California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

The Difference Between Chinese and US Philosophy

by John Lawrence

Western philosophy is predicated on the individual and the philosophy that the best society is one in which the individual is completely and totally free. Freedom of the individual is the bedrock of the US Constitution which spells out individual rights but not individual responsibilities. Freedom is spelled out in John Stuart Mill's book On Liberty, but it goes back even further than that all the way to the life of Jesus who, as demonstrated in the New King James version of Luke, when his mother was looking for him famously said to her,  “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” So for Jesus the freedom to pursue his career took precedence over familial responsibilities. Chinese philosophy places the emphasis on the fact that familial responsibilities should take precedence over individual freedom. That is the basic philosophical difference between US and Chinese philosophy. Confucius, who is the penultimate philosopher for Chinese society, had a different view regarding the relations of human beings to society. According to Roger T. Ames, Theorizing the Person in Confucian Ethics,"How or in what way (dao) do persons in their roles become consummately humane (ren)? This was the perennial Confucian question asked explicitly in all of the Four Books: in the Great Learning, in the Analects of Confucius, in the Mencius, and again in the Zhongyong. And from the time of Confucius onward, the answer was a moral, aesthetic, and ultimately religious one. Persons (necessarily plural) become humane by cultivating those thick, intrinsic relations that constitute our initial conditions that locate the trajectory of our life narrative - its whence and whither - within family, community, and cosmos."

The Chinese emphasis is on harmony and stability whether at the familial level or at the societal level. Western society emphasizes individual liberty in the hope that the societal level will take care of itself. The US Constitution emphasizes individual rights; there is no mention of individual responsibilities. There is the hope that individuals competing among themselves will end up with the result that society will flourish, but there is no direct connection as there is in Chinese philosophy. Article 53 of the Chinese Constitution states: "Citizens of the People's Republic of China must abide by the Constitution and the law, keep state secrets, protect public property, observe discipline in the workplace, observe public order, and respect social morality." Article 54 states: "Citizens of the People's Republic of China shall have the obligation to safeguard the security, honor and interests of the motherland; they must not behave in any way that endangers the motherland's security, honor or interests."

While the Chinese Constitution also grants political rights such as freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, and religion and also economic rights, the Constitution also emphasizes obligations and responsibilities. Article 51 states: "When exercising their freedoms and rights, citizens of the People's Republic of China shall not undermine the interests of the state, society or collectives, or infringe upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens."

There is an emphasis on order, social morality, not infringing on the interests of others or society in general. Americans find this emphasis on social cohesiveness and stability too restraining and inhibiting of their rights as guaranteed in the American Constitution. The US Constitution's emphasis on individual rights without a concomitant emphasis on responsibilities has produced major instabilities in American society. The fall back position for the US is complete dependence on the rule of law and the preservation of American institutions rather than a libertarian view of freedom. Basically, the US, in order to preserve US democracy has had to come up with an almost Chinese position regarding societal stability. The January 6 insurrection and subsequent indulgence in free speech by certain actors to and beyond the point of truth telling has resulted in a continuing threat to US democracy. Certain members of American society are pushing Constitutional guarantees of free speech and gun rights to the point of undermining US democracy in general. Perhaps the American Constitution needs to be rethunk or at least amended. The Republican party threatens the destruction of American society unless they get their way.

Off the Top of My Head

Republican Presidents Have Been Mainly Responsible for Increases in the National Debt

by John Lawrence

The Reagan, George W Bush and Trump tax cuts are responsible for most of the US national debt. During the Trump administration, the debt increased by roughly $7.8 trillion, and The George W. Bush administration  enacted sweeping tax cuts that will have cost more than $8 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. The nation’s fiscal pictured changed in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan enacted the largest tax cut in U.S. history, reducing revenues by the equivalent of $19 trillion over a decade in today’s terms. Although Congress raised taxes in many of the subsequent years of the Reagan administration to claw back close to half the revenue loss, the equivalent of $10 trillion of the president’s 1981 tax cut remained. Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) that it’ll weigh down the economy for years.

A series of massive, permanent tax cuts have created large federal budget primary shortfalls and continue to exert upward pressure on the debt ratio. In other words, the current fiscal gap—the growing debt as a percentage of the economy—stems from legislation that cut taxes, disproportionately for the very rich. While it is true that the Great Recession and legislation to fight it, along with the costs of responding to the health and economic effects of COVID-19, pushed the level of debt higher, these costs were temporary and did not change the trajectory of the debt ratio. If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

Therefore, taxes on the rich should increase while spending on the poor and middle class should also increase. Americans want both: social programs and reduced taxes. However, the gross inequality that exists between rich and poor begs the question: why raise taxes on everyone? Shouldn't the rich have their taxes increased while the poor and lower middle class have their taxes reduced? Of course, that 's the ideal solution. However, Republicans represent the interests of the rich so they would never agree to this proposal. They will continue to argue for increasing taxes on the poor while cutting spending that mostly benefits the poor and lower middle class. That's the American situation, writ large, folks. That's all you need to know to understand American politics. It's a struggle between rich and poor. The rich think they deserve all their money even if it runs to billions of dollars while the poor are only trying to get a foothold in the American Dream. The rich think the poor deserve their lot in life because they didn't work hard enough to overcome their poverty. The rich also believe in a meritocracy where they themselves are the winners who made all the right moves and worked the hardest. What's wrong with this picture?

Read "The Tyranny of Merit" by Michael Sandel.

Off the Top of My Head

The Trouble With Belief Systems

by John Lawrence, March 28, 2021

Belief systems lead to cults. A cult can be defined as a group of people who all fervently believe the same things although there is no objective proof for any of their beliefs. People who believe Trump won the election are members of a cult. People who believe their religion is the only correct and true religion and everyone who does not accept their belief system is going to Hell are members of a cult. A lot of wars have been fought because members of one cult dehumanized members of another cult. The European wars of the 16th century were fought because Catholics and Protestants could not accept that there were people who did not have the same cult beliefs as they did. The 30 years war was a war between Protestants and Catholics. The Crusades were wars between Christians and Muslims. People who hold belief systems fervently cannot accept the fact that there are other people in the world who don't hold their same belief system.

There are some things that are unknowable, at least at this point in time, and they form fertile ground for some one or one to develop a belief system around. Charlatans and manipulators realize that there is money to be made by claiming to assuage peoples' anxieties. One of the biggest unknowables is what happens to us after we die. Another is is there a God or, if there is, is He a judgmental or a loving God? The Founding Fathers of the US, cognizant of the European wars of religion, were mainly Deists. They believed that God created the universe, but was not involved with it after that, the so-called "watchmaker God." Founders who fall into the category of Christian Deists include Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was more influenced by the reason-centred Enlightenment than either Adams or Washington. Jefferson also created his own version of the Bible. This Bible was focused only on Jesus, but none of his mystical works. It didn’t include major scenes like the resurrection or ascension to heaven, or miracles like turning water into wine or walking on water. Instead, Jefferson’s Bible focused on Jesus as a man of morals, a teacher whose truths were expressed without the help of miracles or the supernatural powers of God.

Because of our existential anxiety caused by not knowing what's going to happen to us after death or even in this life, belief systems have grown up and attracted adherents. Fervent belief systems are really cults as they exclude and dehumanize people with alternative beliefs. There is no objective proof, but people are willing to kill those who aren't members of their cult. This is from Britannica:

"Deists argued that human experience and rationality—rather than religious dogma and mystery—determine the validity of human beliefs. In his widely read The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine, the principal American exponent of Deism, called Christianity “a fable.” Paine, the protégé of Benjamin Franklin, denied “that the Almighty ever did communicate anything to man, by…speech,…language, or…vision.” Postulating a distant deity whom he called “Nature’s God” (a term also used in the Declaration of Independence), Paine declared in a “profession of faith”: I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and in endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.''"

The problem with the Trump "true believers" is that they have been sold a bill of goods by those who shamelessly have made money off of feeding this cult a bunch of lies. These people have been conditioned by means of their religion to have a certain set of beliefs which they are willing to fight over. These beliefs coincide with a way of life predicated on an American version of history and an American narrative in which America is a shining city on a hill and a beacon of veracity and truth to the rest of the world. They believe in an America also which is fundamentally white like it's always been in their minds, but that's not the reality any more. American history is not all that noble. Indians were robbed of their lands and Africans were brought here and used as slaves. After they were freed, supposedly, Jim Crow laws made sure that they remained second class citizens. So there is  clash of belief systems. There are those who think the great and noble sentiments expressed by our Founding Fathers should not apply to everyone equally and those who point out the hypocrisy of not doing so.

The problem really is with belief systems which turn into cults. The way forward is really the one expressed by Rodney King: "Can't we all just get along?" With deference to Mission Impossible: your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to make the world a better place for this and future generations without regard to belief systems or ideology. Your vaunted way of life, as perceived to have existed in the past, is irrelevant.

Off the Top of My Head

Are We Really All in This Together?

by John Lawrence, October 21, 2020

The pandemic in terms of dying has affected mainly old people and minorities, but also there have been many at the highest level White House related cases including 87 year old Senator Chuck Grassley. I assume that these high level cases have been and will be treated with monoclonal antibodies like Remdesivir which "cured" President Trump. These treatments it should be noted are not available to everyone. Why not if they are so efficacious. Those who have the best treatments available can subscribe to the thesis that the coronavirus is no big deal. Mainly others are doing the dying.

Pope Francis' words of wisdom, Fratelli Tutti, his encyclical letter on Fraternity and Social Friendship represents a plea that we all should be in this together even though it's clear that in many parts of the world we're not. His words of wisdom follow:

"All too quickly, however, we forget the lessons of history, “the teacher of life”. Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. God willing, after all this, we will think no longer in terms of “them” and “those”, but only “us”. If only this may prove not to be just another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing. If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as a result of the dismantling, year after year, of healthcare systems. If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might rediscover once for all that we need one another, and that in this way our human family can experience a rebirth, with all its faces, all its hands and all its voices, beyond the walls that we have erected.

"Unless we recover the shared passion to create a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources, the global illusion that misled us will collapse and leave many in the grip of anguish and emptiness. Nor should we naively refuse to recognize that “obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction”. The notion of “every man for himself” will rapidly degenerate into a free-for-all that would prove worse than any pandemic."

Yet in the US we are divide into two nations fundamentally at war with each other. Even religious institutions fan the flames of political divides. Masc wearing has become something that freedom loving Americans feel free to not do on Constitutional grounds. Caring about the welfare of others is unAmerican when it takes away from some Americans' freedoms. That's the American way: freedom trumps "Fraternity and Social Friendship" as the Pope would say. Is freedom the only value worth supporting? Must it dominate all other values? Must saving the earth from global warming be politicized into a Left-Right issue? Those who want to convert to renewable energy are characterized as "too far Left?" It isn;t a matter of Left Right. It's a matter of what is the right thing to do.

When it comes time to give the American people a tax break, there's no hue and cry about deficit spending. When the big banks were bailed out costing trillions of dollars, there was no hue and cry about deficit spending. Even though many of the bankers had committed fraud, none of them went to jail and the fines were just a slap on the wrist. But when a government program that forgives student loan debt or funds a massive green infrastructure program is mentioned, all of a sudden Republicans are concerned about deficit spending. It's "too far Left." Providing affordable housing, feeding the hungry, creating jobs for the unemployed - all those ideas are "too far Left." It's more important to preserve American values than it is to solve social problems. In other words despite the Pope's pleas, we are not all in this together. Freedom is more important than social cohesion.

Herbert Marcuse's Philosophy of Liberation

by Paul Von Blum

from truthdig, March 1, 2020

Herbert Marcuse, the German philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, delivers a lecture in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1979. (Kurt Strumpf / AP)

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) is the greatest but largely unknown philosopher of the mid-20th century. When I mention him in my UCLA classes today, almost no one recognizes the references. Yet when I began teaching in the late 1960s, he was a major staple of my work. For several years, at UC Berkeley, I assigned and taught “One-Dimensional Man, An Essay on Liberation, Eros and Civilization,” and “Repressive Tolerance.” These course readings were well received and generated robust, often animated discussion. These assignments and reading lists were less well received by my more conservative faculty superiors­—all likely liberal Democrats—who disliked and feared the ongoing student rebellions on the Berkeley campus and throughout the nation.

I also had the distinct pleasure of meeting Marcuse in person a few times when he visited Berkeley, and I had a limited correspondence with him when he taught at UC San Diego. Marcuse remains a powerful influence in my present intellectual pursuits. Along with the writings of C. Wright Mills, he helped form the intellectual foundation of much of my teaching over the years. That contact, however brief, was invaluable.

The new graphic biography, “Herbert Marcuse: Philosopher of Utopia,” illustrated by Nick Thorkelson, edited by Paul Buhle and Andrew T. Lamas, and with a foreword by Angela Y. Davis, may herald a Marcuse revival. Buhle and Lamas add enormous scholarly depth to this project. Its pictorial character is appealing to younger readers, and its biographical accuracy, philosophical sophistication, historical acuity, and incisive observations and commentary about Marcuse’s social and political analyses make the volume equally attractive to scholars and educated laypersons.

But for me, the book succeeded mightily because it catalyzed my extensive return to Marcuse’s texts, which I had only glanced (embarrassingly) fleetingly at more recently. It proved to be an enormous pleasure, for example, to look closely again at various parts of “One-Dimensional Man.” I was reminded of how perceptive Marcuse was in addressing the life-negating consequences of rampant consumption, the manipulation of needs by vested corporate interests, and the consummate delusions of “liberty” in a sophisticated scheme of totalitarianism for the “affluent.” He wrote this while recognizing at the same time that millions of marginalized residents are brutally kept in line, which led him to identify with the growing African American freedom struggle in the 1960s, and, by extension, the struggles of oppressed peoples throughout the world.

The early parts of this engaging graphic biography are a remarkable fusion of Marcuse’s life with his philosophical development set against the tumultuous historical development of early 20th century Europe. It chronicles his early studies with Martin Heidegger, his prominence in the iconic Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and his necessary flight as a Jew from the growing threat of Nazi rule in his native Germany. Marcuse joined a large and distinguished number of intellectuals, artists, and others who fled Nazi tyranny, finding refuge in the United States and elsewhere during those horrific times.

Nick Thorkelson’s drawings add enormously to this narrative. He is a longtime graphic artist with a distinguished record of illustration, especially on radical and labor topics. He shows how effectively this medium can convey complex ideas in a thoroughly intriguing way.

Students and others interested in philosophy and intellectual history should be especially engaged after seeing and reading here about the Frankfurt School and its key figures. Marcuse’s early encounters with Hegel, Kant, Goethe, Freud, Mann, Heidegger, Marx, and other major philosophical and literary figures led him to the Frankfurt School. The book also notes such intellectual luminaries as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Frederick Pollock, Erich Fromm, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Lowenthal and Franz Neumann. Obviously, a graphic biography of Herbert Marcuse cannot address the philosophical and theoretical ideas of all these thinkers in any depth, but it can and does catalyze intellectual curiosity. It encourages readers to explore the vast literature that is widely available.

Marcuse’s intellectual and political journey in America is likely to interest most readers of “Herbert Marcuse: Philosopher of Utopia.” The book deals with his personal struggles, his academic trajectory, especially his work at Brandeis University, and his growing stature as a political and public intellectual. One of his star students at Brandeis was Angela Davis, who came to realize, with Marcuse’s model and early encouragement, that it would be possible to be an academic, an activist, and a scholar. Her subsequent career validated his faith in her multifaceted talents.

The book reveals how Marcuse’s increasing political visibility during the 1960s caused Brandeis’ leaders and donors to turn against him—an all too common reaction against leftist academics and others. In 1964, he published “One-Dimensional Man,” a powerful and scathing indictment of modern society, especially American society and political economy. This is Marcuse’s most influential book, and if Thorkelson’s graphic biography accomplishes nothing else, it should stimulate readers to either look at it for the first time or return to it in the perilous era of the early 21st century.

Thorkelson does an impressive job of summarizing “One-Dimensional Man.” As I tried to show my Berkeley students many decades ago, its main theme is submission to a sophisticated capitalist scheme that demands and almost entirely ensures that people “recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.” The only thing that has changed since 1964 is the growing level of capitalist sophistication and domination. Today the products are electronic, including dazzling computers, addictive smartphones, and many other forms of consumerist social controls that reinforce corporate hegemony; these are products that Marcuse could never have imagined more than a half century ago, but the deeper reality of human alienation is identical. This is what made Marcuse the subtlest and most perceptive Marxist critic of his time.

In “One-Dimensional Man,” Marcuse revealed the fundamental truth of modern Western capitalism: “Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination… . Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear—that is, if they sustain alienation.” It does not matter at all whether millions of people recognize their alienation, often blissfully unaware that their “needs” are not their own but merely produced through their superficially pleasant submission. The corporate state continues largely unchallenged.

Thorkelson also shows how Marcuse was no armchair theorist. He identified openly and publicly with the resistance movement in the United States and throughout the word, making him “The Reluctant Guru,” as the volume indicates. As he wrote, millions of human beings left out of the Affluent Society were kept in line “by a brutality which revives medieval and early modern practices.” These words from 1964 resonate eerily in the present, especially when police misconduct and killings of people of color have become all too commonplace.

Marcuse was outspoken in supporting African Americans, students and other protesters, and in opposing the Vietnam War. By then, he had moved to UC San Diego, a city well known for its conservatism. He attracted considerable hostile attention, including from the American Legion, the Ku Klux Klan, Gov. Ronald Reagan, Vice President Spiro Agnew, actor John Wayne, and other right-wing forces and people. The book shows how he was even forced to go into hiding during those times, a victim of the reactionary responses to the black, student, and other movements sweeping the globe and Marcuse’s unwavering support for them.

More unnerving to him was the increasing animosity from his former Frankfurt School friends and colleagues. Adorno especially took issue with Marcuse’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his support of the worldwide student movement. Adorno, in some respects the model of the paternalistic German university professor, was subject in postwar Germany to derision by left-wing students. In one case, in 1969, women students interrupted his classroom by baring their breasts and showering him with flowers, which Thorkelson draws in an amusing panel in the book. Some of the cordial correspondence between the old comrades is also reprinted, and shows dramatically how Herbert Marcuse was on the right side of history.

During the height of student, black and brown, and increasing women’s protests against war, racism, and sexism, a new force emerged that drew Marcuse’s pointed critique. Charles Reich, a Yale law professor, published a widely popular book, “The Greening of America,” which asserted that the new youth movement involving major changes of consciousness, communal living, spirituality, and withdrawal from mainstream society would usher in a new order in America and elsewhere.

Reich saw these changes in places like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, New York’s East Village, and others throughout the nation. The colorful clothing, the flowers, the unconventional hairstyles, the music, the open sexuality, even the drug use in the new “hippie” culture, often known as the “counterculture,” enthralled him. Above all, he loved the optimistic spirit emanating from these young people.

Marcuse saw it very differently. Thorkelson’s bibliography notes that Marcuse published an article entitled “Charles Reich—A Negative View.” ­­He understood that this counterculture was profoundly apolitical and offered no solutions to the Vietnam War or any other real problems besetting the world. Earlier, in “One-Dimensional Man,” Marcuse had warned of this false negation: “But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.”

History has validated his perceptions. The counterculture predictably faded as a force in American society. Many of its participants resumed their lives as pillars of the neoliberal establishment, their bygone “hippie” days of the past credentializing them as free spirits. A few, unfortunately, succumbed to the drug culture and became casualties of the era while others continued to live highly marginal lives. Notwithstanding its insights and critiques, “The Greening of America” was little more than the corporate version of the great rebellion.

Marcuse continued to support real resistance, including the women’s movement. He regarded it as the most important radical movement of the times. He supported his student Davis throughout her activism and unjust incarceration. She writes in her foreword that “Fifty years later, as we confront the persisting globalities of slavery and colonialism, along with evolving structures of racial capitalism, Herbert Marcuse’s ideas continue to reveal important lessons. The insistence on imagining emancipatory futures, even under the most desperate circumstances, remains­­—Marcuse teaches us—a decisive element of both theory and practice.”

Davis is absolutely right. The time has come for a Marcuse revival.

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Paul Von Blum is Senior Lecturer in African American Studies and Communication Studies at UCLA. He has taught at the University of California since 1968, serving 11 years at UC Berkeley before arriving at UCLA in 1980. He is the author of six books and numerous articles on art, culture, education, and politics. His most recent book is "Paul Robeson for Beginners" (2014). Other books Von Blum has authored include "Racism and the Law" and "A Life at the Margins: Keeping the Political Vision," his 2011 memoir that chronicles almost 50 years of political activism, starting with his civil rights work in the South and elsewhere in the early 1960s.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Did God Create Predators?

by John Lawrence, December 6, 2019

One of the things we don't understand very well is why there are predators in nature. Surely, if God controlled the evolutionary process, only docile herbivores would have evolved. Most of the herbivores that did evolve never hurt another animal. Did a cow ever attack another animal for its meat? No, a cow is content just to chew on its cud all day. Well, some cows are a little on the mean side as anyone who grew up on a farm can attest to, but maybe that cow did not have an ideal childhood.  However, like with dogs, the meanness can be and by and large has been bred out of them. So evidently God had no problem with animals including humans who attack other animals and intended for there to be predators, animals whose very life depended on attacking, killing and eating other animals.

Just think what a world without predators would be like.All animals would have evolved to eat only plants. Take the manatee for example. Manatees, often called sea cows, are voracious herbivores who eat up to one-tenth of their massive body weight every 24 hours. Dining exclusively on water grasses, weeds and algae, these gentle giants are graceful swimmers despite their bulk; they weigh up to 1,300 pounds and grow to 13 feet long. Manatees never leave the water, but need to breathe air at the surface. The manatee population has declined due to hunting pressure for their oil, bones and hides, and they are now endangered, and protected in the waters they inhabit along the coasts and estuaries of Florida, Central America and the West Indian islands. If left undisturbed, manatees can live up to 40 years in the wild.

A manatee like a cow is a peacenik who never attacked any other animal, much less killed and ate another animal. Other examples of docile, peace loving animals who never hurt a flea are deer, rabbits, cows, sheep, goats, elephants, giraffes, horses, and pandas and the green sea turtle. The peaceable animal kingdom are often attacked and killed by the non peace loving variety of animals known as predators. Is it for lack of sufficient vegetation that predators evolved? Or was it to limit the expansion of peace loving herds? Was nature's purpose to cull the herds? If so does war serve that same purpose for human beings?

What was in God's mind when He or She created predators? Some say the earth is in the goldilocks zone - not to close to or far away from the sun. The moon is there to control the tides so that the oceans don't become stagnant. The magnetosphere is there to shield the earth from the deadly solar wind. This wouldn't have been possible without a molten iron core. Water is in abundance. Oxygen is there for breathing. Natural resources supply the ingredients for food and all sorts of human activities. So much is ideal. But maybe the earth still isn't perfect. If it was, then maybe predators would not have evolved.

Suppose the earth in addition to all its has going for it had a perfect climate in which food in the form of plants was abundant. All you had to do was pick and eat it. Fresh water was in great supply. And it was that way all over the entire surface of the earth. Would any animals have evolved to be predators under those conditions? Why would humans fight  if food was abundant, the climate was so moderate that clothing and housing were non-issues, there was no work that had to be done, people had nothing to do except reproduce and, in general, there was nothing to fight about. In other words if resources were abundant; there would be nothing to fight about. Would humans and other animals then have evolved to be docile, peace loving herbivores?

Off the Top of My Head

Did Homo Sapiens Wipe Out the Neanderthals?

by John Lawrence, October 13, 2019

We will never know for sure. But Neanderthals flourished in Europe and Asia for about 360,000 years - from  circa 400,000 until 40,000 years ago. Modern humans spread across Europe about 40,000 years ago. What a coincidence that the Neanderthals disappeared from Europe at about the same time that modern humans, homo sapiens, entered Europe.Since our species, homo sapiens, is known for its predilection for war and genocide, it's likely that modern humans committed species-cide on the Neandethals. Genocide comes from the Greek word, genos, meaning "race, kind". There have certainly been many examples historically of genocide, Hitler's attempted elimination of the Jews being the most well known example. But there have been others. In the past 150 years, tens of millions of men, women and children have lost their lives in genocide or mass atrocities. Millions have been tortured, raped or forced from their homes.

The Turko-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane was known for his extreme brutality and his conquests were accompanied by genocidal massacres. William Rubinstein wrote: "In Assyria (1393–4)—Tamerlane ...  killed all the Christians he could find, including everyone in the, then, Christian city of Tikrit, thus virtually destroying Assyrian Church of the East. Impartially, however, Tamerlane also slaughtered Shi'ite Muslims, Jews and heathens." Christianity in Mesopotamia was hitherto largely confined to those Assyrian communities in the north who had survived the massacres. Tamerlane also conducted large-scale massacres of Georgian and Armenian Christians, as well as of Arabs, Persians and Turks.

From the earliest years of colonialism, conquistadores like Vasco Núñez de Balboa would brazenly advocate genocide against the native population. In the 1700s, British militia like William Trent and Simeon Ecuyer gave smallpox-exposed blankets to Native American emissaries as gifts at Fort Pitt, "to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians", in one of the most famously documented cases of germ warfare. While it is uncertain how successful such attempts were against the target population, historians have noted that, "history records numerous instances of the French, the Spanish, the British, and later on the American, using smallpox as an ignoble means to an end. For smallpox was more feared by the Indian than the bullet: he could be exterminated and subjugated more easily and quickly by the death-bringing virus than by the weapons of the white man."

From 1885 to 1908, the Congo Free State in central Africa was privately controlled by Leopold II of Belgium, who extracted a fortune from the land by the use of forced labor of natives. Under his regime, there were 2 to 15 million deaths among the Congolese people.

Beginning in 1915, ethnic Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were rounded up, deported and executed on orders of the government. The combination of massacres, forced deportation marches and deaths due to disease in concentration camps is estimated to have killed more than 1 million ethnic Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks between 1915 and 1923.

In the four years after the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in 1975, between 1.7 and 2 million Cambodians died in the Khmer Rouge’s "Killing Fields."

In 1994 in Rwanda approximately 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered in a carefully organized program of genocide over 100 days, making history as the quickest killing spree the world has ever seen.

In 1992 the Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in areas under their control in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The war in Bosnia claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people.

There are many other examples so the probability is that modern humans exterminated the "subhuman species" of Neanderthals when they entered Europe about 40,000 years ago.

According to Canadian scholar Adam Jones, if a dominant group of people has little in common with a marginalized group of people, it is easy for the dominant group to define the other as subhuman. In the eyes of homo sapiens the Neanderthals were probably seen as subhuman because they actually were subhuman or at least extrahuman, other than human. Hypotheses which suggest that genocidal violence may have caused the extinction of the Neanderthals have been offered by several authors, including Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright. However, several scholars have formed alternative theories as to why the Neanderthals died off, which means there is no clear consensus as to what caused their extinction within the scientific community.

At the present time Homo Sapiens is in the process of wiping out every species on earth including itself because of its addiction to fossil fuels and the resultant global warming that is producing. Oh well, it's been a noble experiment in part.

Off the Top of My Head

Some Thoughts on Evolution

by John Lawrence, August 10, 2019

A more evolved being is to human beings what human beings are to cats. That's it in a nutshell. We know a cat can't do algebra or calculus, but the human mind is capable. Logic would tell us by extrapolation that there might be possibly a more evolved being, whether they exist right now somewhere in the universe or nor, whether human beings could evolve into them or not, whose mind was capable of things which are utterly impossible for human beings to comprehend just as a cat can't possibly comprehend higher math.

Clever Hans was a hose that his owner supposedly had trained to do math. Apparently Hans could add, subtract, multiply and divide. The horse would tap his foot four times, for example, when his owner asked him to add 2 plus 2.The horse was even able to understand German! He belonged to a man called Herr Wilhelm von Osten. Von Osten was a teacher who taught math at a school. He was an amateur horse trainer. Von Osten took his amazing horse around the country demonstrating that he had been able to teach the horse math. Scientists became interested in Clever Hans. The psychologist Carl Stumpf got a group of people together to study what was happening. His assistant Oskar Pfungst was the main investigator. It was discovered that the horse could sense when the owner wanted him to stop tapping as long as he had eye contact with the owner. The conclusion was that the horse didn't really understand math!

So what would a more highly evolved human mind be capable of? Clairvoyance, precognition - extra sensory perception (ESP) in general. Perhaps some humans have already had a mutation in their genes which gives them some of these powers. Edgar Cayce was the most documented psychic of the 20th century. For more than 40 years of his adult life, Cayce gave psychic "readings" to thousands of seekers while in an unconscious state, diagnosing illnesses and revealing lives lived in the past and prophecies yet to come.

Later in life, Cayce would find that he had the ability to put himself into a sleep-like state by lying down on a couch, closing his eyes, and folding his hands over his stomach. In this state of relaxation and meditation, he was able to place his mind in contact with all time and space — the universal consciousness, also known as the super-conscious mind. From there, he could respond to questions as broad as, "What are the secrets of the universe?" and "What is my purpose in life?" to as specific as, "What can I do to help my arthritis?" and "How were the pyramids of Egypt built?" His responses to these questions came to be called "readings," and their insights offer practical help and advice to individuals even today. Cayce accurately diagnosed many peoples' medical problems and either referred them to a doctor or advised a cure. He didn't need to be in the same room with them. He only needed to know their address.

So maybe Cayce had a gene flip that enabled him to have a "universal consciousness." If this mutation spread throughout the human race, we might assume that humans will have evolved to a higher being in the same way that certain gene changes spread among the higher apes which allowed them to evolve from apehood into humans.

The book, "Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain," details much of the research the Russians have done on this subject of paranormal and parapsychological events. The authors present six new chapters of post-Cold War activities. They offer evidence indicating that the Russians have been successful in harnessing psychic energy and show how Russian scientists advised Pentagon officials on controlling the thoughts of David Koresh during the 1993 Waco, Texas standoff. Well, let's ask the psychics how we get rid of war and get universal peace and prosperity. Or how do we solve global warming? That would be really an accomplishment for "universal consciousness."

So while there are individuals capable of harnessing psychic abilities, these abilities have not spread into the gene pool of the whole human race just as, I suppose, that the gene for language was manifested at first only in a few individuals before it spread to encompass the whole human race. It might even be possible for a cat or a horse to evolve into a hypercat or hyperhorse that was capable of doing math. Evidently some hyperevolute humans exist or have existed (Cayce died in 1945 although there is still an institute bearing his name). At the present time most humans simply are incapable of answering questions like "What happens after I die?," What is the ultimate fate of the universe?," What existed before the universe came into being?," and so forth and so on just as a cat is incapable of doing calculus.

Off the Top of My Head

What is the Purpose of Life/Evolution?

by John Lawrence, May 3, 2019

In my opinion the purpose of life is to develop ways and means for all nations and peoples of the earth to live in peace and harmony with each other and with nature. If that doesn't happen, and it doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon, before the earth is destroyed by war, climate change and pestilence, then evolution on planet earth will have reached a dead end and has been a total failure. Somewhere else in the universe, the sun may be shining brightly and people might be getting along, people may have found ways to create peace and to avert war. Their Peace Corps may outnumber their War Corps (plural). Somewhere else in the universe, which consists of trillions of habitable planets, people may have learned their lesson that we need to do our best to ameliorate poverty and inequality, to live in harmony with, instead of trying to dominate, nature and to love one another eliminating hate from the world.

That in my opinion is the purpose of evolution, but as we all know, there are many evolutionary dead ends. There are species that evolve only to die out at some point for a multitude of reasons. Think of the Neanderthals, for example. So like Casey at the Bat, there may be no joy in Mudville, but somewhere in the universe the sun is shining bright - hopefully.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
the band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
and somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
but there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.

Off the Top of My Head

Republican Philosophy: Self Selection for Removal from the Planet

by John Lawrence, February 26, 2018

While Hitler earmarked a particular ethnic group as well as the mentally defective for removal from the planet, the Republican or conservative philosophy lets people self select for removal. That's what the opioid crisis is all about. Republicans are followers of Ayn Rand and Herman Spencer. It's 'survival of the fittest' and devil take the hindermost. As Nixon stated, people should be treated with 'benign neglect.' Hitler treated then with 'malign neglect.' Republicans are equal opportunity employers. They go along with self selected removal from the planet without regard to religion, race, ethnic group or national origin.

As Neitsche and Ayn Rand believed, there would be the 'emergence of the superman.' That was what society should be all about according to them. We have seen the emergence of a superman class lately: billionaires. The economic divide grows greater on a daily basis. The homeless are treated with benign neglect until public health issues force society to do something because unsanitary conditions are impacting the rest of us.

The philosophy of a 'preferential option for the poor' has totally gone by the way side as a 'survival of the fittest' philosophy has become mainstream. Christ's teaching of 'blessed are the meek' has been replaced with 'blessed are the powerful and successful.' Christianity has morphed so that having wealth is an indication of God's favor. Being poor is an indication of lack of moral fiber. The rich, the smart, the beautiful, the ambitious are to be encouraged. Those having merit are to be encouraged. Those lacking merit - the low IQ, the ugly, the weak - are encouraged to self select to leave the planet. Republicans will help them along by encouraging corporations to manufacture the means for their own self removal.

In Germany corporations manufactured the gas that killed people in gas chambers. Here corporations manufacture opioids that are freely available for those who want to remove themselves from the planet. There is only limited space on the planet so the human race will only improve itself if the meritorious survive while those lacking merit self select for removal. Again self selection for removal is open to all on an equal basis without regard to race, religion, ethinic group or national origin.

Off the Top of My Head

We Have Been Given a Great Gift: Our Individual Identities

by John Lawrence

Whether or not we were created by God, the universe, evolution or the Great Whatever, we got here somehow. It's not clear exactly how but in any case we have been given an individual identity and we have free will. We can pretty much, within certain constraints, decide what we are going to do today. This gift may be time limited in that it might end at some point in time just as it had a beginning at some point in time. It doesn't make it any less of a gift if it does end, if it doesn't continue in some other time and space after we die.

If someone gives you a gift, say $10,000, you don't complain that they didn't give you a bigger gift. The gift was limited in its monetary value but it still was a gift to be thankful for. By the same token if the gift of individual identity doesn't continue after we die, it is still a tremendous gift to be grateful for. Life still goes on with other life forms including people and perhaps in other places in the universe. And whether this gift was given to us by God or the Great Whatever, it is still a gift to be thankful for.

The Equivalence Principle plays a big part in science. In the theory of general relativity, the Equivalence Principle as developed by Albert Einstein was that the gravitational force as experienced locally while standing on the Earth is the same as the pseudo-force experienced by an observer in an accelerated frame of reference. I think that the Equivalence Principle as applied to life is that whatever happens to any lifeform after death is the same for all lifeforms.

So if I swat a fly on the wall, thereby causing its life to come to a sudden end, whatever then happens to that fly is the same thing that will happen to me or any other life form after its life ends. But I don't really believe there is a fly afterlife or a fly heaven. I believe individual lives are time limited. It makes that life no less a gift to be thankful for. Rather than saying, but you should have given me more, say gee that was great and thanks for that even if at some point it's over. Same applies to a gift of money or a relationship for that matter.

Even if our individual identity ends, it was still a great gift while it lasted.

The Dance of Death

by Chris Hedges from Truthdig, March 12, 2017

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.

The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.

The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump’s decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.

“Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.”

The Trump appointees—Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and others—do not advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is “a machine for demolishing limits.” There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.

Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant. Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud observed in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” written on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II.
“It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros,” Freud wrote. “But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.”

The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around them. Ernst Juenger captured this “monstrous desire for annihilation” in his World War I memoir, “Storm of Steel.”

A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call “crisis cults.”

Norman Cohn, in “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements,” draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.

“These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it,” Cohen wrote. “But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.”

These movements, Cohen wrote, offered “a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security—even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.

“So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.”

The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society’s demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.
A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call “crisis cults.”

Norman Cohn, in “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements,” draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.

“These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it,” Cohen wrote. “But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.”

These movements, Cohen wrote, offered “a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security—even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.

“So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.”

The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society’s demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.

Effective Altruism: Is It Up To Rich People To Save the World?

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Peter Singer has written a book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (Yale University Press, 2015). Singer has been called "the world's greatest living philosopher" and is currently a Professor at Princeton so we must take his work seriously. Yet I'm bothered by the implications of his work as condensed in an essay: How You Can Do the Most Good: It's Not as Simple as You Think.

He tells about one of his students who, though caring to extreme about the plight of poor people in the world, nevertheless, chose to go to work on Wall Street when he graduated. His reasoning was that he could help the most poverty stricken by dedicating a large amount of his considerable salary to helping them rather than going to work as a volunteer working directly with them in Africa, for instance. A huge amount of money contributed to the right charities would alleviate the conditions of more people than would be helped by a person of meager resources who devoted his working efforts to their cause.

The utilitarian part of me can't argue with this approach to helping the poor. However, I'm bothered by the fact that this guy went to work for the Evil Empire (pardon my hyperbole) in order to do good for others. This isn't exactly the Robin Hood approach. Robin Hood didn't go to work for the devil; he stole from him. To my way of thinking this is an ethically better approach.

I consider many occupations to be unethical including working on Wall Street. To say that a greater good can be accomplished by taking ill gotten gains after contributing to an enterprise's evil activities can't be justified by saying that, on a utilitarian basis, more good can be accomplished than bad created. Singer is saying that those who go into teaching because their passion is helping children would do better by going into a profession in which they could earn far more money and then using a portion of that money to help the uneducated. This is pure nonsense. When taken to extremes he justifies the sacrifice of some people for the greater good of saving a larger number.

For example, suppose you were faced with the proposition that you could earn a million dollars by killing someone. With that million dollars you could help 100 poor children escape poverty. Does that justify killing one person? I don't think so.

Should One's Life Work Be Ethical?

I consider one's life work to be something that should be considered from an ethical viewpoint. There are jobs and occupations which, although legal, are from my viewpoint unethical. Take for example petroleum engineering. There are very high salaries for college graduates in this field and jobs are readily available. But in an age where climate change is being exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels, I consider it unethical to go to work for the fossil fuel industry.

There are other jobs and professions I consider to be unethical and others that I consider ethical. This is just my own personal assessment. Others would disagree, but I consider working for the military-industrial complex unethical because it supports the war industry instead of putting time and energy and money into the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. I consider working in the advertising industry unethical because it exists to convince people to part with their money for the enrichment of corporations while pretending to be concerned about the welfare of the individuals they seek to influence. It promotes "unbridled consumerism" as Pope Francis has said.

The pharmaceutical industry which charges what the market will bear for life saving drugs is clearly unethical. The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired by a former hedge fund manager. The price was immediately raised to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I consider teaching, care giving, nursing, providing services to the local economy such as those provided by tradesmen or craftsmen to be ethical. Factory farms I consider to be unethical; organic farms I consider to be ethical. I could go on creating two lists: ethical and unethical jobs and occupations but I won't.

Other people can make up their own lists. Most Americans would probably consider any legal job or occupation to be ethical. I disagree obviously.

Here is Singer's very persuasive argument:

I met Matt Wage in 2009 when he took my Practical Ethics class at Princeton University. In the readings relating to global poverty and what we ought to be doing about it, he found an estimate of how much it costs to save the life of one of the millions of children who die each year from diseases that we can prevent or cure. This led him to calculate how many lives he could save, over his lifetime, assuming he earned an average income and donated 10 percent of it to a highly effective organization, such as one providing families with bed nets to prevent malaria, a major killer of children. He discovered that he could, with that level of donation, save about one hundred lives. He thought to himself, “Suppose you see a burning building, and you run through the flames and kick a door open, and let one hundred people out. That would be the greatest moment in your life. And I could do as much good as that!”

Two years later Wage graduated, receiving the Philosophy Department’s prize for the best senior thesis of the year. He was accepted by the University of Oxford for postgraduate study. Many students who major in philosophy dream of an opportunity like that—I know I did—but by then Wage had done a lot of thinking about what career would do the most good. Over many discussions with others, he came to a very different choice: he took a job on Wall Street, working for an arbitrage trading firm. On a higher income, he would be able to give much more, both as a percentage and in dollars, than 10 percent of a professor’s income. One year after graduating, Wage was donating a six-figure sum—roughly half his annual earnings—to highly effective charities. He was on the way to saving a hundred lives, not over his entire career but within the first year or two of his working life and every year thereafter.

Should One Sell His Soul to Wall Street in Order to Do Good?

So Singer apparently considers working for Wall Street a more ethical job than being a professor. I don't think so. He doesn't stop to consider the ethically corrupting influence that Wall Street will have on Wage himself who may at any time decide his money will be better spent on his own noncharitable predilections or may decide that selling his soul to Wall Street, even for a good cause, is something he can no longer do.

He doesn't stop to consider how much evil Wage will be participating in simply by doing his job. He doesn't consider the corrosive influence that working in a toxic environment will have on Wage's soul. He doesn't consider that Wage might not be able to tolerate working in that environment for more than a short time like many young people who went to work on Wall Street right after college. In short Wage is selling his soul for a mess of pottage, pottage to be sure that he intends to give away to help others, but pottage gained by losing his soul, his humanity and his integrity nevertheless.

Singer's argument suggests that it's up to rich people to save the world. In fairness rich people do a lot of good through their charities. But it's not an unmitigated good. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done much good in the world which wouldn't have been possible without the success of Microsoft Corporation. The Gates Foundation is not without controversy, however, including their support for GMOs and charter (privatized) schools. Gates and other rich people who have gotten rich off of technology naturally feel that there's a technological solution for every problem.

So is it up to billionaires to do the most good in the world because they possess the most resources? We also must consider that not all billionaires are up to doing good with their money. Many of them use their considerable resources, instead of helping people, to maintain a system of oppression over people lest those people take their resources away from them. That's why we can't trust that billionaires are going to save the world. Many of them are up to making it worse, particularly the plight of the least well off.

An article in Salon says it better:

As H.L. Mencken writes, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve." While some philanthropists support good causes (like Bloomberg’s fight against Big Tobacco), other pet causes are not so humanitarian. While we may applaud the work of Bill Gates, many philanthrocapitalists, like the Adelsons and the Kochs, have decided that their philanthropic venture will be empowering the Ted Cruzes of the world to wreak havoc. Wealth is power, and concentrated wealth is concentrated power. The most benevolent inventions are also the cruelest.

A better approach might be to limit the economic power that can be accumulated by corporations which then ends up in individual hands. Some billionaires do a lot of good in the world; some do bad, but not everyone can be a billionaire. Everyone can aspire to working in an ethical job or occupation. A system that results in the accumulation of economic power by the 1%, no matter how much resultant good comes with it, is not ethical especially when that means that the plight of the lower classes worsens from year to year. A good society would distribute economic well being more equitably and democratically. Then we all wouldn't be so dependent on the noblesse oblige of the rich.

Charity is Good But What About Justice?

Some make a distinction between charity and justice. Charity deals with the immediate needs of desperate people. Justice deals with setting things up so that they don't become desperate in the first place:

Justice directly confronts the challenge of preventing people from ending up in vulnerable situations. What causes over 15 million children in the U.S. to go to bed hungry each night? Why don’t we have universal public health care? Why aren’t public colleges and universities tuition-free like high schools in the U.S. and [colleges in] most western European countries? Why are our public works crumbling and creating unnecessary obstructions for disaster relief (reaching people stranded after hurricanes)?

It is advocacy promoting justice that seeks the prevention of the causes that lead to so much misery, institutional harm, poverty, and the loss of human life and potential. Repairing the wreckage of wars places huge demands on charity. Waging peace and negotiating arms control agreements places huge demands on justice.

Singer says, "Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place." You can't argue with that, but that applies to everyone in the economic spectrum not just to rich people. And many are so hobbled economically that they don't have any spare resources. They need an inflow of charitable or societal resources just to make ends meet. They should not be contributing to charity at all.

If society provided more opportunities for people to do good ^i.e. by transferring resources from the war machine to the Peace Corps for instance, more people could work in ethical occupations and pull themselves and others out of poverty at the same time. Too often, however, what the American society provides is opportunities to work in unethical occupations which are rewarded handsomely while working in ethical occupations is rewarded minimally or not at all. If the budgets of the military-industrial complex and those of the Peace Corps were transposed, a massive movement of those working in ethical occupations would provide a greater force for good than the combined forces of ethical billionaires.

Reliance on billionaires to do good in the world is a return to feudalism where kings were the only forces for good or bad in the world depending on whether they were enlightened despots like Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great or just plain despots like Ivan the Terrible or Caligula.

We must consider whether a society which creates "opportunities" for some people to become obscenely wealthy, even though they can then supposedly turn around and use their money to do good, is as good a society as one which creates opportunities for most people to work in ethical occupations and do good at the same time.

Singer's world view is one where everyone is well off and gives to charity without sacrificing any of their own self-interest at all. They needn't do that because after all they are billionaires and have much more money than they ever could spend on themselves. It's not the real world. It applies to a small fraction of rich people - those who want to use their money for good purposes. They barely, if at all, offset the rich who use their money to perpetuate bad purposes.

Perhaps Wage will find out that he cannot sacrifice his own soul to gain the world even if he gives half of it away.

In an article in Salon Sean McElwee says : Charity is great, but it won't bring real change — and worse, it perpetuates the myth that we need the ultra-rich:

Think of the planet’s best human being. Who are you thinking of? Pope Francis? Your parents? Justin Bieber? According to Business Insider, it’s Mark Zuckerberg. Why? Because he’s planning to donate $1 billion (less than 5 percent of his massive fortune) to charity. While it’s certainly welcome, philanthropy is far more insidious than it appears at first sight. It tends to lead to fawning press coverage, but little in the way of good reform. Worse, it perpetuates the myth that society’s problems can be solved by the rich and powerful. ...

There’s a very real sense in which it would be hard for Zuckerberg to have done less for the poor. After all, he and his rich Silicon Valley friends regularly use their wealth to lobby for policies that would make them even richer — even if in the guise of social responsibility.

Billionaires Do Not Always Use Their Money for Good Purposes

And that's the rub. The rich in addition to their charitable endeavors also use their money to perpetuate the system that made them wealthy in the first place even if that system fosters subjugation and oppression for the vast majority. McElwee writes: "In charity, the rich approach the poor not as equal citizens but rather [as] benefactor and serf. It perpetuates a class society, where the poor and middle class are dependent on the wealthy."

We must also consider the rationale and ethics of a society that makes some people insanely wealthy for inventing things of questionable and even trivial value. For instance, take Snapchat. Snapchat has made its corporate owners, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy fabulously wealthy.  Using the application, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. These sent photographs and videos are known as "Snaps". Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their Snaps after which Snapchat claims they will be deleted from the company's servers.

The main purpose of SnapChat is so users of the application can take pictures of their "junk", send them out and then not have to worry that a prospective employer might view them. In June 2013, Snapchat raised $60 million in a funding round led by venture-capital firm Institutional Venture Partners. According to Forbes, Snapchat’s chief executive Evan Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy, have made it to the 2015 Forbes 400 list. Mr. Spiegel, who is 25, is now the youngest billionaire in the world and currently his net worth sums up to $2.1 billion. Don't tell me that we live in an ethical society when a piece of crap like SnapChat can raise $60 million, make Spiegel a billionaire and poor kids go hungry.

In addition it turns out that Spiegle didn't even invent SnapChat. It was invented by former "friend", Reggie Brown, who was subsequently shut out of the company. This is reminiscent of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg who shut out the Winkelvoss twins, who actually invented Facebook, and later settled with them for $65 million, a large amount to be sure, but not the $35.7 billion Zuckerberg is worth. Long story short, people screw their friends over huge amounts of money. This is an ethical society when things like this can happen and people can make huge amounts of money for crapola?

On May 9, 2013, Forbes reported that Snapchat photos do not actually disappear, and that the images can still be retrieved with minimal technical knowledge after the time limit expires. The Electronic Privacy Information Center consequently filed a complaint against Snapchat with the Federal Trade Commission, stating that Snapchat deceived its customers by leading them to believe that pictures are destroyed within seconds of viewing.

Snapchat eventually settled with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations it deceived users over the amount of personal data it collected and was responsible for a security breach that impacted 4.6 million customers. It will face privacy monitoring for 20 years.

That's the story in a nutshell. Unethical people making huge sums of money in unethical enterprises while the poor and people striving in ethical professions such as teaching and caregiving starve to death. Capitalism, especially as it is currently conceived, manifested and practiced, is unethical. Make no mistake about it: capitalism is not some absolute thing-in-itself that has always existed from time immemorial. It is a moving target, continuously being reinvented and updated to advantage the already rich with every new wrinkle that some financial expert can come up with.

In other words, it evolves and not necessarily in benign ways. Its original purpose, to develop pools of money that could be used in enterprises which would benefit society, has long been forgotten. It allows for despoiliation of the environment, the granting of huge rewards to insiders who come up with stuff that only degrades the culture and the complete neglect of the kinds of enterprises that are necessary to make peace in the world and build a better and stronger society.

Eve Can Dance

By Dr. Carol Carnes

There seem to be two Americas. There is the America of lilt and swing and there is the America of march and control. These are musical references which show how our culture has been influence by the Puritan European reigning in of nature and the African freedom with its joyful expression of all that is natural. It is the contrast between ballroom dance with its precise foot-steps and free style movement which celebrates the whole body.

The young tend to lilt and swing and to rebel against march and control until they discover that lilt and swing do not usually produce a good income! Not in this culture. These references were part of a talk by the late Alan Watts, but I have often thought myself that if we did not have the influence of our Black rhythm culture, we would be marching in lockstep, forever trying to defeat Nature. Racism is the tension between the two impulses: as Watts said, there is a distrust of African American culture in those people who fear freedom. This goes back to old time religious notions of sin and retribution. Of course, today we are all one big American family, but the distinctions are still being made.

Lately I have seen more clearly than ever, the destructive effects of Institutionalized religion which equates with institutionalized masculinity, which has robbed men of the joy of feeling whole and fulfilled. Designed to reign in the people, to control them and to get them in line to march into domination over nature, it has done its job well. As we used to say, it has done a number on us! This is not to denounce devotion, reverence and the very real feeling of a responsive universe. There is a natural spirituality in us that will always come to the forefront as we live in accord with Nature. My stance on religion is about superstition and dogma which have no basis in truth. This is about our fear of being alive and responsible for our experience. We blame a made up evil power for our violence or attribute the cause of suffering to the will of some male God in the sky. Our hearts have been co-opted and our minds have been corrupted.

The feminine aspect of our true nature belongs with the lilt and swing camp. Our hips sway, our bodies are fluid and in tune with the moon. The Feminine is free but she is not out of control. She is in charge of the environment. She is the organizer of families. She is the keeper of the flame. She will dance to the drum, but she is fierce when called to defend her brood. She is desperately needed in our world view, in our policy making, in our decisions for our future. She is desperately needed in our men. Without her, the sacred masculine cannot emerge.

For more about the Sacred masculine check out the writings of Matthew Fox, founder of Creation Spirituality.

Dr. Carol Carnes: Keynote speaker, meditation teacher, mother of two, grandmother of  two, member of the Leadership Council of the Association for Global New Thought. Spiritual teacher of Science of Mind. Honorary member of the Board of Preachers at Morehouse College, MLK Jr. School of Divinity. Co-convenor of three Synthesis Dialogues with HH the Dalai Lama and other world leaders in various  disciplines. www.carolcarnes.com

 

 

Country Club America and the Ghost of Ayn Rand

by John Lawrence

I was startled into wakefulness by the ghost of Ayn Rand, she the author of the Virtue of Selfishness and sundry other solipsistic tomes. Unlike Scrooge, she is not the least bit repentent. She told me of her new concept of Country Club America. Not everyone deserves to be a member. It's sort of a metaphysical walled community in which some people get to join; others are left out. Only the Best, the Brightest and the Most Beautiful can be members. The rest - the homeless, the hoi polloi, the common people, vagabonds, hippies, the proletariat, rabble and riffraff cannot be members.

As for immigration, the basic idea is to only accept the Best, Brightest and Most Beautiful people from all over the world while keeping the commoners out. PhD students, entrepreneurs, people who can start businesses or people bringing with them great wealth are acceptable. Everyone else gets filtered out. No longer will Country Club America accept the poor "huddled masses."

Emma Lazarus wrote "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" The ghost of Ayn Rand made it clear that her followers wanted no homeless, no "wretched refuse" - no cast-offs from the societies from which they emanated. Country Club America didn't want the Worst, the Dimmest the Ugliest. Au contraire, only the Best, the Brightest and the Most Beautiful would be accepted. In fact certain words are to be air-brushed out of Emma Lazarus' famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. In their place, the words "Give me your energetic, your rich, your exceptional students yearning to compete for wordly gain, the best and brightest of your teeming shore. Send these, the gifted, the noble, the beautiful, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden [and I repeat golden] door.”

So I asked what would happen to all those who didn't qualify - those whose imperfections made them less than her demanding criteria required. "Well," she said, "there would be no need for the gulag or concentration camp to get rid of them." She mentioned a concept developed by one of the greatest semantic architects of right wing rhetoric - Richard Nixon. He called it "benign neglect". This is as opposed to "malign neglect" which would include torture, imprisonment, the gulag etc. It's just that the non-qualifiers for Country Club America wouldn't be encouraged in any way. Some of them by dint of their own hard work and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps might some day even hope to actually make it into Country Club America. The rest would be left to their own devices and devil take the hindermost.

Those with money and lots of it automatically qualify for Country Club America because they have proved that they are the best, ipso facto, no matter how they acquired it. Those with genius or near genius IQs also are readily accepted for membership. But since Country Club America is a private club, not all can be expected to join. There are no guarantees.

Model quality women will not find it too hard to get in since the best and brightest men will naturally want to date them and only them. There are already dating sites for men who just want to date model quality women. Their advertising pitch goes somethng like this: why date 4s, 5s and 6s when you can date 8s, 9s and 10s? For men to qualify for admission they must have a net worth of several million dollars and be in the top ranks professionally (and, of course, they must pay), but women get in for free - the right women that is. And then there are the dating sites that are just for the Ivy League. Community college graduates need not apply.

I broke in to argue that civilizations had been built on just the opposite values. In fact much of Western Civilization was built on the values of the Peace Prince who was a champion of the poor and dispossesd. Wasn't it he who said, "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth?"  "No, no," said the ghost of Ayn Rand. "It's just the opposite. Not the meek but the powerful shall inherit the earth. You don't see any meek people who are successful on Wall Street. The Captains of Industry, the entrepreneurs, the upper 1%, they are inheriting the earth, not the meek. Those who start businesses, the job creators, the risk takers - they are not meek. They are self-confident, bold, brash - anything but meek. Meekness is for losers."

Well, I said, this is certainly a departure from the values of "give me your huddled masses" and from the "preferential option for the poor" that one of our great church people opined about. The ghost of Ayn Rand replied. "Yes it is. We espouse a preferential option for the rich. You know the rich got there by outcompeting their peers. They are the winners. They're the ones we want in Country Club America and by extension (since the rest of the world emulates us) in Country Club Earth. In competition there must be winners and losers and to the winners belong the spoils."

"But wouldn't cooperation advance the interests of the human race more than competition?" I asked naively. "Competition leads to war; cooperation leads to peace and to the consideration of all interests equally and to the recognition of everyone's human dignity." "You liberals are always talking about equality when what is really important for the advancement of the human race is the emergence of great men (and women). Nietzsche called it the emergence of the ubermensch. This superior man would not be a product of long evolution; rather, he would emerge when any man with superior potential completely masters himself and gets rid of conventional Christian 'herd morality' in order to create his own values, which are completely rooted in life on this earth. The only way this happens is through competition."

"So how would you deal with global warming, a problem that requires a high degree of cooperation among all the peoples of the earth?" I asked. "It's more important that the Best, the Brightest and the Most Beautiful pursue their own selfish interests than to spend any time worrying about a problem that will mainly create a hardship for the non-Alphas of the world. The rich will always be able to buy their own personal mitigation. Besides global warming has not yet been proven. I don't think it is really happening. It's liberal propaganda."

"It sounds like you want to honor and encourage and support only the rich and powerful and those favored by nature with a great brain or a great body." "Isn't that the way to progress the evolution of the human race? Yes, some people are Alphas, as Aldous Huxley wrote, and the rest are Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. We only want Alphas in Country Club America. The rest don't qualify for admission. They will be filtered out. They are basically takers while the alphas are the makers. Of course we can't in all honesty say any more that they are 'job creators' because all the jobs are being performed by robots these days. Automation has made it unnecessary to have a working class."

"So what happens to all those who are disenfranchised because they aren't sufficiently qualified to make it into Country Club America?," I again asked. "Benign neglect," she repeated. "Don't worry. They won't be tortured or sent to the gulag unless they are caught with illicit drugs. Illicit drugs will be the right of everyone inside Country Club America, but anyone on the outside, they will have to obey the law."

"Everyone needs to compete and then the losers get filtered out. It's important to have a filtering out procedure. Otherwise, the values of the Best, the Brightest and the Most Beautiful get vitiated, compromised, watered down. We won't tolerate anything less than excellence. We are trying to create, well not exactly a master race here, but evolution should favor the highest specimens of humanity we have available. The rest should quietly live out their miserable existences and eventually die off."

The ghost of Ayn Rand was quick to follow up this tirade with "I know what you're thinking, and it's not like that. Country Club America is an equal opportunity privatized American club. We don't have to cater to the least common denominator. However, we are open to all - regardless of race, religion, national origin or ethnicity. We don't discriminate based on the color of your skin or anything else. That other guy, what was his name, tried to just advance the interests of one certain ethnic group while malignantly neglecting certain other ethnic groups. Country Club America is not like that at all. It's just that we have the highest standards of excellence for membership. Not everyone gets in. No pikers here."

"You seem to advocate that society should only encourage and support the Best, the Brightest and the Most Beautiful, but the Peace Prince  advocated for helping the poor, the homeless, the starving. In fact he said that was the only way you could enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Here read this":

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

"What claptrap," the ghost of Ayn Rand replied. "Stuff and nonsense. Nobody believes in that crap any more. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the greatest of these my brethren, then ... inasmuch as ... stuff and nonsense ..."

Her voice trailed away, and then the ghost of Ayn Rand disappeared.

Ayn Rand and The Ideological Basis of Republicanism Circa 2011

by John Lawrence

Paul Ryan is just the latest Ayn Rand aficionado to try to use government to benefit the rich and to denigrate the poor. Former Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, Alan Greenspan, was a huge Ayn Rand aficionado who took a flower arrangement in the shape of a dollar bill to her funeral. But who is Ayn Rand and why is she so influential? Ayn Rand was Russian born. She moved to the US in 1926. Her father's pharmacy was confiscated during the Russian Revolution. Ayn Rand's biggest successes were her novels, the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Her philosophy of extreme egosim and selfishness is solipsistic to the max, bordering on sociopathic. Rand and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche both shared a fondness for "the Superman," the Ubermensch, and eschewed the ordinary Joe Blow. Her philosophy elevated the rich, the powerful, the brilliant, the talented above people who were only average or below average in their capabilities. The merely average she called parasites turning on its head Marx' philosophy which considered the wealthy class the parasites and the middle class the productive workers. To Rand the poor in all aspects were the parasites.

Is it any wonder then that Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan's budget attempts to balance the Federal budget on the backs of the poor while giving tax breaks to the wealthy? Certainly Alan Greenspan attempted the same thing in his advice to President Reagan. A handy device was raising social security taxes which had the effect of balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. Reagan's 1984 tax reform act raised social security taxes by 50% on the self-employed. Rather than putting the $2.5 trillion raised by such a move in a "lock box" for future generations of retirees, it was just spent in the general fund with the result that the Social Security Trust Fund now containes $2.5 trillion of worthless IOUs, which now Republicans don't want to honor. As it turns out, surprise, surprise, it was merely a device to partially balance the budget on the backs of the working class poor without raising taxes on the wealthy. And remember it was Greenspan who got real concerned about inflation if working class wages started going up faster than he thought they should.

Ayn Rand based her main protagonist, Howard Roark, on a notorious serial killer by the name of William Hickman. Hickman kidnapped and killed a 12 year old girl and then extorted a ransom from her father who thought she was still alive. Rand admired Hickman's complete defiance of societal norms and complete disregard for anyone but himself. Rand considered Hickman a "Superman" because he lived only for himslf and had no empathy for anyone else. In other words he was a complete sociopath.

From Alternet:

One reason most countries don't find the time to embrace Ayn Rand's thinking is that she is a textbook sociopath. In her notebooks Ayn Rand worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" she promoted in her more famous books. These ideas were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate "entitlement programs" increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked Atlas Shrugged as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after the Bible.

Ayn Rand's philosophy represented a sort of bastardized Nietzscheism. Rand's philosophy mirrors Nietzsche's adoration of the "Superman" and his amorality as presented in his book, Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche's rejection of Judeo-Christian morality mirrors Rand's atheism. Republican budget whiz Paul Ryan is just a latter day reincarnation of Ayn Rand. He requires his staff to read her books. The lineage goes back to Nietzsche who also inspired Hitler in his rejection of conventional morality and admiration for the Superman whose "will to power" takes matters into its own hands without any consideration for the lives of others.

From Wikipedia:

Nietzsche's growing prominence suffered a severe setback when his works became closely associated with Adolf Hitler and the German Reich. Many political leaders of the twentieth century were at least superficially familiar with Nietzsche's ideas, although it is not always possible to determine whether or not they actually read his work. Hitler, for example, probably never read Nietzsche, and if he did, his reading was not extensive, although he was a frequent visitor to the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and did use expressions of Nietzsche's, such as "lords of the earth" in Mein Kampf. The Nazis made selective use of Nietzsche's philosophy.

What Ayn Rand admired about her heroes was that they were sociopaths who had no regard for the feelings of others:

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and, with a consciousness all his own, he has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

In this she shared the philosophy of Neitzsche and Hitler. The Tea Baggers and Libertarians of today such as Alan Greenspan, Paul Ryan and Clarence Thomas share the same philosophy. It gets translated into a disdain for the poor and the middle class and an admiration of the powerful and the wealthy. This is the ideological basis of Republicanism circa 2011. They have no regard for the unemployed, the homeless, those struggling to make a living. They only admire those who have a "will to power" and are willing to cut corners and take ethical shortcuts to get there, no matter whom they trample in the process. These are the kinds of people Republicans seek to use government to protect and promote. This is at the heart of their efforts to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and turn them over to private interests, the interests of the ubermensch, and take them out of the domain of the pedestrian government bureaucrats.

Ayn Rand wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." So her hero was a man lacking the slightest degree of human compassion or empathy, who used people to the maximum extent, and had absolutely no qualms about the suffering he caused others. Hitlerism exemplified exactly the same philosophy, which was mainly directed at the Jews, although Hitler also killed Germans who were mentally defective or homosexual. Ayn Rand, nominally a Jew herself, was just an equal opportunity persecutor to those at the bottom of the social pyramid, those she considered parasites. Instead of directing her philosophy against one ethnic group or another, her victims were all those who had some degree of human compassion and were not supermen willing to defy all social norms in order to promote their own solipsistic self-interest.

For Rand, Nietzsche and Hitler selfishness is a moral good, altruism a moral weakness. It's all basically the same philosophy. Who are the weak, the parasites? Those on welfare, basically. "What's really unsettling is that even former Central Bank chief Alan Greenspan, whose relationship with Rand dated back to the 1950s, did some parasite-bashing of his own. In response to a 1958 New York Times book review slamming Atlas Shrugged, Greenspan, defending his mentor, published a letter to the editor that ends: 'Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.'" So let there be no doubt where Alan Greenspan, Paul Ryan and other Republicans are coming from. They are out to screw the "parasites" whom they consider to be the lower classes and are out to reward the "supermen," who in today's world are the CEOs, hedge fund managers and the super wealthy. Their common ideological basis is Ayn Rand by way of Nietzsche and cousin to Hitler. By the way when Ayn Rand was dying of lung cancer she went on Social Security and Medicare, a concession of the ubermensch to the fact that we're all finally at the mercy of forces greater than the "will to power."

Is a Belief in No Afterlife Compatible with a Belief in a Benign God ?

by John Lawrence

Could a benign God create a universe in which there is no afterlife for human beings? Or as the French philosopher Ernest Renan said,"O God, if there is one, save my soul if I have one." All of these controversial beliefs are up for grabs because no one has a definitive answer to the question, "Is there life after death" or even "If there is life after death, do I experience it as the same individual I am today or in another form?" Since there are no scientific answers to these questions, the void is filled with belief systems which tend to answer these questions in a definitive manner while offering no proof whatsoever. I would rather consider all the possibilities which can possibly be imagined and then whittle them down to the ones that seem more likely or more palatable or more esthetically pleasing. Belief systems tend to limit a consideration of all possibilities, and confine the believer to only one. But speculation opens the mind to a consideration of all possibilities in the hope that perhaps at least one of them may turn out to be correct, and, if so, the speculator has at least touched upon eternal truth whether or not he has adopted it as his own personal belief. And I don't accept the implicit threats that come with many belief systems of dire consequences unless one accepts that belief system wholeheartedly whether the belief system is political or religious. I reject belief systems that come with such threats, and I will freely examine all possible answers to unanswerable questions and adopt one of them as a belief or none of them as I freely choose. Belief systems that come with implicit threats I consider brainwashing. I can't accept that one must believe something or else there will be dire consequences either in this life or the next.

There are certain subjects for which there is no scientific proof one way or the other and these are subjects either for belief or speculation. For instance, is there a God or no God? There is no scientific proof. People are free to speculate or believe as the case may be. I believe in God because I can't conceive of a universe as multifaceted, complex and miraculous as the one we live in without there having been a Creator. But on the subject of an afterlife I'm not quite so sure. Hamlet said, "To be, or not to be, that is the question." He contemplated being or existing and non-being or non-existing, mainly in earthly terms, not in eternal terms. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book, "Being or Nothingness," which I find impenetrable. However, the subject of this blog post is just that. Since we are alive, we have being. Since we have being, we can contemplate the state of non-being or nothingness which, evidently, we were in before we were born.

I have no recollection of anything before I was born. When I was born, approximately, I went from a state of non-being to a state of being. As a being, I have knowledge of three things: 1) there is a universe that exists,  2) life exists in that universe and 3) I am an individual who is alive in that universe. I did not have this knowledge before I was born. As far as I knew, I didn't exist nor did the universe. Therefore, I was in a state of non-being. Is it possible that after I die, I might return to that state of non-being or non-existence? Yes, it is a definite logical possibility. Or I might retain some sense of being without retaining my individuality. I might not retain awareness as an individual being. Or my existence as a specific individual might have ended but not my existence in some other sense, or, what most religious people believe, my individual existence could continue with or without an earthly physical body. However, I want to focus on the concept of there not being an afterlife, and is this compatible with a belief that there is a benign God?

Life to me is a window in space-time. We are born into the universe. We have a finite number of days of existence in that universe, and then we die. There is a symmetry to the birth death cycle. Practically everything we know of has a birth death cycle. Stars are born and then later they die. The universe itself was born in the Big Bang, and then some day, astronomers assure us, it will die either in a Big Crunch or because it has expanded to the point that it is just a bunch of space junk. One of the arguments for non-existence after death is that of symmetry. Scientists - especially physicists - love the concept of symmetry. So the symmetrical component of birth is death and vice versa. If there were birth but no death, this would be asymmetrical. If there is no Big Crunch to match the Big Bang, this would be asymmetrical. There is symmetry in the concept that we return to that state we were in before we were born after we die. When we are born, we go from a state of non-being or nothingness to a state of being or somethingness. After our window of space-time is up, perhaps we return to the state we were in before we were born - or nothingness. Could a benign God have created such a situation?

I think so. First a state of nothingness is associated with a state of no pain, and, of course, no pleasure as well. But a state of no pain is compatible with a situation created by a benign God. We as human beings might prefer a state of eternal bliss, and an afterlife in which we are either punished or rewarded based on our life as a human being is certainly a logical possibility, has a certain appeal, but not to exist after having existed is better than never having the experience of having existed at all. It's sort of like love: to have loved and lost is better than to never have loved at all. From that perspective perhaps we should be grateful for having had a window of existence in space time rather than to feel cheated if our window of space time, having been created, does not continue ad infinitum. So a God who made it possible for us to have the experience of existence and knowledge of ourselves as individuals and knowledge of the wonders of the universe, in my opinion, certainly is a benign God regardless of whether or not that window in space time comes to an end and we return to a state of nothingness at some point.

Human beings are extremely self-centered and egotistical. That's why we usually don't want to contemplate the possibility of our non-existence after death. We want to believe that we will continue to exist albeit in some altered state, a state that is even better than the one we  experience on earth, commonly known as Heaven. But if we consider Heaven from an anthropoligical point of view, there are two facts that stand out. First, almost every religion contends that only members of that religion have the possibility of going to Heaven. Christians believe that non-Christians don't go to Heaven. Ditto for Muslims etc. So humans are OK with the idea of non-existence after death, or worse, for human beings that don't belong to their religion or human beings whom they don't like. Secondly, to be fair, if there is an afterlife for humans, there should be an afterlife for animals who after all are sentient beings too. But humans are OK with "putting animals to sleep" and that being compatible with a belief in a benign God. Humans are OK with a belief in non-existence or nothingness for animals once they die although some humans who are extremely attached to their pets do believe in an afterlife at least for their pets.

But to be consistent, if there is an afterlife for human beings, there should also be an afterlife for all individuals of whatever species. This leads to a belief that the universe would have to be replicated on another plane, as it were, and get messier and messier as time went on. The overcrowding and running out of resources we are experiencing on our planet would be nothing compared to the overcrowding in the afterlife. However, as miraculous as the universe and everything in it is, it would be entirely possible for such a God that created it to also have created an alter universe in which all beings that had existed on earth could continue to exist in some form. It is logically possible but not esthetically neat. Esthetically, the symmetry of life and death, of being and nothingness, is much more appealing. The other thing is that, if humans have eternal life, they would be in some sense putting themselves on the same level with God. From an esthetical point of view, God, the Creator of the universe and of all life within it, should be the only One to have eternal life. His creations should not have eternal life just because they are not gods; they are the creations of a God. The concept of one God or monotheism is esthetically most compatible with the belief that only that Being is eternal and that all other created beings ascend from nothingness to being and then, after their window in space time is up, descend again to that state from which they started, that is, from being to nothingness.

I think that it is humans' egocentricity that leads them to believe in an afterlife for themselves but not necessarily for others. Humans don't want to contemplate that there may be a limitation to their own exsistence. They don't want to contemplate that they may indeed become nothing although we can certainly imagine what non-existence was like since that was the state we were in before we were born. Before we were born, we had no idea that there was a universe with living beings including our parents in it, and yet the contemplation of that fact doesn't cause us great grief. So if we think about it, we can certainly comprehend what the experience of nothingness or non-being is. It is that state that we were in before we were born. And, if that is the state we return to after we die, we certainly are farther ahead than if we had never been born at all.

Another thing is that "life goes on". If we go into a state of nothingness when we die, there are others who are still living to carry on the human quest whatever that is. There are our children if we are lucky enough to have had them. We want them to have a good life. Our love for them can even exceed our love for our own life. The fact that some day they will die too did not deter us from having them. By extension we want others to have a good life too. The idea of progress, the idea that life and society are perfectable and can be made pleasant and pleasurable for subsequent generations is a joy in itself although not a foregone conclusion. We can imagine a day when there is Peace on Earth and all people cooperate to enjoy earth's bounty rather than compete to gather more of that bounty for their individual selves. We imagine this is what Heaven, if there is one, is like: people cooperating and sharing rather than competing for scarce and even non-scarce resources. The fact that our life on earth is limited in scope is not a deterrent to the idea that our life here is worthwhile and that we can make a difference whether or not we continue to exist after death. The fact that our life is limited in space time puts the emphasis on what we do while we are here. It puts the focus on the fact that we should make the best use of our time and energy since at some point we won't have any more of either. It puts the focus on the fact that we as individuals are not the be all and end all of the universe. It makes us less solipsistic, less egocentric and more altruistic. It puts us in the position of wanting to make the world a better place for our children, grandchildren and others rather than having lived just for our own gratification.

Which brings me to the subject of Pascal's wager. Pascal said that we really don't know whether or not God exists. But if we believe that God doesn't exists and it turns out He does we will have lost everything. However, if we act as though or believe that God exists and he does we will have gained eternal life. If it turns out He doesn't exist after believing He does, we will not have lost much. Well, Pascal's wager assumes that it is very important to God whether or not we believe in him. I contend that it doesn't make that much differfence to God, if He exists, whether we believe in Him or not. God's ego is big enough that He's not offended if we don't believe in Him. So belief, in and of itself, is not the most important consideration. This shoots Pascal's wager in the head and makes it seem ridiculous. If God takes you in after death whether or not you believe in Him, Pacal's assumptions are moot, and you will have spent your life efforting in a way that, all things otherwise being equal, you would have preferred not to have had to. That's the downside.

Another argument against the importance of believing in God is that Jesus Christ, when asked by His disciples how they were to get into Heaven, didn't even mention that they had to believe anything. Instead He responded as in Matthew 25:

Matthew 25:31-46 (New International Version, ©2011) The Sheep and the Goats     31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.    34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’    37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’    40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’    41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’    44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’    45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’    46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Well, when it comes to getting into Heaven, Jesus did not mention one word about belief. It was all about doing. Has Christianity been barking up the wrong tree for 2000 years? If getting into Heaven is predicated on "helping the least among us," how does cutting off government programs that help the poor bode for the chances of Republicans who are determined to do so? And these are the very ones who for the most part claim to be Christians? The above Biblical passage puts Pascal's wager in a different light. To cover one's bases one better have done something to help the poor. The quote, "I was a stranger and you did not invite me in" might have been translated as "I was homeless and you did not invite me in." The homeless are certainly in today's world among "the least of these my brethren."

So going back to original Biblical sources, it would seem that, if there is an afterlife, a belief in God has nothing to do with it at least according to Jesus. What is important is what one does to help out the poor and less fortunate. But to answer my original question, I believe that a benign, even a loving, God could have set things up in such a way that there is no afterlife, that we go back whence we came into the same state we were in before we were born into a state of nothingness, that, when we die, the lights simply go off and that's it. We had no awarenes of what went on before we were born, and we may have no awareness of what goes on after we die. So unlike Hamlet who contemplated continuing to exist or to be or the non-continuation of his existence, particularly his existence as a living being, when we contemplate the answer to the question, "What happens after we die?", the truthful answer is, "Nobody knows." But to extend Pascal's wager, to be on the safe side, action to help the less fortunate is more important than what one believes.

Evolution and Creationism Not Incompatible?

Evolution Presupposes Design, So Why the Controversy?

by Ervin Laszlo

Systems philosopher, integral theorist, concert pianist

Posted: April 15, 2010 04:17 PM

The debate among conservative Christians, Muslims, and Jews (the "creationists") and natural scientists and the science-minded public (the "evolutionists") centers on biological evolution. But on a deeper level, it concerns the universe in which life has evolved -- or in which it was created. And, as I will argue, on this level there is no contradiction between design and evolution: both are equally needed to explain the facts.

At first glance, the scientific community -- and anyone who believes that science can tell us something about the nature of reality -- is compelled to reject the hypothesis that all organisms are the way they are because they were designed to be that way. But the creationists question that the stupendously varied panoply of life arose from mutations in the genome occurring by chance with the resulting organisms fitting by chance into environments where they can reproduce better than their predecessors. Such a chance-mutation and lucky-environmental-fit process is surely too "hit or miss" to have created the complex web of life in the biosphere. The theory that affirms it is bound to be false.

However, at the cutting edge of science, the theory of evolution doesn't rely on random serendipity. That view marks the classical Darwinist position, still championed by a few (though always fewer) mainline biologists. Richard Dawkins, for example, insists that the living world is the result of processes of piecemeal trial and error, without deeper meaning and significance. Evolution happens, but there is no purpose and meaning to it.

Take cheetahs, said Dawkins. They give every indication of being superbly designed to kill antelopes. The teeth, claws, eyes, nose, leg muscles, backbone, and brain of a cheetah are all precisely what we should expect if God's purpose in creating cheetahs was to maximize deaths among antelopes. At the same time, antelopes are fast, agile, and watchful, apparently designed so they can escape cheetahs. Yet neither the one feature nor the other implies creation by design: this is just the way nature is. Cheetahs have a "utility function" to kill antelopes, and antelopes have a utility function to escape cheetahs. Nature itself is indifferent to this game. This is a world of blind physical forces and genetic replication where some get hurt and others flourish. It has precisely the properties we would expect it to have if there were no design, no purpose, and no evil and no good in the world, only blind indifference.

If a Designer is responsible for the way the living world works, He/She would have to be at best indifferent to what comes about in that world, or at worst a sadist who enjoys blood sports. It's more reasonable, according to Dawkins, to hold that the world just is, without reason and purpose. The way it is results from random processes played out within limits set by fundamental physical laws. The idea of design is superfluous. Classical Darwinists echo French mathematician Pierre Laplace, who is reputed to have said to Napoleon that God is a hypothesis for which there is no longer any need.

Confronted with the classical theory, creationists are justified in pointing out that it's extremely improbable that all we see in the world of life, ourselves included, should be the result of chance processes governed by impersonal laws. The idea that everything evolved by blind chance out of common and simple origins is just theory, they say. The world is more than a random assembly of disjointed elements; it exhibits meaning and purpose. This implies design.

The creationist position would be the logical choice if -- but only if -- scientists would persist in claiming that the evolution of living species is a product of two-fold serendipity. But at the cutting edge, scientists no longer claim this. Post-Darwinian biologists recognize that the evolution of species is far more than the chance processes classical Darwinists say it is. It must be more, because the time that was available for evolution would not have been sufficient to generate the complex web of life on this planet merely by trial and error. Mathematical physicist Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the probabilities and came to the conclusion that they are about the same as the probability that a hurricane blowing through a scrap-yard assembles a working airplane.

Leading-edge scientists realize that the evolution of organic species is an orderly, highly coordinated process, even if it's not mechanistic and deterministic. The evolution of the living world is part of the great wave that created particles from the underlying virtual-energy and information field misleadingly called "vacuum" (and is better called unified field, nuether, or Akashic field). The wave unfolded in the cosmos by structuring particles into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into macromolecules and cells, cells into organisms, and organisms and populations of organisms into local, regional, and continental ecologies.

The wave of evolution could only have unfolded in a universe where the fundamental laws and constants are finely tuned to permit the emergence of complexity. Ours is such a universe. Physicists know that even a minute difference in these laws and constants would have foreclosed the possibility of life forever.

Our universe is staggeringly fine-tuned to the creation of systems of higher and higher orders of complexity, differentiation, and integration. That such a universe would have come about by chance is astronomically improbable. According to quantum cosmology, some 1 x 10⁵⁰⁰ (1 followed by five hundred zeros) universes could exist physically, but only a handful could give rise to life. That our life-supporting universe would have come about by a random selection from this enormous set of possible universes is a zillion times more improbable than that living species would have come about by random mutations. The great wave of evolution requires highly harmonized and coordinated processes in all its domains.

In the final count the evolution of life presupposes intelligent design. But the design it presupposes is not the design of the products of evolution; it's the design of its preconditions. Given the right preconditions, nature comes up with the products on her own.

The debate between creationists and evolutionists would be better focused on the origins of the universe than on the origins of life. Could it be that our universe has been purposefully designed so it could give rise to the evolution of life? For creationists, this would be the logical assumption. Evolutionists could not object: evolution, being an irreversible process, must have had a beginning, and that beginning must be accounted for. And our fine-tuned universe is entirely unlikely to have come about by chance.

So the creationist/evolutionist controversy really is pointless. Design is a necessary assumption, because chance doesn't explain the facts. But evolution is likewise a necessary assumption, for given the way this universe works, the evolution of complexity is a logical and by now well-documented consequence. Therefore the rational conclusion is not design or evolution. It's design for evolution.

Then why the controversy?

How the Democrats Blew It

by John Lawrence

They failed to recognize that, with a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate, they could have passed whatever legislation they wanted. Instead, they started off with a watered down approach to health care. They ruled out single payer from the start. They tried to be bi-partisan with a party that was absolutely committed to not being bi-partisan with them. They should have started with a very simple concept, a concept the American people could understand and appreciate: a Medicare buy-in available to all. They should have campaigned on it and then followed through in short order and enacted it into law. It's a concept so simple that the low information American voters, the bulk of them, could understand it. Instead of 2000 pages of sausage making and mish mash, a Medicare buy-in for all could have been expressed in one page and could have been voted into law in a matter of weeks! It wouldn't have required anyone to choose Medicare over private insurance so it wouldn't have been coercive. They could have kept their private insurance if they wanted to.

Instead, Obama and the Democrats went out of their way to show deference towards the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies and American "tradition." They should have used their political power effectively instead of trying to be nice to everybody. They should have drawn a distinction betweeen their philososphy and that of the Republicans. Instead they came up with a complex bill that the American public could not understand all the ramifications of and it took too damn long. The fact that it took too long allowed the Republicans, in the final analysis, to scuttle it by a stroke of fate. They had already expressed out loud the hope that some Democrat would die thereby denying the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority. It turned out that a Democrat did die (Ted Kennedy), and this eventually did deny them a filibuster-proof majority after a Republican was elected in his place. The more time that went on, the more likely it was that something would happen that would cause the Democrats to be defeated. The lesson here is that the Democrats squandered their political power, time and energy instead of using it effectively.

If the Democrats had pushed through a "Medicare for all" bill soon after Obama's election, they would have had a quick major success upon which to build. They then could have gone on to build on that success. Instead, they frittered away time and time is money and in this realm time is political power. They let the Republicans delay and delay when they had no intention of helping them with this legislation. Their only intent was defeat the legislation and if they couldn't do that, to water it down, vitiate and undermine it. A failure to recognize what was going on and let themselves be snookered by the Republicans is their major failure. They failed to recognize that the Republicans didn't give a hoot about "helping the American people" because the Republican belief is that the only way to help the American people is to reduce taxes and to deregulate. They believe that helping American corporations and eliminating social programs is the way to help the American people. They believe that privatizing everything including health care is the way to help the American people. Since the Democrats don't believe this, they should have drawn the distinction more poignantly instead of making believe that the Republicans could have been drawn into a bipartisan agreement. They made believe that the Republicans would join them in their effort to help the American people directly instead of via the Republican vision of helping them by throwing them a few crumbs from the corporate table.

The Democrats allowed everyone to be exhausted by an interminable legislative process resulting in a watered down health care bill that would have passed if only it hadn't been for Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts. How ironic that it was Ted Kennedy's seat, vacated by his death, a man who had fought for health care his entire life, that would doom the health care bill that had consumed so many man hours of Congressional time. Think of all that might have been accomplished if a "Medicare for all" bill had been passed immediately, so that all the Congressmen could have gone on to other things like jobs, for example, having built on their success with health care. Now instead, Obama is in the position of trying to build something on failure. He's in the position of having to beg the Republicans for every little thing he wants to accomplish, and he'll get nowhere with that because the Republicans have already shown that they don't want to compromise. The only compromise they'll accept is capitulation. So just as Clinton was dictated to by Newt Gingrich, Obama is being set up to be dictated to by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. The Republicans, by virtue of the filibuster rule, are in the position to deny every bit of legislation that the Democrats put forth. So not only will they fail at health care, they will fail at job creation, at financial regulation and anything else. Their only possible pretense of success is to do what Clinton did and pass a Republican agenda.

The Democrats don't understand that the Republicans are diametrically opposed to their agenda, and besides their main goal is to defeat the Democrats, not to help the American people and certainly not to help the middle and lower classes. They are elitists who only represent the wealthy and the corporations. That should be absolutely clear. Instead the Democrats played this game where they pretended that the Republicans were really nice guys, and, if they were just nice to them, the Republicans could be won over to do the right thing. How wrong could they be? So all the talk about health care being Obama's waterloo turned out to be right. By a stroke of fate, the Republicans have defeated the Democrats. All the "fight" talk notwithstanding, Obama doesan't have a fighting chance of getting anything passed because it all has to go through the Senate where the Republicans will filibuster it. So it's game over for the Democrats. They've proved themselves to be ineffectual when they had all the power that the American political system is capable of bestowing. The American people like a winner, and by frittering away their time and energy over health care instead of passing a simple plan immediately - Medicare for all who wish to buy into it - they set themselves on a course for defeat.

So the Democrats now have two choices. Obama can try to "triangulate" as Clinton did. This means he will give the Republicans most of what they want in return for a few crumbs from the table. But this will not work this time as it arguably worked for Clinton because the Republicans smell blood in the water, and their main goal is to defeat Obama and the Democrats. The elections are too close - later this year. The Republicans are much more vile and vindictive now than they were even when Clinton was President. Besides Obama's impulse was to triangulate even when he and the Democrats had all the power and didn't need to. By giving up single payer immediately, Obama was "triangulating" even when he didn't have to. So why should the Republicans now give him anything even a few crumbs from the table. Instead they will pile on showing Obama no mercy. Obama's only choice now is simply to challenge the whole system, the system which has elevated the filibuster to the dominating and paramount element of American politics. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the filibuster this power. In fact there is nothing in the Constitution about it at all. The intent of the Founding Fathers was that majority rule should be the deciding factor in both the House and the Senate. So now the Democrats have a choice. Do they really fight and attack the very legitimacy of the filibuster or do they "play fight", talk tough, pass numerous bills through the House and have them defeated in the Senate by Republican filibusters with the Democrats acting like "nobody could have predicted that the Republicans would filibuster all these bills." It's a direct analogy to Lucy taking away the football just before Charlie Brown goes to kick it again and again and again.

The Republicans will even act like they want to be bipartisan, they want to participate in the sausage making process. Why? So they can fritter away more of the Democrats' time and energy in an enervating, self defeating process. Their calculation is that the Democrats are too wimpy to really challenge the system, and that, when they take power again, the Democrats will not filibuster them because they'll want to be "helpful" and "responsible." That's why they say "let's start over" with health care. After dealing the Democrats one huge defeat over health care, they'd like nothing better than to deal them a second huge defeat with the same issue! They'd like nothing better than to pound the wimps into the ground. After the Republicans take over, corporatism will have totally defeated any semblance of democracy in America. The process begun by Ronald Reagan will have been completed. The American middle class will have been turned into a nation of neo-serfs indebted to their corporate masters. Money in politics has already won the day due to the recent Supreme Court decision. That and the Democrats imminent defeat is all the corporatists need to seal the progressives' doom.

But, the Democrats, should they choose to do so, could fight to defeat the filibuster rule, and then use their majorities in both Houses to power through the legislation that they favor including health care, jobs and financial regulation. They could use reconciliation and even the nucear option, but they're probably too wimpy to actually challenge the system. They could make the Republicans stay on the Senate floor and talk 24/7 if they want to filibuster, make them pee into a bucket and eat take out pizza. But they're too wimpy to do that. They have indulged the Republicans with their willingness to try and be bipartisan and this has only served to defeat them. Obama has tried to be Mr. Nice Guy and the Republicans have used this to defeat him. The Democrats' hesitance to use their political power full bore has redounded to the benefit of the Republicans who would never make that mistake. In short the Democrats have learned nothing from their opponents. Instead they've tried to be nice to an opponent who is dead set on defeating them and winning political power. Now the Republicans smell blood in the water. They're circling Obama like a pack of wolves. They've used him to bail out the bankers and the financial elites. Now that he wants to bail out the middle class, they've got no use for him. They've got him where they want him. Obama has been snookered.

American and European Values

John,

You correctly say we must fix our values first .... related to many things I might add. This is the thrust of my earlier writings about merging the "I" (Individual or Me Interests) with the "We" (Community or Common Interests) in our society .... that for so long have been guiding Europe with the binding human value, "We are all in this life together." This outlook does not translate into a loss of liberty and freedom or "patent 'socialism"  for Europeans as so many Americans are automatically inclined or  programmed to think .... particularly whenever judging the role government plays or may play in fundamental change affecting the betterment of the whole society. Our discourse -- rather than being trapped by pure rote dogma -- requires a willingness to pause long and look at ourselves in the mirror and ask what are we doing and saying to each other .... a self-examination and shared critical spirit that Europeans are quite comfortable engaging .... a cultural inheritance of "I am because we are," an integral unifying value Europeans have evolved to universally respect.

Our US overlapping Federal  vs. 50-State government systems form a dynamic complexity of varied and constantly changing political colors, different economic well-being, different laws and social services, different taxes and constitutional restrictions on raising taxes and limiting budget deficits .... all creating challenging, conflicting pressures on overall system harmony, continuity, and even-handedness in these rapidly changing times.

In confronting this reality, we Americans seem unable to have an objective, open, reasoned discussion of the obvious breakdowns afflicting our social-economic model and ultimately our common good. We can't seem to exploit nor merge the best of our conservative and liberal traditions. Discussion of almost anything descends to a culture of winning the argument or issue at all sacrifice of truth and logic, exacerbated by blanket ideological name calling (often expressed in ugly tones and demeaning barbs), e.g., "socialism, big government, disregard for the poor and common folk, tax and spend, loss of liberty and freedom, wild defense spending hawks, trickle down benefits, death panels for Grandma under a public health care option," etc., etc.. We are stuck in this deep cliche liberal-conservative purity test dialectic whereby any new idea coming forward is immediately politically degraded and labeled as not passing passing one's conjured up ideological litmus test.

This cultural pattern has been making a mockery of our creativity, constructive compromise, civil cooperation and common sense values in approaching serious internal and external problems .... where in these modern, complex times a healthy sensible balance between the "I and WE" aspects of our co-existence is a sine qua non.  Until this culturally unproductive dialectic and ineffective policy making changes, we will remain prisoners of our purist ideological values, fears and greed .... and of the propagandistic pundits promoting them.
Regards,
Frank Thomas   

Great Ideas from Michael Moore

Published on Thursday, October 22, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Michael Moore's Action Plan: 15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now

You've Seen the Movie -- Now It's Time to ACT!

by Michael Moore

Friends,

It's the #1 question I'm constantly asked after people see my movie: "OK -- so NOW what can I DO?!"

You want something to do? Well, you've come to the right place! 'Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system.

Here they are:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people's homes are now truly worth -- and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies -- you name it. If a company's primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by -- and the first rule is "Do no harm." The second rule: The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don't contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here's a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors' de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete's sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!

FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent -- or even a candidate from another party -- if they don't do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!

2. Take over your local Democratic Party. Remember how much fun you had with all those friends and neighbors working together to get Barack Obama elected? YOU DID THE IMPOSSIBLE. It's time to re-up! Get everyone back together and go to the monthly meeting of your town or county Democratic Party -- and become the majority that runs it! There will not be many in attendance and they will either be happy or in shock that you and the Obama Revolution have entered the room looking like you mean business. President Obama's agenda will never happen without mass grass roots action -- and he won't feel encouraged to do the right thing if no one has his back, whether it's to stand with him, or push him in the right direction. When you all become the local Democratic Party, send me a photo of the group and I'll post it on my website.

3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year -- or, better yet, consider running for office yourself! You don't have to settle for the incumbent who always expects to win. You can be our next representative! Don't believe it can happen? Check out these examples of regular citizens who got elected: State Senator Deb Simpson, California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall, Tempe, Arizona City Councilman Corey Woods, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Chris Danou, and Washington State Representative Larry Seaquist. The list goes on and on -- and you should be on it!

4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there's more of us than there are of them!). Make some noise, have some fun, get on the local news. Place "Capitalism Did This" signs on empty foreclosed homes, closed down businesses, crumbling schools and infrastructure. (You can download them from my website.)

5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth -- so you have to do it! Start a blog! Start a website of real local news (here's an example: The Michigan Messenger). Tweet your friends and use Facebook to let them know what they need to do politically. The daily papers are dying. If you don't fill that void, who will?

FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:

1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.

2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one -- the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.

3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.

4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run. Here's how to do it (more info here). Nothing is more American than democracy, and democracy shouldn't be checked at the door when you enter your workplace. Another way to Americanize your workplace is to turn your business into a worker-owned cooperative. You are not a wage slave. You are a free person, and you giving up eight hours of your life every day to someone else is to be properly compensated and respected.

5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she's right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, "Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants"). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month. I know this sounds like I've turned into your grandma, but, dammit, take a good hard look at Granny -- she's fit, she's rested and she knows the names of both of her U.S. Senators without having to Google them. We might do well to listen to her. If we don't put our own "oxygen mask" on first (as they say on the airplane), we will be of no use to the rest of the nation in enacting any of this action plan!

I'm sure there are many other ideas you can come up with on how we can build this movement. Get creative. Think outside the politics-as-usual box. BE SUBVERSIVE! Think of that local action no one else has tried. Behave as if your life depended on it. Be bold! Try doing something with reckless abandon. It may just liberate you and your community and your nation.

And when you act, send me your stories, your photos and your video -- and be sure to post your ideas in the comments beneath this letter on my site so they can be shared with millions.

C'mon people -- we can do this! I expect nothing less of all of you, my true and trusted fellow travelers!

Yours,
Michael Moore
[email protected]
MichaelMoore.com

Einstein and Socialism

Einstein did not hesitate to describe himself as a socialist. Thus the greatest thinker in the history of mankind would be denounced today by the right wing fringe who are in the business of demonizing the word "socialism" just as they denounced the word "communism" several decades ago. With Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, anyone thought to be a "communist" was denounced, blacklisted or worse. Little thought was given to the meaning of these words let alone their manifestation in actual political systems. The Soviet Union in the 20th century bore little resemblance to communism by their own admission just as the United Staes in the 21st century bears little resemblance to democracy. The denunciation of "communism" amounted to little more than school yard name calling. So rather than demonizing words and ideas, a better approach would be to criticize manifestations of those words and ideas and to discuss how they measure up or fall short of their ideals.

Einstein wrote an essay "Why Socialism" which appeared in the May 1949 issue of Monthly Review. Here is an excerpt from that essay:

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society. The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals. For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product. Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism. Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before. This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured? Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo ...

With all the irresponsible banter by right wing talk show hosts declaring Obama a socialist, does anyone stop and think - well, what's so bad about being a socialist and what does it mean to be a socialist and can one admire the ideals of socialism without being a socialist. And if the greatest thinker of all time was a socialist, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to demonize and dismiss socialism. But generating hysteria about communism or socialism or liberalism is grist for the mill of putting money in right wing talk show hosts' pockets. Their stock in trade is convincing poor people to espouse policies that only work in the interests of the rich. There is a whole genre of psychology that works towards this goal backed by huge private wealth and right wing think tanks. Part of the psychology is to demonize certain catch words like communism or socialism or "government takeover". Do you want a government takeover of the health care system? No, if you characterize it that way. But they're in the business of characterizing and defining issues in self serving ways - ways that get the little people behind their agenda.

There is no intelligent discussion of capitalism or socialism or communism or any other ism by the demagogues of the airways or the Congressional halls. Their efforts are directed towards convincing people to back their agenda, and their agenda is the agenda of rich powerful interests that then amply reward the spokesmen who are able to convince poor people to support the interests of the rich. Einstein was named Time magazine's Person of the Century in 1999. It is not an understatement that all the yahoos denouncing socialism today could not collectively hold an intellectual candle to Einstein, but they follow the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck who are intellectual lightweights and demagogues.

Let's consider some of Einstein's beliefs as espoused in the above essay. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society. For Einstein the highest calling was to make a positive contribution to society not to pursue self-interest or profit as right wing demagogues would have us believe. The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. So Einstein believed that capitalism was evil or at least in its extreme forms it was evil. One might say he believed unfettered, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism was evil - pretty extreme words from mankind's greatest thinker. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Have we not seen in the recent recession the manifestation of these sentiments? And those responsible for the recent economic meltdown are resuming their work as if nothing really ever happened thus guaranteeing future meltdowns down the road. A huge increase in ambient unemployment will be the legacy of the recent meltdown since all that was considered vital was to get the banks functioning again - not to come to the aid and assistance of individuals and families.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. Does this not say a lot about the values and mores inculcated into the average American? Combine this with a military ethic derived from father to son traditions of military service, and you get an unrelenting set of rigid attitudes that comprise the American character. American jingoism, exceptionalism and triumphalism goes unchallenged except for the fact that other societies have recently been more successful in meeting the needs of their citizens and the fact that the initial locus of the economic meltdown was in the US. The US' preaching about the virtues of unfettered capitalism suddenly sound hollow to the rest of the world. Our demonization of communism has sudenly become muted as we cozy up to Communist China who has become our banker. What a superb irony: a country we formerly denounced as our nemesis because of its communist system has become a country we are now economically indebted and beholden to. Capitalists have become indebted to communists! What a ridiculous irony in the theater of the absurd otherwise known as human history!

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society. Einstein made it absolutely clear that he believed capitalism which glorified self-aggrandizement and individual success should be replaced by a system that emphasized individual responsibility to one's fellow man. Work would be distributed in a rational manner and a livelihood would be guaranteed to every man, woman and child. That says it all. Of course, not even Einstein could lay out a blueprint of how this was to be accomplished. But in his ideal society human centeredness would replace the centrality of banks. What exists in the US today is a combination of the military-industrial complex Eisenhauer warned us about and a financial sector comprised of banks that are too big to fail, and, therefore, must take precedence over mere citizens. The welfare of its citizens is merely an afterthought for high government officials. The main thing is to take care to see that the banks don't fail. What happens to individuals who lose jobs, homes and families is of no immediate concern. The conventional thinking is that that will all take care of itself once the banks are functioning well again. This is simply the tail wagging the dog. Banks are supposed to serve people - not the other way around. Note that Einstein replaces "patriotism" with "responsibility for his fellow men."

In the final analysis, Einstein was right. That's why right wing demagoguery is so strident about demonizing the word: "socialism." Rather than dispassioned discussion of the merits of various economic systems, poor people are convinced by very clever people with tons of financial backing to support policies which work to their disadvantage and to the advantage of those who profit the most from the capitalist system.

Wilhelm Reich, Orgone Energy, Dark Matter and Spontaneous Generation

Wilhelm Reich had a theory that a life energy, what he called orgone energy, permeated the universe. He invented a device called an orgone accumulator to  concentrate this energy and then a person could sit inside it and reap the healthful benefits. He claimed that it could cure disease and make a person more healthy, vital and full of energy. Later outgrowths of his work were bioenergetics, Rolfing and primal therapy. Reich never claimed that orgone energy was a precursor of life or that it gave rise to life. Other related claims for life energy or spiritual energy are the Chinese concept of qi or chi, the Indian Chakra, the Japanese concept of Reiki. There are also many other related concepts.

Charles Darwin invented neither the concept of evolution nor the concept of the "spontaneous generation" of life. Others before him including Lamarck also believed in it.

Darwin was not the first to develop a theory of evolution. More than 50 years before him the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that the various species had not been created in their current forms all at once, as was commonly believed, but had evolved through time by natural processes. He also embraced the principle of spontaneous generation propounded by Aristotle: Living things came into being directly from nonliving matter. Lamarck supposed this occurred on a minute scale unobservable to human eyes.

The general idea is that life had to come into being from non-life or be spontaneously generated. Another term for this is abiogenesis. This theory as well as others are concerned with the origin of life on earth from a primal soup. None of these theories postulate a universal life energy that permeates the entire universe and is a precursor for the development of life wherever circumstances are propitious such as on the planet Earth. The purpose of this blog entry is to propose such a universal precursor, and, I think, proof of it would have to be sought at the quantum level. Is there such a field as quantum biology? That's what I'm proposing. In fact it might be related to the dark mass/energy which makes up a considerable part of the universe and has physicists stymied. There may be some particle of mass/energy similar to a quark which is ubiquitous in the universe (as is microwave background radiation) and is capable of combining with "physical" particles such as quarks and electrons to form elementary life forms. Nothing like this has ever been observed because biologists are only looking at the molecular level. They need to be looking at a level many orders of magnitude smaller, the level of quantum physics rather than the level of molecular biology.

Physicists have yet to observe a Higgs boson or a graviton although they think they know so much about the fundamental particles. They have no idea what dark matter or energy is. If you have a scientific mentality, you would have to believe that life is capable of not only existing anywhere in the universe where conditions are favorable, but could come into being by natural means anywhere in the universe. For that to be the case, there must be one or more precursors that are ubiquitous and I speculate that they would be similar to the fundamental particles and might be incorporated into the Standard Model, which is a listing of all the particles and forces known to physicists.

Strictly speaking, the term particle is a misnomer because the dynamics of particle physics are governed by quantum mechanics. As such, they exhibit wave-particle duality, displaying particle-like behavior under certain experimental conditions and wave-like behavior in others (more technically they are described by state vectors in a Hilbert space; see quantum field theory). Following the convention of particle physicists, we will use "elementary particles" to refer to objects such as electrons and photons, with the understanding that these "particles" display wave-like properties as well. All the particles and their interactions observed to date can be described by a quantum field theory called the Standard Model. The Standard Model has 40 species of elementary particles (24 fermions, 12 vector bosons, and 4 scalars), which can combine to form composite particles, accounting for the hundreds of other species of particles discovered since the 1960s. The Standard Model has been found to agree with almost all the experimental tests conducted to date. However, most particle physicists believe that it is an incomplete description of Nature, and that a more fundamental theory awaits discovery. In recent years, measurements of neutrino mass have provided the first experimental deviations from the Standard Model.

I suggest that physicists incorporate the investigation of life at the level of quantum mechanics so that the Standard Model would include not only all the physical forces such as gravitation and electromagnetism and particles such as quarks and bosons but a "precursor of life" mass/energy as well. Maybe this is what makes up dark matter and energy. And Wilhelm Reich, although he never made the connection between orgone energy and spontaneous generation, deserves a posthumous apology from the federal government which incarcerated him, banned his literatrure and destroyed his orgone accumulators. He died in federal prison in 1957. One of the things I'm proudest of is that in the late 1960s a group of us, who published the San Diego Free Press, also obtained a copy of Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism (from Canada) when it was still banned in the US and published and distributed a number of copies. The Mass Psychology of Fascism is especially relevant today in light of the character structure of the Bush Asdministration.

In February 1954, the FDA filed a Complaint for Injunction against Reich in the Federal Court in Portland, Maine. The Complaint declared that orgone energy does not exist, and asked the Court to prohibit the shipment of accumulators in interstate commerce and to ban Reich’s published literature which they claimed was labeling for the accumulators. After considerable thought and discussion of this matter, Reich responded with a lengthy letter to Judge John Clifford, explaining that he could not appear in Court, since doing so would allow a Court of law to judge basic scientific research. He wrote: “Scientific matters can only be clarified by prolonged, faithful bona fide observations in friendly exchange of opinion, never by litigation... Man’s right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan. Furthermore, Reich asserted, if his painstakingly elaborated and published findings “...over a period of 30 years could not convince this administration, or will not be able to convince any other administration of the true nature of the discovery of the Life Energy, no litigation in any court anywhere will ever help to do so. I, therefore, submit, in the name of truth and justice that I shall not appear in court as the ‘defendant’ against a plaintiff who by his mere complaint already has shown his ignorance in matters of natural science.” Judge Clifford did not accept Reich’s letter as a valid legal response, and on March 19, 1954, a Decree of Injunction was issued on default as if Reich had never responded at all. But the Injunction itself was even more excessive than the initial Complaint: it ordered orgone energy accumulators and their parts to be destroyed it ordered all materials containing instructions for the use of the accumulator to be destroyed it banned a list of Reich’s books containing statements about orgone energy, until such time that all references to orgone energy were deleted After the initial shock, Reich continued his research, traveling to Arizona to experiment with the cloudbuster in the dry desert environment. While he was there, and without his knowledge, one of Reich’ students—Dr. Michael Silvert—moved a truckload of accumulators and books from Rangeley, Maine to New York City, a direct violation of the Injunction. As a result, the FDA charged Reich and Silvert with criminal contempt of court. Following a jury trial, both men were found guilty on May 7, 1956. Reich was sentenced to two years in federal prison, Silvert was sentenced to a year and a day. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation—founded in Maine in 1949 by students and friends to preserve Reich’s Archives and to secure the future of his discovery of the Cosmic Life Energy—was fined $10,000. While Reich appealed his sentence, the government carried out the destruction of orgone accumulators and literature. In Maine, several boxes of literature were burned, and accumulators and accumulator materials either destroyed or dismantled. In New York City, on August 23, 1956, the FDA supervised the burning of several tons of Reich’s publications in one of the city’s garbage incinerators, including titles that were only to have been banned. Among the materials burned were: Orgone Energy Bulletin (12,189 copies) International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research (6,261 copies) Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics (2,900 copies) Annals of the Orgone Institute (2976 copies) The Oranur Experiment (872 copies) Character Analysis Cosmic Superimposition Ether, God, and Devil Listen, Little Man People in Trouble The Cancer Biopathy The Function of the Orgasm The Mass Psychology of Fascism The Murder of Christ The Sexual Revolution This destruction of literature constitutes one of the most heinous examples of censorship in United States history. On March 8, 1957, Reich signed his Last Will and Testament. Among its stipulations was the establishment of The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund as the legal entity charged with operating Orgonon as The Wilhelm Reich Museum; protecting, preserving, and transmitting his scientific legacy to future generations; and safeguarding Reich’s Archives. All appeals denied, on March 12, 1957—two weeks shy of his 60th birthday—Wilhelm Reich was temporarily incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Penitentiary in Connecticut. On March 22, he was taken to the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He died there of heart failure on November 3, 1957, and was buried at Orgonon.

Fractal Voting

Fractal Voting (FV) is a voting method I developed. It is one of a class of utilitarian methods similar to range voting (RV) in some respects. Other utilitarian methods are approval voting (AV) and Evaluative Voting (EV). RV, AV and EV are all special cases of FV. Utilitarian voting methods involve a ranking of candidates or alternatives from most preferred to least preferred. In general there are two types of rankings: ordinal and cardinal. Ordinal ranking involves a list such as ABCD where the position of the letter, for example, indicates its preference ranking in this case A is preferred to B is preferred to C etc. Cardinal ranking also indicates how much A is preferred to B and how much B is preferred to C etc. This "how much" is also referred to as preference intensity. With utilitarian methods  numbers are usually asssigned to the candidates and the differences between the numerical rankings of two candidates indicate the preference intensity. One of the differences between FV and RV is that voters don't assign numbers to the candidates but indicate  preference intensities graphically.

Fractal Voting consists of a graphical user interface (GUI) or we could call it a graphical voter (GVI) interface (we will use the terms voter and user interchangably) and underlying software which translates the voter's preferences into numerical values which can then be used to sum up the votes for  each candidate and  determine the winner. Range Voting involves a system defined scale such as 0-99, 0-9 etc. The voter assigns a number contained in this scale to each candidate, and then the numbers are summed for each candidate to determine the winner. With Fractal the voter determines the scale and the scale can be more finely determined or less finely determined in different segments as the voter wishes. For example, if the voter wants to differentiate among candidates near the top of the scale more finely, he or she can subdivide that portion of the scale more finely in order to make these distinctions. The fineness of the scale is called the sensitivity level.  The sensitivity level, in general, will differ for each voter depending on how finely a voter can distinguish between two candidates or alternatives. This concept can be generalized to include fine distinctions between tastes or smells for example. A person might be asked to distinguish and rank several wines. Some people would be able to distinguish them very finely and others would only be able to make rough distinctions, say between good and bad. With RV, the system defines the sensitivity level which is the same for all voters. RV with a scale 0-99 has a higher sensitivity level than RV with a scale 0-9 and allows finer distinctions among candidates to be made. For example, candidates A and B might each be given ratings of 5 with RV (0-9) but given ratings of 51 and 57 with range (0-99). So finer distinctions can be made the more levels are available. 

With Fractal, the user or voter has complete control over the sensitivity which is variable over the whole scale. For instance, at the beginning of the voting process, the first thing a voter would do is to choose the number of levels he or she would like to start out with. This might be just two - good and bad. So there would be two "buckets" if you will, the good bucket and the bad bucket. All candidates in the good bucket would be indistinguishable from or indifferent to each other. However, before choosing the number of levels or buckets, the voter would first choose their most preferred or favorite candidate or candidates and least preferred candidate or candidates. Then all others would be relative to those. So initially a screen would be presented to the voters with two buckets - one for most preferred and one for least preferred. The voter would drag appropriate candidates onto these buckets from a list arbitrarily located on the right side of the screen. Then the voter would choose how many buckets or levels to start with. Please note that, if the voter chose 100 buckets and didn't go any deeper or finer than that in terms of sensitivity level, the voting method would be the same as RV. After the initial choice of number of buckets, that number of buckets appears on the screen as well as the buckets at either end denoting most preferred and least preferred. Now the voter drags other candidates from the list onto the buckets. Then the voter has the option of clicking on any one of the buckets and further subdividing this segment of the  scale. Let's say that the voter started with 10 buckets, and, in all but one bucket, there is only one candidate. In one bucket there are 4 candidates. The voter may choose to click on that bucket and then choose to subdivide that bucket alone into, for instance, 4 finer levels. These buckets then appear on the screen along with the list of the candidates who were in the original bucket. The voter then drags candidates from this list onto one of the buckets that represent subdividions of the original bucket. This process can be repeated indefinitely leading to finer and finer distinctions. When the voter is satisfied he or she can terminate the process and submit his or her vote.

The final vote can be printed out as a paper ballot showing an overall scale subdivided as the voter has indicated and all candidates listed in order of preference, preference intensity and fineness of distinction or sensitivity. The underlying software can be implemented in terms of a push down stack where the first word in the stack contains the number of words in the stack. Initially, this would be 2 for most preferred and least preferred. These words might contain the numbers 1 and 0, respectively. As the voter adds levels or buckets, words are added to the stack.  The stack would be popped up to the level where the voter indicates that he or she wishes to add levels, and then the number of levels added that the voter has indicated. For instance, if the voter initially wants to order candidates just in terms of good and bad (a binary decision), two words would be added to the stack between the words corresponding to least preferred and most preferred. One might contain the number 1/4 (corresponding to the mid-point of the "bad" bucket) and one might contain 3/4 (corresponding to the mid-point of the "good" bucket). Continuing on in this way, the buckets are each defined in terms of a numerical value in a process that is totally transparent to the voter who just has to deal with a simple GUI and repeat the same process over and over to as many levels as he or she wishes. Then each candidate is associated with a pointer that points to the appropriate numerical value in the stack.

Since the process is the same for the voter no matter how deeply he wishes to proceed in terms of sensitivity level, we call this method Fractal Voting. Think of it as branches on a tree some of which are subdivided into smaller branches which are further subdivided and so on. At each stage the voter performs the same steps so the process is simple and intuitive for the voter.  This is the essence of the fractal process: no matter what the depth, the procedure is the same. At completion each candidate will be asssociated with a pointer which represents his numerical rank. The pointer will point to a word in the stack which will contain a value between 0 and 1 which represents the intensity  of that rank. Note that, unlike RV, the voter never has to assign numerical values to candidates making the provess simpler and more intuitive akin to punching a hole on a ballot or putting a check mark next to a candidate. When all voters have submitted their ballots, the numerical values associated with each candidate are summed and the one(s) with the highest value win(s).

The advantages of Fractal over Range are the following:

1) There are no "partial strength" votes. A partial strength vote is submitted in Range when a voter does not pin his most (least) preferred candidates to the limits of the range.

2) The voter has a simpler and more intuitive while at the same time more sophisticated interface which allows him or her more options in the voting procedure.

3) The voter can choose his or her own sensitivity level and can continue to refine this as the voting process continues.

4) The voter can go into detail selectively in those parts of the overall ranking that concern him or her while doing a rough ranking in other parts of the overall scale.

5) The voter need not be concerned with numbers at all, but only with a visual on-screen representation of the preference rankings and intensities.

Fractal Voting lends itself to delegable proxies since various parts of the tree could be designated and filled in by trusted parties who have pre-voted and whose results are only a mouse click away. For instance, the voter could select certain candidates, indicate he wished to make a proxy vote and then select Ted Kennedy from a list of proxies. Then these candidates would be added to the screen in exactly the way that Ted Kennedy had previously indicated he would vote. This method would lend itself either to touch screen or computer screen voting. Security of the vote could be guaranteed by different methods, but this is really a separate issue. Issuance of a paper ballot and receipt would be a start.

In summary Fractal Voting is a generalization of AV, EV and RV and a voter could choose to vote in any of these styles if so desired. It is a utilitarian voting method since the placing of each candidate on a line in order of preference ranking and intensity reveals the voter's utility for each candidate in some sense. Social utility could be measured for each candidate by simply adding up the numerical values asssociated with that candidate in the stack over all voters. This would not represent a social utility in an absolute sense but in a relative sense. The voter is allowed to make either fine or rough distinctions among the candidates according to his or her sensitivity levels and/or knowledge of the candidates, and also to rely on the advice of trusted experts who have studied the issues and/or candidates more closely. Both the GUI and the underlying software are easily implemented.

Is Human Nature Basically Good or Basically Bad?

Thom Hartmann, a talk show host on Air America, is always referring to the conundrum about human nature: is it basically good or basically evil. I think "evil" is a loaded word so I transcribe the question to good vs bad. Hartmann then goes on to say that the traditionally liberal position is that human nature is basically good and the traditional conservative position is that human nature is basically bad. This leads to liberal positions that government should be a "backstop", something that provides help for people in need such as universal health care etc, and conservative positions that government should be a police force or military, something that protects the good guys from the bad guys.

My question is: why can't government do both? Provide social protection such as education, health care, social security and provide police protection from the bad guys. In fact most governments do both so there isn't such a dichotomy as Hartmann imagines.

Returning to the basic question, I don't think there is such a thing as human nature in general. I think there is an aggregate of many human natures, and human nature spans the whole spectrum from good to bad. Some people are basically good and some are basically bad. Most are somewhere in between. The real question is "is the median human nature more good than bad or more bad than good or absolutely neutral, that is neither good nor bad." If bad is on the extreme right end of the spectrum and good is on the extreme left end, let zero represent the neutral point, negative numbers represent good points and positive numbers represent bad points. So the question becomes where does the median or average human nature lie.

My answer is that the average would be somewhere slightly to the right of zero or slightly bad. The reason is that I think people in general are basically selfish. For a person to be on the good side of the spectrum, he or she would have to balance selfishness with compassion, self-interest with caring for others. Since compassion and caring for others seem in short supply, on average, I don't think human nature is, on average, basically good although there have been examples of people who are basically good such as Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa, people who have devoted their lives to  caring for others, people of immense caring and compassion.

However, just because the average human nature is more bad than good is no reason to say that government should be just a police force and that's it, that people should fend for themselves. You would have to be pretty far to the right on the spectrum before I would say that you don't deserve any help from society but only deserve punishment. Shouldn't liberal government serve the bad as well as the good, especially when the bad aren't totally and thoroughly bad? I think so. It just need not be suckered. There are people who will abuse and subvert any service. This has to be guarded against. So while serving with the left hand, government has to be willing to punish, if need be, with the right.

From a Darwinian perspective, human nature has evolved in such a way that under certain conditions bad people are more successful than good and under different conditions good people are more successful than bad. Under primitive, less civilized conditions, in conditions of lawlessness, bad people tend to win out. For several centuries after the fall of the Roman empire, for example, war parties and raiders massacred peaceable people, pillaged, raped and stole their property. Bad people prevailed driving out good. In more civilized societies where the rule of law prevails, good people tend to drive out bad by either imprisonment or execution. However, bad people because of their ruthlessness, tend to rise to the top and gain powerful positions in large organizations including government. They, therefore, are in a position to wreak havoc on entire human civilizations. At the same time many small individual selfish decisions can lead to destruction of the environment by ignoring the welfare of the commons and only being concerned with selfish welfare. Both of these tendencies could cause the extinction of the human race just as 90% or more of the species that have ever existed have become extinct.

Whether humans can rise the level of compassion and cooperation necessary to  realize that their own collective selfishness is a threat to their quality of life and the cultivation of the commons is an enhancement remains to be seen. In some parts of the world, they seem to "get it." In other parts, not. It's a drama whose final  chapter has not yet been written.