The Lie

America has bought the lie that the market place will solve all the ills of society. It has been defrauded by this confidence trick, this brazen formulation from the most piratical inflection of Wall Street and the corporate sphere. That the self-serving orb of high finance would ever volunteer to fix a social disease or problem is as likely as an elephant piloting an aeroplane. Yet this is not only political orthodoxy but the most very virulent Anglo-Saxon strain of private-capital thought. For this reason a legitimate left, or a European style left would fail in America because it goes against the culture as well as the politics. Only 'a fair shake' poem aligned with a true left force could ever have a chance, and even then its scope would be limited.

And so that virulent strain has mutated into Donald Trump. A man who understands culture and media more than politics, a man who is not very far from a goon, a man who is more the head of an ochlocracy than the president of the voter of sober judgement. Not for Trump is the slow and careful Swede. This election, among many things, was also an election between Dionysos and Apollo. And the laughing grimace of the mad, dancing drunk, won. Thus confirmed is the disease, the virus. The virus of legitimized greed, the confirmation of poverty, the stratification of people, the arrangement of quality and capital. This is the result of any society that puts money at the centre and not ideas. A few people benefit now from money but, everyone, always will benefit from good ideas. Donald Trump will expand the remit of what money can do and will assail on the wellbeing of millions. If history will remember him, it won't be for kind reasons.

And what kind of vigorous opposition is there? There are mealy-mouthed murmurings. Let the con-artist govern, they say. Give the most diseased, selfish money-grabber the chance to rule. This is no more an opposition than saying nothing as you are being robbed. The political class and their pundits wind on. When anyone winds on, windy in their speech, a solid breaking of the wind is the only decent response.

The liberal left is too busy deciding if it should be 'manhole' or 'person-hole' to be rallying against crypto-fascism. Relativism has dissected the very language they need to post a solid defense or mount a stout attack. If all language can be interpreted any which way than no words have meaning and all words have no meaning. This abnegates the purpose of language as a means of communication. It quite possibly nullifies thought. Words must have meaning and they should have a precise meaning. If we cannot quantify things then we cannot understand anything. All leads out from that. If the liberal left think to defend the ever-increasing meaninglessness of objects and defeat the most libertarian and libertine promises of capitalism, then they must possess a power unknown to history. That is possible but its certainly not a decent or honorable position. The liberal left is post-modernism taken to its logical conclusion and so has concluded the liberal left.

And what of the radical left? The angry left? The left that calls a spade, not an earth moving object operated by an individual possessing mammalian qualities and by their own will, but simply, a spade. It is understood that if the crazy right has not only defeated the sensible right, but the sensible left then the radical left has some prospect. And this has explained to a degree the rise of Bernie Sanders,  a man more qualified than Hillary Clinton to be president because moral, social, political and philosophical experience is deeper than public office or title. This left has more legitimacy because it derives its power from the foot of suffering in the state, and thats where sits the just seat of government. And Bernie has lit a fire with plain speaking. He has lit a fire under the soles of feet destined otherwise never to march. And they have sung a sweet song. Maybe dear Bernie can win. Maybe he can shoot for the moon and get it. And maybe America could inch closer to the just state, where ideas rule not men and their money. Or maybe not. Que sera sera.

There also remains an iron-faced fact. If all seven billion people had the middle-class life of the average American, a middle-class existence in decline, than we would need four planets worth of resources, not to mention four atmospheres, to effect it. This has two implications: 1/ Either we must lower our expectations of being middle-class or 2/ keep two-thirds of humanity in poverty. The latter surely cannot be the stated position of a forward thinking mind. Which means we must work on the former. Our society is long on things and short on ideas, precisely because money is the centre of the argument, not ideas. And money is thing. Money is greed codified, poverty confirmed and power consecrated. Unless we rise above its gravity, its thralldom of the primitive brain and our weakness for primordial rule, we may not survive.

What we must do is decide that there exist a thing called the dignity of man and that that it belongs to everyone. And that it will be defended against the egregious privations of the market place. It will be defended against the wool-minded brains of the liberal left. That it will be defended against the tyranny-creep of foreign despots. That it will be defended against self-defeat, and the anarchy of the religio-fascists. That it will be defended against the internet, a thing as yet that is high on knowledge but low on culture, a thing that awaits sentience as the primordial ooze awaited single-celled organisms. And yet everyone knows it. This project may appear too heavy and really should be buried, but it keeps recurring and so we must answer it. We should answer it honestly rather than with craven procrastination.

A wise man once said that only a fool learns from his own mistakes; a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. We have known for a good long while that that Anglo-Saxon virus was unsustainable. Not only are we to repeat those mistakes, but we are to fail to learn from our own. Thus we are worse than fools. Old Europe looks on and weeps. We have anchored ourselves to a doctrine that only guarantees poverty. Worse than this it sponsors the rich, gives them welfare. Is this the just city? What happened to the seat of Lincoln? The pen of Jefferson? The courage of Washington? Usurped. Stolen by money. And by the con-artists. And America, too stupid to save itself, lays the machines out for its own torture. Plaudite omnes.

Therefore we must rally. We must march. We must stand. We must fight. We must resist. We must not let what little that separates stop us from mounting a defense. We must join in what we have deepest in common to square us up for the fight. We must neither let the thralldom of money distract, nor trinkets nor favor dissuade. Ours is the right and dignity, and it is maintained only with strong defenses.

Europa

Europe is not just an idea, it's an identity. It's not just a place but a promise, a promise of the cosmopolitan and the international in all its essence, its concentrated form. It's the promise of 740 million to co-existed merrily, fraternally, peacefully in spite of millennia of battle. 28 countries live in the hope of a common life and sweet citizenship. It is not a petty project. It carries the hope of mankind. If man can thrive here, it raises the bar, sets the world ablaze with political ambition. And indeed union is the rage. African Union, North American Union, Eurasian Union, union is the means where we show our human selves, where what hurts someone over there affects us over here. Where the interest is in all people and not one nation above another, one away from any other. Where we look at each other as brothers in the sweet web of existence, naked to the vast universe, and not exercising power by incendiary action and retarding, backward thinking. Content of character, not color of skin. If my African brother is sad, I'm sad too. If a poor begging girl in Mumbai taps my hand for bread, pathos is my brother. If the wretched die young, they die on your witness.

That is why Europe matters. It is the promise to the world of what it should live like. Of all humanity it is its expectation; Its right to live like. There is no reason why the world can't live like Europe. And no reason why it shouldn't. Except that reason doesn't rule in the majority of the world. Given what we know, we cry bootless prayers to the moon when we see ignorance and stupidity reign high. We say, 'if only they knew'. And our souls flutter. If only they could see... And yet still there's no reason against all living like the European.

And so the European project is not just for the Europeans but for all man, all society. It is the model. And so when the cynics bite like sharks, they must examine their conscience to see if they are the opposite to argument, or just the passionate from ignorance. Or against humanity. Or really against themselves. 

Europe never was one country, so why should one country bring it down? 

It won't. It can't. It never has. With trepidation we say it never will. And so the life of the human keeps its dignity. Sweet old Europe, preserver's of dignity. Thus those who supported Brexit have won a pyrrhic victory. They have won a victory for the sclerotic, the stupid, the ignorant. They call it sovereignty. But what brother shuts the gate to his own? Turn your back on the world, and, as Chesterton says, it turns its back on you. How stupid is all this madness? Beyond the stupid. And what does the student of it conclude? That Europe will survive and that it doesn't depend on any one European country for it to survive.

Let that old harmony play. Let that union be. Let it be recorded that humans fight for justice, fraternity and the common life. Let not the selfish and the stupid be the megaphones of the human spirit. Let rivers of love rush on. Embrace your fellow. To those that oppose such a tendency, yours is the tragic victory. There, you win the prize of the joy of self-obsession and the hurt of self-flagellation. Enjoy your wounds. Enjoy your scars. Enjoy your distance. Enjoy your distance from the beauty of embrace. 'Good riddance Britain', they will say. 'Good riddance Europe', will be your reply? But Britain will lose more. Because Britain must lose more. Britain will suffer. But Europe must be open. And should the sulking baby of Britain, stupid in its people, want to play the prodigal, Europe will let that old scene play and sacrifice the fatted calf. Happy in the welcome of a wayward son. And welcomed back Britain would be. But ye gads of decency, preserve, why let such insults manifest? And why should Europe ever forget?

And so the isolationists sell a double lie. That they can deliver better and that they can defend sovereignty. They are charlatans who don't know history. They are trinket men who sell stollen goods. They can never understand the dignity of man. They are one idea's men. They are fascists because they cannot think otherwise. They cannot think beyond their own heartless primitive gratification. They are the reflex of the presumptive. Sovereignty rests in the deepest caves of men, not one place or the other.

Trinkets are shiny. Beer is cheap. A good time is a few pieces of money away. Is this to be the standard? Well no. Not by a good long way. Because old Europe has come to compact. And whether Britain accepts terms or no, is of supreme indifference. And what old Europe teaches with touching pathos is that if you fight for it, you get it; If you fight for it, you get it. You get it by long fashion. And no power will molest. Because no power of one state can tell the other 27 what to do, or hold them to ransom. The populists will lose in the long run. They will pass. And so Britain will lose. A too proud union rejecting the most successful union, is not our world full of irony?  

Thus I, for one, want it to be known that I reject British policy. I defy it. I am European and no one May tell me otherwise. So I defy the stupid who have 'risen' up? Go back to your caves and melt into the rocks. Descend back to the vegetation where you belong. Huffing and puffing is your basic practice, don't disturb the intelligent with your nonsense. Huts are your houses. Go dwell there. The dialectic is beyond you, the debate is a side-show to you. Leave off and return to your straw dwellings. I defy the authority that strips me of the right. And I defy the history, the bone-hardened legacy that says only some in Britain are entitled to good education. No, in sweet old Britain, in dear old Britain they would never have voted the rod for their own backs if they all had good education. 

And there lies the rub. In England the culture proclaims nothing about education being a way to escape poverty, when the truth is education is the only way to escape it, to tunnel out from low to high. And so poverty is chief in a country that should know better. And yet England has education enough to know better. Education for a few means nothing, it is in the long deleterious. Education is a right, not privilege extended. If all can't be well educated, then the state is not very smart. And I will clash swords with any who thinks otherwise.

We are hopeful, and we are fearless knowing that the dear face of Europa is pleasant enough to welcome back a recalcitrant fool.

Demokratia

Democracy is in the minority and always has been through out history. Ponder the irony of that sentence for a moment. An aberration in the ancient Hellenic peninsular surrounded by city state autocracies and empires, land masses ruled from citadel and democracy didn't emerge anywhere until modernism. This idea is in the minority in space and time, like a piratical crew surviving by wits in a sea that seldom likes how you think. In the catalogue of human past, democracy was the minority form of society. Even today most of humanity lives not in democracy. And there's nothing, especially given these facts, that suggest it ever will be. Let that sober consideration give you pause. Let also, its fragility concentrate your mind.

Let also the sober fact that prosperity is also in the minority, that most of history has been history of mass poverty, starvation, war and Bacchic-born judgement by a few, or by one. Let then the fool who today murmurs petty, cynical disquiet be struck cold by the pitiless oblivion in our history, and always dormant in our bones. Let not hubris and ignorance blind the fact that we live as a minority, and always will. Let it not blind us, for in such darkness we could lose all that was gained. The tragedy then would be that it was lost not heroically, but prosaically. Flippantly, laconically. We could lose our enlightened democracies because we could  amuse ourselves out of guard duty. Amused then to death. We could, too selfish to serve, destroy the thing that worked for our own best interests. Perhaps this is why democracy has always been in the minority. It is the thing which releases all talents, which release all benefits, which releases all selfishness, which releases all possibility, which releases all freedom, and therefore all chaos.

Yet if the autocrat, the tyrant, the totalitarian may collapse by a breath from Dionysus, democracy lets such winds pass through its Apollonian metric like wind over water. There is strength in democracy. There is a precious beauty in it too. And yet it will never be in the majority because it gives too much promise to too many. It treats everyone with dignity, when there isn't enough to share. This is a gloomy picture because history adumbrates that democracy is fragile. It is the best, and like the best wine, it is the most expensive and delicate. And also the rarest.

And so it is also a stubborn element too. We do not live by reason. And as long as Homo Sapiens is the dominant intelligence that statement won't change. Democracy is the most rational system, but it is in the minority. And yet reason is stubborn because although there are many different ways for greed or avarice or corruption to change, reason stays the same. It repeats. It comes back to the beginning. The allotropes of greed and fear, evolve only to greater entropy. Democracy is stubborn because it is built on defenses of truth, not on the lies of tyrannies whose aim is to exploit. Thus democracy is also beautiful. Truth be beauty, beauty truth.

Against the bitter winds of chaos, the democratic society can fortify with equanimity. Against the same winds, the tyranny only has force. That's because all tyranny is a state of force, where force is the centre, where the aim is not the best for the greatest number, but the maintenance of power. And in such states, the life of the individual is always subservient, power cannot co-exist with the right of the individual. Therefore, beware the justification of power for its own sake. Beware the excuse of maintaining order. Committee of Public Safety? There's one in China as there was in Robespierre's France.

Democracy threatens because by unleashing all talents, the ruling class cannot compete and so lose power. Since their state is based on power, if they lose it, their state crumbles. But democracy is based on the equal weight of voice, of vote, of power. Arguments are won by persuasion, not force. Power is distributed. Government is responsible. It is answerable. It can be renewed. It can be reformed. It can be removed. And yet Hitler was elected. Mussolini was elected. Mugabe was elected. Putin was elected. What are we to understand by the election of self-confessed anti-democrats? It can be understood by the following:

Democracy works only as well as the citizens are educated.

Only the ignorant can elect fascists. Only the stupid can vote against their own interests. Only a mass enthralled by trinkets, lucre, circuses, greed and fear can destroy the equality that maintains the state. By this way the society throws away a diamond only to clutch a piece of coal.

Therefore fortify yourself, fortify others. Defend our democracies, minority states in place and moment. Encourage education. Stimulate dialectic and debate. Energise the cynical, appeal to their heart. Never let anyone say the democracy is inferior. It is superior. It is superior to all other forms. The apathetic aren't lazy, they just don't understand the value of the jewel. Whisper to them the value.  Show them the life without the jewel. Let them see the jewel shine. And always be ready to fight against the lie for the lie is undemocratic. If the jewel belongs to everyone, everyone shines. If it belongs to one, to a few, it is shrouded in the deepest vault, among the most miserable of men.

Greed To The End

Greed and fear are allotropes of the same matter. And in the ancient lesson of greed and good, greed wins. And in the modern, it has proven itself time and again. Our brains make us slaves to greed and fools from fear. The hope of a sensible world is washed away in the rising waters of stupidity. Unleashed with technology, the human mind, the primitive mind, is a poor planetary trustee. What conceit it is to assume that 'all will be right'. That we won't destroy this planet or make it inhabitable. That we won't only collapse our own species, but condemn all life. That our insatiable industrial demand, controlled by greed, defended by fear, is the thing which is ending us. Ending. The Anthropocene is ending things. And the problem is our brains. They are too primitive to the task. They are shaped to throw spears at animals. They produce too much adrenaline and the neocortex is in the wrong place. If life could exist formless, intelligent without attachment to fear and the bipedal... but that's... that's... the dreamer's dream. The summa of hope. What chance? What hope?

And if so, we have to live with this primate body until then. With its contradictions and its charms. None of this would be so bad, except for the fact that we face an existential crisis in what we are doing to the environment. Fight! If the powers that are, refuse, then there can never been a more legitimate case for revolution. Greed destroying life, what further cause do you need. That has greater necessity than the revolts against George III and Louis XVI combined. And yet I am not an optimist. What is there to be the optimist for? Scarce little. Could we make it in time to take evolution into our own hands, we could be the ancestors to the answer. Yet I have little hope of our getting to that point. Because greed, and its complementary, fear, rule. They keep reason to ransom; logic to the sword. Unleashed on a universe heading towards entropy, are primitive brains, with the technology of destruction. What chance? What hope?

And yet sweet music, you play of hope. It is torture. Cease your strumming, unless it be a lament. Unless it sings of the endless folly of man and his gut desire for the destructive. Rise above the fear! Rise above it. There is nothing to fear! It cannot be a secret that there is nothing to fear. But who will believe it? Who will credit it? And yet you are right, music, in your sanguine sarabande. Each note leads on inevitable to the next. Once the first is played, it decides the last. Once an acorn seed is sown  it will only be an oak. The first to the next, to the next to the last. The first to the last. It is not predestination. It is nature. It is the law of cosmos.

And yet, oh how the human spirit dares! How it dreams! How, tenaciously it hopes. How it achieves victories when none seem possible! Could it be that that valiant creed, that hero's spirit defeats greed and fear? Oh, it can happen. It can. That spirit that channels through the ages, from the mind's ancient dreams to the wisdom of philosophy, it could yoke the primitive in its pen and the thinking brain could soar. Oh see it soar! See! Look what beauty in it's flight. See how its flight is delicate and light. Light. See how it dares. See the beauty.

But I am not hopeful.

Greed is a power that cannot check itself. Fear is a state that needs no reason. Through the strong vacuum of human forces, what right of the delicate, what chance for the best? Where can man swim to, bogged down by the drag of the ape? Where else but to the clutch of brothers. But what if those brothers kill? Fear wins. What if those brothers steal? Greed wins. What if those brothers give their life to others. Hope wins. Will you go to the stake for your position? Will you go to the stake for anything? But it's not likely. Martyrs are fools too. Intelligence is the ability to mock the primitive. Have no hesitation in that. And martyrs cannot mock themselves.

Yet the odds are not good. They are long that there is a future for the species. Was it always thus? Did the mediaeval priest think it was end of days? Yes. Has the eschatological existed before? Yes. But now marks a difference, because science tells current leads to catastrophe. Science! What can the thinking brain do? Built up on a history of success, what can it do?

The truth is, it is powerless to greed and fear. And the power of enlightened authority is over estimated. Thus the money-men rule. They will laugh like Bacchus, and sing like the pied piper, and the mass will follow them off the cliff. What is the philosopher to this stampede? And so there is no hope. There is no destiny for our species but annihilation and the destruction of life on earth. And, perhaps like the first note, it was inevitable. Perhaps it is inexorable. The only chance, and I'm no optimist, is that we take our evolution into our hands and make anew the species. Then wisdom may soar in beauteous flight. But...what chance? What hope?

Art, Between and Beyond.

No man is an island, so no art is of itself.

And synesthesia between art is the only way to know what art is. How can literature rise without rhythm? How can painting sing without music? How can a tale move without an image? An art walled away, itself to itself, dies.

As poetry comes from music, let that music play on. As music comes from life, let the life live. And in the silence between the notes, consolation. The dreamer will think of clouds, the pragmatist will think on irony; all the while the artist thinks on what is, or was, shall be or should be. And yet all are human, all different, all the same.

What binds us is stronger than what divides us. That is the soft and loud of art: All is one. Chaos to cosmos, Destruction to Creation, Death to life, Night to Day. There is a unity in art that says there is a unity in life. The artist may veil it, he may even refute it. But can we even have the very thought to hold the brush if chaos is total? Form implies order. Form is not possible without order. And so for art to exist, so must order. Therefore there is order. And so art. And therefore art unites people. Art is the fraternity in time and space. And among people. It is the eye into the heart. It is the ear into the nature. It is the vein into the precious, mineral soul.

Let the storm clouds gather, their baleful portent. Let the money-men win. Let the stupid have their victory. Let old gorse prickle. Let all follies have their run (their run will be had). But wherever, whenever man looks up, in, or out and thinks; what he seeks is truth. And truth is always there. Always there. A thing that is, for truth cannot not be. It is a thing that is, not a thing that isn't.

Therefore make art.

There is no war between reason and art. There was never a battle between Rousseau and Hogarth; Jefferson and Beethoven. The battle is, always was, between the Agora and Ideas. Between money and the just city. Between the money, which thinks itself power, and art with its belief in the pursuit of ideas and feeling. Yet, what is man to do? He is a piece of clay. Yet his dreams, the beauty, the soul and the spirit? Can you keep him low? Is he just a consumer? Is the mind too primitive? Ah, there is the irony. Man's hubris is cosmic, his reach far, beyond the planet. Yet there is still no cure for poverty.

And Jupiter is large with no life. And what does it suggest? That, fool is the one who thinks smart and strong are the same? Or big is clever? Or large is life? Fool, our race is full of fools. But it is art, its emancipation, that gives us the view. Informs. Say, we are a scientist lying, in wait of a galaxy to turn, and to prove an hypothesis. Yet, in that wait the artist has already given the answer. That is nature. The artist is unaware of what he has, yet the scientist finds the proof. So a lovely un-scripted alliance exists between them.

Why?

Truth.

Truth is the rhythm of cosmos. Was it thus? Will it be thus? No. It is what is. Is now in perpetuity? No. Truth is evolutionary. It is what is. But only in the moment it is. Is that casuistry? No, the meaning of truth is that which recurs. Pattern is truth. And that is arbitrary, yes. But that which endures is truth. Truth is that which repeats. The question is how many times must it repeat for it to be considered truth. And maybe it is a million. Perhaps a trillion. Or perhaps we decide.

Art loses to money because the Neo-cortex slower than the primitive brain. The artistic, the thinking, the dreaming, the laughing mind, is slower than the fighting, the warring, the territorial, the greedy. That is how our brain is made. The gun has always been mightier than the thought.

Rise above that, and you might avoid repeating catalogue of misery in history.

And, so, we say we are civilized.

If we could organize neurons now, we would throw away the bi-pedal with lightening speed. Man must rise. Or intelligence rise. Out there in the destiny, will intelligence survive? Nothing is possible, in that vein. But why should man be in that destiny? We are destined to end all our thinking, art, life, hope, dream, angle and aim by either our own stupidity, which is inexhaustible, or by the star-death, galaxy-oblivion or cosmic implosion.

What hope of intelligence?

Or are we one of many? Many Comose's, repeating? In a multiverse? Dimension surplus?

Alas, Occam's razor is very sharp. What can be proved is. What can't, isn't. That's the end of it.

It is art that unifies. Music to painting, painting to theatre, theatre to literature, literature to the flowing river. What does it do, it keeps an eye on man. It is the microscope to the heart. It is the overflowing of the breast. It is the sage reflection of the well examined life. It is man, it is him. It is truth, that which recurs. And if it doesn't, it's not truth. C'est Ça.

Maybe one day, intelligence won't rely on the bi-pedal. Could such a mind survive through time? Oh please, take Beethoven with you. Please? Let all stupid things perish, let smart things endure. This is not sophistry but obvious sense. But I plead a case for Beethoven. You will never have better. If there was only one man to whom I could speak, it is Beethoven, as much as man may speak of the deaf.

What diamonds we throw away, and in return, what coal we clutch. Yet why not love each other? Why not forget territory? This is arts humanity. And greed? - don't call it geo-politics. Let's all be long on ideas and short on things, for things are greed. Things are battles. Things are war. Good heavens let us be brothers. For heavens sake let us be brothers.

Things make us primitive. Things make us stupid. It is things that stupefies. The immaterial makes us smarter. The more things, the more will be destroyed.

No. Things are the problem. Oh, cut out the Limbic, cut out the Amygdala. Let's be past those things. Let us be past those things. Because those things are greed and money and power. Intelligence should live with ideas, that way they live with love and without greed. Is all that fine by you?

But if man wants to live sustainably with the world, he has live with its ideas. Not it's things. You in posterity understand, it is sad man now that doesn't.

Perhaps the future of intelligence is formless, thingless.

So you in the future, if you know, arm yourself. Never trust authority. Never a soft code.

And remember, money, greed, wanton, is all the realm of things and, so, unnecessary. And so things that are death disguised, that lead onto death. Oh, what of love?

And all art is connected. As, all life be so. It is to ideas, not things that are our legacy. Why then, you idiots, do you thirst after fools?

And yet, why not you feel our love. You, stupid idiot fool, no-brains, you still need love. And love you will have. Love is yours.

What waits us, is the marriage of art and love.

What waits us, is rising above ourselves.

The Agora

A police force of 300 Scythian slaves carried red ochre-stained ropes to induce the citizens who loitered in the agora of Athens to attend the meetings of the assembly. Anyone with red-stained clothes who was not in the meeting was liable to a penalty. 

The retreat from the Ekklesia to the Agora is a sad, soul-ennervating trend. It is also a dangerous one. If the centre of our debate and politics and what it is to live in the just state is the Neo-Cortex, the Agora is the Limbic. The Agora is the Amygdala. The Agora is fear, because it is greed. Nobility isn't urgent and that's why it loses the fight against fear, against the primitive. So we now live in a time where mass-man, devoid of ideas, cannot stop a Joseph Smith-like fraud, a tin-pot demagogue, a billionaire who at seventy suddenly calls himself a working-class champion, from winning the chair of Washington, Lincoln and FDR.

It isn't that we are so far through the looking-glass. No. And it isn't that the intellectual has lost the debate to the brute, for what is argument against the cudgel. No. And it isn't that the electorate lacks the critical brain. No. It is that money has numbed our brains. Stimulation now comes from things, not ideas. Where once radicals fought for a new republic, searched to the high atmospheres of the self and mind for man's own destiny and drew up a new contract; we, now, invest our minds in the vapid, protean language of capital and purchase. Thinking man weeps - sad, elliptical, drawn-out tears. He sits, with his stinging eyes, sighing over the edge of the sea-touched cliff and hoping with bootless prayers. He knows they won't come to be. The Agora has won.

Or is the answer technology?

Perhaps. Perhaps if the computer matches and ascends beyond human capacity and cupidity. Are we in thrall to money and its superficialities merely because technology is too stupid and forces us down to its level? And so is there hope? Hope that one day technology will make us smart, will stimulate us away from the numbness of things and the fetters of money?

Or is technology always only to be an extension of man?

Revolution has always been scented with youth. Unfettered by the wims of the Agora youth has fought for the best, natively idealistic. Yet where are the young to fight the corruptions of the age? There are some, precious few. But the others are consumed, by things, by money, by the dominion of the market place, by the circus and theatre. By the titillations of the animal. They are taught that satisfaction is better than thinking. They are told not to have ideas, except the onanism of the credit card. They are told not to think but to consume. Always consume. They consider nature something that should produce for them. How then to expect radicals from this? Yet, why not? Nature always throws exceptions. There are some millennials who see the dark clouds gathering, who know their portent and who are prepared to die by their own ardor. This gives us great hope. Hope that man will look to conquer himself against the forces of greed, narrow interest and the diminishing returns of rising consumption and its rising entropy. For who in their conscience would not go to the stake for the good of the species? Who would not be a benefactor of the race, if he could so choose? Why should we surrender the fight to greed? For greed is nothing more than the primitive, the expeditionary force of the conquering primate stealing territory and goods; while thought and ideas are the light that shines in the thinking man's hand.

How much does a lie cost?
How deep are the pockets of liars?

How corrupt are the powerful?
How stupid are the people?

So truth and intelligence are the antidote. And populism and money, the arsenic. This should be in high contrast. Yet our phones and computers and our shopping malls are multicolored, they shade and lull into the sheep-mind. This world isn't for the romantic, the Byronic, the philosopher, the dreamer. Greed is the king and he was installed by cabal when our backs were turned watching the pretty fireworks. The Agora won. The Agora always wins. Only it doesn't if we first learn to conquer ourselves. It is a fool's creed that says, 'it'll all be fine.' Civilisations before us have been wiped out. There's nothing in history that shows things always working out. Why should they now? Do not slide blissful down the ignorant slide, with the casual impulse that 'they' know what they're doing. And that they will make sure the fun fair runs for perpetuity. This is foolish for this reason: Because 'they' are also numb, 'they' are also unstimulated, 'they' are also short on ideas. 'They' are the chef who refuses to eat his own food because he knows its bad. 'They' are also slaves of the Agora.

That is why thinking and art and the freedoms they produces are the balm. And literature is the one thing in our banal age that shines with the force of all its history behind it. And literature is the one thing that will outlive our banal age because it is loud enough to echo into future history. But let not hubris rush on. Man is capable of such high spheres, yet blood gushes and he swirls giddy. We used to believe in the greatness of man. But post-modernism, bless it's happy sweet death, sold us the lie to our disbelieving guts: That all things are relative. Yes, but some things recur, and they are pattern, they are truth. Yes, the cosmos is ever changing and evolving, yes the sun from one angle is different than from another, but you are an absurdist if you think there is no distinction between the pattern and the random. There must be a distinction for this reason: If there is none, nothing holds meaning, words have no meaning. If that is the case, then let our little species on it's small blue dot vanish. Let us not be. Let us anti-be. Let us be anti-existed from time. Either a thing holds value, or there is no value. Either a thing is, or nothing is. Either something is true or all things are lie.

And all the time, the Agora wins.

Then let us fight, let us write, let us dream. Let not the empires of the bloated corporate kings distract us. Let us be pirates and lords unto ourselves in the age of greed. We must merily set our sail for Atlantis and dam the storm, dam their navy, dam their arsenals. We will outfox them. We will vex their plans. We will survive in our sweet minority. We will surround the Agora in a rope of reddened ochre. And we will love and dance and kiss each other in the kindest fraternity.

Our Stupid Tragedy

Stupidity is on the rise, stupidity is in the majority, stupidity is growing powerful. Pseudo-Modernism , the impulsive daughter of Post-Modernism, is giving birth to fruits it doesn't want to but does non-the-less. It is like a cliff that you see from a long distance, your mind is dragged over and in that flight over the precipice a boy's choir serenades your descent.

We know we must stop, we must turn back, we know it, but we are too bored to be wise. Our ancient bellicose ghosts demand we dance naked into the fray. Sensible means sitting in a library. Sensible means socialism. Sensible means curbing all native anger. Sensible means sober. The Neo-Cortex is eons ahead of the Limbic, and that's our tragedy. If we could only cut the out the spear-throwing legacy. Maybe in the future we can. Maybe we get to the future. Maybe the future will look on us as wayward life, maybe it will throw disdain as we do of the sad primitive Neanderthal. See how easy condescension is. But I would rather be known a snob than a fool, any day. 

Yes we want action, we want drama, we want the fight, we want war. All the ancient causes are in us. Yet we also know how we should arrange things, how, practically, we should arrange things. Yet every generation proves how what is sensible, rational, enlightened, Apollonian is instead jettisoned because of a rush of blood, because of the promise of mayhem, a thing which sits deep in everyone's soul. 

At the centre of that bay of blood is the excuse of it - stupidity. It is possible to excuse drunkeness, sloth, perversion, delay and the other failures as a part of the condition. But stupidity, and I state this without any sense of the relativity of the term, is a thing that shows us how far in the future we can go but how far in the past we are strung. And it is the one thing that can eclipse us all, despite our genius and our advance. One act of stupidity can destroy a generation of brilliant gifts. Is that supposed to be our epitaph? Oh do we not have some duty to the cosmos that made us? Oh help us, if it's all to no purpose. And even then, surely the wise arrangement is better than the fool's. But we cannot control this primitive brain. We lust with this primitive body. We burn with primitive heart. Despite what we know yet we long for pillage. Despite our genius yet we destroy ourselves.

In this age we have abandoned all propriety. But I have heard that said in history books. So then it is a generational question. How can we hope to conquer our primitive inheritance. Here is what I say. And only you in posterity can say how close to the mark I am: First, the future of intelligence must not depend on Homo-Sapiens. Second that intelligence cannot be restrained by the bi-pedal and all it's primitive heredity. Third, that intelligence in it's greatest is least constrained by the corporeal - this is no modern idea but rather Platonic. Fourth, that such an intelligence would understand that life has no meaning and no purpose but that in spite of these things a thinking mind would always prefer the superior to the inferior. Fifth, and last, that the thinking mind will always look out to the greater good.

Freedom is the prime point. It gives sanctuary to the stupid, and flame to the noble. We used to have a world were the arrangement was thus: the stupid could have their day, but the smart would rule. For the life of me I couldn't see the problem there. But now we set our standards so that all is equal. I ask, what finer example of stupidity can there be? 

We have a right to examine the world and so by proxy examine ourselves. Yet the the moneymen want beer and circuses. Not because we would examine their fraudulent model, but because it would make us more the thinker and less the consumer, and that would not suit their interests. When will we realize the our enemies are the rich who wish to keep all our hearts and souls in the thralldom of money. When will we realize that that enlightened state is the one which is long on ideas and short on things. Ah but you, in posterity, I hope to all you exist, you know because you are less physical than we. The elite is not our enemy, the enemy is the addiction of money and unchecked greed. Money is an addiction like Nicotine or Cocaine. I don't expect all the sodding proletariat, the great un-hosed, to be sophisticated. I just want a society free of the thralldom and mercenary grubbiness of money. 

It splits the heart and it galls to know where we should be going, and to know that where we are going are in two different directions. Yet are we not an ironic species!? Failure is mixed in with success at every turn. The soul wants to soar, the mind wants stimulation yet animals we are. Well then let the stupid have their bones and their day, but please let them never rule. I am sure that you in posterity would never let the stupid anywhere near a tool of power. I am confident that you in posterity all set a high bar. And that you all understand the proviso that one must prefer the superior to the inferior. 

Now I address you of today. Let me concretize it thus. Because you are stupid, you vote against you're own best interest. Because you're stupid you fail to read the wind. Because you're stupid you fail to understand irony. Because you're stupid you grasp on the crest without knowing which way the current goes. Because you're stupid you won't even know the moment you're 'movement' collapses under the weight of it's own implosion. Because you're stupid you won't even know what it is to have power. Because you don't have the mettle, you will fail. 

But some how, we will survive to you in posterity. Somehow we will, I'm confident. I am certain it will be the hard way, I'm certain it will be in spite of all the selfish interests. Of all the ungenerous and unfeeling, unpitying, racist, bigoted, backward minds, we will overcome. 

Hopeful then we must be. Ready to the fight must we be. Tolerant to a good cause. Open to our fellow. But critical of a bad idea. Sharp to mawkish power. Skeptical of authority. And...weary of the power of stupid.

Life In The Age Of The Banal.

Suppose within the girdle of this earth lies two sub-genres of Dubstep, whose low subsumed divisions make the vast, expanding cosmos, nothing. Piece then their similarities with thought, and try to travel long and far into space and self. How do you find it comrade? Comfortable? Did you learn something? Did the earth shake?

No?

Well...then take a sound probing of the depth. Is it shallow? Oh, it is? But aren't you going to say that profundity is all relative? What is all this depth and shallowness but muck and muck to the miner?
But, flippant person, are you really prepared to say that the difference between Beethoven and Bieber is a question of perspective? Or the difference between Shakespeare and Scrubs is merely a point of angle? Or that the term 'false equivalency' is a lie? Are there not quality differences between? Or separations of value? Because there's surely a flaw in your logic. If all things are relative, then in conclusion nothing has meaning. Words lose their meaning, gesture holds no use, art is a waste of significance. So by your thinking, all things are the same and all things are nothing.

So stupidity is equal to intelligence. Art is equal to the random. High equals low. Soft equals hard. Light equals dark. Deep equals shallow. Is Facebook as good as the mind? Or the instant message as good as the dead sea scrolls? If Einstein meant, by enlightening us with his truth, only to prefer the images of Twitter to Titian, than relatively speaking could I not say I think relativity is, relatively speaking, relative and therefore itself, nothing?

Ah curmudgeon my ancient droog. Dialectic summon! Where does that get us? Well it gets us at the heart of things. That is: Interest. You see the real difference between Beethoven and Bieber, Facebook and Mind is that one is more interesting than the other. And by corollary, one more boring than the other. You, being generous, I'm sure can figure the one from the other for that's not a relative question. For example, how much thought, how much concentration, how much consideration, how much practice went into the comparative music of each other. Significant by any count. And who shall last the longest? Need I spell it out? I understand when you say that none of this matters, it's wind over water and vapors in the sky. But dear sainted brother, are you really going to sponsor a jumped-up arrogant little, stupid monkey-boy over a man who suffered the fate of being deaf to his own art?

If so, then welcome then to the life of boring. Welcome to the age of the cat video. Welcome to the superficial. Welcome to the frivolous. Welcome to the Banal. Goodbye to Socrates and the wisdom that truth is knowing how little you know. Goodbye Confucius and the debts to study, the extension of faculty. Goodbye to Shakespeare and the line, "each man gets what he deserves." For in this world, reward often follows the stupefied. Merit, is what mass-man decides.

Aye there's the rub. Populism is the problem. From the Youtube comments to the Facebook post to the Twitter rant, to the message interchange with emoji to the Instergram pic, to the commonplace to the Yottabytes wasted, to the nights wasted to the black holes that have sunk sad souls, to the trolls to the reality TV proles, to football goals. Is that it? Circuses and bread? Junk food for junk brains? Oye Veh. what a palaver? Therefore I speak to you, yes you, in posterity. Perhaps you are a machine, computer or symbiosis of man and machine. Thank the Muses you are the trustees of intelligence and not our primitive species. Thank the decent, you have, I hope, solved our awful mess. What are apologies in time? So forgive if I don't apologize. But my duty here is to speak of the times, now.

Thus:

- Never underestimate the appeal of the banal, it's measureless attraction.
- Never discount the reach of stupidity.
- Never take for granted the gush for nonsense.
- Never wave off the idiot, infinite are his ways.
- Sigh on and frown, at the pleasures of the crowd.

Our world is long on things but short on ideas. Our culture is infantile, and therefore not free, and more about senses and less about sense. We must live, therefore why shouldn't we shine as we live?  Is my soul just a commercial? Can a romantic survive in the modern world? Should I just jump off something tall right now? What can it matter at all?

Alas, this is the Age of The Banal. No demons to exorcise. No land to till or great thought to mill. And thus also welcome to the age of decline, since we may not have progress without ideas. 

Trumponia

Trump?

“Trump supports gay,” was chanted at convention.

The suggestive thing about Trump is that history doesn’t seem to matter. What he says last week is often contradicts what he says now. Thus rules of critique don’t apply. There is only, with Trump, the ever present now, protean as the wind. In this he fashions his appeal. Some say he looks like Mussolini. Some say he looks like a tramp. 'Tramps for Trump' is only a heartbeat away from 'I love the poorly educated.' Yet not only does he survive, he flourishes.

But a lack of support among the black population and the dissidence of women bears down on his thin skin. With his desperate shrill - proof that he is losing, and bluster he attacks like a rabid dog sadly diseased and incurable. The quiet rage of migrants, who though it would be previous to say are more radical, but generally are, do at least know a fraud when they see one. Added then are the accretions of braggadocio. It may not matter so much his ban on Muslims, but when added to a wall to stop a stampede that doesn't exist, or the fiction of crime waves, or an imagined American getting raped at the hands of international sodomites, or the endless spasms of his old-chap prejudice, there comes a calculus of these spurts of machismo that does, and will, add. 

On the other hand it must be said it is churlish to compare him, as some do, to Hitler or Mussolini. No doubt he has fascist leanings, no doubt he plays the strong-man game, but he neither could be nor has the mind for dictatorship, in principle because given power he would not have a clue what to do with it. 

So too are the comparisons that Clinton and Trump are like Apollo and Dionysus, except in one detail. The teetotaler Trump is making people drunk with wish-thought, time-travel, fact-freedom, fancy-flight and empowerment of embarrassing stupidity, so much so that the revellers will mutter and stutterer out any nonsense, non-sequitur, incoherency and bigotry happy they have a champion who will dance with all the satyrs of chauvinist yesteryear. He brings all the bones long buried back to life with his applause lines of hysteria, his narrow vision of the future based on a narrow vision of the past. The small lanes of victory are surely Clinton’s yet… ah these febrile years, this topsy-turvy world, these poll-failed times… perhaps the criticisms of her being Apollonian are unjust, but surely, surely the world needs wise heads, surely common-sense…surely...surely...Hillary.

So never in recent times has the Whitehouse race been so antonymic. Trump: 50’s man, nativist, isolationist, über-menshen. Clinton: 60’s woman, globalist, inclusive, boring to the point of faded tapestry. The victor this November is not just R or D. Victorious shall be also which vision of America will live and which will die. Will it be the progressive young future that celebrates, or the revanchist old white man spluttering into the sunset who suddenly gets given the reins of power and can’t believe his luck, buck-wild with his jumping horse and jumpy gun? Will the black have his rights and expectations renewed, or removed? Will the Mexican have his path to citizenship acceded to or will the flash lights wake him up? Will divisions cleave deeper or will society grow with far-sight and large heart?

Alas, the tea leaves this year have been of a poor crop. We shall wait until November and hold our breath. We should be prepared for the outré Trump, as we have had to adjust to the unthinkable, senseless, stupid and backward Brexit. Should the confidence machine he is win, we must remember the sky shall not fall nor shall the Universe reach that point of absurdity where it implodes on itself. No indeed, we, in Churchillian whistle, would ‘keep buggering on’.

  ~ “And this too shall pass.” ~

Honor

You ask me what is wanting in this world? Well, dear one, I can't answer that but I can suggest something which is necessary for our culture: Both the word and value of, Honor.

First I will state my definition of Honor and then expand upon why I think it's necessary for progress, equanimity and hope:

- To not commit a crime even when you can do so with impunity
- To not take advantage even when you can do so without ill conscience
- To not violate your morality even when man and law are blind and deaf.

Now I will tell of why such a value should be reappraised in our culture. I do so with an example.

There is a story of the two young Syrian soldiers. They are standing in the middle of a road and they are joking and laughing to each other. A boy is playing in the street some hundred yards off. Their thoughts begin to collect and they laugh and shake hands on a bet. Is the bet about a sports game? A girl? An adolescent dear? No. One of the soldiers raises his rifle and takes aim. The bullet when it strikes goes clean through the boy's head. The other soldier pulls out his wallet, slowly, and gives some notes to the shooter. He sighs and then they both burst into a sad, liberating frenzy of laughter.

My sweet, it is a true story. It happened in the name of Assad.

There are two points:

1. These two young men would not have done what they had if they were not soldiers, given license to kill, in the middle of war, knowing they would fear no justice.
2. More critical to our point, if they had valued honour, if their culture had sold it as the thing all real people should have, if their society had put a premium on it and bred the idea, as a little shine among stars, they would have never even contemplated such a thought let alone let it run on to action.

Many may say that such a word and value is too old hat, too old fashioned, too much the stuff of twee, too old for our hefty march of progress. Yet our culture puts a premium on the superficial, the banal, the frivolous, the inane. Our culture is dense with stupidity. Our politics leaden with cynicism. Our populace not even close to realising potential. Our world stultified with junk food, junk bodies, junk minds full of junk ideas. Failed ideas. There is always better, though we don't know what that looks like we know it is better and head for it. Honor, and its corollary honesty, at least will deal in even hands; at least tally truth and reality together. Be forthright and true then, and sell it to everyone you meet. A true friend is the only friend who pulls you up when you are wrong. Honor is a handshake amongst true friends.

My dear, even if we fell into a thousand years of darkness and even if the forces of fear, power and poverty overwhelm, if a man or woman acts with Honor, such a world as we know shall not be lost.

I go back to the Syrians. It is tragedy for the boy. It is tragedy for the soldier. Because he will in time, remember the moment he killed a child for caprice. A thing, you must know see, Honor would have stopped.

Pericles Among The Russians

Today Russia is a one party state with a one man rule. Russian revanchism was perhaps always destined after the fall of the the Soviet Union and especially after the basket case economy of the 1990's. There was a chance, if Boris Yeltsin had had the benefits of the land's oil revenue, to bring the new Russiskaya Federatsya out of squalor. But such opportunities were vetoed by corporate America through the charming gauche face of President Clinton. In the 90's the exact number of oil assets the Russian government controlled was 0. Private America controlled them and gave the Russian government a pittance which barely paid the grain.

And so, Vladimir Putin. In office in the year 2000, had, by what is only natural, all the oil assets nationalised soon after. In 1951 Mohammad Mosaddegh began to nationalise the oil assests of Iran only to be deposed two years later by MI6/CIA. Putin would not suffer Mosaddegh's fate, as Russia was too big, being former pole of a once bi-polar world. Yet Putin felt white heat all the same. If Clinton wanted Russia to be an ally why was he complicit in pushing it to beggary?

If our premise in this article is the force of your history condemns you then, it must seem the dictator was never going to join the comity of western, democratic, progressive joys. Instead, inheriting the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and before that the "serfdom of the Tsar". Can it be that Russia cannot understand democracy? Are we to expect democracy in communist China, which has been autocratic since primitive man?

America's independence in 1776 or Britain's parliamentary sovereignty in 1649 or France's provisional committees in the 1790's were all the sharp relief of the people. Russia's moment came in 1917. But the Russian uprising took Marx, deciding to lump the privations of capitalism in with the Occidental concepts of rights, representation, law, free press and enquiry. Forgetting the contradictory term of 'the people's dictatorship', why wasn't Lenin impressed by Jefferson? Why did workers consider the democratic model contemptible? If it's because the Tsar represented the same European order, then the Bolsheviks lacked key detail. There was presented the perennial dilemma, was it the system that needed fixing or the system that needed replacing. Today's question is, is it Globalisation that needs repairing, or replacing? Is it the Establishment that needs remaking or revolting against? These surely are questions of the surface. Isn't it populism precisely that's the problem? Of course we should be able to elect Pericles, but we do so knowing he was born and bred for the task. A populist candidate championing populist commotion will never solve a jigsaw puzzle, let alone a countries problems. How can everyone rule? This is facetious. A Few may rule, not all. That is Law. The real struggle is the ancient one, rich and poor.

Thus, Putin overturning the American rape of oil and inheriting a failing state without any form of democracy in its history and a people used to the directive from the 'boss', was it perhaps always an optimists daydream that Russia become the newborn nephew of democracy? 

Putin can last until 2024 or he could be out by 2018. In a kind of thinking his position is anathema. He's been at it too long already. The real question is when he goes, will Russia finally see the benisons of true democracy, or will history condemn the Russian once more tethered to the Tsar?

Sovereignty Is King.

In 1642 a campaign began between two sides of an argument: Where sovereignty lays. Is it the king or the parliament? In 2016 a referendum was held which lay a similar question. Is sovereignty in London or Brussels?

The king paid a capital price for his stubbornness. When the head left the trunk, Parliament was sovereign. In 1992 that same parliament ceded part of its sovereignty. Now arises the question whether that same parliament will see it returned in. 

There is a very imperishable quality in the English character that explains why this contentious point of sovereignty nettles the British where it merely tickles the French. Perhaps the British prize their sovereignty the greatest because of the Europeans they have had it the longest. And perhaps the Europeans have, by nature and history, a more acquiescent and flexible nature to power structures. Consider, Germany wasn't a country until 1871. Italy the same year. The Benelux countries where part of first the Holy Roman Empire, then the Austro-Hungarian. France was amputated by England until 1558 and had had been invaded in both world wars. England, was invaded last in the ubiquitously known 1066. Alors, is it possible the English don't like to be ruled over by any but the English and the Europeans don't take it so much to heart? However, notice, I say English. There is the Scottish question.

Is it a surprise Scotland has voted by 62% by district unanimously for the EU? No, for this reason. Invaded countries don't mind the supranational over them. Independent countries abhor it. Scotland wasn't a properly its own country until around 1338 and then lost that independence formally in the Act of Union in 1707. Scotland is pro-EU because it has known union already. The same is true for Northern Ireland. 

Thus, England. Proud Albion! Independent since 1066, the first taste of elective sovereignty in 1649. Germany last unified in 1990. Is it a small wonder the English prize their independence so? 

But this referendum wasn't just about sovereignty. Immigration. Putting aside the fact Europe is connected by land mass and so travel between states there is easier and more accepted. And putting aside the theory of island nations being more xenophobic, as exemplified by the Japanese, what is it in the English that adores the national and dislikes the foreign? From the Tory rural to the Romford geezer. Why do the English flinch for foreignness? I don't pretend a comprehensive answer here. Perhaps foreignness presents a threat to long held cherished independence? Perhaps the absence of the foreign in much of England's history compared to the fluidity of European borders and orders, makes the English fearful. Fearful of new orders, new systems to which Europe has old hat with. The English cherish their old ways, and who knows perhaps this stubbornness has its advantage. 

Now, you may say a word or two concerning the Nordic countries. Were they not also largely independent? Well, yes but Norway is not part of the EU and Sweden and Denmark still retain their currency. Finland, part of the EU and the Euro, was part of Russia until 1917. So, those that have been the longest independent value their independence more than those whose concept of independence, unification and sovereignty are more recent in history. Is it thus any great wonder that the head of the supranational organisation of the EU is headed in Brussels, the capital of a country independent only since 1830?

The UK's giant leap into the unknown was a risk the generally risk adverse English retreat from. When the choice touches the jugular of their ancient rights, an Englishman thinks the risk worth it. 

In 1649 Oliver Cromwell created a new concept, perhaps pregnant in many minds at the time. In 2016 Britain is reminded of this. And yet even though all the rational arguments clearly demonstrate remaining in the EU, and given that few of those who chose leave had much in the way of cogent argument, Britain has voted leave and did so because their gut told them to. A gut constructed by a history where sovereignty is king.