A world information war, with no distinction between military and civilian combatants. The Aries-Pisces alignment is now underway. This is not chaos, it's tyranny.
I become discouraged, thinking that perhaps, when people read your lucid writing about what we are living through, what is being sold as reality, they still don't think it is 'real' in the sense that it is, or are not struck enough by what you are saying to go deeper into understanding what is unfolding both in the world and in themselves.
I am wondering whether there is sufficient recognition of its lethality?
Yes you are feeling my frustration. Thousands of people will read this article. I am not writing for entertainment, or to create "content" that is to be "consumed." I'm here to facilitate a mutual education process, and to provide a place to consider these issues. What I am not doing is writing to trigger people — that would be easy enough, but it's not my assignment.
We don't need to to lethality, though I suspect that part of the silence is that I am accurately describing a problem that nearly everyone feels is outside of their power to affect. However, I'm not describing it that way. And I don't conceive of it that way.
Until recently — until the A.I. crisis — Planet Waves has a dependably engaged, aware and creative audience. I'm wondering what's going on. I am one of those writers who wants minimal distance between me and my audience, and it's painful.
I, for one, am waiting for an intuition to emerge about a "right course of action", one which I can reasonably undertake given my resources/circumstances. Right now, at least posting a reply to break the silence seems good, but ... well, but nothing. Maybe actually supporting each other is one clearly good thing we can do, even though it's hard to see how to affect the larger-scale problems directly.
Eric, I'm reminded of your advice at the end of a recent show, "Act as if to hold the world together". Maybe exchanging a few words about what's happening, even via this digital medium which is such a part of the problem, at least invites a bit more coherence than looking away. So thanks. I'm listening.
I posed the question a few PW posts back about how not to take the ‘bait’. A Wise Wolf posted this today and unpacks it so much more eloquently:
"The person down the street who votes differently than you is not your enemy. They are your neighbor. They worry about the same things you worry about. They want their kids to be safe and their bills to be paid and their country to be a place worth living in. They have been manipulated just like you have been manipulated, fed a different flavor of the same poison, sorted into a different tribe by the same algorithm, pointed at you as the enemy by the same people who point you at them.
The working class Republican and the working class Democrat have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire class that funds both parties.
You share the same struggles. You face the same rigged systems. You are being crushed by the same economic forces that have transferred more wealth upward in the last fifty years than at any point in human history. And instead of uniting against the people doing this to you, you are screaming at each other on the internet about pronouns and flags and whatever fresh outrage the algorithm served up this morning.
This is exactly what they want. A nation at war with itself cannot resist a takeover. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy. Every empire that fell was divided before it was conquered. Every free people who lost their freedom were set against each other first.
The red versus blue war is not real. It is a show put on by people who own both teams. It is professional wrestling and you think it is a real fight. The wrestlers go backstage after the match and laugh together while you are still screaming at the guy in the other section who was rooting for the wrong character.
This Is Our Country Not Theirs
This nation belongs to the people who live here and work here and raise families here and will be buried here. It does not belong to billionaires who hold citizenship in three countries and will flee to their bunkers the moment things get bad. It does not belong to tech oligarchs who view democracy as an obstacle to efficiency. It does not belong to foreign interests who have purchased so much influence that they might as well be writing our laws themselves.
We have to stop letting them divide us. We have to start seeing each other as fellow Americans again instead of enemy combatants in a culture war that was manufactured to keep us weak. We have to remember that the person screaming at us online is also a victim of the same manipulation, and maybe if we stopped screaming back and started talking, we might realize we have been fighting the wrong enemy this entire time.
Turn off the television. It is not informing you. It is programming you. Question everything, including the sources you trust, especially the sources you trust. Talk to people who disagree with you and do it without trying to win. Listen to why they believe what they believe. You might discover that the monster you have been told to hate is actually just another person trying to make sense of a confusing world with imperfect information, exactly like you.
Remember who you are. You are an American. Your ancestors came to this land or were brought to this land or were already on this land, and regardless of how they got here, they built something together that was supposed to be different from the old world’s tyrannies and aristocracies. That project is not finished. Every generation has to fight to keep it alive against the forces that want to drag us back to a world where a handful of rulers own everything and everyone else serves at their pleasure.
Stop letting them divide you. Your enemies are not your neighbors. Your enemies are the people who profit from your division and are building machines to replace you the moment you are no longer useful.
Start acting like it before it is too late". —The Wise Wolf
Very well said. I was reading that c.1955 McLuhan article, one of the oldest available, and it makes this point; and the internal ethical center of a person is created by the process of reading books. That deep interior quality that then finds its counterpart in a collective. Bailey talks about this too: how a group is a group of individuals; anything else is a "mass" without a conscience. There is always this risk when people get together due to the benefit of "blaming the group" for what individuals in the group do. But this, currently, seems to be at its worst, at least since the shock of radio was setting in during the 1930s.
I become discouraged, thinking that perhaps, when people read your lucid writing about what we are living through, what is being sold as reality, they still don't think it is 'real' in the sense that it is, or are not struck enough by what you are saying to go deeper into understanding what is unfolding both in the world and in themselves.
I am wondering whether there is sufficient recognition of its lethality?
Yes you are feeling my frustration. Thousands of people will read this article. I am not writing for entertainment, or to create "content" that is to be "consumed." I'm here to facilitate a mutual education process, and to provide a place to consider these issues. What I am not doing is writing to trigger people — that would be easy enough, but it's not my assignment.
We don't need to to lethality, though I suspect that part of the silence is that I am accurately describing a problem that nearly everyone feels is outside of their power to affect. However, I'm not describing it that way. And I don't conceive of it that way.
Until recently — until the A.I. crisis — Planet Waves has a dependably engaged, aware and creative audience. I'm wondering what's going on. I am one of those writers who wants minimal distance between me and my audience, and it's painful.
I, for one, am waiting for an intuition to emerge about a "right course of action", one which I can reasonably undertake given my resources/circumstances. Right now, at least posting a reply to break the silence seems good, but ... well, but nothing. Maybe actually supporting each other is one clearly good thing we can do, even though it's hard to see how to affect the larger-scale problems directly.
Eric, I'm reminded of your advice at the end of a recent show, "Act as if to hold the world together". Maybe exchanging a few words about what's happening, even via this digital medium which is such a part of the problem, at least invites a bit more coherence than looking away. So thanks. I'm listening.
The first action I'm facilitating and proposing is a conversation in this space, so we can hear from one another.
I posed the question a few PW posts back about how not to take the ‘bait’. A Wise Wolf posted this today and unpacks it so much more eloquently:
"The person down the street who votes differently than you is not your enemy. They are your neighbor. They worry about the same things you worry about. They want their kids to be safe and their bills to be paid and their country to be a place worth living in. They have been manipulated just like you have been manipulated, fed a different flavor of the same poison, sorted into a different tribe by the same algorithm, pointed at you as the enemy by the same people who point you at them.
The working class Republican and the working class Democrat have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire class that funds both parties.
You share the same struggles. You face the same rigged systems. You are being crushed by the same economic forces that have transferred more wealth upward in the last fifty years than at any point in human history. And instead of uniting against the people doing this to you, you are screaming at each other on the internet about pronouns and flags and whatever fresh outrage the algorithm served up this morning.
This is exactly what they want. A nation at war with itself cannot resist a takeover. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy. Every empire that fell was divided before it was conquered. Every free people who lost their freedom were set against each other first.
The red versus blue war is not real. It is a show put on by people who own both teams. It is professional wrestling and you think it is a real fight. The wrestlers go backstage after the match and laugh together while you are still screaming at the guy in the other section who was rooting for the wrong character.
This Is Our Country Not Theirs
This nation belongs to the people who live here and work here and raise families here and will be buried here. It does not belong to billionaires who hold citizenship in three countries and will flee to their bunkers the moment things get bad. It does not belong to tech oligarchs who view democracy as an obstacle to efficiency. It does not belong to foreign interests who have purchased so much influence that they might as well be writing our laws themselves.
We have to stop letting them divide us. We have to start seeing each other as fellow Americans again instead of enemy combatants in a culture war that was manufactured to keep us weak. We have to remember that the person screaming at us online is also a victim of the same manipulation, and maybe if we stopped screaming back and started talking, we might realize we have been fighting the wrong enemy this entire time.
Turn off the television. It is not informing you. It is programming you. Question everything, including the sources you trust, especially the sources you trust. Talk to people who disagree with you and do it without trying to win. Listen to why they believe what they believe. You might discover that the monster you have been told to hate is actually just another person trying to make sense of a confusing world with imperfect information, exactly like you.
Remember who you are. You are an American. Your ancestors came to this land or were brought to this land or were already on this land, and regardless of how they got here, they built something together that was supposed to be different from the old world’s tyrannies and aristocracies. That project is not finished. Every generation has to fight to keep it alive against the forces that want to drag us back to a world where a handful of rulers own everything and everyone else serves at their pleasure.
Stop letting them divide you. Your enemies are not your neighbors. Your enemies are the people who profit from your division and are building machines to replace you the moment you are no longer useful.
Start acting like it before it is too late". —The Wise Wolf
Very well said. I was reading that c.1955 McLuhan article, one of the oldest available, and it makes this point; and the internal ethical center of a person is created by the process of reading books. That deep interior quality that then finds its counterpart in a collective. Bailey talks about this too: how a group is a group of individuals; anything else is a "mass" without a conscience. There is always this risk when people get together due to the benefit of "blaming the group" for what individuals in the group do. But this, currently, seems to be at its worst, at least since the shock of radio was setting in during the 1930s.