I just spent two months working with a 20 year old who had abandoned his smart phone because it was impinging on his time and his ability to focus. Within himself, he seemed to have found something larger, something that he couldn't access thru the phone or with his peers. He continues to seek that larger thing, by himself, and with others — when they're not on their phones, or otherwise consumed by all that would distract them from the larger thing inside themselves — which is why he loves singing in a choir, because the goal is a harmony that none can acheive by themselves, and that is bigger, even, than the group.
Harmony contains both "good" and "evil" — tho we may never understand the boundaries that separate one from the other. How can we define what we cannot see or know? We can’t get to that place of harmony by ourselves. Neither can a group of us force anyone to go there. It's a mystery.
Here’s a lovely line from Richard Wagamese’s lovely movie (from his book), Indian Horse:
"Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. It is the foundation of humility and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel it. We honor it by letting it be that way forever."
It seems to me we can’t unravel good from evil. But we can seek to live in the mystery, cultivate humility, learn to make compost, love the humus that results, and go deeper into the mysteries of life, death, and fertility.
I love this example of someone who has to come to their own conclusions, after being overloaded/overwhelmed, or simply bored with the ubiquitous gadgetry. When parents or someone outside tells someone "this is bad" rather than some internal mechanism saying so, it holds such a different frequency in our lives. How do we nurture this inner voice more fully? As many know, some of the answer lies in BEING as much as DOING: meditation, attention to nature, heightened presence in mundane tasks, etc.
This is where I think a collective web of practitioners and a template/infrastructure that nurtures this way is so vital. It can be at an ecovillage, but it can also be in anywhere-ville USA. It just takes a handfull of people who make the great leap. You see it when kids go to camp, when adults go to retreats, when busy people go on vacation, when summer beaches fill with strangers, when a large group convenes at a music concert..you see the "letting go" of the drama and stress of the modern world, of the "you should do this" and the right/wrong-ness of making choices rather than being present in the moment together, with all that is. I think we are simply yearning for a sustained effort that supports that way of being. It's up to us, collectively, I guess... I think singing in a choir, harmonizing our voices is about as good a way to start as any!
I love this example too! And I agree - it is up to us to create the communities of our dreams, to engage in those activities that make our hearts sing in concert with one another. To take part in activities that are designed solely to demonstrate opposition to the other, like our current election process, simply adds fuel to the fire. Furthermore, it seems to me that many if not most are unable to conceive the existence of a single alternative, much less dream of limitless possibilities.
However, I have witnessed and experienced the magic that emerges when a little creative energy is shared among people who may only have one thing in common... a shared sense that there has to be something better. As Buckminster Fuller concluded, significant changes are never realized by shaking our fists or even displaying clear and compelling evidence of its necessity. It only happens when an alternative is presented that makes the current way obsolete. I am full of hope!
Thank you Charles for offering this space, and for your wonderful insight, your incredible talent for bringing context to such enormous subject matter, and doing so with such gentle prose that I imagine even those who have but little confidence in themselves, are left feeling they are already part of a community of champions.
I am a fan of Distributism, the approach that power, ownership, social and government structures is to be “distributed” into small, local units and the consolidation of these things is to be guarded against. G.K. Chesterton quipped “The problem with capitalism is not there are too many capitalists, but there are too few”. Of course individual smaller units can go wrong, but the damage is limited and the answer doesn’t lie in erecting superstructures to make a perfect world where nothing goes wrong.
I was raised in the last days of an intact small town, small business, family based agrarian Midwestern culture in rural Wisconsin. Order was maintained through shared expectations of honesty, responsibility and civility and working things out privately with very little need for legal intervention. There was a interconnected matrix of friendships, families, business relationships, broad based involvement in township and village self government, school boards, volunteer fire departments. You knew those in those positions or knew someone who did. There was also an array of private organizations, churches, clubs, volunteer service opportunities. It was a diverse stable ecosystem with many small components. My mother volunteered for Meals on Wheels for shut ins and was in the same Homemaker’s Club for 50 years. Neighbors helped each other out in crisis. It wasn’t utopian perfection, human conflicts, problems, and unhappiness occurred, but it was safe, crime was unheard of, no locked doors anywhere in homes and cars. My parents in their retirement would winter in Texas and their house would sit there on the farm unlocked for two months with my brother coming by occasionally to check on things.
Yes! We agree, Jeff. In my response to Camilla I talked about my economic system of small-scale sovereignty supporting and strengthening families of self-reliant children, who expect to be a reciprocal member of the family. I'm going to do an episode today called "Ain't Creativity Quaint?" that looks at the expectation 120 years ago that people were capable and even kids could take responsibility. This is based on a jigsaw puzzle I put together of children's books from the late 1800's to the early 1900's. The world you describe is one I'm certain we can get back, in a better and more lasting form.
Yes, the week before my 13th birthday in June I worked with a crew of 5-6 boys ages 13-15. Our job was on farmland used to grow corn for seed to be used the following year. We would walk up and down endless rows cutting down individual plants that were too tall so the resulting seed would produce plants of an even height. Tall corn tends to fall down in the wind. The owner would pack us into the back of a pick up truck, and then drop us off early in the morning with sharpened blades on long handles, and we were on our own for the day with our lunches and water. We were working and middle class white boys, mostly not farm boys. They were too busy at home. This was in 1966. No interfering labor regulations, no supervision by “adults”. We worked, got along and didn’t goof off. In general farm kids from age 13 or so were expected to drive tractors hauling stuff even on the road, run potentially dangerous equipment, work long hours during the summer, get up early to milk cows before school and after. They were also given guns, taught gun safety and would go hunting on their own. In our high school attendance would drop during deer season.
Hi, Jeff. I just posted my video, where I mention your story and also highly recommend the series from Charles, which I think is such an important topic. Here's the YouTube, Substack to follow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZf1DyHgYhU.
Excellent report, thanks for postng it. It reminds us that we need to do has been done before, and thus brings hope where hope has otherwise been lost.
I fully agree with the spirit of this comment, but I have a problem with the G.K. Chesterton quote, nonetheless. “The problem with capitalism is not there are too many capitalists, but there are too few”. The problem with capitalism has been its tendency toward hegemonic power, the accumulation of power into but a few hands, resulted in most people becoming disempowered.
Capitalism is a hegemonic system which robs some of power while putting power in the hands of a few. That's what it is. Not to understand this is not to understand capitalism.
Using 'capital' is not capitalism. It's possible to have a capital-using system non-capitalistically. But it's presently very rare. Capitalism is a concentrative system of power. It is hegemonic. It's 'centripetal' in its relation to power, not centrifugal.
But if I'm a small business woman and I save some dollars to use toward growing my small business, that does NOT make me a capitalist, per se. I become a capitalist when 'my' workers and the forest I live in become mere resources for my exploitation.
In my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I define capitalism as ownership of the assets that back the money. It's meaningless without defining who that owner is. In our case, we live under banker capitalism because 94% of $$ are issued as mortgage debt (without creating the interest, which is a problem leading to our current crisis of capitalism).
My economic model is community capitalism where the community banks issue the mortgages in a local currency I call a caret, and every resident gets a monthly dividend in the form of targeted subsidies for locally produced food, wellcare, education and home improvement. So it enables the money in circulation for local goods and services to always be equal or more than the cost of housing. In that sense, I agree with GK because the only way to own our own labor is to issue the money that organizes it and is backed by the intergenerational transfer of wealth in housing and infrastructure.
I think we have come into the realm of semantics. For me the small business person is an expression of capitalism, and a weakness of capitalism is concentration of ownership over time and the imperative of money as being the ultimate value. Distributism recognizes this weakness and aims to counteract it.
Jeff, my friend, I use 'capitalism' to refer to an exploitative, extractive, soulless, system of oppression and domination. To say (to someone like me) that 'capitalism is any use of capital' is akin to saying that the use of a razor is synonymous with the use of guillotines--or even of nuclear weapons. I'm simply using mine to shave my beard. I'm not using mine to oppress or dominate you -- or anyone.
Anything of value in a market system can be said to be 'capital'. I thereby have some. You're welcome to mine. Come on over and you can have mine. I have so little.
Capitalism is an ethos -- and the ethos is one of oppression and domination.
James, my brother, for me it’s a generic word for an economy based on private not government ownership whether or not it involves abuse and exploitation. Thank you for your clarification. Alway good to see you here and there.
In the mainstream traditional / historical version of actual socialist theory and ideas, socialism (some would call it 'communism') would be local communities regulating their own communities, not a state apparatus (government). The workers who work a farm of factory would own and control the farm of factory. It's management would be decided by the workers.
The idea that socialism is all about state ownership and control over the economy (and a dictatorship by a bureaucratic state) is false in the same way as it is false to say that all trees are walnut trees and all dogs are Labrador retrievers. Some governments, of various kinds, have claimed to be both socialist and communist governments. But not all socialisms are about government at all -- such as is the case with libertarian socialism. Libertarian socialism seeks to create socialist ways of life without and beyond the state (government).
What Jeff is calling ‘distributism’ sounds like what I think of when I hear the word ‘socialism’ — government using economic policies such as taxation, tariffs and subsidies to counteract the accumulative nature of capitalism to one degree or another. BTW, it’s worth noting that the disappearance of those idyllic agrarian communities was a deliberate policy decision dating back to the Nixon administration (USDA head Earl Butz: “Get big or get out”).
Anyway, if we accept the premise that capitalism is inherently exploitative, but also acknowledge that a certain degree of specialization on the part of individuals leads to greater efficiency and benefits to the group, then the question is what system of exchange/ currency minimizes inequality while allowing for a level of social complexity beyond direct barter for material goods? I ask this as someone who has spent most of my adult life trying to figure out a non-exploitative means of sustenance from my family’s land, and I’m a long way from achieving that goal. As far as the question of private vs. public land ownership is concerned, how to balance the idea that housing is a basic human right against the not-unreasonable fear of misguided technocratic policies based on faulty, self-referential values? Or, to put it more simply, if no one owns the land, then how do people figure out what a reasonable population density actually consists of?
(Side note: if you look at a map of Kentucky, keep in mind that the county lines were drawn based on a rule that each county seat should be within one (Edit, that doesn’t sound right…3?)day’s mule ride from the next.)
TLDR; can ecological literacy and an ethic of care for all living things be used to continue to provide us all with something above mere subsistence?
That's not a capitalism problem, it's fundamental human nature. It is a tool that provides the means for hegemony, just like communism, fascism, and all other forms of government. Money, our own ot that of others who we control, is power. Power corrupts.
You don't need to rationalize your capitalism. Small businesses are the epitome of capitalism.
"You don't need to rationalize your capitalism. Small businesses are the epitome of capitalism."
That makes no sense whatsoever. To say my comments "rationalize" capitalism is just nonsense. It's like saying up is down and left is right and yes is no and blue is red.... I'm opposed to capitalism. I don't know what happened in our culture, where one can say "I oppose capitalism," and it gets translated as "I love capitalism."
Getting people to pay you to water their trees is capitalism. Expecting others to water your tree for you is socialism. Being out of touch is a common affliction among socialists.
Unless you were black or an Indigenous person. In 1940, 45 percent of Wisconsin's black population was unemployed, compared to 13 percent of whites. While World War II's critical wartime industries temporarily provided employment, housing segregation and other forms of discrimination continued.
In the 1930s, William Kelley of the Milwaukee Urban League began a decades-long fight for black teachers in the public schools. Initially, white officials only agreed to employ black teachers in schools with many black students. After the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, the hiring of teachers became better integrated.
During the 1940s and 1950s. Racial discrimination and segregation continued unabated, however, especially in Milwaukee where ties of ethnicity and religion had established highly insulated residential patterns for more than a century.
Thanks for the information, however, I don't think anyone is saying that everything was working for everyone, as it obviously wasn't. But we can learn from what worked in the past and update it in the present.
A book that looks deeply at that, I think, is the late David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. I only scratch the surface in my episodes, but I have two that talks about its anthropological view that people have figured out matrixed (and often matri-led) horizontal communities before:
Small, local units are only viable if your adversaries are also small, local units. They're not. If they're bigger, they will attack you and take your unit. It's how the world works. Large units are necessary for our safety, and only become evil if we allow it by abdication of its supervision to others.
I have discovered a flimsy-ness in the fiction of control (evil) that appears so real to us these days. Several months ago I filed an Ethics Complaint at my son's university, GWU in Washington DC. It named top administrators at the university for continuing a mandate for students to receive the COVID booster to continue their education. I shared 7 research studies showing the risk/reward ratio for this vaccine is severely skewed to the risk side for this age cohort. And emphasizing that it is now almost 2023 and the majority of the population has gotten COVID, many times over in some cases. I have gotten the run around with my complaint, referred to this person and then onto another. They even closed my case without it having been resolved. I did finally have a call scheduled with the Chair of the Covid Advisory Panel that is making the decision to re-up the mandate for students this spring. When I shared my questions with him in advance of our call, he wrote back that they relied on credible sources and were clear in their need for the mandate for 'student saftey'. While processing the rage regarding this insane response, and his lack of willingness to address my question regarding how they integrated the peer-reviewed findings I shared, I reached out to my son and asked him about what was going on. He had gotten an exemption for the booster last year and his girlfriend, also at GWU, had simply ignored it. Nothing had ever happened, no one followed up, and this mandate simply didn't have any teeth, it was just air. The students who followed it, did so because they believed it was real. Students who did not, discovered it was just lip service. A political stunt really. So in the spirit of Charles' piece here about there probably being no actual puppeteers, voila. There may, in truth, be none except those we focus on and give power to. Food for thought!
It seems 'the man behind the curtain' is, in fact, a relatively small group of (mostly) men, huddling together and breathing hushed reassurances to one another, whilst making loud and confident sounding proclamations in public.
Just like Toto, your story exposes these hucksters to a scrutiny they cannot bear.
I love Thich Nhat Hahn! As a parent, I believe that the one true use of power over someone else is to give them eventual power over themselves. If I don't use my power over my kids to keep them from thwarting their true selves, I make them into permanent adolescents looking for someone or something else to take care of them. I can't make my kids be anything they're not, I can just not reward them when they're being less.
The same principle, I believe, applies in governance. The purpose of community governance is to enable families to have power over themselves and the purpose of federal gov't is to enable communities to have power over themselves. That's the principle behind the economic system in my book, and I relate it to my system for raising kids here: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-caret-system.
There is a lot I could comment on here but one particularly important element of the essay is the observation that "big brother" or "consensual reality" or the "evil conspiracy" is actually a psychic event. As a result, many people don't even realize the conspiracy is there because it is happening between their ears, where it is not so explicit as what people usually think when they think, "conspiracy." Thus the need for individual wakefulness, for a revolution of awareness, especially of one's own self and how one has been conditioned
I suspect we never have been in our right mind. This whole human experiment has been rather insane from the very beginning. The insanity has simply multiplied is all.
There is a very real difference between the highest good for all beings and the greater good. Only over the last few years have I begun to understand the difference, and it has been through doing a lot of spiritual work. When you truly feel the interconnectivity of life you start acting for the highest good of all beings. Hardly anyone talks about how doing the spiritual work is the hardest thing you will ever do: it will require loss on every level of your being and life, it will require death over and over again. But it is also the most worthwhile thing you will ever do, and if you can have the courage to cross the valley of the shadow of death, you will get to the place where you fear no evil for the love of christ and christ consciousness is truly in your heart.
It’s funny how attempts to use words and concepts to “explain” “Reality” always fall short and end in tail-chasing paradox for the “mind” of the “separate self.” Before they do though, “we” always “hopefully” think we are “getting somewhere.” What if “the separate self” IS suffering? All attempts to avoid suffering can be seen to be ultimately futile in a Möbius-strip play of occillating opposites--pleasure/pain is what “we” read while we are stuck as “us.” This lock-up of thwarted desire produces rage in those who will not understand so they insist on using will to acquire “power” to try to even temporarily trample their way to “pleasure”. But the suffering only builds. Meanwhile, the Truth-Recognizing Organ, the “Heart” and its mysterious dimension of Love, is ignored.
Well the city of San Francisco just voted to arm robots to control gun violence. This after they Defunded, Detoothed and Declawed the police so thoroughly they were made incapable of dealing with crime. So of course crime exploded. So now of course the unthinkable becames our pseudo savior. So now let's continue to fight over legal gun control for citizens, while arming robots. Let's fight over banning hunting rifles, while doing nothing to disarm thousands of nuclear warheads. Really this kind of says it all and it is happening in every direction of society with every issue imaginable. Humans are going to be insane for a very long time. We will not be able to figure our way out of this one no matter how 'smart' we are. Balance must come from the bone deep decision of every individual to become sovereign in themselves. That takes a whole heck of alot of guts since we live in a world that rewards compliance and punishes true authenticity. So pretty much every force around and within us is working against us in having Truth backed individual and collective AHA! moments. I put my energy in Spirit these days because that is the only way I see through all of this. Alot of folks are suffering and it is getting worse. Most simply cannot cope with the mounting stress on all sides. The masses are going to default to totalitarian authority. It is inevitable, barring some unfathomable miraculous intervention. Hope is not a solution but it does open the doorway to other possibilities. We cannot 'fix' this. But we can hold a space within our own sovereign Spirit where we can take refuge and reach out to those who also seek Truth. Our brains have already been co-opted. We have to dig deeper.
Power is the power to make another suffer and do what they do not want to do. And an unwillingness to exercise that power was why I quit public school teaching. The conditioning to accept authority against your own best interest starts early, and I could not be a part of it.
Charles, as always, thank you! Because of the deep resonance around the topic of power, I dare to talk about my book here (New Stories of Love, Power, and Purpose; A Global Invitation to Experiment with the Unknown).
Specifically over the past 10+ years in which I have deeply engaged in the field of self-organization, I have seen the impact the stories of power, which societies almost everywhere have developed and internalized, have on individuals and collectives; the limitations these stories so often imposes on following the invitation to see the more beautiful world our heart knows is possible (I refer to your writings repeatedly in my book).
These experiences eventually led me to write. I felt called to share on a very personal level what lead me to hold a new story of both love and power, and how this changes my entire being and becoming. With my book I hope to contribute to the energy that is giving rise to new stories - stories that affirm life and this more beautiful world that you and many others thankfully bring into the awareness of so many.
Only a few days ago a reader of my book posted a picture with Orwell's 1984 and my book together. She pointed towards overlaps and suggested to read the two books in parallel. With great humbleness and deep respect for Orwell's work, I DO NOT compare my book to 1984!! When I saw the post, I first was completely overwhelmed by it and didn't know what to say or do, the part of me that is in charge of humility calling "NO, NO, NO!!! That doesn't feel right!!!", but soon I was able to settled down and breathe, allowing the deep gratitude for this experience to unfold. I took it as what it is - one reader who let me know in her own way that my book has touched her. How absolutely wonderful!
Your article touched me and I am very grateful for the way you address the issue of power. And it naturally led me back into the experience I described.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the inspiration I have found in your stories, your writings and your many recordings. Sending you loving power and powerful love!
What a wonderful description of the Abrahamic religious cult. It had blossom to perfection of absolute power in the early Medieval Europe, via the the Roman Empire’s ever-powerful, ever-present institutionalized Church that had replaced all the native European Gods and instituted a complete ideological, emotional, and physical tyranny.
I doubt this is true. The concept of “heretic” was developed much later and was related to power struggle within the Roman religious authorities. Mind you, the people of Europe had *always been struggling against the Church and several religious movements had developed. I think it were either the Bogoliubs or the Occitans who were the 1st murdered heretics. While towns in southern France (Frankish lands) were wiped out in horrific ‘orgiastic’ violence. Also, when the Spain was rechristened by Isabella, they needed to do something about the Jews and Moors. And it was then when the concepts of race and heresy were created.
Of course he does. He is in this for the glory: im an MD in private practice for over 25 years Dr. Fauci was a co-editor of a major textbook of internal medicine. He thinks that he is a medical hero. And in this respect he is the model for a tyrannical dictator. All dictators thought that they were helping their people Nikolai Ceausescu“loved” his people. Tony Fauci wants to win a Nobel prize. He thinks that generations of medical students have been inspired by his work. He has no idea how out of touch he is he has no idea how much misery and suffering and death he has caused
Yes hubris. Hes an 80 yo italian guy from NY. Hes like a mafia don. Astronomical ego! Thinks he knows whats best for everyone, telling “NOBLE “ lies to a clueless population. Smug in his own righteousness
The ‘they’ that the conspiracy theorists refer to is the same ‘they’ that Christ referred to when he said “forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
It basically refers to the ignorant—to the ignorance in us.
I just spent two months working with a 20 year old who had abandoned his smart phone because it was impinging on his time and his ability to focus. Within himself, he seemed to have found something larger, something that he couldn't access thru the phone or with his peers. He continues to seek that larger thing, by himself, and with others — when they're not on their phones, or otherwise consumed by all that would distract them from the larger thing inside themselves — which is why he loves singing in a choir, because the goal is a harmony that none can acheive by themselves, and that is bigger, even, than the group.
Harmony contains both "good" and "evil" — tho we may never understand the boundaries that separate one from the other. How can we define what we cannot see or know? We can’t get to that place of harmony by ourselves. Neither can a group of us force anyone to go there. It's a mystery.
Here’s a lovely line from Richard Wagamese’s lovely movie (from his book), Indian Horse:
"Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. It is the foundation of humility and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel it. We honor it by letting it be that way forever."
It seems to me we can’t unravel good from evil. But we can seek to live in the mystery, cultivate humility, learn to make compost, love the humus that results, and go deeper into the mysteries of life, death, and fertility.
I love this example of someone who has to come to their own conclusions, after being overloaded/overwhelmed, or simply bored with the ubiquitous gadgetry. When parents or someone outside tells someone "this is bad" rather than some internal mechanism saying so, it holds such a different frequency in our lives. How do we nurture this inner voice more fully? As many know, some of the answer lies in BEING as much as DOING: meditation, attention to nature, heightened presence in mundane tasks, etc.
This is where I think a collective web of practitioners and a template/infrastructure that nurtures this way is so vital. It can be at an ecovillage, but it can also be in anywhere-ville USA. It just takes a handfull of people who make the great leap. You see it when kids go to camp, when adults go to retreats, when busy people go on vacation, when summer beaches fill with strangers, when a large group convenes at a music concert..you see the "letting go" of the drama and stress of the modern world, of the "you should do this" and the right/wrong-ness of making choices rather than being present in the moment together, with all that is. I think we are simply yearning for a sustained effort that supports that way of being. It's up to us, collectively, I guess... I think singing in a choir, harmonizing our voices is about as good a way to start as any!
I love this example too! And I agree - it is up to us to create the communities of our dreams, to engage in those activities that make our hearts sing in concert with one another. To take part in activities that are designed solely to demonstrate opposition to the other, like our current election process, simply adds fuel to the fire. Furthermore, it seems to me that many if not most are unable to conceive the existence of a single alternative, much less dream of limitless possibilities.
However, I have witnessed and experienced the magic that emerges when a little creative energy is shared among people who may only have one thing in common... a shared sense that there has to be something better. As Buckminster Fuller concluded, significant changes are never realized by shaking our fists or even displaying clear and compelling evidence of its necessity. It only happens when an alternative is presented that makes the current way obsolete. I am full of hope!
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Thank you Charles for offering this space, and for your wonderful insight, your incredible talent for bringing context to such enormous subject matter, and doing so with such gentle prose that I imagine even those who have but little confidence in themselves, are left feeling they are already part of a community of champions.
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I am a fan of Distributism, the approach that power, ownership, social and government structures is to be “distributed” into small, local units and the consolidation of these things is to be guarded against. G.K. Chesterton quipped “The problem with capitalism is not there are too many capitalists, but there are too few”. Of course individual smaller units can go wrong, but the damage is limited and the answer doesn’t lie in erecting superstructures to make a perfect world where nothing goes wrong.
I was raised in the last days of an intact small town, small business, family based agrarian Midwestern culture in rural Wisconsin. Order was maintained through shared expectations of honesty, responsibility and civility and working things out privately with very little need for legal intervention. There was a interconnected matrix of friendships, families, business relationships, broad based involvement in township and village self government, school boards, volunteer fire departments. You knew those in those positions or knew someone who did. There was also an array of private organizations, churches, clubs, volunteer service opportunities. It was a diverse stable ecosystem with many small components. My mother volunteered for Meals on Wheels for shut ins and was in the same Homemaker’s Club for 50 years. Neighbors helped each other out in crisis. It wasn’t utopian perfection, human conflicts, problems, and unhappiness occurred, but it was safe, crime was unheard of, no locked doors anywhere in homes and cars. My parents in their retirement would winter in Texas and their house would sit there on the farm unlocked for two months with my brother coming by occasionally to check on things.
Yes! We agree, Jeff. In my response to Camilla I talked about my economic system of small-scale sovereignty supporting and strengthening families of self-reliant children, who expect to be a reciprocal member of the family. I'm going to do an episode today called "Ain't Creativity Quaint?" that looks at the expectation 120 years ago that people were capable and even kids could take responsibility. This is based on a jigsaw puzzle I put together of children's books from the late 1800's to the early 1900's. The world you describe is one I'm certain we can get back, in a better and more lasting form.
Yes, the week before my 13th birthday in June I worked with a crew of 5-6 boys ages 13-15. Our job was on farmland used to grow corn for seed to be used the following year. We would walk up and down endless rows cutting down individual plants that were too tall so the resulting seed would produce plants of an even height. Tall corn tends to fall down in the wind. The owner would pack us into the back of a pick up truck, and then drop us off early in the morning with sharpened blades on long handles, and we were on our own for the day with our lunches and water. We were working and middle class white boys, mostly not farm boys. They were too busy at home. This was in 1966. No interfering labor regulations, no supervision by “adults”. We worked, got along and didn’t goof off. In general farm kids from age 13 or so were expected to drive tractors hauling stuff even on the road, run potentially dangerous equipment, work long hours during the summer, get up early to milk cows before school and after. They were also given guns, taught gun safety and would go hunting on their own. In our high school attendance would drop during deer season.
Hi, Jeff. I just posted my video, where I mention your story and also highly recommend the series from Charles, which I think is such an important topic. Here's the YouTube, Substack to follow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZf1DyHgYhU.
Excellent report, thanks for postng it. It reminds us that we need to do has been done before, and thus brings hope where hope has otherwise been lost.
I fully agree with the spirit of this comment, but I have a problem with the G.K. Chesterton quote, nonetheless. “The problem with capitalism is not there are too many capitalists, but there are too few”. The problem with capitalism has been its tendency toward hegemonic power, the accumulation of power into but a few hands, resulted in most people becoming disempowered.
Capitalism is a hegemonic system which robs some of power while putting power in the hands of a few. That's what it is. Not to understand this is not to understand capitalism.
Using 'capital' is not capitalism. It's possible to have a capital-using system non-capitalistically. But it's presently very rare. Capitalism is a concentrative system of power. It is hegemonic. It's 'centripetal' in its relation to power, not centrifugal.
But if I'm a small business woman and I save some dollars to use toward growing my small business, that does NOT make me a capitalist, per se. I become a capitalist when 'my' workers and the forest I live in become mere resources for my exploitation.
In my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I define capitalism as ownership of the assets that back the money. It's meaningless without defining who that owner is. In our case, we live under banker capitalism because 94% of $$ are issued as mortgage debt (without creating the interest, which is a problem leading to our current crisis of capitalism).
My economic model is community capitalism where the community banks issue the mortgages in a local currency I call a caret, and every resident gets a monthly dividend in the form of targeted subsidies for locally produced food, wellcare, education and home improvement. So it enables the money in circulation for local goods and services to always be equal or more than the cost of housing. In that sense, I agree with GK because the only way to own our own labor is to issue the money that organizes it and is backed by the intergenerational transfer of wealth in housing and infrastructure.
I think we have come into the realm of semantics. For me the small business person is an expression of capitalism, and a weakness of capitalism is concentration of ownership over time and the imperative of money as being the ultimate value. Distributism recognizes this weakness and aims to counteract it.
Jeff, my friend, I use 'capitalism' to refer to an exploitative, extractive, soulless, system of oppression and domination. To say (to someone like me) that 'capitalism is any use of capital' is akin to saying that the use of a razor is synonymous with the use of guillotines--or even of nuclear weapons. I'm simply using mine to shave my beard. I'm not using mine to oppress or dominate you -- or anyone.
Anything of value in a market system can be said to be 'capital'. I thereby have some. You're welcome to mine. Come on over and you can have mine. I have so little.
Capitalism is an ethos -- and the ethos is one of oppression and domination.
You can construct your own language, but then nobody will understand you.
James, my brother, for me it’s a generic word for an economy based on private not government ownership whether or not it involves abuse and exploitation. Thank you for your clarification. Alway good to see you here and there.
Jeff -
In the mainstream traditional / historical version of actual socialist theory and ideas, socialism (some would call it 'communism') would be local communities regulating their own communities, not a state apparatus (government). The workers who work a farm of factory would own and control the farm of factory. It's management would be decided by the workers.
The idea that socialism is all about state ownership and control over the economy (and a dictatorship by a bureaucratic state) is false in the same way as it is false to say that all trees are walnut trees and all dogs are Labrador retrievers. Some governments, of various kinds, have claimed to be both socialist and communist governments. But not all socialisms are about government at all -- such as is the case with libertarian socialism. Libertarian socialism seeks to create socialist ways of life without and beyond the state (government).
Classic Distributism had a strong emphasis on worker owned enterprises and local self government
What Jeff is calling ‘distributism’ sounds like what I think of when I hear the word ‘socialism’ — government using economic policies such as taxation, tariffs and subsidies to counteract the accumulative nature of capitalism to one degree or another. BTW, it’s worth noting that the disappearance of those idyllic agrarian communities was a deliberate policy decision dating back to the Nixon administration (USDA head Earl Butz: “Get big or get out”).
Anyway, if we accept the premise that capitalism is inherently exploitative, but also acknowledge that a certain degree of specialization on the part of individuals leads to greater efficiency and benefits to the group, then the question is what system of exchange/ currency minimizes inequality while allowing for a level of social complexity beyond direct barter for material goods? I ask this as someone who has spent most of my adult life trying to figure out a non-exploitative means of sustenance from my family’s land, and I’m a long way from achieving that goal. As far as the question of private vs. public land ownership is concerned, how to balance the idea that housing is a basic human right against the not-unreasonable fear of misguided technocratic policies based on faulty, self-referential values? Or, to put it more simply, if no one owns the land, then how do people figure out what a reasonable population density actually consists of?
(Side note: if you look at a map of Kentucky, keep in mind that the county lines were drawn based on a rule that each county seat should be within one (Edit, that doesn’t sound right…3?)day’s mule ride from the next.)
TLDR; can ecological literacy and an ethic of care for all living things be used to continue to provide us all with something above mere subsistence?
That's not semantics, it's fundamental. Just a matter of scale. Apple probably doesn't consider Dell to be capitalism.
That's not a capitalism problem, it's fundamental human nature. It is a tool that provides the means for hegemony, just like communism, fascism, and all other forms of government. Money, our own ot that of others who we control, is power. Power corrupts.
You don't need to rationalize your capitalism. Small businesses are the epitome of capitalism.
"You don't need to rationalize your capitalism. Small businesses are the epitome of capitalism."
That makes no sense whatsoever. To say my comments "rationalize" capitalism is just nonsense. It's like saying up is down and left is right and yes is no and blue is red.... I'm opposed to capitalism. I don't know what happened in our culture, where one can say "I oppose capitalism," and it gets translated as "I love capitalism."
Most Americans do not know what socialism or capitalism actually refer to. And that's a FACT.
If I piss on a tree stump, that's not capitalism or socialism. That's piss on a tree stump.
I have no idea how people can be this out of touch with history, politics, philosophy, culture....
Getting people to pay you to water their trees is capitalism. Expecting others to water your tree for you is socialism. Being out of touch is a common affliction among socialists.
Have you ever read a book, David Watson?
Thank you.
What you've described is a great template for the kind of community I'd be happy to live in.
Not perfect, but human, viable and genuinely sustaining.
Unless you were black or an Indigenous person. In 1940, 45 percent of Wisconsin's black population was unemployed, compared to 13 percent of whites. While World War II's critical wartime industries temporarily provided employment, housing segregation and other forms of discrimination continued.
In the 1930s, William Kelley of the Milwaukee Urban League began a decades-long fight for black teachers in the public schools. Initially, white officials only agreed to employ black teachers in schools with many black students. After the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, the hiring of teachers became better integrated.
During the 1940s and 1950s. Racial discrimination and segregation continued unabated, however, especially in Milwaukee where ties of ethnicity and religion had established highly insulated residential patterns for more than a century.
Thanks for the information, however, I don't think anyone is saying that everything was working for everyone, as it obviously wasn't. But we can learn from what worked in the past and update it in the present.
Absolutely!
We don't need to reinvent the wheel. It's all been done before, many times over.
With an enlightened historical perspective, we should be able to choose the best and discard the rest.
A book that looks deeply at that, I think, is the late David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. I only scratch the surface in my episodes, but I have two that talks about its anthropological view that people have figured out matrixed (and often matri-led) horizontal communities before:
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/muskrat-love-and-anarchy
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/when-mothers-ran-the-world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJIHWk_M398
Thanks for the link, James!
Small, local units are only viable if your adversaries are also small, local units. They're not. If they're bigger, they will attack you and take your unit. It's how the world works. Large units are necessary for our safety, and only become evil if we allow it by abdication of its supervision to others.
You have identified yourself as Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. We know about you.
Or perhaps you are the spawn of Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes? In either case, you cannot kiss my arse. I only let those who love me kiss me there.
I love you, James, but I am not going to kiss your arse anytime!
I love you, too, brother! And I'd be happy to give you a big hug anytime.
Deal!
Probably pretty rare.
Actually, lines form outside my little casita, and most get turned away. ;)
Agreed. Decentralized > Centralized
I have discovered a flimsy-ness in the fiction of control (evil) that appears so real to us these days. Several months ago I filed an Ethics Complaint at my son's university, GWU in Washington DC. It named top administrators at the university for continuing a mandate for students to receive the COVID booster to continue their education. I shared 7 research studies showing the risk/reward ratio for this vaccine is severely skewed to the risk side for this age cohort. And emphasizing that it is now almost 2023 and the majority of the population has gotten COVID, many times over in some cases. I have gotten the run around with my complaint, referred to this person and then onto another. They even closed my case without it having been resolved. I did finally have a call scheduled with the Chair of the Covid Advisory Panel that is making the decision to re-up the mandate for students this spring. When I shared my questions with him in advance of our call, he wrote back that they relied on credible sources and were clear in their need for the mandate for 'student saftey'. While processing the rage regarding this insane response, and his lack of willingness to address my question regarding how they integrated the peer-reviewed findings I shared, I reached out to my son and asked him about what was going on. He had gotten an exemption for the booster last year and his girlfriend, also at GWU, had simply ignored it. Nothing had ever happened, no one followed up, and this mandate simply didn't have any teeth, it was just air. The students who followed it, did so because they believed it was real. Students who did not, discovered it was just lip service. A political stunt really. So in the spirit of Charles' piece here about there probably being no actual puppeteers, voila. There may, in truth, be none except those we focus on and give power to. Food for thought!
More power to you, your son and his girlfriend!
It seems 'the man behind the curtain' is, in fact, a relatively small group of (mostly) men, huddling together and breathing hushed reassurances to one another, whilst making loud and confident sounding proclamations in public.
Just like Toto, your story exposes these hucksters to a scrutiny they cannot bear.
Thich Nhat Hahn's book The Art of Power elucidates the one true use of power: to alleviate suffering in oneself and others.
I love Thich Nhat Hahn! As a parent, I believe that the one true use of power over someone else is to give them eventual power over themselves. If I don't use my power over my kids to keep them from thwarting their true selves, I make them into permanent adolescents looking for someone or something else to take care of them. I can't make my kids be anything they're not, I can just not reward them when they're being less.
The same principle, I believe, applies in governance. The purpose of community governance is to enable families to have power over themselves and the purpose of federal gov't is to enable communities to have power over themselves. That's the principle behind the economic system in my book, and I relate it to my system for raising kids here: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-caret-system.
There is a lot I could comment on here but one particularly important element of the essay is the observation that "big brother" or "consensual reality" or the "evil conspiracy" is actually a psychic event. As a result, many people don't even realize the conspiracy is there because it is happening between their ears, where it is not so explicit as what people usually think when they think, "conspiracy." Thus the need for individual wakefulness, for a revolution of awareness, especially of one's own self and how one has been conditioned
.
McGilchrist talks about the domination of the left hemisphere. This internalized self-control sounds a lot like what you’re pointing to.
It’s not out there- “The call is coming from inside the house!”
Yes, McGilchrist's work, on illuminating the dichotomy between the two hemispheres of the human brain, is essential in these troubled times.
It boils down to this:
We are simply not in our right mind!
Yes, McGilchrist's work, on illuminating the dichotomy between the two hemispheres of the human brain, is essential in these troubled times.
It boils down to this:
We are simply not in our right mind!
I suspect we never have been in our right mind. This whole human experiment has been rather insane from the very beginning. The insanity has simply multiplied is all.
Beautiful essay--thank you.
There is a very real difference between the highest good for all beings and the greater good. Only over the last few years have I begun to understand the difference, and it has been through doing a lot of spiritual work. When you truly feel the interconnectivity of life you start acting for the highest good of all beings. Hardly anyone talks about how doing the spiritual work is the hardest thing you will ever do: it will require loss on every level of your being and life, it will require death over and over again. But it is also the most worthwhile thing you will ever do, and if you can have the courage to cross the valley of the shadow of death, you will get to the place where you fear no evil for the love of christ and christ consciousness is truly in your heart.
It’s funny how attempts to use words and concepts to “explain” “Reality” always fall short and end in tail-chasing paradox for the “mind” of the “separate self.” Before they do though, “we” always “hopefully” think we are “getting somewhere.” What if “the separate self” IS suffering? All attempts to avoid suffering can be seen to be ultimately futile in a Möbius-strip play of occillating opposites--pleasure/pain is what “we” read while we are stuck as “us.” This lock-up of thwarted desire produces rage in those who will not understand so they insist on using will to acquire “power” to try to even temporarily trample their way to “pleasure”. But the suffering only builds. Meanwhile, the Truth-Recognizing Organ, the “Heart” and its mysterious dimension of Love, is ignored.
Indeed.
The heart has reasons that reason cannot fathom.
(Paraphrasing some French guy)
Thank you Charles. I find this fascinating and thought provoking. The themes are certainly apparent in the happenings of our world.
Well the city of San Francisco just voted to arm robots to control gun violence. This after they Defunded, Detoothed and Declawed the police so thoroughly they were made incapable of dealing with crime. So of course crime exploded. So now of course the unthinkable becames our pseudo savior. So now let's continue to fight over legal gun control for citizens, while arming robots. Let's fight over banning hunting rifles, while doing nothing to disarm thousands of nuclear warheads. Really this kind of says it all and it is happening in every direction of society with every issue imaginable. Humans are going to be insane for a very long time. We will not be able to figure our way out of this one no matter how 'smart' we are. Balance must come from the bone deep decision of every individual to become sovereign in themselves. That takes a whole heck of alot of guts since we live in a world that rewards compliance and punishes true authenticity. So pretty much every force around and within us is working against us in having Truth backed individual and collective AHA! moments. I put my energy in Spirit these days because that is the only way I see through all of this. Alot of folks are suffering and it is getting worse. Most simply cannot cope with the mounting stress on all sides. The masses are going to default to totalitarian authority. It is inevitable, barring some unfathomable miraculous intervention. Hope is not a solution but it does open the doorway to other possibilities. We cannot 'fix' this. But we can hold a space within our own sovereign Spirit where we can take refuge and reach out to those who also seek Truth. Our brains have already been co-opted. We have to dig deeper.
Power is the power to make another suffer and do what they do not want to do. And an unwillingness to exercise that power was why I quit public school teaching. The conditioning to accept authority against your own best interest starts early, and I could not be a part of it.
Charles, as always, thank you! Because of the deep resonance around the topic of power, I dare to talk about my book here (New Stories of Love, Power, and Purpose; A Global Invitation to Experiment with the Unknown).
Specifically over the past 10+ years in which I have deeply engaged in the field of self-organization, I have seen the impact the stories of power, which societies almost everywhere have developed and internalized, have on individuals and collectives; the limitations these stories so often imposes on following the invitation to see the more beautiful world our heart knows is possible (I refer to your writings repeatedly in my book).
These experiences eventually led me to write. I felt called to share on a very personal level what lead me to hold a new story of both love and power, and how this changes my entire being and becoming. With my book I hope to contribute to the energy that is giving rise to new stories - stories that affirm life and this more beautiful world that you and many others thankfully bring into the awareness of so many.
Only a few days ago a reader of my book posted a picture with Orwell's 1984 and my book together. She pointed towards overlaps and suggested to read the two books in parallel. With great humbleness and deep respect for Orwell's work, I DO NOT compare my book to 1984!! When I saw the post, I first was completely overwhelmed by it and didn't know what to say or do, the part of me that is in charge of humility calling "NO, NO, NO!!! That doesn't feel right!!!", but soon I was able to settled down and breathe, allowing the deep gratitude for this experience to unfold. I took it as what it is - one reader who let me know in her own way that my book has touched her. How absolutely wonderful!
Your article touched me and I am very grateful for the way you address the issue of power. And it naturally led me back into the experience I described.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the inspiration I have found in your stories, your writings and your many recordings. Sending you loving power and powerful love!
What a wonderful description of the Abrahamic religious cult. It had blossom to perfection of absolute power in the early Medieval Europe, via the the Roman Empire’s ever-powerful, ever-present institutionalized Church that had replaced all the native European Gods and instituted a complete ideological, emotional, and physical tyranny.
To wit: I recently read that within five years of Christianity becoming the "state" religion of Rome, they had executed their first "heretic."
I doubt this is true. The concept of “heretic” was developed much later and was related to power struggle within the Roman religious authorities. Mind you, the people of Europe had *always been struggling against the Church and several religious movements had developed. I think it were either the Bogoliubs or the Occitans who were the 1st murdered heretics. While towns in southern France (Frankish lands) were wiped out in horrific ‘orgiastic’ violence. Also, when the Spain was rechristened by Isabella, they needed to do something about the Jews and Moors. And it was then when the concepts of race and heresy were created.
So, 12th-13th centuries and on
Christianity become the official religion of Rome in 380. The first official Christian heretic, Priscillan, was executed in 385.
Tony fauci believes that he is doing good
I'm not sure I believe that!
Of course he does. He is in this for the glory: im an MD in private practice for over 25 years Dr. Fauci was a co-editor of a major textbook of internal medicine. He thinks that he is a medical hero. And in this respect he is the model for a tyrannical dictator. All dictators thought that they were helping their people Nikolai Ceausescu“loved” his people. Tony Fauci wants to win a Nobel prize. He thinks that generations of medical students have been inspired by his work. He has no idea how out of touch he is he has no idea how much misery and suffering and death he has caused
That is because he is a malignant narcissist and sociopath.
He doesnt think he is doing anything bad.
You may well be right, but I find it very hard to believe he could be so lacking in self-awareness.
I mean, all his flip-flopping over masks etc has been thoroughly documented and now distilled into at least one utterly condemning short video.
His reputation has been shot to pieces, many times over.
And you're telling us he can somehow blithely ignore these things?
That would be hubris of astronomical proportions.
Yes hubris. Hes an 80 yo italian guy from NY. Hes like a mafia don. Astronomical ego! Thinks he knows whats best for everyone, telling “NOBLE “ lies to a clueless population. Smug in his own righteousness
😂😂
The ‘they’ that the conspiracy theorists refer to is the same ‘they’ that Christ referred to when he said “forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
It basically refers to the ignorant—to the ignorance in us.
Ignorance is the ultimate evil.
Power is the ultimate evil. It thrives on corrupting the beautiful human nature by substituting good for evil.
https://pandauncut.substack.com/p/nietzsches-last-men-and-the-covid