Dystopia

[DavidM58]

Here's a report from the future, written in the year 2050 by a geo-paleontologist.

"...Before 2015, almost everyone believed that time’s arrow pointed in the direction of greater integration. Some hoped (and others feared) that the world was converging on ever-larger conglomerations of nations. The internationalists campaigned for a United Nations that had some actual political power. The free traders imagined a frictionless global market where identical superstores would sell the same products at all their global locations. The technotopians imagined a world united by Twitter and Instagram.

In 2015, people were so busy crossing borders -- real and conceptual -- that they barely registered the backlash against globalization. Officially, more and more countries had committed themselves to diversity, multiculturalism, and the cosmopolitan ideals of liberty, solidarity, and equality. But everything began to change in 2015, a phenomenon I first chronicled in my landmark study Splinterlands (Dispatch Books, 2025). The movements that came to the fore in 2015 championed a historic turn inward: the erection of walls, the enforcement of homogeneity, and the trumpeting of exclusively national virtues.

...I would be remiss if I didn’t point out something that many have noted over the years. We have been fragmenting at precisely the time when we should be coming together, for the problems that face the planet cannot be solved by millions of individuals or masses of statelets acting alone. And yet how can we expect, with desperate millions on the move, the rise of pandemics, and the deepening of economic inequality globally, that people can unite against common existential threats? Only today can we all see clearly, as I wrote so many years ago, that the rise of the splinterlands has been humanity’s true tragedy. The inability of cultures to compromise within single states, it seems, anticipated our current moment when multiplying nation-states can’t compromise on a single planet to address our global scourges. The glue that once held us together -- namely, solidarity across religion, ethnicity, and class -- has lost its binding force.

At the beginning of the great unraveling, in 2015, I was still a young man. Like everyone else, I didn’t see this coming. We all lived in a common home, I thought. Some rooms were in terrible disrepair. Those living in the attic were often exposed to the elements. The house as a whole needed better insulation, more efficient appliances, solar panels on the roof, and we had indeed fallen behind on the mortgage payments. But like so many of my peers, I seldom doubted that we could scrape together the funds and the will to make the necessary repairs by asking the richer residents of the house to pay their fair share.

Thirty-five years and endless catastrophes later on a poorer, bleaker, less hospitable planet, it’s clear that we just weren’t paying sufficient attention. Had we been listening, we would have heard the termites. There, in the basement of our common home, they were eating the very foundations out from under us. Suddenly, before we knew quite what was happening, all that was solid had melted into air."

Read the entire piece here: On the Verge of the Great Unraveling, or Splintering: The View from 2050 by John Feffer.

So, what kind of post-metaphysical spirituality will be most appropriate for this future?

[andrew]

The saviour didn't save us?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes

[andrew]

Hey, while everyone is on the fictional speculation trip then how about this one: 2015 is not the date of the great unravelling! Specifically it be May15th 2018 , the day after god gave Israel 7 decades to live in peace with systems of fairness and equity with the Palestinian's that would be pleasing to the master . Israel's complete and utter failure to do so leads to the great unravelling ! No? Okay, the future is negotiable ........

[Edward theurj Berge]

The more my body-mind starts to crumble at an accelerated pace the less I can give to the global crumbling.

[DavidM58]

"There is one thing more difficult than to tell good from evil, it is to decide which time we are in, which epoch, and which land we have our feet on." - Bruno Latour

John Maynard Keynes was a genius for his times, and his economic ideas were appropriate for that time. These ideas are also, however, dependent upon abundant energy resources available for low cost in order to underwrite the growth imperative that Keynes' debt based economic plan entailed. It would also require an ignorance of the environmental effects - the true extent of the externalities this approach engenders.

Pogany claims "each global system has its text." For Global System 2, Keynes' "General Theory," published in 1936, "was the synoptic gospel, based on which Samuelson penned both the Roman catechism, the "Foundations" (Samuelson, 1948), containing the hieratically expressed cornerstones of faith for mitered men of the cloth..."

Footnote from Pogany: "Did Keynes suspect that the system he inspired would not last forever? Probably he did. Rereading "General Theory" (Keynes, 1965), now in GS2's end times, its author comes across as the genius in a hurry who throws a sketch of his ideas on the table with 'try something like this, it might work for a while,' then leaves."

[Havoc, Thy Name is 21st Century by P. Pogany, p. 54]

[DavidM58]

Ain't that the truth, Edwyrd.  I hope the pace can at least be decelerated on both accounts. I hope you're doing OK.

theurj said:

The more my body-mind starts to crumble at an accelerated pace the less I can give to the global crumbling.

[Ambo Suno]

Ditto on that, DM.

I hope things go well enough for t and us all as they nevertheless move inexorably to the great sometimes dreaded whatever. I hope for an inner 'grace' that can let go of the 4 dignities of man, with dignity. And the most challenging ones aren't even in the ancient chinese 4. May I and we perform adequately the final acts, be at out bests, under the circumstances, during that unforeseeable physical disassembly, with more artfulness than we/I ever did in normal daily life. Or some similar blessings.

A hair's breadth from the end, a wild hare's breath, a hairy death, well-groomed.

DavidM58 said:

Ain't that the truth, Edwyrd.  I hope the pace can at least be decelerated on both accounts. I hope you're doing OK.

theurj said:

The more my body-mind starts to crumble at an accelerated pace the less I can give to the global crumbling.

[andrew]

[andrew]

A really good paper that is saying today's solutions are not really Keynesian at all : 

https://www.trentu.ca/globalpolitics/documents/Discussion093Pickel.pdf

The solutions being offered today are only meant to keep the established power structures functioning as usual ( oligarchic welfare or the transfer of the wealth of the commons to various 'legitimate', criminal cabals ) )  These power structures always needed diversion tactics; hence the manufactured war on terror . Now we can't focus on these regressive trade deals or pollution . Wez gotz Erabs to kill dammit!

And one from Robert Reich who outlines GS1 and GS 2 . Reich doesn't seem to getting that a major systemic upheaval is on the way . Or he just can't bring himself to believe that there could be such a thing as post-capitalism .

http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-big-struggle-financial...

[andrew]

this was right then and it's right today::

They're 5 miles high as the crow flies
Leavin' vapour trails against a blood red sky
Movin' in from the east toward the west
With balaclava helmets over their heads, yes!

But if you think that jesus christ is coming
Honey you've got another thing coming
If he ever finds out who's hi-jacked his name
He'll cut out his heart and turn in his grave

Islam is rising
The christians mobilising
The world is on its elbows and knees
It's forgotten the message and worships the creeds

It's war, she cried, it's war, she cried, this is war
Drop your possessions, all you simple folk
You will fight them on the beaches in your underclothes
You will thank the good lord for raising the union jack
You'll watch the ships out of harbour
And the bodies come floating back

If the real jesus christ were to stand up today
He'd be gunned down by the c.i.a.
Oh, the lights that now burn brightest behind stained glass
Will cast the darkest shadows upon the human heart
But god didn't build himself that throne
God doesn't live in israel or rome
God belong to the yankee dollar
God doesn't plant the bombs for hezbollah
God doesn't even go to church
And god won't send us down to allah to burn
No, god will remind us what we already know
That the human race is about to reap what it's sown

The world is on its elbows and knees
It's forgotten the message and worships the creeds
Armageddon days are here again

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[DavidM58]

Who is it?

[andrew]

This is a band called, The The . When I first heard it in the eighties I new it to be prophetic. Interesting that they wrote this at the time of the re-establishing of the globalist, neoliberal, zionist , christian fascist,  new world order . Of course this mindset was previously established some where in the 1800's where many of the chess pieces for todays conditions were put in place ; and prior to that in and around 1500 when the colonial powers first realized that God might not exist ( in a way that would have been acceptable to them), and have since been on a genocidal killing spree. 500 years of wiping out every indigenous culture on earth so they are well acquainted with dealing with tribal protests against their hegemony. This time the tribe just happens to be Islam . We will be next . They are already setting up the conditions for civil war in Europe and N.A. 

But there shall be no equanimity in our assessments when  culture is premised on emotional manipulation and dishonest reaction . For the record, healthy non-theism and a-theism that cares deeply about the earth and its life forms is of no serious consequence ; but that is not what came out of the French enlightenment , what came out of that is an ontological rabies, IMO. We are seeing the fruit of that bad interpretation today .

Okay, i have to watch disney now while WWW 3 rages on . And it will go on for a long long time with more unintended consequences that one can imagine. 

[andrew]

Here is a rather detailed expose on The Islamic State and what it is they are trying to achieve : 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-reall...

and another from a random blogger who is quite correct that the caliphate is engineering a fantasticly sinister situation for western muslims : 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-reall...

Of course the global capitalists who are destroying the earth environmentally will play right into this gambit . Whether ISIS is a proxy branch of the global corporatocracy is probably something that shouldn't be dismissed outright . Or, dismiss the possibility to ones own detriment, imo. 

Also, if I were a psychopath and came upon Wilber's theories i would co-opt them for my sinister purposes much like Bernay's did with Freud. Dismiss this one, too,  at your peril .,