Endnotes (My Meta-Thoughts)

Endnotes (My Meta-Thoughts)⁴⁵

According to Jordon Peterson, I’m not allowed to talk about any of the issues below, since my house is so out-of-order and I’m such a failure at being bourgeois. Whatever. I just wanted to get all of my thoughts out of my head and recorded somewhere before I died. I’m sorry if they’re occasionally incoherent and rambling. BTW, I plagiarized some parts of what’s below from thinkers much smarter than me. So a big hat tip to all the original sources. I was too lazy to cite them properly, so you can Google to find the original content.

Don’t read this section if you are feeling delicate or touchy, or if you are easily triggered.

1  In 1998, I bought a book called Die Broke. I was totally disinterested in the financial advise in the book; I only bought it because I was drawn to the book’s title. Even back then, I was attracted to the idea of dying young and dying broke. Guess what? I made my dream come true! I guess it’s true what they say: where there’s a will, there’s a way!

BTW, if you want to donate some money in my name after I’m gone, please donate to any farm-animal sanctuary, the kind that takes in unwanted farm animals and lets them live out their natural lives in peace. The one I really like is called Lefty’s Place Farm Sanctuary, a small animal refuge in the Macedon Ranges, Victoria, Australia. It’s run by a real saint, Tamara Kenneally. You can find out more about Lefty’s Place and the details on how to donate to her on Facebook or Google.

For Direct Bank Deposits:

Account Name: Lefty's Place Inc
Bank: NAB
BSB: 083-451 ACCOUNT No: 74-132-0298 Or via PayPal: paypal.me/leftysplace

2  Besides the overwhelming number of convincing arguments against religion or the existence of God (see Christopher Hitchen’s God is Not Great and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith), I don’t understand how anyone with a moral conscious can patronize a Church that has systematically covered up wide-spread child sexual abuse for decades, if not centuries. Just last month, there were reports that upwards of 330,000 children were abused by French priests in the last 70 years! In Germany, about 1,670 church workers, or 4.4% of the clergy, had been involved in the abuse of 3,677 children, which is "shocking and probably just the tip of the iceberg," according to Germany's Federal Justice Minister. In a separate case in August 2020, more than 1,400 people in Germany accused at least 654 monks, nuns and other members of the orders of sexually abusing them as children going as far back as the 1950s. In Ireland, in August 2018, a list was published which revealed that over 1,300 Catholic clergy in Ireland had been accused of sexual abuse, with only 82 of them getting convicted. In 2004, the John Jay Report tabulated a total of 4,392 priests and deacons in the U.S. against whom allegations of sexual abuse had been made. And on and on and on it goes in every country the Catholic Church exists in. It’s amazing to me how people can rationalize away such evil, all because it makes them “feel good about themselves.” I mean, can’t you find ways to be spiritual that don’t involve participating with or giving money to such a corrupt and wicked institution as the Catholic Church? I do have some sympathy for these pathetic, closeted priests. I can understand how, if you are denied the ability to develop normal, healthy sexual relationships with adults, that your sexuality can get twisted, and that wounded, twisted beast within you can start to seek out whatever outlets that it can find. If I hadn’t come out of the closet and started to date adults, I, too, probably would have ended up as sexually twisted as these poor buggers.

To me, religion is snake oil that makes this miserable existence bearable. To the poor, it justifies all the harsh degradations of this world and promises an afterlife to reward your endurance of such hardships. To the middle class and wealthy, it provides the soothing tonic they need to feel smug and complacent about their comfortable little lives. It’s the opium of the masses, as someone once rightly said. I really don’t see any Christians living up to the radical statements in the New Testament regarding justice, social equality, and the evils of wealth. And thankfully, almost all Christians and Jews ignore all the verses in the Bible condoning or tolerating slavery, genocide, incest, and rape. But that’s just par for the course: the religious just cherry pick the verses they want to follow and ignore or rationalize away all the difficult, crazy, or obsolete ones. I will admit that I’m jealous of all the social network and support that organized religion provides people. Too bad my social anxieties usually prevented me from feeling comfortable around other like-minded atheists or participating in related social-activity groups. I do wonder, sometimes, how my life would have been different had I been born straight. Perhaps I would have never questioned or lost my faith, and then I never would have questioned a huge set of society’s systems, rules, and expectations. And both my personality and a whole chain of events that resulted after the discovery of my sexual orientation would have turned out radically different.

3  I’m convinced my positive attitude towards drugs came from reading Dune in high school. I really wanted to know what it was like to expand my consciousness by playing around with my brain chemistry after reading about how Muad’Dib was able to see through time and space after taking the drug called “spice” in the book. I remember after reading Dune pretending to indulge in some spice by sneaking some cinnamon out of the kitchen.. hahaha

4  I consider my decision to become a vegan one of the most important and meaningful I ever made. However, this decision would also result in a disdain and disgust for all the human-caused animal suffering I saw around me, as well as sow much of my chronic emotional anguish as an adult. So let me explain the three reasons (health, environmental, and ethical) I became a vegan. The scientific evidence for the health benefits of veganism is pretty overwhelming. Vegans have lower rates of all kinds of cancers (especially colon cancer), osteoporosis, erectile disfunction, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, as well as lower rates of Type II diabetes, obesity, heart disease, high cholesterol levels, etc.

Then there are the environmental benefits: vegans require up to 90% fewer resources to feed themselves than meat- eaters. These resources include energy, as well as land and water. This is because only 10% of all the energy at each trophic level (plants are the base trophic level, plant-eating animals are the next higher level, meat-eaters are the next higher, etc.) is available to the next higher tropic level as it moves up a food chain. 90% of all the other energy at any trophic level is lost to entropy. By the time the energy has reached meat-eaters, only 1% of the energy that originally came from plants is still available. But a total of 10% of the energy from those same number of plants is available to vegans, since they cut out the middle-man, as it were. This is a basic law of physics and biology that we teach in grade 8 science class. Google “energy pyramid” if you don’t understand. This is why, if you look at any given area in an ecosystem, you’ll see, say, millions of plants, but only ten thousand plant-eaters and only a few hundred meat-eaters. So, in theory, you can feed 10 times more plant-eaters on a given amount of land than you can meat-eaters. This means it would take substantially less farm land and resources like water, fossil fuels, fertilizer, and pesticides to feed the current human population if we all switched to a vegan diet. It’d also mean a huge reduction in the CO2 and methane – from cow farts and the billions of tons of poo (500 million tons each year in the US alone) created by farm animals around the world – emitted for food production. 40% of all the grains grown world-wide are fed to domesticated animals instead of humans. Most of the deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest is for growing soy for animal feed or to make grazing lands for cattle. If everyone went vegan, we could almost double our food supply or, even better, 40% of farmland could be rewilded to capture carbon and allow areas for wild plants and animals to expand and repopulate.

Last is the ethical reasoning for veganism. Animals – especially vertebrates such as ourselves and most domesticated animals – have similar nerve and brain tissues for processing pain and creating emotional states such as the fear of pain or the fear of death. (I define suffering here as prolonged periods of experiencing pain or fear.) Animals evolved these abilities because they offered survival advantages: those that moved away quickly and avoided the sources of these pains and fears would survive and reproduce. Plants never evolved the ability to experience pain or fear for the simple reason that plants cannot move away from the potential sources of pain and fear. There would never be any selective pressures for plants to evolve and gain these functions since they would offer no survival advantages. And looking at how plants respond biologically when they’re are being attacked by, say, caterpillars and saying that, therefore, “plants have feelings” is a disingenuous rationalization and an unscientific projection by people of their own experiences onto plants. With no brain or nervous system, how can plants experience pain or fear? And what purpose would it serve for plants to experience either since they can’t move away from the caterpillars? If I can take a plant, chop it into three pieces, stick each piece in soil, and each of those three pieces grows into a new plant, then what would pain or a fear of death be to a plant? Another fact is that almost all fruits of plants evolved for the sole purpose of being eaten by animals. Do you think an apple tree experiences fear and pain every time you pick an apple when the sole purpose of growing an apple is to get eaten by an animal? It’s just completely illogical. The ethical argument that vegans are making is not that we shouldn’t kill. The only way we can eat is by killing something. The ethical argument simply boils down to this: animals suffer when they die. Plants don’t. So let’s do everything we can to reduce the suffering we cause to animals for the simple matter that we CAN reduce their suffering. I can’t eliminate all animal suffering or death. Tractors run over mice. Trucks that bring my food to town run over birds. But I can still REDUCE the suffering my dietary choices make each time I sit down to eat instead of just ignoring it. You can’t say, “Oh, I can’t eliminate all animal suffering. Therefore there’s no use in trying to reduce it.” That would be making the perfect the enemy of the good (that’s called the Nirvana or the Perfect Solution Logical Fallacy). On top of these facts, we now have the scientific knowledge and means to feed ourselves healthily on a plant-based diet.

Therefore, since we know scientifically that animals suffer when we enslave or kill them, and we know that plants don’t suffer, and since we can choose what we eat, the only ethical choice is to NOT kill animals or sentient creatures for food. (By “sentient,” I mean not just the organisms that are aware of their surroundings or even show intelligence, but can feel pain and fear and who try avoid these states.) Since we – as humans with unique moral reasoning abilities, free will, compassion, and empathy – have figured out these basic scientific facts, and since we, unlike predators like a lion, can choose what we eat, it is morally imperative for us to avoid causing pain or death to our fellow sentient creatures. To knowingly and willingly cause pain and suffering on other sentient creatures with no cause or purpose other than palate pleasure is a moral evil for the same reason that it’s evil to knowingly and needlessly inflict suffering on humans, dogs, or cats for fun or pleasure.

Veganism is the next stage in human moral evolution, just as we’ve used our moral reasoning skills to end slavery, child marriage, child labor, infant genital mutilation – except here in America, where we still routinely mutilate boys’ genitals at birth without their consent (a point I’m still personally pissed off about, especially after dating Taiwanese guys for 20 years), and in the Muslim world, where girls are still routinely mutilated –, warfare (well, at least trends are heading in the right direction), etc. People say they have the choice to eat “meat,” a convenient euphemism that evades both the lethal and the moral consequences of this choice. Those moral consequences are the very real suffering of sentient creatures that think and feel very much like you and me while they are being imprisoned, mutilated, and then hung upside down and having their throats slit. You want to know why I’m a vegan? Ask yourself why you’re not a cannibal, or why you don’t eat dogs or cats. Then know that I’m a vegan for the very same reasons. Since we CAN choose to live healthily without inflicting suffering on other sentient creatures, why wouldn’t we?

Anyway, I just love all the hypocrisy of non-vegans who claim to love animals, but will argue all day about why it’s ok to abuse and murder them, all for five minutes of quickly forgotten palate pleasure. People love to claim to be against oppression, inequality, and injustice – until they sit down to eat. Then they’ll mindlessly heap big piles of all of those things on their plates at each meal. But this is just one major reason why I really detest most human beings: they have unlimited ability to be blindly selfish, greedy, and hypocritical. BTW, I think calling the systematic killing of tens of billions of animals in industrial farms a “holocaust” is totally apt: industrial-scale murder and killing driven by capitalistic commodification, profit-seeking, and “efficiency” in a system that sees sentient creatures merely as disposable objects. Think I’m being hyperbolic? Then try Googling Alex Hershaft, animal rights activist and Holocaust survivor, who spoke out for years about the obvious similarities between Auschwitz and these industrial death farms.

If the world went vegan, what would we do with all the hundreds of billions of farm animals around the world? Well, first of all, those hundreds of billions of animals didn’t fall from the sky or reproduce naturally in the wild. The vast majority of them were deliberately bred by humans (often using artificial insemination) inside industrial farms or as part of of the “business” of animal agriculture. If, in the future, the world did go vegan over time, simple economics would dictate that farmers would stop breeding or forcing those animals to reproduce. Domesticated animal populations would decrease with time. Personally, I think the most ethical thing to do would be to allow these domesticated animal species to go extinct, for the simple reason that these species never existed in the wild; instead, they were selectively bred, designed, and “manufactured” by humans to meet human needs (like to be slow, dumb, and docile). Since most of these domesticated animal species have been bred to be totally dependent on humans to survive and could never live freely in the wild, I think the most ethical solution would be to let their numbers decline until they went extinct (especially modern-day chickens, whose bodies are totally destroyed by the unnatural amounts of eggs they’ve been selectively bred to lay each month). If a few animal sanctuaries (not zoos, which are exploitive, for-profit animal prisons) wanted to keep a few domesticated animals around, these animals could bear silent witness to the horrors of industrial-scale slaughter and suffering that humanity perpetuated for centuries.

A bit off-topic, but I just realized the reasoning for why I’m a vegan is similar to the reasoning for why I’m an atheist. I’m a vegan for the same reason you don’t eat dogs or cats. We both don’t want to cause suffering to creatures we relate or connect to emotionally. I just take that relationship to the next logical step to include all sentient animals. If you can show me one bit of evidence why pigs and dogs don’t think and feel in exactly the same way, I’ll change my mind. I’m an atheist for the same skeptical reasons people don’t believe in Thor or Zeus. We both already don’t believe in 99.99% of all the gods ever invented. I just take that healthy skepticism to the next logical step to include all gods. If you can show me one bit of evidence why your God is more real than Zeus, I’ll change my mind. At least I’m consistent and not carving out a special exemption for my own particular taste in food or religious belief. (Isn’t it an amazing coincidence that for 99.9% of all religious believers that the one TRUE religion just happens to be the one they were brought up in?) And you could say I’m a vegan and an atheist and an anti-capitalist for all the same reasons: I’m against any man-made system of exploitation.

5  I just want to tell everyone how terrible I feel that I worked so hard to create a comfortable and interesting life in Taipei, one of the greatest cities on this planet, only to have been visited by a grand total of ONE of my family or friends: Chris Homsley. I find it sad that no one else I knew ever came to visit me in the 18 long years I lived in Taipei. And please don’t use the excuse that it was too expensive to fly there. All you had to do was put $20 a month in a Mason jar, and you’d have more than enough money after 18 years to pay for business-class airfare, only nine years for economy! I guess being slightly uncomfortable for 12 hours on a plane was also just too great a price for getting to spend time with me in Taipei and getting to see the life I had tried to create for myself or getting to see a new part of the world. Or was it the thought of being in a strange place with people that looked and sounded different than you and possibly having to eat strange, new food in a restaurant that doesn’t exist in America that turned you off? “Pathetic” is my only response.

6  The most difficult part of moving back was not leaving my friends, possessions, or Taiwan’s superior democratic, transportation or nationalized health-care systems, but leaving my two dogs behind. I worry about them every day and feel terrible for leaving them with that unfeeling and unthinking ex of mine, Perry. I would have brought my dogs back with me, but I knew I didn’t have long for this world, and I didn’t want to put them through the stressful and dangerous ordeal of flying across the world and of then being quarantined only to burden people here with them after I was gone.

7  I had been planning my end ever since I returned from Durango, but there were many considerations that followed one after another, convincing me to keep delaying the date I would choose for my end. First, there was Sharae’s health going up and down, and so I waited until she finally passed away to begin my final preparations, since I didn’t want to interfere with her funeral. Then there was the date of Joy’s procedure, Rachel’s job interviews, Duane and Kathy’s on-again-off- again vacations, Brett’s birthday, Aunt Boo and Uncle John’s visit for Thanksgiving, then finally Jailyn’s birthday right after that. So, I’ve put off my end as long as I could, and I’ve done my best not to have my end interfere too much with other people’s lives. I know I still made poor Joy feel like shit and worsened her recovery time. And I know my death put a damper on everyone’s Christmas plans, and so I’m deeply sorry about all of that. But considering how I really feel about Christmas, there was no way I was going to have to endure that holiday again (see note 10).

(And I never had any actual intention or motivation to get a job or to work at Publix, as I discussed above. Though I’ve gone through the motions of looking for a job this past year, it was mostly a ruse to give me something to do while keeping everyone off my trail and off my case.) So, all these considerations combined determined the date of my death.

8  As an outsider, I see “The Market” really as just being the official religion of the “invisible hand” of capitalism. It comes complete with its own temples, its own holy books, and its own high priests who counsel us and our leaders on what their god called “The Market” really wants from us. To do so, these priests perform divination rituals, speak the accepted propitiations, and demand that the proper sacrifices (of natural resources and cheap, dispensable human labor) be performed to appease the “The Market.” This god is a jealous god who will not tolerate competing gods. It’s a totalitarian god, in that it will assign a value to all material objects, the lives of all living organisms (human lives too, until we finally banned slavery), all human labor and creative ideas, all the spaces of this planet’s surface, and even to time itself. In the moral universe of “The Market,” anything that makes more money is “good” or “desirable.” Anything that stops you from making more money is “bad.” But just like every religion or nationalism we’ve ever invented, “The Market” is just another useful and convenient fiction (see Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens) that binds us all together and keeps us working collectively like good little worker bees. But I would even push it a step further and say that capitalism and “the Market” are techno-ecocidal religions that represent the idolatry of man’s ego and greed, the idolatry of progress, growth, development, and technology built on faith in everlasting growth on a finite planet.

And really, I don’t understand how people give credence to these priests, who give out their confusing and contradictory advise 24 hours a day on TV. People seem oblivious to the very obvious conflict-of-interests involved when a high priest of “The Market” tells everybody they need to go buy stocks of a company they already own shares in! Example: Priest A already owns shares of IBM. He tells his eager TV viewers, “Hey you must go out and buy IBM. They’re a steal! Tech stock are going up!” A million viewers rush out and buy IBM. IBM shares go up as as result. The priest pockets the profits from the share-price increase. What a joke! Though probably less funny since I felt the need to explain the joke. And even less funny because so many people apparently don’t know / don’t care they’re being played.

9  You want to know what drove all the anti-drug hysteria of the ‘60s – ‘00s? No explanation is clearer than that by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy advisor and one of the architects of the “War on Drugs:”

You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Think of the millions of lives destroyed in the last 50 years on this stupid, unwinnable war, all so politicians could divide people and win elections. The War on Drugs, just like the War on Terrorism, is unwinnable because you can’t fight a war against an inanimate thing or an idea, only people. And the fact that blacks and whites use drugs at the same rate, but blacks are five to seven times as likely to get incarcerated for drug-use just proves that the War on Drugs was really just another manifestation of Jim Crow. The new Jim Crow is the school-to-prison pipeline that exists in a country that has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The War on Drugs is one of the most sophisticated and expensive forms of social control and repression ever to exist in this country. The way we “punish” drug abusers and sellers while allowing Big Pharma and unethical doctors off the hook is objectively disgusting. The drug war is a bunch of BS the government hides behind to excuse the disparate treatment of black and whites, of poor folk and not-poor folk, and those well connected and those not. Just say no to the War on Drugs.

Hopefully, now saner and more moral minds are in control, we can finally enjoy the many benefits of cannabis: governments get lots of new tax revenue. Companies get happier, more mellow employees. And human beings – with bodies and brains full of cannabinoid receptors – luckily get the mental health benefits of this remarkable plant.

10  Can you please tell me, an atheist, what I’m supposed to get out of Christmas? First of all, almost all the symbols of Christmas, from the tree to the wreath to the mistletoe to the date of Christmas itself are all pagan in origin! Christians have been really shameless in appropriating other people’s religions or just plain oblivious to the origins of their traditions. Not surprising, see how much of Genesis, including the whole Flood story, was plagiarized from earlier Mesopotamian myths (even elements of the Moses story were ripped off from myths about King Sargon of Akkad) and the entire Jesus story is just rehashed from earlier Osiris and Mithras mystery-cult rites and mythologies of a dying and resurrected god or a hero who conquers death. Second, it’s a religious holiday, so please don’t require me to participate in it or push all that gaudy, religious tripe down my throat every time I step into a public space. Third, I’m sorry, but exchanging gifts doesn’t mean anything to me. I find it to be mindless consumerism and materialism, devised by the captains of industry to keep capitalism’s wheels greased. (“Consumers for Christ,” a sign held up by a Christian in the movie Brazil, sums up the season perfectly.) The thing I hate the most about Christmas, besides the grating sentimentality, faux nostalgia, annoying and trite songs (which are played endlessly for months in the stores to trick you into buying, just like Pavlov’s dogs), ticky-tacky decorations, and forced and phony family camaraderie I have to endure is the sham moral posturing: “Peace on Earth,” the Christians proclaim, all the while chowing down on murdered-animal carcasses, the product of extreme violence, and voting for parties that promote warfare, destruction, and wholesale murder abroad. Hey Christians: peace begins on your plate and in the voting booth, you hypocrites! The emptiness of Christmas is just more evidence to me how empty Christianity is, as it’s widely practiced; it just serves to reify and confirm all the prejudices and destructive, exploitive, or violent habits of society, not fight against them. And then it papers over all the guilt, remorse, or emptiness you might experience by participating in that corrupt society by promising some kind of totalitarian afterlife. I don’t get it. Thankfully Easter has never been commercialized like Christmas and is easy enough for atheists like me to ignore. It, too, is pagan in origin, from the rabbit to the eggs to the name of the holiday itself. Halloween? Degraded into a silly kid’s holiday now. In fact, you’ll notice the trend is for all religious holidays to devolve into a bunch of empty and mindless traditions that revolve around kids. That’s because kids are the only ones still willing and eager (dare I say gullible) to buy into all the fantasy behind them. For the adults, most of these religious holiday traditions now are just attempts to recreate the “magic” of their lost childhood.

Then there’s Thanksgiving, another holiday that, to me, is really religion wrapped in the most shallow and empty of secular values and a glossy, white-washed version of history. First, how can you “give thanks” without having a god to give thanks to? Otherwise, who are you thanking, yourselves? It’s obvious the object of the imperative “give thanks” is “to God.” Further proof that Thanksgiving is a religious holiday masquerading a public, secular holiday: the first national day of Thanksgiving was declared by President Lincoln on Thursday, August 6, 1863 as a day of giving thanks to God for Union victories. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the Southern rebellion. Want more proof? As I write this, today is Thanksgiving, and half my family has gone to church to give thanks to their god. The Thanksgiving ritual, like all religious social rituals, has one chief purpose, and that is to make its participants feel smug and self-satisfied with themselves and the world order as it is. It’s definitely not to ask questions about any of it. “All the good fortune and overabundance and material comforts I have are gifts from God; this all must be exactly what God wants for me and the little society I’m in. Thanks, God!”

As an atheist, I don’t see any value in this, and I resent being pressured to participate in such a religious holiday. If I wanted to feel grateful for what I have, I’d try doing without – such as fasting or not purchasing the stuff I thought I needed – or spending some time with those less fortunate. And then, “giving thanks” is really just a rationalization to engage in gluttony and overconsumption, which is the reality of the huge Thanksgiving meal. “It’s OK that I overeat as long as I tell myself I’m ‘thankful’ beforehand!” Or does the logic go the other way as a kind of public virtue-signalling? “Look at me! I’m expressing my gratitude for what I have by mouthing a few empty words and then overeating!” Either way, forty-six million intelligent, thinking, feeling turkeys are killed each year for Thanksgiving in an orgy of blood and gluttony. The tradition of having a yearly big feast might have made sense in the past, when people were always one meal away from starvation. But now, in this era of overabundance, in a country with one of the worst obesity rates in the world, when people in other parts of the world are starving, overeating really seems, to me, pretty gross. Then, of course, there is the way that the Thanksgiving story and most of US history is white-washed: seldom mentioned is the way, before the first thanksgiving meal in 1621, that most of the Wampanoag people were wiped out by diseases brought by the white colonizers, how most of the Indigenous People’s land was stolen by encroaching settlers, how treaties were routinely broken by the Puritans, resulting in frequent raids and mutual killings, how several subsequent “thanksgiving meals” observed by the Puritans were actually in celebration of the 1637 burning of a Native Pequot village or the 1676 killing of the Wampanoag-tribe leader’s son (his severed head was put on a spike in town, the thanksgiving centerpiece, I guess), how by 1703, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was offering white colonists $60 per Native scalp, etc. If it were up to me, we’d replace Thanksgiving with an Indigenous Holocaust Memorial Day, a day of fasting and atonement in memory of the 55 million human beings who were killed wholesale (ie, a genocide) in the 16th through 19th centuries as a result of European colonization of this continent. “Thanksgiving: celebrating a human genocide with an animal holocaust.” Makes no sense to me!

Then there’s Labor Day, in a country that has some of the worst labor and union-protection laws in the developed world. (No surprise, since the oligarchs make all the laws here.) Memorial Day: let’s go to the beach, eat a bunch of dead cow flesh, and get drunk to remember all those who died in America’s wars. That makes no sense to me. And on and on. The only holiday that means anything to me is New Years, a completely secular and useful holiday when you get the chance to mark the passing of time and symbolically begin your life again.

11 For the years I was active, sex – especially under the influence of ecstasy – was my form of spiritual worship. It was how I connected to what I felt was the divine nature present in that other body. I remember telling myself when I was in Taiwan: I’m here to worship your gene pool! But yes, drugs are a two-edge sword; they expand your mind, but they also make you suffer, both physically and psychologically. When you play with e, you have to deal with depression and mood swings for weeks afterwards because it uses up all the dopamine in your brain. But remember the root of the word “passion” is the Latin word patior, which means to suffer! Suffering is the price you pay to feel the passion!

Now that I’m both sober and celibate, I think of the sexless, passionless child-psychologist, Professor Dysart, from the movie Equus when I say to myself: I’ll never again gallop at night in ecstasy. I’ll never again suck the sweat from my god’s hairy cheek and proclaim: WITH MY BODY, I THEE WORSHIP! So many other good lines from that movie: “The normal is the good smile in a child’s eye. It’s also the dead stare in a million adults. Both sustains and kills, like a god. It’s the ordinary made beautiful. It’s also the average made lethal. The normal is the indispensable, murderous god of health. And I ... am his chief priest.” “I wish there somebody in this life I could show, one, instinctive, absolutely unbrisk person that I could take to Greece, and stand in certain shrines and sacred streams, and say, “Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods. Not just the old, dead gods, with names like Zeus, but living geniuses of place and person. Not just in Greece, but here, in modern England. Spirits of certain trees, of certain curves of brick walls, of slate roofs, of frowns in people, and of slouches. I’d say to them, ‘worship all that you can see... and more will appear.’” and “Can you imagine anything worse that you could do than take away a person’s worship?” “Without worship, you shrink!” “Do you know what passion meant originally? Suffering! The way you get your own spirit through your own suffering. Self-chosen. Self-made. He’s created his own desperate ceremony just to ignite one flame of original ecstasy in the spiritless waste around him. He’s destroyed for it. He’s virtually been destroyed by it.” “When Equus leaves, Alan, if he leaves at all, it will be with your intestines in his teeth. And I don’t stock replacements.”

If you want to know what my weekly debauchery in Taiwan was like, go listen to Above and Beyond’s “On a Good Day,” while imagining yourself dancing in a sweaty group hug for hours in a club or, even better, dancing naked in a group hug at home. Sigh. I really miss that feeling! It was so powerful and transcendent! But I suffered greatly – physically, emotionally, and financially – to feel that passion; my good friend Duncan even died for it. And so, I’ve had to “stop galloping on Equus” and sacrifice my own ecstasy, out of necessity, to the god of normalcy. However, my life, though free from the pain and suffering caused by partying, is now dull and without passion. Now that I’m celibate, I’ve lost my main form of worship, and my soul has shrunk as a result. My life just seems so empty and meaningless now that I’m basically sober and celibate. And apparently I’m the only one of my old party-mates who retains any positive memories of those past experiences. None of that meant anything to them. In fact, knowing that they’ve already forgotten about all those transcendent moments and how little it means to them now hurts me more than not being able personally to re-experience that ecstatic transcendence anymore.

12 This economic system has a name: capitalism. Just because capitalism survived the struggle against Soviet communism does not make it perfect or beyond reproach. (Besides, communism is alive and well under Xi’s China, apparently. So it never was, in fact, defeated by capitalism. In fact, I think the battle between Western capitalism and the Eastern fusion of capitalism and communism will be the major shaping force of the 21st century.) But anyway, there are plenty of critiques of capitalism – by thinkers far more astute than me – who have made all kinds of legitimate critiques of capitalism and have argued for ways we could replace it or, at least, make it more humane and sustainable. After all, I believe the most dangerous phrase in the human language is, “We’ve always done it this way.”

But I don’t consider myself a communist or a true Marxist, as it’s obvious that Marx got a lot of things wrong – like his belief in the inevitable, linear progress of human history towards some utopian communist paradise (the “Stage Theory” of history) and his belief in the “blank slate” of human nature – and that all the attempts so far to implement Marx’s ideas have been complete humanitarian disasters. However, I think one thing Marx got right, and why some of his descriptive tools have staying power, is his description of how the economy determines politics. The economy determines certain political structures (and not the other way around); these structures organize themselves in support of the economic forces of capitalism. And I think that some later political philosophers and social scientists who called themselves Marxists have developed useful sociological tools for unpacking the ways that various social structures (such as in the fields of law, finance, the media, and education) that have developed under capitalism favor the rich and powerful and disfavor the poor and weak. (More on that in note 24).

But I find myself alienated by various aspects of unbridled capitalism, with its Darwinian style of competition; the anti- democratic power that accumulates with its corporate leaders; its exploitation of the weak and poor; the robbing of our future natural inheritance for short-term profit; its reduction of people into atomized, mindless consumers; its commodification of nature, our labor, and now, our personal information; the fetishization of those commodities; its glorification of greed, self-interest, and materialism; and the unsustainable devastation that this unquenchable beast has unleashed on this planet. And capitalism works just as well in the West – where it fits hand-in-glove with monotheism and Greek individualism – as is does in the East – where it’s been melded to Confucianism, statism, and even Marxism!

It seems that most of capitalism’s practical arguments have been disproven in the last 40 years, at least here in America:

1/ “Capitalism may increase inequality, but at least it lifts all boats.” In fact, since Reagan implemented neoliberalism, with its emphasis on financialization, globalization, and domestic austerity spending, wages for the bottom half of incomes, when adjusted for inflation, have remained flat or fallen. Meanwhile, the income and wealth of the top 1% has skyrocketed, even during the past 2 years of a pandemic. See note 16.

2/ “Capitalism creates a large, strong middle class, and that leads to political stability.” The rise of the politically nihilist T**** and the cult of his neo-fascist MAGA-its and all the instability of the past five years disproves that idea. See note 27. In fact, the unaccountable wealth that accumulates in the pockets of capitalists and the oligarchy is leading to the rise of a neo-feudalism. See note 13.

So that just leaves three moral arguments for capitalism:
1/ “Anything besides capitalism would be worse. It’s us or North Korea.” Well there is democratic socialism.

2/ “Capitalism teaches us to be moral: we need to work hard to pay our debts.” This teaching only applies for the working poor, not for the rich. If you’re T**** and never pay your debts or go bankrupt, they elect you president. If you’re a member of the working poor and try this, you’re a “deadbeat” and a “loser” and will be punished accordingly.

3/ “Our purpose in life is to work.” This Protestant idea is the bedrock of capitalism and instills in us the belief that if we aren’t willing to slave away at a bullshit job (and believe me, almost every job opening I applied for the past year was a bullshit job), if we aren’t working harder than we want to, doing something we don’t particularly enjoy or even detest, under the orders of someone we don’t like, then we’re just a bad person, and that we don’t deserve help. We’re just losers whose only alternatives are to be homeless, go to jail, or go die. The way capitalism denigrates those who rebel against it reminds me of how black people were labeled and denigrated by the supporters of white supremacy:

When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression. - Frederick Douglass

Just as white supremacists looked at uneducated, unsocialized blacks as proof that their “childlike” state needed protection and control by white supremacists, capitalism looks at the poverty and lack of material “achievements” of third-world inhabitants, hippies, and other capitalist refuseniks as proof that humans are, in fact, lazy and indolent, and that they can only be corrected by the strict discipline of the harsh “rod and lash” of capitalism. White supremacists in the antebellum South despised Northern “carpetbaggers” and do-gooder Republican Freedmen’s Bureau workers, who they saw as the instigators of uppity former slaves who dared vote themselves into power under Reconstruction and that had to be suppressed by Jim Crow laws, the KKK, violence, and lynchings. Similarly, capitalists see Marxists and anyone who dares criticize capitalism as threats that must be suppressed via police violence, state violence (see Vietnam war), or by the social violence of poverty, ostracism, and denigration.

In fact, capitalism idealizes both sadism and masochism. If you’re a lucky-ducky capitalist, then you’re taught that it’s OK to enjoy the power to exploit others and the environment. If you’re a minimum-wage laborer, you’re taught that work is painful and difficult and you’re supposed to like it that way. It’s very Protestant in its outlook: endure happily the pain of this fallen and evil world. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Your reward comes in the afterlife.

In fact, capitalism has always been based on the promise that the future will also always be be better, that history under capitalism is a progressive line of improvements in health and wealth to some unseeable and unknowable future techno- utopia. It will be another century or two – once the ecocide of unsustainable capitalism destroys the planet’s ability to provide and maintain the agricultural surplus that civilization is based on – before capitalism’s chief promise is proven just as wrong as Marxism’s belief in the “Stage Theory” of a future Marxist utopia.

But if capitalism is the best and only economic system we can currently devise for ourselves – and the past 100 years of history seems to indicate that it is – then it is an indictment on the limits of human intelligence and moral imagination. But since there is no viable alternative to capitalism, I’ve decided the only moral option remaining for me is to refuse to participate in it. The way I’ve chosen to opt out of capitalism is to respond with,

I prefer not to. ~ Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

My English Literature degree, which I wasted all the savings of my twenties obtaining, was at least good for something. In fact, I believe the only way humanity will survive the environmental ravages and antidemocratic forces unleashed by capitalism is if people cease to consent to it. The 19th-century democracy campaigners knew this, the suffragettes knew it, Gandhi knew it, and Martin Luther King knew it.

Sadly, when you refuse to participate in capitalism, your only actual options are to find a hippy commune (I’m too anti- social for that), join the legions of America’s homeless and live under a bridge (I’m too much of a wimp), go insane and get committed to an asylum (tempting; “asylum” is a perfect name for a place for drop-outs seeking refuge from capitalism), or just live by yourself in the woods like the Unabomber (I wouldn’t last a week). The only other option available to refuseniks like me is an early death, unfortunately.

Perhaps having capitalism constrained and controlled by democratic socialism (like what FDR tried to do here or in the Scandinavian model, whose citizens enjoy the highest standards of living in the world) is the best we can do for now. Good luck ever implementing that model again here in America, where, since 1980, we’ve experienced non-stop Revenge of the Oligarchs and Neoliberals, who overturned FDR’s New Deal policies and the Bretton-Woods controls on capital flows, destroyed the power of unions, shipped factories overseas, and decoupled the wage and productivity growth that existed between WW2 and 1980, leading to the largest amount of income and wealth inequality since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century (when robber barons monopolized the economy, kept wages low, and bribed lawmakers... hmmm, sounds familiar).

I admit that socialism rubs against the grain in a society here in America founded on rugged individualism, distrust of government authority, and riven by racial and tribal fears and resentment. But it’s funny how some people always love socialism when it benefits them – roads, schools, public libraries, police, fire departments, most utilities, the military, jobs (think how many jobs just in Huntsville owe their existence to government spending), Social Security, Medicare, government pensions, etc. – but resent socialism when it benefits people or groups outside their class or tribe. And Red States never complain about socialism when it come to federal dollars; most Red States receive billions of federal tax dollars more than they send to Washington. In fact, eight of the ten most dependent states on federal fund are Red States. But perhaps socialism really is impossible in a multi-ethnic society because the resentment of out-groups just can’t be overcome. Or perhaps the rationalizations people give for their selfishness, greed, and tribalism over the centuries are too insurmountable. (It helps when those rationalizations are continuously reinforced and confirmed by complicit propaganda outlets. See note 24.)

I hear this argument all the time: liberals who support socialism are just resentful of rich people’s success. I’m not resentful of their success or their wealth; I’m resentful of their selfishness and the disproportionate power in a democracy that their vast wealth gives them. Notice how selfishness is a virtue in libertarianism, the political ideology for the super- rich and a few well-meaning but naive white, middle class people who have the historical knowledge and sociological skills of 16-year-olds. The good thing about voting Libertarian is you can smugly vote for their party till the cows come home as a protest vote, safe in the knowledge that you’ll never have to actually live in the dystopian nightmare that would result if the Libertarians had enough power to enact their policy ideas. Hopefully one day soon, all those libertarians can join Peter Thiel in a seasteading community – a hypothetical libertarian, government-free utopia floating in international waters – or Elon Musk up on the Moon or Mars, where the poor, the weak, and the incapable will be forbidden, because they could never afford the entrance fee to join the lucky-ducky few.

Thanks to tax loopholes which the oligarchs help write and off-shore tax havens where they can hide their wealth, billionaires in this country effectively pay no taxes. I believe we all have certain collective obligations to take care of one another in a society, that there are certain material needs that simply can’t be met effectively by most people on an individual level, and that the most fair and democratic way to take care of these needs and obligations is by pooling our wealth by a democratic government, which administers programs that provide these needed services and redistribute the wealth more fairly. If Western European and the Scandinavian countries can figure out a democratic way to solve these problems, why can’t we? But this is why the quality of life in Western European countries is so much higher than here. That and not squandering 3.3% of their GDP on a military-industrial complex like we do in America.

When Republicans warn of socialism, they are not talking about actual socialism, which is an economic system in which the means of production – the factories and industries – are owned by the people or the government. True socialism has never been popular in America, and virtually no one is talking about it here today. The best it has ever done in a national election was in 1912, when labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, running for president as a Socialist, won a whopping 6% of the vote, coming in behind Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. True socialism isn't a real threat in America.

What politicians mean when they cry "socialism" in America today is something entirely different. It is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when black men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the free labor system from which they had previously been excluded, these men joined poor white men to vote for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans), and develop the economy with railroads and ports to provide an equal opportunity for all people to find work, rise up the social ladder, and pursue “the American Dream.”

Former Confederates loathed the idea of black men voting. But their opposition to black voting on racial grounds ran headlong into the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S. government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” When white former Confederates nonetheless tried to force their black neighbors from the polls, Republicans in Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had been terrorizing the South.

With racial discrimination now prohibited by the federal government, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to black voting not on racial grounds, but because black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, "Socialism in South Carolina."

This idea that it was dangerous for poor working men to have a say in the government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into cities to work in the new factories. Like their counterparts in the South, they voted for roads and schools, and Northern men of wealth, too, insisted these programs meant a redistribution of wealth through tax dollars.

They got more concerned still when a majority of Americans began to call for regulation to keep businessmen from gouging consumers, polluting the environment, and poisoning the food supply (where milk was preserved with formaldehyde, and candy was often painted with lead paint). Wealthy men argued that any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man's “liberty,” (see note 24) while an army of bureaucrats to enforce regulations would cost tax dollars and thus would redistribute wealth from men of means to the poor who would benefit from the regulations.

Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers' government to life, Americans who opposed regulation insisted that their economy was under siege by socialists. That conviction did indeed lead to a redistribution of wealth, but as regular Americans were kept from voting, it went dramatically upward, not down.

Regulation of business and promotion of infrastructure is not, in fact, the international socialism today’s Republicans claim. According to Abraham Lincoln, who first articulated the principles of the Republican Party (back when it was the liberal party that cared about the public good), and under which the Party created the first American income tax, the “legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities.” Those things included, Lincoln wrote, “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.” Who knew Abraham Lincoln was such a “CRAZY LIBRUL”?????

The word “socialism” has been twisted and mischaracterized by the oligarchs and their propaganda outlets over the past few centuries into a spooky, manipulative scare-word. In fact, it’s been used against every single progressive program implemented since FDR: in 1935, the American Liberty League tried to scare Americans about Social Security by labeling it “socialism.” It’s what the oligarchs called Federal Bank Deposit Insurance, unions, and union-protection laws. It’s the scare-word Reagan used to denounce Medicare when it was introduced in the ‘60’s, and it’s what Republicans called the ACA, even though it was originally a Republican think-tank idea, etc. But to pretend that any of these popular programs or the democratic socialism in Sweden (or in all the Western European democracies) is the same thing as the autocratic socialism in Venezuela or whatever it is the CCP wants to call socialism in quasi-fascist, authoritarian China is just being completely dishonest. But I’ll lay my cards on the table: I’m a huge fan of FDR, who saved this country and Europe from fascism, and who envisioned the post-war international world order that oversaw the biggest growth of the American middle-class we’ve ever accomplished. Thanks to FDR’s socialism, we got all the New Deal programs, Social Security, the TVA, the GI bill, etc. And a few lucky people have even gotten cushy government jobs working for the military, including getting to take early retirement with pensions. Imagine how they’ve benefited from American socialism! I hope they appreciate it!

Speaking of capitalism’s exploitation of the poor, I see the The Great Resignation continues. A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September 2021, breaking the record set in August of 4.3 million. Quits were highest in sectors with low-wage, in-person jobs. Call this what it is: an unofficial general strike. In its own disorganized way, it’s related to the organized strikes that have broken out across the country – John Deere workers, Alabama coal miners, Kellogg workers, nurses in California. Disorganized or organized, American workers now have bargaining leverage to do better – and they’re flexing their muscles for the first time in years. Corporate America wants to frame this as a “labor shortage,” and entitled middle-class folks whine all day about how “lazy” the working poor are becoming. But what’s really going on is best described as a living-wage shortage, a hazard-pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick-leave shortage, and a health-care shortage. Unless these shortages are rectified – via the collective bargaining power of unions and via the implementation of socialist government programs to rectify capitalism’s exploitation of the working poor – many Americans won’t return to work anytime soon. That’s the real lesson here. I say it’s about time.

13 Without a UBI (originally proposed by Nixon in 1969, back when Republicans were still moderate and still cared about the public good), poor people in the future stuck here on Earth are going to be so fucked!

I like what Yanis Varoufakis has said about how capitalism has already morphed into a kind of techno-feudalism:

Capitalism has morphed a number of times. Like Covid-19, it’s had many variants. It had the alpha-variant back in the pre-19th century, with the baker, the brewer, and the butcher (NB: the model of Adam Smith, the philosopher who first posited that selfishness under capitalism was a virtue). Then there was the beta-variant with the robber barons and monopoly capital and the network-capital of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Then after the Great Depression and the New Deal, capitalism went through the kind of technical restructuring that John Kenneth Galbraith described; it became the gamma-variant by going through the Bretton-Woods Era of globalization through central planning, with fixed exchange rates and capital controls. Then this whole arrangement collapsed on the 15th of August 1971 (NB: when Nixon announced his “New Economic Policy” and the end of fixed exchange rates) and the neoliberal attacks ten years later on organized labor and the New Deal under Reagan. Capitalism then morphed into the delta-variant- era of financialized capitalism. All these kinds of capitalism were different from one another. But they all shared two things between them: First they shared a belief in the primacy of “profitability.” Private capital profit has always been the fuel of the system. Second: the “markets” are the locus of exploitation, of value creation and extraction, whether its the labor market or the real estate market or the money market.

But in the last 12 or 13 years, both of these pillars – profitability and the markets – are waning. First: today, instead of profits driving the system, today it’s Central Bank money. It’s sovereign money, issued by a powerless state: a state which is the pocket, not of the sovereign people, but of the oligarchy. And we also have many companies that are taken over by private equity and then split into two: the first part is a holding company which owns the buildings, which are used as collateral to add huge amounts of debt. The other part of the company that provides goods or services becomes effectively a debt-slave to the first part. This whole agglomeration, or zombie company, has no profits, yet the company’s shares still have value in the stock market. So this is a major transformation in capitalism; profitability is no longer driving the system. Second: we have the steady fragmentation of markets and their replacement by “platforms,” by companies like Amazon. Once you enter Amazon’s platform, you’re in space that’s ex-capitalist. You enter a kind of fiefdom. It’s a digital fiefdom where what is supplied, what is purchased, what is advertised, what you see, what you don’t see is determined by an algorithm belonging to one man or one company. That is not capitalism. Amazon is not capitalism. Google is not capitalism. Facebook is not capitalism. It’s a techno- fiefdom. We leftists used to dream that after capitalism, something better would come along. I think something much much worse is coming: our economy transforming into a kind of digital feudalism.

And God help all you fools who are going to follow Musk and his techno-utopianists to Mars! (In fact, notice how almost all our sociopathic tech billionaires are libertarians, who want to replace our government and any democratic control we have over our lives with an undemocratic, tech-driven, corporate-run autocracy, all in the name of convenience, “efficiency,” and, of course, profitability for its share-holders.) Elon Musk has wet-dreams of building a government-less tech-utopia on Mars, where every building, every bit of oxygen and food, every spacesuit, and all the transportation to and from Earth will be owned by him! You can’t get any more totalitarian than Musk’s vision of humanity’s future on Mars! A democratic government is always authoritarian to these nerdish nitwits, but an undemocratic corporate-autocracy will somehow NOT be authoritarian? If you want to read something really scary, check out an article about Musk’s belief in “longtermerism” on Aeon Magazine. According to this philosophy, anything that guarantees the long-term survival of the human race (until the universe experiences heat death in 10100 years and the human population reaches its “ultimate potential” by evolving into hyper-intelligent beings) is good. Anything that slows or threatens that potential is bad. If most of our planet’s species go extinct and even billions of poorer humans have to die due to wars or climate change, that’s ok, as long as our industrial output guarantees the long-term survival of a lucky few: the smart oligarchs who can escape off-world and continue to evolve towards our future, imagined “potential.” It’s the most dystopian, most fascist thing I think I’ve ever read.

Meanwhile, our billionaire saviors, Musk, Branson, and Bezos – currently engaged in a dick-measuring contest (with Musk the clear winner) of shooting rich people into space – are rushing off to bring down the cost of getting payloads into LEO. Good for them. So with super-cheap access to space, all the strip-mining and pollution we’ve subjected this planet to will now be transferred to all the pristine worlds in our solar systems. All the off-world colonies will be privately run, of course, minting a whole new class of uber-wealthy trillionaire overlords (think they’ll be willing to pay any taxes? Oh silly me! By that time, all sovereign currencies will have been replaced by government-free crypto- currency!) Good luck to any life-forms currently existing on those other worlds. In the meantime, with thousands, perhaps millions of launches per year, the promised relocation of polluting industries to space will turn out to be a total sham, with all the additional CO2 and other pollutants the unlucky Earth inhabitants will have to endure from the frequent rocket launches. Meanwhile, Musk (no doubt the beneficiary of some the life-prolonging technologies he and his billionaire friends are investing his billions into) will be out on Mars breathing his SpaceX-copyrighted oxygen supply. If he’s really lucky, he’ll live long enough to have his consciousness uploaded to the Cloud or transferred to an indestructible cyborg! (I picture something like General Grievous!) Because the only thing motivating him now is he burning, ego-driven need to be the one who made humanity a two-world species. (I see it as just spreading the cancer of humanity across the solar system.) And of course Musk is really motivated to make sure he remains the richest, most powerful human in the solar system. What a fucking nightmare. So glad I won’t have to endure witnessing any of this.

Speaking of libertarian sociopaths, I see Peter Thiel is planning on moving to Washington, D.C, no doubt to use some of his billions to bribe politicians, get some of his T****ian VC pals elected to office, and to push some of his ego-centric, dystopian ideas. This guy is so crazy, even a narcissistic sociopath like Musk thinks he’s fucked up. Oh lucky Americans, you have no idea what kind of laws and policies this fanatic is going to finance and push through. Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin recently said, “There are aspects of Thiel’s politics that aren’t libertarian at all; they’re closer to authoritarianism. It’s super-nationalistic, it’s a longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive, or, you know, a dictator, in other words.” In 2009, Thiel wrote an essay for Cato Unbound, an online libertarian journal published by the Cato Institute, in which he stated that he no longer believed “freedom and democracy are compatible,” and that “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries” and the extension of voting rights to women had “rendered the notion of a ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” Thiel is a big fan of the essayist Curtis Yarvin (more on him in note 27), who often wrote on “formalism,” a theory that argues against democracy and in favor of a federal government structure that operates more like a corporation or dictatorship. (Some of these tech nitwits really do see China under the CCP as the most successful and enviable formalist society ever!) These views later crystallized into what has been called “neo-reaction.” This ideology, Chafkin claims, holds that climate science is fraudulent, that inflationary currencies are “diabolical,” and that genetic differences predispose certain groups to “mastery” and others to slavery. Thiel, Chafkin writes, “subscribed to the first two views, if not the third.” Max Read, a former editor-in-chief of Gawker, would note that Thiel’s politics were informed by “an apocalyptic fear of stasis.” And of course, by supporting T**** in 2016, the most chaotic, politically nihilistic politician in modern American history, Thiel may have seen a way out of stasis.

But he and his billionaire friends are busy constructing totally unregulated investment units – called DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations – where they can continue to inflate their wealth by anonymously investing their money in crypto-currencies in a totally lawless, unregulated, and unaccountable environment. He, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos are investing billions in many of the afore-mentioned life-prolonging technology, using their enormous wealth to help humans (ie, rich people) “cheat death.” Because the one and only tool we have – natural death – to tame the unbounded egos of these sociopathic billionaires is the one thing that they believe must be solved by their money and their technology. “I think involuntary death is clearly morally bad, which makes the quest for longevity a morally noble thing to engage in,” tech-investor Jaan Tallinn said. No, the opposite is true! Death is the most essential part of the natural order, and accepting our own natural death gracefully is the most moral, noble, even enviable thing we as humans could ever achieve. (Yeah, I know that means I accept I’m not graceful or moral or noble. So sue me.) Without death, there is no possibility anymore of the young to have their fair chance. The physicist Max Planck one said that science proceeds, “one funeral at a time.” In other words, people don’t change their minds with when better ideas come along. You’ve got to wait for the people with the bad ideas to die off, especially the ones with power. So by delaying or avoiding death, you’ve thereby closed off any further chance of change or further evolutionary or social progress. These fucking egotists are going to destroy the entire natural order of the world. Now you’ll NEVER be able to escape the egos and power of these uber-rich assholes!!! If they succeed, I get the feeling these libertarian, techno- utopianist oligarchs are going to break off from the rest of humanity in terms of wealth, power, and lifestyles, build their own separate society, and evolve off in directions we can’t even imagine, kind of like the online persona did in that movie, Her. I am so glad that I will never have to witness the dystopian future these guys are going to unleash on the world.

Then you have another sociopath, Mark Zuckerburg, who just announced he’s going to pour his billions into constructing a “metaverse,” an utterly dystopian, Matrix-like future that will lead to even greater polarization because we’ll all be living in our own customized, algorithm-generated realities. It will destroy our ability to just exist in the unconnected, unfiltered real world. NFTs and plots of “digital land” are already being bought and sold in the metaverse for millions of dollars (using its own cryptocurrency, of course). As long as the electricity doesn’t go off, these nerdish nitwits are going to just leave the rest of behind in the boring “real world” as they escape into their digital fantasyland. Why do I hate these libertarian techno-utopianists so much, besides the fact their vast wealth gives them such undemocratic and unaccountable power? Because Thiel and Zuckerburg have been responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that technological progress and “disruption” should be pursued relentlessly – with no regard for potential costs or dangers to society. That their unlimited access to money and to amoral software engineers (I’m looking at you, Vince, who already told me, “I’ll do anything, as long as I get paid.”) gives them the power and right to “disrupt” everyone else’s lives. Thiel sees his pursuit of his techno-utopia in religious terms: “God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth – in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.” Many of Thiel’s investments suggest a Blade Runner-like world that is militaristic, private, secretive, corporate, and controlled. For him, the processes of liberal democratic life are either an obstacle or a distraction. Technological innovation is paramount. What’s on offer is a fantasy of a future shaped purely by technology. What makes me hate all of this the most is that we, the poor hoi polloi, have no choice in any of these technological changes. They are forced down our throats by the rich and powerful, all because of capitalism’s requirement to constantly “grow” and make more incentivizing profits for their shareholders at all costs. And no matter how much or how quickly these technologies reshape our minds and our society, we just have to accept it. I say to these guys: FUCK YOU ALL!!! And by my death, I’m giving my last middle-finger to all these libertarian, neo-feudalist, techno-utopianist fuck-wits!

14  The only response I’ve ever gotten from a meat-eater to any of the factual or ethical arguments against carnism – the unspoken, unexamined, and pervasive ideology that says eating meat is normal and necessary – is, “Yes I know you’re right, but I just don’t care enough to change.” In fact, carnism was created to help meat-eaters subsume and pave over all the obvious subconscious guilt and disgust at killing animals, a disgust that is obvious to any thinking five-year-old. What I’ll never understand is how people can honestly claim to “love animals,” yet they’re perfectly OK with paying some poor slob to slaughter animals with identical nervous systems, identical emotional lives, and identical ability to feel pain and to suffer as the cats and dogs they love and admire; they can’t see the violence and suffering behind that “meat” on their plates. That’s the moral blindness created by carnism.

15  There’s plenty of good evidence that COVID-19 was cooked up in a lab as part of gain-of-function research. Scary stuff, though it’s just a matter of time until the next altered bug evolves, escapes, or, even worse, is deliberately released. It’s more proof that our technology is always producing unexpected “structural violence” that we can’t always predict, control, or countermand. The structural violence caused by new technologies always requires the invention of yet more new technologies, in a vicious, never-ending arms race and growing technological complexity. What will happen when the unintended structural violence of our technology outpaces our ability to predict or control it?

16  With the exception of three brief periods:

1/ Reconstruction, back when the Republican Party was the liberal party who cared about the public good and supported the rights of blacks and poor whites,
2/ the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt, and
3/ the New Deal Era of FDR, which lasted till the Carter administration,

the oligarchs have always been the ones who have actually controlled our government, ensuring their vast wealth, power, and privileges go unchallenged.

The most pressing threat to our democracy (after voter-suppression laws) is the asymmetric power of the oligarchy and super-wealthy in this country. The top 1% of Americans (by wealth distribution) owns twice as much wealth as the entire middle class and 16 times more wealth than the entire bottom 50% combined. And the gaps are only growing bigger each year. This is what oligarchy looks like.

Then there was the way the Fed, who in 2008-9 and again this past year, artificially propped up the value of the stock market by purchasing trillions of dollars of depressed assets and flooding the financial system with trillions in printed dollars. And what did the banks do with all those trillions in freshly printed dollars? They certainly were not going to loan it to the working class, who were suffering from the austerity of cuts in state spending and loss of employment. No, they gave it all to huge corporations at practically 0% interest. And the corporations didn’t use that money to build more factories (no one is buying stuff in a recession), so they then used that money to buy back shares in their own companies, enriching themselves further. (This is the exact same thing corporations and the rich did with the trillions in tax cuts the Republicans have given them over the last two decades.) So now, no need to buy any more GM cars; they can just borrow billions from JP Morgan, who can then get that money from the Fed’s printing press. And GM’s stock price – and the wealth of its share holders – remains the same!

This was all done to protect the short-term wealth and power of the privileged oligarchs and to stop the middle class – who have been encouraged over the last four decades by the neoliberals to stick their retirement savings into the stock market, since their pensions had long since been taken away, thus ensuring the middle class would reliably vote for the interests of the uber-wealthy – from getting upset and rejecting the current system. (The top 10% of incomes hold over 70% of the value of all stocks. Let’s not fool ourselves which class the stock market serves. BTW, home ownership and student debt work the same way as 401(k)-requirements for retirement: they transfer enormous amounts of wealth from the pockets of the working poor and middle class into the pockets of the banking and financial systems. They also ensure that the interests of the oligarchical bankers and the wealthy developers always become the interests of the middle class.) The stock market is now a just an artificial pyramid scheme kept inflated by the Fed for the benefit of the wealthy. The stock market certainly doesn’t reflect the true health of the economy anymore; stock prices are now largely decoupled from profits or the health of individual companies when the US GDP can plunge 33% at the beginning of the pandemic, but the stock market STILL goes up! Here’s Rivian, a 12-year-old car maker – who has produced a grand-total of 156 cars in its existence and has never made a penny in profit – who is now the no. 3 car-maker by value. (Is there any way I could ever run a business like this? No way, unless my company is being kept alive by a post-capitalist monopoly like Amazon! See note 13.)

In America, it’s always socialism for the rich, and cruel, Darwinian capitalism and austerity for the poor. You can tell that when Reagan said the most terrifying words are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you,” he was totally lying. As soon as his oligarch friends get in trouble, the first thing they always do is to run to Uncle Sam for trillions in hand-outs. But as the financial bubbles are continuously being re-floated and the decoupling of financial markets from the real world continues, the inequality becomes unbearable. Good luck when the bubble finally bursts!

BTW, you can tell who really runs this country right now: the corporate-run media are all breathlessly reporting the Democrat’s modest plan to tax billionaires – a plan that would only affect about 750 people – as some kind of existential threat to this country. It so obviously proves my point that we live in an oligarchy, as the concerns of those 750 billionaires are always somehow greater than the concerns of the 300,000,000 non-billionaires in this country. (Am I supposed to believe the poor guy working the cashier machines at Walmart is going to be a billionaire one day and just wants to protect his future tax rate?) And even after such a tax, those billionaires would still have obscene quantities of wealth left over to build whatever dystopian future they envision for themselves. It’s just like how the Republicans have convinced their sheep that the evil government is going to come steal all their money when they die with a “death tax”, when in fact, the estate tax only affects 0.2% of Americans, the richest of the rich (and, with all their tax loop-holes, only the dumbest or laziest of the rich pay this tax, anyway).

Elon Musk increased his worth by $38 billion in just one day on October 26, 2121. (And he paid $0 in federal income taxes in 2018.) This is an utter obscenity, when it comes to a mismatch in power. It would seriously take the average worker more than 800,000 years to make that much. Now Musk is scaring the poor by saying that if he has to pay more in taxes, they will too... eventually. Notice the massive psychological transference at work here, where the worries of the super-rich are always being transferred unto the worries of the poor by manipulation, good ol’ fear-mongering, and false, slippery-slope arguments (remember when the Right said that if we let gays marry each other, sooner or later, we’ll have to let people marry their dogs or brooms? Didn’t happen either, the idiots!) I think there’s also some kind of bizarre beliefs at play by the poor plebes who keep falling for scams such as the prosperity gospel, where being a billionaire like Bezos is always just one donation or prayer away! And the oligarch’s cultural power relies on a hypnotizing fairytale (perpetuated by the “aspirational marketing” perfected by Edward Bernays 100 years ago): capitalism persuades us that we are all temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

Even Adam Smith, the father-philosopher of modern capitalism, warned against sympathizing with the rich and the powerful. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he wrote that “we imagine the happiness the rich enjoy, and share in that imagined happiness so strongly that we come to believe they deserve it. We grieve for every injury that is done them,” although we feel “indifference for the misery” of the poor: “Thinking about their lives gives us no vicarious happiness.” But the rich and powerful, Smith argued, are neither happier nor morally superior to other people. They are often miserable and vicious. And they use our illusions about them to justify their privileges. Elites benefit from inequalities of wealth and power in our society because the basic structure of our emotional life, sympathy, leads us to identify with our oppressors. Smith invited readers to contemplate a “poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition.” Such a person sympathizes with the rich and powerful, working hard to become like them. He sacrifices “the real happiness of life,” which consists of “ease of body and peace of mind.” He makes himself miserable trying to imitate the rich, who are not happy themselves.

Musk whines about how much tax he already pays, but in fact, the opposite is true: the poor and middle-class already pay a far greater % of their income and wealth in sales taxes, property taxes, and income taxes than Musk does. And unlike Musk – who arrogantly thinks he, as a member of the elite billionaire super-club, gets to decide for himself how his tax money is spent – regular people who pay taxes on their wages don’t have the luxury of not being able to pay their taxes just because they are skeptical of how the government spends their money. And if Musk and his 749 friends won’t pay their fair share, then the rest of us much poorer slobs will have to pay more to make up the difference. It is often billionaire messes – like the 2008 recession or Bezos’s treatment of warehouse workers or the unmet social needs of minimum wage workers in Walmart – that the government is seeking to fix with their tax dollars. Our tax system is built upon ability to pay, and those with the greatest ability to pay – the billionaires – structure their affairs so that they pay the least. The working poor and the middle class should be tired of paying taxes for them. This is why I think almost all the billionaires in this country are sociopaths: they only care about themselves, and they’ll lie, steal, and cheat to hang on their obscene wealth, even if the rest of the country suffers. (You have to be kind of sick in the head to be so obsessed with money that every waking moment of your life is taken up with making more money for yourself than the GPD of a lot of countries.) But these fuckers don’t have a lick of empathy or compassion for anyone but themselves and other members of their elite billionaire class.

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. ~ Justice Louis Brandeis

The difficult truth is that, to prevent the undemocratic accumulation of power by the oligarchs, as well as to prevent some of the climate and ecological damage caused by the extravagant, jet- and rocket-setting lifestyle of the uber- wealthy, we need to level down. We need to pursue what the Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns calls “limitarianism.” Just as there is a poverty line below which no one should fall, there is a wealth line above which no one should rise. What we need are not just carbon taxes, but wealth taxes.

But I don’t know why I keep dreaming. There’s no way either party is ever going to touch the wealth of the oligarchs, who have bribed the politicians of both parties. Joe Manchin killed the billionaire tax, despite the fact that there aren’t any billionaires in West Virginia. Manchin doesn’t represent his constituents. He defends the wealthy and corporations. Biden's infrastructure bill actually contains a tax cut for the wealthiest – the 2nd most expensive item in the whole bill! Even legislation for our roads and bridges have to be a giveaway to the rich. So if Republicans cut taxes on the wealthy, and Democrats cut taxes on the wealthy and keep T****'s tax cuts the way Obama kept Bush's tax cuts, our entire government works for the wealthiest, not for the average American. The sick thing is that Democrats will ACT like they want to tax billionaires in order to get elected, since taxing the rich is extremely popular. Once they get elected, there's very little difference between the two parties. Which is why the wealthy keep getting wealthier no matter who is president while the social needs of the poor and the struggling continue to go unmet. It’s just so morally obscene.

17 While it’s painfully obvious that the framers of our Constitution hated democracy, the fact that we fought a bloody Civil War to give black people citizenship and we’ve extended the vote to all citizens in this country over 18 – regardless of race, gender, or wealth – means that democracy is now a bedrock of our society: one that no longer shares the views and values of the framers 234 years ago. This is why I think our Constitution is so outdated and needs to be seriously updated or replaced. BTW: “We’re a Republic, not a Democracy” was a slogan first popularized by the John Birch Society in the 1950’s and ‘60’s to justify denying black folks the right to vote. It’s now been mainstreamed within the Republican Party whenever they want to justify or explain away the undemocratic features of our current government. (Look it up, bookworm.) Obviously, they are not mutually exclusive; the mechanics of a republic are supposed to work within the framework of a democracy. This slogan is like saying, “I have a golden retriever, not a dog.”

But, let’s look at all the undemocratic parts of the federal republic system of government we’re stuck with. We have:

1/ the undemocratic Senate. Today’s 50 Democratic senators represents 41,549,808 more people than the 50 Republican ones. State lines were arbitrarily drawn up throughout the first half of the 1800’s to give pro-slave or anti-slave forces more power in the Senate (depending on who was drawing the state lines). Especially today with how frequently people move around, state lines don’t represent any kind of real collection of popular sentiment or autonomy. The Senate may have been designed to “cool” our politics, but it’s become the icebox of democracy, where good laws go to die. The Senate is a huge, undemocratic beast (especially if the filibuster is retained) that I think should be abolished all-together. Either that, or let’s redraw all the state lines to reflect demographic changes since the 1800’s!

2/ the undemocratic House. Due to the influence party apparatchiks have in re-districting and the freedom that SCOTUS has given them to gerrymander, the House of Representatives is not representative. For example, in 2017, in Red States, Republicans garnered 56% of the vote but 74.6% of representation. In Blue States, Democrats won 60.3% of the vote but 69.1% of representation. A pox on both their houses! But you can see how much more successful the Republicans have been at gerrymandering than the Democrats. Having a greater disdain for democracy and a greater penchant for shamelessness will aways garner you more power! And it’s only going to get worse; see note 27. If we had a Constitutional amendment abolishing gerrymandering and a bipartisan system for drawing district lines fairly, we could fix this problem.

3/ the Senate’s undemocratic filibuster. With the filibuster, we have 20% of the voting populace able to hold up the wishes of 80% of the populace. Now the filibuster is used routinely by the minority party to stymie every bit of Senate business, no matter how mundane. Plus, there’s its racist history: the filibuster was used extensively by Southern white- supremist Senators in the 19th and early 20th centuries to block anti-lynching legislation and keep Jim Crow laws on the books (as part of what historians call the “Restoration” and what I call the First American Counter-Reformation. BTW, do you know what justification Southern states used for Jim Crow laws in the 1800s? Fighting “voter fraud,” of course!)

It’s curious how the filibuster was only used sparingly for the years between 1877 and 1965. In fact, the lack of extreme polarization and the willingness of both parties to adhere to democratic norms that seems to have existed between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 up until the 1970’s was predicated on uncontested white power and privilege that existed in all US states. During this period, any democratic threat to that white power and privilege was all but removed in the South by Jim Crow laws; Northerners held onto their white power and privilege by resisting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (whose people were not considered at the time to be really “white”). But then the use of the filibuster began to rise exponentially in the ‘70’s – not coincidentally the exact same time that black people regained their right to vote after the ‘65 Voting Rights Act.

Interesting! As soon as Jim Crows laws fell and blacks regained some of their political and civic power in the ‘60s, new roadblocks to democracy – like the filibuster and new forms of voter suppression – had to be reinvigorated or invented. As soon as blacks regained the right to vote (spearheaded by Johnson and the Democrats), you had Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and the massive movement of racist Southern whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party, using all the classic racist dog-whistles like “law and order,” and “lazy moochers.” And you had the start of the “The Great Unraveling” of democratic norms we’re still experiencing today. The Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s reached its ultimate goal in 2008 when we finally elected a moderate, sane, scandal-free, pro-corporate black guy like Obama, and anxious, white racists in this country clutched their pearls and started a hysterical Second Counter-Reformation (“Obama is a secret Kenyan anti-colonialist Muslim communist who wants to destroy America and take yer guns!”), launched the astroturf-driven Tea Party, and rushed out to support an extreme racist like T**** eight years later to undo everything Obama had accomplished. (The exact same thing happened – in a more concentrated and blatant form – during the First Counter-Reformation of the late 1800’s, when, after passing Jim Crow laws, newly empowered and elected white- supremist Southerners rewrote all the state constitutions and erased all the laws that had been written by elected black legislators during Reconstruction.) I’ve barely touched on race, but it so clearly plays a fundamental role in how power and politics gets played out in this country. But I digress.

On the one hand, if they were serious about passing their agenda (which it’s clear to me they’re not: see note 26), the Democrats would abolish or modify the filibuster, this archaic relic of our racist past. Absolutely nothing could be more important right now than abolishing the filibuster to pass voting rights bills that would re-establish people’s access to voting that Republican’s have stripped away all across the New Confederacy... I mean, the Red States. Republicans in the Senate are currently using the filibuster to block even the discussion of the most watered-down of these voting rights bills. Republicans, who voted overwhelmingly for the Voting Rights Act of ‘65 and each time for its re-authorization as late as 2006, now say the federal government has no say in the way their Red States handle elections, ignoring the text of the 14th and 15th Amendments.

In fact, today’s Republicans are standing on the same ground that Civil War-era Democrats (then known as “the white man’s party”) did, the Confederates did, as well as their successors did throughout the Jim Crow Era all the way up till the 1960’s: they insisted that only states can decide how the people within those states live and who gets to vote. After that idea led to the Civil War, Republicans (back then, the liberal party that cared about the rights of minorities) overturned it with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which give the federal government the power to protect equality within the states.

Since WW2, the federal government has taken that charge seriously, protecting minority voting in the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and, most thoroughly, in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since the passage of that measure, Congress repeatedly reauthorized it by large, bipartisan majorities, most recently in 2006, when the Senate voted unanimously in favor of it. But then in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted that law, and now, only eight years later, Republican senators claim federal protection of voting rights is an assault on “states’ rights.” But I digress again.

On the other hand, the Dems know if they break another of what’s seen as a democratic “norm” by eliminating the filibuster, the Republicans will have permission to break even more norms once they get back in power in a vicious cycle of tit for tat, until there are no more norms left, and we’re stuck either living in a one-party autocracy or fighting another civil war. So far, I would say its the Republicans who have the much bigger balls when it comes to breaking democratic norms. How far the Democrats are willing to stand up for the principles and institutions of democracy, or how far they willing to follow the Republican lead in this game of democratic decay, only time will tell.

4/ the undemocratic Electoral College. The Electoral College was implemented by the framers to protect the interests and power of slave-owners in Southern states. And the Electoral College has TWICE in 16 years thrown the election to candidates who lost the popular vote. This used to be a rare, once-a-century event. Now it’s happening about once a decade or so. Are the majority of Americans who are continuously having their democratic choice rejected by this archaic institution supposed to just sit back and accept it? Worst yet, Republicans and their Eastman memo have shown the inherent flaws in the Electoral College: with enough members in the House and an unscrupulous, anti-Constitutional VP, the electors sent by the states could simply be disputed by the VP, sending the selection of the president to the House. The results of both the electoral college and the will of the people could be easily overturned. (Apparently, Pence, under intense pressure from his neo-fascist boss, was considering following the Eastman memo and disputing the electors in 2020. It may have been the advise from Dan Quayle, who correctly surmised the VP does not have the power to dispute electors, stopped Pence from following this path.)

Obviously, the solution here is to abolish the entire Electoral College. And Republicans could easily compete (and even win) in presidential elections without needing the Electoral College if they’d run centrist candidates with popular, centrist policies, like they used to with Eisenhower, Nixon, Dole, and HW Bush. (Even a popular right-winger like Reagan was moderate enough to raise taxes when necessary. Reagan would be considered a RINO by today’s Republican standards.) But unfortunately, the party has drifted further and further rightward each year because their elected officials, sitting in safe seats, don’t have to worry about losing in a general election; Republicans only have to worry about being primaried by someone who’s further right than them, usually by some delusional, fire-breathing MAGA-ite, like MTG, Lauren Boebert, or Roy Moore. So the only way to stay in office in Red States is by always steering more and more to the right. (Of course, there’s another requirement now to avoid getting primaried or getting the RINO-label: you must swear complete loyalty and fealty to T****. In fact, Republicans have drifted so far to the right in the last five years they’ve become a neo-fascist party. See note 27.) Thus, the current sorry and extremist state the Party is in now and why they’re unelectable on a national scale without relying on the Electoral College. Since 1992, the Republicans have only won the popular vote in a presidential race in ONE election (2004). Pathetic!

5/ now, an undemocratic Supreme Court. Five Supreme Court justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. And now a bunch of rich, straight, white (mostly) men, appointed by these same presidents who lost the popular vote, are going to decide what rights the poor, gay and trans people, women, and blacks enjoy in this country.

Roe v. Wade was part of the dramatic expansion of civil rights after World War II, in which Republican-led Supreme Courts used the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment to enable the federal government to overrule discriminatory state laws and protect individuals’ civil rights. It was on these grounds that the court protected the rights of black people, interracial marriage, access to birth control, religious freedom, gay rights, and so on. Those who objected to such expanded equality insisted the court was indulging in “judicial activism” by overruling the state laws that preserved the power of white men. They worked to stack the court with “originalists” who would defer to the states. Now, finally, thanks to T****’s three SCOTUS picks, the era of using the federal government to protect equality appears to be under deadly threat, although the laws that protect civil rights are popular: 58% of Americans want Roe v. Wade to stay in place, for example, while only 32% want it overturned. Make no mistake: it is not just reproductive rights that are under siege. If the Supreme Court returns power to the states to legislate as they wish, any right currently protected by the federal government is at risk.

The Dems could try to pack the court to try to balance out its current undemocratic corruption, but this would then unleash the hell-hounds of Republican revenge, who’d just break even more democratic norms. There are so many decent, less extreme ideas on how we could improve this undemocratic, decrepit, and increasing unpopular and disdained institution, such as 20-year term limits, regularly rotated judgeships on a fixed schedule, and nominating judges by bi- partisan commissions. There are plenty of other good ideas from other democracies on how to make nominating Supreme Court judges less an existential crisis each time and more routine and democratic. But I doubt there’ll ever be any sincere, bi-partisan attempts to reform SCOTUS, especially now that it’s been packed 6-3 with pro-corporate hacks who are hell-bent on disabling the government from functioning or from regulating a single part of our economy.

18 Almost every other democracy in the world has implemented a parliamentary system, which allows for the development of multiple (ie, more than two) parties – instead of this Presidential system we have here in America, which always devolves into a competing duopoly of “big-tent” parties. Multiple parties in parliamentary system mean people have more real choices in finding a party that represents their particular ideals and policies. Multiple parties also means that each party is inherently weaker and transitory, and thus harder to buy-off by the oligarchs. Having only two parties in our American Presidential system means that each party is huge – with amorphous, ill-defined, and even contradictory policy positions – and are extremely stable and powerful.

It’s no accident we’ve been stuck with this crappy Presidential system for centuries. It means that buying off each of the two resulting powerful political parties by the oligarchs is so much simpler and more effective. Having only two stable parties means it’s much easier for the oligarchs to play each party against the other in an endless game of bait-and-switch. (See notes 24 and 26). A Presidential system means it’s child’s play to get divided government; this “vetoacracy,” where too many actors have veto rights, produces inevitable grid-lock, which means there’s little chance any legislation will ever get passed that affects the oligarchs. It also means that one person, the president, now has unimaginable and unaccountable (see note 19) amounts of power to affect not just Americans but the entire world. It also means that we are subjected now to nearly four-year-long campaign seasons for the presidency, costing over $14 billion in bribes... I mean, campaign contributions in 2020 alone. I think this system is a fucking joke compared to the much simpler, more limited, and much more indirect way of selecting a Prime Minister in a Parliamentary system. And when shit can’t get done in parliamentary system, it’s generally not a problem to get the ruling party to announce new elections, which happen irregularly and not on some fixed two- or four-year schedule. And at least the unified government of a Parliamentary system means that SHIT GETS DONE, for better or for worse.

19  The Framers intended Congress to be a check on Presidential power. But with a weak and fearful Congress ceding more and more its Constitutional powers – like its power to declare war – to the Presidency since WW2, with presidents signing more and more executive orders as a result of Congress’s dysfunction and paralysis, and with a divided Congress who now will never remove any president – no matter how egregious his crimes, no matter how unfit for office he proves himself to be – as well as how Congress’s subpoenas are now regularly ignored by certain authoritarian presidents – thwarting Congress’s ability to investigate and check the president’s power – the president has become a de facto, untouchable emperor. This is great for ruling America’s sprawling global empire, but not so great for America’s democracy. And with Republican-Party gate-keeping having all but dissipated in the last few decades, we’ve had to endure the results: four years of a tyrannical, narcissistic, criminal, delusional psychopath who had his finger on the nuclear button and who never ceased breaking down this country’s democratic institutions and norms. And he’s still threatening the world with a re-run! (God help us all.) “I alone can fix it,” says this would-be dictator, a direct attack on democracy and self-government.

20  The paralysis of our current system was intentionally designed to protect the property-based rights, wealth, and power of America’s rich oligarchs (see note 18): at first it was to protect the “property rights” of slave-owners, and now it’s to protect the special rights of billionaires and unelected corporations not to be taxed or regulated.

The right of the oligarchs not to be regulated now includes their speech: since SCOTUS has now declared that money = speech, that means that any money the oligarchs spend on politics is now protected “speech.” And because speech = power to persuade in a democracy, the oligarchs now have so much more power than your average, poorer American. In fact, the rich now have unlimited power to buy all the ads, PACs, lobbyists, and politicians they want to, since SCOTUS has proclaimed that all this bribery of both political parties is simply their “free speech” rights. This is one more example of how all the laws in this country are designed for the interests, power, and privileges of the oligarchs.

21  To fix the undemocratic problems of our current system, at the very least we’ll need constitutional amendments to ban paid lobbyists, dark money, and PACs, to declare that money is NOT the same as speech and that corporations are NOT the same as people, a ban on gerrymandering, a requirement that anyone running for high office release their tax records, a complete ban on owning stocks while in office, and stipulations that protect the right to vote nationally, including making voting day a national holiday.

22  In the Civil War, around 260,000 people from the Ol’ Red States (ie, the Confederacy) died just to protect the right of 6% of the white population (ie, Southern oligarchs) to own slaves and to make sure no “degenerate darkies” in the South could ever vote, gain power over anxious whites, and start “amalgamating the races.” If there were a second Civil War, what would the gullible and blinkered MAGA-ites be willing to die for this time? The right of billionaires to never pay a penny in taxes? The right to infect others and die in a pandemic? The right to go broke if you get sick? The right to be treated as disposable by the corporations? The right to burn all the oil and turn our atmosphere into an oven? It is all so ineffably sad to me. I’ll be so glad when I don’t have to read or think about their shit anymore.

23  These differences go all the way back to the fights between Jefferson and Hamilton and their competing visions of governance, and especially since the Civil War: do we want a limited government and accept a rule by a supposedly wise and benevolent aristocratic class (today’s oligarchs). That certainly was the thinking of antebellum Southern aristocratic slave owners, who were convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, who were opposed to the idea that “all men are created equal” and were even willing to destroy this country and fight a bloody Civil War in which 700,000 men died in order to protect enslavement above all.

Or are we going to follow the path of leaders like Abraham Lincoln, who was dedicated to idea that “all men are created equal” and its radical implications? At the time, those implications included the willingness for hundreds of thousands of men to lay down their lives defending this proposition. It also includes having a government that plays a legitimate role in helping the poor do that which they can’t do for themselves (as Lincoln saw it) and in ameliorating the economic inequalities that arise in a capitalistic system by leveling the playing field and providing a democratic, balancing node of power (as FDR saw it) to capitalism’s undemocratic, oligarchic powers? Clearly, I’m with the latter. Which side are you on?

24 Today’s polarization is the deepening divide between the Left (who predominate in Blue States) – comprised of college- educated city dwellers that are increasingly secular and multiethnic and with diverse values and outlooks – and the Right (who predominate in the Red States) – comprised mostly of the high-school-educated rural working class and heavily Southern and heavily Christianist suburbanites. (I use the word “Christianist” to mean someone who claims to be a follower of Christ and His teachings but who actively engages in acts and deeds that are obviously contrary to Christ’s teachings.) Some of this division is historical (see note 23), and some of it is intentional, like Nixons’ Southern Strategy (see note 17 part 3). But who or what is driving today’s polarization, and who benefits from it?

In fact, polarization and division is an integral part of today’s dysfunctional political system in America (see note 26). It solves the number one problem of the oligarchs: how do you convince a majority of Americans, who are poorer and obviously not part of the oligarchy, to vote against their own self-interests and vote for the interests of the oligarchs? First you need to hide the bait-and-switch somehow and to indoctrinate the plebes into thinking they are getting something beneficial out of the current system. Nationalistic symbols (like flags and patriotic songs) and a compliant media and education system willing to peddle that nationalism usually do the tricks. Bamboozle people from childhood with words like “liberty” or “freedom,” hiding the fact that this “freedom” historically meant the freedom of the oligarchs to own other human beings, and now means freedom for the oligarchs to continue raping this planet while using their obscene wealth and power to bribe and control our government. If “socialism” is the negative scare word of the oligarchs (see note 12), then “liberty” has to be the alternative; it’s intended to manipulate people through their emotions by producing a positive kind of Pavlovian response. In fact, the empty-signifier “liberty” has all kinds of disparate meanings. For decades it’s been associated with Christianist-nationalism (think how many churches in Alabama are called “Liberty Baptist Church”) where “liberty” means the freedom to impose their religious values on women, gays, minorities, and the rest of the country. For those into white-nationalism, “liberty” means the freedom to rule over or wall yourselves off from non-whites. For the NASCAR race-car crowd, “liberty” means the freedom to pave over the landscape and drive massive, gas-guzzling, smoke-belching trucks. For the polite suburbanites, “liberty” means the freedom to get tax breaks for their massive McMansions and to keep all 30,0000 square feet of space heated and cooled year-round while they fill up their oversized homes with McShit from Amazon. For the dystopian techno-libertarians, their “liberty” is conceived as having exorbitant wealth and power that remains untouchable by the “losers, leeches, and other non-achievers” running a democratic government.

“Freedom” is the foundational myth of America: the detached individual roaming freely across the empty landscape, unencumbered by any social obligations. What I believe this notion of freedom gets wrong is the fact that, as social animals, we can only survive and thrive as part of a social group, nor can we be truly free without the safety that society provides you. People think they can be free without anyone telling them what to do, without the obligations of group membership. In fact, humans have never lived like that, and freedom without social obligations is just infantile. Only children owe nothing. But an infantile world-view is what neoliberals like Reagan and Thatcher bequeathed conservatives; they attacked both society and the government that administers it and foolishly asserted that individuals and their families, cast adrift in the amoral torrent of the “free market,” could solve all their problems by themselves. (Both society and government have been further eroded by the libertarian Internet and social media. See note 13.) But I believe the conservative conception of freedom ignores the fact that you aren’t free if you are poor and lack any agency to make choices for yourself. You’re not free if you get sick with no health insurance and can’t afford to see a doctor. You’re not free if you can’t take off work to take care of a sick child or parent. You’re not free if you are living in fear of becoming homeless or can’t afford the car you need to get to work, etc. This is why we have social obligations to each other for certain material and social needs. I’m sure conservatives agree with that notion, but their circle of compassion and obligation seems to only extend to their family and, maybe in an emergency, to their tribe. I don’t know how we convince conservatives to expand that circle of concern and compassion to include their American neighbors that don’t look or think like themselves, much less the Earth and its other inhabitants.

Anyway, the oligarchs have always relied on emotional and Manichean arguments to divide and manipulate people. These arguments feed off the Christian belief in a supernatural but worldly fight between the forces of good and the forces of evil, which, ever since the start of the Cold War, has been transposed in America politics into a fight-to-the- death struggle between the forces of the good and virtuous capitalism-loving Christianists against the forces of godless communism and tyranny. A few other prime examples: “We, the freedom-loving individuals vs. they, the scary, collectivist government, which is always evil and bad, even democratic ones, and is coming to take yer freedoms.” Then there’s this one: “We, the rugged individualists vs. they, the lovers of scary socialism, which is always evil and bad, even the democratic kind, and is coming to destroy this country!” (See note 12.)

These Manichean arguments resonate most deeply within the Republican Right, whose rigid ideology (if it indeed still has an ideology besides more tax cuts for rich people) is maintained by the party’s homogeneous ethnic and religious make-up (90% white and Christian). Feeling their “freedom of conscious” is being attack by society’s changing values and mores and the laws that reflect them, many of these evangelical Christians homeschool their kids to insulate them from the “evils of secularism.” They also insulate them from any knowledge of science (many believe the world is only 6,000 years old, and evolution is a lie from the devil), as well as indoctrinate their kids in Christianist-nationalism, the idea that this country is to rightly run by and for (white) evangelicals. Already we have an entire enclave of millions of Americans who think of themselves and their government in radically different ways than their secular neighbors, who grew up in public schools with diverse student bodies, who believe in science, who believe in a separation of Church and State, and who don’t see themselves involved in any apocalyptic struggle with the forces of Satan.

Then in 1987, Reagan vetoed the reauthorization of the Fairness Doctrine. Since then, an entire right-wing, epistemologically enclosed, alternative-universe media-sphere (such as Fox News, OAN, One America, and conservative talk radio), the bedrock of the right-wing “fantasy industrial-complex,” has been created by and for the interests of the super-wealthy. This media-sphere continues the work of the oligarchs to divide Americans into an “us” vs. “them” struggle: where hatred of “them” (anyone different from the white, Christianist Republican rump) are painted as diabolical or existential threats by lying haters like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones; where the crazy ideas and conspiracy theories of the John Birch society became mainstreamed within Republican discourse; where the stenographers of the oligarchs repeat their pro-corporate talking points; where inconvenient scientific facts (like human- caused global warming) that threaten the oligarchs’ power or world-view are dismissed as part of a “vast, left-wing conspiracy to undermine capitalism;” where lies (like Biden stole the election) are pushed as “truths” that now threaten Americans’ fundamental faith in democracy; and where racial fear and resentment is continuously stoked by its race- baiting, white-nationalist attack-dogs, like Tucker Carlson. These divisive voices of fear, hatred, and intolerance are amplified by the new social media (the work of unaccountable billionaires whose only concern is profits), which creates a self-reinforcing echo chamber of lies, misinformation, and anti-factual and anti-science conspiracy theories.

Who’s paying for the right-wing think tanks and PACs which provide all the talking points for the right-wing propaganda outlets? Big money and the oligarchs, or course, who want to continue getting their tax breaks and deregulation, which will keep their wealth and power intact. You’d think that the breakdown of shared values and a shared vision for America that has led to all the recent political chaos and violence would eventually concern the oligarchs, as the breakdown of rule of law and the chaos caused by these political nihilists will eventually affect the oligarch’s bottom line. Apparently not. For example, efforts to overturn the election, the January 6 organizers, and even white supremacist groups all have one thing in common: they have received anonymous funding funneled through a single conservative dark-money behemoth called Donor's Trust, a conservative, Koch-aligned nonprofit which does not need to reveal the names of its donors and has been called the “dark money ATM of the right.” This information, disclosed in IRS documents, shows the group channeled major support for entities which fought to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory and organized the January 6 rallies in Washington, D.C. Donors Trust also gave more than $2 million to groups linked to white supremacists, including the VDARE Foundation – which regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists, and anti-Semites – as well as Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), which received $1.3 million from Donors Trust in 2020 and has been affiliated with white nationalists and the neo-Nazi organization Identity Evropa (more on white supremacists later). At the same time, the fund shipped millions of dollars to right-wing organizations pushing unfounded fears about CRT (see below). Just follow the money!

We also know that Russia has used every major social media platform to try to influence US elections and inflame polarization in general. A US Senate report in 2018 exposed the scale of Russian disinformation efforts by showing how YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and PayPal – as well as Facebook and Twitter – were leveraged to spread propaganda. The report says Russia had a particular focus on targeting conservatives by creating fake accounts with posts on immigration, race, and gun rights. There were also efforts to undermine the voting power of left-leaning African-American citizens by spreading misinformation about the electoral process. An investigation by Jordan Liles of Snopes.com shows that foreign social media accounts are still magnifying right-wing voices. In the wake of the Rittenhouse acquittal, for example, foreign accounts posing as Americans appeared to celebrate the jury’s decision.

Back here in America, the oligarch’s tools at Fox News have to make sure the plebes are kept in an agitated state of constant fear (and therefore easily manipulated) by conjuring up non-existent boogie men, like BLM or antifa (which are not organizations but merely Twitter hashtags) or the current right-wing bête noire, CRT: an academic theory that has been taught in some law schools for some 50 years without anyone ever noticing or caring. It’s currently taught in a grand total of ZERO primary and secondary schools. Typical of right-wing astroturfing and their propaganda outlets: they find a data void and fill it with fabricated fear. In fact, the only people talking about CRT are dip-shits who never heard of CRT until five minutes before they went on TV to talk about it. It’s no coincidence that Fox News never mentioned CRT until the Republicans lost control in Washington in late 2020. It’s a very convenient way to keep the base motivated and their wallets open. (It’s also a great book-selling opportunity in the right-wing media-sphere.) Fear over CRT serves the same purpose as gay rights did in the ‘80’s - ‘00’s and busing, “law and order,” or the Drug War did in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. Emotional, fact-free culture war issues are always better at manipulating people than talking about economic issues, where blatant, pro-oligarch Republican policies just don’t move the poor masses as well.

So the grifters at Fox News start screaming: “OH MER GERD! Libruls have a secret plan to destroy our country with CRT! BE AFRAID!!!!” Red States respond by passing new laws. (Very similar to the way T**** would watch Fox News all day in the White House, then tweet new policies in response to what he saw on TV.) Here’s a perfect storm that combines white fragility (the discomfort and defensiveness of some whites when reminded of all the social privileges of being white in today’s society and how those privileges came about), white social anxiety (the fear that the privileges of being the white majority are diminishing in today’s changing demographics), and moral panic: white snowflakes are freaking out about a manufactured crises involving a theory only used in a few university classes, all based on an irrational fear that somehow white kids might feel “uncomfortable” in school if we ever discuss the history of racism and its continuing effects in our society.

Now that Republicans have, in lock-step, outlawed an ill-defined, amorphous thing they call “CRT” in Red States, teachers and book publishers there are scared to even bring up race in America (since anything they say about America’s racist past and how it still affects people today could be included in the catch-all label “CRT,” thus making them criminally liable). The Party that proclaims to love free speech now uses the law to suppress teachers’ free speech and ideas. (BTW, attacks on teachers are standard fodder for authoritarian attacks. They were standard for Pol Pot, Mussolini, and Stalin as they consolidated their power.) The Party that hates “cancel culture” now uses the law to cancel history class. The Party that shouts “don’t tread on me” now uses the law to stop any criticism of Big Brother and Big Money (which both tread on the poor). The Party that tells blacks to just “get over” 400 years of slavery and racism is also the party that gets out the smelling salts for poor, delicate, put-upon whites.

Of course, the backlash of these delicate, fragile whites against any discussion of their privilege and power in this country is totally predictable and has happened numerous times in this country: from the bloodletting of the Civil War itself to the rejection of Reconstruction to the imposition of Jim Crow laws and the thousands of black people killed by lynching to the deadly fights in the 20th century against the civil rights movement to the killing in the South of civil rights leaders to the assassination of Martin Luther King to the mass migration of Southern racist “Dixiecrats” to the Republican party after the Dems pushed through civil and voting rights for blacks to the fights against integration to the election of a racist like T**** and his determination to undo any accomplishment of Obama and now to the current labeling of any discussion of racism in this country as being “anti-white” and the belief that white people in this country are the real “victims of racism.” These last two items are the fulfillment of the white-supremacist “Mantra” (just Google it) and the “white replacement” theories of racist white-nationalists like Tucker Carlson. White-supremist ideology lives on in the “zero-sum myth,” the ideas that progress for people of color necessarily comes at white folks’ expense. It fear- mongers about the future: if white people are not worshipped in schools, then they will be demonized. If white people don’t reign supreme, then they will be subjugated. If white people don’t hoard resources and opportunity, then they will be starved. If white people cannot kill at will, then they will be killed at will. White violence is presumed to be self- defense. Defending yourself against a white supremacist is presumed to be a criminal act.

In fact, race has always been the number one tool the oligarchs have used to divide and manipulate the hoi polloi over the centuries. Once poor folks are divided by race, they can be easily played against each other in a classic divide-and- conquer tactic. And the more you remind white folks of all the ways they are different or privileged in this society, the more they experience “loss aversion” and the less they are willing to risk any changes that might threaten their privilege. As Lee Atwater admitted, the oligarchs used to use blatant racism like, “Those lazy n*****s want to take yer money and rape yer daughters! That’s why we can’t let ‘em vote or let ‘em live next to us!” (some of the actual arguments used by white-supremist Southerners to justify ending Reconstruction and replacing it with Jim Crow laws.) Then it changed to racist dog whistles like “welfare queens and moochers”, “states’ rights”, and Willie Horton ads. Now the racism has to be abstracted to “let’s cut government spending on social programs.”

But there are many other tricks the oligarchs have used over the decades to keep people divided, like the purely emotional appeals of issues such as guns, abortion, and gay rights. Since many of those old tricks have lost some of their power to manipulate, they’ve had to make up new ways of dividing and manipulating people, such as the fear of manufactured “crises” at the border, of invasions of dirty Mexican rapists in caravans (those dark-skinned invaders always conveniently appear at the border right before every election, strangely enough) and Muslim terrorists sneakin’ in to kill you, to fears of transexuals using the same bathroom as you. Notice the one thing motivating the right-wing mind: it’s always FEAR! Fear of the Other coming to infect you and take away your God-given lifestyle. And that “lifestyle” is always one where, conveniently, the oligarchs stay in charge, and the poor and the minorities don’t get uppity or question their place in the social hierarchy.

So what is CRT? CRT doesn’t ask, “Why is Karen racist?” It asks, “Why does the data show that Karen and the people who look like her experience the legal system (and by extension, other systems like financial and education) differently than their non-white peers?” For example, we know that blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rate. So why does the data show that blacks are five- to seven-times more likely to be incarcerated for drug use than whites? CRT offers no solutions to the racial disparities apparent in the criminal justice, employment, or education systems; it’s only a sociological lens through which to see the problems. CRT is using the tools of sociology to reveal the normally invisible means by which social systems shape the way we see and operate in the world.

In the real world of offering solutions to these problems, answers will vary: people on the Left would argue that the disparities in outcomes are evidence of “systemic racism:” laws are written – whether intentionally or not by individual lawmakers – in such a way that produce racially distinct outcomes and that typically discriminate against minority groups. For example, drugs used by poorer blacks, like crack cocaine, have penalties that are many times harsher than for drugs used by richer whites, like powder cocaine. These differences will result in blacks being jailed at much higher rates or for longer periods than whites. So the Left would argue that systemic racism should be addressed by changing the rules of that social system to make them fairer. Again, nobody is being accused individually of being a racist. People on the Right would argue it’s all down to individual differences: some people are just naturally better at functioning inside that system and that other individuals just haven’t made the right choices in life or just don’t have the right natural characteristics to function within that system. And that we should just accept the different outcomes as the result of differences in human nature and just let the system remain as it is. (Some on the Right will argue that those differences are caused by genetic differences between black and whites, without understanding the nature or distribution of genes within groups, how environment shapes behavior, the unscientific and socially constructed definition of “race,” or their inability to understand bell curves.) If poor blacks have made bad decisions to use crack cocaine, they should just accept the consequences. I don’t buy those conservative arguments; even if you control for similar IQ, education, and income levels, blacks STILL have different outcomes than whites. So I fall somewhere in middle and think there are many ways we can make our current legal, financial, and education systems fairer and more equitable, but I don’t ever believe that the systems can be totally abolished or ever made perfect by imperfect people.

I do understand how the words “Critical Theory” ring alarm bells in the minds of the Right. Critical Theory (CT) was developed by Max Horkheimer and other political scientists (who called themselves Marxists) in the Frankfurt School. In my mind, this does not make the tools they developed wrong. In fact, I think these tools have been proven to be very useful and insightful. However, being a threat to the established order, the Right would much prefer to suppress or ignore the tools of Critical Theory and their revelations on social structures. So they are automatically dismissed by the Right with a catch-all smear-word like “Marxism;” to the Right, anything associated with Marx is just pure evil that must be rejected wholesale. People on the Right even hysterically claim the Frankfurt School is a threat to Western values. I guess in the right-wing mind, God came down from the heavens and created the social and economic hierarchies we see today. And so any attack on those hierarchies is an attack on God Himself and his ordained world order? Or maybe it’s because many forms of post-modernist theory (and CT is incorrectly associated with post-modernism) seek to “deconstruct” truth and its socially constructed signifiers (with God as the ultimate signifier of truth in the Western world). Therefore, without God, all we have left is hedonistic nihilism? (More on this thread later.)

BTW, since he’s the newest and trendiest prophet of right-wing ideology, I’ve been trying to make my way through Jordon Peterson’s turgid prose and figure out his key message. His self-help philosophy – which I believe is a kind of fundamentalist but quasi-secularized civil religion that takes as its cornerstone the supremacy of the “individual” – boils down to this:

Civilized Western society is founded on the idea of the sovereign individual as a divine center of “Logos” and whose mission is, by individually transforming chaos into order in their life, to take on the responsibility of political leadership.

I see Peterson’s civil religion as a kind of mirror image of wokeism (more on that later), which also speaks of self- evident, bedrock axioms and unshakable pillars. Both wokeism and Peterson’s individualism deal with moralist dogmatism. Both make individualistic claims to authentic identity. Both breed fundamentalism and zealotry. Both are highly divisive, since I don’t see how you can take any of Peterson’s ideas seriously without first having a belief in God, the creator of the “Logos” that makes your center divine. Therefore, atheists and non-believers are not invited into Peterson’s civil religion, right from the start. It’s also extremely Manichean, seeing everyone on Peterson’s side as the defenders of “order” struggling against the evil forces of “chaos,” which I guess includes anyone to the left of him, anyone who does not submit themselves to the “we” of the self-righteous cult of the individual. (Note how the right-wing – firm believers in individualism and “the sovereign individual” – are always the most eager to conform to bourgeois, in- group values and expectations and how they express that individualism.) Peterson also seems to assert repeatedly that Western society is the best and most superior in the world, a lack of modesty that is not only dishonest, it’s dangerous: people sporting similar ideas have been responsible for centuries of imperialism and colonialism. People who spout this kind of Western chauvinism should take their heads out of their ass and spend some time living in Taiwan or Japan, two very successful Eastern countries that seem to do some things as well if not better than the West. Lastly, I would posit that Peterson’s individualism encourages and justifies – intentionally or not – selfishness and greed, as well as making post-facto rationalizations of current social, political, and economic hierarchies.

But I see Peterson’s cult of the individual as the last intellectual hold-out that, for centuries, put Rational Man at the center of the universe. As other thinkers have pointed out, this notion has been destroyed (Freud said “insulted”) by the last few centuries of scientific discoveries. First, there was the Cosmological Insult: the Earth is not the center of the universe, but a tiny and insignificant speck of dust in a vast, impersonal universe. Second was the Biological Insult, where Darwin discovered humans are not the crown of creation, but just one of many species that arose via evolution through random mutations and natural section. Third was the Psychological Insult, where Freud showed that the Ego or rational self was not the center of our psychological being, but one small part of it, with our decisions being driven by our animal drives and passions (the Id) and the Subconscious, a huge, hidden, subsurface part of that mental being. (I would add another dimension to this Psychological Insult: neurobiology has demonstrated that our notions of Free Will are, in fact, an illusion.) Fourth was the Sociological Insult, where social sciences has showed us that society is not steered or controlled by rational individuals or human agency, nor are human individuals directly in control of society. Rather, human agency evolves and emerges through social forces, rather like how we evolved biologically through evolutionary mechanisms. The complex mechanisms of society and the media enables and shapes human agency, not the other way around. Many philosophers have pointed out that, in today’s politics, it’s not mature, rational individuals making informed decisions that drives politics and creates order out of chaos. Rather, it’s the triumph of spectacle and the hyper-reality of symbols and ideas, the socially constructed and performative nature of identity and the rise of profilicity (the curating of our online profiles that project our identity as individuals), and the conformity of emotional tribalism that shape our decisions. Peterson reacts to this last Insult by asserting on faith the primacy of individualism and by defending his idea that God-derived “Logos” grounds our identities, truth, and our ethical values.

I just don’t buy any of it. I think of society – as philosophers like Emile Durkheim and sociologists like Anthony Giddens have demonstrated – not as something shaped by sovereign individuals that “man up” and take control of our society, and definitely not as “chaos,” but as multiple social orders (like the media, education, law, politics, etc.) that co-exist and evolve and shape us and make our agency possible. And I think plenty of Western philosophers have demonstrated how truth and ethical values can be exerted and known without relying on the magical idea and rhetorical slight of hand of “God” to give it force. Start off with Christopher Hitchens and dig deeper by looking at philosophers like George Santayana, etc. And to me, there’s no value more Western than the empiricism of looking at data, asking questions about the data, asking questions about the nature of power, and applying our Western-Enlightenment ethical values and our reasoning skills to propose ways to improve the social structures of power in our society by making them more democratic and fairer. (I think veganism is another example of such exertions of Enlightenment ethical values and our moral reasoning skills. No God required.) But I realize now I’m going down a philosophical rat hole, and quite honestly, I’m too tired. So I’m just going to leave it at this.

But Peterson and his merry band of hierarchy-worshippers all hate Critical Theory, or anything derived from Marx’s ideas, because it attacks their power and privileges in this society by focusing on how our current social structures have been designed to favor them (for that matter, they all hate environmentalism for the same reasons). The oligarchs would much prefer to keep their influence invisible, hide their responsibility in today’s social and environmental problems, as well as stop any focus in politics on class struggle or the public good by shifting the focus onto the individual level. For example, the “Keep America Beautiful,” a marketing campaign begun in 1953 by packaging manufacturers, shifted the blame for the tsunami of plastic trash the manufacturers caused from them onto individual “litter bugs”, a term they invented. It’s just like the plastics industry – a product of “efficient” capitalism – that creates 380 million tons of plastic each year, the vast majority of it being unrecyclable, yet the attention is always on individual use of plastic bags and separating our garbage. That’s just like the fishing industry – another product of “efficient” capitalism – that has left 640,000 tons of fishing nets in the ocean and, at current catch rates, will leave an ocean devoid of usable fish stocks by 2050. Yet all the attention is not on stopping the fishing industry but on individual use of plastic straws. And just like how the oil companies cover up their role in climate change by shifting the attention from corporations to individuals (reduce your individual carbon footprint, kids!), the oligarchs want to deflect attention from how our entire legal and financial system is designed for their benefit by always shifting the conversation and focus to individual initiative, endeavor, or misfeasance.

BTW, I think “wokeism” – the mirror image of Peterson’s individualism – is becoming like a religion to many on the Left, where they’ve taken some of the sociological findings of CRT and other academic studies and turned it into a full- time job of pursuing and overturning all “power differentials” in society, which they see as all-pervasive and all- encompassing. And anyone who tries to stop them are seen as the “enemies” of racial justice. It’s therefore super- Manichean: you’re either “woke” or you’re the enemy of justice. With its emphasis on unique identities, wokeism is hyper-individualist, just like Peterson’s individualism. Like other religions, wokeism places an emphasis on guilt and has lots of taboos. Like Christianity upon whose shoulder it rests, it exerts faith in a future racial “redemption” which can only be achieved by large, public confessions of guilt (similar to how Germans hope for a future redemption by publicly admitting guilt over the Holocaust, called “guilt pride”). Wokeism exerts many ritualistic conformity pressures, such as requiring “diversity statements:” confessions of how you have and haven’t lived up to woke expectations, not too dissimilar from Maoist “confessions” of past bourgeois sins. Wokeism seems to deny that truth and goodness can ever really be known, seeing them as constructs of the powerful. I reject such ideas, as I’ve stated above. Wokeism sidelines class and economic issues, concerning itself only with cultural issues and how we can assert our unique identities within our culture. Wokeism is basically a souped-up version of identity politics; it’s more interested in making public identity profiles than struggling for a better and fairer state or economy. Therefore, contrary to Peterson, wokeism is not, in fact, Marxist (which is primarily focused on economic issues) at all; it fits quite comfortably within a capitalist framework. That’s why wokeism has been so easily appropriated in marketing campaigns to sell products for Nike and other big corporations. In fact, capitalism has already successfully appropriated wokeism; it’s basically the left-wing of neo- liberalism. Also, contrary to Peterson’s claims, wokeism is not post-modernist, which sees identity as fluid, socially constructed, and therefore, nonessential. In contrast, wokeism sees identity as fixed and essential. Wokeism has appropriated some of the jargon of post-modernism while containing none of its most fundamental ideas.

Woke bullies have also tried to shut down free speech on campuses (the cancel culture) by stifling debate and stopping anyone who takes a different POV from speaking out or engaging with “woke” ideas. As a firm believer in free speech, I’m totally against this. Therefore, I have to say that wokeism seems to be a dangerous ideology that is afflicting the Left and should be resisted or firmly argued against. But conflating CRT with wokeism is being either stupid or disingenuous. They’re not the same thing at all. But I guess arguments lacking truth or nuance would be just par for the course. I’m against wokeism, in principal, and I think these woke folk are lacking in proper perspective. Woke ideas do seem to have spread quite quickly around college campuses, the marketing departments of many large corporations, and even government agencies like the CIA (thus proving that wokeism is the very opposite of a Marxist threat). But I’m a lot less worried about them than I am about the wealth and power of BP, Shell, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and sociopaths like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg to control our thoughts, lives, and destiny.

If some on the mainstream Left in America have adapted woke language, it certainly hasn’t affected it’s ideological or political stance on economics. First, the one good thing about the Dem’s big-tent politics and ethnic and religious heterogeneity is that there are more likely to be a variety of political stripes and thoughts shaping Party policies. I think there are going to be plenty of people in and around the Democratic Party willing to critique wokeism and to stand up against the woke Left. And you’d think the Dems would move leftward in safe “Blue state” districts from the lack of a centrist or conservative competition, but so far, I haven’t seen anyone with policies to the left of FDR gaining power. In fact, the very opposite has happened: as the Republicans move ever more to the right, the Dems have been sucked into the right-of-center vacuum left behind, with many of the old right-of-center Republican ideas having been absorbed into the policies of the Democratic party (for example, the ACA came straight out of a right-wing think-tank and was first proposed and implemented by a Republican governor: Mitt Romney). This is no surprise: as campaign-finance regulations and voting-rights laws have been systematically dismantled in the last 40 years by pro-corporate judges, the same uber-wealthy class of oligarchs that run the Republican party have bought off the Dems, who have now strayed quite far from the legacy of FDR since 1980. So we end up with bland, right-of-center, pro-corporate legislation and milquetoast, pro-corporate dweebs like Bill “The Era of Big Government is Over” Clinton in the ‘90’s and Barack “No Sudden Moves” Obama in the 2010s. In the 2016 and 2020 election, the progressive wing of the party (myself included) wanted Bernie Sanders, but ended up nominating boring, pro-corporate moderates like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. In fact, I’m convinced the oligarch-bribed, pro-corporate leadership that really runs the Democratic Party would have rather lost with Clinton than won with Sanders. (See note 26.) As the right-wing echo chamber has grown in strength and influence, some of the mainstream media have tried to create a left-wing counterbalance to that voice. But as much as the Right complains about the mainstream media being liberal, they are all bought and paid for by the same corporations that provide Fox News with their talking points: anything that protects the wealth, power, and privileges of the oligarchs is called “moderate” while anything that threatens them are labeled “extreme” or “radical.” CNN is just as biased against the progressive Left as it is against the Right.

A good example or this country’s current polarization is looking at how Republicans have reacted to the recently passed bipartisan infrastructure bill. It was “infrastructure week” about once a month during the T***** administration, and passing an infrastructure bill had wide, bipartisan support back then. But since the Republicans were not actually interested in the hard work of governing or doing anything besides passing tax cuts or making sound bites for Fox News, they were simply too incompetent to pass a similar bill when they were in power. So now that the slightly more competent Democrats have led the passage of their own infrastructure bill, the MAGA-ites have attacked the bill as “Joe Biden’s communist takeover of America” and have attacked any Republican who supported it as “a traitor to our party, a traitor to their voters, and a traitor to our donors.” The Republicans who voted with the Dems on the passage of this bill have been stripped of committee memberships, and some have even gotten death threats.

To see how bat-shit crazy and unmoored from both reality and even the most basic denotation of words the Right’s critique of the Left has become, get a load of poor Little Marco Rubio. In a case of biting the hand that feeds you, he called in November for a political purge of corporate leadership, accusing many of them of being “instruments of anti- American ideologies” and “devoting hundreds of billions of dollars to corporate propaganda” that promotes “cultural Marxism.” Apparently Rubio wants to replace these hidden Marxists running today’s corporations with “true Americans” (using a political litmus test devised by him and the right-wing of course) who will get companies back to America’s true religion: fucking over their workers and the planet! Ha ha! You can see how CT, in general, is now the new Red Scare: a Marxist is under every bed now, ready to come and steal the souls of your children! Well, good luck to him with that political purge. I guess in the future, we’ll have book burnings of “Das Capital” and “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Turn off your brain off, kids, and just march along in goose-step! It’s always easier than thinking! And this from the so-called “conservative” Party!

But Rubio and the Right obviously can’t tell shit from Shinola because he lacks even the most elementary understanding of what Marxism is. Memo to the Right: Marxism is opposed to Big Business. Marxism critiques the ways Big Business makes and markets their shit to people; it has no interest in trying to help sell more shoes for Nike (who exploits its child workers in Bangladesh and whose only purpose is to make their capitalist owners richer)!! Rubio says, “Big Business is not our ally. They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.” I’m really confused. I thought you loved free-market capitalism. If something is free-market capitalism at its heart, doesn’t that make it good to conservatives? Or... are you just mad because some meanie you call a Leftist “covered” your precious free-market capitalism... with woke words? The only reason Big Business would use woke language is because it’s a marketing scam they use TO SELL MORE SHIT TO PEOPLE!!! Earth to Rubio: the real Left hates Big Business and it really hates free-market capitalism!!! What you’re calling the “Left” are really right-of-center, pro-corporate shills like the Clintons and their rich banker friends. As I mentioned earlier, the “wokeness” you fear is just the left wing of neoliberalism, the ideological heart of modern-day capitalism. You should get a clue.

I read this in a summary in Atlantic Magazine of the recent National Conservatism Conference about what attendees there believe: “the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all. Its workers, indoctrinated at elite universities, use “wokeness” to buy off the Left and to create a subservient, atomized, defenseless labor pool.” I’d kinda agree with the first sentence. But it’s true only as long as you agree to use the capitalists’ shitty phones that track your every move and sell all your personal data for profit. But I thought conservatives LIKED capitalism? Why are conservatives upset because the captains of capitalism are profiting from a surveillance system? After all, the purpose of this system IS TO MAKE MONEY FOR SHAREHOLDERS! I thought conservatives liked and believed in that shit?!?! Are conservatives just angry because social media companies wouldn’t permit T**** to continue inciting violence and an insurrection against the US government or undermine our democracy? You do realize the Facebook and Twitter are privately run “presses” and privately run companies, not totalitarian governments with their own police and army. And the press has the freedom in this country to “print” or display whatever the owners of a privately owned press decides is stuff that conforms to their legal and political standards. You conservatives do realize this is how the free-press works, don’t you? What’s your solution? Having the government tell the press what to print? How would that be “free” in any way? If you don’t like Facebook or Twitter’s standards, start your own damn press or social media outlets. Back to the quote: and whatever leftist or Marxist ideas people might be exposed to or “indoctrinated” in college (whether at elite schools or junior colleges), I promise you THEY JETTISON THAT SHIT AS SOON AS THEY GET CORPORATE JOBS!! There are no Marxists running today’s top corporations or banking firms. All they want to do is to make more money for their shareholders. That’s what capitalists do! That’s ALL they’re allowed to do in capitalism. And how do you “buy off” anyone with wokeness language? We live in a capitalist society that runs on money!!! The only people buying off the Left are rich oligarchs, which they still do the old fashioned way: they use good old-fashioned Greenbacks, honey, not a bunch of empty words. And then there’s this language coming from actual conservatives: woke workers at tech companies want “to create a subservient, atomized, defenseless labor pool.” Dude, this is classic Marxist language in a classic Marxist critique of capitalism. If woke bosses are atomizing the workers, then those bosses aren’t Left. They are the opposite of Left! They’re just a bunch of your typical conservative, pro-corporate, capitalist assholes.

So to summarize: conservatives are now using Marxist ideas and Marxist language to attack the Left’s Marxist plot to undermine America; according to conservatives, this plot is to indoctrinate workers at school to use “woke” words, which, when they go to work to make money at corporations, they will use to 1/ buy off the Left (which is simultaneously the indoctrinating and the indoctrinated, both plotting and being bought off with magic but financially worthless words) and 2/ hijack capitalism in order to make workers weaker and more subservient to their capitalist bosses in order to make more money for the capitalist owners of these woke companies. Because they’re all Marxists who want to destroy America. Or something. As a classic Leftist with a brain, NONE OF THIS SHIT MAKES ANY FUCKING SENSE!!!! The politics of the Right has become gripped with meaningless!!

Today

Is the last day

That I'm using words

They've gone out, lost their meaning

Don't function anymore... ~ Madonna, “Bedtime Stories”

From the same Atlantic article: “The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.” First, we’ve been told for decades by conservatives that we need to have a meritocracy to produce our elite leaders of industry and government. But when that meritocracy produces elites that stray one inch from conservative orthodoxy, the Right’s reaction is: “we need to burn down every American institution and start over again!” This is political nihilism. I think here the Right and Left would agree on a few things. we have been screwed over by elites, but mainly because there has been ZERO accountability for elites in this country when they screw up. See note 32. We’d agree our society is under attack by corporate elites that are creating a technological, totalitarian nightmare. But the cause is not because they are “leftist” or secret Marxists who want to destroy this country. These unaccountable corporate elites are products of capitalism, a system the incentivizes and rewards the production of their scary surveillance technology because it makes profits for the company and its shareholders. And in the political system created by and for capitalists, their power is unchecked by and unaccountable to the everyday people that technology affects, and is and therefore, undemocratic. And whatever democratic oversight that could be provided by our government has been systematically destroyed over the last 40 years by the neoliberals and the capitalist oligarchs who want no threats to their power. You’ve identified a potential enemy of your freedom, but you’ve totally misidentified the cause of that threat because you can’t take off your pro-capitalism blinders. To solve these problems, we need MORE democratic oversight of both capitalism and our elite institutions and more accountability of those elites to the general public, not some kind of fascist take-over of out institutions by one political party. Because whatever problems democracy has can usually be solved by MORE democracy, not less.

In the same Atlantic piece, an NCC attendee said, “What they (the Left) want is to destroy us,” she said. “Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,” but they’ve already been doing it for years “by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.” The sad fact is the Right has completely lost both the culture and the intellectual wars and, in the process, lost exclusive access to the institutions that produce that culture and knowledge. If you want to control the institutions that produce culture, how about fucking make some culture that somebody outside your all-white Christianist base would want to consume! And maybe if you could come up with something more intelligent than, “God good! Family good! Tax cuts good! Liberals EVIL!!!” you might have something more useful politically to offer America. So they’ve convinced themselves with a zero-sum fantasy that it’s all the fault of the comic- book-like super-powerful liberals, who, like mean bullies, won’t let the conservatives have a go at running Harvard. Or something. In fact, the big fat meanie libs WANT TO DESTROY US! <Evil laugh while twirling handle-bar mustache> How exactly liberals are planning to “destroy” the conservatives, she, of course, never says. I suspect it will involve having their kids watch Sesame Street. So, instead of creating your own alternative right-wing cultural, intellectual, and political institutions that can compete and win in the marketplace of ideas, the Republicans now insist on nihilistically destroying every institution in this country. See note 28. They’re just like a child who, when losing a game, throws the board in the air and cries, “Screw you guys, I’m going home.

As you can see by the Manichean and extremist rhetoric from this NCC conference, polarization in this country is driven by misinformation from right-wing think-tanks, conservative politicians, Fox News, super-PACs, and other other extremist voices within the right-wing echo chambers, who repetitively claim “leftist extremists want to destroy our way of life” and thus, it is reasonable to do everything in their power to stop the Left. In this narrative, every illiberal move Republicans and conservatives make is a form of self-defense. Seizing partisan control of vote counting is justified as a means of stopping imagined Democratic fraud. Banning school libraries from carrying books by black and queer authors or banning teachers from having any discussion on race in America is a means of stopping imagined liberal indoctrination. Laws that protect drivers who run over protesters from lawsuits or that protect killers who shoot in “self defense” are ways of protecting communities from imagined rioters. There’s even a growing overlap between right-wing talk about “overthrowing” (presumably by democratic means) institutions they see as corrupted by the Left and militant white-nationalists, who believe that these institutions have been undermined by the nefarious influence of blacks, Jews, and other undesirable minorities. They see white Americans as justified – maybe even obligated – to take up arms to protect their people and their culture. This is how far polarization and division has gone in this country. And the Right will continue to look for scapegoats for all their social anxieties, for all the unease, inequality, unfairness, and chaos caused by the change-engine of capitalism. The Right will continue to misdirect all their anger at “woke leftists” and “Marxists,” when in fact, the enemy is staring them right in the face: its capitalism and its captains, the oligarchs. This is why the Right is morphing in a neo-fascist party. See notes 27, 28, and 35. The exact same thing is going to happen to other democracies around the world, very sadly, and will only kick into overdrive as capitalism’s ecocide of the planet’s biome continues, causing mass starvation and making entire swaths of Earth uninhabitable.

25 In my utopian dreams, America would have a peaceful way for states to leave the Union, perhaps having a national referendum on whether this country should be divided in twain: a country for the Red States and a country for the Blue States. If this referendum passed, in my fantasy, each new country could write a new Constitution or keep the old one. I’d much prefer to live in a country with a parliamentary system and with more than two political parties, since it is FAR more democratic than this Presidential system we’re stuck with now and that has been adapted by very few other democracies. In my fantasy, the Blue States could even join up with Canada to become the United States of Canada! At least that way, we’d get to live under Canada’s superior nationalized health care system.

The Red States could either keep the old name or select a new one. Since so many MAGA-ites clearly want to live in a Christianist theocracy, they could call themselves “Jesusland,” for all I care. In fact, I see today (Nov. 13) how T****- pardoned criminal and disgraced former national security advisor Michael Flynn recently told an audience of raving MAGA-ites, “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.” That should really get the white evangelical/ Christianist-nationalist base of Republicans fired up with major hard-ons, irregardless of how it flies in the face of the First-Amendment prohibition of any laws respecting an establishment of religion. As an aside, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” James Madison explained that the establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right – an unalienable right – of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants. (How naive this concern about Christian denomination-based “freedom of conscience” seems compared to today’s debates over abortion, birth control, guns, taxes, history, gay marriage, carbon taxes, vaccine and mask mandates, etc. and how they’re all mixed up in battles over different groups’ ideas about their “freedom of conscience.” Good luck sorting that shit out! You’re going to need it!) Ah, who am I kidding? Everyone has been ignoring the text of the First Amendment since the Civil War, what with a major Christian religious observance like Thanksgiving and Christmas being made a national holidays, with the words “In God We Trust” emblazoned on every dollar bill, with Christmas trees and all that other religious crap adorning government buildings, etc. The Christianists have been launching a slow-motion coup for decades in their quest to turn what was supposed to be a completely secular government into a theocracy.

Anyway, at least in my fantasy, each new country could develop a new political center around which new political parties could evolve. And we could finally solve the unbridgeable gaps in epistemology, values, and visions of governance between the Blue States and the Red States and avert all this scary, crazy talk about another civil war. If they can figure out a peaceful, democratic way to succeed in the U.K. (Scotland has gotten to vote several times on succeeding from the U.K. already), why can’t we do the same thing here in America? But really, we shouldn’t accept being told that sensible solutions like this are too crazy or too pie-in-the-sky, all because the framers were too short- sighted 234 years ago to put an exit clause in the Constitution. And if there’s another civil war in this country as a result, the fault will really be on their heads. And on ours for not insisting on some sensible solutions to our divisions.

Oh yes, and in my utopian fantasy of getting to start over again with a freshly written Constitution for the 21st century, there would definitely be no Second Amendment – which was written to ensure state militias were well armed to fight the frequent slave revolts in Southern states – in any Constitution I’d want to live under. Maybe we can convince the four-in-ten American gun-owners they’d be safer if they’d all turn in their guns, to be melted down for the steel to build the 30,000km of high-speed rail that’d replace the interstate highway system. (Fat chance! But it’s my fantasy; I can say what I want!) But having lived for 18 years in a country with no guns, I think the ultimate freedom is not having to feel endangered every time you’re in a public space by hyper-masculine, gun-toting fanatics with a chip on their shoulders.

26 The dysfunction in this country is caused by the levers of democracy being hijacked by the oligarchs and corporate interests, misdirecting resources away from the needs of the many to serve the needs of the few. Just as the financial market are now decoupled from the real world of making profits by selling good and services (see note 13), the political world is now decoupled from social movements and the will of the people. And I see the Democratic Party – who won a majority of votes in the 2020 election and whose policies are backed by a majority of the Americans – and their inability to pass their popular bills or to raise taxes on the rich by even the tiniest amount as proof that the oligarchs are in control of our dysfunctional government and will thwart the wishes of the majority of Americans at every turn.

Just look at the bait-and switch techniques of the bought-off Democratic leadership: they’ll always make huge, enticing promises to the progressive FDR-wing during the election (and manipulate us each election by stoking fears of a right- wing take-over), only to have all those promises disappear or negotiated away once we get the Dems voted back in power, even lowering taxes on the rich after campaigning on raising them. Meanwhile, the party leadership will continue helping the oligarchs with their bait-and-switch tactics and playing the left-wing of the party against the right-wing of the party to keep the party divided, weak, and ineffectual. Want more proof? How about the Democrat’s completely tepid defense of voting rights and the fact that they’re allowing two Senators to stymie progress on the voting-rights bills and probably are going to end up keeping the filibuster. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear by now the Dems want to the system to be broken. They want to make sure their corporate donors don’t get upset and keep the big bucks rolling into their political coffers. Since they’ve all been bought off or bribed by the oligarchs, they actually have little interest in lowering drug prices, a policy that is widely popular among both Dems and Republicans. In fact, corporate Democrats just saved Big Pharma $450 billion by watering down their drug pricing plan, which represents a return of 1700 times the amount Big Pharma spent on lobbying Congress this year, producing a huge and obvious system of circulating bribes. Dems have no interest in taxing the rich, despite running on that promise. Dems have no real interest in expanding health care by creating a cheaper public option for health insurance or making community colleges free/cheaper or mandating paid parental leave or raising the minimum wage to $15/hour or many of the other promises they always make. Another bit of evidence that the Dems are not serious about most of the progressive policies they campaign on is the fact that so very few of those policies have been implemented in the Blue States where they have clear majorities. And the “mainstream media,” owned and operated by the uber-wealthy oligarchs, will continue to push pro-corporate talking points bashing anything designed to help the working poor as “extreme” or “radical” while policies that continue to coddle and protect the extreme wealth and power of the rich or squander trillions on the military are always pictured as “moderate.”

Want more proof there’s not really a dime’s worth of difference between the two major Parties when it comes to serving the interests of the oligarchs? Joe Biden spent Thanksgiving 2021 at the mansion of billionaire David Rubinstein in Nantucket. Rubinstein's the co-founder of investment firm/war profiteer the Carlyle Group – which belongs to the US Chamber Of Commerce and Business Roundtable. These two groups are currently spending millions on lobbyists to derail Biden's own Build Back Better bill – the one which just passed the House – so that it won't pass the Senate. If you thought Joe Manchin was the only obstacle to the bill, see where the Biden family broke bread for Thanksgiving.

Look at how leaders from both parties are running through the revolving doors of the Carlyle Group. HW Bush was a senior advisor at the Carlyle Group when George W. Bush was president, and was in a penthouse meeting with one of Osama Bin Laden's brothers when 9/11 occurred. (He and other Bin Laden relatives were spirited out of the US while no Americans were permitted to fly.) William E. Kennard, Bill Clinton's FCC chairman, was a high level Carlyle employee, as were former British Prime Minister John Major, Office of Budget And Management director Richard Darman, former Clinton chief of staff Thomas F McLarty, former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt, former Secretary Of State James Baker, and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci.

The Republican who just won the governor's race in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, was the co-CEO of Carlyle Group. It was thought that his Dem opponent, Terry McAuliffe, might take more shots at Glenn because of this unsavory connection to this private equity firm, which was sued in 2008 after it defaulted on its mortgage bond fund. But then everyone realized that McAuliffe was himself linked to the group through investments, leading Axios.com to conclude: “The bottom line is that private equity now permeates almost all parts of American life, including the campaigns of those running against private equity.”

Yes, a vote for either party is to a vote to keep the oligarchs in charge. Anyone who really cares about democracy, equality, or fairness in this country and thinks one party is better than the other has been bamboozled. There may seem to be two parties, but they’re just two sides of the same coin. And this coin’s only principles are greed, war, and destruction of the planet for profit. Joe Biden likes to brag about his humble Scranton roots and how he takes Amtrak to DC for work in order to fake a working class vibe, yet he's been having Thanksgiving in the elite stomping grounds of Nantucket since 1975, and often in this vacation home. This is a completely tone-deaf move for someone known as "Scranton Joe," who's laughably trying to brand himself as the new FDR. I'm thankful that a few people are waking up to the rampant corruption that is DC. All this info is available through Google, yet somehow never mentioned on corporate media. On TV news, you'll see photo ops of Biden volunteering at a soup kitchen or pardoning a turkey with a cute name. If you're on the right, you'll sneer; if you're a centrist Democrat, you'll cheer. Meanwhile, our rulers are laughing at the bottom 99% of us.

So on one hand, we have the Democratic party: their oligarchs pretend to be about 3% less selfish, since they can see some benefit to long-term stability by appearing to spread a tiny bit of their wealth around. So they end up passing watered-down, pro-corporate policies that are only about 3% less cruel than what the Republicans want to do. On the other hand, we have today’s cynical, politically nihilistic, neo-fascist Republican party, which is the party of anti-politics: it’s totally disinterested in the public good or in governing. In fact, it has one guiding purpose: to destroy the ability of our government to function properly through endless tax cuts and deregulation, to “drown the baby in the bathwater,” thus removing the government’s ability to threaten the power of the oligarchy. And then to re-install the authoritarian T**** family to preside over the rubble of our Constitutional order, apparently.

Maybe one day, those same business leaders who craved all those tax cuts and deregulation might regret it when rule of law in this country is replaced with authoritarian favoritism and there are regular riots in the streets because the government has lost the consent of the governed due to voter suppression.

27 T****, the coup leader, fits all the standard definitions of an authoritarian: he rejects the accepted rules and norms of democracy; he denies the legitimacy of his opponents; at best, he regularly promises to curtail the civil liberties against his perceived enemies and the press; at worst, he threatens them with violence or jail; and he blames our problems on “elites” and foreign invaders and praises the repressive measures of other autocrats. While president, he installed loyalists in the FBI to cover up his campaign-ties to Russia and in the OGE to cover up his numerous conflicts-of-interests created by his business dealings. He labeled our press, an institution protected in our Constitution, as the “enemy of the American people,” the same rhetoric deployed by Mao and Stalin. This raving psychopathic fabulist lied while in office an estimated 30,573 times (the most dangerous of all his lies being that he rightly won the 2020 election), undermining people’s most basic trust in their government or in democracy, and through his bullying, lying, and cheating has “defined deviancy down” to all-time new lows.

T**** cultivated ties with and sought election help from multiple shady people with ties to Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign. For example, both the Mueller Report – which uncovered 140 contacts between the T**** campaign and Russian nationals or intermediaries – and a bipartisan Senate panel report in 2020 found that campaign chairman Paul Manafort – another criminal pardoned by T**** – passed along internal polling data to Russian operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik. Russian trolls operating from St. Petersburg then may have used that information to shift the outcome of the 2016 election in much the same way they had done previously in Central Europe, using fake Facebook pages (sometimes impersonating anti-immigration groups, sometimes impersonating black activists), fake Twitter accounts, and attempts to infiltrate groups like the NRA, as well as weaponizing hacked material from the Democratic National Committee. The T**** campaign welcomed this intervention, and even sought to take advantage of what they imagined might be broader Russian technical capabilities. “If it’s what you say I love it,” little T**** Jr. wrote to an intermediary for a Russian lawyer who he believed had access to damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In 2008, T**** Jr. had told a business conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” and in 2016, Russian oligarchs’ long-term investment in the T**** business empire paid off. In the T**** family, the Kremlin had something better than spies: cynical, nihilistic, indebted, long-term allies.

When T**** saw he could escape punishment for any of this sleaze, he immediately shifted gears and tried other undemocratic and unconstitutional grifts. The fat criminal bastard was finally impeached twice in office: once for using the powers of the Presidency to force a foreign government to dig up dirt on his political enemies, and a second time for leading a resurrection against the US government, which tried to overturn an election. And we’re still learning how he pressured government officials to overturn the 2020 election and change official election vote counts in his favor. We’ve even found out there were numerous meetings – in a “war room” in the Willard Hotel led by T****-pardoned criminal Steve Bannon – between the Jan. 6 insurrection leaders, White House staff, and Republican Congressional leaders. In fact, we’ve just found out from sources that T**** was in touch with people in this “war room” just hours before the insurrection. Just connect the dots.

Even after losing the 2020 election and after inciting the January 6 insurrection, T**** still commands tremendous power and respect within the Republican Party. In fact, he still demands utter loyalty and obedience from everyone within the Party by bullying and imposing his Mafia-style fear tactics. Any Republican who dares oppose him will be primaried or defeated by hordes of fanatical, loyal MAGA-ites. Conformity is also enforced by complicit firebrands in the right-wing media-sphere as well as by right-wing social media, an institution with the power to marshal populist energy against critics and opponents.

And during all these years that democratic norms have been broken and our Constitutional order attacked by this raving, authoritarian idiot, Republicans have just sat with their thumbs up their asses and found ever-new ways to rationalize and normalize his behavior. “Well, T**** gave me a $20 dollar tax cut, moved our embassy to Jerusalem, and can really troll the libs. So he has my total and undying support!” What a bunch of fucking moral cowards, who get hard-ons just because they see an “R” in front of someone’s name and who are willing to sell out our democratic order for another tax cut. The exceptions are a brave few, like Liz Cheney, whom I’ve come to deeply admire. In New Hampshire on November 9, 2021, Cheney tore into the T**** Republicans, saying that:

Americans are confronting a domestic threat that we’ve never faced before: a former president who's attempting to unravel the foundations of our Constitutional Republic, aided by political leaders who have made themselves willing hostages to this dangerous and irrational man. In this time of testing, will we do our duty? Will we do what we must?

Will we defend our Constitution? Will we stand for truth? Will we put duty to our oath above partisan politics? Or will we look away from the danger, ignore the threat, embrace the lies and enable the liar? There is no gray area when it comes to that question. When it comes to this moment, there is no middle ground.

Amen to all that, Liz!!! For standing up for the truth and for the Constitution, Republicans have rewarded Cheney – who votes with Republicans 92% of the time – by stripping her committee memberships as well as membership in the Wyoming Republican Party. She’s also receiving regular death threats from MAGA-ites. Pure authoritarianism!

This is just proof that the “Big Lie” – that T**** somehow really won the 2020 election and was cheated by secret, unproven Democratic perfidy – has become the litmus test of party loyalty and fealty. Rather like how “the Jews stabbed us in the back” was the loyalty test for Nazis, how “Joseph Smith found golden plates in Manchester, NY, left by the lost tribe of Israel” is the loyalty test for Mormons, or how “Hillary Clinton leads a cannibalistic pedophile-ring” is the loyalty test for Q-Anon followers, the crazier and more outlandish the lie, the more loyal and fervent the followers will prove themselves to be. 82% of people who watch Fox News now believe in the “Big Lie,” proving what Nazi Joseph Goebells said: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes truth.” Already the Big Lie is morphing into “the only way Democrats can win elections is by cheating,” further destroying people’s faith in democracy. And now you have MAGA- ite fanatics like Wendy Rogers, a Republican state senator from Arizona (and who Steven Bannon has praised as a rising Republican star), calling for the jailing of anyone who certified Biden the winner of the last election. Apparently the fact that all the recounts, all the Republican law-suits, and even the Republican “audit” of the Arizona vote count have found no evidence of fraud is of no consequence to these delusional people.

30% of Republicans now think violence might be warranted to “reclaim America.” In fact, many secretaries of state (the officials usually in charge of certifying state vote results) all around this country are regularly receiving death threats from MAGA-ites and who now require 24-hour security protection. The threat of right-wing violence against government officials from various shadowy anti-government paramilitary groups and militias like the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys, as well as the conspiracy-inspired lunatics like Q-Anon, is still rising. These militias have been publicly courted by T****, Bannon, and Roger Stone. Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who has previously embraced white nationalist and neo-Nazi culture, posted on his official Twitter account an anime video that showed a character with his face photoshopped onto it killing a character wearing the face of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). The “Gosar” character also slashed with swords at a character wearing the face of President Biden. What’s obvious is that sharing an image of yourself killing a colleague would get you fired from virtually any job. But only two Republican Representatives (Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) were willing to denounce this violent video by voting to censure Gosar. So it appears that all but two Republican lawmakers are willing to embrace violence against Democrats if it will lead to political power. The march toward Republicans’ open acceptance of violence has been underway since January 6, as leaders embraced the Big Lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election. Those lies have led to a logical outcome: their supporters believe that in order to defend the nation, they should fight back against those they have been told are destroying the country. When Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing group Turning Point USA, spoke in Idaho last month, the audience applauded when a man asked when he could start killing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” the man said. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk denounced the question not on principle, but because he said it would play into Democratic hands.

And Steve Bannon says next time there’s an election, he will be standing by with 20,000 “shock troops” of loyal fascists, willing and eager to dismantle whatever democratic safeguards and institutions remain to block their rise to power. In fact, Republican political-nihilists like Steve Bannon are part of a growing number of far-right think tanks – such as the Claremont Institute – egging on the “dismantling of the administrative state” (ie the democratic institutions that resist their fascist rise to power). In a May Claremont podcast, Curtis Yarvin (see note 13) – a self-described monarchist who wants to appoint a Silicon Valley CEO king of America – muses about how an American strongman – whom he alternatively calls “Caesar” and, more honestly, “T****” – could seize authoritarian control of the US government by turning the National Guard and FBI into his personal stormtroopers. In a March article in The American Mind, Claremont’s blog, writer Glenn Elmers declares that “most people living in the United States today – certainly more than half – are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” If T**** voters and conservatives do not band together and wage “a sort of counter-revolution” against these “citizen-aliens,” then “the victory of progressive tyranny will be assured.” Notice their fanatical, quasi-fascist, zero-sum logic here: totally incompatible with democracy.

Wikipedia defines neo-fascism as an ideology that includes:

• ultranationalism: We believe in “American first!” (NB: a term first popularized by anti-Semitic and pro-fascist groups before WW2)

• racial supremacy: We don’t want people from those shit-hole countries. We want whites from Norway! I’m a smart guy with “the best genes.” (To an all-white audience:) “A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota."

• populism: Liberal woke elites are ruining this country.

• authoritarianism: I alone can fix it.

• nativism: My white supporters are the “real” Americans.

• xenophobia: They’re rapist. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. I want a complete and total

  shutdown of Muslims entering this country.

• anti-immigration sentiment: Build that wall!

• opposition to liberal democracy: Democrats only win by cheating.

• opposition to liberalism: You’ve got to take back your country. If you don’t show strength, they won’t respect

  you.

• red-scare tactics: Biden wants to implement his communist policies to destroy this country.

• threats of violence against political opponents: I’d like to punch him in the face. If you smack a protestor, I’ll

  pay your legal bills.

• commands total loyalty from supporters: I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and I wouldn’t lose voters.

It should be painfully obvious by now from these examples that the Republican party has devolved into both an authoritarian cult and a neo-fascist party.

28 The major driver of Republican-party politics in the last four or five decades has been racially motivated “status anxiety,” as their power and privilege as a majority-white voting block has gradually diminished due to shifting demographics. In fact, because the white Christianist rump-base of the Republican Party is a decreasing % of the voting populace and because Republican standard-issue policies of slashing taxes for rich people and slashing the social safety net are so unpopular nationwide, Republicans have had to resort to a long list of anti-democratic practices to retain power. Let’s list these practices, shall we?

1/ Gerrymander Congressional districts. The conservative-stacked SCOTUS has given both parties carte blanche to gerrymander all they want. Being the more shameless of the two major parties, Republicans have done a much better job of gerrymandering than the Democrats. Georgia has written new congressional maps that would give Republicans 64% of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in a state Biden won with 49.5% of the vote. In the Georgia state senate, Republicans would take 59% of seats. In Wisconsin the legislature passed a map that would give Republicans 75% of U.S. House seats and 60% of legislative seats in a state Biden won. The Ohio senate has passed a map giving Republicans 80% of seats in state T**** won with 53% of the vote. In North Carolina, which is 40% non-white and evenly split politically, the Republican legislature passed redistricting maps giving Republicans 71–78% of U.S. House seats. In Texas, where T**** got 52% of the vote, Republicans would take 65% of the seats, etc.

2/ Pass voter-suppression laws. The moment that SCOTUS gutted the ‘65 Voting Rights Act in 2013, all the Southern states erected dozens of voter suppression laws to make it more difficult for poor and minority voters to vote, in what can only be labeled as Jim Crow 2.0. After all, what is making a working-poor person take off work and wait 11 hours in a line just to vote but a modern-day poll tax? And voter suppression has really been kicked into overdrive in Red States after T**** made up his “Big Lie” about a stolen election, of which he has still produced no proof. Republican have introduced 361 voter-suppression laws in 2021 alone, dozens of which have already passed. And of course the poor and dispossessed in this country are eventually going to rise up against their blatant disenfranchisement. James Madison predicted this conflict in Federalist Papers No. 10: either the people will rise up and fight back against a government that does not derive its power from the consent of the governed, or the government is going to have to suppress its opposition.

3/ Take control of state election procedures by replacing non-partisan election supervisors with partisan hacks. Since the Democrats won control of the House and Senate and the White House in 2020, Republicans have used their power in Red States to pass laws that will transfer control of the counting of election results from non-partisan officials to partisans, along with the right to exclude votes they claim are “fraudulent.” Had such measures been in place in 2020, T**** would currently be in the White House. For example, Senator Ron Johnson is spearheading an attempt to get rid of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, created by Republicans, and to charge the members of the commission with felonies, while giving control of federal elections to Republican lawmakers. Johnson says that the Republicans need to control state elections because “Democrats cheat,” offering no proof. In fact, Johnson has earlier admitted that Biden won Wisconsin fairly in the 2020 election, but is now arguing for the Big Lie to justify rigging the system in Republicans’ favor.

4/ Use Republican majorities in state legislatures to rewrite the rules and strip Democrats of power if they win, which is what they did in 2018 after Governor Tony Evers defeated Scott Walker in Wisconsin. A similar tale is playing out in Michigan, where Democrats Gretchen Whitmer, Dana Nessel, and Jocelyn Benson handily won the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state races, respectively. Michigan Republicans changed the laws to guarantee the GOP-controlled legislature the right to intervene in any legal battles involving state laws that the attorney general may be reluctant to defend, as well as remove campaign finance oversight from the Secretary of State’s office. In 2016, North Carolina set the precedent for this kind of move, when the Republican-controlled legislature stripped then-incoming Democrat Roy Cooper’s power over Cabinet appointments, made the state’s judicial system more partisan, and ensured that the state’s board of elections would be controlled by Republicans in election years.

5/ Pack the courts with extremist, pro-corporate activist-hack judges (see the next item) who will reliably decide cases that will disable the ability of our government to regulate the economy or perform its most basic functions and who will reliably decide other cases in a partisan way that favors Republican donors and Republican policies.

6/ Break democratic norms like mutual toleration and forbearance. Two current Republican-appointed members of SCOTUS owe their seats to the shameless hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell and his willingness to break democratic norms. When Obama was president, Mitch said, “Oh, we can’t have a hearing on a president’s SCOTUS nominee when it’s so close to the election. Nine months is too close!” For the first time in US history, the Senate REFUSED to consider an elected president’s SCOTUS nominee. BTW, Mitch just pulled this new rule straight out of his asshole, the place that’s usually loose and well lubed from all the oil barons who are usually fucking him. But when an R is president, Mitch changed the rule and said, “Six weeks before an election is now A-OK!”

Typical of R democratic norm-breaking: they have one set of rules when an R is the president, and another set of rules when a D is president. When an R is president, Mitch will rubber-stamp each court appointee. When a D is president, Mitch will gum up the approval process with every trick in the book, leaving many court vacancies open. Even now, R’s are launching objections to the confirmations of nominees to even routine appointments, running out the clock on the Senate calendar. When an R is president, Rs say, “Deficits don’t matter! More tax cuts for rich people!” as they explode the deficit. (Doesn’t matter how many times it’s been proven that tax cuts don’t pay for themselves and that trickle-down economics only explodes wealth inequality, the solution to every problem for an R is always a robotic: “Must cut more taxes!”) As soon as a D is president, they turn coats and suddenly become deficit hawks. When an R is president, raising the debt ceiling is a bi-partisan requirement. When a D is president, it’s suddenly all up to the Ds to find the votes, and all the Rs will vote in lock-step to play chicken with our economy by threatening to default on the debt, all so they can “own the libs.”

7/ Attack all institutions perceived as liberal. The emerging right-wing line is that America’s core institutions have become captured by the Left and must be seized if the country is to be “saved” (ie, so Republicans can have uncontested power and can roll back all the gains in, say, gay, trans, women’s, and labor rights, etc, over the last 60 years). See note 24. Republicans want to remove state attorneys general, lay siege to universities, abolish the teachers’ unions, and overturn school boards. T**** and his supporters have already promised to change the law to shut down media groups that attack him if he’s re-elected. Republicans are calling for the use of the law as a weapon to weaken or even eliminate what they perceive as the social bases of their opponents’ political power. It’s a vision of politics in which power is not shared democratically but wielded against one’s enemies. This is the textbook definition of political nihilism, and are pages right out of Steve Bannon’s “tear down the administrative state” fascist playbook. Other institutions like the military and the police are already being packed with shadowy fascist, pro-Republican groups like the Oath Keepers or have developed connections with groups like the Proud Boys. These organizations could come in really handy whenever Republicans plan their next coup. And the Eastman memo demonstrated how institutions like the Electoral College can be gamed to overturn democratic elections. See note 27.

8/ Stop immigration. Doesn’t matter that immigration has been a bedrock of this country’s history. Doesn’t matter that the ancestor of every single white American was once an immigrant. Doesn’t matter that that the Statue of Liberty has an inscription that says, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” To socially anxious Republicans, all immigration, even of, say, the Afghani translators who helped our troops, is BAD. Thus the fascination with building useless walls. The exception is if the immigrants are white people from, say, Norway, according to the racist T****. (No coincidence here: Scandinavians were considered top of the of the racial-group hierarchy by early 20th-century racist American eugenics groups.)

9/ Fire up the base by utilizing a) propaganda outlets like Fox News, OAN, and One America, where an entire epistemologically enclosed universe of lies and “alternative facts” has been created that always paints the opposition as mindless, communist extremists who want to destroy the family and the country b) appeals to white Christianist- nationalism and nativism, fears of non-existent Marxist dangers in schools (see note 24), phony populism, and demagoguery.

10/ If all else fails, resort to violence or a coup. See note 27.

The willingness of the Republican party in breaking democratic norms is the main reason that democracy is in a death spiral in this country. And if anyone thinks any of this OK just so they can get another $20 tax cut, then they’re just part of that decay.

29  This list is so incomplete. I could easily add many others: Zimbabwe, Belarus, Malaysia, Indonesia, even Japan, where one party has ruled virtually uninterrupted for 70 years! Don’t be blinded by notions of “American Exceptionalism” and think just because America has had successful elections and changes of ruling political parties for 200+ years that democratic decay and breakdown can’t happen here! (That would be an error of induction.) It’s painfully obvious to observers all around the world that this country’s democracy is eroding steadily. See note 27. In fact, America has been just been added for the first time to their annual list of backsliding democracies compiled by the NGO, the Institute for Democracy and Assistance, which pointed to the “visible deterioration of democracy” in the United States on several criteria, including unwillingness to accept credible election results, voter-participation suppression efforts, increasing polarization, checks on government, and declines in civil liberties. The report also pointed to the “decline in the quality of freedom of association and assembly during the summer of protests in 2020” after the murder of George Floyd.

The Republican Party is now considered an illiberal, far-right movement, with rhetoric “closer to authoritarian parties, such as Fidesz in Hungary,” according to as massive V-Dem Institute study in 2020 that surveyed the policy positions of political parties around the world. Coincidentally, Hungary, which is beloved by conservatives, is no longer considered a democracy but a “hybrid regime.” This is exactly why Tucker Carlson recently went there to host his top-rated Fox show in part thanks to a recommendation from conservative writer Rod Dreher, who admires Orban for willingness to take the “hard stances” to stand up to “woke loonies.” Those “hard stances” include promoting virulent nationalism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and anti-semitic conspiracy theories, as well as silencing the press, purging academics, and replacing critical voices in the government and courts with subservient yes-men. No wonder Steve Bannon said Orban was “T**** before T****.” Hungary is your ideal blueprint if you’re a white, Christianist, nationalist movement that seeks to abuse its power to ensure minority rule at all costs. See note 28 for how Republicans are trying to play catch-up with their heroes in Hungary, Russia, and Turkey.

It’s time for people in this country to wake up and smell the coffee!

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. ~ George Orwell

30  America has done things I can be truly proud of in the last 100 years, including defeating fascism in this country (thanks to FDR’s New Deal policies) and in Europe (back when being antifa was both cool and an obvious necessity) and how we contained Soviet communism in the Russian Empire until it collapsed. But it’s also done many things I’m quite a bit less proud, like all the murderous, anti-communist right-wing dictatorships we propped up around the world (like in Chile or Taiwan) or the right-wing death squads we used to fund in Central America or the popular, democratic, left-wing governments our CIA used to overthrow. On one hand, I’m proud of the humanist and Enlightenment principles this country has generally stood for; on the other hand, this country has rarely implemented those principles within this country without one hell of a fight. But if you want to live in a country where people don’t criticize their government and its policies, try living under the CCP in China, the world’s most perfected totalitarian surveillance-state, combining the worst of capitalism with the worst of undemocratic statism. So while the Republicans are busy dismantling FDR’s domestic legacy, the Chinese are hell-bent on dismantling FDR’s global legacy by neutering global institutions like the UN and remaking the global financial system in their favor, making this world safe for authoritarians. I fucking hate the CPP and everything they stand for. But I’m not taking up space in this document criticizing the CCP or the other systems that are doubtless far worse than the one in the USA. I just really get disillusioned when my country does not live up to the values it claims to support.

31  This country can always squander tens of trillions of dollars on wars around the world without batting an eye and continue to squander hundreds of billions on the defense department each year – even increasing the defense department’s budget right after we finished another of our unwinnable wars. In fact, no one ever asks, “how are we going to pay for it?” when it comes the $700 billion we squander every year on defense spending. But when it comes to spending money on the poor and middle class and their social infrastructure, that’s always the one and only question that somehow is always answered with, “sorry, we can’t afford it. But here’s another tax cut for the billionaires.” Eisenhower (probably the only moderate, half-way moral, and sane Republican president since WW2) had it right over 60 years ago when he warned of the cancerous dangers of the military-industrial complex.

32  First there’s T**** -- the sitting president who instigated an insurrection against the US government, who tried to subvert the peaceful transition of power, and who tried to overthrow the results of a democratic election by pressuring numerous government officials to change the legitimate vote counts in his favor – who now gets to continue to plot his authoritarian comeback without fear of consequences.

As an aside, letting insurrectionists off the hook in this country goes back to the Civil War, where tens of thousands of Southern insurrectionists were give a blanket pardon by Andrew Johnson. Some of these unreconstructed and unrepentant white-supremist insurrectionists then forced the end of Reconstruction and, instead, implemented Jim Crow laws in the unreconstructed South and tolerated decades of discrimination, violence, and lynchings, leading to many of the ongoing racial problems we have today. Then there was the insurrection of white vigilantes in Wilmington, NC, in 1898, who launched a coup d’état against the duly elected city government. The insurrectionists admitted that the government of black men and poor whites had been fairly elected but, they said, such people should not be voters at all, because they would pass laws using tax dollars to help poor people in the community. White property owners were within their rights to refuse to be governed by such people, they claimed, and they would never allow such a thing again. In the process of taking over the government, they killed between 60 and 300 people, primarily African Americans. None of the murderers or insurrectionists were ever prosecuted. The more things change, the more they stay the same. But letting insurrectionists off the hook is never a good idea in a democracy.

Additionally, the Mueller investigation found at least 10 cases where T**** potentially obstructed justice while president. The DOJ has STILL not opened further investigations of these crimes, much less issued indictments.

Then there’s Obama, who can sleep well at night in his mansion on Martha's Vineyard not having to worry about all the innocent people around the world killed by the drone strikes he authorized or the civil war and chaos that ensued because of the unconstitutional war he launched in Libya.

Then there’s GW Bush – the war criminal who authorized CIA torture and who can't visit certain foreign countries for fear of being arrested for war crimes, who started two unwinnable and bankrupting wars, the one in Iraq begun on Bush’s fabricated casus belli -- who gets to spend his care-free days in retirement making bad paintings.

Then there was Reagan and Ollie North, who never had to face any consequences for Iran/ Contra. For Reagan, because it was likely his pre-Alzheimer’s conveniently prevented him from remembering his involvement. “Well, I don’t recall. Would you like some jelly beans?” repeated 100x. For North, because he was pardoned by HW Bush.

Then there was Nixon, Johnson, and McNamara, who never faced consequences for their lies or war crimes in Vietnam and SE Asia. And Nixon was pardoned by Ford, so Nixon never had to face any legal consequences for all the Watergate crimes he committed.

Then there’s Henry Kissinger – who, along with Nixon, treasonously sabotaged the ‘68 Paris Peace Talks to help Nixon get elected, prolonging the Vietnam War by six years and resulting in millions of additional and needless deaths, (and, by expanding the war to Cambodia, caused the instability that led to the rise of Pol Pot), and who authorized various other crimes against humanity and against international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture in Pakistan, Bangladesh, East Timor, Chile, Cyprus, etc. while USSOT, – who will get to die comfortably in his own bed, his corpulent corpse sitting on an enormous mountain of Chinese cash, his reputation as a “serious statesman" still in tact.

Then there was Colin Powell – who, ignoring his own Doctrine, got in front of the UN in 2003 and knowingly lied about the existence of fabricated WMDs in Iraq in support of Bush’s war – who is lauded by the media as another “serious statesman” upon his death.

Then there’s the convenient way that the US has never joined the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice – the few ways the world has of bringing some of these war criminals to justice – since American jurisprudence is unable and unwilling to do so. In America, sadly, power is more important that justice, truth, rule of law, or human rights. As Obama said, "We have to look forward, not backwards." That's just a free "get out of jail" card for every person in power in this country. Nixon even famously said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Can you imagine anything being such an open invitation for criminality and unaccountable power?

Besides the lack of accountability for political leaders, there’s the complete lack of accountability for the policy failures of economic and corporate leaders of the past 40 years (the collapse of unions and the hollowing out of their legal protections from corporate union-busting, the off-shoring of manufacturing and the disappearance of good-paying working-class jobs, flat or declining wages, the Savings and Loan crises, the 2008 Financial Crisis and Recession, etc.). Not a single banker or economic leader or regulator ever paid any price for their incompetence, greed, or mismanagement. It’s no wonder people are pissed at the “elites” and are looking for an easy target to pin the blame on and for some charismatic leader to fix all their problems.

33  I’m convinced most of humanity’s material and cultural accomplishments since we invented farming 10,000 years ago were motivated by three things: 1/ greed 2/ its sister, the lust for social status 3/ the fear of death. The first two are obvious. And people crave social status and power because it increases their sexual attractiveness.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. ~ Henry Kissinger (war criminal)

You can see how the fear of death has driven humans to create religions, to desperately want to have children, to neurotically need to accomplish something “to be remembered by” – resulting in most if not all or our cultural and scientific achievements of the last 10,000 years – to cling on so desperately to this shitty global capitalism that we know is destroying us and this planet, and to cling onto one’s life long after its quality has diminished to a point of uselessness or constant suffering. Sorry, but 99.99% of all the humans who ever lived will be forgotten after they’re gone. Deal with it. But I suppose the real reason I’ve worked nine months composing this document, which I’m afraid has devolved into pedantic sophistry, is just a vain attempt for my own thoughts to live on somehow after my death!

34  Now humans, all by themselves, are causing the 6th major extinction in the history of this planet, called the Holocene Extinction. And I ask myself, “Is having indoor plumbing, antibiotics, and a cell phone really worth the past 10,000 years of stupidity, suffering, wars, destruction, mass-murders, mass-extinctions, and a trashed planet?” And the answer for me is a resounding, “Hell fuck no!” It’s too bad the first farmers didn’t drown in the Euphrates, Indus, and Yangtze Rivers! We should have never left our simple hunter-gatherer bands, where we lived quite comfortably for millions of years (and where fascist nature could keep a lid on our unbounded egos and our destructive tendencies by keeping our numbers low.) You can’t say our lives were shorter when we still lived in the Garden: human life-spans and health, in fact, plummeted once we gave up being hunter-gatherers and switched to being sedentary farmers. Toiling away for 12-hour days doing back-breaking, repetitive work, these farmers were shorter, stupider (brain sizes have also been shrinking continuously for the last 10,000 years), and much more unhealthy than their hunter-gatherer predecessors. But the excess food the farmers grew allowed them to out-reproduce their hunter-gatherer competition (much like how all the superstitious and religious are going to replace us secularists and atheists since the former have many times more children than the latter).

I know it’s just a fantasy, but when we were hunter-gatherers, we only had to work a few hours a day for food and shelter. And for the rest of the day, we could spend our time doing a variety of creative activities, like making art and music, dancing, as well as tripping our balls off on mushrooms while fucking like crazed weasels and experiencing spiritual ecstasy while communing with the gods! Unfortunately, like Pandora’s Box, once the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no going back to the Garden (to mix metaphors). The last 10,000 years since we invented farming has been a non- stop arms race and endless bloodbaths and war as the oligarchs and rulers (the tiny elite who benefitted from the wealth and technology generated because of farming) battled it out for who was richest and most powerful while the vast majority of farmers led miserable lives to support their rulers. (And what is capitalism and democracy now but warfare by other means?) And the future is going to be an exponentially faster technological arms-race (with a tiny band of ultra- wealthy, capitalist-elite rulers who will reap most of the benefits of the new technologies while the vast majority pay the environmental and social price to support the lifestyle of their rulers) until we completely destroy this planet and each other. I hope having Netflix was worth it!

In fact, I realize now, at the 11th hour, that all the time and effort I’ve put into arguing over politics in this document is a total waste of time. It would take 8 Earths just to provide the resources for the current 7 billion humans to live an American middle-class lifestyle. And it goes without say, but we only have one, finite Earth. We’ve already shot past the carrying capacity of the Earth beginning in the 1950’s; we’ve already blown past the point where multiple feedback loops, like melting permafrost, are going to produce a 4o to 6oC temperature rise in one hundred years; and this planet’s ecosystems are already on an unstoppable, collapsing trajectory. If you think today’s tribal conflicts and political squabbles over how to allocate resources are bad now, wait another century or two when our entire farming system collapses due to nutrient depletion, erosion, heat, and drought, and 6 billion people have to leave the cities and go forage for food or migrate from the equatorial regions made uninhabitable by global warming to the cooler polar regions. Or just wait until we have a 10- or 20-meter rise in sea levels, and another billion or two people have to migrate from low- laying regions. No wall will be able to stop that! Not to mention we’ll have a few more Fukuyama meltdowns and radioactive releases as interruptions to the power-grid caused by climate change fuck up these nuclear power-plants’ ability to cool off, that’s a guarantee. Even if we could figure out how to produce energy from fusion, it’s just a matter of time before capitalism uses up all that additional energy because of its need for continuous and exponential growth. Just look at how much of total global energy today is already being devoured by the exponentially rising levels of crypto- currency “mining” and storing the 33 trillion+ gigabytes of porn and cat videos on server-farms. This is called the Jevons paradox, which is the scientific effect that describes how any increase in the efficiency with which a resource is used results in an increase in the consumption of that resource. Another example: more efficient car engines didn’t mean our gas consumption decreased; rather, it just meant that cars got bigger and bigger over the last 20 years to take advantage of their increase in fuel efficiency, negating the benefits. It’s just as Marjorie Dawes said on Little Britain, “These new diet biscuits have half the calories of regular biscuits. And because they have half the calories, you can eat twice as much!” That’s capitalism in a nutshell!

Nope, I believe the only hope for humanity’s long-term survival, once it passes through the bottleneck of the upcoming ecological collapse, is if the human population eventually shrinks to about 500,000 and we revert to being hunter- gatherers again. After all, being hunter-gatherers is the only truly sustainable lifestyle we intelligent primates have ever successfully implemented; we survived for over 2 million years as hunter-gatherers vs only 10,000 years of farming- based civilizations, of which ALL have eventually collapsed due to ecological destruction. For humanity to survive on this planet, it must learn – voluntarily or not – to live within the limits imposed by the planet’s carrying capacity. Because I think all this talk about transforming capitalism into something sustainable (when all its ever done is to commit ecocide) is just stupid green-washing and also simply impossible, and all the belief in new technology saving us and this planet (when it was the technology that fucked everything up to begin with) is pure fantasy. The idea that we can geo-engineer our way out of this mess is pure hubris. There are plenty of excellent scientific sources to back me up. Just Google “overshooting global carrying capacity.” The only way you’re going to survive the upheavals, mass immigrations, genocides, mass starvation, ecological collapse, and the subsequent rise of ultra-right fascist regimes in the former democracies is to move from the stage of denial you’re in now and to learn how to live with grief. Go watch some talks by the eco-theologian Michael Dowd on Youtube for some coping techniques. All I can say is: good luck, everyone! You’re going to need it!

35 Please forgive the hypocrisy of a person who died by gun violence deploring gun culture in America and the violence it produces. But I just have to call out the insanity of “stand your ground” laws and the lawlessness that results. Already in the last few years, we’ve seen how lonely, pathetic losers like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse get to use guns to threaten other people in racially-charged environments; then – if those threatened but unarmed people respond in any way other than complete submission and passivity – these white guys have the right to legally murder the people who challenge them. (There’s no doubt if Zimmerman or Rittenhouse were black, they most likely would have been shot dead by the police, or they’d be in jail right now.)

It’s all part of the violent, gun-loving cowboy culture that still pervades this country that worships phallic guns as totems of their toxic hyper-masculinitiy: vestiges of our colonial ancestors who used gun violence to frighten the Native Peoples of this continent off their lands, to kill those Natives that resisted, to violently put down slave revolts, to lynch uppity black folks during Jim Crow, to intimidate hippie protestors and other ne’er-do-wells today, and to make little men with little.... minds feel big about themselves. And I guess in the minds of these right-wing gun-worshippers that when God came down from the heavens to personally write the words of the Second Amendment, he also added an invisible exception clause to his “Thou Shalt Not Kill” Commandment to exclude people unfortunate to be killed by gun violence IF the shooter, in any way, feels “threatened.” (I’ve noticed how Christianists have conveniently changed this Commandment to “Thou Shalt Not Murder” now to assuage their guilt and moral responsibility for being meat-eaters, soldiers in wars, and believers in capital punishment.)

But I think you can draw a line from Jordon Peterson’s admonition for men to “use righteous anger” to “man up” and “get assertive” in defending their beliefs and lifestyle to T****’s aggressive and cruel rhetoric, which saw social norms and boundaries as “weakness” and “cowardliness,” to – with just a few more drops of testosterone – the masculine “aggressiveness” and “strength” that delusional Christianists believe is necessary to defend their “Judeo-Christian values” to the violence openly perpetuated by Rittenhouse and others and even to the violence threatened by crazed right-wing militias to “fend off the libruls’ and the government’s assaults on ma freedums!”

In fact, these killers have become convenient heroes in the minds of many right-wing Republicans. By suggesting Rittenhouse is a hero, the implication is that what he did was not a tragedy at all. It wasn’t a conflict gone lethally wrong, it was a good lethal conflict. The Rittenhouse verdict is a powerful symbol for the Right because he acted out a long-held fantasy: a man with his gun, standing up to the liberal hordes. That he was found not guilty is validation that fantasy could be made reality, a godsend to genuine extremists. These extremists see the Rittenhouse verdict as proof that they too can kill without legal consequence, as evidenced by their posts on Telegram, a secure messaging app popular with extremists, with one poster saying the verdict gives, “good Americans legal precedent and license to kill violent commies without worrying about doing life in prison if we defend ourselves in a riot.” A user on a chat room called “Warriors for America (Oath Keepers)” wrote that it was “open season on lib trash commies!” Rittenhouse has been “sanctified” by right-wing extremists, joining the ranks of mass shooters like the Christchurch, El Paso, and Norway shooters. This is where your love of guns and violence is heading, America. I’m sorry for you.

36  Oh gosh, how I hate sports, especially American football! I see football as an antiquated pagan spectacle, replete with all the ritual violence, prayers, tribalism, fitness displays, and competitive hyper-masculinity that our blood-thirsty ancestors craved. Like some kind of tribalistic mystery-cult rite of holy communion, the fans believe that their individual lives can also share in the glory of their team just by watching the game and wearing their team’s colors.

I think its the embodiment of everything that’s silly and stupid about humanity. All those millions of people pretending a bunch of padded lugs hitting each other (and taking boring one-minute breaks between each 10 seconds of play) means anything!!! Sports fans, can you please show me how your life is – in any material, insightful, or spiritual way – any better or worse if this team wins or this team looses? Can you please tell me what profound insights into the human condition you’ve gleaned by watching these games (besides the fact that the competition, violence, and zero-sum logic craved by our reptilian brains are still core values cherished by this society)? To me, it’s all pointless ephemera, a “bread and circus” distraction from things that actually matter. I think many people follow sports for the same reason they eat meat: they can’t bear the thought of missing out, sticking out, or being different from what their neighbors are doing. In fact, I think entire books could be written on the overlap in psychology between “liking sports” and “liking meat.” I’m pretty sure you could throw “liking guns” into the mix, too.

37  I tried for many years to used the tools of Buddhism, which emphasize meditation and a belief in detaching yourself from external sources of mental suffering. But unfortunately, either due to personal reasons (it’s hard to focus on meditation techniques when you are feeling anxious by life’s daily dramas) or my inability (due to my social anxieties) to find a group of practicing Buddhists to talk and meditate with, I never had any success with Buddhism in relieving my mental suffering. I also have read widely about the ancient school of Stoicism, which I found intellectually more appealing than Buddhism. The Stoics had a similar belief as the Buddhists about the need to detach yourself mentally from all external sources of suffering. And the most famous Stoics – Seneca the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius – maintained that death by one's own hand is always an option and frequently more honorable than a life of protracted misery.

38  Socrates may have said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." I'll tell you who wouldn't agree with him: people with unexamined lives. These blue-pill folks would argue their lives have been peachy-keen, that they've just blindly followed whatever society or their parents told them, and lo and behind, things turned out pretty much just like their parents promised. Since they reached the goals their parents or society set out for them, they'd probably say their lives have been totally worth living.

But the people like me – the red-pill types who examine and re-examine every facet of our lives, who mull over every value and every decision we've ever made – are the ones who always wonder if we've screwed something up when we realize how far we've fallen short of their goals. We’re the ones whose lives feels unsatisfying or unhappy because we haven't measured up to our potential. We’re the ones that have no way of knowing if our goals or our potential were ever even possible, given that we've jettisoned 9/10 of what society taught us after realizing most of it was BS or based on a bunch of lies. And so I have to ask myself, "Was trying to lead an examined life worth it?"

I was just thinking today that this is one of the most basic cleaves between liberals and conservatives: the cleave between those who are willing to accept things as they are vs. those who are willing to question the received wisdom, knowledge, history, rules and social and economic systems of our parents and the society that raised us. For liberals, questioning authority, exploring past sins of our history and culture or the hypocrisies between what we claim to believe in and how we’ve acted, questioning the fairness of our economic systems, and then trying to FIX or atone for these problems is one of the most essential goals in political life. For conservatives, it’s the opposite. They cling desperately (I would argue childishly) to the received wisdom, history, economic systems, religion, and beliefs of their parents or nation, and they react bitterly and defensively when past sins or shortcomings are exposed. To conservatives, there’s a persistent belief in a “Golden Age” in the past, when everyone knew their place and nobody questioned things and everyone was supposedly happy and content (usually the “Golden Age” happened around 1950). And conservatives react with anger or fear to any attempts to change any of those systems they grew up in. Unless, of course, the change is imposed on them by capitalism or its rulers, the givers of their identity and their place in the social hierarchy. If there’s money involved, strangely, then corporate-caused change becomes “something we have to accept. We have no choice.” Or the conservatives will start lashing out by scapegoating and blaming the wrong people for their feelings of angst, like the non-existent threats of CRT or phantom Marxists running the corporations, when it’s really capitalism itself that’s causing their angst. See note 24.

So anyway, if you decide to examine your own life and the received wisdom of your parents and society and end up rejecting most of their goals, rules, and values, that means you’ve got to develop some of your own. I’ve done my best all my life to try to escape nihilism, the idea that there is no purpose or meaning to life. After all, you know what the Dude had to say about Uli Kunkel, the nihilist who didn’t believe in anything:

Oh, that must be exhausting. ~ The Dude, The Big Lebowski

But honestly, developing your own opinions, world view, and values is fucking exhausting too! I have done my best to develop a coherent value system and try to make decisions about my life based on those values. Unfortunately, at this late stage in life, I have found it practically impossible to stay true to those values without facing extreme ostracism from most of society, extreme poverty from a lack of interest or motivation in participating in a capitalistic society I find immoral, uncaring, and unchangeable, and the extreme mental suffering that comes from seeing so much needless selfishness and stupidity in a cold, indifferent, callous, violent society. Maybe if I had better mental health (including the social skills, social IQ, and social network I never developed), things would have turned out differently.

39  Or maybe I’ve just got brain damage to the orbitofrontal cortex section of my brain, which helps represent value and reward in the mind, and is known to be dysfunctional in depressed patients. I say this because I don’t relate at all to most of society’s values, and I do not respond to society’s normal rewards. But I’m just not prepared to spend years – if not decades – more in this current sorry and excruciating mental state, where my own values are so out-of-synch with the rest of the world’s.

40 Please go listen to Bjork’s excellent Biophilia album. Biophilia is the human tendency to interact or be closely associated with other forms of life in nature, or the human desire or tendency to commune with nature. “Biophilia” was coined by the Harvard naturalist, Dr. Edward O. Wilson, to describe what he saw as humanity's "innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes," to be drawn toward nature, and to feel an affinity, love, or craving for nature. It’s not a religion, per se, as it only describes a natural human emotion, like compassion and empathy.

I first experienced these feelings of biophilia as a kid when I had pets. I remember dropping a pet turtle when I was in grade 1 or so. The turtle died. I was heart-broken. I remember watching a cartoon on TV in grade 1 or 2 about carrier pigeons; how there used to be millions of them blanketing the sky; how white colonizers slaughtered them en masse, and how they were subsequently made extinct by human greed and avarice. The voiceover said, “Once there were millions. Then there were hundreds, then dozens. Then there was one. And now there are none.” This really disturbed me greatly. I also remember watching a TV show about the same time about adopting puppies. I still remember the tune and lyrics of the song used in this show, “It takes a lot love! It takes a lot of love!” That love and compassion between the humans and puppies really made me cry. I remember how fascinated I was by the pet parakeets I had later in elementary school; the wonder I felt by the birds’s sleek, perfectly adapted physiology and feathers would later grow into a fascination with wild birds. I remember I traced and labeled hundreds of birds from a National Geographic book of North American birds. Even today I can recall the names of dozens of these wild birds. I should have become an ornithologist, I guess. It’s too bad I always had panic attacks in science class. Later, I would find things like gardening and getting my hands dirty by digging in the dirt a deeply spiritual experience, which would grow into a love of plants and the wild woods where I would spent the last year of my life. And I’ll never forget that psychological and emotional breakthrough I had when I realized there was no difference between me, my pet dogs or parrots, and the pigs and chickens that people routine slaughter. Now, the fields I once played in as a child with my friend, Wilson Miles, are now covered over with hideous sidewalks, asphalt parking lots, and abominable warehouses and chain restaurants. I want to cry when I think of all the nature that was destroyed for these “developments.”

Just like our empathy and compassion forms the emotional basis of our moral reasoning skills, biophilia forms the basis of our spiritual impulse to worship nature, the religion of our ancient ancestors and of our Indigenous brethren that conceived of the relationship between humans and nature as being “I-thou,” not “I-it.” When I’m out on my walks in nature, I think of our ancestors and how they must have experienced feelings of awe, of the divine, of the sacredness of the nature around them, and, I presume, of each other, especially when under the influence of various natural psychotropics similar to the man-made ecstasy I used to take. We’ve lost most of that ability to experience the divine ever since we’ve “conquered” nature, first through farming and later by our technological revolution, which was intensified and reified by capitalism. Capitalism, of course, suppresses this natural human emotion of biophilia as well as our impulse to worship nature, as it requires all of nature to be objectified and commodified. In fact, one of the main reasons I insist on walking is because I want to reclaim my freedom to walk this Earth, just like every human did for millions of years before the capitalists divided the world with roads and fences and required us to buy a car just to get from A to B. In tandem with capitalism, the shitty, monotheistic sky-god religions of our bronze- and iron-age past have further diminished our ability to experience the divine in nature by removing God from creation and exiling Him to the remote heavens, detached from His clock-work universe. And materialist Marxism is just as guilty as the Christianist capitalists in imposing this anthropocentric view of nature as spiritless material for human profit and benefit and a waste- dump for our garbage. Because we’ve lost the ability to conceive, experience, and worship the divine in nature, because we’re so cut off from nature physically as well as spiritually, because our society is ordered around an anthropocentric rather than eco-centric moral viewpoint, millions of office workers and city dwellers – who spend hours of each day in soul-crushing commutes and who spend their lives in sterile, sexless office space while they busily commodify and destroy the nature we once worshiped – feel empty, depressed, anxious, or are willing to fall for cheap spiritual substitutes and trivial views of the divine.

What happened to this song we once knew so well?

Signed promise for moments caught within the spell

I must have waited all my life for this moment, moment

The future poised with the splendor just begun

The light we were as one

And crowded through the curtains of liquid into sun

And for a moment when our world had filled the skies

Magic turned our eyes

To feast on the treasure set for our strange device. ~ Yes, “The Revealing Science of God”

Current mainstream religions are just coping mechanisms, the snake-oil that reassures you that capitalism and your middle-class existence is theologically tolerable and morally acceptable. What we need is, as the eco-theologian Michael Dowd has described, a new religion that combines our knowledge of nature from science with our innate and natural desire and need to worship nature, a “sacred realism,” or “religious naturalism,” or “evidential mysticism.” This new religion would, by necessity for the future of a healthy, sustainable society, function as a control mechanism which would insist on honoring human limits and the Earth’s natural carrying capacity. The credo of this new eco-theology would go something like this:

* Reality is my God.

* Evidence is my scripture.

* The Epic of Evolution is my Creation Story.

* Ecology is my Theology.

* Living within nature’s limits is my Spiritual Path.

* Promoting faithfulness to the future health of Gaia and to a sustainable society is my Mission.

41  I’ve uploaded a copy of this document on my blog at https://ericpickett.blogspot.com. Since I have made the ultimate blasphemy of making a rational argument for suicide, I predict this document will be quickly erased from all the various locations I’ve stored it on. Apparently the arguments are really compelling!

42  I’m really glad I got live out my retirement year during this brief, two-year “interregnum” period during which the sane, half-way moral people were still in charge of this country, and before the hordes of pro-fascist fanatics continue their Second Counter-Reformation by voting their way back into power (just like Hitler, Putin, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsonaro, Fujimori, Peron, Chavez, etc. and their supporters all started their autocratic rise to power by winning elections, sometimes after several attempts). And as they’ve already demonstrated, if they lose at the ballet box, they’re more than willing to suppress turnout of the opposition/ empower their state legislatures or partisan hacks to change the vote outcomes/ get their next VP to reject certain states’ electors/ riot their way back into power.

Every nation gets the government it deserves. ~ Joseph de Maistre

But even if only a few of my fears or predications I’ve made in the document come true, I can only wish my family and friends the best of luck. You’re going to need it.

43  I’ve never been happier and more content than this last week of my life. There’s something about knowing this is the last time you’ll see a sunset, bask in a waterfall, or watch an amazing Japanese butoh dance on Youtube that makes you appreciate just how unspeakably beautiful life is.

It’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst......and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it. And then it flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid... little... life. ~ Lester Burnham, American Beauty

44  I have not used the word “literally” incorrectly in this entire document. Every time this past year I’ve heard someone say something like, “I literally just posted my selfie on Instagram,” I’ve wanted to scream and tell them to get a clue. Not literally get a clue, but figuratively. So you’re welcome. And I’m glad I’ll never have to be tortured (figuratively, not literally) by this word’s misuse again. :-)

45  I came up with labelling my Endnotes with “My Meta-Thoughts” months before Zuckerburg announced anything about his “Metaverse.” So my label has no connection what-so-ever to his shit. I’m sorry there’s so much crap in these Endnotes about politics. Apparently, POCD (Political Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) is a genetic trait that has been passed down the male line in the Pickett family for the past three generations, much to my general bane and dismay. 

The sum of most of my thoughts in 51,220 words. And that, after only 47 weeks of writing. What a hardy-ass cracker! 

Don’t know where else to put these lyrics, so I’ll end the Endnotes with this, from one of my favorite songs:

And yesterday I saw you standing by the river, 

And weren't those tears that filled your eyes,

And all the fish that lay in dirty water dying,

Have they got you hypnotized?

And yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers,

But all that lives is born to die.

And so I say to you that nothing really matters,

And all you do is stand and cry.

I don't know what to say about it,

When all your ears have turned away,

But now's the time to look and look again at what you see, Is that the way it ought to stay?

That's the way...

That's the way it oughta be

Oh don't you know now.

Mama said, that's the way it's gonna stay, yeah.

Mama said, mama said...

That's the way it's gonna stay.... ~ Led Zeppelin, “That’s The Way”