“The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would’. For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things for impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature from superstition; the light of experience from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinions of the vulgar. Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometime imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.”
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in Works, ed. J. Spedding et al. (London, 1857-61), iv. 57, cited in “Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth Century Philosophy,” Susan James, Clarendon, 1997, p. 162.
Tag Archives: Cognition
Rudolf Steiner On Why Plutocrats Love Democracy
“It is interesting that the excellent statement was made in 1910 [by Francis Delaisi, La Démocratie et les Financiers, 1910]: ‘… that big capital has succeeded in creating out of democracy the most wonderful, the most effective, the most flexible instrument for the exploitation of the population as a whole. Continue reading
The Cosmic Serpent And DNA
More on the symbolism of the serpent in various forms (dragon, caduceus, kundalini) and its parallel to the DNA structure in “Shopping for Spirit: The Search for Truth” (Equilibra.com):
“In Jeremy Narby’s excellent book “The Cosmic Serpent – DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” – he investigates shamanism and the indigenous peoples uncanny biochemical knowledge of the plant kingdom. Whilst studying Ashaninca ecology, Narby discovered that these honest people living almost unheard of in the Amazon forest insisted that their extensive botanical knowledge came from plant induced hallucinations. 26 These hallucinations happen in a trance state during which, Narby found shamans talked of a ladder or vine, a rope, a spiral staircase, or a twisted rope ladder that connects heaven and earth which they use to gain access to the world of spirits. These spirits present themselves to the Ayahuasquero (shamans) when they drink their special plant brew.27 Continue reading
Gurdjieff On Religion And Action
“Religion is doing; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he ”lives” his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy.”
— George Gurdjieff
Earth To Government: No More False Flags
“Those who have studied history know that nothing invigorates and empowers an authoritarian regime more than a spectacular act of violence, some sudden and senseless loss of life that allows the autocrat to stand on the smoking rubble and identify himself as the hero. It is at moments like this that the public—still in shock from the horror of the tragedy that has just unfolded before them—can be led into the most ruthless despotism: despotism that now bears the mantle of “security.” Continue reading
Tomas Schuman: Love Letter To America
Note:
Please note. Bezmenov was talking about Soviet society and propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s. That means his analysis of the general dynamics of propaganda has to be cautiously reconfigured, when it comes to specifics. The US and USSR he described then (prior to the 1980s) had clearly differentiated economic/political systems. In the 30 years that have passed since, the ideological convergence he mentions elsewhere, has in many ways occurred, or is in the process of occurring. [I describe this in much greater depth in “The Language of Empire.”]
The USA hasn’t been free-market capitalist in any real way for some 20-30 years, at the very least. Instead, we’ve had ever-accelerating state intervention and crony capitalism that has turned into the final danse macabre of casino capitalism and pure plunder.
Thus the terms that Bezmenov uses in discussing the totalitarian communism of the Soviet system now actually apply to the US, albeit incompletely.
Bezmenov didn’t know, or perhaps chose not to express, since this was the country he defected to, that US propaganda and psyops were far more subtle, and thus in the long run more effective, than Soviet propaganda.
He also doesn’t acknowledge that at many levels “capitalist” and “communist” leaderships were/are symbiotic and that they have ultimately led to the globalized kleptocracy, in which the two ideological forms, while retaining different emphases, copulate and spawn the “third way” of corporatized politically-correct social democracy, which is the benign face of the corrupt neo-liberalism that has always been the power behind the throne of the multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, EU, UN, and others…
There is no longer a west versus east polarity. The division is really between centralizers (neoliberal globalizers, central bankers) and decentralizers, in which, however, some of the decentralization is orchestrated to promote the globalizers’ agenda. One has to know the specifics of every situation. They can’t be understood ideologically.
Murray Rothbard On The Cult Of St. Ayn
Rothbard’s penetrating analysis of the cult of St. Ayn:
“The adoption of the central axiom of Rand’s greatness was made possible by Rand’s undoubted personal charisma, a charisma buttressed by her air of unshakeable arrogance and self-assurance. It was a charisma and an arrogance that was partially emulated by her leading disciples. Since the rank-and-file disciple knew in his heart that he was not all-wise or totally self-assured, it became all too easy to subordinate his own will and intellect to that of Rand. Rand became the living embodiment of Reason and Reality and by some quality of personality Rand was able to bring about the mind-set in her disciples that their highest value was to earn her approval while the gravest sin was to incur her displeasure. The ardent belief in Rand’s supreme originality was of course reinforced by the disciples’ not having read (or been able to read) anyone whom they might have discovered had said the same things long before.
Ejection From Paradise
The Rand cult grew and flourished until the irrevocable split between the Greatest and the Second Greatest, until Satan was ejected from Paradise in the fall of 1968. The Rand-Branden split destroyed NBI, and with it the organized Randian movement. Rand has not displayed the ability or the desire to pick up the pieces and reconstitute an equivalent organization. The Objectivist fell back to The Ayn Rand Letter, and now that too has gone.
With the death of NBI, the Randian cultists were cast adrift, for the first time in a decade, to think for themselves. Generally, their personalities rebounded to their non-robotic, pre-Randian selves. But there were some unfortunate legacies of the cult. In the first place, there is the problem of what the Thomists call invincible ignorance. For many ex-cultists remain imbued with the Randian belief that every individual is armed with the means of spinning out all truths a priori from his own head – hence there is felt to be no need to learn the concrete facts about the real world, either about contemporary history or the laws of the social sciences. Armed with axiomatic first principles, many ex-Randians see no need of learning very much else. Furthermore, lingering Randian hubris imbues many ex-members with the idea that each one is able and qualified to spin out an entire philosophy of life and of the world a priori. Such aberrations as the “Students of Objectivism for Rational Bestiality” are not far from the bizarreries of many neo-Randian philosophies, preaching to a handful of zealous partisans. On the other hand, there is another understandable but unfortunate reaction. After many years of subjection to Randian dictates in the name of “reason,” there is a tendency among some ex-cultists to bend the stick the other way, to reject reason or thinking altogether in the name of hedonistic sensation and caprice.
We conclude our analysis of the Rand cult with the observation that here was an extreme example of contradiction between the exoteric and the esoteric creed. That in the name of individuality, reason, and liberty, the Rand cult in effect preached something totally different. The Rand cult was concerned not with every man’s individuality, but only with Rand’s individuality, not with everyone’s right reason but only with Rand’s reason. The only individuality that flowered to the extent of blotting out all others, was Ayn Rand’s herself; everyone else was to become a cipher subject to Rand’s mind and will.
Nikolai Bukharin’s famous denunciation of the Stalin cult, masked during the Russia of the 1930’s as a critique of the Jesuit order, does not seem very overdrawn as a portrayal of the Randian reality:
It has been correctly said that there isn’t a meanness in the world which would not find for itself and ideological justification. The king of the Jesuits, Loyola, developed a theory of subordination, of “cadaver discipline,” every member of the order was supposed to obey his superior “like a corpse which could be turned in all directions, like a stick which follows every movement, like a ball of wax which could be changed and extended in all directions”… This corpse is characterized by three degrees of perfection: subordination by action, subordination of the will, subordination of the intellect. When the last degree is reached, when the man substitutes naked subordination for intellect, renouncing all his convictions, then you have a hundred percent Jesuit.3
It has been remarked that a curious contradiction existed with the strategic perspective of the Randian movement. For, on the one hand, disciples were not allowed to read or talk to other persons who might be quite close to them as libertarians or Objectivists. Within the broad rationalist or libertarian movement, the Randians took a 100% pure, ultra-sectarian stance. And yet, in the larger political world, the Randian strategy shifted drastically, and Rand and her disciples were willing to endorse and work with politicians who might only be one millimeter more conservative than their opponents. In the larger world, concern with purity or principles seemed to be totally abandoned. Hence, Rand’s whole-hearted endorsement of Goldwater, Nixon, and Ford, and even of Senators Henry Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan.
Neither Liberty Nor Reason
There seems to be only one way to resolve the contradiction in the Randian strategic outlook of extreme sectarianism within the libertarian movement, coupled with extreme opportunism, and willingness to coalesce with slightly more conservative heads of State, in the outside world. That resolution, confirmed by the remainder of our analysis of the cult, holds that the guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.
Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.” The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians,
Of the several works on Randianism, only one has concentrated on the cult itself: Leslie Hanscom, “Born Eccentric,” Newsweek (March 27, 1961), pp. 104–05. Hanscom brilliantly and wittily captured the spirit of the Rand cult from attending and reporting on one of the Branden lectures. Thus, Hanscom wrote: After three hours of heroically rapt attention to Branden’s droning delivery, the fans were rewarded by the personal apparition of Miss Rand herself – a lady with drilling black eyes and Russian accent who often wears a brooch in the shape of a dollar sign as her private icon….
“Her books,” said one member of the congregation, “are so good that most people should not be allowed to read them. I used to want to lock up nine-tenths of the world in a cage, and after reading her books, I want to lock them all up.” Later on, this same chap – a self-employed “investment counselor” of 22 – got a lash of his idol’s logic full in the face. Submitting a question from the floor – a privilege open to paying students only – the budding Baruch revealed himself as a mere visitor. Miss Rand – a lady whose glare would wilt a cactus – bawled him out from the platform as a “cheap fraud.” Other seekers of wisdom came off better. One worried disciple was told that it was permissible to celebrate Christmas and Easter so long as one rejected the religious significance (the topic of the night’s lecture was the folly of faith). A housewife was assured that she needn’t feel guilty about being a housewife so long as she chose the job for non-emotionalAlthough mysticism is one of the nastiest words in her political arsenal, there hasn’t been a she-messiah since Aimee McPherson who can so hypnotize a live audience.”
At least as revelatory as Hanscom’s article were the predictable howls of overkill outrage by the cult members. Thus, two weeks later, under the caption “Thugs and Hoodlums?”, Newsweek printed excerpts from Randian letters sent in reaction to the article. One letter stated: “Your vicious, vile, and obscene tirade against Ayn Rand is a new low, even for you. To have sanctioned such a stream of abusive invective…is an act of unprecedented moral depravity. A magazine staffed with irresponsible hoodlums has no place in my home.” Another man wrote that “one who has read the works of Miss Rand and proceeds to write an article of this caliber can only be motivated by villainy. It is the work of a literary thug.” Another warned, “Since you propose to behave like cockroaches, be prepared to be treated as such.” And finally, one Bonnie Benov revealed the inner axiom: “Ayn Rand is…the greatest individual that has ever lived.” Having fun with the cult, Newsweek printed a particularly unprepossessing picture of Rand underneath the Benov letter, and captioned it: “Greatest Ever?”5
My Comment:
I was repelled when I first read “The Fountainhead” when I was about twenty. To tell the truth, I didn’t really read it. I read about 20 pages and then got someone else to tell me about it.
That was natural, I think. I was reading a lot of Catholic philosophy and was surrounded by socialists. In India, that book and the kind of people who read it were people who lived in a different world from mine.
My friends and I tended to laugh at them, as well as at the crowd we called “JNU Marxists” (upper class and upper middle-class Indian students who affected Marxism and usually attended the Marxist dominated university, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi). These Randian contemporaries of mine, like the JNU Marxists, were usually affluent and enamored of the West, which they saw through the eyes of Western counter-culture.
It was only 15 years later, when I reread Ayn Rand, that I came to appreciate what had first seemed repellent to me.
I thought about this when I was reading Shikha Dalmia’s recent commentary about Rand at Forbes. She writes that a love of Rand is a sign of adolescence and is something you leave behind when you become an adult with adult responsibilities. Dalmia’s criticism is a common one, but for me it’s unconvincing, because in my case, I came to admire Ayn Rand relatively late in life.
As for Rothbard, as always, he presents many useful insights, but he was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to understand a woman of Rand’s nature. There’s a whiff of male chauvinism here. Despite all her pretentiousness (and the pretentiousness of her acolytes), despite the flaws in her thinking and in her character, to reduce her to a power-hungry, narcissistic “wicked witch of Capitalism” is just mistaken.
Whatever warping of her personality took place, we have to remember when and where she grew up. She had to struggle mightily simply to maintain her vision of individualism intact, floating in a sea of collectivism and political ideology in the middle of the twentieth century. That, more than pathology, probably accounts for those ideological and personal alignments she made that seem opportunistic to us today….
“I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Call this what you will but it’s not narcissism…and it is very very far from selfishness.
As for what is is that sends people screaming to the exits when they hear her name:
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
Jesus, The Trend Follower
King James Bible, Chapter 12, Verse 54
“And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?”
My Comment
The notion that you could look at nature and “read” it is part of the so-called “hermetic” tradition of the West and very much a part of eastern religion (Buddhism, Hinduism) as well, from where they might have been derived partially. In the hermetic tradition, the world was conceived of as a complex fractal system in which each part reflected the whole in a succession of patterns that extended from the stars in the sky down to star fish in the ocean. This way of looking at nature holistically in symbolic terms is not necessarily diametrically opposed to the scientific method, a truth that is evident from the fact that leading scientists from the Renaissance to the twentieth century have managed to pursue impeccably empirical research, while holding beliefs that the intellectual class today would call obscurantist.
Albert J. Nock On Mass Man
“The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses.”
— Albert J. Nock
[I had this down before as Alfred J., sorry…
For patient readers of this blog, no, I do not have dyslexia or ADD, as you might think from the strange ways I mangle names. I’m simply a recovering word-associationist. From years of writing poetry and playing music, I’m far more aural than visual. I posted something from Four Quartets a while back, and I think “Alfred J. Prufrock” was playing somewhere in the back of my mind]
At least, that’s my excuse.
Iraq War: Firing On Old Women And Taxis
Update: This comes from Glenn Greenwald. There’s been criticism by the Weekly Standard and others that WikiLeaks released an edited rather than a complete video. Greenwald says Wikileaks released both on the same site and the mistake arises from an erroneous statement in a NY Times piece on the subject.
“The only problem with this? From the very beginning, WikiLeaks released the full, 38-minute, unedited version of that incident — and did so right on the site they created for release of the edited video. In fact, the first video is marked “Short version,” and the second video — posted directly under it — is marked “Full version,” and just for those who still didn’t pick up on the meaning, they explained:
WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.
This is Bumiller’s fault for misleadingly suggesting that WikiLeaks failed to release the full video. I know she’s been notified by at least one NYT reader of her misleading sentences but has thus far failed to respond. Establishment media outlets can’t stand that WikiLeaks is breaking major stories and are trying — consciously or otherwise — to imply that they’re not as reliable as Real Media Outlets (hence, the “WikiLeaks edited the video to 17 minutes” without indicating that they released the full video). But this is exactly how clear falsehoods are manufactured and then spread.”
Update (Thanks to AD Niven):
The blog post below (April 6, 2010; see also the April 8, 2010 post) says the Wikileaks video was edited to make the event look less defensible.
(Lila: That’s the reason I didn’t post it…….I’ve been through this a number of times with “war footage”)
***********************************
The NY Times, in their story about the incident, spends paragraph after paragraph fretting that we killed a bunch of innocent men standing around doing nothing more than contemplating whether Grotius’ notion of jus ad bellum conflicted with that of Aquinas. Then they hit you with this seemingly important piece of information buried near the end:
“Late Monday, the United States Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released the redacted report on the case, which provided some more detail.The report showed pictures of what it said were machine guns and grenades found near the bodies of those killed. It also stated that the Reuters employees “made no effort to visibly display their status as press or media representatives and their familiar behavior with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents and their furtive attempts to photograph the coalition ground forces made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.”
I’d also direct you to Bill Roggio’s post on the subject if my own thoughts didn’t convince you that this was one of the worst smear jobs against our military based on zero evidence in the last decade.
Case closed.
Dahr Jamail in Truthout (hat-tip to Lawrence Vance at LRC blog):
“On Monday, April 5, Wikileaks.org posted video footage from Iraq, taken from a US military Apache helicopter in July 2007 as soldiers aboard it killed 12 people and wounded two children. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency: photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh.
The US military confirmed the authenticity of the video.
The footage clearly shows an unprovoked slaughter, and is shocking to watch whilst listening to the casual conversation of the soldiers in the background.
As disturbing as the video is, this type of behavior by US soldiers in Iraq is not uncommon.
Truthout has spoken with several soldiers who shared equally horrific stories of the slaughtering of innocent Iraqis by US occupation forces.
“I remember one woman walking by,” said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq. He told the audience at the Winter Soldier hearings that took place March 13-16, 2008, in Silver Spring, Maryland, “She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.”
The hearings provided a platform for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to share the reality of their occupation experiences with the media in the US.
Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement (ROE) in Iraq, and how lax they were, to the point of being virtually nonexistent.
“During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot,” Washburn’s testimony continued, “The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry ‘drop weapons’, or by my third tour, ‘drop shovels’. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent.”
Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, told of taking orders over the radio.
“One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation…. One of the snipers replied back, ‘Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?’ The lieutenant colonel responded, ‘You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.’ After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment….”