In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:
What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.
That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.
In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.
With that in mind, what follows are some summations.
• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.
• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.
• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.
• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.
• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.
• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.
• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.
• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.
• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.
• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.
• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”
But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.
So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:
We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on
Bad advice.
Thank you, Edward. Superb and lucid.
The art racket is now the domain of the innocuous soi-disant rebels, as you suggest. Yesterday I was looking through my copy of the 1943 Crown edition of The Complete Etchings of Goya, which includes Goya’s commentaries on those etchings known as The Cappricios. El sueno de la razon produce monstruos, translated there as The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters. Sueno may be translated as either ‘sleep’ or ‘dream,’ but Goya’s commentary suggests ‘the sleep of reason,’ i.e. reason that is not active or alert.
“Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of its beauty.”
What a great article again by Edward, right on the money about how dupped, dumbed down most people in America are !!
The USA capitalist class has always been expanding its borders and global territory under its control since July 4, 1776. It intervened, late, in the last two world wars and in 1945 produced about 50 percent of world economic output. It now has 25 percent of world GDP (and declining), has war spending that matches the next 10-15 countries combined and has 200+ bases around the world and has public debt of ~130 percent of GDP.
Doesn’t the Middle East have geo-strategic reserves of oil and gas, including 55.5% of the world’s known oil reserves? Doesn’t the United States, like British imperialism before it, need a reliable ally in the region to assert its control and exclude its rivals? It’s no easy task for them.
They overthrew the democratically elected regime in Iran and ended up supporting the Shah, but he was overthrow in 1979. They had Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and backed his regime in a brutal war against Iran, but then decided they needed their own troops in the region so allowed Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990 to give the pretext for the First Gulf War. They have allies in the other gulf monarchies, but all of those regimes rest of feudal repression to control the opposition.
Israel has proved itself to be the reliable ally, especially since 1967.
Look at Joe Biden himself making the relationship of U.S. capitalism to Israel plain in 1986 in this Youtube video https://youtu.be/FYLNCcLfIkM
“If we look at the Middle East I think it’s about time we stopped, those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, apologizing for our support for Israel. There’s no apology to be made. None. It is the best 3 billion dollar [a year] investment we make. Were there not an Israel the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.” -Joe Biden (a capitalist slave of Isra-Hell), 1986
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Quit apologizing for jewish elites you miserable faggot
I quite agree with your “summations” Ed. And I’ll add yet another. Most citizens of America and in the West know at least enough rudimentary historical information to be able acknowledge that elites have routinely and repeatedly acted in sociopathic, narcissistic, greedy and violent fashion toward those they rule for millennia now – yet somehow these same people can’t seem to allow themselves to dare imagine that “their elites” today could be characterized by these exact same traits and behavior. Any acknowledgement of elite evil and/or psychopathy by the typical Western citizen invariably involves attributing those qualities to elites ruling an – “official enemy” nation – a Putin, a Kim Jong Un, etc.
One could argue that one of the prime propaganda methods used by Western elites to camouflage their own breathtaking levels of moral corruption, and to delude their populace, is by convincing their populations that it is always and only those – “other elites” – in far off places that are corrupt and violent. The valorization among “progressives” of war criminals like Hillary and Obama speak to both the effectiveness of such propaganda – and to the complete detachment from material reality of such “progressives” in favor of life lived inside – “the dolls house.”
Gary: I try to be humble in giving opinions about existence and about every thing about the causes of voting tastes and of the behaviour patterns of humans. But from own personal humble perspective and opinion (i could be wrong), i really think that the real cause of why the majority of US citizens and the majority of people from other nations of the world, and of the majority of people from very poor countries of the world are so anti-politics, and so distanced from political activism, is really non other that morality, moral codes, legality, religion, the mainstream media, schools, churches, work places, families etc. and many other institutions and factors have castrasted the normal warrior violent agressive instincts of the human race.
Warrior, violent, agressive instincts (according to Nietzsche) have been destroyed by religion and morality. Which is in a way good because violence is not healthy.
However what people do not realize (specially many in the left) is that in order to see a real change in this world people need to be warriors, like the ancient spartan warriors. And because most humans are not warriors (specially in the USA) we won’t see a change in the near future.
The people with warrior attitudes are a few, like Edward Curtin who is a warrior, Scott Ritter, Joe Napolitano, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is also a warrior. They are literally warriors because writing articles against the deep state and against the ruling class is already an act of war. Amy Goodman is a warrior. Chris Hedges, Ron Paul, Max Blumenthal, but we are a few, the majority in America are not warriors. And when people are not warriors, what happens is that they would hate politics, but their hatred of politics is really a fear against wars and being warriors. Because politics is really a war, so in order for people to love politics, they have to be warriors.
Lots of people need warrior attitudes to do a lot of things, a professional american football player is literally a warrior, a professional baseball player is a warrior, a boxer like Mike Tyson is a warrior. Sports are also wars
But like i said the majority are not warriors. we need people to embrace to be warriors so that might see a revolutionary situation in which the united oppressed working class and poor people would be willing to overthrow the oppressor classes of the whole world
Something has to give !!
Thank you David R. I think what is not being discussed enough is, how can we transcend all of this rot that is US ! How can we discuss possibilities about living more sanely, humanely, if this subject is never considered? (Put Bach away and improvise)
I think most of us spend too much time reading about, thinking about all the death, wars, a worthless political system (248 years worth of worthlessness), we forget to think beyond, we forget to think about friendlier human relations. How can we transcend the ‘thinking’ that has been for far too long. We cannot if we do not consider thinking outside of the tube we have all been stuffed into!
This tube has the same dimensions, diameter and height. There are seldom variances of the dimensions of our tube. Our fear threshold’s vary as well as the amount of worthless information we consume. I have seen communities attempt to start something new. Just the attempt is worth acknowledging. however, at some point the babble and activity become repetitious and tend to start to appear like what these people are attempting to transcend. Habitual thinking is a killer !
The familiar. How do we counter, acknowledge the familiar, so to not repeat everything that is not wholesome to the individual or community? How can we get off of this treadmill? Of course, I feel the start is only very local among a very small group of people. Some businesses feel they have created this community though I think is only about dollars and not real human relations within the human experience. Feelings, intuition have been shut down. We learn to be afraid of our fear and other feelings. We learn to even ridicule innate human experiences. I think we need to come out of our heads and consider what is possible.
Be with people who want to leave their tube and all of the information that has been stuffed into that tube. Help each other to learn what is not learned. Cry together, laugh together, talk about those things you have been afraid to talk about when your naval area feels them!
Past-Present-Future
inspired by Ed to fashion this Summation:
1963 – November 22nd – 2024
https://ratical.org/index.html#Friday61yrs
Stop it. “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you”