Formal Credentials

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This site rejects credentialism, i.e. the ideology that only those who have received formal credentials from establishment institutions have any standing to express critical points of view about technological and bureaucratic projects of the corporate establishment.

 

From this point of view cheerleading, of course, is fine, and therefore you’ll never see a pro-GMO activist saying a non-STEM type like Jon Entine or Owen Patterson should recuse himself from pontificating on what the cultists call “scientific issues”. This is one of the proofs that public STEM types have no moral integrity and are nothing but liars and hypocrites.

 

Well, we know that formal credentials mean nothing in themselves, and indeed that the more formal education one has, the more likely one is to have “learned” all the wrong things and to be arrogant in one’s ignorance. I think it was Mark Twain who said that the problem isn’t those who don’t know but those who don’t know but “know what isn’t so.” That sums up the West’s “educated” class perfectly. There’s no question that the higher one’s IQ, the more conformist and idiotic one’s likely to be where it comes to everything that’s important. Including being stupid enough to believe that IQ tests measure much more than one’s skill at taking such a test. I’m saying that as someone who scored 154 when I took the test as part of a middle school gifted-and-talented program. I also had the highest SAT score in my high school graduating class. But I’ve never been dumb enough to think my test skills were what proved my intelligence.

 

If I’m intelligent, what proves it is my willingness to see what is and not to lie to myself about anything. And then my willingness to learn for myself about anything which I consider important and which I haven’t previously learned. (I remain somewhat astonished at how completely ignorant electoral-type people are about the politicians they worship. I personally know many Clinton/Obama voters, and I doubt a single one could pass a high school-level quiz about what those politicians have actually done in their careers.)

 

I will say, however, that if a credential is to matter, then my BA in political science is the best preparation for understanding such a complex, 100% political/economic matter as GMOs. So if I were to be converted to the credentialist ideology, I’d then say that only myself and those who have a similar academic career have any standing to pass judgement about pesticides and GMOs, while STEM types must be ruled out as having no relevant knowledge.

 

Indeed, if we’re going to talk about expertise then to understand GMOs requires a special mix of knowledge. One must know political theory, economics, history, ecology, human medicine, and agronomy. Other sciences are far less important. Of course the whole thing is not a “scientific” matter at all, but a political controversy. Anyone who says science has anything to do with the economic deployment of GMOs is a liar or a moron.

 

The fact is that to understand such a vastly politically ramified matter as genetic engineering requires generalist knowledge most of all. This is precisely the kind of understanding which corporate education seeks to suppress and destroy.

 

And why do the universities and media hate and disparage this knowledge most of all? Because it’s the kind of knowledge necessary for true political participation, and the kind which tends to drive people to want to politically participate. The establishment is dedicated to discouraging such participation, and all its ideas and themes are committed to this suppression.

 

The takeaway from all this is that poison-based agriculture is properly a generalist matter, and most specifically a political/economic matter. Therefore the best credential for it is being an intellectually honest and adventurous person, while receiving the corporate/university STEM indoctrination regimen is probably the worst, most anti-intellectual way to derive an ideology.

 

Like I said yesterday, the corporate “scientific” establishment deserves zero trust or respect, and on the contrary should be driven out with a whip as the proven systematic liars and malign cultists they are.

 

If there’s to be an abolitionist movement, it’ll need to be clear about the absolute illegitimacy of the intellectual establishment, both in principle and in practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Break the Mammon Mindset

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The standard mindset among system NGOs is: “First we need funding in order to subsist, then we need the mainstream media to take us seriously, then we need to get the establishment to listen to us.” The same is true of established churches and many other kinds of organizations, and this mindset percolates to individuals who become interested in politics. This mindset is part of the Mammon ideology, also called the “bourgeois” ideology.

 

Instead, picture this affirmative mindset: First we need to hold a true idea and commit to a real goal and must never waver from this core commitment. Then we seek whatever we can get in order to subsist and be heard and fight along the line to which we committed.

 

Compare the difference between the Mammonist “bourgeois” mindset and that of a public citizen. The former, whatever he superficially claims about his focus, really places his “job” and his car at the center of his life. Then everything else, including his political interests, is really a hobby at best. On the contrary, the affirmative citizen and faithful of God places her commitment and her faith-in-action toward this commitment at the center of life. And then a “job”, if one’s part of the majority who can’t “make a living” directly through our commitments, is just a way to pay the bills.

 

If everyone who claimed to care about certain ideas and to want certain outcomes were to liberate their minds from the Mammon mindset and live the affirmative faithful mindset, we’d have a very different political and cultural scene. It really is true that the first proximate obstacle is in our own minds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There Are No Scientists Within the Establishment

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(Perhaps some poetic exaggeration in that headline. But if we are to have a rigorous definition of a scientist, this must include the fraternity’s own criterion of speaking “as a scientist” only within the bounds of one’s formal discipline, and clearly stipulating where one speaks purely as an opinionated layman. That, of course, is always the case with STEM-credentialed pro-GMO activists, as I demonstrated in this classic piece.)

 

 

Besides the other things wrong with the pro-GMO activists – the fact that they’re liars in everything they say, that they’re corrupt to the core, that they’re factually wrong on every single point – it can’t be stressed enough that every time “scientists” publicly comment on pesticides and GMOs (and many other things), they’re proving they’re not scientists at all, but just typically stupid and ignorant blowhards. Just to cite the example of the ringleader of the “Nobel laureates” (as it pleases GMWatch still to call them) who signed a Syngenta manifesto on behalf of the golden rice hoax, Richard Roberts is not a scientist or an expert in any way relevant to almost any discussion of golden rice or GMOs as such. He’s a pure ignoramus and idiot who has zero credentials or knowledge of agriculture, ecology, economics, history, or political theory, yet who specializes in pontificating about these while the media fraudulently depicts him as some kind of expert on these subjects. See here for another typical example of alleged “scientists” (the AAAS), an NGO (Pew), and the media collaborating to propagate a massive intellectual fraud by fraudulently representing ignorant and corrupt laymen as “scientists”. Roberts, of course, is not a scientist but a profiteering biotech subsidy-miner, and is simply talking his book.

 

If there’s to be such a thing as a real anti-GMO movement, this movement needs systematically to discredit and de-legitimize the so-called scientific establishment, which we know is nothing but a propaganda front. We must systematically apply the standard that anyone who claims to uphold the credentialist principle is automatically being anti-science the moment he claims to speak with authority on any subject which is not part of his formal credential. We must publicly assert this standard at every opportunity.

 

(Meanwhile, ironically, for anyone who actually does care about science, Roberts is one of those who in his actual scientific work has debunked the entire theoretical basis of genetic engineering and beanbag genetics as such by contributing to the demonstration of how chaotic the genetic functioning really is. The fact that as a lying hack ideologue he misrepresents his own scientific work says it all about his absolute lack of integrity.)

 

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“If Only the Czar Knew!” To toss in a related point, I’ve noticed people trying to exonerate pollsters for their rather poor performance in projecting the outcome of the plebiscite. They blame the media for dumbing down the intricacy of the statistical forecasts, the public for not reading the fine print, etc.

 

Now let’s get this straight. No one propagates the cult of any group of “experts” more relentlessly than the experts themselves. The mainstream media just follows the experts’ lead. As it must, since the media receives all its propaganda themes from the experts themselves. The most inveterate and reckless popularizers are always the experts themselves. The worst scientism wingnuts are the scientists themselves. The most demented theologians of engineering are the engineers themselves. The most arrogant pomposities of the economist priesthood are spewed by the economists themselves. And no one touts the infallibility of the polls more disingenuously than the pollsters themselves. The whole business of blaming things on the media, on popularizers, and of course on the people themselves, is just another version of “if only the czar knew.” But anyone who knows history knows that the most radical, aggressive, insane part of the autocracy is always the autocrat himself. And so it is with the many cults of the “experts” currently afflicting humanity like a plague. Here most of all we need the vaccine and the purgative.

 

 

 

What Shall This Man Do?

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I’m a farmer, and I do what I can to grow food, help others grow their own food, and build the Community Food sector.

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And then I’m a writer. I write about the necessary new ideas and the ways it’s possible politically to organize to prepare for the necessary revolution of these ideas. I’m organizing all these ideas for my first book, and this blog has been, among other things, notes toward the coming books.

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I’m not much of a public speaker (I can muddle through the infrequent times I have to) and I don’t thrive on having a hundred face-to-face conversations a day. Last night having one conversation about this stuff exhausted me. Therefore I’m not naturally a demagogue or organizer, and thus far I don’t have the touch of the real evangelist.

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Nevertheless I’d do these things too if I had comrades, if we were building an organization together.

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But for now, being totally isolated, facing a steel wall in every direction, and living among such people that even the seemingly decent ones are still all Good Germans, such that I feel I’m living, not even in a lunatic asylum, but within a cult compound; living amid such adverse conditions, it would be too demoralizing to do those things all alone and against such odds. It’s all I can do to keep up the prophetic writing. And I often wonder why I bother with that. I guess I have nothing left but the sense that some force always has driven me to the way I feel about everything I see, and I have no choice but to do the best I can to fight evil and build good.

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I wish I had help, but so far there’s no one who cares about good and evil the way I do. This world cares more about the images of the propagandist. Thus the circus world, to give just the most extreme example.

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Whose Pipeline

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Letter to all the people exercised about the Dakota Access Pipeline and cheering on the fighters, but who also support the Democrat Party and are even asking questions like, “Where is Obama on this?” (And of course those who voted for Clinton.*) :

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Those are Obama’s cops, in case you were too clueless to notice.

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Of course energy projects of this scale require all kinds of federal regulatory approval. And it is, of course, impossible for a significant energy project to exist without massive federal subsidies. So in both ways, it’s impossible for such a project to exist against the will of the president. On the contrary, it requires lots of action from the executive branch to make anything happen at all. All that corporate welfare doesn’t hand itself out, and all those federal thugs and federally subsidized and equipped thugs don’t outfit and deploy themselves. You do know, right, that there’s barely a cop in America who isn’t dependent upon the federal gravy train. Certainly not the kind of cop the corporations deploy against the faithfully active people at a place like this.

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But then, we know that almost everyone engaged in social media meta-“activism” on the occasion of the pipeline fight, which basically means circulating memes and clicking on the “Angry” button, really supports Big Oil and voted for it this last circus as they’ve voted for it every previous circus. After all, progressive opinions are fine to have, but those personal cars won’t fuel themselves.

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Of course I’m not talking about those who understand and fight on the basis that the fossil fuel system is unsustainable, destructive, and evil, and are struggling to bring to light the need to break free of it while we can. But I imagine they’re not doing much better than I am with poison-based agriculture, including having to face the impenetrable bubble of idiocy within which the president idolators vegetate. In the case of pesticides it’s the FDA-worshippers who comprise the plague, with fossil fuel extraction they fetishize the Department of Energy.

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(For those who care about “property rights”, the entire project is also a perfect example of how there’s no such thing as property rights in America, but only the right of the stronger as this private corporate project had its physical way cleared through eminent domain. Governments of course provided administration and thug services.)

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I wrote this post, like some other recent ones, thinking about the fact that a president has almost unlimited latitude to do whatever it wants. I want to drive off the earth with a whip any of the liars who claim the president doesn’t have complete control of the executive branch (which includes every kind of triage where it comes to enforcing/respecting laws and court decisions) where it comes to anything the president really cares about. Just one of the many reasons I have infinite loathing for corporate liberals, that they base their existence on this lie.

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*Bernie Sanders also supports the pipeline. I just went to his website to see if he’d changed his position at all, and found that although “the revolution continues” and will accept money, the site no longer has any content. Kind of self-contradictory, wouldn’t you say? Of course anyone who knows the slightest bit about politics could peg Sanders as a fraud from day one, precisely because he wasn’t building any kind of outside-the-system movement. If I was wrong about that, wouldn’t today be the day for Bernie to be proving me wrong? Wouldn’t the aftermath of this election be the time for a true movement to go into hyperdrive, capitalizing on the evident failure of status quo liberalism? Any Bernistas out there who can explain?

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And forget the Green Party. Their vapid “issues” page gives zero details on what it means for Jill Stein to “Oppose” something, obviously by design. Would she halt all illegal pipelines and cease all the necessary subsidies for “legal” ones? (And for that matter halt the “legal” ones too?) Or to put that in a more vague, politician-friendly way, does she at least promise that one way or another these projects will cease to exist? Obviously not.

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Nor do I see any movement call there.

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The fact is that my despised and rejected blog, with almost no hits and zero commenters, nevertheless represents more of a movement and revolution than all these frauds put together.

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What is “States’ Rights”?

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And so once again we see lots of rhetoric about “states rights”. What does this term mean? I’ll begin by describing the principle of it, insofar as I can deduce any principle from the rather inchoate rhetoric of its proponents. Of course what it’s really supposed to mean in practice is something different, i.e. the usual collaboration with corporations.

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1. It makes a fetish of lines drawn on a map rather than any value derived from morality or reason.

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2. It does not want to be rational and base political units on watersheds or foodsheds.

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3. It is a form of pure statism which wants arbitrarily to centralize beyond rationally defined boundaries for no purpose other than to concentrate power.

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4. It differs from other pure statists in that it wants arbitrarily to halt the centralization at some point rather than expand this indefinitely. Lacking any other basis for where to call a halt, it chooses the arbitrary borders* of US states as the place to do this.

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[*There’s a few state borderlines which run along the crests of mountain ranges where streams divide, and thus in themselves are rational. But these are never organically part of any larger rational system of borders. Meanwhile far more common is the actively irrational practice of using rivers themselves as legal-political borders. This is worse than purely arbitrary; it aggressively splits reason in half.]

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So there it is. States rights ideology is based on two arbitrary leaps. First, it arbitrarily wants to centralize beyond rational boundaries and without regard for any rational or moral value. It has this in common with other forms of statism. Second, and contrary to conventional statism, it arbitrarily wants to halt the centralizing process somewhere short of however far power can concentrate itself.

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Some may say I’m leaving something out, that states rights does have a value, the value of constitutionalism. Allegedly, in exalting the tenth amendment this is trying to recapture the true spirit of the 1788 constitution.

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The most obvious refutation of this is that states righters, like everyone else who claims the constitution as a value, seem to care little to nothing about other core elements of the constitution such as those which would make the imperial army, the police state ,and the prison-industrial complex impossible, nor do they seem concerned to take back the constitution from corporate abusers. (For this, one must look to the community rights movement.) So in idolizing the constitution the states rights types are really just cherry-picking.

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And indeed, should the 1788 constitution, conceived by elites for the avowed purpose of quashing the American Revolution and building a continental empire (both Hamilton and Madison say so in the Federalist papers), be an object of idolatry in the first place? The fact is that constitution-worship is no value in itself for anyone, but rather is always a stalking horse for other, usually pro-corporate agendas. Of course the constitutional conventioneers accepted the Bill of Rights in the first place only under duress and only because they were confident that the authoritarian centralizing campaign enshrined in the main articles of the document wouldn’t unduly be hindered by what they saw as a pointless sop. And so it has been.

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Nor do I see any reason to think the states rights people have any greater respect than conventional centralizing statists do for the vastly more rational and morally coherent philosophy of community rights. If anything, the states rights types might be even more aggressive in wanting to allow/help corporations to devastate communities.

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Obviously in practice the notion of state rights is just like the constitution, or law, or property, or “free trade”, or “science”, or “the free press” or what have you. It’s propagated by corporate elites and meant to be used and abused, regarded and disregarded, in a purely cynical, tactical way according to whatever maximizes corporate domination.

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By fetishizing a purely arbitrary legally-defined border and caring zero for reason or any moral value, the “state rights” notion is especially useful for this corporate purpose. In this way it goes well with the most vile feral scam of all, “libertarianism”, which wants direct corporate dictatorship and uses the rhetoric of “freedom” to mean “freedom from all mutual responsibility, freedom from all human community, from all moral and rational values, license for total exploitation and theft, for those who are already rich.” Of course corporations are nothing more or less than creations and extensions of government, so to be for corporate power is by definition to be for big government, while to be against big government has to mean wanting to abolish government’s corporate power. That’s why it’s called the corporate state, a monolith. How in principle libertarians can be simultaneously for and against the most vile extremes of big government remains one of the mysteries of the universe. Of course the simple truth is that they’re liars. If they weren’t they’d be anarchists.

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Getting back to the state righters, I suppose many of them have the temperament which, among national groups, tends to manifest as nationalism. But, in spite of lots of idiotic rhetoric from conservatives and liberals alike, there is so far no such thing as an American nation, nor can a new nation ever cohere under the conditions of corporate globalization. Indeed, globalization’s basic thrust is to eradicate all human modes except that of the atomized individual, all alone in body and soul, facing the awesome might of the corporate demon. Never forget, anyone who in any way speaks against movement solidarity and organization as such is doing the work of the corporate Satan. (It should be needless to say that any political philosophy which explicitly or implicitly says voting is the be-all and end-all is part of this corporate assault.) Anyone who dreams of an American nation must commit to the total abolition of corporate rule as a prerequisite.

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It’s possible such an abolitionist movement itself can be a strong point where such a national consciousness can begin to cohere.

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Humanity and the Earth need a new movement based on a complete organic embrace of human values and reason, on the new idea necessary for a new beginning as natural history soon resumes after the berserk digression of the fossil fuel binge. And we need a movement basis which totally rejects and condemns all the lies and stupidities of the corporate global “order”. We must form the adamant core of the affirmation and the inexorable force of the negation. Anything which can be used toward these great goals may be used, but only in the right ways. The wrong ways also are for the flames.

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We have a long, hard road ahead. The necessary work is only beginning. It will continue at its necessary pace without regard for the idiocies of superficial “politics” and false “culture”. There we see nothing but decadent barbarism. The corporate age was always evil, and now it becomes ever more rancid. Sometimes it seems human beings need gas masks. It’s hard to tell what’s worse, the physical poisons or the spiritual ones.

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But the eternal wind, the wind of the spirit which nourishes and cleanses and carries us always between and through the home to which we’re heading and the home we never left, never stopped flowing. Briefly amid the din of Babylon we were unable to hear it and lost knowledge of whence and where it blows. But the strains of the new song are starting to come through.

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“No Place to Go With Your Vote”

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Where can I GO with this thing?!

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Here’s a quote I saw in an internet comment: “I have to say that I think the duopoly is also part of the problem with holding politicians accountable, sometimes there is no place to really go with your vote.”

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That’s a common sentiment and superficially seems reasonable enough, but even so it strikes me as peculiar.

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By now such a thought reads to me as if it’s meant literally: One’s vote is a physical thing one is carrying, like a bomb with a lit fuse, and one must physically go somewhere safely to dispose of it. Thus if there’s only two or three bomb-proof receptacles where you can deposit your bomb, you must choose one of them. Or it’s like a barrel of toxic waste one accumulated which one has to dispose of somewhere.

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I’ve never thought of my vote, or anyone’s vote, in such a way. It’s only a potential, and if there’s no way to render it kinetic, it doesn’t exist anyway. In that case to go through the ritual anyway is just idle fantasizing or entertainment or whatever.

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No place to go with your vote? But that doesn’t exist as any real thing, so you don’t need to go anywhere with it. Free yourself. Let it go.

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The fact is, electoralism under corporate rule has zero to do with democracy and political participation. On the contrary, corporate electoralism is anti-political, the consumerist version of politics. It is to true participatory politics and democracy what McDonald’s is to fine cooking and cuisine. Electoralism has been the subject of systematic indoctrination and propaganda precisely in order to help discredit and suppress true politics and democracy. By now it’s succeeded even in eradicating the very idea of these, and almost everyone inertially, without a thought, takes it for granted that voting is the essence of democracy, the beginning and the end. But this is nothing but one of the biggest of big lies.

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Freeing our minds is the first step toward liberating our actions toward the goal of true freedom. We can start by taking it as axiomatic that anything the government, corporations, mainstream media, mainstream churches, academia, NGOs, celebrity flacks, or anyone else “respectable” wants us to do, is absolutely something we mustn’t do. Or, in such a case as belief in the electoral cult, which we must stop doing.

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In saying this I don’t mean there’s never a context for voting. I mean that voting can be meaningful only as the tactical extension of a fully coherent and strategized anti-corporate movement and campaign which exists and operates from outside the system.

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Only when we have created the place where we are, will we then have a place to go.

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Kangaroos

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As always, I voted No in yesterday’s plebiscite, as I vote against corporate rule every day of my life. That’s part of my whole way of life, my life of faith-in-action.

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But, if I’d been forced at gunpoint to vote Yes in the plebiscite, this is the outcome I would’ve picked. It’s the “lesser evil”, to use the favored formula of the wingnuts.

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Here’s the speculative reasons why the idiot Trump is a better outcome than the idiot Clinton:

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1. With any luck we’ll get the most extreme strife and mutual reviling among the Clinton wingnuts, the Sanders wingnuts, and the Stein wingnuts that at least some of them will wake up to the fact that the entire electoral concept is rotten to the core and that the whole thing needs to be blown up completely.

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I stress, maybe some of them will wake up, though I have very low expectations of any of those three sects.

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2. If the previous pattern holds, a Republican administration will bring out more active resistance and protest against the imperial war and other corporate aggressions. As we saw during the Bush years, there were many who opposed the war and corporate assaults on the environment, not because they really oppose those as such – when it became Obama’s war and Obama’s assaults, these persons then supported those crimes – but because they oppose them when it’s Republicans doing them.

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So now that it’ll be Trump’s war, Trump’s pipeline, Trump’s Monsanto rather than Obama/Clinton’s war, Obama/Clinton’s pipeline, Obama/Clinton’s Monsanto, maybe more bodies will get out there to oppose in some way.

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I say this not because I think it’ll directly have a great effect to get such an influx of such worthless hypocrites, but because just the fact of there being far more people out there doing something, with greater volume than before, may help encourage more conversions to the real anti-corporate philosophy and action.

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But as I said, this is speculative, and any such action dividend will depend on the ability of real abolitionists, real revolutionaries, real prophets, to force the true word home among this resistance.

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Of course the corporate media and the Clinton wingnuts will do all they can to propagate the exact opposite of this, that the reason Clinton lost is that she wasn’t right wing enough. I don’t see how it’s possible to be further to the right than Clinton – the only difference between her and Trump is communication style, not ideology or policy – but that’s what Democrat establishment criminals and cultists always do.

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Most of all, the absolutely necessary prerequisite for anything to change in this world, is that the Democrat Party, the single most malign and vile obstacle to change, must be completely blown up and destroyed. So anything which escalates and intensifies the hostility and conflict among those who support the Party, especially those who fantasize moronically about “redeeming” it in some way, is a pure good. That’s why if I had to choose an outcome, this is the one I would have chosen.

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Free As A Bird

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Freedom is the most ambivalent ideal. It offers the great promise. (The promise of what? This by definition, or lack of definition, can never be answered. The very mutability is the promise and the source of what warmth it has.) It also promises danger. It often brings persecution. Freedom is so ambivalent that almost no one truly loves it, but only for himself and those he identifies as his, and will persecute the freedom of others. Most of all those who hate all freedom but Mammon’s devilish perversion of freedom, which is the license extended only to those who accumulate sufficient markers of the beast, money and property, which then become the intoxicants and weapons of this perversion of freedom. But in fact this is not freedom at all but universal enslavement to the markers.

 

Yet even those who love some measure of freedom, and even the few willing to go all the way and truly be anarchists, must love with ambivalence. The truly free are always doomed to some measure of outlawry, and indeed the outlawed of medieval times were often called “free as a bird”. Is an outlaw, is a runaway slave “free”? In the end the exercise of freedom, the faith-in-action of freedom, is always the quest to attain freedom. Freedom can never be a noun, only a verb. It is never a place, only a striving.

 

This recently has been borne in most unequivocally, there’s no there here and no striving to get to any other “there”. The vileness of the circus, everyone reveling in dementia, with even those who affect superiority over it really doing this only as their pose in the thick of it, their own cultism/fandom demonstrated by their fixation, indistinguishable from that of a paid hack….

 

It’s horrible to have it flaunted constantly even when you’re making the effort to avoid it. It’s horrible forcibly to be made aware of the basic evil of those you know personally and who you’d normally think are better than that. But few, if they can’t be good, at least have the decency to be “apathetic”, as the term goes…

 

To be sure, most of them exemplify the “banality of evil”, and their cheering for the Democrat (or in a few cases Republican) Party is based on stupidity, short-sightedness and ignorance more than conscious malignity. But that doesn’t change the fact that, at least among middle class Westerners with formal education and internet access, all ignorance is willful ignorance. Whatever they don’t know is because they don’t want to know and don’t care.

 

This is what Nietzsche thought was the most excruciating evil of all, the day to day petty evil of an atomized society completely submerged in Mammon and suffused to the core with the ideology and temperament of Mammon. (Or, as it is called in economic history, the bourgeois ideology.)

 

Well, at least this situation has the virtue of clarity. To take another point from Nietzsche, try to prove your enemies did you some good. So in one sense I owe a debt to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and the whole vomitous crew. They, and the lunacy they’re still capable of generating amid a modern civilization after all these years of their self-evident insanity, failures and crimes, is the final proof that this is a terminal case. There’s nothing left but evil and what’s been co-opted by evil in any institution, any idea that has anything to do with this civilization. I no longer believe we can redeem from this shipwreck the idea of democracy the way I used to believe. Whatever may exist of positive democracy and participatory politics in a post-oil, post-capitalist world will have to evolve anew with no taint carried over from the modern Babylon’s funhouse mirror images of “democracy”. Those who want to be agents of this evolution will have to write and preach this way.

 

The only thing we can redeem from the wreckage is the science of agroecology, though this exception proves the rule since it is not new but rather the form contemporaneous with modernity of the evolution of thousands of years of human ingenuity in getting our daily bread. It turns out that agriculture as commonly known was wrongly seen as the final form rather than perhaps a necessary transition. The final form, which offers the only solution for bread, health, freedom, and happiness, is agroecology’s middle form between agriculture and horticulture, its fruitful melding of empiricism and science.

 

And so the great task is neither to “reform” modernity nor even to explore its alleged transition to new forms. Physically, culturally, spiritually, the great fossil fuel binge has been a unique, ahistorical experience which temporarily broke with the normal path of evolution. This normal path is now about to resume. Therefore the task requires a much greater arc of thought and word and action which will survey the greater evolution, make history its province, and search out the true threads which flow unhindered from the best aspirations of the past to the best ambitions for the future. This is the only reformation, redemption, renaissance, revolution, and restoration. Those who will be part of this true natural, historical, spiritual evolution will write and preach from the aspect of a thousand years hence, and a thousand years ago.

 

To be sure, the fundamentalist cult of false election is an aspect of modern Mammon. This cult didn’t exist prior to the advent of fossil fueled modernity and the rise of capitalism. Thankfully we can expect it will perish with these.

 

As Jesus said, it is impossible to worship God and Mammon, the murderer of all human values and holy faith. We add, it is impossible to exalt freedom and Mammon, the murderer of all freedom and exalter of psychopathic license for those who have sufficient money. Finally, it is impossible to cherish the good and Mammon, the murderer of all love, all friendship, the killer of all that makes us human.

 

Well, if a prophet is doomed to have no honor in his own country, then it’s no surprise I have no honor or help or support or friendship in the depths of modern America, Babylon, the ground zero of Mammon. Here I must accept that I’m alone. My time and place is only there and there, where “there” exists. Not here.

 

 

 

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