantly, to enable every individual to enjoy his or her "ownership share" in the (spiritual) "whole" of human collaboration.<br />
<br />
If everyone shared only in only that portion of value whose production can in fact be assigned to no private individual(s) but comes solely out of the collaboration surplus and can only be assigned to the "community," the "system of relationships" and to nature (including earth, resources and those needs that are common to all persons), we would have a world without poverty and likely a world where love and beauty ruled the day.<br />
<br />
Now I said "if" we were able to make these distinctions. Are we? Technically, I the answer is yes. Making a full cost accounting like this would not be all that difficult.<br />
<br />
One of the key places that this value resides is in land. Land value isn't the entire answer, but it is probably the main answer. That's because the "public value" that I'm talking about, that portion of dollars in the economy that are attributable to no individuals, but only to the surplus value created by community and collaboration, is reflected in the market price of land. (This extends to all nature actually, including natural resources which only have "market value" to the extent that a public demand is developed for them, which demand itself grows from the engine of collaboration, and also includes things like the airwaves and internet bandwidth and public writing). <br />
<br />
The value of land, and of access to market communications, are functions of the value of human collaboration, i.e. the public value I identified above. The great insight was probably first made and elaborated by the great Henry George. <br />
<br />
What makes a piece of land worth a certain price? -- by the value of land here, we mean the land itself, not any "improvements," such as buildings and infrastructure, that might be made upon it. (In standard property tax bills, this distinction is already made and accounted for between
value of sheer land (nature) and "improvements" added by the efforts of
individuals.) What makes the value of the sheer land worth a certain amount? Certainly not the individual, private efforts of any person. Consider a plot of land in a major urban city: the land is just there, unchanging, yet its value generally increases! As often in fact happens, an individual might buy a plot and do absolutely nothing with regard to it, yet its value still skyrockets and goes into his pockets!<br />
<br />
As this example makes obvious, what gives value to the land is the health and collaborative/economic capacity of the community that is located near that land. As some economists say: the price of land and housing is a function of the jobs in the community. If there is a lot of high-paying work available, the price of land goes up. Which means if the location is a hot-bed of collaboration fueled by the public infrastructures of roads, markets, common individual needs, communications and relationships, the value goes up. This is a community-produced value. <br />
<br />
My main point with this aside into the value of land has been to suggest that, yes, the distinction between individually-created and publicly-created wealth can be measured, although we don't pay attention to it and that is part of our dysfunction and why we don't have the tools to figure out how to relate our individual selves to our communal selves (and so we have very superficial and heated arguments that pit individualistic capitalist ideology against communitarian socialist ideology).<br />
<br />
To distinguish between what is properly individual and what is properly collective is key. Our current systems have largely been constructed on individualist logic, in part because the "scientific" turn of earlier generations towards the concrete and away from the religious and spiritual sent thinkers into refuge towards "hard individual facts" and away from seemingly "spiritual" things like community love and togetherness and relationships. But relationships are no more or less spiritual than individuals. And if we design money only to serve individuals without remembering the collective component, we create a system that ultimately leads to disaster for individuals and the collective: morality deteriorates, corruption spreads.<br />
<br />
The monetary system is part and parcel of the private
property system and our political/governance system -- land is a container, people are
the agents, nature provides the resources, and governance provides the vehicle for coordinating and channeling all human energy towards collective benefit. Viewed in this way, the monetary system (together with taxation) is a part of governance -- this is why, in the U.S. Constitution, the power to issue money is named as a core power of government. This power was delegated to private banks with the institution of the Federal Reserve in 1913.<br />
<br />
PERSONAL & COLLECTIVE GROWTH: HEALTHIER, HAPPIER INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES <br />
<br />
The core logic I am attempting to bring forth here is something like the logic that appeared with the innovation of employee stock ownership plans -- these plans operate on the reasoning that, when everyone has a stake in the health of the whole, there is a moral and energetic benefit to all individuals and to the whole as well. (Of course, our current ESOPs of course exist only within individual firms, which themselves exist within a larger competitive context where there is no such recognition, economically speaking, of a collective ownership in the whole.)<br />
<br />
The logic I'm trying to bring forth is also something like the logic that has emerged out of a<br />
powerful strain of psychological thought and practive: that is, individual psychic health and the health of relationships in couples and groups of any size, is highly a function of the degree to which individuals are capable of distinguishing the difference between what they are "individually" or privately responsible for, and where relational matters depend on mutual coordination. Autonomy and intimacy, or autonomy and collective/relational strength, paradoxically grow together with one<br />
another.<br />
<br />
One of the key features of classical economics was the assumption that all economic logic was founded on the rational behavior of individuals and individual organizations. With the understanding that different orders of logic operate on different "higher" levels (an understanding that Keynes was one of the first to begin to bring into mainstream economics, in a partial way), our thinking about economics will change and we will begin to see more clearly the essential connection between the economic and the political, and indeed, the primacy of the political, which means not that government is more important than business, but that how we structure the human conversation, and ensure that all voices human and natural are heard and respected, is the most critical question and task facing us today: the assumption must be that the whole comes first, the collective comes first; "we" and the health of the we, ultimately decides every I.Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-75554849960498859152013-04-20T09:58:00.002-07:002013-04-20T10:12:35.459-07:00A Workshop With Horses (From an email to a friend, October 2011)<b> </b><br />
<b><br /></b>One fine sunny autumn day, I attended a full-day "horse sense" workshop located at a lovely ranch in Marin. The participants, 16 women and 4 men -- executive coaches and life coaches, therapists and counselors, and some individuals just looking for healing in their lives -- had come to discover what they could learn about themselves and their behaviors through interaction with horses. Together, we went through a series of experiences, each intriguing in its own way.<br />
<br />
For instance, the workshop leader proposed that horses are extremely sensitive to the internal dynamics of any group of people — if a group is a "unity" (so the workshop leader proposed), the horses are drawn to it. But if the horses perceive division or screwy emotional energy in the group, they are not. Horses, she explained, are naturally drawn to the energy of a confident, relaxed, flowing group because they "want to be part of the action."<br />
<br />
We broke into a number of three-person groups and had some fun experiences testing that claim. One group would form, and then wander, self-directed, into the large corral in which various horses were scattered. The horses responded to the different groups in different ways. As a group, we then discussed the different ways the horses responded, and each of the people in each group talked about what had been going on in their thoughts and emotions (and thus in the group's interior dynamics). Rightly or wrongly, we assumed in every case that the behavior of the horses was a response to the group dynamics that we uncovered.<br />
<br />
The workshop exercise that stirred the strongest reflections in me was this:<br />
<br />
Our full workshop of about 20 people sat in a semi-circle, as a kind of audience, just outside a round horse-pen about 25-30 feet in diameter. A single horse was in the pen. Beyond the pen, beautiful rolling hillsides, a small canyon, the sky, other horses dispersed and wandering.<br />
<br />
Volunteer workshop members were invited to enter the pen, one at a time, each taking a turn. Each volunteer was asked to bring into the pen some issue of struggle that they wanted to work on or a decision-point that they were facing in their lives. When in the pen with the horse, the volunteer was asked to speak aloud whatever his or her issue was, and to interact with the horse (or not) in any way the person chose.<br />
<br />
The rest of the group simply watched what happened.<br />
<br />
A pattern soon arose. Whatever the volunteer's story of struggle, in each case the horse (and sometimes other horses outside the pen) would do something that the workshop leader and participants then interpreted as clear a "sign" from nature, indicating something important to the volunteer. In unison, the group saw the horse's response as recommending a course of action or affirming an inner realization that the person in the pen had not yet owned up to.<br />
<br />
On several occasions the leader reassured everyone -- in case there were any skeptics present -- that these moments we were witnessing together were not mere random coincidences, but that indeed the horses were communicating messages of significance, coming from the horses' almost-supernatural sensitivity to human emotion, or even from a deeper knowing. Could it be that, like dogs whose sense of smell is hundreds of times more powerful than our own, that horses have a much keener sense than we for emotional energies? The group, it seemed to me, readily accepted this proposition and, even more, seemed to assume the the horse, in its quiet knowing, could in some way understand human language.<br />
<br />
Now a skeptical part of me rose up with some energy, and was somewhat surprised at the eagerness and willingness of the group, in full chorus, to "project" human meaning onto the horse's every quiver, snort and movement. Yet, at the same time, I was also aware that lovely things were happening that were winning my heart. So there was some way in which I was divided.<br />
<br />
For me a special part of the experience was how I resolved this tension within me.<br />
<br />
For instance, one of the few other men in the workshop was in the pen. He started to speak of his difficulties, in his personal life, with expressing love and gentleness, due to feelings of awkwardness and vulnerability. He spoke of a desire to express more love in his life. While he was speaking these things, a humming bird suddenly flew up, paused beside his ear, and then flitted away.<br />
<br />
The workshop leader assured the group that this was no coincidence, that the hummingbird is a known symbol of love. "Nature," the leader affirmed, was responding to support this man and the feelings of his heart. She knew so from long experience. She had done nearly 5,000 of these horse-consultations, and it was clear to her that the things that happened were not accidents, but actual responses to the energy of the person in the pen.<br />
<br />
I felt moved by the man in the pen; I felt skeptical of the leader's words.<br />
<br />
Then there was another incident.
While the same man stood in the pen with the horse, the workshop participants were invited to share what they had noticed, and what they had seen and felt during his time in the pen. I decided to say something.<br />
<br />
(By the way, it's relevant to say that some people earlier in the workshop had wondered aloud if there was some competitiveness going on between the fellow in the pen and myself — this was after, early on during a different group exercise a horse had spontaneously came running up to me, and this man had later said in a debrief that he had felt jealous of me, but also that he had afterwards imitated my approach to the horses).<br />
<br />
In front of the group, I told the man that I had felt quite moved by his words about wanting to express love, and that what he had spoken had inspired in me feelings of support, admiration and affection. — Just at that moment, in the near distance, a beautiful snowy white egret came upon the scene and flew, slowly and majestically stroking its long wings, across our field of vision! A woman spoke up about how fitting it was that nature had given this lovely sign, just at this moment of the expression of love between two men. It certainly marked that moment as special.<br />
<br />
I looked at this whole scene:
- The lone individuals going into the pen, revealing their vulnerability, their aspirations and their yearnings in front of all.
- The group of mostly women, seated as spectators, each of them striving to be caring and supportive, each of them wanting love and kindness to win the day, as intensely as fervent sports fans root for their team to win a game.
- The beautiful landscape and the magnificent living creatures upon it.<br />
<br />
I saw that I could choose skepticism, and doubt the interpretations that the group was making. Or, instead, I could decide that whether the interpretations were "true" or "not" was entirely beside the point. To doubt, to invoke the criterion of "fact or not fact," was to miss what was most important here.<br />
<br />
Here was a community of people acting out of innate love and support for their members, and out of an innate sense of the beauty of nature. It was this loving intention that wove the whole scene together into stories of compassion, hope and care.<br />
<br />
This little community was taking every opportunity to capture their care, for fellow people and for nature, in signs, symbols and happenings that could be shared and remembered among everyone. And because they had been made into stories, and shared, they marked the moments as special for a long time after.<br />
<br />
I was reminded of certain ancient texts, where the poets would freely speak about gods and signs in the natural world interwoven into the human drama.<br />
<br />
<br />Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-54730249603701152412011-04-11T14:15:00.000-07:002011-04-14T23:12:35.330-07:00The Current Money Crisis - Taking the Conversation DeeperNearly all of the discussions I hear about the government's budget crisis and the country's growing wealth inequality omit what is probably the most fundamental consideration of all: What is money's ultimate origin? How does it get into the economy in the first place? <br />
<br />
We are hard up for cash to fund critically important public needs like education, healthcare and economic infrastructure. Huge numbers of people with sharp minds, strong hands and good hearts are ready to do needful work -- but they can't get a job because cash is scarce. And yet nobody stops to consider where money actually comes from. <br />
<br />
It's an important question, in part because core economic growth and job creation are funded with newly-created money, never with pre-existing dollars. In those strong economic periods that we've all experienced, money was being created in huge amounts to fund the growth and to keep things running at the expanded capacity. But where was all the new money coming from? The answer will surprise most people. What's more, even though the answer is in fact very simple, it goes so contrary to unquestioned assumptions that it takes most people some time to overcome the initial disbelief and to understand how it really works. <br />
<br />
When I came to understand a few simple technical details about how money is created under today's monetary system, my entire framework for thinking about money was transformed. Slowly, the ramifications of this new understanding began to branch in many directions. Wonderful visions began to sprout in my mind -- I began to imagine new possibilities for unleashing all the good energy in this country, so much of it misdirected or underutilized, to serve the public good. I began to see the possibility of a world where there was no shortage of funding for the things that mattered most to the health of our society and environment. <br />
<br />
HOW MONEY IS CREATED - A SIMPLE TECHNICAL FACT THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR THINKING<br />
<br />
Here’s the technical fact about where actually money comes from, followed by a brief explanation of why it's so important to understand. What I am about to tell you is not a secret. It's publicly available knowledge, even described in some old, out-of-print pamphlets published by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Congress (some cited in my list of references below). Yet even though this knowledge has technically speaking been available for decades, very few people have had the slightest inkling of why it had any importance. It's worth remembering that the modern banking system is something relatively new and, as with so many new technologies, it was "pushed upon us" before we understood the alternatives or the consequences, without the benefit of thorough-going public discussion, and before we had learned to use or regulate it wisely. Public thinking still hasn't caught up to the banking system yet. The "esoterics" of economic talk have obscured the simple underlying truths. But awareness and understanding is growing today, as the citations below attest.<br />
<br />
So here comes the simple fact I've been talking about. If it doesn't make you perk up with interest, it should. Don't leave this page until the importance of what I'm saying starts to dawn on you: <br />
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Under our current “fractional reserve banking system”--created in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve system--the United States money supply today is entirely created by private banks when they make loans. (The actual printing of physically-circulated paper money on government printing presses is irrelevant; it’s entirely secondary to this process of money-creation by banks.) <br />
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That's it. All money in circulation today is created by private bank loans.<br />
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Now you are probably either curious, startled, confused, skeptical or ready to go to sleep. Assumuing you're at least still awake, you might be asking, "How can this be?" or "What difference does that make?" or "What exactly are you saying?" What I'm saying, in short, is this: <br />
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When you “borrow” money--to buy a house, for example--the bank does NOT go to some reserve stash of dollars and lend you pre-existing money they have in their vault. No. The money that is “lent” to you in truth gets created by the bank out of thin air. <br />
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Confused? If so, part of your confusion probably stems from the fact that the term “loan” is a total misnomer. Money isn't really "loaned" when you take a loan. It's created. It's created simply through an accounting mechanism: the amount “loaned” is entered into your deposit account, and an equal amount is entered into the bank’s corresponding account as a new “asset,” i.e. what you owe the bank (plus accruing interest). <br />
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That’s the technical mechanism I'm talking about. All the money in circulation, with the exception of the metal coins minted by the government, comes into existence through this mechanism of bank loans. <br />
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Of course, there is more to the story. For instance, there are restraints on just how much money the banks can create--this is where the "fractional reserve" rules come into play. But none of the pieces that I am leaving out affect this one fundamental fact: the fact that all the money that exists today is created through the loans that banks make. (Many more details, and reliable sources verifying what I have said so far, can be found in the books, pamphlets and videos I list at the end of this blog.) <br />
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Assuming you can absorb this crucial fact, which may or may not seem a little mind-bending, you are ready to understand why this money-creation mechanism is much more than a mere technical detail, and is of such enormous consequence for the public well-being. <br />
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ALTERNATIVES HAVE EXISTED IN MODERN INDUSTRIAL NATIONS<br />
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First, it’s useful to understand that it doesn’t have to be the way it is today. Although today’s “debt-based” system is the way money-creation now works all around the world, robust, alternative methods of money creation have in the past existed in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, funding energetic economies that gave people meaningful work and built schools, hospitals, roads, etc., without creating inflation or painful boom/bust cycles. Under the alternative system I am here referring to, money was created not by banks, but by the government itself, and it was created, not as loans tied to debts, but as money existing independently of debt that was spent into existence to fund public projects. <br />
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Such a system of government-issued money operated, for example, in Canada from the Great Depression until 1972, and in the United States, to take the most recent example, during the decades after Lincoln created the government-issued “Greenbacks” to fund the Civil War without going into debt to banks. Indeed, the alternative of government-issued paper currency is as American as apple pie: government-issued paper currency was an American invention. It paid for the American Revolution. Before the Revolution, the American Colonies had invented such money as a way of dealing with the extreme monetary scarcity imposed by England. It was on the basis of this American-government issued cash, the Colonies built prosperous economies and the foundation of American independence. Ironically, the current monetary system, based on private bank debt, was a later importation from England -- an importation, some argue, that made its way to our shores through rather nefarious means. The story of how the banks acquired the money power in the United States, even though the U.S. Constitution specifically reserves the nation's money-power to Congress, is a story worth reading.<i>(For the Canadian system, see the Bill Abram's videos on You Tube; for dicussion of the Greenback currency and American monetary history generally, see Zarlenga and Brown. For the story on how bankers achieved the passing of the Federal Reserve Act that established the current system, see Rothbard.)</i><br />
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WHY IT MATTERS -- SOME DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES OF THE CURRENT MONETARY SYSTEM<br />
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Why should we be interested in alternatives? Because the architecture of our monetary system has as profound consequences for the moral fabric and well-being of our society as does our culture or our politics. And because the present monetary system gives rise to many of the worst features of our current political-economic system, for example:<br />
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1) Under the current system private banks, by deciding where to make loans, decide the direction of the country’s primary energy and activity — Will they fund war industries? Housing bubbles? Environment-exploiting companies? The top 1% of earners? Or education, hospitals, roads and bridges, green technologies, and healthy democracy? To whom will the money be made available? Of course, banks choose to lend the money in whatever way will make them the highest return. Whatever the banks decide, that’s where the money will be, and the energy and action of the people will follow, because people need jobs. Will our national energy be dedicated primarily to achieving what the world most needs? Or instead to achieving the private-enrichment schemes of a very few? This decision is in the hands of those who have the money power. Today, that would be the world's private banks. Ever notice how much the financial sector has grown in comparison to all other sectors of industry over the past 100 years?<br />
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From the perspective of job-seekers, one result is that we are all generally constrained to line up for a job at the door of those whom the banks deem worthy. There are few jobs, and to take a high-paying one too often means working to achieve goals that are not necessarily in the best interest of all. A just monetary system, in contrast, would put all of the people into action in building the common well-being. Full employment should signify nothing more than mobilizing the available energy of every person in constructing the wonderful world that we all want. Our present monetary system instead funds the most powerful private interests, those who are best at exploiting others, and these folks, in the short term, benefit from high levels of unemployment that keep wages low. <br />
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2) Under the current system, if we the people (the public sector or government) need money, we must borrow it from the banks and pay the banks back with interest. This makes no sense. As Thomas A. Edison and others have realized, if the government can issue an IOU to the banks in return for money, it can just as well issue the money directly, without having to pay interest. (That's why Lincoln created the U.S. Greenback currency 150 years ago, to pay for the Civil War without having to put the government in debt to banks. It worked.) The current system presents an absurd situation where we have delegated the money-power to private interests, who then charge us a whopping price for the extraordinary privilege we (for the most part unknowingly) have granted to them. One disastrous consequence is that public projects cost us taxpayers a multiple of 3 to 5 times more than they need to, due to interest charges. Money needed for education, roads, hospitals could be many, many times more abundant, helping to secure our future prosperity for generations. Instead the money is in short supply.<br />
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3) Because under our system all money is created through "loans," more money is always owed than is actually created. Whether you look at an individual loan or the aggregate of all loans, the bank creates (i.e. "loans") <i>x</i> amount of dollars, and always demands back “<i>x</i> + <i>interest</i>.” In other words, as a structural necessity of the system, more money is always owed to banks than exists. This creates a situation of inherent scarcity and competition, with terrible moral and environmental effects, harming the social fabric and the ecosystem.<br />
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The only way for any person or business to pay its debts is to get money from others, which increases the general monetary scarcity and competition, and also means that some must by necessity go bankrupt. The current system places us all in competition with one another to get scarce money, supporting rapacious practices and fueling exploitation of the environment and of people. <br />
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Since the only way to expand the money supply is to borrow more money, this system locks our society onto a path of exponentially increasing growth-and-debt. It’s not an accident that people and governments have been accruing exponentially-growing debts over the past century. <br />
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This monetary system has its deep and pervasive psychological effect: at some level we are all vaguely aware, even if we don't understand the reasons why, that there is not enough money to go around. This breeds fear and cynicism in the culture generally and in our individual psyches: the fear that any one of us could fall victim and discover ourselves in abject poverty (the system as structured requires that some must go penniless), and the cynicism that the law of the world is tooth and claw, with individuals ultimately out for themselves alone. It doesn't have to be this way at all. The goodness still left in our hearts, and the hope we hold out for a different future, derives from a past when things were different.<br />
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MONETARY REFORM & INNOVATION -- FINDING SOLUTIONS TO SUPPORT HUMAN WELL-BEING GLOBALLY<br />
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Our world can’t shift its current unsustainable course without radically reforming the monetary system. It's an essential piece of the puzzle. <br />
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I am aware of one movement for radical reform at the national level, and thousands of movements at the local level. At the local level, new community currencies are helping to relieve communities from their dependency on conventional, bank-controlled money, and to provide new ways of unleashing local, self-directed energies and capabilities. There are many varieties and experiments with local currencies going on today — some are only extensions of the current system; others hold the promise of creating something truly new and exciting. There are even glimmers of possible new exchange mediums that, some think, could even eventually replace money as I have spoken of it altogether. <br />
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At the national level, the reform effort of most interest to me is the one being pushed by the American Monetary Institute and Stephen Zarlenga, in alliance with Dennis Kucinich. <br />
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REFERENCES<br />
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I hope you're interest is piqued and that you'll enjoy learning more. Here are a number of books, videos and authors who treat some or all of the things I’ve been discussing. Stop by again and tell me about what you're learning. <br />
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<b>1. Stephen Zarlenga,</b> <i>The Lost Science of Money</i>. See Zarlenga's American Monetary Institute for additional publications and links. (See: <a href="http://">www.monetary.org</a>) <br />
<b>2. Ellen Brown</b>, <i>The Web of Debt</i> (See: <a href="http://www.webofdebt.com/">http://www.webofdebt.com/</a>) <br />
<b>3. Bill Abram on Canada’s Banking System</b>, parts 1-4 on YouTube<br />
- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghiU55O5eY">Part 1</a>: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghiU55O5eY<br />
- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyHpaHo71mQ">Part 2</a>: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyHpaHo71mQ <br />
- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ixeDP5LEEQ">Part 3</a>: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ixeDP5LEEQ <br />
- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtretltL3I">Part 4</a>: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtretltL3I<br />
<b>4. Robert de Fremery</b>, <i>Rights vs. Priveleges</i>. <br />
<b>5. Bernard Lietauer</b>, <i>The Future of Money.</i><br />
<b>6. Paul Grignon</b>, Videos (available on YouTube): <br />
- “Money as Debt,” parts 1 & 2; <br />
- Website: <a href="http://www.moneyasdebt.net">www.moneyasdebt.net</a><br />
<b>7. Murray N. Rothbard</b>, <i>The Case Against the Fed</i>.<br />
<b>8. Thomas Greco</b>, <i>The End of Money</i>.<br />
<b>9. Peter North</b>, <i>Local Money</i>.<br />
<b>10. <i>"A Primer on Money:</b> Subcommittee on Domestic Finance, Committee on Banking and Currency"</i>, [Wright Patman (Texas), Chair], House of Representatives, 88th Congress, 2d Session, August 5, 1964. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1964. <br />
<b>11. <i>Modern Money Mechanics</b>: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion</i>, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. (Online at: <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Modern_Money_Mechanics">http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Modern_Money_Mechanics</a>) <br />
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______________________________<br />
<br />
Marc Tognotti, Ph.D., <br />
Co-Director, Institute of the Commons<br />
<a href="http://www.iotc-hub.org">http://www.iotc-hub.org</a> <br />
E: marc@iotc-hub.orgMarc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-85644522291977225952010-12-31T13:31:00.000-08:002010-12-31T13:31:15.005-08:00H.R. 6550: National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2010Kucinich has introduced a bill to fundamentally reform the American monetary system. If passed, I think it could be the most significant act of Congress ever. <br />
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Because almost nothing affects so many things as does money, monetary reform has potentially huge consequences. Due to the current fiscal crisis, certain long-unquestioned, very basic assumptions about money -- what is it? who really creates it? how is it introduced into the economy? what are the consequences? what alternatives are there? -- are receiving new attention, making real reforms at least thinkable. <br />
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The Kucinich measure holds within it the possibility of funding full employment, universal healthcare and public education, and of repairing the national infrastructure, while eliminating the Federal debt and boom and bust cycles of inflation and deflation. It promises to reduce the exploitation of people and the environment. As I said, it can affect so much, because this is about reforming the monetary system, and nothing affects so many things as does the monetary system. <br />
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Yet I am curious whether what the bill proposes -- the assumptions it questions, the simple but at first difficult-to-fathom concepts it introduces -- has any real chance of making its way into public discourse. I wonder whether it will be able, even, to get any real hearing in Congress. <br />
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There are a lot of passionate, smart and dedicated people who have shepherded this bill, and the thinking and historical awareness behind it, this far. But I don’t imagine it’s that difficult for those interests who will feel threatened to make any serious, thoughtful consideration of what it says impossible. Sometimes I wonder if a chief function of our government, media and educational systems hasn’t been to keep people distracted from every fundamental question and insight. <br />
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The full text of the bill -- it’s being called the National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2010 (H.R. 6550) -- is available at: <br />
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http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-6550<br />
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A good background piece can be downloaded at: <br />
http://www.monetary.org/32pageexplanation.pdfMarc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-37963025871860295902010-08-12T13:26:00.000-07:002010-08-12T14:28:29.450-07:00Prosperity & Community - And Canada's Great Monetary ExperimentIn this engaging set of video clips (see below), Bill Abrams, a retired, 85-year old Canadian high school teacher nicely tells the story of modern money and banking that, I hope, is gradually working its way into the public awareness. <br />
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The story he tells, which parallels what has happened in the United States and elsewhere, is about Canada’s growing national debt and the gradual bankrupting of its community life, individual freedoms, and public goods and services consequent to the adoption and spread of the “fractional reserve banking system.” <br />
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This is the system the United States, without public debate, adopted in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve. Ever since, our country’s direction has been largely determined by private banks, our national debt has grown exponentially, and we have been subject to unnecessary cycles of economic boom and collapse. <br />
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Abrams talks about how Canada for many decades operated on a different monetary system — a healthier system that pulled it out of the depression and enabled Canada to build a national infrastructure, full employment, and safe, happy communities from 1935 to 1972, without incurring any significant public debt. <br />
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But as Abrams relates, in 1972, under pressure from the international banking system, Canada too adopted the debt-based, fractional reserve currency-issuance system. Since then, its public debt has been skyrocketing year after year, and interest payments to banks on that debt have been taking an ever-larger piece of the public budget. In other words, Canada joined the club. <br />
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Perhaps surprising to many, the United States, too, has at times enjoyed monetary systems that were in fundamental ways like what Canada had in place from 1935 to 1972. In fact, the American Colonies invented similar systems when they devised paper money to fund local prosperity. It was British opposition to Colonial-issued paper money that helped to ignite the American Revolution. Abraham Lincoln resurrected such a system when he started issuing the famed “Greenbacks” in the mid-19th century, to fund the Civil War without going into debt to banks. But, like the Bank of Canada, Lincoln's Greenback system was gradually displaced by modern banking, and with similar results. <br />
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Similar stories have occurred elsewhere. For instance, there is the dramatic example of the Island of Guernsey, which I wrote of elsewhere (<a href="http://tognotti.blogspot.com/2009/08/reinventing-money-to-serve-public-good.html">Guernsey</a>). <br />
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All of these stories renew hope for a world where every community can rediscover its way to creating a world of safety and prosperity, where we lead more fulfilling and meaningful lives, in more caring and neighborly communities. <br />
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The stories also suggest that local communities – towns, neighborhoods, counties — have it within their power to create complementary currencies that can help them regain the sovereignty and self-sufficiency they have lost to the “system,” i.e. to large private and public institutions and the marketplace that they control. The phenomenon of local currency creation is one of the remarkable stories going on around the world right now, with many thousands of examples springing up around the world. <br />
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Money in its essence is a human creation, an artifact of the law — or, more fundamentally, of human agreement. Money, in its essence, is simply a powerful enabler of human cooperation. It can be understood as an acknowledgment of service rendered, and the promise of the same in return. Money is therefore simply a sign of trust. Even in our corrupt, privatized system, and despite money’s alternating “golden” and “filthy” emotional associations, this mutual trust is still the underlying core from which money derives and that makes money work. Our current monetary system, which uses privately-issued bank debt as a substitute for money, falls sadly short of fulfilling money's social promise. A good money system builds community trust and capacity, and engages everyone in building a world that benefits all. How we create money is a great piece of the puzzle for setting the world on a better and different course. History shows that there is a better way. <br />
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Here are the Bill Abram video clips: <br />
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THE CRIME OF THE CANADIAN BANKING SYSTEM: Bill Abram <br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghiU55O5eY"><b>Part 1</b></a> (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghiU55O5eY) <br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyHpaHo71mQ"><b>Part 2</b></a> (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyHpaHo71mQ)<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ixeDP5LEEQ"><b>Part 3</b></a> (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ixeDP5LEEQ) <br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtretltL3I"><b>Part 4</b></a> (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtretltL3I)<br />
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Other people who are telling the story, each from a different angle, include: <br />
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- Stephen Zarlenga, <i>The Lost Science of Money</i><br />
- American Monetary Institutute - <i>www.monetary.org </i><br />
- Bernard Lietaer, <i>The Future of Money</i><br />
- Robert De Fremery, <i>Rights and Privileges</i><br />
- Ellen H. Brown, <i>The Web of Debt</i><br />
- Thomas H. Greco, Jr., <i>Money: Understanding and <br />
Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender</i><br />
- Paul Grignon, Videos (available on YouTube): “<i>Money as Debt</i>,” <br />
parts 1 & 2; Web: <i>www.moneyasdebt.net</i> <br />
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<i>“All of the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arises, not from the defects of the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation” -- John Adams</i>Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-20583511924588461632010-01-15T12:50:00.000-08:002013-04-22T10:27:43.734-07:00The American Monetary ActThe <a href="http://www.monetary.org/American_Monetary_Act_version_10_feb_06.htm">American Monetary Act</a>, a legislative proposal intended for U.S. Congress, recognizes that through the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, private banks effectively took over from Congress the sovereign power to create money, and that this has resulted in “a multitude of monetary and financial afflictions, including:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>an uncontrollable national debt</li>
<li>excessive taxation of citizens</li>
<li>inflation of the currency</li>
<li>drastic increases in the cost of public infrastructure investments[*]</li>
<li>excessive un- and under-employment and</li>
<li>erosion of the ability of Congress to exercise its Constitutional responsibilities to provide for the common defense and general welfare”</li>
</ul>
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[<i>Notes: Bullets added.</i>] <br />
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The proposed legislation, created chiefly through the initiative of Stephen Zarlenga and his <a href="http://www.monetary.org/">American Monetary Institute</a>, is breathtaking. It is brief, simple, commensensical, practical, revolutionary. The Act isn't entirely new: it's an update of legislation first proposed by respected American economists in the 1930's. Zarlenga lays out the rationale for it at the end of his magnificent (if inexpertly edited) 700-page globally comprehensive history of money, which he personally gave me a copy of back in 2002 or so, <a href="http://www.monetary.org/lostscienceofmoney.html"><i>The Lost Science of Money</i></a>. <br />
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The language of the Act is relatively simple, but it may still be too laden with technical terms to be easily comprehensible to the newcomer. A supporting, 32-page explanatory pamphlet available at Zarlenga's web site can be downloaded <a href="http://www.monetary.org/32pageexplanation.pdf">here</a>. This document itself is one of the best primers on the current monetary situation that I have seen. It gives a good synopsis of Zarlenga's book as well as of the proposed Monetary Act. I recommend that newcomers to monetary policy read this pamphlet before diving into <i>The Lost Science of Money.</i> It will make the larger book more easily comprehensible by providing a clear overarching framework.<br />
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Among other things, the proposed American Monetary Act is intended to: <br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Convert our money system from one running on debt-based money (today’s money that is created primarilty through private banks "lending" at interest) to one running on real money issued directly by the government.</li>
<li>End “fractional-reserve” banking (where 95% of money in circulation is created through bank loans), making banks into what almost everyone today already believes that they now are, banks of deposit that manage real money.</li>
<li>Over time, eliminate the national debt and burdensome interest payments on that debt, which eats up a large and growing portion of our tax dollars.</li>
<li>Catalyze spending on public needs at a fraction of prior cost and in the service of full employment and enhanced productive capacity by bringing additional money into circulation, not through lending, but through debt- and interest-free spending on public works. (Under the current system, the costs to government for infrastructure construction are increased 100%-200% by unnecessary interest payments to banks.)</li>
<li>Keep inflation at bay by matching new disbursement with expanding productive capacity.</li>
<li>Reduce or replace taxation with government issuance of money through spending on public priorities. </li>
<li>Bring the Federal Reserve, now a consortium of private banks only nominally overseen by government, within the U.S. Treasury.</li>
<li>Help to eliminate the terribly destructive boom/bust cycles that further enrich the elite at the expense of the rest, in part by replacing the "house of cards" of "credit money," which is like an unstable Ponzi scheme, with real money.</li>
<li>Reduce influence of private interests on government.</li>
<li>Provide a new, ethical princple for government monetary policy: that of “furnishing sufficient liquidity to support the reasoned sustainable expansion of the physical economy, providing for the common defense and general welfare of the United States, and full employment of the nation’s working population.”</li>
<li>Set out country on a new healthy course more supportive of the common good.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
Reading the Act, I find it quite beautiful to imagine all of us exchanging the filthy luchre of “Federal Reserve Notes” for cleaner, greener “U.S. Money,” and throwing the old notes in the trash. This is in the section stipulating that, in timely fashion: “the Secretary [of the Treasury] shall establish the capability of converting outstanding Federal Reserve Notes to United States Money of equal face value upon presentation to any domestic ... financial institution by the bearer;" “all fund accounts within United States financial institutions shall be denominated only in United States Money; and “The Secretary shall promptly dispose of all Federal Reserve Notes upon receipt.” <br />
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The fact that this Act can be proposed in such straightforward simplicity seems to me a good sign. If Obama and his ilk were ever publicly to take notice of it, I would know they were for real. Bernanke the current Fed Chair seemed a pile of nerves in one interview where I saw him responding to unprecedented focus on the Federal Reserve, as Ralph Nader and others began asking for a first-ever comprehensive audit of that institution. But it seems to me that the Fed has, for now, successfully deflected the recent scrutiny. <br />
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As Thomas Alva Edison once remarked, if the U.S. Government can issue IOUs to private banks (as it now does to the Federal Reserve at interest, with the banks subsequently creating the money supply through subsequent loans based on this initial fractional reserve), the government can just as well issue U.S. currency directly. <br />
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Here, again, is a link to Zarlenga’s proposed <a href="http://www.monetary.org/American_Monetary_Act_version_10_feb_06.htm">American Monetary Act</a> (http://www.monetary.org/American_Monetary_Act_version_10_feb_06.htm).Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-27252504813084270802010-01-14T16:59:00.000-08:002010-01-15T13:52:54.889-08:00Toward A More Just Money System (Money as Debt II - Video by Paul Grignon)A set of short, animated videos by Paul Grignon -- available on YouTube and entitled "Money as Debt II" -- provides a pretty good overview of money and its history as I’ve been learning about it over the past several years, and points to the historical opportunity we have today of transforming money to the world's benefit. <br />
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The videos tell the story, in brief, of the rise of our current private-bank-controlled, debt-based monetary system, and point out some of its consequences in, for example, unsustainable environmental exploitation, gross economic injustice, overwhelming imbalance and concentration of power, war, and a whole host of familiar ills. <br />
<br />
A valid point is that the current money-system, while it gives rise to many evils, has also unleashed extraordinary human productivity by introducing extraordinary liquidity into the world of human relations and human exchange. Defenders of the current system have a legitimate perspective: If a population is thirsty, then even filthy, muddy water is a godsend. Dirty oil is preferable to no oil to keep an engine running. Maybe this is why our emotional response to money has always been so ambivalent.<br />
<br />
But now with historical hindsight growing rapidly in the wake of modern progress, we are gaining the clarity necessary to separate the baby from the bathwater; i.e. we are opening a new prospect of having abundant money, but clean stuff, rather than filthy. Imagine clean money that helps repair the world, that builds human relations of cooperation and mutual benefit rather than extends systems of domination and exploitation, that supports rather than destroys a healthy environment. Can we exchange our filthy luchre for pretty? <br />
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The history of money is a story whose basic arc, I hope, will gradually come to the public’s attention over the next several years. ("The cat is out of the bag," I say to myself. "Too many people are starting to write about this and spread awareness. How many years will it take before these new realizations about our money system reach the general public? Five? Ten? Fifteen?" Or am I overly optimistic and is the capacity of mainstream propaganda simply too much to overcome?) <br />
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Grignon's video series points, in its final segments, to the existence and need of such alternatives to the current system. (I noticed, for instance, passing references to the Guernsey dollars I blogged about some months ago, as well as to colonial scrips, the old U.S. Greenbacks, and to the currently burgeoning community currencies, all of which I’ve also commented upon.) <br />
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The videos even make brief reference to Stephen Zarlenga’s work at the American Monetary Institute and his American Monetary Act, legislation [discussed in my following blog] that Zarlenga hopes to bring before Congress and in which Dennis Kucinich has shown an interest. (Look for the unidentified cartoon images of Kucinich and Ron Paul that briefly pop up in the Grignon videos; alert me if you see others that I missed!) I believe Zarlenga’s thinking is a bit stronger and clearer in some respects than Grignon’s, but these videos are very good nonetheless; then again, Grignon no doubt has valuable insights of his own to bring to Zarlenga's thinking. <br />
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To see the videos, click here (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_playlists&search_query=money+as+debt+ii+promises+unleashed&uni=1">series 2</a>) or here (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8">series 1</a>) and/or search YouTube for: <br />
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money as debt ii promises unleashed (1 of 8) through (8 of 8) <br />
money as debt (1 of 5) through (5 of 5) <br />
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See also: <br />
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<b>Stephen Zarlenga</b>: His book, <i>The Lost Science of Money</i> and his non-profit organization, <a href="http://www.monetary.org"><b>The American Monetary Institute</b></a> (http://www.monetary.org/) <br />
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<a href="http://www.monetary.org /American_Monetary_Act_version_10_feb_06.htm"><b>The American Monetary Act</b></a> (at http://www.monetary.org/)<br />
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<a href="http://www.moneyasdebt.net/"><b>Paul Grignon's Web site</b></a> (http://www.moneyasdebt.net/) <br />
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<b>Ellen Hodgson Brown</b>: Her book: <i><a href="http://www.webofdebt.com">The Web of Debt</a></i> (http://www.webofdebt.com/) -- Brown’s book is a good overview and compendium of many of the things Zarlenga addresses, and it’s more accessible and more focused on modern U.S. Monetary history (but much less historically comprehensive). <br />
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<i><a href="http://www.themoneymasters.com">The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America</a></i> (http://www.themoneymasters.com/) -- This 3.5 hour video can also be found in free segments on YouTube; it’s a great and revealing piece, although the unfortunate and strong “conspiracy theory” tone and slant might drive some people away.<br />
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<b><a href="http://www.henrygeorge.org">Henry George Institute</a></b> (http://www.henrygeorge.org/) -- The above thinkers are concerned with the privatization and monopolization of the inherently public money power by the private banking system. The economist Henry George instead focuses on another critical and related concern: the privatization of the earth, or land.Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-59436622615895829452009-11-18T13:46:00.000-08:002009-11-18T17:33:04.134-08:00The 50-Year War and The Greatest Power in AmericaI just finished reading an article by Jonathan Schell, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/17/opinion/main5682042.shtml">The Fifty-Year War: We Learned So Much, At Such Cost, In Vietnam. Why Must We Learn It All Again In Afghanistan?</a><br />
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Schell ends with a question concerning the greatest power in America. He asks: “What is the source of this raw power [over] presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan.”<br />
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What power is Schell talking about? He's talking about the power that causes American democratic presidents to get involved in and maintain wars that they know cannot be won. <br />
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Schell begins by invoking what has now become a cliché, a purported lesson of Vietnam, that “you can't win a guerrilla war without winning the "hearts and minds" of the people.” Even General Petraeus says about Afghanistan, “the decisive battle is for the people's minds.” <br />
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But Schell argues, the Democratic presidents and advisers who led us into Vietnam and who are now keeping us in Afghanistan have known in advance that this is an impossible objective, an unwinnable battle. Occupying a country to fight a war on its behalf itself undermines the possibility of winning the hearts and minds of the people. Schell: “The art of victory has to be to try to set up a government that can both survive US withdrawal and serve US interests. The circle to be squared is getting the people of a whole country to want what Washington wants. The trouble is that, left to their own devices, other peoples are likely to want what they want, not what we want.”<br />
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The remarkable fact, Schell says, is that Vietnam wasn’t simply a mistake in hindsight. It was already known to be a mistake in foresight – but our Democratic presidents did it anyway. <br />
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So the question is, why? Why do we go into and maintain wars that we already know are unwinnable, given the self-defeating aim of creating stable self-government for others through violence? <br />
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The reason and motivation of the democratic presidents, Schell says, has little to do with either the logic of foreign affairs (e.g. the domino theory or what have you) or an unfailing optimism concerning fighting strategies (if we could just fight it better, we might win) -- but lies instead within domestic politics itself. <br />
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Lyndon Johnson "didn't want to listen" to doubts about the war because he “was afraid that if he did anything to ... appear to appease the North Vietnamese, he would be severely criticized by the right wing of American politics."<br />
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Similarly, the resounding defeat of McGovern “seemed to confirm [the Democrat] fears that had haunted Johnson: those who oppose or lose wars lose elections.” <br />
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Our foreign wars are “really a matter of domestic politics” -- the Democratic leaders’ fear of the right. <br />
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Democratic presidents go to war, and presumably do many things that are counter to their beliefs, because they are afraid of the right wing, and the power the right wing has to sway the mind of the electorate. <br />
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Interestingly, this takes us back to the opening focus of Schell’s essay. In other words, foreign wars are indeed about “a battle for the mind and hearts of the people” -- but “the people” is us. <br />
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The "great power" that Schell is seeking to understand -- whose "source" Schell calls a "key" to American history -- is this presumed power that the right has over the left and over the American people itself. <br />
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I’m led to reflect on a politics structured as a competition among representative “leaders” to achieve (by any devices available) popular support (however blind and superficial). We have a politics based on manipulations of appearances, of representatives making representations -- a politics of illusion.<br />
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I also notice that, while Schell points to a weakness in Democratic leaders, which is above all the fear of <i>appearing</i> weak (leading ironically to an assertion of "strength" in war), Schell doesn’t seem to account for right-wing hawkishness itself, which would seem to be the “origin,” in his framing, of this entire dynamic. <br />
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I find myself wondering if Schell is invoking two interdependent halves of the American psyche, linked by something in common that runs very, very deep: On one side are the right-wing accusers; on the other, the tail-between-the-legs, appeasing left-wing wimperers — who choose, ironically, to cover up their own weakness by going to war. I wonder if this might point to the underlying psychology of the right as well: posturing hawks who posture to cover up their own weakness. <br />
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If so, maybe this melds with the thought that we have a politics of illusion: we are all citizens of a country based on creating the illusion of its own power, a country whose trajectory is the trajectory of an assertion of power and control based on an underlying experience — that must be hidden at all costs — of weakness and vulnerability. <br />
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The main players in this whole scenario are neither the leaders of the left nor those of the right, but "the people" whose "hearts and minds" each side is engaged in trying to win over. Apparently, both sides come together in one belief: of all the things that the people at large cannot accept, it is this thing called "weakness." We are a nation unified, it would seem, in our readiness to point our collective finger at "weakness." We will not be taken advantage of, we will not be threatened, we will not be dominated. <br />
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I wonder if politics and the media in which it subsists has become above all a playground for the personal fantasies of a dominated, powerless public.<br />
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Perhaps we are profoundly afraid of weakness because weakness means relaxing the pressure of domination that is constantly being felt and replicated by the great majority of individual psyches. <br />
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Schell's question of this "power" might hide a more fundamental question: when, in our collective history, in our individual and aggregated personal histories, were we subjected to a fear that became so fundamental that we daily carry it in our being and in our orientation to the world and one another? <br />
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If the "source" of the power Schell is after is neither in the leaders of the right nor of the left, but in the American people itself, in our deep fear of weakness, or in our collective attempt to cover up the sense of our own powerlessness, then what is the appropriate action for us to take? If America was in Vietnam, and is now in Iraq and in Afghanistan for reasons having more to do with the domestic political psyche than in circumstances external to us, then what is the appropriate action for us to take as a people?**<br />
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One thing I know is that fear rigidifies the heart and the mind, obstructing the flow that is necessary to experience love, healthy thinking and authentic power.<br />
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**People who know me will know the remedy I advise, taking my cue from Thomas Jefferson: create a national system of elementary republics capable of reuniting the people, at the grassroots level outside of partisan politics, in the discovery and cultivation of common vision, agreement and coordinated action. This is my vision for a national system of neighborhood assemblies. Find out more at: <br />
http://sfnan.org/iotc/navlist/gen_page_main.php?id=65&navlist=leftMarc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-54822016609749000042009-08-20T14:38:00.000-07:002009-08-22T11:03:47.507-07:00Reinventing “Money” to Serve the Public Good – How Small Communities Can Lead the WayThe remarkable story of a small independent state in the Channel Islands, Guernsey Island, demonstrates a topic I’ve been revisiting lately(1): how what we call “money” could actually be reinvented to serve the common good — that is, how our present-day money system could be transformed so that, instead of lining the pockets of a few fat cats, it might foster a more just and widely-distributed prosperity for all.<br />
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The Guernsey story is in addition a case study in how <i>small, local, face-to-face communities </i> — where innovative thinking, tight coordination, trust and commitment are uniquely possible — may be essential to the kind of social and economic innovation that the world is so much in need of. Guernsey is one more exemplar of why, as E.F. Schumacher stated in his famous book, “small is beautiful.”<br />
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A SMALL COMMUNITY REBUILDS ITS OWN ECONOMY WITHOUT OUTSIDE HELP<br />
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The story begins in the early 1800’s, when Guernsey, a community of 16,000 (2), was economically on the ropes -- as was much of Europe during the hard times caused by the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to 1825.<br />
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The conventional wisdom presumed that every community had to suffer with the downturn in the wider financial system. With the larger economy in bad shape, what could little Guernsey do? It seemed a victim of circumstances beyond its control.<br />
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But, thrown to its own devices, this island community came together to defy the conventional wisdom. In a surprising tale of success, Guernsey invented a different kind of money that enabled the community to pull itself out of a woeful period of depression and unemployment, rebuild its severely deteriorated infrastructure, cancel its public debts, and become an exceptionally prosperous, fully employed and happy place.<br />
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This all started in the second decade of the 19th century, when Guernsey found itself in terrible shape. “[The] trade of Guernsey was practically extinguished and the people were in despair. Unemployment was rife, ... there were practically no roads.”(3) What roads they did have “were muddy and only 4 1/2 feet wide.”(4) The island’s “sea walls were crumbling,” “public buildings were in disrepair and, above all, a new market house, where the islanders could exchange their produce, was urgently needed.” Not surprisingly, people were leaving Guernsey and there was little employment.(5)<br />
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There seemed nothing the community could do. They were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Higher taxes were out of the question. “It was impossible for the Government to finance these necessary improvements out of revenue, as this only amounted to £3,000 yearly, and of this amount £2,400 had to be used to pay interest on its public debt of £19,000. Nor could the necessary finance be obtained by borrowing; the Government sought indeed to raise a loan, but such was the poor state of the island's assets that the only would-be lenders demanded the prohibitive rate of 17 per cent per annum.”<br />
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In short, “Orthodox finance could do nothing to get the people out of the depression caused by the Napoleonic wars.” (6)<br />
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In the middle of these financial straits, some people began to see an unnerving irony. Large numbers of unemployed people ready and able to work were everywhere on hand, as were the material resources needed to get the public work done. Activity was at a standstill only because there was no money available, except at prohibitive cost. Under this nonsensical situation, someone had an epiphany: “there was nothing to prevent the Government issuing its own money.” (7)<br />
<blockquote style="font-family: times new roman;">[T]he idea put forward that the State should issue its own money daily gained ground. It was argued that, as labour and materials were both available, it was absurd for improvements to be held up simply through lack of money, and as conditions became even worse, this plan served to provide the only solution. Finally, after various setbacks and considerable opposition, the adherents of State money carried the day and, in 1816, 4,000 notes of £1 each were printed by the Government and paid out for the most urgent repairs. (8)</blockquote>The notes were issued to pay for the reconstruction of Guernsey’s sea walls, and once paid out, they began to circulate in the local economy, enabling people to begin freely exchanging goods and services once again. The locally-printed money worked like a magic dust to awaken the productive activity of the islanders.<br />
<blockquote style="font-family: times new roman;">By the success of this issue the principle was established, and during the next 20 years the Government authorised notes to the extent of £80,000, which were utilised in building the new Market House, schools in every parish, roads all over the island, St. Elizabeth's Cottage, etc. (9)<br />
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[T]he appearance of the island changed out of all recognition. From its backward and depressed state it became, within 20 years, renowned for its well-being. Moreover, by issuing State money, this transformation was carried out without increasing the island's national debt and without incurring interest charges. In fact if interest had been payable on the capital sums for these improvements, they could not possibly have been carried [out]. (10)</blockquote>Since the astonishing success of its initial experiment, Guernsey continued a string of public issues of money well into the 20th century:<br />
<blockquote style="font-family: times new roman;">[In 1816, the initial] 4,000 pounds were used to start the repairs of the sea walls. In 1820, another 4,500 pounds was issued, again interest-free. In 1821, another 10,000; 1824, 5,000; 1826, 20,000. By 1837, 50,000 pounds had been issued interest free for the primary use of projects like sea walls, roads, the marketplace, churches and colleges. This sum more than doubled the island’s money supply during this thirteen year period, but <i>there was no inflation</i>. In the year 1914, as the British restricted the expansion of their money supply due to World War I, the people of Guernsey commenced to issue another 142,000 pounds over the next four years and never looked back. By 1958, over 542,000 pounds had been issued, all without inflation. (11) </blockquote>Ellen Hodgson Brown summarizes: “When it wants to create some public work or service, [Guernsey] just issues the money it needs to pay for the work. The Guernsey government has been issuing its own money for nearly two centuries.” Brown adds that Guernsey has a simple, low and loophole-free 20% flat income tax. And no government debt. (12) Inflation has been kept at bay because increases in the amount of money in circulation were matched by the growing number of goods and services available for people to exchange with one another.<br />
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Unfortunately, according to historians, Guernsey’s exercise of self-reliant power today isn’t quite what it used to be, due to the intervention of private banks. Starting as early as 1827, banks began focused efforts to halt Guernsey’s control of its own local money supply; the banks questioned the legality of the issues, set up competitive and linked systems, and found various means to influence Guernsey public discourse and legislation. Through such means, the banks succeeded in severely blunting Guernsey’s independence. “Although since 1914 the Guernsey Government has again issued its own notes, these are now always covered by the Government deposits with the banks, and as today Guernsey currency is linked with Sterling, these notes are issued or withdrawn in conformity with orthodox principles.” (13)<br />
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The Guernsey story is by no means unique. Many other governments — including, famously, the American colonies (14) — have generated local prosperity through issuing their own money. But “Guernsey is one of the few to have stayed under the radar long enough to escape the covert attacks of an international banking cartel bent on monopolizing the money-making market.” (15)<br />
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DEVELOPING LOCAL SELF-EMPOWERMENT FOR GLOBAL BENEFIT<br />
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Guernsey’s success was in part due to its luck in staying “under the radar long enough” for local innovations to gather steam without outside interference. Such possibility of flying “under the radar” of larger governmental and private institutions – or, more to the point, of communities acting on their own initiative and sense of entitlement – is part of what gives us hope today. Guernsey tells us that there is room, here at the grassroots level, underneath the big institutional superstructures, for reinventing the world where we live, with our friends and neighbors, in our local communities.<br />
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We are not limited to fighting the existing behemoth institutions that dominate the system – big government and big business. Instead, local innovation in small communities can lead the way. The lesson we take from Guernsey is that small communities can begin to act on their own for change, in ways that can have consequences around the world. When communities lead, government and even business will often follow. We do not need to fight the problems when we can take initiative to create the solutions. (16)<br />
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If local communities can begin to realize and exert their own power, and eventually create a new layer of thoughtful cooperation and action at the grassroots level, our hope is that local communities can eventually coordinate on a wide scale to bring the world back into balance, locally and globally, infusing the ethics and qualities of healthy face-to-face, human-scale communities back into the larger system.<br />
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Today, there is more room than ever at the grassroots, because government and big business are more remote than ever. Even while we are more dependent on the control of distant forces than ever before, the conditions for self-organizing local action have also become more propitious.<br />
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Perhaps that’s why, today, little Guernseys are springing up everywhere, and in a variety of areas including economics, food production, land ownership, health, direct democracy, etc.<br />
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Our work at Institute of the Commons (<a href="http://www.iotc-hub.org/">http://www.iotc-hub.org</a>) is dedicated to creating the small-community skills and infrastructure that can support such innovation and networked collaboration among small communities and neighborhoods.<br />
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ADDENDUM: THE GLOBAL LEARNING CURVE -- MONEY AND DEMOCRACY<br />
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The Guernsey story shows that, underlying the phenomenon of money even as it functions in the present system, are the keys to a broad public power with enormous potential that has not yet been fully realized. We have learned that money as a tool can unleash extraordinary productive activity in large populations.(17) What we haven’t fully learned is how this money power can be wrested from private control in order to serve the common good.<br />
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This is not the place to go into detail about the current money system of the United States, established with the institution of the Federal Reserve in 1913, and modeled on the British banking system. But a few outlines can be drawn to indicate the deeper relevance and import of what we are discussing.<br />
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Under the Federal Reserve system, the U.S. Government does not issue its own currency, but instead leaves the issuance of currency in control of the private banks that form the Federal Reserve System. The money supply is increased in the U.S. only when private U.S. banks make loans. Our Government, unlike that of Guernsey in the story, must borrow all the money that it spends by selling bonds that pay interest. Over time we have built up an enormous national debt that consumes an ever-larger percentage of annual revenues.<br />
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Moreover, because all money in the United States is created only through bank loans that require the payment of principal <span style="font-style: italic;">plus interest</span> (with the interest owed typically much more than the principal), money is always artificially in short supply. By definition, more is always owed than has been borrowed, forcing competition among debtors such that bankruptcy for some is foreordained, and such that, regarding the system as a whole, the only way to pay off current debt is through additional borrowing, which only creates more debt, and so on ad infinitum.<br />
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The current money system thereby fuels ever-expanding, increasingly frantic production and consumption, while growing an increasingly burdensome debt closer and closer to a point of collapse. In a way of which few social and environmental activists are aware, the money system itself thus is a major contributor to the country's most pervasive social, political and environmental concerns. Not only does it favor the concentration of wealth that skews our political process, it also demands a hyper-production and consumption that extracts an unsustainable toll on people and the environment.<br />
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Yet our current banking system is only a recent historical development, resulting partly from accident and partly from the actions of the interested parties who developed modern banking and who were able to take private advantage of their insights into its internal mechanisms. Presently, individuals across our society are only beginning to discover and raise broader awareness of the alternative choices that lie before us concerning how money as a social tool is created, used and implemented. (For some emerging voices and insights, see some of the suggested resources listed below.)<br />
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Historical examples show that alternative money systems are not just theoretical. They have worked exceptionally well over long periods of time, with highly desirable results.<br />
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The choice is ultimately ours, whether the issuance of money will direct human activity towards the benefit of a few, or to the broader common good. We have the choice of producing a democratic currency, based on trust and collaboration, or a currency based on private control, doubt and competition for domination. But how to find our way, burrowing beneath present assumptions and daily practical realities, to discovering and implementing the choices that are actually there for us to take up, albeit only through concerted focus and collaboration? (18)<br />
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We believe that the place where full awareness of such choices can be best developed, along with the skills of implementing them, is in the laboratory of smaller communities.<br />
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We find hope, excitement and meaningful purpose in the recognition that western civilization hasn’t figured out everything yet, and that some of our most basic and unquestioned concepts and institutions — like money, community and democracy — are only in their infancy. The world is young on a steep learning curve, which means that the opportunity for individuals and small communities, including you and me and our neighbors, to advance the world’s learning is huge.<br />
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If people were to become more cognizant of the opportunities for learning and invention that lie near at hand for all of us, we might organize the world in a way that enabled us all to be a part of acting on those opportunities -- of learning and collaborating in the interest of all. That is only another way of defining meaningful, active, thrilling citizenship.<br />
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With such a way of thinking, we might begin to transfer our primary forums for learning from our present-day universities to the streets of our communities; we might start to join learning and thinking more directly to real innovation, action and citizenship. Only the domination and routine keep us somnambulating on the prescribed pathways of orthodoxy.<br />
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We’ve only barely started as a culture to understand the nature and potential of money. We’ve only barely started to understand the nature and potential of democracy. Small communities like Guernsey, and innovative neighborhoods anywhere can start to lead the way to new discoveries, new institutions, building on the ancient and recent past.<br />
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Once we have had the liberating realization that all of our existing institutions are only recently-fashioned stepping stones along a larger human path, roughly-designed and changeable artifices invented out of initial learnings; once we have the realization that each of these stepping stones has been created on the basis of human energies and conditions that we share with our ancient ancestors – joy, fear, desire and love; body, earth, and sky; life and death -- then we together, as individuals and as communities, can begin to feel rejoined to one another and to our ancestors in a great quest that unites us all: the quest to discover and shape the deeper essence and future of humanity itself.<br />
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What is it to be human? Who shall we be and what shall be the consequence of our having lived? Shall humans build a legacy of love and cooperation among people living in harmony with the earth? All of us are a part of fashioning the answer, whether we know it or not. To take up the answer consciously is to have a life of meaning.<br />
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We are all entitled to weigh the essence, history and future of humankind in our thoughts. We are all entitled to presume, on the basis of care for the common quest, that we have something to say in response to all those who have gone before and all those who are with us now. We would like to create communities designed to support every individual in assuming such eminence.<br />
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SUGGESTED RESOURCES<br />
<br />
Ellen Hodgson Brown. The Web of Debt. 2007.<br />
Henry George. Social Problems. 1883.<br />
Thomas Greco, Jr. Money. 2001.<br />
Paul Grignon. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIIAvdJvCes&feature=related">Money as Debt</a>. (Video. 2008.)<br />
Bernard Lietaer. The Future of Money. 2001.<br />
---------. "<a href="http://uazu.net/money/lietaer.html">Money, Community and Social Change</a>" (Interview transcript. 2003.)<br />
Stephen Zarlenga. The Lost Science of Money. 2002.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">ENDNOTES</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size:85%;">1. Cf. my earlier blogs: </span><span style="color: rgb(254, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" ><a href="http://tognotti.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-understanding-what-is-money-could.html">http://tognotti.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-understanding-what-is-money-could.html</a></span><span style="font-size:85%;">, and</span><span style="color: rgb(254, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" > <a href="http://tognotti.blogspot.com/2009/04/policy-follows-practice-mammon-or-maman.html">http://tognotti.blogspot.com/2009/04/policy-follows-practice-mammon-or-maman.html</a></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />
2. For citation of 1816 population, see <a href="http://www.islandlife.org/history_gsy.htm">http://www.islandlife.org/history_gsy.htm</a>. Guernsey’s present-day population (2008) is 68,000; see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey</a><br />
3. “History of Guernsey,” at <a href="http://www.islandlife.org/history_gsy.htm">http://www.islandlife.org/history_gsy.htm</a><br />
4. Bob Blain, “The Other Way to Deal with the National Debt,” Progressive Review (June 1994). Blain is Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University. Quoted in Ellen Hodgson Brown, <u>The Web of Debt</u>, 2007, pp. 100-101.<br />
5. D.M. Sherwood, “The Guernsey Market House Scheme,” The Fig Tree Quarterly (No. 10, September, 1938, pp. 190-3. Full article at <a href="http://www.alor.org/Library/The%20Guernsey%20Market%20House%20Scheme%20.htm">http://www.alor.org/Library/The%20Guernsey%20Market%20House%20Scheme%20.htm</a><br />
6. Sherwood, ibid.<br />
7. Ibid.<br />
8. Ibid.<br />
9. Ibid.<br />
10. Ibid.<br />
11. Blain, ibid.<br />
12. Ellen Hodgson Brown, <u>The Web of Debt</u>, 2007, pp. 100-101.<br />
13. Sherwood, ibid.<br />
14. The American Colonies started issuing paper currencies in the 17th century. In 1690, Massachusetts printed the first colonial paper money not backed by any physical thing (backed only by the State’s agreement to receive them in taxes), and spent it into circulation on public projects. Seeing the paper scrip's power to develop local economic activity, other colonies soon followed. Pennsylvania developed another model, creating a State loan office and loaning money into circulation at low interest. According to Benjamin Franklin, it was above all the British Crown's clampdown on the colonial currencies that incited the Revolutionary War. The Revolution was itself funded through the printing of the Continentals, which, even though their value suffered greatly due to the huge British counterfeiting efforts, managed to pay for the war effort – a huge feat. The next great instance, it seems, was Lincoln’s issuance of Greenbacks to fund the Civil War, in defiance of bankers who sought to profit enormously off both sides. Some conjecture that Lincoln's assassination, like the assassinations of McKinley and other Greenback supporters who followed, was due to this threat posed to the financial industry control. The Greenbacks remained in circulation for decades, although banks sought to remove them from circulation in various ways (and ultimately succeeded). The great populist movements of the late 19th century, in which small farmers and urban labor joined forces together against the great industrial and financial monopolies, took the name of the Greenbacks for their party name. For a more detailed account, see Stephen Zarlenga, <u>The Lost Science of Money</u>, 2002, pp. 361ff.<br />
15. Brown, ibid.<br />
16. An aside on the possibility of dual money systems, local and translocal: One insight the Guernsey story teaches is how the money system, when organized and controlled by private entities, can keep communities oppressed (by direct means as well as on the basis of a community’s own ignorance concerning the mechanisms of money creation and control). This insight was understood by the ancient Romans, during the glory years of the Roman Republic before the rise of the Roman Dictators. Hence they created a dual monetary system on the basis of the distinction between local public control of the money supply, and control by private and/or foreign interests. In order to avert outside or private manipulation, Rome used one kind of money, based on gold and silver, for foreign trade, and another currency for domestic trade, based on publicly-issued currency -- <i>fiat </i> currency like the currency created by Guernsey. The dual system combined local control with the capacity to take advantage of international trade, without risking dependency on outside exploiters. In his book <u>The Future of Money</u> (2002) Robert Lieatauer advocates for such a system under his notion of “complementary currencies.”<br />
17. As we have seen, the issuance of money gave rise to amazing productive activity in Guernsey. The same phenomenon on a larger scale can be seen when, with the discovery of the New World, a sudden infusion of gold and silver into Europe led to an astounding new levels of European economic activity. See my blog: </span><span style="color: rgb(254, 0, 0);font-size:85%;" ><a href="http://tognotti.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-understanding-what-is-money-could.html">http://tognotti.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-understanding-what-is-money-could.html</a></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />
18. Is money inherently “filthy”? We speculate that what makes money “filthy lucre” isn’t inherent in the concept of money itself. Our belief instead is that our sense of money as a “tainted” object reflects the fact that currency as we know it is under private control, ultimately an instrument of domination, competition and climbing. The public essence of money, the value it gains from the aspirations, needs and desires of all human beings to engage in activity, has been usurped. It’s the manipulation by the usurping parties that causes the stink, not money itself. If the sources of air had been taken over by a very few, and all of us were forced to elbow each other aside in order to get the best air for ourselves, we might begin to look upon the very desire for air, and even air itself, with suspicion and revulsion, not to mention greedy air-grasping humanity itself. With Woody Guthrie, we might say, “Look what your greed for money has done." Yet perhaps the artificially scarce money supply, manipulated under private hands, fosters greed and not money itself.</span>Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-7424102788481201742009-08-10T11:25:00.000-07:002009-08-10T15:36:10.820-07:00Through the Mushroom PortalLooking for mushrooms is a tradition in my italian family. My grandmother would talk about her long walks, with groups of her friends, into the hills of the Garfagnana to look for Porcini mushrooms in the fall of every year. The thought takes me back to Lammari, to the wonderful feeling of people living together, simply, with one another and with the land. The smell of the woods and grass infuses the misty air that we breathe as if it were an extension of the body and flesh, connecting us with the land. Not like here in the city, where we find ourselves in an outdoor artificial container breathing pulverized rubber and road soot, such that we must take refuge in hygienic insulated indoor artificial containers called homes and apartments, sheltered from the loud traffic.<br /><br />Back in 1999 I decided I’d learn how to hunt mushrooms. I looked on the web and found a listing that said a group of shroomers was meeting in a parking lot near the Pulgas Water temple just south of Crystal Springs reservoir. I went. Three of the five or six people there were italian guys over 70 years old. Che meraviglia.<br /><br />Looking for mushrooms is meaningful on many levels. Mushroom hunting takes you through a portal into another time, primordial, off the artificial grid. Every good mushrooming park worth its salt has the same sign on its bulletin board near the parking lot: a white skull and crossbones on black with the words “Warning!”, “Danger,” and “Death.” Mushrooms are dangerous. Picking them is verboten. Fines will be levied. The sign in Palo Alto’s Huddart Park says that simply touching a poisonous mushroom can be deadly (untrue). I suspect that the ubiquitous posting of these signs is a plot decreed at the highest levels by some secret Council of Mycological Illuminati as part of a brilliant campaign of deception. The danger of mushroom picking is one of those broadly-accepted cultural myths, repeated mouth to mouth, by which we hem ourselves into the neatly sequestered parking spaces of modern life, keeping between the white-painted lines. Yes, some mushrooms are deadly. The secret is that, with a little education, the danger is easily enough circumvented. The propogated fear protects the treasure from pilfering by the impure. Only those capable of transgression may pass through the portal towards real living.<br /><br />Mushroom hunting takes a person off the beaten path. Literally. The first step of the mushroom hunter is sideways, off the trail. I follow not the worn way, but always only my own feel for beauty and adventure and instinct. I look all around me and listen. Which direction is calling me? The glade to the left, infused with light? The damp, dark, musty spot down the hill? Shall I climb on high? Whither am I called? There is no reason to go one direction or another but that I am more attracted this way than that. All life should be such a wandering towards beauty.<br /><br />Mushrooming teaches us the magic of the second sight. How often I have had the experience of standing in a wooded grove, scouring the leafy ground with my eyes, and scouring again, and scouring yet again, seeing not one single mycological specimen, none, when, lo, suddenly, I spy a single specimen! I look close in and inspect. Then I widen my gaze when, magically, I see another mushroom just the same, and then another, and another — and I realize that I am surrounded by an army of mushrooms everywhere! Some say it is a matter of looking right. Your looking always looks from assumptions that you cannot see until some discordant surprise throws open the curtains to new contact with the outside. This may be the case. Or maybe the mushrooms themselves are sly creatures of intention who like to play peek-a-boo; they wait cunningly until you aren’t ready before they pop out into the open. I have in fact found it a helpful device to say aloud “There obviously aren’t any mushrooms around here!” The sentence works as a kind of mushroom call.<br /><br />The variety and abundance of mushrooms is astounding. Everywhere the woods contain an abundance. And it is open to the taking. Mushrooms are one of the few wild foods left to us. They remain within a past time when nature was open, when nature was a part of us. You find a mushroom and you may take it home and eat it. You can go back for more. You do not have to pay cash money for them.<br /><br />On the other side of the portal, the word "free" has no meaning, because the exaction of payment hasn't even been invented yet.<br /><blockquote><span style="font-family:Calibri,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial;"><span style="font-size:11pt;"><br /></span></span></blockquote> <!--EndFragment-->Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-54701092480355305012009-08-01T15:41:00.000-07:002009-08-02T17:50:12.636-07:00A Rant Against the "Theory of Everything"I recently came upon a story in a mainstream newspaper entitled "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/large-hadron-collider/3314456/Surfer-dude-stuns-physicists-with-theory-of-everything.html">Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything."</a> The story titillated readers with the thought that a former graduate student now living as an "impoverished surfer" may turn out to be the world's next Einstein. The young man "has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists." Part of the excitement has to do with the simplicity of the new theory: "his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics. " <p></p><blockquote>"Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year."</blockquote><p></p>Intrigued by the story, I researched it a bit on the internet, and found more explanation, as well as a nifty spirograph-style image of "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_%28mathematics%29">E8</a>," what some call "the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics," which the new "theory of everything" proposes as the underlying pattern that might solve the biggest quandary in particle physics.<br /><br />Here is where my gripe started to arise. The sad part for me is that this horribly-misnamed "theory of everything," if not viewed in a broader context, can support an extremely reductionist view of the universe that denudes it of all its experiential qualities and beauties and of all that we associate with living things and humanity.<br /><br />They call it a theory of "everything" presumably because, assuming that "everything" in the universe is built upon a foundation of legos, this new theory potentially explains the composition of the lego in a more comprehensive and encompassing way than ever before.<br /><br />But when we look at legos in isolation we by no means see "everything" that has or can be constructed on a foundation of legos: e.g. living creatures, human beings and all the achievements of human communities over the course of history are themselves invisible in the lego theory, even though lego theory says that looking into any of these things we will discover legos behind them. What I am suggesting is that something that inherently transcends legos in fact has more "being" than the legos viewed in themselves can ever have. Spoken from the point of view of lego theory, this "something" might be said to consist in different patterns of relations and processes between legos, and then between such stabilized patterns and processes themselves, which relational patterns themselves come to constitute levels of being that can never be reduced to or fully explained through the underlying legos themselves. The logic of life, for instance, is a logic over and above the logic of physics and not reducible to it, just as the logic of human conversation and friendship- and community-building cannot be reduced to or explained by biology.<br /><br />Thus this so-called "theory of everything" might more appropriately be called a "theory of nothing," nothing being the defining complement to the concept of "everything." That's because, from an important perspective, this "going back" of mathematical physicists (going back conceptually and temporally) to the underlying primary foundations of everything is to go in the direction of nothing: it is to follow evolution backwards to its beginnings and to the discovery of the primordial constituent components of "everything."<br /><br />(This process of lego-discovery requires going so far beyond the scope of ordinary experience that the findings must be called a "theory" only, must be described in terms that defy ordinary conceptualization, and can be "tested" only by constructing enormous technological experiments -- e.g. the so-called supercolliders -- in a quest to reproduce conditions never otherwise found or encountered within the scope of earthly nature.)<br /><br />This tracing backwards accords with a dominant view that has been around for a few thousand years, what Nietzsche and subsequent existentialists called "metaphysics," which assumes that true Being and Power are at the Beginning, in the Past, in what "was," i.e. in what lies under or before (arrived at through conceptual and actual dissection and other means of decomposition, such as super-collision; as Bacon said, "science puts nature on the rack"), rather than, for example, in the Future or what "might be" (e.g. what might be built upon our endowments joined with our hopes and dreams). Hence, in our tradition God is conceived as a Past Creator "in the beginning," rather than as a Future Attractor.<br /><br />Compare the artist who starts only with colored dirt and liquid (the artist's legos as it were), and over time and with ingenuity and vision creates a painting where before no painting was; compare the carpenter who with certain basic materials, e.g. stone and dead wood, mixed with desire and purpose, creates a house where before there was nothing; compare the process of evolution which, from out of the primary raw materials of matter and energy, led to the emergence of variegated life in systems interacting to produce the conditions for more and more vibrant life, eventually leading to the emergence of people like you and me and our gatherings of friends who are motivated by hopes and possibilities.<br /><br />"Everything" is not to be found in the underlying subatomic legos, in the under-realms upon which our experienced world is built, but in the other direction, in the emergence of the world of our experience over eons of time and, finally, in the future where we might hope to build a more beautiful and harmonious world. The future is everything.<br /><br />The primary components through which the future human world are to be built cannot be found by dissecting the things we experience into constituent components, but only by coordinating the elements of our experience to form new structures and relations that realize new harmonies and possibilities, i.e. through innovative new relatings and combinings that cannot be foreseen by recurring to the underlying atoms that are not even visible in ordinary experience. The birthplace of such innovation must be social and public conversation and mutual coordination. The everyday world and the everyday language in which we live the world is ultimately where science gets all of its direction and orientation, and is therefore the ultimate source of "everything," including "theories of everything." Scientists are kidding themselves if they think otherwise.<br /><br />All this is important, I think, because as a culture we are given to this illusion that science sees "everything" when in fact science and its resultant technologies are based on a kind of tunnel vision that, without direction from loving human community, can lead down a dangerous road. We are given to overlooking the importance of relations -- ecological, systemic, communal -- and the importance of cultivating relations relative to a shared and commonly constructed vision of the human future -- because we are focused on objects that can be pointed to, dissected, and, theoretically, controlled. I bristle at the arrogance, naïvete, self-congratulation and thrill of power that I imagine to be present in the phrase "theory of everything."<br /><br />The question might arise, but can't this knowledge of the underlying legos of creation be put to use in constructing that beautiful longed-for future?<br /><br />Here I have my doubts. One reason is that I fear that the impetus to discover this kind of knowledge is often or even primarily rooted in a collective, fearful flight from the given finite conditions of humanity and a related desire to re-engineer nature because of a fear of accepting these limitations. What I am talking about is a reaction against all the "limitations" of our biology in every respect, including our natural consignment to a finite, localized world. Ultimately, this might be epitomized by the fear of accepting the human condition of mortality. Unable as communities to face up to nature and even death in a way that apprizes us of the beauty of what we have and who we are (on the ground of accepting what is given), we get caught up in a collective pursuit based on denial, as if we could change, or as if it would be desirable to change, the very grounds of our existence through technological and scientific intervention. Look at the world today. As evidenced by widespread psychological struggle, our very relationship to our "selves" is troubled by non-acceptance.<br /><br />Individually and collectively, we instead turn to technology and consumerism that is aimed at overcoming nature. (Imagine, overcoming nature!) Technology, in general, has been all about transcending limits -- starting perhaps with the limits of time and space, and ending with the limits of the natural world to sustain technologically-enabled mass consumption.<br /><br />Incapable of realizing the beauty and meaning available to us within the natural finite limits given to human beings, incapable of accepting (i.e. loving) our selves, and on that basis of acceptance, realizing everything that love makes possible, we are under the spell of a knowledge-model that believes it can get to the root of "everything," which belief has a lovely but illusive silver aura of total control. Human beings are attempting to live in the world as if they were not bound by earthly limitations, with the result that they fall out of balance with nature and themselves.<br /><br />This "theory of everything" might look like a theory of everything from the point of view of the engineer/scientist who loves to satisfy curiosity and to contemplate the beauty of "objective knowledge," as in elegant diagrams, blueprints, descriptions and machines. This is an important knowledge and appreciation, but again I say that the danger is not to see it within a larger context that brings other perspectives into the mix. The engineer/scientist's knowledge is incomplete and in itself is never enough to lead to action, and is never enough to understand the motives behind the engineer/scientist's own action. Action requires motivation. Motivation comes from emotion: we move away from something due to fear, or towards something from love and attraction. The most powerful source of emotion is our relationship to other people, i.e. how we find ourselves nurtured and sustained in community.<br /><br />It is in the interest of those who are in power and who act from fear to laud the engineer/scientist's way of knowing as the highest way of knowing as a cover for preserving their reign of fear. Fear can drive technological development under the cover of a drive towards objective knowledge.<br /><br />Because objective knowledge itself is directionless, the choice of what to investigate and know is never itself rooted in objectivity. This is why the engineer's knowledge is always subservient to emotion. This is why a community must work to cultivate love and acceptance if it is to direct, not only the pursuit of knowledge but human action in general, in desirable and "sustainable" ways.<br /><br />For people who want to learn how to recreate nature through artifice, this having a more advanced theory of the lego must be quite exciting. It might open a key to unlocking even more fundamental natural forces than humanity has hitherto been able to unlock. We might be able to tinker with nature and biology (e.g. in biotech and nanotech) in ways that have even more significant consequences than anything that has been done before. The trouble is, I am not confident that more significant means better. It is not my wish to provide more keys to power to those who are tempted to "improve upon" nature because they are turned against nature, or to those who confuse a theory of dark and distant underlying foundations with a theory of "everything." Unfortunately, every advance into the theory of the lego -- like the earlier advances in the theory of the atomic nucleus -- brings humanity that much closer to attaining the power to destroy everything in the universe. To toy with the forces that rule the underlying physical foundations on which all subsequent layers of life and world have been built, is to toy with the forces that can unravel them all.<br /><br />Earlier steps into the atomic nucleus and its logic led humanity to discover how to unleash nuclear explosions that could destroy whole cities and cultures, undoing hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary achievement with the flick of a switch. With this new knowledge a step nearer to the theory of "everything," who knows but we might discover how to create a bomb that could explode the planet in a flash, or the sun or solar system. From the perspective of the "theory of everything," even if you blow it all up, "everything" would still be there. Presumably, it's a theory about the stuff you can't destroy. It's what you end up with when you smash "everything" to bits. (That's why they use super-colliders to test it.) Now there's a more appropriate name: "A theory of what can't be destroyed."<br /><br />As kids, my brother and I had an enormous set of wooden building blocks. I can still remember the piney scent of the wood. The blocks filled a tub-sized wicker basket. We used to build tall and elegant towers, architectural masterpieces. We'd put the biggest, heaviest, most simply-shaped blocks, the ones with wide, flat tops, at the bottom. They were the foundation. Then we'd carefully set various forms atop these, in successive layers, some jutting out in intriguing cantilevers with curvaceous profiles. We took our time. We enjoyed the evolution of the structure. At the top, we put our most colorful, most whimsically-shaped blocks -- as a fancy crowning glory. We admired what we had built. We were concerned that someone unaware of what work had gone into the masterpiece, someone perhaps ignorant of its fragility and its laws of balance -- someone like my two-year-old little sister -- might inadvertently knock it down. We were acutely aware that moving the pieces on the very bottom was particularly dangerous to the whole.<br /><br />I hope our world gets busy building community. I hope we focus more attention soon on cultivating love and collaboration between neighbors and neighborhoods, between towns, between nations. Conversation is where the world is really made, and it's on the quality and depth and breadth of our conversations that "everything" really depends. We've taught science and industry in our schools for a long time now. I think our technological power has well gotten ahead of our ability to achieve harmony among peoples and within ourselves. We've taught our young around the planet how to look through microscopes and telescopes. We've whipped up a frenzy of excitement over powerful technologies that enable us to manufacture, produce and consume vast quantities of goods, and to transport people, goods and communications over vast distances far in excess of what we are naturally capable. What we have been paying less attention to is how our excited pursuit of such technological powers have been having unintended consequences on our communities and on the planet that sustains us. How much of our drive to push forward with technology is rooted in problems that we can only solve at the level of community and human relations? How much does our overweening focus on technical development exacerbate the problems that technical development can't solve?Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5125876289934032281.post-40524654069666257812009-06-25T10:07:00.000-07:002009-08-02T17:42:09.172-07:00Human Civilization May Be Coming to a New Understanding of Money - and This Could be a Key to World Renewal[A Reflection on Money and the Mission of the Institute of the Commons (http://www.iotc-hub.org)]<br /><br />One of the interesting things I’ve learned in my recent research into the emergence of "money" in western culture is how the discovery of the New World was a critical turning point. Starting in the 15th Century huge quantities of gold and silver were discovered in the Americas, especially in the Peruvian silver mines. With the funneling of these large quantities of precious metal back to Europe, there was a sudden explosion in the amount of money in the Old World. The sheer volume of coins in circulation increased many, many fold. And this had a huge consequence which may have been surprising on the face of it but in retrospect is less so: an enormous increase in productive activity in Europe, leading to the Renaissance and ultimately the development of today's market culture and the industrial revolution, and leading also to the development of modern banking and what has turned into the modern money-creation system. (Much of this story can be found in the relatively recent work of Fernand Braudel.)<br /><br />[What if Money were in its Essence a Spiritual Thing?]<br /><br />The reason I point to this historical development is that I believe we have hardly begun to learn, as a society, what recent history has to teach us about banking and about money itself. In the 1500s when these large quantities of precious metal started coming into Europe, money, gold and silver were more or less synonymous in the public mind. Today, however -- after having decades ago abandoned the gold standard and with it the (already by then hollow) notion that money gains its value from its relation to quantities of gold and silver or other commodities, and after having become familiar with "digital money" that exists only as bytes on our computer screens -- we are much closer to being able to understand the essence of money in a whole new way, and with this, we are closer to understanding the different ways in which money has been created in the past, how it is being created now, and how it could be created differently tomorrow. To put this in more exciting terms: we are also on the verge of understanding for the first time in history the huge stakes involved in deciding whether to continue with the current money-creation system or to begin using other systems; we are on the verge of understanding how the power of money-creation could be used by society as a very significant tool in creating a happier, healthier and more just world.<br /><br />Because few people realize that money is a historical artifact, they don't realize that the present-day money-creation system is only one possible system among readily available and even already-tested alternatives. Today's money-production system is something that we ought to investigate and evaluate in terms of how good of a job it is doing at making our society prosperous, harmonious, happy and just. But today we don't even realize that there are critical decisions to be made about how we choose to create money. And we don't realize how enormous the stakes are for society, or that their lies sleeping before us an enormous opportunity. Instead, we go mindlessly on with the status quo. The public at large defers to the experts. And the experts are those who have a stake in preserving the status quo. Nothing today is more mysterious or more inducing of sleep than the language of the university-trained economists and bankers. Distracted by the sleep-inducing hocus-pocus of these academicians, the general public doesn't even realize how to begin the frank conversations it needs to have about the essential lubricant of productive human activity.<br /><br />However there are signs now that thinking about money is starting to awaken far and wide. See, for example, the writings of Bernard Lietauer, Stephen Zarlenga, Thomas Greco, Paul Grignon, Ellen Brown and the renewed of interest in writers such as Henry George and Alexander Del Mar, and even in the monetary wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans. There are signs, also, that certain members of Congress are beginning to look again at how money is created today. Take, for instance, the recent bill put forth in Congress asking that the public have insight into the up-to-now secret doings of the Federal Reserve (that consortium of private bankers that considers to masquerade as a government agency).<br /><br />Let me point to at least three lessons hidden in the story I have told about the 16th-century currency explosion.<br /><br />The first lesson is that the sheer availability of money is directly related to the productivity realized by a society. The dark ages had lasted for centuries. The sudden presence of money unleashed astonishing human activity: industry, trade, exchange, art, science, learning. Within this story are hidden other stories and lessons. Yes, it was huge and unpredicted importations of gold and silver that showed what an abundance of money could mean for social productivity.<br /><br />But what wasn't realized at the time - but is becoming clear today - was that in order to create an abundance of money, gold and silver weren't even necessary. Had the governments of the middle ages only understood money more thoroughly, they could have simply created it using tokens of almost any kind: for example, using cheap and abundant copper (the way the Romans had), or using paper, the way the Colonial Americans would do in later times. A lesson to be learned, then, is that the world in 15th century Europe had for ages lived under the conditions of a great and unnecessary scarcity of money. Once we realize this fact, we are also ready to realize that the western world today, also, lives under conditions of a great and unnecessary scarcity of money, and that the current money system needlessly allows money to be concentrated into private hands (so that most of humanity must line up beggarly at the doors of those who can offer salaries), which leaves the major portion of humanity's great potential for creative, productive activity unused and squandered, and leaves major portions of the world's population in unnecessary misery.<br /><br />A second lesson, related to the first, has to do with the insights it can provide into the nature of today's money-production system, the banking system. With the great increases in the amount of currency in 16th-century, with the concomitant increase in trade and industry, modern banking and modern currency systems were developed. Banking grew largely out of accidental discoveries. Goldsmiths who regularly stored heavy gold coin for those who owned them developed into a new unexpected thing called bankers, and a number of accidental discoveries by these goldsmiths. [Among these accidental discoveries were the fact that the "receipts" they gave their customers for gold on deposit started being traded by their customers as if these receipts had value themselves; similarly, they discovered that when they made loans to trustworthy individuals, they could issue such "receipts" to the borrowers to use as money; additionally, they discovered that, since their customers only rarely came to the bank to exchange their receipts for actual gold held on deposit, the bankers could lend out much, much more in "receipts" than they actually needed to have on hand in gold. (They could make the illusory claim that all the receipts, i.e. money, that they issued was backed by gold, when in fact the amount of gold held in reserve was only a small fraction of the money that was said to be backed by it.)] In short, bankers discovered that they could create money out of thin air simply by issuing loans and writing a corresponding debt into their books for the dollars that they created and lent. Money issued by banks in the form of debt is still the chief form of money-creation that we have in the world today.<br /><br />Understanding how this privately-controlled, debt-based system robs the public and creates unnecessary, devastating economic depressions is a knowledge that today lies just beyond the public grasp. A great hope for the world today is that, as the public at large begins to reflect upon how money and modern banking came into being over the past several hundred years, they will begin to perceive both the great injustices that have were inadvertently built into the current system and, more importantly, the tremendous hidden opportunities that the current system hides from view, that are coming ready for the world to benefit from. We have before us the potential for a new era of human learning about how to produce money and unleash the productivity and creativity of people everywhere in the service of a healthier and more harmonious world.<br /><br />A third lesson could said to be hidden in the first two. This lesson lies behind my statements above, that we have discovered how money does not indeed depend for its value from any commodities or precious metals that might be said to "back it." With the almost accidental extraordinary surplus of coinage that came about due to the discovery of the Americas, Europe suddenly became the scene of an accidental discovery and experiment: the discovery that human promises (e.g. to return services or goods in exchange for services or goods, or better, to collaborate and coordinate activities in pursuit of individual and/or shared desires) could be “abstracted” and not only represented in oral language but be made durable on bits of metal that were neither consumed or used in themselves, but only traded for usufruct of the “promises” that they signified.<br /><br />The discovery we are becoming more clear on today is that the content of the promise, the essence of the money itself, in fact has no relationship whatsoever to the commodity value of the material that might carry it — i.e. the value of money, as money, has nothing whatsoever to do with the value of the underlying gold or silver on which it is stamped, but is entirely a reflection of something else, something intangible, i.e. the degree to which a culture or society had developed its capacity for productive collaboration and exchange in answer to shared desires; this capacity for collaboration can be summed up in a few words, chief among which might be the word “trust” and “inter-reliance” (which I prefer to the word “inter-dependence” -- to “depend” is to “hang upon” another and has for me connotations of co-dependency; to feel trusting and capable of relying on another does not necessarily connote dependence).<br /><br />This is related to another aspect of money, viz: The value of money reflects the quantity of goods and services that are available in a culture for exchange. An increase in the number of goods and services available in a culture reflects an increase in the collaborative capacity of a culture. (Note: How this relates to the QUALITY of the particular goods and services available is a very important question that I am not addressing right now.) Hence a shortage of money results in a stunting of potential growth in a culture, it inhibits the ability of people to actively fulfill their needs and pursue their desires – a shortage of money is what we call a “depression” or “recession.” An excess of money in a culture leads to inflation. The art of money-generation which civilization has yet to learn would include development of skill in the regulation of the quantity of money in a culture.<br /><br />Now, returning briefly to the question of the “quality” of the particular goods and services available. This is equivalent to the QUALITY of the collaborative capacity of a culture, i.e. the quality of human relationships in a culture, which is to say the moral makeup of community, the degree to which it is a community where love is prevalent, and not domination. Under our present culture the money-making power is under the control of private interests; this inherently public power has been usurped.* This is equivalent to the people not recognizing or taking up their own self-empowerment. This failure of the people to take up the power that is within themselves and instead leave it to the control of others outside themselves, remaining dependent on “external” forces is ultimately a political failure. This is where the neighborhood assemblies idea comes in, and where the kind of environment for speech and mutual coordination that we bring into being through our processes comes in. Ultimately, it is all about the coordination (and not merely the “dialogue and deliberation”) of all the players within the system with one another in an environment of mutual respect, transparency, public love.<br /><br />(*In part this usurpation came about through somewhat of an accident - simply because out of unplanned developments and unexpected discoveries in early modern Europe, the private banking system gradually emerged as goldsmiths stumbled upon the money-creation power in the form of the issuance of credit and the creation of debt — they stumbled upon the system of “fractional reserve banking”; subsequently those who stumbled upon it grew this power, pursuing their own interests of course, until it became what we know as the modern-day banking industry; it is largely only in retrospect, as more people begin to realize that, in effect, this inherently public power to issue money was discovered and appropriated by private hands, that it looks as if the public has been “robbed.” In fact, the public is being robbed every minute of every day, as public and private debts to banks grow by the minute, but it becomes a robbery only to the degree to which the perpetrators and victims are aware that it is such. (Because the essence of money is so elusive to current modes of understanding, this awareness is quite elusive and easily displaced by other ways of constructing the matter.) -- Otherwise, it looks simply like “the way money works”; and in many respects it’s true and evident that “better with than without money”; it’s only when the question can move out of the domain of this “either/or,” with or without money, that we become free to move in a new direction. The question then is no longer stuck in you have money or you don’t have money, but can become “what is money and how could it be otherwise?”, what kind of money do we want with what consequences? Until we realize that this is a question, the public power to release its own capacity for collaboration in just and democratic ways remains frozen. We have a hunch that small communities, e.g. those empowered through neighborhood assemblies (communities that can work as closed feedback loops for taking responsibility, experimenting with actions and consequences) might be necessary as innovative laboratories of thinking and experimentation that can move society as a whole forward on these issues. Still, important work can possible be done at higher levels of government — but I don’t know how possible this is under current political conditions.<br /><br />(In respect to the importance of small, cohesive communities - empowered by institutions that enable them truly to THINK together as wholes, which Neighborhood Assemblies as we envision them are intended to do - to serve as laboratories for monetary innovation, we can look at the example of the Ancient Greeks and the polis. Some of Aristotle's insights about money, for instance, are being cited today as containing great insights that, if widely understood, could dramatically change how we think of money in the modern world (and how the institution of modern economics thinks of money). Aristotle understood what we do not, that the essence of money derives from the public, i.e. from the cohesiveness and collaborative capacity of a community, i.e. from the degree to which the public has trust in itself, its laws, its public agreements. If we understood this we could take back our public power into the hands of the people and realize a truer and more just democracy.<br /><br />The question concerning the nature of money has direct parallels to, and is a form of, what Martin Heidegger early in the 20th century referred to as the question concerning the essence of Being. Heidegger recognized that western culture had since its beginnings understood the nature of Being on the model of present objects that can be pointed at. He recognized that one of the most common of all words in our language, the word "to be" and its forms (like "is," "are"), was also one of the words we least understood. How ironic that a concept we so relied on was also fundamentally so puzzling! So it is with money. We rely on it daily, people dedicate their lives to its pursuit, we talk about it all the time, and yet it is very little understood.<br /><br />What Heidegger realized was that their was a form of Being that was quite obvious, but had never been noticed by western philsophy. He pointed out that there was a form of being that we recognized all the time in common language and usage which philosophy, however, had never accounted for. He at one time indicated what he meant through the example of a hammer. From the point of view of western philosophy, a hammer was only wood and metal. But the hammerness of the hammer, Heidegger realized, came into being only through the networks of relationships that came into play when the hammer was put into use: nowhere in the wood or metal that composed the hammer was the "hammer" to be found; the hammer became what it was only in relation to hammering, to building a house, to pounding a nail, etc. Hence the essence of the hammer was in a coordinated network of human relationships, invented through human activity and imagination and purpose. Similarly with money, an artificial invention like the hammer. We try to think of money in terms of its objectness - is it gold or silver? is it the dollar bills we hold in our hands? is it the digital representations in our online banking accounts? No. It is an invention that carries within itself the reflection of our relations to one another and to the earth; money is a reflection of the moral quality of our world. When we get money right, we will get human relations right - we will live in harmony with one another and with the creation, the natural living world bequeathed to us.Marc Tognottihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02937295902930672882noreply@blogger.com2