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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2022 16:11:32 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 5, 2022 21:23:54 GMT
Capitalism is Destroying our Collective Mental Health In a new chapter, epidemiologists spell out the mounting evidence of the sickening effects of capitalism on mental health. By José G. Luiggi-Hernández -November 4, 2022 www.madinamerica.com/2022/11/capitalism-whats-destroying-collective-mental-health/A summarized collection and critical assessment of the ongoing research that exposes the sickening effects of capitalism on mental health was recently published as a chapter in the Oxford Textbook of Social Psychiatry by epidemiologists Jerzy Eisenberg-Guyot and Seth Prins. Psychiatry and social sciences’ focus on individual factors has failed to account for the role of structures and systems – such as capitalism – in developing mental illness and the disparities in psychological forms of suffering. The authors write: “What explains these trends and inequities? While this question has been a primary concern of quantitative social science, the resulting answers have not always engaged directly with capitalism—a socio-economic system that not only structures societal distributions of health-affecting resources and power but also modulates our experiences of reality and the production of knowledge within it. Instead, mental health researchers have focused on the roles of individual-level factors like ‘risk behaviors’ or socio-economic status. Moreover, capitalism’s ubiquity makes it difficult to isolate pathways through which it affects any single outcome like mental health.” To move away from this individualizing trend, the authors review the most recent and historical literature and empirical research that illustrate the influence of capitalism on mental health in this chapter. For example, studies have shown that people who adhere to capitalist values are more likely to experience loneliness and decreased psychological well-being. Capitalism has also been previously conceptualized as a social determinant of health. Eisenberg-Guyot and Prins agree, as they “recognize that all research on the social determinants of mental illness implicates capitalism.” In addition, however, they draw an explicit connection between capitalism and racism, colonialism, and the patriarchy, making a visible connection between capitalism and the suffering of women, people of color, the colonized, and other minoritized groups. Original Studies on the Relationship between Capitalism and Mental Health Using official data and observations, Friedrich Engels developed one of the first epidemiological studies ever and included information about physical and mental health in Britain. He found a connection between the poor work conditions of early industrialization and the illness and premature deaths of workers. Engels also found that the capitalist promotion of competition led to increased loneliness, indifferences, and isolation. Moreover, repetitive tasks led to a lack of creativity and autonomy and increased boredom. Finally, he described how the physical illnesses developed at work led to irritability, hopelessness, and depression. Through similar methods, Karl Marx identified how the industrialist material conditions and dynamics influenced the mental and emotional life of the working class. By minimizing the tasks of the workers, the capitalist “increases efficiency and productivity (and thus profit) but degrades and deskills labor.” This reduced the creative capacity of the worker and generated isolation, powerlessness, boredom, anxiety, and a lack of purpose. The time spent working also took away from the time and energy necessary for the worker to engage in their social life and more fulfilling activities. Marx and Engels also identified how women and children worked under worse conditions than adult men, were paid less, and had added responsibilities such as domestic work, leading to a disparity in “exhaustion, pulmonary disease, injuries, poisonings” and lower life expectancies (or infanticide). While class difference was the primary focus of Marx’s and Engels’ epidemiological analyses, Marx briefly acknowledged the role of colonialism and slavery in creating and perpetuating capitalism and how they generated mass death and suffering among the colonized groups. Marx didn’t generate a theory around sexism and racism, but the authors explain that “feminist and black radical theorists have filled these gaps, arguing that capitalism depends on racism and sexism to maximize profits through hyper-exploitation, colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy.” “They argue that capitalism has been racialized and gendered since its inception and that it has used such hierarchies to expand – by appropriating resources and Labour from Africa, the Americas, other parts of the Global South, and elsewhere, and by creating and exploiting gender divisions of labor.” Alienation and Work Environment Many researchers were influenced by Marx’s theory of alienation which states that under capitalism, workers are alienated – or separated – from the fruit of their labor (as the capitalist takes both what workers create and most of the profit that is made from their work), from themselves (their needs and desires) and from others (such as other workers, friends, family, and community). Social Psychologist, Seeman, expanded Marx’s work and identified various dimensions of alienation, such as powerlessness (belief in the inability to achieve one’s goals), meaninglessness (lack of confidence in predicting the outcomes of one’s actions), normlessness (having to engage in socially unacceptable behavior to achieve one’s goals), and isolation (lack of connection with others). In addition, he and other researchers found that alienation was associated with depression, anxiety, poor self-esteem, hopelessness, and self-perceived physical health. The authors found similarities between these findings and other theories. For example, they mention how psychoanalytic theorists have also believed that the dehumanization of workers under capitalism hinders their creativity, social connections, and the ability to satisfy their needs and desires. Eisenberg-Guyot and Prins also see the compatibility between these ideas and the diathesis-stress model (which argues that the interaction between socially-patterned experiences and stressful life experiences, alongside one’s history, contribute to the development of mental illness) as the structured life of the working class alongside their alienation and personal histories influence the development of mental illness. Occupational research has also found a relationship between alienation and mental health. Karasek developed the demand/control or job strain model, which studies two aspects of work. The first is job demands or the laboriousness necessary to go about one’s work and the stress that arises from other tasks and interpersonal conflict at work). The second is job control, the employee’s ability to change the work environment or how they perform their tasks. According to this line of research, people whose jobs had higher demand and lower control were more likely to report more anxiety, depression, exhaustion, distress, and stress-related physical health issues. However, Karasek fails to acknowledge the power dynamics that are played out due to class relations and the capitalist structure. Job strain itself isn’t the cause of health disparities between classes but the result of inequality. Due to changing social structures and dynamics, sociologists and psychologists left behind the dichotomy of capitalist/worker and began using a model that fit the newly emerging hierarchies within the workplace. This included the capitalist, the manager, the supervisor, and the worker. Managers and supervisors are characterized by the contradiction of their class location as they do not own the means of production but overlook the laborer’s work. Using the theory of class contradiction, researchers found that low-level supervisors had less control over the workplace policies, environment, and decision-making processes. Being “dominated and exploited by capitalists and antagonized by subordinates (the contradictory class location hypothesis),” these low-level supervisors were at higher risk of developing mental illness, reporting higher levels of depression, anxiety, and alcohol use disorder when compared to both higher-level managers and workers. Other studies show that capitalists and managers report better psychological well-being than workers and supervisors. Still, the relationship between class and health was stronger amongst men compared to women. They hypothesize that this difference might be attributed to the disparities in heterosexual couples’ division of domestic labor, among other reasons. Additionally, recent research has found that the petit bourgeoisie (or entrepreneurs, small business owners, professionals, etc.) were found to be at higher risk of mental illness than the previously mentioned classes as they are often competing with capitalists without having the same number of resources and often end up becoming part of the working class. While most research in these areas used self-reports, which measure the person’s perception of job strain, other researchers have used different kinds of data to study workplace social relations and their influence on mental health. For example, in 2015, Muntaner and colleagues measured organizational-level exploitation using employers’ for-profit or not-for-profit status and measured managerial domination in the frequency of labor-relations violations. They found that US nursing assistants exposed to more organizational-level exploitation and managerial dominance were at higher risk of experiencing depression. Studies using similar, more objective measures found that the percentage of income workers who were not paid in accordance with their labor increased the workers’ odds of developing mental illness. Moreover, employees whose work had become more automatized had more odds of engaging in binge drinking than workers with more authority and autonomy over their work. While class status has often predicted mental health outcomes, research shows that people of color experience worse health outcomes across most classes. Since the early 20th century, researchers have linked capitalism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy to mental health disparities. More recent studies have found how the mental health of racialized workers is affected by chronic stress, estrangement, double shifts, residential and occupational segregation, and various forms of state violence; racialized women being disproportionality affected. Psychiatric epidemiology has often failed to study the interconnected structural and systemic factors (e.g., colonialism, racism, colonialism, sexism, misogyny and patriarchy, LGBTQphobias, etc.) that influence mental health. Future studies should aim to fill the gaps in research about the connection between capitalism and the objective conditions lived by people of color and people of the Global South. **** Eisenberg-Guyot, J. & Prins, S. J. (2022). The Impact of Capitalism on Mental Health: An Epidemiological Perspective. In D. Bhugra, D. Moussaoui & T. J. Craig (Eds.) Oxford Textbook of Social Psychiatry (pp.195-222) doi.org/10.1093/med/9780198861478.003.0022 (Link) CHAPTER 22 The impact of capitalism on mental health: An epidemiological perspective Get access Arrow Jerzy Eisenberg-Guyot, Seth academic.oup.com/book/43957/chapter-abstract/369595483Abstract Researchers have documented capitalism’s pernicious effects on the health of the poor and working class since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This chapter summarizes and critically assesses the relationship between capitalism and mental health. It begins by defining capitalism: broadly, a socio-economic system characterized by the private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation and domination of wage labour for profit. Early research on capitalism and mental health is then reviewed, with a focus on the work of Engels and Marx, which described how nineteenth-century capitalist industrialization damaged workers’ mental health by degrading their social, working, and living conditions. Next, quantitative research on capitalism and mental health since the mid-twentieth century is discussed. Although epidemiological research on the topic remains underdeveloped, research consistently finds that capitalism harms workers’ mental health and exacerbates inequities. It does so through at least three mechanisms: alienation; exploitation; and domination. Finally, it is argued that the mental health effects of other axes of power, like racism, sexism, colonialism, and imperialism, cannot be fully understood without attending to their historically contingent forms under capitalism; likewise, capitalism’s mental health effects cannot be understood without attending to these other axes of power. Keywords: capitalism, epidemiology, mental health, mental illness, psychiatric, social class, social determinants of health Subject Psychiatry Series Oxford Textbooks in Psychiatry
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Post by Admin on Dec 29, 2022 18:41:59 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 29, 2022 19:33:02 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 8, 2023 16:39:06 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 13, 2023 17:30:21 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 25, 2023 14:40:08 GMT
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Post by Admin on Aug 27, 2023 17:06:52 GMT
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Post by Admin on Aug 28, 2023 19:20:59 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 22, 2023 22:24:05 GMT
INTERVIEW | ECONOMY & LABOR Insecurity Is a Feature, Not a Bug, of Capitalism. But It Can Spark Resistance. Debt abolitionist Astra Taylor discusses how capitalism’s manufactured insecurity can feed movements for radical change. By C.J. Polychroniou , TRUTHOUT PublishedOctober 22, 2023 truthout.org/articles/insecurity-is-a-feature-not-a-bug-of-capitalism-but-it-can-spark-resistance/Capitalism is a socioeconomic system that depends upon exploitation and generates inequality. In a recently published book titled, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, filmmaker, writer and political organizer Astra Taylor also describes capitalism as an inherently insecurity-producing machine. From education and home ownership to workplace surveillance, capitalism manufactures insecurity, argues Taylor, a co-founder of the Debt Collective. This insecurity makes us increasingly vulnerable to economic uncertainty, which the system weaponizes in turn against us. Yet, Taylor argues in the exclusive interview for Truthout, the system’s manufactured insecurity can also band people together to demand radical reforms, although insecurity in today’s world seems to be drawing people increasingly toward authoritarian political leaders. C. J. Polychroniou: It is often said we live in strange and dangerous times. Indeed, there are crises in place which threaten human survival; there is continuous growth in economic inequality since the 1980s and authoritarianism is on the move as democracy weakens. In this context, in your recently published book aptly titled, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, you have described insecurity as a “defining feature of our time” and an essential feature of the capitalist system. Now, capital reigns, to be sure, and capitalism exploits insecurities, but isn’t occasional insecurity also a natural part of life? Why make insecurity a driving force behind today’s economy and politics? Why not resentment, or protest actions, which are growing throughout the world, although some studies indicate that the same thing is happening with political apathy? Astra Taylor: Insecurity relates to the many intensifying and intersecting crises we face today — unaffordable housing, rising debt, toxic media, worsening mental health, an emboldened far right, climate catastrophe, Artificial Intelligence and Big Tech, the list goes on. I wouldn’t say that I “make” insecurity a driving force behind today’s politics. I’d argue that it just is one. That’s because, as I show in the book, insecurity is a defining component of capitalism — one as essential as the profit motive. To paraphrase your question, capitalism not only exploits insecurities; more fundamentally, it generates them. Insecurity, in other words, isn’t just an unfortunate byproduct of our current competitive economic order. It’s a core product. If you aren’t insecure, you don’t keep buying, hustling, accumulating. Insecurity is the stick that keeps us scrambling and striving. And yet, as you note, insecurity is also a natural part of life. In the book, I distinguish between two kinds of insecurity. First there is existential insecurity, or the kind of insecurity that is inherent to human life and that stems from the fact we are mortal creatures who can’t survive without the care of others. Then there is what I call manufactured insecurity, and this is the kind of insecurity that is essential to the functioning of a market society. Looking back over the centuries to the dawn of the industrial era, I show how capitalism began by making people insecure in this modern sense — by severing people from their communities and traditional livelihoods so they had nothing to sell but their labor. We see this dynamic playing out today, as officials pursue monetary policies explicitly designed to weaken the hand of workers. That’s the manufactured insecurity at work. This might all sound rather heavy, but I really tried to write the book with a light touch — drawing on history and economics while also incorporating myth, psychology and even some humorous memoir elements. And there’s hope. Right now, our society is structured to worsen rather than tend to our insecurities and vulnerabilities. But we can always arrange things differently. The notion of insecurity as a feature in today’s world might lead people to assume that it leads to despair and inaction. Yet, you argue that insecurity can indeed be a step toward creating solidarity for the purpose of challenging and eventually transforming the system. Is this a theoretical statement behind the purported symbiotic relationship between capitalism and insecurity, or one based on actual empirical evidence? In other words, can you describe how insecurity translates into collective action and what form, in your own view, collective action needs to take for the system to be transformed? In the book, I argue that insecurity can cut both ways. It can spur defensive and destructive compulsions, or it can be a conduit to empathy, humility, belonging and solidarity. We see this all the time. The right wing knows this and is dedicated to inflaming people’s insecurities, encouraging them to misdirect their rage toward the even-more-vulnerable — rather than toward the economic system and the elites who profit from the status quo. One example I give is how workers and the unemployed organized during the Great Depression. We forget it today, but “insecurity” was actually a critical concept in the battle for the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt called insecurity “one of the most fearsome evils of our economic system” and made the concept of security a cornerstone of the welfare state. I certainly see insecurity — shame, fear, anxiety about the future — transformed into solidarity in my work with the Debt Collective, the union for debtors that I helped found. In today’s economic climate, the rental housing crisis has become particularly acute in thoroughly neoliberal societies like the United States, but rents have also exploded across Europe and more and more people are facing precarious living conditions. Are there innovative solutions for the rental housing crisis? For example, can Vienna’s social housing policy be duplicated in countries like the United States? Absolutely. I spend some time on the example of Austrian social housing in the second chapter of the book. It’s a fantastic example of how to eradicate a form of material insecurity that is now depressingly endemic across North America. In the book, I return again and again to a core paradox. As I write, “Today, many of the ways we try to make ourselves and our societies more secure — money, property, possessions, police, the military — have paradoxical effects, undermining the very security we seek and accelerating harm done to the economy, the climate, and people’s lives, including our own.” Housing really is a prime example. In the U.S., a paltry 1 percent of housing is provided on a non-market basis. The commodification of housing ensures that huge numbers of people will be priced out and perpetually insecure and also unhoused. The very thing that we are told will finally guarantee us security — a mortgage on a one-family unit — also helps drive the destabilization of our communities. Ever-appreciating values and rents push working-class people out of their towns and neighborhoods. Single-family, car-dependent fiefdoms are ecologically wasteful. Not to mention the way the financial sector and the rise of Wall Street landlords are further enriched by this model, further contributing to volatility. Social housing is the only way out of this conundrum, and the only way to ensure real housing security for all. The Biden administration has made inroads on student debt, but student debt cancellation is still far from becoming a reality, largely because of the Supreme Court’s ultraconservative majority. First, I would like you to explain to readers why the Debt Collective, which you co-founded in 2014 and which happens to be the first union for debtors, talks about “debt cancellation” and rejects the term “debt forgiveness,” and then whether you remain optimistic that an ultimate victory for student-loan borrowers is going to happen at some point down the road. We reject the idea of “debt forgiveness” because debtors did nothing wrong. People don’t need to be forgiven for pursuing an education — for wanting to learn or to better their lives. This is why the Debt Collective prefers to speak of debt “cancellation,” “relief” or “abolition.” Our small-but-mighty movement has come a long way in a decade. I believe that we will win — if people get off the sidelines and join us. One easy way people reading can do that is by taking 10 minutes to submit a dispute to the Department of Education using our new Student Debt Release Tool. Anyone with federal loans can do so. The tool will send a former letter demanding relief to the top brass at the Department of Education. The more applications they receive, the more pressure we can apply. We’ve had victories, we’ve had setbacks, and then more victories and setbacks. I’ve been in the trenches long enough to know that’s how movements go. The arc of justice is, sadly, rather crooked and sometimes loops back on itself. But this is not a moment to throw up our hands — it’s one to keep holding the president’s feet to the fire. The movement for debt abolition is just getting started.
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Post by Admin on Nov 24, 2023 18:34:49 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 24, 2023 18:36:38 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 6, 2023 14:22:24 GMT
Capitalism Cannot Turn Into Anything But Autocracy …only to disintegrate altogether soon after thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/capitalism-cannot-turn-into-anything-but-autocracy-bf176012f64eThe history of capitalism has an arc of its own. It has a beginning, a high point, and yes, an end — with or without revolutions, climate change or ecological destruction. Capitalism follows a trajectory of natural evolution culminating in a Orwellian dystopia, right before its quick demise. Join me in this short review on the origins of capitalism to understand why every attempt made at dismantling it has failed — and will continue to do so — until the authoritarian technologies making it possible disappear in the not so distant future. According to Investopedia “Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production, with labor solely paid wages. Capitalism depends on the enforcement of private property rights, which provide incentives for investment in and productive use of capital.” What is sorely missing from this definition — as always when it comes to economics — is the role of technology and energy. Both factors have played a crucial role in the conception of this idea, let alone its growth into the hydra it has become. Contrary to common wisdom, I argue, neither of these critical inputs — energy and technology — were brought about by capitalism itself, it was completely the other way around. It was the use of technology and an ever growing availability of energy which has made capitalism possible, and thus the loss of these will be the cause which will eventually bring it to its knees. Capitalism can never hoped to be dismantled without abandoning technology. I know that is a harsh statement, perhaps prompting some of my readers to point out how anti-technology I am, and how a socialist revolution / green technologies / Bitcoin / gold / or fill in the blank could turn things around overnight. Well, all I ask is this: bear with me for a few more minutes. Let’s start things off with colonization, the Petri dish in which the conception of Capitalism took place. According to how it’s taught in schools around the West (or at least where I live) colonization was purely a result of political factors and conscious decisions. The discovery of the Americas (which was thought to be West India back then) was quickly followed by the genocide of indigenous populations and a forceful takeover of their wealth and land. Slave trade provided settlers with an abundant flow of laborers, who were often forced to work under extremely harsh conditions. The flow of gold and other commodities from the newly established colonies in turn have rapidly transformed European societies and gave birth to capitalism. What is woefully missing from this story is the technology which has enabled all this: sailboats. Without large and sturdy enough ships, developed and perfected for centuries, or navigation systems like the compass, hourglass, astrolabe and quadrant it would have been impossible for Columbus to get to the Caribbean and back alive. Note how these technologies were already there ready to be used, well before this whole story began. It was not colonization which has brought sailboats and navigation about, but the other way around: it was these technologies which have enabled European nations to conquer much of the world. What is perhaps even more important to note here, that these technologies were — as the late sociologist Lewis Mumford would say — autocratic in nature. Said differently: ships could not have been developed and built without a hierarchical system and without the use of force and aggression. It is perhaps a lesser known fact of European history, but even after the conception of Western kingdoms the continent was full of indigenous tribes inhabiting many of its woodlands, and living alongside the various states of Europe. Thus before the actual colonization of Americas could took place, large European powers were already busy exterminating these tribes together with their rich culture, eager to grab their resources: in this case wood suitable for building large ships. Building — let alone manning — a large sailboat also required a strict hierarchy and a kingdom able to accumulate enough surplus food for both the woodworkers and sailors. None of this was a voluntarily act: men were often forcefully recruited to join ship crews, and food was confiscated from peasants through the well established means of a feudal system. As we can see, the very technology — ships — have already carried the seeds of colonization well before Columbus set sail in 1492. In other words: colonization — and later capitalism — happened because it could, not because someone had an idea to make it happen. Compare that to what took place in more egalitarian societies, like the Polynesian. They never evolved into despotic civilizations controlling global trade as they used more democratic technologies, like small catamarans. These vessels could have been built and manned by a handful of humans, and most importantly without the need for large hierarchical societies, confiscation of land, food and other resources. The very fact, that anyone could’ve built such ships (or their own weapons and tools for that matter), made these technologies widely available to every member of the society. When everyone has the same bow and arrows or the same means to sustain their family, who needs a king for anything other than ceremonial roles? This natural democratization of technologies demanded a much more egalitarian structure where everyone had a say, as opposed to autocratic states which used oppression and large scale warfare to sustain their technological base. Itwas in this context of authoritarian technologies used by authoritarian states where capitalism first appeared. Abstractions like property rights (beyond personal property) gave birth to privately owned corporations raising funds for their journeys through selling and offering dividends on their stocks. The immense flow of wealth and raw materials into Europe started to change hands on exchange markets. People made investments in the hope of profits. New businesses popped up everywhere, financed by bank loans. None of this were possible, however, without stripping the massive flow of goods and wealth of their blood stained history. Commodities were named commodities not only to make their price more comparable, and thus easier to trade with, but also to strip them from the context in which they were made. The blood staining Aztec jewelry was purposefully washed away as these intricate pieces of precious metals were melted and shaped into uniform gold coins and ingots. The sweat and tears of slaves working on plantations were erased from memory as soon as the sugar and cotton they produced was poured into uniform sacks. Everything was turned into neat little units of goods without any prior history. The same process of de-contextualization unfolded on the plantations as well. Plant species, like sugarcane, were uprooted from their original habitats — together with slaves of African origin — and were placed into a sterilized environment stripped from their original inhabitants. There they had no choice but to perform their task: grow profits at low to minimal investment costs. This complete disregard for original habitats and the needs of all (not just human) species, has yielded a process easy to replicate all across the globe. Kill, destroy, replace, reap. Rinse and repeat. Without any interest in context on both ends of the process it was easy to forget that all this was a one time boom. You can exterminate and rob a rich culture only once. You can cut down an ancient forest and sell it’s prized wood only once in a lifetime. You can establish only so many slave farms before running out of suitable land. You can only discover and colonize a second hemisphere only once. After that, there is no planet B. As one would expect, such a “successful” recipe couldn’t result in anything but exponential growth — at least until limits were reached. Those who warned that this could not go on forever based on a finite set of resources were called names and cast aside. It was just way too profitable to continue plundering the planet — one finite resource after the other. Land. Coal. Oil. Copper. Lithium. The same process was repeated time after time: exploration, killing the inhabitants of the land, extracting a finite reserve, then moving on to the next great opportunity. Limits be damned. Looking at the essence of “renewable” technologies nothing has changed. In fact, things only got worse. Rare earth metals, copper, silver, nickel, cadmium, high purity sand, steel are all needed in higher quantities due to the extremely low energy density and intermittency of “renewables”. Wind and solar sites must be overbuilt by as much as 4-7 times to reach the same level of output as a coal or gas fired power plant. Mining and the destruction of Nature thus also has to accelerate at a similar rate — or even more if you consider the rapid decline in ore grades. All powered by fossil fuels, of course. There is nothing renewable about “renewables”. They depend on the same autocratic technologies as the very fossil fuels they aim to replace. Finally, if you consider that colonizing nations and their allies are responsible for 92% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide emissions and 74% of excess material use, it’s clear that the current ecological crisis is the responsibility of industrialised economies in general and the corporations running them in particular. In this sense the green revolution is but a last ditch attempt to maintain this unhealthy imbalance in power and ultimately the rule of corporate interests, the true winners of colonization. Capitalism has come about as a natural response to technology use and a temporary abundance of raw materials. It was simply the most effective way of plundering the planet, and thus won hands down every time it was contested. Even its much ballyhooed challengers were built upon its core principles. They way how returns are distributed or who makes owns the productive assets, of course, can be greatly different, resulting in a lower or higher inequality in society. Irrespective of wealth distribution and questions of ownership, however, the essence of every large scale industrial system remained inherently autocratic. As long as the resources for building technological devices (be it sailboats, steam engines, solar panels or Bitcoin) must be expropriated and extracted to exhaustion, the system will remain the same. Since the economy, no matter how we name it, is only interested in making a net return on investment, not in the health or well being of humans and the more than human world, it will eventually turn on its own population as its resource base wanes. As long as everything, from raw material to labor, could have been extracted far away from the “bastions of democracy”, people at home were allowed to be free, but only as far as not to hurt business interests. This gave the illusion of progress, or a better life through technology, together with better health, care for the young and elderly or rights for minorities. As resources grew thinner and thinner, yielding less and less profits though, the system has started to show its real face: autocracy. Modern democracies across the planet have started to turn into a local variant of a soft or inverted totalitarianism. A political arrangement in which corporations exert a subtle but substantial power over a system that superficially seems democratic. Think: corporate donors writing laws, often against the interests of the voters. A complete take-over of the media and the civic discourse. Shutting down dissent and labeling everything but the mainstream narrative dangerous misinformation. Freedom and democracy proved to be nothing but a brief anomaly in this inherently inhumane system arching back to the emergence of the first empires. Soon, as the debt based everything bubble bursts, governments around the world will have no other choice than to take complete control over the money system, even if it means banning every other form of exchange (bitcoin, gold, or something as simple as cash). By controlling what money can be spent on (and for how long by giving it an expiry date) central governments will have a chance at managing the economic descent downstream from a steady decline in energy production. Repossessing homes of people unable to pay their debts and turning them into tenants, for example, seems to be another way how the financial superorganism might try to hold on to profitability. You will own less (and less) and be… “happy”. A modest, low energy, low consumption life will be marketed as “green and sustainable” to somehow take the edge of the situation and make acceptance easier. Make no mistake, I do think that lowering consumption is the only way out, but only if everybody does it in a concerted manner. As John Kenneth Galbraith astutely observed, however: “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.” The ruling class is thus not at all interested in creating a more sustainable system. They have a different motive: staying on top, no matter what. Thus they will take every opportunity during this long emergency to concentrate power, to squeeze out political opponents while trying to maintain the flow of profits to an ever smaller round of donors. Again, a system entirely dependent on autocratic technologies cannot evolve into anything else than an Orwellian dystopia. As soon as energy inputs — maintaining the underlying technology base — fall below a bare minimum level, though, the system will collapse under its own weight. Moving towards an ever more digitalized (digital ID, digital currency, digital shopping) world is thus an incredibly short sighted way to maintain power. As the electric grid starts to fail in many places (due to a lack of fossil fuel inputs), these autocratic systems will be harder and harder to maintain. As blackouts become more frequent and longer it will be harder and harder to pay at the store or log into digital government services — let alone performing the many BS jobs requiring a computer and a stable internet connection. At this point the current centralized capitalist system will vanish sooner than one could imagine. Political power will fall back to the lowest level possible (municipalities) and real world skills will once again become respectful means of earning an income. The world will become ever more localized, and people will be forced to rely on manual labor to survive. On the other hand, lacking six continent supply chains, they will be also forced to use improvised low-tech — and thus more democratic — technologies setting the scene for a new, more egalitarian world to be built. How many of us will live to see that, what technologies will remain viable, or how long will this take is anyone’s guess... One thing seems to be sure: we have quite interesting times ahead of us. Until next time, B Notes: For the record: China has also developed ocean faring explorer ships during the 14th and 15th centuries — but much bigger and more sophisticated ones than their European counterparts, expanding trade relations into East Africa and throughout the Indian ocean. Following a change in power though more focus has shifted inwards, on protecting China from the Mongols with the construction and expansion of the Great Wall. The famous explorer Zheng He embarked on his last voyage in 1431 (six decades earlier than Columbus first set sail) and died on his way home. After his demise explorations were no longer financed, the ships were left to rot or burned in their docks. When China returned to the scene more than a hundred years later, the world has been already transformed by colonialism.
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Post by Admin on Dec 21, 2023 16:51:36 GMT
WETIKO IN A NUTSHELL www.innertraditions.com/blog/wetiko-in-a-nutshellWetiko in a Nutshell WETIKO IN A NUTSHELL BY PAUL LEVY, AUTHOR OF WETIKO: HEALING THE MIND-VIRUS THAT PLAGUES OUR WORLD A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Wetiko is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.” Wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen. Wetiko bewitches our consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up, and give meaning to our experience of both the world and ourselves. This psychic virus can be thought of as the “bug” in “the system” that informs and animates the madness that is playing out in our lives, both individually and collectively, on the world stage. Before being able to treat this sickness that has infected us all, we have to snap out of our denial, see the disease, acknowledge it, name it, and try to understand how it operates so as to ascertain how to deal with it—this is what my book Wetiko is all about. The Normalization of Wetiko A few years ago I ran into a friend whom I hadn’t seen for a while. He asked me what I had been up to. I answered that I was writing about the collective psychosis that our species had fallen into. His response was telling. He asked me what made me think there was a collective psychosis going on. His question left me speechless; I literally didn’t know how to respond. What made him think there wasn’t a collective psychosis going on, I wondered. Could he give me one piece of evidence? Our collective madness had become so normalized that most people—my friend was extremely bright, by the way—didn’t even notice. Many of us have become conditioned to thinking that if we were in a middle of a collective psychosis it would mean that people would be doing all sorts of “crazy” things such as running around naked and screaming, for instance. This ingrained idea, however, gets in the way of recognizing the very real collective insanity in which all of us are—both passively and actively—participating. If we want to envision what a collective psychosis could actually look like, it might be a real eye-opener to realize it would look exactly like what is happening right now in our world. What Is Wetiko Really? Wetiko is a cannibalizing force driven by insatiable greed, appetite without satisfaction, consumption as an end in itself, and war for its own sake, against other tribes, species, and nature, and even against the individual’s own humanity. It is a disease of the soul, and being a disease of the soul, we all potentially have wetiko, as it pervades and “in-forms” the underlying field of consciousness. Any one of us at any moment can fall into our unconscious and unwittingly become an instrument for the evil of wetiko to act itself out through us and incarnate in our world. If we see someone who seems to be taken over by wetiko and we think they have the disease and we don’t, in seeing them as separate we have fallen under the spell of the virus ourselves. Wetiko induces in us a proclivity to see the source of our own pathology outside of ourselves—existing in “the other.” Wetiko feeds off of polarization and fear—and terror—of “the other.” Seeing the world through a wetiko-inspired lens of separation/otherness enlivens what Jung calls “the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul,” and simultaneously plays itself out both within our soul and in the world at large. Wetiko subversively turns our “genius” for reality-creation against us in such a way that we become bewitched by the projective tendencies of our own mind. Falling under wetiko’s spell, we become entranced by our own intrinsic gifts and talents for dreaming up our world in a way that not only doesn’t serve us, but rather is put at the service of wetiko (whose agenda is contrary to our own). Our creativity then boomerangs against us such that we hypnotize ourselves with our creative genius, which cripples our evolutionary potential. To the extent we are unconsciously possessed by the spirit of wetiko, it is as if a psychic tapeworm or parasite has taken over our brain and tricked us, its host, into thinking we are feeding and empowering ourselves while we are actually nourishing the parasite (a process which will ultimately kill its host—us). In wetiko disease, something that is not us surreptitiously, beneath our conscious awareness, takes the place of and plays the role of who we actually are. Shape-shifting so as to cloak itself in our form, this mercurial predator gets under our skin and “puts us on” as a disguise. Miming ourselves, we become a copy, a false duplicate of our true selves. We are then truly playing out a real version of the imposter syndrome. The Sickness of Exploitation Wetiko is powerless to control our true nature, but it can control and manipulate this false identity that it sets up within us. When we fall under the sway of wetiko’s illusion, we simultaneously identify with who we are not, while dissociating from and forgetting who we actually are—giving away our power, not to mention ourselves, in the process. Disconnecting from our own intrinsic agency, we open ourselves to be used, manipulated, and exploited by outside forces. Indigenous author Jack Forbes, who wrote the classic book about wetiko entitled Columbus and Other Cannibals, refers to wetiko as “the sickness of exploitation.” Wetiko can be conceived of as being an evil, cannibalistic, vampiric spirit that inspires people under its sway to take and consume another’s resources and life-force energy solely for their own profit, without giving anything of value back from their own lives. Wetiko thus violates the sacred law of reciprocity in both human affairs and the natural world as a whole. The main channel of wetiko’s transmission is relational. It exists through our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world at large. Like a vampire that can’t stand the light of day, the wetiko virus can’t stand to be illumined. However, in seeing how it covertly operates through our own consciousness, we take away its seeming independence, autonomy, and power over us, while at the same time empowering ourselves. The way the vampiric wetiko covertly operates within the human psyche is mirrored by the way it works in the outside world. Jung never tired of warning us that the greatest danger threatening humanity today is the possibility that millions—even billions— of us can fall into our unconscious together in a collective psychosis, reinforcing each other’s madness in such a way that we become unwittingly complicit in creating our own destruction. When this occurs, humanity finds itself in a situation where we are confronted with—and battered by—the primal, primordial, and elemental forces of our own psyche. The Internal Origins of Wetiko The most depraved part of falling under the thrall of wetiko is that, ultimately speaking, it involves the assent of our own free will; no one other than ourselves is ultimately responsible for our situation. There is no objective entity called wetiko that exists outside of ourselves that can steal our soul—the dreamed-up phenomenon of wetiko tricks us into giving it away ourselves. People under the sway of wetiko are implicated in and willingly subscribe to their own enslavement. They do this to the point that when offered the way out of the comfort of their prison they oftentimes react violently. They symbolically—and sometimes literally—try to kill the messenger who is showing them the path to freedom. Ultimately speaking, in wetiko disease we are not being infected by a physical, objectively existing virus outside of ourselves. Rather, the origin and genesis of the wetiko psychosis is endogenous; its roots are to be found within the human psyche. The fact that wetiko is the expression of something inside of us means that the cure for wetiko is likewise within us. If we don’t understand that our current world crisis has its roots within and is an expression of the human psyche, we are doomed to unconsciously repeat and continually recreate endless suffering and destruction in increasingly amplified forms, as if we are having a recurring nightmare. In my language, the inner situation within ourselves is getting “dreamed up” into materialized form in, through, and as the world. In waking life we are continually dreaming right beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when we are under the influence of our unconscious complexes. In other words, when we are “under the influence” of our activated unconscious, we will unknowingly recreate our very inner landscape via the medium of the outside world. What can be more dreamlike than that? What is happening in the world today is reflecting—and both literally and symbolically revealing to us—something unknown within our own psyche. At the same time, in a nonlinear acausal feedback loop that happens both atemporally (outside of time) and over (linear) time, events in our world are informed and shaped by the very inner psychological process they are reflecting. The inner and outer are simultaneously co-arising and reciprocally co-evoking each other. This is to say that what is happening within us and what is arising in our world have a mysterious interconnection; the inner and the outer are ultimately not separate nor separable. Recognizing the correlation between the inner and the outer, between the micro and the macro, is the doorway into being able to see wetiko and wake up to the dreamlike nature that wetiko is simultaneously hiding and revealing depending on our point of view and level of awareness. Recognizing the connection between what is happening out in the world with what is taking place within our minds becomes a channel or secret doorway that leads beyond our merely personal psychological issues, empowering us to deal with the essential problem of our time. Dreaming Wetiko The wetiko psychosis is a dreamed-up phenomenon, which is to say that we are all potentially participating in and actively cocreating the wetiko epidemic in each and every moment. Like a collective dream, the wetiko epidemic is the manifestation of something in our shared collective unconscious taking on material form. Wetiko is literally demanding that we pay attention to the fundamental role that the psyche (the source of our dreams) plays in creating our experience of ourselves and of the world. Forgetting the crucial role that the psyche plays in creating our experience, we marginalize our own intrinsic authority, tragically dreaming up both internal and external authoritarian forces to limit our freedom and mold our experience for us. Never before in all of human history has our species been forced to confront the numinous, world-transforming powers of the psyche on so vast a scale. Even with the ongoing multiple catastrophes that are converging in our world, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the darkness that is emerging today might become the soil out of which a regenerative age and nobler culture arise. Although the source of humanity’s inhumanity to itself, wetiko is at the same time a potential catalyst for our evolution as a species. Recognizing the dreamed-up nature of the wetiko epidemic can become the impetus for us to awaken to the dreamlike nature of the universe itself. In a circular process without beginning or end, we are being dreamed up by the universe while dreaming up the universe at one and the same time. To see this not only demands that we have an expansion of consciousness, it is the very expansion itself. The less wetiko is recognized, however, the more seemingly powerful and dangerous it becomes. Wetiko can only be seen when we begin to realize the dreamlike nature of our universe, step out of the illusory viewpoint of the separate self, and recognize the deeper underlying field of which we are all expressions, in which we are all contained, and through which we are all interconnected. These are interrelated insights of the same multifaceted realization. The energetic expression of this realization, and the wetiko dissolver par excellence, is compassion. Connecting with the compassion that is our nature we find ourselves in very good company. Being the unmediated expression of recognizing the dreamlike nature, compassion reciprocally co-arises with lucidity. In other words, if we’re genuinely awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality, both lucidity and compassion will be inseparably united components of our experience. As if an instrument of a higher intelligence, wetiko literally invites—make that demands—that we become conscious of and step into our intrinsic creative power and agency, or suffer the consequences. Instead of mutating so as to become resistant to our attempts to heal it, the wetiko virus forces us to mutate—to evolve— relative to it. Wetiko is a quantum phenomenon, in that it contains within itself the potential to be either the deadliest poison or the most healing medicine. Will wetiko destroy us? Or will it catalyze our evolution and wake us up?
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Post by Admin on Jan 22, 2024 18:53:04 GMT
When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.
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