The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.
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Bouts of mania, and eventual clinical insanity, are more often
than not predicated by the need to establish order amidst an unraveling
present. In early psychotic states, patients become obsessed with
random linkages and relationships where none exist, leading to the
self-manifestation of more concrete connections as they indulge
increasingly strong impulses. This succession is slow at first, and then
increases in frequency and scope as time passes. As detachment from
reality grows, greater categorization, greater schematics, greater
lists, become essential to manage internal panic. Eventually, individual
tallies become tallies of tallies . . . and lists become lists of
lists.
The progression of the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual (DSM) from
1952 to the present day DSM-V, follows an identical pattern. In fact,
fitting all the mental afflictions of the West into a neat and tidy 947
pages is exactly the type of mania you would expect in a modern
hyper-rational neurotic patient.
The latest version of the DSM was nearly two decades in the making.
Thousands of practitioners, associations, foundations, students and
universities and millions of hours of grunt work—not to mention the
institutional backing of the 36,000-member American Psychiatric
Association—went into its birth. The result is a highly profitable, and
significantly profound, symptom of the insanity epidemic sweeping the
globe.
Part McLuhan, part Freud, inside the DSM-V is a deep and unintended
revelation. Medium. Message. Subconscious. Drive. The revelation is not
Big Pharma's influence on psychiatry or the relentless drive of
capitalism to profit from mental illness—though these remain obvious
concerns—but that the DSM-V project itself represents collective
madness.
It wasn’t until Darwin located the mechanism of human evolution in
genealogy rather than taxonomies that scientists truly began to
understand, instead of react to, nature, says Canadian philosopher Ian
Hacking in his review of the DSM-V in the London Review of Books.
That same transition has yet to happen in mental health. Instead, the
majority of Western approaches to insanity continue to operate within
the taxonomy model, focused on symptom over causation, appearance over
mechanism. And herein lies the heart of the argument that DSM-V is the
ultimate symptom of the suffering modern mind. Unable to break from
obsession over meaning and control, the entire symptomatic range of the
abnormal has been designed for easy reading and easy diagnosis.
“Trying to get it right, in revision after revision, perpetuates the
longstanding idea that, in our present state of knowledge, the
recognized varieties of mental illness should neatly sort themselves
into tidy blocks, in the way that plants and animals do,” Hacking says.
As it stands, the DSM-V is the ultimate symbol of the very plague it
is trying to manage. And if the next DSM, which will come two decades
from now, is to have any value, it must begin with uprooting the insanity at its core.
We’ve fouled up our planetary nest and now we’re saying,
fuck it! I don’t feel like cleaning up this mess. Let the oceans rise,
the fish vanish, the glaciers melt . . . I’m plunging into virtual
reality where everything is just fine and rather exciting . . . hot new
shit happening everyday!
But there’s a price to pay. You feel stressed and anxious a lot of
the time, your moods sink and soar without warning and you wake up
feeling lousy almost every day. And all the while you find yourself
becoming more detached, less empathetic, emptied of joy and unable to
decide upon anything . . . one way or another.
If a huge chunk of humanity suffers from mood disorders and
constantly feels sad . . . if a substantial percentage of us lose our
collective zest and crispness of mind – then how will we ever be able to
deal with climate change, collapsing ecosystems and all of the other
social, political, military and financial crises looming on the horizon?
Strategic Insight: Psycho collapse is a much more serious
threat to our long term survival than eco collapse . . . Without clarity
of mind, nothing we do will ever work out.
As our planetary crisis deepens, radical new visions of
the future are bubbling up like never before. All the norms, rules,
traditions and taboos that we've taken for granted for centuries are
suddenly up for grabs. As Einstein famously pointed out, we cannot solve
a problem by using the same type of thinking that created the problem
in the first place.
So what are some of the scenarios that could change the direction of our civilization?
Could a new messiah, a modern day Buddha, Muhammad or Jesus, suddenly
appear on YouTube with a message that goes viral and sparks a spiritual
movement that takes humanity by storm? Could he—or maybe this time a
she—demolish all the sacred cows and false gods we currently
worship—growth, consumerism, individuality, freedom, progress—and give
us a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence here on this
Earth?
Could an astronomer sitting in an observatory high in the Andes
suddenly stumble upon intelligent life on another planet? What an
existential jolt that would be! And then, could the humbling realization
that we are not alone, that a spirit really does pervade the whole
universe . . . that in the vastness of the cosmos other civilizations on
other planets have sprung up, peaked and waned just like ours is doing
right now—could this be the answer that finally solves the great
civilizational quest for meaning we've been on since our beginnings?
Or, on a more mundane plane, could ten thousand university
campuses explode like they did back in 1968 and creatively destroy our
current global system? Could the Greek anarchists, Spanish indignados,
the Occupy forces, the yabastaers, Gezi greenies and Rio revelers rise
simultaneously on a clear Autumn day and pull off a coordinated
occupation of the whole world?
Or imagine this: a bunch of fired up back end programers develop an
open source, real world KILLCAP game that gets a billion activists
jamming the system every day until the cost of doing business as usual
becomes too hard to bear.
Yeah, these are beautiful pipe dreams . . . nicely served over a
midnight bottle of tequila.
But maybe our best hope of derailing the planetary trainwreck is
something much more ordinary, anticlimactic even . . . like a slow,
imperceptible cultural heave, one that gives way to a renaissance of
conviviality. We grow tired of the consumerist orgy, the rat race, the
moral one-upmanship . . . the wars, the secrets, the punitive strikes,
the holocausts and genocides, the stultifying bureaucracy of
techno-capitalism. We move, as Ed Vulliamy wrote in a recent Guardian Weekly
article, from “some combination of cocaine, Red Bull and Viagra towards
aromatic coffee, a cool aperitif and an afternoon snooze.” We jump from
pyramid to rhizome thinking, from a hard helvetica, top-down
corpo-driven culture towards a soft, organic DIY one. We learn to play
jazz and start living lives of never-ending spontaneous creativity and
uninhibited play . . . We wake up one morning feeling happy!
The capitalist algorithm we're currently caught in has turned our
planet into a death star. The internet, virtual reality, nanotechnology,
genetic engineering, green markets, wind turbines . . . none of these
innovations will save us. Our only chance of transitioning into a sane
sustainable future is to stumble onto something that we feel in our
bones, something not yet here, but the spirit of which—its essence, its
taste, its tone, its resonance—we can feel all around us in the touch of
a lover, a chat with a bright-eyed stranger, a quiet moment in the
wild.
The legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, believed
that at its core, economics is ruled by “animal spirits”—that markets
operate more according to Freudian animal heritage and erotic, emotional
impulses, rather than reason. Other thinkers from this early formative
era of economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, saw a violent, warlike impulse
of “creative destruction” lurking at the heart of capitalism. And Karl
Marx, that great dreamer, was convinced that economics could pave the
way towards a utopian future in which people give according to their
abilities and receive according to their needs.
But around the 1950s, when the logical positivists started strutting
their philosophy of strict rationality, applying scientific method to
all social phenomena, economists jumped on their bandwagon. Over the
next few generations they rationalized human behavior, sanitized their
theories and models, and tried to transform economics into a
mathematically driven exact science based on the model of physics.
Now in the wake of the financial meltdown and as climate change
punches an existential hole into the current economics paradigm, it is
becoming painfully obvious that the rationalist enterprise is a grand
delusion. Not even one in a hundred—nay, one in a thousand—professors of
economics and mainstream economic policymakers around the world saw the
meltdown of 2008 coming . . . and now the logic freaks of economics are
on the defensive, forced to admit that their understanding of
nonlinear, real-world systems is frail at best and that their
mathematical models have very little to do with reality.
This is the perfect moment to end 60 years of positivist rule—to grab
these old school practitioners by the scruffs of their necks and toss
them out of power . . . and to give birth to a new paradigm of economics—a
psychonomics, a bionomics, an ecological economics—a wide-ranging,
multifaceted, human-scale discipline full of magic, mystery and animal
spirits once again.
—Kalle Lasn, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics
They lied to us about the premise for entering Vietnam.
They lied to us about the murder of Allende in Chile,
the history of intervention in Haiti and Cuba, the back-room deals to
buy and sell drugs, guns and dictators in Central America and beyond.
And of course they lied to us about Afghanistan, about Iraq, about Libya, about Syria.
Chances are they’re lying to us about Egypt right now.
The 21st century is barely a teen and already it is as obscene,
violent and arrogant as its older brother 100 years before. Even in the
past ten years, the same mistakes, the same carnage, the same lies,
repeat like a flipping cathode ray television screen. Lie. Stall. Lie.
Stall. Lie. Stall. And if that doesn’t work, lie and stall some more.
It was no small happening that on the same day that Chelsea Manning
(formerly Bradley Manning) was handed a 35-year sentence for exposing
American war crimes in Iraq, former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak was
freed from a Cairo prison and the democratically elected, now ousted,
Mohamed Morsi was left in a secret cell.
This type of serendipity is indicative of the deep culture of secrecy
pervading geopolitics today. Who benefits from this obsessive secrecy?
Certainly not the half million dead civilians in Iraq. Nor the two
million civilians killed in Vietnam during the Cold War. Nor the
innumerable victims who have died in the blowback from the long list of
covert actions conceived in secret and fought in darkness. Even the dead
are told that it was for their own good, that somehow things could have
been even worse. And, of course, we’ll never really know what could
have happened, because we, the people, are always left in the dark.
How many ghostly and fake Al Qaeda threats and foiled terror attacks
have we witnessed since the Snowden revelations alone? The recent
American embassy closure panic was nothing more than a sad rehashing of
the terror-temperature chart that was broadcast on American television
in the early years after 9/11 (recall the "chances of a Bin Laden
attack" craze). Looking back, it brings a smile. But don’t be too quick
to laugh. It would be comical if there weren’t so many of us who are
still duped by these very same tactics … who are actually swayed to hate
the Mannings and the Snowdens out there … the very people trying to
pull back the curtain of secrecy.
The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and
we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret
societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long
ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of
pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify
it.
— JFK, 1961
So why do we still believe our leaders when they say “trust us”? Why
do we still wait in eager anticipation for them to read from carefully
crafted scripts that they don't even write? The answer is simple: we
don’t know any better. And why don’t we know any better? Why do we
continue to live in the dark? Another simple answer: our governments are
legally allowed to lie to us. Totalitarian or democratic, East or West,
it’s written into every state constitution in the world. And each time a
government is given a mandate, we participate in the farce … we
reaffirm that, contrary to what we tell our children, lying isn’t so bad
after all.
If we are ever going to escape the 21st century with less bloodshed
than the 20th century, we’re going to have to strip our governments of
the right to lie to us citizens. In this information age, where gigatons
of information zips around the globe each second, and where the
geopolitical, financial and ecological stakes are so high, we need a new
human right … one that is stamped into the first article of every state
constitution, one that needs to become the centrepiece of the United
Nations Charter.
The UN was created in the aftermath of the two most traumatic and
disturbing wars of all time. Auschwitz. Dresden. Hiroshima. These
atrocities made the battlefields and massacres of Gettysburg, Sevastopol
and Waterloo a century earlier look like a track and field warm up.
When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was penned in 1948, it
was based on the belief that without basic human rights, violence, war
and genocide were sure to continue, if not flourish, into the future.
The resounding and hopeful spirit of “Never Again” led the way. It was a
groundbreaking moment for the human spirit. A moment that,
unfortunately, never had a chance to fly.
So long as elites and powerful forces are able to concoct wars and
geopolitics in secret, we, the people, will never see a day of peace on
Earth. Not even a single minute in fact … likely not even a second.
Aggression, hatred, greed, jealousy and fear may be the ingredients of
war, but secrecy is the heat that it needs to rise … the fuel that turns
the disapproving into blind followers. So long as secrecy prevails as a
fundamental right of states, peace, unity and brotherhood will always
remain dreams … increasingly jaded ones.
In the spirit of 1945 and 1948, we propose the following amendment to
the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to every
constitution of every country in the world:
Even in the seconds before their heads were about to
roll away form their bodies underneath the blade of the guillotine, it
still puzzled the opulent Paris elite how this could be happening.
Just months before the storming of the Bastille in 1789, everything
was peachy. The social order ran smooth. The poor paid their dues. The
middle class kept their mouth shut. The aristocracy parties like it was
1999.
One day they were handing out orders and advice to adoring insiders
like a mall Santa dispenses candy canes, and the next day they were
being dragged through the streets by their frilly collars like common
thieves. Surely they wept like babies, but by then it was too late to
apologize.
It always follow the same pattern. The rich and privileged overstep
their mark and trigger an almighty backlash of
feeding-frenzy-like-violence and cruelty.
After the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik’s looted the royal palace
and executed the entire family even the children. During the Cultural
Revolution in China, the intellectual elites were publicly humiliated
and carted off to camps where they were forced to work like peasants. In
the 1970s, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had child soldiers kill every
privileged Cambodian, even those with eye glasses.
Today we are living through another one of those moments, though this
time it’s not the royalty, not the land owners nor the intellectual
elite ... but the financial 1% running around making money off money off
money off the backs of the 99% and being very arrogant and remorseless
about it.
For the masses, when honest work no longer pays, the more sinister side of survival begins to take hold.
So here’s some advice to the Lloyd Blankfeins, Rex Tillersons, Jamie
Dimons, Donald Trumps and Hugh Grants … Watch out! … you might be
triggering something that will engulf you.
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