Hi Tal,

The more I have considered the situation, the more I suspect that it is necessary we go through a breakdown of the current system that necessitates transition to a new societal infrastructure, based on ecological design principles and equitable distribution of wealth across the entire global population. 

I have just finished Antonio Negri's "The Politics of Subversion," in which he argues that the essential lesson of the Twentieth Century is that "Capitalism is impossible," and not reformable. The failure of the New Deal and the Great Society revealed the impossibility of capitalism, and Empire, and now we are experiencing its prolonged death rattle.

The question of how are we as individuals going to survive the increasingly volatile crises of the next few years is, of course, an interesting one. I suppose it would not be illogical to find access to high land that is arable and has its own water supply. The people who are going to be in the best situation to deal with this are indigenous people such as the Mazatec Indians in the mountains of Oaxaca and the Maya in remote areas of Guatemala. 

A friend of mine went with Alberto Villoldo recently to Peru to speak with Incan elders, who are now coming forth with their own 2012 prophecies. When one of them was asked about what was going to happen in 2012, he said, "Well, we are going to miss our white brother."

 When we look at how disconnected most Americans have become from natural systems and how passified we are by a mass media created by a dominator control culture, I can see that the elder may have a point. However, in the brief time that remains to those of us who are now awakening, we can hope to spread the awareness as far as it is possible to spread it, to reduce the consequences of the destructive processes that have been unleashed by the "predator virus" of Empire. 

I still hold out the hope for a highly concentrated and accelerated transformation of global consciousness - a "fall of the Berlin Wall" scenario on the level of the collective psyche - that will usher in a new era at a speed that seems unimaginable to us now. You can feel the energy of consciousness somehow gathering force even beneath the incredible idiocy that is mostly apparent to us.

"Will the transformation."-Rilke

This topic Daniel Pinchbeck has stated is one I am in agreement; those who refuse to grasp and learn how the world economy works are victims of ‘the three card trick’ that street hustlers have used in the past. Today’s economy ‘street hustlers’ work with the guile that people today are too busy to see how the new updated ‘hustle’ is being used.

On Daniel’s web site Breaking Open the Head there is a topic called ‘Big Bump in the Road’. http://www.breakingopenthehead.com/forum/showthread.php?p=33122#post33122

This is a small primer on how ‘the three card trick’ is being used today.

We are truly at a fork in the road on one side the road continues to the cliff’s edge and the other road leads to our understanding of our place on planet Earth.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

T. S. Eliot

AstralGlamBoy wrote:  While I agree a collapse would certainly expedite change, some environmentalists think that such a collapse would be incredibly bad for the environment because it would unleash an all or nothing grab for resources. Without a power grid, for example, forests will be shredded.

This is something that has been on my mind recently. A serious socio-economic collapse could have disastrous effects on ecosystems. The last thing we need are liberated 'cavemen' charging around hurling sharpened golf clubs at anything that looks consumable. I wonder though if this 'dominator' model might be based on capitalist assumptions. If the capitalist has so obviously and publicly blown it, maybe he'll just sit in the corner and weep, while others with more realistic models kindly brew tea for him...without murdering trees. The jury is out.

Interestingly related perhaps, an evolutionary theorist is dreaming of or channelling ideas of population bifurcation. Here's a choice morsel from the bbc webgrove:

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6057734.stm   

Anyway, I feel that we will indeed experience a "fall of the Berlin wall" moment, as Daniel puts it. I expect it to be a close run thing however, testing our boundaries of trust and fear. As Omar Khayam (I think) notes, "a hair's breadth separates the false from the true."

We are all the magical elusive 100th monkey. Clarity of intention and vision will burn away the fogs of fear that the blind and dumb black magicians in the boardrooms are pumping out into our minds.

Political processes are deeply compromised - nation state democracy is a puppet show that ignores our delighted applause. I suspect that McKenna was right: only a revival of shamanism can have the necessary rapid transformative effect on western society that will circumvent a collapse. The birth of this new being began perhaps a hundred years ago, but only recenty has it begun to speak with many voices (and this website would be one of the first boards on the vocal wave.) There is a very old and very wise and very strange being in speech.

Also, I wonder sometimes if all the weird and violent  applications of technology we are seeing will be suddenly supplanted by a radical refreshing of that original and still most powerful technology, language. The human voice box may be the only tool we need.

Indeed, maybe the human imagination is a truth machine, and language, that divine spark of the logos, is where it will be decided whether we are diabolic or symbolic beings.

Hi Antonio,

A comment on your comment: Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine discusses Milton Friedman, who apparently realized that when there is a huge crisis, the ideas that get used are the ones that are available, "lying around." We can see that crisis is approaching on a mega-scale, but at the moment the only ideas lying around are the NeoCon and Neoliberal ideas that got us into this mess. Therefore we - the Left - need to have a full set of offerings available for an alternative social paradigm, and also have those ideas marketed in media-friendly form as shit hits fan. This was my purpose with my last attempt to start a media and network company, and remains my purpose here.

Part of the problem is that we don't have a compelling model of societal redesign mapped out. My perspective seems to be becoming increasingly extreme and socialistic as I think through these issues. I agree with Fuller that the goal is to create a "win win" situation for global humanity, and that is now going to take a massive redistribution of resources, along with a transformative shift in consciousness and understanding.

I am thinking a lot lately about the "production of subjectivities," which Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt discuss at length. The production of subjectivities is the most important form of production in our postmodern world. That is why control of the media and the education system is so critical for the dominator system. The media is where capitalist "subjectivity" is reinforced, and creates a context where class consciousness and class solidarity is hidden.

Why is Bush against the child health care bill? One reason has to do with the way that class consciousness is currently suppressed, by creating an apartheid-like system where there is a large (ever-growing, these days) excluded group. What is excluded is kept out of discourse, but haunts every aspect of our social world. The political framing that allows for millions (billions, worldwide, living on $1 or $2 per day) of excluded subjects masks the exploitation that has engineered this situation.

The question is whether the accelerating crises will lead to a further regression of consciousness or an empathic opening to the excluded others (humans and species) across the world. I feel the battle zone, right now, is the media and new tools such as this one, that could allow for a different type of subjectivity to emerge. Small groups can be "tipping points" that influence and transform vast social processes.

"Will the transformation."-Rilke

Antonio,

In his great book, "The Spell of the Sensuous", David Abrams develops the thesis that the origin of our current crisis is based in the shift from direct participation in sensuous reality to abstracted intellectualized perception that had its origins in the construction of an alphabet that lacked real-world referents. He looks at phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and indigenous cultures. I do think that this is a great thesis, but I would say that it doesn't really answer the question of what caused the original shift.

Social ecologist Murray Bookchin's book, "The Ecology of Freedom", argues that it was the inception of hierarchy - dominator relationships - that caused the shift. I am fascinated by Pierre Claustre's "Society Against the State", which argues that tribal and aboriginal societies were organized to make it impossible for relations of dominance and hierarchy to arise. The Chief was not in a position to order anyone to do anything - he was the best talker, therefore the best mediator, and also the storyteller and myth-spinner of the tribe.

(Claustres describes how the Chief's job includes speaking out loud, for hours every day, telling stories etc, while nobody pays him any attention, everyone just go esabout their business. However they are still reassured by his background resonance. When i read this, I was intrigued by the similarity in the use of television today by many people - TV is kept on in the background, not really watched, kind of ignored, but an ever-present frequency. In this way, television fulfills the function of the tribal chief, perhaps.)

Then of course you have Riane Eisler and the notion that it was the emergence of patriarchy and the suppression of women that was the originary cause of the modern perceptual shift.

Julian Jaynes talks about the modern self emerging as a voice speaking in the head which is first perceived as an outside voice, and then seen as the self - the myth of Athena breaking out of the head of Zeus symbolizes the emergence of the modern self.

Then Gebser suggests that our relationship to spacetime is primary, and "mutational breaks" develop out of crises of anxiety. Robert Lawlor proposes that there was some sort of change in the Earth's electromagnetic envelope that had a "field effect" on human consciousness in the North - the Australian Aboriginals felt it least, living in the South and remaining without clothing or houses, so they stayed in continual contact with the Earth's electromagnetic pulse.

I suppose I would say that all of these are possibly valid, and that we may never find an originary cause that is definitive. The astrological vision of Rick Tarnas in "Cosmos and Psyche" - or the cyclical view of the Mayan wizard time-scientists - is probably equally sensible. There seems to be a nonduality of processes, less a cause and effect than an archetypal pattern that unfolds or crystallizes within our limited perception of space-time. It is very interesting from this nondual perspective that, for instance, the electromagnetic fields around the Earth appear to be changing dramatically at this point in time, no doubt influenced by human technology (though the quickening of our technological development would also be seen from this nondual perspective, as less something we are "doing" than something that is simply happening, compelled from the needs of the surrounding universe, working through us as its agents).

I did a lot of research into this question of the origin of the perceptual shift into left-brained "rightness" because it seems like we can't move forward properly unless we have a good foundational understanding of what forces impelled us into this current situation.

Perhaps this leads back to the crucial question of the "production of subjectivities" through media and education. Negri and Hardt's focus is on discovering a new potentially revolutionary subjectivity that has developed due to changes in the structure of labor since Marx's time. The work of the "multitude" requires collaboration and communication across global networks. The need for a boss or an authoritarian power structure has, actually, been obliterated by this development of collaborative potencies across the global multitude - all that is lacking is the general awareness of what this means, and a new social infrastructure to facilitate it. A vast effort on the part of the ruling oligarchy has gone into denying the awareness of a unitary social consciousness through instilling fear (nuclear and terrorist threat), somehow normalizing a policy of exclusion (our soldiers matter, Iraqi civilian deaths are inconsequential. Affluent white people matter, not poor orphans in the favelas), and instituting a false consciousness that has now reached bizarre and suicidal dimensions.

This weekend I went to several events in NYC, including a loft party and a children's Haloween party, and what struck me is how we have constructed our social events in a way that makes real exchange about the visceral realities of our time to be almost impossible - not only because of blaring noise, but because of social codes that allow for only the most insipid banalities to be exchanged. When is the crust going to break, and allow some reality in through the cracks?

However as depressing as these events were, I felt some strange confirmation of Negri and Hardt's ideas when I happened upon a synchronized event across the planet to establish a world record for the most people doing the same dance at the same exact time - in this case, gyrating together to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," in which the Zombies briefly come to life, appropriately. This type of global coordination - based on memes that happen to catch, for reasons only a genius media theorist might fully understand - suggests that the moment of the Multitude is in fact approaching, but as N and H ask, what will this new "social flesh" of the Multitude do when it awakens within its new global body?

"Will the transformation."-Rilke