Save Your Mind, Save Your Freedom, And Save The World – Slow Down
As Chogyam Trungpa said, “The first thing to do is cut the speed.” Slow down. Unplug from all media and electronics. Make time for stillness, silence and solitude. Reflect. Read,…
anthropology
Nihilism – The Scourge of the Modern World
(My response to the talk below and to the question of nihilism… To a general audience, as (virtually) always, speaking to the general public.) * Nihilism is the scourge of…
What The World Needs Most
Great discussion, as always, and a great song. (See the link below, to a podcast interview by one of my top three sources.) Now, maybe a song about sisu, the…
On History: Clarity & Delusion
It’s good to see some of the millennia-old illusions about history being slowly peeled away. To speak of the Roman Empire as, “the world’s greatest killing machine” is refreshingly honest.…
BLOWBACK – And Collapse
JFK, MLK, The CIA – And The Collapse Of The West Yes, the evidence is clear: the CIA killed JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X. They are the goons of…
Human History Gets a Rewrite: A Review of “The Dawn of Everything” [The Atlantic]
Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didn’t…
The Radical Promise of Human History: A Review of “The Dawn of Everything” [Boston Review]
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity David Graeber and David Wengrow The standard history of humanity goes something like this. Roughly 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, Homo…
On Puritan-Capitalism: Money As The Measure Of All Things
The mechanistic materialist world view, which the West, beginning with Europe, adopted a mere 400 years ago, and then exported through economic, financial, military and cultural colonialism and neocolonialism to…
Big Brother Is Watching You – and Yes, It Matters
I talked to my boy in the car this past weekend about what to do when he drives, if he has any problems; and he talked to me about the…
Overviews of philosophy, religion, politics, history & sociology: where one might begin – or continue in more depth
Fascinating look here, in this BBC podcast (linked below), at the history, sociology, psychology, theology and politics of fundamentalism, evangelism, millennialism & apocalyptism. See also, Michael Grosso’s, The Millennium Myth,…
Gender, Hierarchy, Civilization & Collapse: A Few Thoughts
What did Sumeria ever do for us? Invented writing, our concepts of time, irrigation, cities, created the first literature…little stuff like that. Sumeria predates ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and…
Kindred Spirits & “Civilization”
Thinking about questions of human society and what is “civilized” or “civilization” makes me realize again how much I agree with Chomsky, Gandhi and Thoreau. They have all been deeply…
The end of civilization? I’d like to see its beginning
Civilization? Technology does not define it. Morality does. That makes all empires uncivilized, because they are based in conquest, plunder, mass murder and theft. Amazing… Scholars still talking about…
Musings On History: Goths, the Fall of Rome, and the Future of Humanity
I love a good mystery. Who were the Goths? Where did they come from? How did they manage to sack Rome and defeat the most powerful empire the world…
History Repeats: The Decline & Fall of the Western Corporate Empire
“The Goths remained on Roman land and would ally themselves with the Roman army. Later, however, one man, a Goth and former Roman commander, rose up against Rome – a…
Work and Workaholism: Puritanism, and A Day Off
This morning when I got up, feeling exhausted again from the on-going 30-year stint of sleeplessness and insomnia, I thought, I should take a day off – considering I pretty…
Unplug: Nine Weeks To Basic Clarity
Important, extremely useful books here. A brain washing, in the sense of clearing away the fog and gaining some clarity and perspective, is critically needed, now more than ever. What…
The Central Challenge Of Our Time
What is the central challenge of our time? It is not what most people think it is. It is not race or gender, or climate change, or the environment broadly,…
Do You Want To Be An Ape, Or A Lion? On Alphas and The Sociology Of Delusion
This video/talk (linked below) expresses the social psychology underlying the deep, global crisis of legitimacy which the ruling elite are now facing. Kudos for that. However, it also reveals an…