{"id":281119,"date":"2024-11-25T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T12:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=281119"},"modified":"2024-11-23T06:47:46","modified_gmt":"2024-11-23T06:47:46","slug":"lucid-summations-of-fundamental-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/11\/lucid-summations-of-fundamental-issues\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucid Summations of Fundamental Issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

22 Nov 2024 <\/em>– In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination<\/a>, the U.S. 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\u2019t assimilate all the information and need a \u201cnew\u201d way of thinking that he called \u201cthe sociological imagination\u201d that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentences in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills\u2019 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.\u00a0 For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.<\/p>\n

With that in mind, what follows are some summations.<\/p>\n

\u2022 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<\/strong> (tolerant in the cultural realm with \u201cwokeness\u201d under the Democrats) to tolerant<\/strong> (\u201cpromotion\u201d of free speech, no censorship) repression<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people\u2019s fear of death<\/strong>, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms \u2013 war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel<\/strong> as its client state, doing what is best for both \u2013 control of the Middle East.\u00a0 Control of the Middle East\u2019s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.<\/p>\n

\u2022 There is no deep state<\/strong> unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is<\/em> the \u201cdeep\u201d state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The CIA\u2019s public assassination of President Kennedy<\/a> 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<\/strong> together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state\u2019s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets<\/strong> as \u201cthe land of the free\u201d has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show\u2019s \u201cShadow\u201d once asked \u2013 now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.<\/p>\n

\u2022 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,<\/strong> giving what the system\u2019s programmers want \u2013 one dimensional happy talk.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Silence has been banished<\/strong> as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The pathology of technophilia<\/strong> 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 %.<\/p>\n

\u2022 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<\/em>, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don\u2019t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today.<\/strong> What William Blake called the mind-forg\u2019d 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\u2019s assassination, called it \u201cthe doll\u2019s house\u201d in which most Americans live and \u201cinto which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.\u201d There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on \u201csome.\u201d 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: \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills\u2019 advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.<\/p>\n

So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re \u2014 waist deep in the Big Muddy
\nAnd the big fool says to push on<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bad advice.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Edward J. Curtin, Jr., Ph.D. is a widely published author and a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/em><\/a> – email: <\/em>edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information available. They have great difficulty to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, the links between biography and history, self and world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":274660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[867,418,373,2571,70,1594,481],"class_list":["post-281119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-anglo-america","tag-crisis","tag-news","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-usa","tag-war-economy","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":281120,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281119\/revisions\/281120"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}