The New Intelligent Design of Human Society and Anthropology

Nobody in the USA or in the UN has proposed a bill – that I am aware of – for The People to vote on the fundamental topics of our era. We need to discuss such notions as whether we want to be competitive troops in a global, top-down corporate Empire’s war, to continue to become more commoditized, depersonalized and uniform although with an exponentially expanding myriad of trivial, “creative”, commercial consumer choices; or to assert our rights to be self-determining, co-operative communities in our collective society and environment and to face hard choices and harder paths of action to scale back to a sustainable population, self-organized into locally-adapted communities using appropriate technologies, from fingers and thumbs to solar, wind and water.

Phosphorescent Fruit Loops anyone?

Maybe They think that The Peoples are not properly informed to discuss this – I can’t IMAGINE why! They need to be “educated”? Or maybe because this is an “extra-legal process”, a “private matter”, where government can control The Masses, but not the corporations, even though corporations have standing as “persons” in the USA legal system.

Nevertheless, it appears that THEY, posing as We the People, are well along the way to actualizing a dream of an automated Empire in which UHUCU (Universal Human Capital Units) are almost universal in their work capabilities within given, but changing skill strata (currently consisting of executive, clerical, technical, labor) – completely substitutable like Henry Ford’s standard parts, and have no permanent social attachments or “home” environment, having been “raised”, or brooded, in a standard, behaviorist-designed environment, including a digital, group “Skinner Box”, or “operant conditioning chamber” as Skinner called it when he was raising his infant son alone in one. Thus, it would not be misleading to say metaphorically that We the People are living in a bubble; just as was Truman Burbank in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, who says, “You accept the reality with which you are presented.”

If you have no alternative reality of your own, then you accept.

I have one (see Part I); and for better or for worse, I like mine.

The reality presented to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad at Guantanamo, who also has, or once had, a reality of his own, might not be so easy to accept. And, as Stephen Colbert points out, perhaps the prisoner’s communications with his attourney being bugged by the CIA is not really so different from our own circumstance.

“I can’t believe this is happening here! The Internet’s true purpose is to bring the world’s people closer to each other. The Obama Administration is doing just the opposite. It would be advisable for those of us who have consistently opposed and fought against wars of all kinds to view this “cyber war as an equally dangerous and distructive threat.”

How Long Has This Been Going On?

How old is Empire and wars of expansion and colonial domination? Not just tribal disputes in ceremonial dance form, as in Dead Birds, but mass-produced, brutal, dirty warfare conducted by Empire for territorial and material gain, including Human Capital. Empire’s warfare is a premeditated, corporate institutional activity designed for leaving chaos and desperation to be reorganized and utilized under the divine guidance of forum and basilica, the Red and the Black, the carrot and the stick.

This is not new, there was reflective planning for management, exploitation and social control of the dispossessed conquered masses among the 4,500 years-old Empire of the Pharaohs, even long earlier – as shown in Turkey’s 11,500 year old Göbekli Tepe site – in some mass societies “liberated” by Empire.

This is part of a cumulative, shared information base for all of Empire’s ruling class ever since.  The biological connection between the Royals of England, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece, … etc.,  gives some hint of the extent of ruling class networking; but We the (common) People are not privy to gaze into all that, nor are we helped by schoolbook history nor mass media to understand it to be a ruling class; national security you know. If They want you to see or to believe something – true or not, the Royals put on a Prime Time show.“Essentially, the imperialists’ project remain the same”, descendant of Rome, according to Tariq Ali.

This video both shows the extension of the Royal Network to include Saudi Arabia and shows that the creation of the Wahabism movement was a product of British intelligence, an internal rift, as the Taleban was created by the US and NATO in Afghanistan.

“If you want change above, there must be massive movements below.”

But, in my opinion an equally important priority:

 “Unless an alternative is constructed, the beneficiaries will be the Right”. [sounds like the I Ching.]

But, let us also ask whether an “Above” is a necessary part of the solution, other than when the “Above” is Bateson’s Supreme Cybernetic System.

Consider this also when constructing Alternatives. The small is beautiful alternative has no Above, just widening layers of collectivity in which leadership emerges as part of a dissipative structure combining the necessary mass or extent of communities needed to address and resolve the issue, then that structure dissipates; it is NOT institutionalized as a higher level above local government.

Without addressing this, we cannot counter TRADOC. And They are schooled and drilled in it.

I am here suggesting that TRADOC officers, staff and contractors – familiar with the details of the historic broad scope of ruling an empire and the specific battle strategies’ successes and failures accumulated over thousands of years – think about, discuss, debate, design and experimentally revise that now-global “bubble” from the USA’s Fort Leavenworth, Kansas – in their own bubble with virtual hot links for those globally with appropriate security ratings.

This is what families and communities used to do long ago; the parents of a community in the role now occupied by TRADOC, planning their own futures. Now it is a multiple choice presented by The Supreme Something.

TRADOC – the brains of the operation – has commandeered the rights to design the bubble in which the UHUCU will be billeted in a SHU (MilTalk: “standard housing unit”) and sustained, detained, restrained, retrained and entertained as a “public service” which will be paid for by the same consumer/workers’ taxes dedicated to the Department of Defense; garnished from their minimal wage paychecks if needed, just as the Cypriot peoples’ bank accounts will be garnished for their Austerity tax. Certainly the corporate owners will not provide them with their “entitlement”.

 The Club of Rome (ominous name, ¿qué no?), which became widely known upon its publication of The Limits to Growth – the opening shot in the War to Save the World, has presented its projection for the way the world will have developed forty years ahead, 2052. Here’s an excerpt:

… the most radical and unpredictable change will be in the mentality of the majority who will live their lives continually connected to the internet. Many of us already do, but as an acquired habit in adulthood. Growing up with the externalization of one’s cognitive capacity through permanent internet contact is another matter. It will change people’s sense of self and their emotional makeup, their basic cognitive orientation, and their coping strategies. And, he points out detailed effects in regard to Education of Children – … most parents now know that their children will live in a world profoundly different from their own.  Parents know that they are ignorant about much of the world their children will live in [emphasis my own, but, hmmm, un fait accompli, eh?]. But we can only teach children what we know. A main agenda in today’s pedagogic discourse is teaching children to take responsibility for what they need to learn and know.

Vital to NOTE: This is a point at which the system inserts itself to virtually replace the biological parents and the transmission of traditional knowledge and worldview.

My! My! I just can’t imagine from where these tabula rasa children are expected to develop criteria for “what they need to learn and know” … do you have a web address to advise them?

I mean, Matrix Revolution deja vu all over again!

Always Tracked

[and, I add, often tricked: “You can fool almost all the People all the time” under such circumstances.]

A Global Reality – a medium without borders, … a being not identified with any community nor with any specific location, which implies a profoundly different notion of self. One’s belonging to a physical place is blurred by one’s belonging to various virtual networks.

Oh well, Eric Wolf’s “local unity”, Sapir’s and my “genuine culture” has been evanescing into the cybersphere anyway. Bye bye “genuine culture”! Nuristan will be turned into an exotic Disneyland ski resort and tribal reserve for the rich to enjoy like they once enjoyed Cuba.

 And, talking about the megacity of 2052,

… an environment that is diverse and fluid, without clear borders between locations and without stable social structures and ideologies to give guidance as to how one’s life is supposed to be. It will be an environment with few stable necessities and of open-ended and undefined opportunities.

Ah, yes, “no stable frames of reference” – perfect for mind-shaping, but, the opportunities! Gold rush, prime investments, a NEW flavor candy bar; NEW and BETTER Oleomargarine, Fun Island Tours, Michelle Obama Clothes Design Line – Creator and Promoter of Extreme “Individuation”; design your own Avatar Icon and earn points toward a virtual designer wardrobe for your Avatar if you buy one of our monthly special selections.

Do I hear a distressed call for an Insurgency!

Let me slip into this phone booth.

The Real Work and Anthropology

Anthropologists’ (and here, let me be clear, I do not include most archaeologists among cultural anthropologists, but, WAC stands out as a laudable exception) real strength lies in their long-term, first-person participant experience in at least one “foreign” community and knowledge of numerous indigenous or “aboriginal” social and cultural worlds; distinct species of shared sensibilities; unique, historically developed weltanschauungen – unified frameworks for perception and cognition. If anyone is qualified to guide the move away from the present Monomaniacal path that is the Intelligent Design of society and “culture” by advisors to Pharaohs and Kings, it is … [Drumroll and Trumpets!]

 The Anthropologists!

Caution: Not all anthropologists grasp the cognitive substance of culture; for example, Jules Henry, who confused the indigenous Amazonian people – whom he is said to have lived with for a year and whose language he is said to have “mastered”; but whom he studied from a “Freudian Perspective!” – with being in the same predicament as is the engineered urban industrial society of empire; irrationally guided by their cultures.  Henry seems to have supported cultural sterilization and “rational” re-training under professional Freudian tutelage.

And, then, when the Critical Mass has Arisen, there is the need of having a conceptually, consensually-constructed alternative whole system, with many autonomous but articulating parts (local communities), and a plan for getting to there from here. Getting to some baseline state such as that called up by Small is Beautiful, or Ecotopia, and other Dreams of Uprisings Past.

Or, maybe it is wiser to leave this to Obama and to Intelligently Designed Evolutionary Intervention Processes.

Trust them!

My Own Metaphor

As I read the methodical and well-researched work of the USanthropologists working to disconnect their discipline from the military-intelligence complex, I realize that most of my own writings since 2009-2010 are a look, in the light cast by these radical anthropologists, at the impacts of my recent military experiences upon my own worldview. Being not nearly as well-read in the background literature of the current AAA-related “radical caucus” – some of whom have built careers around this investigation, and long-disconnected from the mainstream professional associations, I sometimes think that I must have been blind to what I was being subject to, being irreversibly(?) sewn into.

Somehow, I had not linked it all together until the 2009-10 military experiences led me into reading some of the writings of the “radical caucus” literature on counterinsurgency. Then the reflections and memories all had a larger framework. I am still fitting together this and the 76 years of life and observation inside this same system. I find that weaving back and forth between new information on related work in anthropology and other fields and my own memories and reflections, are a very rich and entertaining enterprise

My nightmare of the process, the enterprise that we children of Rome – the collective, tax-paying USan and NATOan society – are now starting, but could still extinguish, is, as I wrote, metaphorically, earlier:

It’s beyond Time and Space. It’s lift-off; time for the flames to lift off the marble table top where the spilled ethanol fuel has been consumed, time to hover in a blue aurora borealis of ignited fumes above the shiny alabaster cities for a moment, then flicker out. We each become our individual Avatars; mind is in the Data Cloud; body is no longer necessary, … but, not to worry, your “culture”, your heritage, will be virtually there with you – you’ll be issued a body of your choice – except in special assignments, when the Commander will choose your Avatar – at times when Management says you are needed to manipulate the tangible universe that the technosphere has not yet completely automated.

[Clearly this was composed soon after the ethanol fuel had been consumed.]

 Pick Your Favorite Brand

At this point, actualizing Jigger’s solution – Small is Beautiful – is not among the options offered for the conscious concern of US citizens by their Guiding Media. What it really seems to boil down to is “Which kind of Empire would you prefer to buy?” and the answer that The People choose … will determine the nature of the reality “with which you are presented”, as Truman Burbank put it; one designed by the People’s mind, or one that designs the mind of each individual UHUCU.  The former choice is not available in any of the leading brands of Empire.

There is the Capitalist Christian-Judeo, Democratic, Free-Enterprise Empire, for example, and we USNATOans, including Israelis, all know what it is like to be subject to this Regime.

There is a neo-Socialist Empire especially in parts of Africa, almost all of Latin America, strong political parties or social movements in France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Scandinavia, Russia and much of Asia; but the socialism option is not as well-discussed in the USA – where it is limited to the Military and their network of contractors, individual and corporate-institutional – as is the Capitalist Empire descendant of Rome, which is falsely labeled as “democracy” (Warning!  This product might contain horse meat). Socialism is in fact painted as in cahoots with the Enemy, harboring terrorists and repressing their forcibly subjugated peoples; portrayed as “failed governments” that need an Arab Spring; a “democratic, peaceful uprising” covertly funded, armed and trained by the USNATO, as in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which documented the failed coup by the CIA against Hugo Chavez in 2002, a BBC video effectively banned in the USA.

Then there is the Islamic Empire – observably tagged as the main enemy, which is a mix of the People of the Book with a People’s Society in which the charging of interest on a loan is forbidden; positioning Islam directly in front of Judeo-Christian Capitalism’s drive to the basket (or to the bank);  …

 … but, at the last moment Jesus Christ kicks over their money baskets and the shit hits the fan! Both sides say that The Christ is their own player and the Socialist Camp steps up to point out that Jesus, El Señor, is a Socialist who did not sell his loaves and fishes to the hungry masses listening to him go on and on like Fidel in his prime (which lasted into his seventies), but, like St. Hugo The Baddy, a devout Christian saint, he shared them with his community.

It ends in a three-way tie: Free shots for all

You Say You Want a Revolution?

To set about a “revolution”, we first face a “war of liberation”, which many in the USA are taught to confuse with “revolution”.

[The TRADOC counterinsurgency folks have been changing the meanings of things; so, the war of liberation to begin a process of revolution is now thought to be the “revolution”, but has been renamed “insurgence”. You often hear USans say such things as, “Well, it’s been two years since they had their revolution, and I haven’t seen any progress.” … Or, if it is Bush the Lesser (Arundati Roy ‘s real-George term) talking, “Ah hain’t seen no progress!”]

Nonetheless, in order for there to occur a societal revolution, a change of paradigm, the members of society must be mentally liberated from their current sequestered condition and encouraged to self-organize. TRADOC is pushing the rugby ball down the field in the adverse direction. If there is a “We” out there, We must push it the other direction. 

Those who are paid to maintain the current condition will not simply yield and say, “Yeah, you’re right. We have been deceiving, cheating and generally oppressing you; so we’ll do everything we can to help you to design and build a sustainable, human-scale, human-paced society.

“All our collective resources are at your service.

 “AND, from now on, we will only tell the truth!”

[So, legally speaking, everything before the last phrase, following “AND”, cannot be guaranteed to be true.]

Be a Working Man’s Hero; Speak Truth to Power, Go Directly to Jail

No, the truth is, ‘one peep outta you and The Stick!’, … well, just remember what happened to Bradley Manning. As Chris Hedges reports:

This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power….

Manning has done what anyone with a conscience should have done. In the courtroom he exhibited—especially given the prolonged abuse he suffered during his thousand days inside the military prison system—poise, intelligence and dignity. He appealed to the best within us. And this is why the government fears him. America still produces heroes, some in uniform. But now we lock them up.

And, as Arundati Roy said in an interview, which is good advice also for the AAA’s Radical Caucus :

“How do you [here, we address The Anthropologists as “you”] argue rationally against these people? [by now you have some hint who I believe are “these people”] We cannot have a conversation with them at this time; we must do what WE [The common People] have to do.”

Right! We will face a mortal struggle to take what’s ours, including our own work and our identity as part of family and local community and its products. It won’t be gained by diplomacy or by negotiations and compromises with TRADOC’s agents, unless someone is quietly carrying a Really Big Stick.

Do YOU have a Really Big Stick?

Compañero Fidel made it clear recently that the war of liberation in 1958 Cuba would have to be fought differently today. The “hidden” and protected headquarters camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba would be vaporized by armed drones within hours of their discovery by satellite surveillance. Now, it is a “battle of ideas”.

 “Think for yourself, ‘cause I won’t be there with you.” George Harrison singing Fidel’s advice.

And, Latin Americans are not only thinking, they are acting for themselves.  Latin America has refused to be another Gulag for US Extraordinary Rendition. They have collectively, cooperatively, consensually constructed an alternative framework and made it known to all in nuestra america. Largely due to the Bolivarian Movement that was stimulated and brought to power under the leadership of Hugo Chavez after being tested and incubated in Cuba, the Latin South has begun to think for their Collective self, collectively, communally turning the Monroe Doctrine on its head and excluding the Anglo north from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC), just as the Anglos excluded Cuba from the Organization of American States.

 So, also, must the anthros, in consultation, construct a mantra, a mind-tool for this Battle of Ideas to win the hearts and minds of the people, to provide them with a clear processual framework for getting from here to Ecotopia; to Small is Beautiful, to begin to develop a sustainable reality, worldview, embedded within the many diverse niches of Earth’s Supreme Cybernetic System. “Now, here’s the plan!”

So, there is an enemy whom I characterize as managing our total environment as far as possible.
Know thine enemy!

So we need good information on The Management.

And, that’s where the problem begins; who’s really in charge here? and what can The People do about it?

If you think finding Usama bin Laden was difficult…

Meet TRADOC

TRADOC is the central hub for coordinating the training and indoctrination of not only military personnel, but of the entire US population, and, by extension the population of all that they hold sway over; starting in a strong “advisory” position to the Executive Branch of US Government to assure all the President’s Cabinet and policies are well-informed by the military’s perspective on national security interests. I believe this is the substance of the claim that Fort Leavenworth is ‘the intellectual center of the US Military’. TRADOC, the Heart of Darkness, is The Dark Side, the hidden heart and mind of the Pentagon.

Early in January, 2013, before Obama’s second inaugural speech, the US Military took the President into the Pentagon and examined him; his “fitness” to be President.

It’s beginning to feel alot like Egypt!

The moment of clarity is when you realize that the domain of the Training and Doctrine Command is not just the physical training and ideological informing of the USA military, but the in-forming, the in-doctrine-nation of the entire nation, and, in cooperation with the European Union, all of NATO and subordinated (“allied”) nations.

There are no boundaries, unless there is organized resistance! As the then-young Arandati Roy said in 2003: “The US says it can do whatever in Hell it wants. And that’s official!.”

At the top of the pyramid of command, not within it, is the “bubble” of the inner circle of the ruling class as described by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson in a debate on Democracy Now in which the Colonel lays out the intentional duplicity of the information given to the US peoples and to the NATO peoples through the media.

Related, a friend writes:

actually, Like Ray Davis, who was arrested by the Pakistan Government, Bob – here now in Albuquerque – was US Marine acting as faux State Dept employee in covert war in Laos..

Also notice according to Wiki  TRADOC trains “foreign” international soldiers, citing TRADOC manual. (however) In searching that manual, using term foreign OR international, nothing comes up.  WHY?

Went to what I think was place wiki quotes and find

TRADOC schools conduct 2,734 courses (81 directly in support of mobilization) and 373 language courses. The 2,734 courses include 503,164 seats for 434,424 soldiers; 34,675 other-service personnel; 7,824 international soldiers; and 26,241 civilians.^[1]

now reads:

TRADOC scope and scale

TRADOC has more than 25,000 Soldiers and 11,000 civilians working daily to accomplish our mission. We have 32 schools, and we train more than 500,000 Soldiers a year. Our footprint spreads throughout the continental United States at 20 different locations, and we provide the senior commander on 13 of those installations. 

(You, John, you said that your work is) Unweaving the web of “formation of USan consciousness” well said. Mine being as function of (doing the same with the) atomic bomb rather than TRADOC. But objective same, different worker and soldier ants serving the queen. Do ants and bees have dissidents?

That was my friend, Erich. We live in the same asylum. Yes, the one about which Shel Silverstein did his cartoon, “Now Here’s the Plan”.

As an example of another reach of TRADOC’s role is in planning and reporting upon strategic military exhibitionism – also called “war-games” or “joint training exercise”, and then harvesting the Public Information spin from any tense responses it generates. The current example is the account of the US with South Korea in their annual Combined Forces War Games rehearsal, both make clearly threatening scenarios about “change of regime” in North Korea and perform actual armed exercises near North Korea, as described by a Korean American in an interview on Democracy Now.

It superficially resembles the two tribes of Dani warriors brandishing spears and shields, dancing toward each other, then back as portrayed in the Dead Birds film; but this Dance of Death is in a mega-scale, nuclear/digital era, in an entirely different class of phenomena; and the stakes on the table are global, and the choreography is not culturally shared between opposing sides, … or is it?

Here’s Looking at YOU, Kid, in an Intelligently-Designed World?

The human-constructed world in which people such as Truman Burbank will receive training and indoctrination is, itself, designed to optimize and reinforce the effects of that training, including everything from news to stop-signs and seat-belts to social security numbers and standardized “education”. The ultimate Behaviorist Industrial Psychologist’s dream: Total System Design.

We the uprooted, dispossessed of a “civil society”, wards of Empire, iPod in hand, are meekly following the orders, the temptations, the media-stimulated appetites, the warnings and the signs as we march through Satan’s temptations and dangers into the Brave New World Order under our own cognizant volition – if the state of USans’ consciousness can be called cognizant of anything not received in the media, so begging the question whether his volition is truly his/her volition…? – leaving a world without having truly seen it from a fully human perspective; the deeply collective worldview of a historically deep, geographically long-stable society, genuine culture, bye-bye!

 Just blindly following virtual orders? That’s Dumb! Marching to the shower room.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

 Rage, Rage,Against the Dying of the Light.

As the Beatles finally decided to confront the Bullies in the bicycle chase in A Hard Day’s Night:

“Let’s go back and get’em!”

The first rule I learned – both during my actual military service 1956-1959 and again during my 2009-2010 HTS training, required video classes that we had to complete before going on to the next; videos about what to do when captured – The First Rule is to try to escape as early in the prisoner processing process as possible.

Well, I never was captured in Korea, but, soon after arriving back at Fort Lewis, outside Seattle and Tacoma in Washington, on the Northwest Coast of North America, and being marched in a line to duty in the Motor Pool, washing muddy trucks with power hoses, I stepped back and flattened myself against the wall of a warehouse as the line marched around the corner – several others stepping in with me as the line marched on; then we all lit out at a run back to the barracks, changed into civvies and headed into Seattle! Temporarily liberated.

“Think for yourself, ‘cause I won’t be there with you.”

What will be/was Lost; What might be/is Gained?

One of the most remarkable leaps “forward” in this respect, toward termination of sovereign aboriginal societies, local unity, and genuine cultures, has been the universal spread of social media and the applications of the Information Technology devices to manage one’s personal and “social” life, and to provide one with fast-breaking “news” and instant communications from whomever.

Thus, an ethnically self-generated taxonomic framework for reality – based on cumulative, shared, organic, individual perceptions within a local cultural frame of reference, socially evolved over thousands of years – is replaced for the uprooted, occupied and relocated populations by the information technologists’ frameworks that are designed for machines communicating with each other about Empire’s program priorities in ASCII characters.

This “reality” has no fully present smell, no color, no form, no taste,

no vibes, man!

is this alive?

or what?

Whoa! Let’s loaf awhile, just vegetate and tune in to the surroundings in alpha mode (loafing mind) and ponder this.

“Animals are not imbeciles.  There is in the life of wild things in a wild setting a multitude of interactions to which the mind of civilized man is not attuned because it is of the necessity oriented to another aspect of mental energy, namely the rational.  To understand the psychology of the Pit River people, it is necessary to visualize their extremely intimate contact with the trees, the rocks, the weather and the delicate changes in the atmosphere, with the shape of every natural object, and, of course, with the habits not only of every species of animal but of many individuals.  It is almost impossible for a civilized man to form any conception of the degree of intimacy with nature this represents. No civilized man would ever have the patience and energy to loaf in a wild place long enough to catch this subtle rhythm of interactions. (de Angulo, p. 353)

And notice how this resembles Gregory Bateson’s message at the end of this essay, “Bateson argues that Occidental epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven. Purpose controls attention and narrows perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. Additionally Occidental epistemology propagates the false notion that man exists outside Mind and this leads man to believe in what Bateson calls the philosophy of control based upon false knowledge.” I do believe, however, that the current phase of Empre’s Counterinsurgency movement has addressed that concern by focussing the new digital technology upon the cognitive colonization of the UHUCU.

The UHUCU Management Problem

In Part I, I referred to a classmate at the University of California at Davis who had been in the Military Police and later worked as a Yosemite Park Ranger – also essentially an armed policeman, who foresaw the need for a mass society management program.  

Now, fifty years later, I am moved by my recent learning about TRADOC to understand that this was all well advanced by then; universities were offering programs with scholarships and work-study jobs, jobs for graduates with societal management skills; the CIA and FBI were expanding their list of occupational skills, COINTELPRO was taking shape, career opportunities were opening up. The chain of command between all levels of government was being linked up, from local to county, to State, to Federal.

But, other than Defense, the Federal level seems to be in exploitable chaos. What’s above the Federal Government?

Reporters this morning uncovered the fact that while 40,000 or more people were outside the White House asking for his attention about Keystone XL, President Obama was playing golf with oil and pipeline executives in Florida.

There appears to be a massive coordinated apparatus that subsumes industries, communications, invincible military might, the wealth of the richest, and the elected and appointed governments.  The embedded media documents and analyses this, “as advised”. Approximately Ike’s ‘Military-Industrial Complex’; now complexly desarrollado.  Perhaps the appearance of chaos is fostered as a smoke-screen to obscure this?

The “enemy” appears to have We The People, each and all, completely surrounded, subsumed.

However! Do keep in mind that, given our Truman Show situation, we have no way of knowing whether this representation of the government-corporate-military junta as omniscient and omnipotent is true or false.

And, yes, I do think that the general trend toward legalizing cannabis is part of the program for cultivating a more docile herd; but could backfire; don’t forget the origins of the word, “assassin”. Of course, if you control the hashish supply, you probably control the assassins? Leave no turn unstoned.

Hillary Clinton, in her final appearance, her resignation speech, Secretary of State, looking alot like Gabby Giffords appearing in Congress after her “recovery”, tells us the world is “a safer place”

I note that she emphasizes “The Mission” that the US elected government is carrying out. The Mission, of course, is a military term, not a religious term, in this case, …

…and this Mission Creeps hand-in-hand with the religious ones; trying to supplant local worldviews using this carrot and The Stick if necessary. [Ah, good! Another example of syntactic ambiguity: Is the word “Creeps” a noun or a verb?] The Mission Creeps.

At that point in the video narrative about the meaning of OZ National Monument, which is playing on the Big Screen in the Interpretive Center’s Theater – required education before  one enters the Castle for his tour, the little boy – his name is Bradley Manning –  walked up to the big, black curtain and pulled it completely back…  

everybody’s mobile network crashed (Jesus cheers and claps his hands in Heaven)… and a vision appeared unto him and to all present; and the Angel spoke, saying unto the small boy standing there with his slingshot:

“… and in The People, united, is hope, is the source of all budgets and political power….” and, reflecting, the little boy turned to the audience and shouted:

We ARE The People!

Allah Hu Akbar!

with each Palestinian imprisoned or killed; with every “ethnic” stopped and frisked in New York, with each and every drone strike in Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Mali …, from the swelling volume of the voices and number of places from which the crescendo arises:

WE are The People!

Allah Hu Akbar!

The Greenpeace Tree Huggers strapped in a tree high in the air of the Northwest Coast of North America’s Redwood forest community, trying to Save Strawberry Rock, to prevent a timber corporation’s clear-cut of a People’s forest sanctuary; Canada’s First Nations taking a stand to save the Earth; the Bolivarian Revolution as the Legacy of Hugo Chavez; linking the out-reaching hands of Julian Assange, Raul Castro, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega … and Rafael Correa:

We are The People!

Allah Hu Akbar!

As Andy Goldsworth says in his video recording, Rivers and Tides of his transient earthworks as a stone construct collapses while the tide approaches, “This is my work, you know? Too many unknowns.”

He explains how the Lords of Empire who ruled Scotland, moved the people off their lands to make room for sheep; and how the land today is greatly influenced by the habits and needs of sheep that were a commercial investment of the Lords. We are those sheep; and, boy, do we have shepherds! I just tried to follow a link in Wiki to get to a page described in the William Lederer page, “Government by Misinformation“ (Excerpt from Lederer’s Nation of Sheep), but, when clicked upon leads us to what I believe to be one of the TRADOC-designed dead ends:

“Ever feel you’re in the wrong place 404 (Page Not Found) Error If you’re the site owner, one of two things happened:

1. ) You entered an incorrect URL into your browser’s address bar, or 2) You haven’t uploaded content.

If you’re a visitor and not sure what happened:

1) You entered or copied the URL incorrectly or

2) The link you used to get here is faulty.

(It’s an excellent idea to let the link owner know.)

We are Entering our Final Ascent

This boiling global swell of humanity, reaching the climax stage of its tool-based Culture, the “Neolithic”, which we inhabit here and now – not like the climax stage of Redwood forests as an ecosystem in stable balance  – attempts lift-off.

Allah Hu Akbar!

You say you want a Revolution?

This is my work, you know? Esto es lo que hago.

Too many unknowns.”

Ecological anthropology and cybernetics; An Axe is Something to Be

What we need now is not more information, but a plan for changing the direction of our own society, beginning with changing one’s own mind before Someone does it for you. This summary of Bateson’s thought might provide or stimulate a realistic model for thinking about what can be done by a union of anthropologists who want to “change the world” (better first change your mind, instead). Gregory Bateson played on both sides of the political ideology net. He was a Real Antropologist who had best intents within the reality of what he considered to be the practical limits of his influence and to be the probable trajectory of future human societal control options as human population increase came to be a tipping point for the critical global ecology-management problem. I think his writings, along with Edward Schumacher’s,  make a good beginning toward an organized resistance, re-education and reversal response to the current Empire’s efforts to enclose its UHUCUs with finality; a movement organized and occupied by anthropologists and others getting together an organized, loving, counterpunch. It was Gregory who brought attention to the un-recognized wisdom of Jaime d’Angulo’s works during the Whole Earth Catalog era.

I include this excerpt from Wikipedia’s essay on Gregory Bateson because, as Gary Snyder wrote at the end of his own poem, entitled Ax Handles, inspired by helping his son carve a new handle for an old ax-head whose handle had broken, the model was not far away:

It’s in Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, fourth century

A.D. “Essay on Literature” – in the

Preface: “In making the handle of an axe

By cutting wood with an axe

The model is indeed near at hand.”

My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

Translated that and taught it years ago

And I see Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an exe

And my son a handle, soon

 To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on.

As a mentor, Gregory Bateson, also an axe, provided us with a model for a thought-handle for the task we face:

In his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson applied cybernetics to the field of ecological anthropology and the concept of homeostasis.^[19] He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. Each of these systems has adaptive changes which depend upon feedback loops to control balance by changing multiple variables. Bateson believed that these self-correcting systems were conservative by controlling exponential slippage. He saw the natural ecological system as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis^[19] and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and its environment.^[19]

Bateson also viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems.^[19] This supreme cybernetic system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.^[19] While Mind is a cybernetic system, it can only be distinguished as a whole and not parts. Bateson felt Mind was immanent in the messages and pathways of the supreme cybernetic system. He saw the root of system collapses as a result of Occidental or Western epistemology. According to Bateson consciousness is the bridge between the cybernetic networks of individual, society and ecology and that the mismatch between the systems due to improper understanding will result in the degradation of the entire supreme cybernetic system or Mind. Bateson saw consciousness as developed through Occidental epistemology was at direct odds with Mind.^[19]

At the heart of the matter is scientific hubris. Bateson argues that Occidental epistemology perpetuates a system of understanding which is purpose or means-to-an-end driven.^[19] Purpose controls attention and narrows perception, thus limiting what comes into consciousness and therefore limiting the amount of wisdom that can be generated from the perception. Additionally Occidental epistemology propagates the false notion that man exists outside Mind and this leads man to believe in what Bateson calls the philosophy of control based upon false knowledge.^[19]

Bateson presents Occidental epistemology as a method of thinking that leads to a mindset in which man exerts an autocratic rule over all cybernetic systems.^[19] In exerting his autocratic rule man changes the environment to suit him and in doing so he unbalances the natural cybernetic system of controlled competition and mutual dependency. The purpose driven accumulation of knowledge ignores the supreme cybernetic system and leads to the eventual breakdown of the entire system. Bateson claims that man will never be able to control the whole system because it does not operate in a linear fashion and if man creates his own rules for the system, he opens himself up to becoming a slave to the self-made system due to the non-linear nature of cybernetics. Lastly, man’s technological prowess combined with his scientific hubris gives him to potential to irrevocably damage and destroy the supreme cybernetic system, instead of just disrupting the system temporally until the system can self-correct.^[19]

Bateson argues for a position of humility and acceptance of the natural cybernetic system instead of scientific arrogance as a solution.^[19] He believes that humility can come about by abandoning the view of operating through consciousness alone. Consciousness is only one way in which to obtain knowledge and without complete knowledge of the entire cybernetic system disaster is inevitable. The limited conscious must be combined with the unconscious in complete synthesis. Only when thought and emotion are combined in whole is man able to obtain complete knowledge. He believed that religion and art are some of the few areas in which a man is acting as a whole individual in complete consciousness. By acting with this greater wisdom of the supreme cybernetic system as a whole man can change his relationship to Mind from one of schism, in which he is endlessly tied up in constant competition, to one of complementarity. Bateson argues for a culture that promotes the most general wisdom and is able to flexibly change within the supreme cybernetic system.^[19]

Main Points to Take Away

Tariq Ali:

“If you want change above, there must be massive movements below.”

 “Unless an alternative is constructed, the beneficiaries will be the Right”.

JA: 

Let us also ask whether an “Above” is a necessary part of the solution, other than when the “Above” is Bateson’s Supreme Cybernetic System that some call Gaia?

Consider this also when constructing Alternatives. The small is beautiful alternative has no Above, instead ecotopian communities have widening layers of collectivity in which leadership emerges as part of a dissipative structure combining the necessary mass or extent of communities needed to address and resolve the issue at hand, then that structure dissipates; does not institutionalize itself as The Above, and normal local community life continues. .

Come back to Earth, adapt! And, for a hint of what that might mean, I sent you, al capo, to Tariq Ali’s Fundamental Guidance. It’s Now or Never!.