The Epic Human Journey Part 3: Endless Summer

Journal of the Mental Environment

Can a New Generation of Whistleblowers Set Us Free?

A Reboot of the Capitalist Imagination

The Epic Human 3: Journey Part s es Endl Summer

Non-Western Modernity

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The latest study of global temperature records, which date 11,000 years back to now, show that our planet is currently heating up fifty times faster than it has at any point during human civilization.

The one-degree Celsius rise in temperature we've endured so far was enough to start melting the Arctic. So we have to now ask ourselves, what will further increases bring?

Sea levels continue to rise as populations boom and declining water reserves desiccate agriculture. Meanwhile, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson recently announced that the company will be doubling the acreage it is currently exploring in search of more oil. The latest oil find in California was reported to be four times larger than the new oil patch in North Dakota. And in Australia, a new find of shale oil in the Arckaringa Basin of even greater size than the Alberta tar sands was estimated to contain recoverable reserves worth upward of $20 trillion.

The fossil fuel industry has enough clout to demolish all reason.

Despite the math, the evidence, the common sense, and the warnings, no real climate legislation has been passed by US Congress. A few countries are facing the music, like Germany who now harnesses 22 percent of its energy from renewable resources and is aiming toward 40 percent within the decade.

But almost everywhere else the fossil fuel industry prevails by funding disinformation campaigns and by paying off enough legislators to make sure the status quo continues to deliver them billions off the back of the planet.

This status quo will, if left untouched, lead to millions of displaced peoples. Waves of environmental refugees will head towards the northern regions as conditions in the south continue to worsen. Security will flail and crumble. We are entering a long period of global desperation . . . the world as we know it is toast.

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Our present age is the final act of the modern obsession with the promise of more. The desire for increase was the impulse at the heart of Caesar Augustus, the Mongol conquest of Asia, the Bantu migration in Central Africa, the rise of the Aztec and Inca kingdoms in the Americas, the British Empire and the current American and Chinese century. At the end of every battle was the promise of pillage. Battle now, get paid later. This makes empire financially possible. It is the identical philosophy of the “buy now, pay later” and “zero-percent-down” schemes so ubiquitous throughout the West. The relationship between empire and pillage has changed little, save for the fact that the ability to exploit nature has now outpaced humanity’s ability to exploit one another (though it hasn't replaced it). Where there is a center, there must also be a frontier to feed the center. This translates into a new set of mutually dependent entities: where there is a shopping mall, there must be a factory; where there is energy, there must be ecocide; where there is health, there must be sickness; where there is consumption, there must be waste; where there is pristine, there must be polluted; where there is progress, there must be regression and desire. This material reality has a mental parallel. Within each of us there is also an insatiable thirst for increase and abundance. This is fueled by advertising, propaganda and, increasingly, selfdelusion. This internalized graph of progress, one that points exponentially up, governs our relationships, our careers, our sex lives, our friendships, our families, our waste lines, our jobs, our purchasing, our houses, our cars, our travels … everything.

According to this way of thinking, satisfaction is a sign of weakness. Poverty is a sign of laziness and ineptitude. Wealth is a sign of attraction and prowess. This new moral compass of modernity, the consciousness of our world today, is dependent on a single paradoxical truth: infinite growth.

-Darren Fleet

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AFP Photo / Angelos Tzortzinis

Hey all you wild spirits out there,

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What can we make of the beating heart of Gezi Park, the blood soaked Taksim concrete, the barricades of Beşiktaş, the flurry of insurrections popping up everywhere . . . in Chile, Mexico, Bulgaria and Brazil?

One thing: people in droves are waking up to the fact that the ideology of capitalism is bunk, that it’s a fundamentally broken and irreparable system that does not deliver on any of its promises . . . and the dream of a coordinated worldwide uprising, a reboot of the capitalist imagination—a Global Spring—is morphing into reality before our eyes.

A major tactical breakthrough occurred last June in the searing Brazilian heat. For the first time since the youth of Athens exploded ten years ago, an active feedback loop developed between a government and the street. The crowds, the masses, the multitudes, the people, spoke . . . and for the first time a sitting President responded with ears instead of grapeshot.

Imagine if President Obama had actually dropped by Zuccotti Park two years ago to greet the protesters face to face. Where would America be today? Yet this is exactly what the protesters in São Paulo, Rio and Belo Horizonte pulled off by getting President Dilma Rousseff to talk to them and listen to her heart over the glitching, cold brain of the national coffers and megacorporations. This new tactic bodes well for the future. Instead of just projecting anger and being met with force, as we’ve largely done in the past, we nurture effective communication loops with the authorities, the bureaucracies, the presidents, the prime ministers, the militaries, the spy centers, the media. We construct a dynamic cultural and policymaking loop of ongoing, permanent, street-fueled transformation . . .

AFP Photo / Angelos Tzortzinis

The other tactic we noticed working on the streets of Istanbul and São Paulo is that protesters are finally not just targeting sites and symbols of government power, but corporate shops, signs, logos and ATMs. This heralds a strategic awakening among protesters about what really drives our current global system—that it’s not so much the governments, but the transnational megacorporations with their private armies of lawyers and lobbyists that actually call the policy shots and get governments to dance to their tune. The lesson for the future is clear: redirect your rage!

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As the second anniversary of Occupy approaches, one thing is becoming crystal clear: the corpocapitalist doomsday machine has never been so vulnerable, so weak, so ripe for the picking.

Dare to dance without knowing the next step . . . and then begin to move, spontaneously to the beat, with others . . . for the wild, Kalle Lasn

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wu

wei

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No language on earth

except the two-thousandyear-old Classical Chinese script has the words to describe “wu wei,” awkwardly translated as “not trying” or “not doing.” Do not be misconceived, wu wei is not placid inaction nor contemplative stasis, but the elusive genius of improvisation that jazz musicians speak of—that effortless, spontaneous, unselfconscious action that gives way to brilliance, precision, power and radiance.

Not through effort, straining or striving will this elusive and desirable state-ofbeing be attained. The experience of Wu-Wei blends the feelings of ease and joy amidst the process of creating a masterpiece, solving a complex problem or even bringing the entire world into harmonious order. Wu-Wei is embodied and effortless; one can dance through obstacles and move through the physical and social world in a way that is wholly instinctual and yet fully in harmony with the proper order of natural and human realms.

When in this state of body-being-consciousness, an otherwise mundane task becomes an artistic performance. The signet of true knowledge is the ability to instantly and spontaneously slip into the state of Wu-Wei, just as naturally as the instinctive grace with which the body gives way to the seductive rhythm of a song.

Beyond individualism, beyond duality —wu wei is the embodied alternative to the modern West’s ideals of rationality and linearity. This instinctual model for the self offers a potent balm to Western philosophy’s exclusive focus on abstract logic and conscious control, and its belief in the superiority of the intellect and the fundamental separation of mind from body and environment. Unlike the concepts of “going with the flow,” “being in the zone” or “playing jazz,” wu wei is essentially a religious concept; it is the experience of being absorbed and contained in something larger than oneself, something with inimitable value, something whole.

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Wu wei preoccupied the minds of premodern China’s greatest thinkers, from Confucius and Xunzi to Mencius, Zhuangzi and Laozi, who all lived and taught during the so-called “Warring States” period between 5th-3rd century BCE—a time of massive social chaos, political upheaval and not coincidentally, religious and philosophical breakthroughs that led to the founding of all the major schools of Chinese thought—from Confucianism to Daoism.

The paradox of “trying not to try”—how do we get into this state when all conscious effort will contaminate it—was a dire problem for these thinkers because it held the secret key not just to personal transformation but to political, religious, social and interpersonal harmony and cohesion.

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Reverse Capitalist Logic

Jonas Loiske

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it is on planned obsolescence and credit, as well as financing projects, inventors’products and initiatives that will have a bearing on this change in the current socio-economic system, and that will benefit the whole of society.

Nowadays, the big corporations try to cover up or hide these initiatives.

What guarantees does your light bulb offer that those currently being made do not?

To begin with, we offer a guarantee of 25 years, and that’s if it stays on 24 hours a day.

Has the general public taken to this light bulb?

Benito Muros is one of the only businessmen in the world who hasn’t accepted planned obsolescence– the policy developed by many large multinational companies worldwide that aims to create products that cease to become functional after a period of time predetermined by the company . . . all of this so that the product must be purchased again.

In order to show that there are other ways to consume, Muros has created an everlasting light bulb and established the SOP Movement (Sin Obsolescencia Programada = Without Planned Obsolescence).

He insists that if products were created to last, then a market for secondhand goods would emerge, giving people employment in repairs instead of in the production and manufacturing of endlessly new products, which generates waste that pollutes the environment.

How did you react against this economic reality and start your obsolescence-free company OEP Electrics?

When it occurred to me that, with the then-existing technology, a light bulb could be made to last 100 years, I thought why not now? It was then that I began to look into why there are now all kinds of electronic devices that have an increasingly short lifespan.

The bulb is well accepted when we go to the customer directly. But we have had many problems, especially initially, getting it accepted by distributors.

We just signed an agreement with a company in keeping with the principles of the SOP movement, which is going to take charge of the commercialization of our products.

We trust that their help will open more doors for us so that we can bring our products to many more people.

Do you agree with Bernard London, who created planned obsolescence in 1932, that the fault for falls in consumption lies with those who don’t buy and not with the model of production?

Bernard London came up with that concept at the time when there was no research into the planet’s resources and their exhaustion. This is really important now, because we know that the world’s resources are not infinite, therefore we cannot continue to make things as if they were.

Forcing them to cut costs for the rights that took people years to achieve, rights as basic as health and education.

Only we ourselves can make the push towards this necessary change, as has always been the case. That is what we are aiming for with the SOP movement, a peaceful mobilization of people towards that change so that we may have a sustainable and logical economic model to manage our planet’s resources. There are alternatives. There is time, and therefore hope.

Miriam Valero is a journalist at UK-based multicultural journal, The Prisma. This article was published by The Prisma (theprisma.co.uk) on June 10, 2012.

And that’s how the SOP Movement began?

Yes. It started with the aim of making people aware of the need to change the current economic system, based as

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What you seeing lately?

Figure or context?

Quick, before you start thinking about it, ask yourself: what did you notice immediately when looking at these images? Did you notice the airplanes? Or did the variations of landscape and weather strike you?

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Surface or depth?

Several studies performed in the cutting edge field of crosscultural psychology found that given an image of a figure in a context, people from Asia tend to focus on context while Westerners tend to focus on the figure. A 2007 collaboration between University of Illinois psychology professor Denise Park and Michael Chee of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory in Singapore was the first study to confirm that culture shapes the brain, not so much in structural changes, but at the level of perception.

The two scientists and their team ran an array of cognitive tests on 37 young and old East Asians, and 37 young and old Westerners using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanners. Their analysis found tantalizing cultural differences in how adult brains respond to visual stimuli.

When the adult Singaporeans were shown a series of pictures (see images to the left ) with a change of figure from lion to elk to ram to ostrich—their fMRIs indicated no change in brain activity. However, when this same group was shown a series of images, each of which contained a uniform figure appearing in different landscapes, the change of context corresponded to fluctuations of brain activity. Author Gish Jen references this study in her recent book, Tiger Writing, which combines cross-cultural studies, autobiography and literary analysis to explore the differences between East and West in areas such as selfconstruction, narrative style, art and culture. Jen makes an astute observation about this study, clarifying that although the Singaporeans’ fMRIs did finally change when they were asked explicitly to pay attention to the figure, their innate habit was still “to focus on what Westerners tend to think of as the background—the very word background suggesting how it is conceived.”

Of course people from Asian countries notice the figure; it is simply not the locus of their gaze or attention because the figure does not stand out to them. For those reared in the West, the figure pops out immediately, whereas for those raised in Asian countries, the figure and context form an indivisible unit—the halmark of holistic perception.

Westerners, as Jen observes, have a tendency to “isolate the figure, perceiving it as wholly independent of, and eminently divorceable from, its surroundingss—a difference that seems to me to inform our respective views of justice and responsibility, as well as our approaches to illness and medicine, and that may also have contributed to the longheld perception of Asians as possessing an ancient wisdom.”

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REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

BUSINESS AS USUAL Laughter is unlikely to be the best medicine. Our current condition requires a much deeper surgery than that. The synapses within the brain of progress are firing ever quicker. Nations and cities rise and fall in decades, not centuries. The line between exuberant success and irrational failure is razor thin. The margins of prosperity and default can change in an instant. Lehman Brothers was given an AAA rating the day before bankruptcy. Ireland was the first economic miracle of the 21st century before its spectacular implosion. The Black-Scholes proof won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1997, the father of the derivative, only to be revealed a decade later as the most destructive mathematics equation since Enrico Fermi’s schematics for the nuclear bomb. Within this catastrophic balance rests not only the future of human civilizations, but also the very fate of Earths’ biological systems. The order of the global

economic household has been flipped upon its head. The original meaning of the study of economics, oikos (household) and nomos (law), has been lost. What can be said of a civilization where oil spills can yield a profit and freestanding forests become a detriment to economic growth? What can be said of a world where the response to dwindling fish stocks is bigger nets and bigger boats? In a time of unprecedented human wealth, we now face the unprecedented threat of global ecological collapse. We need to ask ourselves how our understanding of household management got so abstracted from reality?

- Darren Fleet

Nationa

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REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Monsanto uses the same business logic as a crack dealer. In India, the company targets impoverished smallcrop farmers with their wares, saying they have a product that will take all of their pains away. Drought. Low yields. Poor fertilization. Small profits. All solved with one simple terminator seed. These uneducated farmers naively trust this fancy newcomer, who comes to the village with flashy gadgets and modern apparel.

Some even praise the newcomer for allowing them to take the first “hit” of GMO seeds on the house. Soon after, when the new Monsanto crop comes in, they find that the soil has been stripped of its nutrients and that the GMO plants don’t bear any seeds. Now they’re hooked, but the seeds are no longer free of charge.

With no money to pay the dealer for a new round of seed and fertilizer, and no more healthy soil to grow traditional crops in, the farmers can’t feed their families or maintain their meager lives. A rapid downward spiral of desperation ensues. Many find that suicide is the only answer. In fact, there is a region of India now called the “suicide belt” because of the many farmers killing themselves for this very reason. The dealers have the countryside by the balls.

National Geographic, Steven Raymer

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a new generation OF whistleblowers

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Here’s a scary thought. What if PRISM is just the tip of the iceberg? A trial run. A mock deployment to work out the glitches of a system ten times more Orwellian than what we’re seeing now. Think for a moment that the security interests behind these programs are not simply arrogant.

What if they’re acting out of real fear? Ponder the possibility that they’re putting these first tentative boots on the ground because they know that when climate disruption seriously hits the fan, surveillance, information and intelligence will be the only thing separating the cowering elites from the starving horde. In this scenario, the Timothy McVeigh’s, the Osama bin Laden’s, the terrorist Chechnya brothers, will become retrospective chicken feed compared to what the surveillance state really fears—those who threaten to tackle the ideology of corporate capitalism and the God of economic growth that has pushed human civilization to the brink of survival. Think journalists. Think climate scientists. Think activists. Think environmentalists. Think you. If you’ve experienced an internet disruption lately, chances are it wasn’t on account of the weather.

democracy, a new type of heroic myth, but instead he chose the gutless route. His only reprieve is that the people themselves don’t seem to mind. Weak leader. Weak people. It’s hard to tell who leads whom anymore.

America has truly become a nation of sheep . . . a nation of people too fat to fight and too chicken-shit to speak-up.

Trust the shepherd. He’ll lead us to pasture. They’d rather shut their eyes and close their ears so long as the HBO keeps running and the Super Big Gulps keep flowing.

Is this really how the American Revolution ends, a revolution that despite all of its contradictions and bullshit inspired the world for two hundred years? What the hell ever happened to the spirit of Nathan Hale—my only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country?

You at the CIA! You at the NSA! You at the White House!

You in the Armed Forces! You at the IRS! You at Goldman Sachs! You hiding behind that computer screen, that algorithm, that drone, that computer program, that security clearance . . . you can’t hide anymore.

WILL set us free!

Google and Facebook sold us out. The information society turned against us. The dream of being connected is suddenly dystopic. The virtual commons is more closed than the real one ever was. And it is becoming clearer and clearer that open source technology will not be enough to save us. Our social networks have been infiltrated. Our short time with the upper hand has been called. Totalitarian states around the globe are waking up to the fact that if you really want to stay one step ahead, you don’t suppress communication, instead you empower communication with gadgets and free Wi-Fi and listen in. And now we’re all walking around with personal surveillance devices in our pockets, smartphones which we voluntarily fill with every single detail of our lives. If we’re going to win the webgame back, we’re going to need whistleblowers more than ever. In fact, we’ll need a global army of insiders courageous enough to turn the lights on at the black box.

9/11 exploded the myth of American military might. Now Snowden has exposed the soft underbelly of the surveillance state. If you have a drop of human blood left in your veins, surely what you’re doing eats away at you the very same way that it ate away at him. It’s time to wake up.

You’re on the wrong side of history. There is no “just following orders” anymore. America is at a crossroads and you’re standing right in the middle of it.

First one. Then five. Then hundreds. Then thousands. Then too many to prosecute. Then a new American Revolution.

Then America saves itself.

What’s it going to be America? Are you really just a nation of obese amoeba’s, cowering in line, saying baaaaaaaaaahhhh like the rest, waiting to be sheared?

Or are you a nation of heroes?

The last remnants of hope that America could somehow move beyond its brutal military megalomania died when Obama gave a thumbs-up to the most sophisticated domestic surveillance apparatus in human history. He had a chance to side with Snowden, to side with a new radical

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Shining Eyes

Media NINJA

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Sure they’re fickle when they rage about somebody fucking with their status update, their timeline and their tweets, but I like this Facebook generation nonetheless. They’re connected. They don’t want anybody to represent them. You don’t fuck with the back button of their lives. Their browser is their browser. Their networks are holy.

They don’t really know about the 60s and 70s dictatorship. They strut down avenues named after generals and torturers without a thought. And that’s okay. They’ve got their eyes on the future.

This might be the first generation on Earth that’s looking only to the horizon. Some people fear that. They think it’s foolish. I don’t.

I think they’re finally living what we’ve fought for so long to let go of. They will never be as young as they are today.

The conditions in the slums of Brazil are some of the worst in the world. There’s a lot of third world shit here. The protest might have started about transit prices but it ain’t about that now.

We’re here because for the first time we can feel the new way of being beating in our veins. Eduardo Galeano said this shitty world is pregnant with another. I can taste it. I can feel it. I can even say that I’ve seen it.

He wasn’t more than 14 or 15. We were marching in São Paulo after dark. There were hundreds of thousands of us. This city is a jungle of concrete built for cars. To be walking in the middle of the road with the faded white stripes under our sneakers, rush hour on a Monday night, singing songs, that was something.

“Man, what a beautiful world we live in,” he said.

It’s something you feel when the lover in your arms is laughing and you feel like your heart is gonna break because there couldn’t possibly be any more room for good inside. The high begins to float you away. We were walking to the govenor’s house, taking time along the way to talk, look at people waving white flags from apartment windows, listen to chants coming and going like waves in this sea of people. I looked into this kids eyes. He kept talking but I only remember those eight words.

I was mesmerized by the shine is his eyes. Sparks. Flashes.

Pulses. Bursts of light.

When the global revolution finally arrives . . . it’s going to shine everywhere like that.

Pedro Inoue

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