Musing on Medusa, Reflections on the Gorgon’s Head

Those of us who fear chaos, through our efforts to control chaos, bring about more chaos, a more virulent chaos, a more violent chaos.

“Let’s be realistic!”

We feel the weight of this admonition upon us everywhere we turn. It stands like a wall between us and it echoes in our minds. We take it as a warning. In fact it is our prison.

The Politics of Nostalgia

As any hope of an actual break with business-as-usual fades into the heat and glare of a summer in which discontent does not lead to action to address its causes; but becomes nothing more than a nuisance of disaffected noise signalling on both sides of our political theater that everyone – with the strongest push

It’s a crime, part II

Must we be pure? Whenever we confront the depths of our corruption we hear this whining plea. Ego deflates us, How can I meet such a standard? A false question. We are what we are. We will do what we feel we must do. What is in question is what do these questions mean? Who

The Dark Economy

After a long transition we’ve gone from having a major world economy that takes place out in the open to one in which all meaningful – by the judgment of those in charge of it – activity takes place within a Dark Economy that is completely hidden from public view. The parasite on the parasite

Our Predicament is Both Tangible and Elusive

We stand at a portal of transition, neither here nor there. The things we do to maintain our selves this day and what will keep us going farther down our track have little in common. Our predicament could be said to lie right at this point of divergence. What works – however poorly – today

The Consequences of Our Precarity

“Most of all you can break out of your mind’s silo and initiate yourself into the tribe — become one of the people. But however you move, you know you can’t do this stuff on your own. Somehow you have to decipher the law. Our ways of understanding life in graphs and linear narrative are

Economic Viability, a contradiction

We spread poison and paralysis around us …in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason. C. G. Jung Economic viability, I came across this expression in one of JMG’s comments. A commonplace of Peak Oil debate. I think it deserves a closer look. It is a grounding assumption for just about

Ideological Justification

In recent decades, American politics has been dominated, at least rhetorically, by a battle over the size of government. But that is not what the next few decades of our politics will be about. With the frontiers of the state roughly fixed, the issues that will define our major debates will concern the complexity of

Coherence is not reasonable.

This statement demands clarification. Coherence it is not a synonym for reason, reasoned, reasonable. Neither is incoherence: unreason, unreasonable, unreasoned. The key to understanding coherence lies at the root of these distinctions. I’ve found this talk given by Anthony McCann valuable in illuminating this distinction. Anthony uses language centered around what he calls Gentleness. His

Religion, Mental Proprioception, and the Implicate Order.

JMG has repeatedly pointed out that a religious impulse is always at work. There are many avenues for this impulse to work through. There are many places it can hide in plain sight, as it does in civic religions. As it does in our belief in science/technology, distinct from the practice of science. There are

Meaning & Action

” … minor twists of fate and individual decisions very often have much more dramatic consequences in dark ages than they do when the settled habits of a mature civilization constrain the impact of single events.” JMG “Failure provides clarity. We perceive that our knowledge is incoherent.” David Bohm Two comments that circle each other