To Protect and Serve… The Empire
by Phillip Farruggio
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Writer Eric Zuesse wrote a great new piece ” How Democracy Ended ” seen on a few fine sites. In it he shows how our U.S. so called democracy is really a scam controlled by the super rich. When all else fails to stop a political momentum, the two parties have always resorted to ‘ The Fix is in’. To this writer, the ‘ fix ‘ that Zuesse alludes to is deeply nesting in both our mainstream media and our elected and enabling two party structure.
The police have that wonderful saying ‘ To protect and serve’. In many cases, witnessed at times throughout the years by this writer, local police have done just that. Sadly, in just as many instances, they have ‘ protected and served ‘ the private property and rights of the super rich. Remembering the great labor disputes spanning perhaps since the beginnings of our republic, it was always the ‘ Cops’ who came in on the side of the corporate few. It has always been as IF the corporate domain was the castle and the striking workers the barbarians. Instead of being there to ‘ protect and serve’ both adversaries, the police always stood in front of the bosses vs. the working stiffs.
Well, we have that in spades in not only our mainstream corporate owned and operated media, but also in the three branches of this government. The mainstream media was always controlled, but since 9/11 it went on steroids! Most of us who actually study history ( from non mainstream sources ) knew that the Iraq debacle was based on hearsay and fabricated lies and half truths. The whole ‘ War on Terror ‘ was what the late great Gore Vidal named ‘ Perpetual War’. Wars keep the natives in line. Wars make lots of money for a select corporate few ( General Smedley Butler’s 1935 essay ‘ War is a Racket’), and wars help justify our obscene and bloated military spending ( duh, like over 50% our federal tax revenue). And who serves this War Economy so well? The media and of course the Congress.
Most of the members of Congress are very wealthy people, especially in the Senate. Regardless of that, they rely on the donations of the super rich, through personal and PAC money, to fund their re-elections. The late Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois once stated: ” When I go out on the campaign trail, and I come back to my hotel room, I usually have a whole bunch of messages. I go through them, and unfortunately, but honestly, if I see the name of someone who has given large donations to my campaign, I do call that person first. Sadly, that is the way it is.” Simon was actually one of the most progressive Senators at the time, and he knew the realities. Money talks. That was in the late 80s and early 90s. Now it is 100 times worse. You watch the hearings on C-Span and all you see are ‘ talking heads ‘ speaking NOT for their constituents… rather for their corporate handlers… from BOTH parties!
We are about to enter, as a nation, into an economic abyss, and hopefully not, a new hot war. All those who are there to ‘ Protect and Serve ‘ this empire will give us are more of the same: Hype, spin, lies and half truths!
Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 300 of his work posted on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Global Research ,Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has an internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected]
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Toby: it is brave of you to share such intimate details of your awakening, and I feel honoured that you can trust ii to someone you have never met (plus anyone else who might read it). Thank you. In my understanding (I’m not a medic) the things we have been talking about do have profoundly physical, and mind altering, consequences. Yogacara doesn’t leave much wiggle room: even the abstract and ideal: or thoughts, feelings, and emotions are materially determined – if not actually ‘material’. This kinda sidelines the ‘Cartesian Split’. I am definitely not positing that the mind or consciousness is reducible to its biophysical components: just that it is not separate from them either (an ‘alterity’ of consciousness?) This carries some weight from modern neuroscience: meditators brains are bio-chemically, bio-energetically and anatomically different from non-meditators. The difference is quantitative, as well as qualitative. Our brains are ‘neuroplastic’ and can… Read more »
It’s happened again! The Russians have hacked my reply to Toby below and put it in at the top of the page. Have they got nothing better to do in St Petersburg! 😀
I hope it’s ok to continue our shared-private conversation here! Re. the Cartesian split: sorry, I don’t mean mind-body at all, I mean subject-object; a reduced-to-its-essence version. Consciousness is the ground of being, not matter. Indeed, matter doesn’t exist as conceived: substantial, space-time occupying, atomic particles of mass. Information physics is the branch of physics that takes quantum-mechanical findings at face value (as it were) to reformulate the nature of reality to be information-based. Information is meaningful data, data made meaningful by consciousness. Thus, consciousness first, then later ‘brain’, where brain/body/physicality isn’t made of ‘particles’ but is patternings of data consciousness experiences. Matter is in this view an experienced quality of consciousness. More poetically and fundamentally, diversity in and as oneness as a dynamically complex whole that evolves via its (consciousness’) ability to make choices and learn cumulatively. At least, that’s how I have come to understand this set of… Read more »
Hi Toby: sorry for the (work) delay. You’ve got me on the information physics, I did try to read one of Hofmann’s papers, at your behest, but it made my brain bleed! Nevertheless, it is completely compatible with Yogacaran epistemics. Re: the Cartesian (mind/body); and the subject/object ‘split’ …there isn’t one, not until in the act of apperception – or in the categorisation of experience – we create one. This is the fundament of misperception: the splitting off from reality to create an insular subjective identity formation. This is codified (textualised) as THE basis of syntactical grammar (subject; verb; object – another ternary or triad). This syntax is the (metonymic) foundation of Western philosophy and political economy: the ‘langue’ (deep and hidden structure: the ‘taken-for-grantedness’) of language, thought, philosophy, and politics …which are built on … In Yogacara (and in canonical Buddhism): subject/object are said to be ‘co-dependently arising’: being… Read more »
A quote I came across while studying systems theory was “World and mind arise together”, which comes from Maturana and some other guy (Varela?). It hit me like a ton of bricks, as I had been in search of a pithy way of ending the deeply frustrating Cartesian split in my thinking. As you put it: “subject/object are said to be ‘co-dependently arising’: being co-original”. This is what I mean when I assert reality must begin with complexity. It cannot start with simple nothingness, nor with some wholly simple elementary particle or thing. Reality is thus fundamentally about complexity and relationships that are ever changing and capable of evolution – the logical prerequisites for cumulative learning. That is my starting ‘assumption set’ and is logically derived. One word/metaphor for that set of factors is consciousness. So when I say split, I mean notional, co-arising, co-creating, but also necessary and good.… Read more »
I feel a need to apologise. Yesterday was a very frantic day, so I knocked together my response with multiple interruptions, rushed the last two paragraphs and hit “Post Comment” without really checking what I was posting. On the other hand, it’s kind of a good example, unintended, of what I was communicating. How do we stay calm with stress all around us and mounting within us? Calmly reached decisions are more often than not better than hastily reached ones. And how do we communicate effectively with people who have very different instincts to us? For me, birthing a more humane and sustainable system comes down to these two issues, which means we each have to prepare ourselves, which is always true anyway. In other words, it’s not really about the endless detail of who did what to whom, singling out the bad guys for opprobrium and the good guys… Read more »
“So when I say split, I mean notional, co-arising, co-creating, but also necessary and good. How can there be relationship/complexity without divisions of some kind. So ‘split’ is kind of quasi-fundamental.” The ‘split’ is fundamental: but the mis-cognition of the ‘split’ is the root of all suffering. So how do we learn to cognise the ‘split’ as merely denotational: and not the Absolute it has become? Our psychological evolution thus far (if that is what you can call it?) has overdeveloped, culturally exploited, and concretised (as an Absolute and essentialist subtext) one part of our beingness. Let’s call it ‘being in time’? Our dialogue can point to an, as yet, undeclared conclusion – that pure perception and pure cognition would lead to pure presence: and the collapse of the perception of time …the ineffable and indescribable Nirvana: in the ‘eternality of the moment’. Let’s call this ‘being out of time’:… Read more »
Let’s call it ‘being in time’? Our dialogue can point to an, as yet, undeclared conclusion – that pure perception and pure cognition would lead to pure presence: and the collapse of the perception of time …the ineffable and indescribable Nirvana: in the ‘eternality of the moment’. Let’s call this ‘being out of time’: or the temporal/eternal split? It’s possible my response here proceeds from a misunderstanding of what you mean by time. Hopefully, my attempt to present my sense of time and what derives from that sense is clear enough to expose any failing in my understanding… Yes, I feel like it’s boiling down to this aspect, but the works I have exposed myself to see time as fundamental, as change requires time to be possible. Without change, nothing can happen. If nothing happens, nothing can be experienced. Thus, change/time is a requirement for awareness/perception/experience and thus for existence,… Read more »
Hi Toby, what with the Bank Holiday, it’s been a busy week …not much time for philosophy! What I mean by Time is purely the ontology of Time: not ‘scientific’ (external?) Time: but the “subjective experience and perception of Time”; the temporalisation of the subject; the conception of a substantive ‘something’, or Self – or ‘trace’ of something – that passes from a ‘past’ to a ‘future’; carrying the sense and meaning of itself ‘forward’ … phenomenologically ‘Becoming’. Cf: the ‘Unbecoming’ of Nirvana ….’Being out of Time’ (‘BooT’). [That is why I chose ‘Being in Time’ (‘BiT’); not ‘Being and Time’ – to distinguish from the Heideggerian position. I won’t digress, but will note that Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s Destruktion is most germane to our dialogue]. Thus, change/time is a requirement for awareness/perception/experience and thus for existence, in my understanding. This is exactly the BiT aspect of our Beingness. (Karmic)… Read more »
Told you my mind was elsewhere: I’ve miscategorised my own categories! Being out of Time should be categorised with the blissful, sublime states. The liberational is the Hegelian synthesis of BiT and BooT in a unity of opposition that neither confirms nor denies the values and experiences of either; the alterity of Being. See what a mess we create when we try to make a transcendental sense of language? Some things are best just experienced, and the experience left unsaid? 😉
As you state and so this will not be a surprise, your exposition arrives at me as the insoluble wrigglings of casuistry, the intellect attempting to communicate a fuller quality of experience than is possible within its domain, or at a blog. That said, I hear in the BiT-BooT distinction a reflection of the intellect-beingLevel distinction that marks Tom Campbell’s metaphorical language. The difference is that in Campbell’s model, what is encountered and learned in BiT is valuable precisely because it encounters ‘suffering’, so BiT is not to be escaped because of it. ‘Suffering’ is but one of a multitude of outcomes of karma that can be transcended within BiT by shedding our fears and beliefs. In BiT, we learn about / experience causality very directly. He calls our physical universe “an entropy-reduction trainer”, i.e., a fast track on the path of becoming love. It’s harder to walk this path… Read more »
Well, exactly: without Yoga – words refer to words, infinitely. Without Yoga: the entire Western Canon of thought is a circularity of casuistry. Without Yoga: Buddhism is a recursion into Metaphysics and Ontology …two areas it has steadfastly refused to go. If we want to go beyond words: we need to start at the ground zero of semiotics …taking Derrida at his exhortation, to create a new language in order to understand him. How do we go beyond words (or any other form of semiotics) …except with words? But you are right: this is not the place. I’d love to take you up on the offer of a beer …unfortunately, I’m in Sussex. Leeds is a bit of a trek! I’ll send you a copy of the manuscript I’m working on: at this rate, it’s going to be very short! I’ve enjoyed this dialogue: I’ve never tried to expand my… Read more »
Shame about Sussex, but if I’m ever headed that way I’ll let you know.
I suspect there’s no beyond, but also suspect that’s as it should be / must be. Infinite regress is impossible, so reality has to be founded on an insoluble paradox of Dasein. As I see it, nothingness is impossible. Our efforts towards the foundations eventually confront a mystery, and this confrontation is like looking into a mirror. Only this mirror forces us to choose what we see reflected there.
I’m looking forward to reading your manuscript!
I suggest you just read the Bhagavad-gita, starting with the second chapter summary. There, Krishna resolves all Arjuna’s dilemmas, which are exactly yours, very pithily. Essentially he is just told to do his duty with no regard for the outcome. I use the precepts daily, and find them very liberating. I’m reminded of another story of two Buddhist monks on pilgrimage. One keeps asking the other existential questions. The other responds every time…keep walking. So go on a pilgrimage would be my advice. I’m planning to set out on the via Francigena to Rome quite shortly, and then later maybe a year or so in India. The world will take care of itself. Krishna says in the B-g…”whenever and wherever there is a rise of irreligion, I descend, millenium after miillenium, to reestablish the principles of religion and to annihilate the miscreants.” So he will take care of it. You… Read more »
Thank you, Charles, for your suggestion. I read your comment this morning on waking, and discussed it with my wife, who grew up in India where she read the B-g. We have discussed the second chapter often. Though I freely confess that neither she nor I is expert in the Baghavad-gita, we both tend strongly to free will as decisive. The concept of dharma is rich throughout all human thought, and one that resonates with me very deeply, for me in the form of obligation. However, it is by our choices that we grow, and that is endless. Change is the only constant. Some things change extremely slowly, some quickly, but its effects are everywhere always. So while I value the binding and spiritually guiding role of religion, I feel my first duty is to how I interpret what I experience, and then make the best decisions I can, in… Read more »
I’m not actually sure that democracy has ever really served the people. It certainly has not done so in a very long time if it ever did. It has always favored the rich and the powerful. Most people not even considered worthy of a vote until recently. It has acted as a divide and rule for us while maintaining the power structure for the few. It has led to a polarization and a swinging back and fourth of the pendulum creating movement with out linear progression to a higher awareness and more equal society.Keeping us effectively in a state of traumatized child hood. It has enabled the powerful and deep state to control our lives and manipulate us. Giving false hope of change where there is none.Things always continue in favour of the elite. It is collective council and community we need. A realization that hierarchy is not innate. We… Read more »
Exactly! Couldn’t agree more. We are deliberately kept in a kind of puppy-like Stockholm Syndrome, an addicted-to-distractions childishness that is, for me, the real enemy. This is the foundational reason why democracy cannot work within hierarchical structures. Or rather, why it works to perpetuate the madness. Society emerges necessarily from us, but we are socialised by multiple institutions to stay dumb. School is one obvious part of this, designed to dumb us down, turn us into obedient factory grunts and manipulatable shoppers (see John Taylor Gatto’s work). The other is the hierarchical structure of the state which systemically requires an elite (or it isn’t hierarchical). Because it was born from farming, which is a constant battle against the encroach of ‘wild’ nature to secure a surplus to endure uncertain winters etc., the state is also about us-and-them, oppositional exploitation and taxation, primarily in the interests of its elites. These sorts… Read more »
A propos the cartoon of a Star Spangled Lady with WORLD POWER going to her head:
Царь-Колокол MOSCOW (Sputnik) –
Ankara is likely to buy Russian Su-57 fighter jets if Washington decides to suspend the delivery of F-35 jets in response to the purchase of Russian S-400 anti-missile systems, the Yeni Safak newspaper reported Sunday.
The more they try, the more they pee in their shoes.
https://sputniknews.com/world/201805271064853249-turkey-jets-buy-russia-us/
+8
Will tje American police be protecting or serving woman in the USA from serial molester and abuser Morgan Freeman?
Freeman is accused of the same series of unwanted molestation and abuse as others in the Me Too scandal. But with two important differences:
1) He’s black (and we know that black people are never guilty of things in the USA)
2) He has been paid-off to film lengthy political diatribes attacking Russia.
And in that light. the trusty Fraudian (or on Sundays. the Obsquequiencer) published this puke-making rebuttal of the charges made against dear Morgan
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/morgan-freeman-sexual-harassment-allegations-devastated-statement-cnn-women-a8370311.html
In the new world, Police, if we have them, will adopt a new motto – “to protect, serve and respect without fear or favour, the will of all men”.
@Toby said “I think we can agree that nothing is the root of all evil, except, perhaps in a loose way, free will that can lead this way and that, with the slippery slopes of fear steadily tending free will towards ‘evil’ if left uncorrected in the sense of making nothing but fear-based choices over time.” Agreed. As such, if Police are to adopt a new motto – “to protect, serve and respect without fear or favour, the will of all men”, as *MarkRussell suggests then they will be protecting, serving and respecting something that inherently “tends towards eveil if left uncorrected.” In my view the role of the Police is to make sure evil is not “uncorrected.” They are or should be there to enforce the correcting. It is not the Police that are to blame for doing their job although they are the ones who often get attacked… Read more »
I see the police, as currently constituted, as one part of how the state, as a monopoly on force, enforces. The state enforces in many ways, including myth making and particularly myth making around money, but without the police, we oiks would have too much freedom to think and roam. One of the primary thing the state enforces, regardless of how, is property rights. As the saying goes, property is 9/10ths of the law. A state without property would be an odd creature, barely a state at all, as there would be next to nothing to enforce and protect. That said, and if I’m reading you right, I agree that some form of policing may always be necessary. Life is a messy business, whatever social system we humans construct to self-organise.
The fact that the US has become a plutocracy doesn’t mean that democracy and the market economy cannot work under different circumstances. There are examples of the social market economy and social democracy that achieve better results, even in the current global environment in which we are all forced to bend to US dictate. The US’s economic and political systems are determined by its imperialist ambitions. Thus, it is the Empire, ie. the greed for geostrategic control, rather than the means or methods of trade, which is the problem. We need a multilateral system of trade, which, in addition to promoting trade, also promotes social and ecological objectives. In other words, the exact opposite of what the US aims for under the current administration more aggressively than ever. We do need a system of “fair trade.” The fact that the US administration has misappropriated this term to signify even unfairer… Read more »
Humbaba – “The fact that the US has become a plutocracy doesn’t mean that democracy and the market economy cannot work under different circumstances.” – actually the circumstances of ALL WESTERN “democracy” and “market economy” ride atop 500+ years of the colonial and neocolonial pillage and enslavement of the entire planet by Western economic interests. The CIA & Western European intelligence organized the destruction of nationalist leaders and movements among the newly liberated formerly colonized nations post-WWII, which benefited not only oligarchy but the Western middle class throughout the West, as Western economies continued to virtually steal resources from what were our former colonies. Under the guise of “fighting communism” these recently “liberated” former colonies were now simply headed by Western backed dictators who presided as our police enforcers rather than openly colonial administrators from the West. The West even allowed “democracy” as long as the elections were rigged to… Read more »
You CANNOT have a decent, moral and humane society under capitalism, in any form. The historical record is unambiguous. ANY reforms granted, reluctantly, by the parasites, when they are weak, are ALWAYS taken back, and more, whenever the capitalist system produces one of its regular and inescapable ‘crises’. And capitalism is predicated on eternal growth, so is a form, a highly malignant form, of cancer.
‘Social “Democracy”‘ is, indeed, a more subtle form of “Democracy”. In ‘Social “Democracy”‘ the farts wear slippers.
Hobnail slippers.
I would say that humanity is entering that abyss, is indeed in it, but as in the manner of frogs being slowly boiled, it just becomes the New Normal by accelerating, unnoticed degrees, day by day by day. Dear author, your post implicitly identifies money as the root of the problem, an observation I agree with. My position is that money is THE pivotal concept we must understand anew if we are to establish radically different guiding principles for human civilisational endeavour. Part of that effort will be developing new cultural understandings of and relationships with value and thus wealth. These core entities – money, value, wealth – are defined, as if scientifically, via the backdoor of very suspect economic ‘laws’ that appear to us, the duped audience, as forces of nature that require some flavour of capitalism as their natural expression in socio-economic form. To make capitalism appear as… Read more »
Toby: bang on the money! I would not normally make such a comment, but we seem to have established a rapport. There is a deeper, more significant layer to the establishment of power, status and wealth: facilitated by the creation, accumulation and monopolisation of money-power …and that is the perception and distinguishing of ‘difference’ that precedes the identity formation that assumes the power, status, and wealth. Thus, the seeds of money-power and capitalism are perceptual and pan-historic: having no First Cause. That would seem like gibberish if you did not know where I am coming from – Yogacaran epistemics. So, money-power creation and ideological capitalism could be viewed as the pan-historic, inter-generational apotheosis (or extremised conditional genesis) of basic misperception. The same ‘seeds’ (bija) that form the basis of the mental constructivism of a fixed (reified) substantive identity formation …become the same seeds that become extremised into something called ‘capitalism’… Read more »
If I start with your closing observation, I’d say what is right in front of us is perception, but that perception, requiring a subject, can only ever be subjective and complex, not “pure” or “untainted”. As such, I wonder about the apparently pivotal role of the word “innocence” in your reply. I think we can agree that nothing is the root of all evil, except, perhaps in a loose way, free will that can lead this way and that, with the slippery slopes of fear steadily tending free will towards ‘evil’ if left uncorrected in the sense of making nothing but fear-based choices over time. Also agreed is that money is underpinned by inaccurate perception, but here things get quickly muddy, as what money is differs as we approach it from different angles. Money is incredibly hard to define. So, when I point at it as pivotal, I mean as… Read more »
Toby: coming right back at you with decades of auto-didactic “work and worry” and concern for the depths of reality: in anticipation of a fruitful cross-fertilisation and dialogue. Instead of ‘difference’; perhaps I should have said ‘*differance* (with an ‘a’) because we are in Derrida’s deconstruction of philosophy and politics territory. A good reference would be “Positions” or “The Margins of Philosophy”. What you seem to be saying is that there have to be “binary oppositions” (speech/writing; presence/absence; black/white) in place in order to categorise perception? That perception is linguistic (textual) and we categorise experience according to the play of ‘*differance*’: set within to a binary oppositional structural framework (structuralism; semiology; syntactic language)? In Derrida’s deconstruction, with which I concur, this codifies dominance and authoritarianism into the very act of perception. The elemental binaries become subliminal hierarchical dominance structures: less a “peaceful coexistence”; more a “violent hierarchy”. This becomes most… Read more »
I agree almost entirely, but with a subtle difference in emphasis and approach (by “approach” I mean how I, being me, come at this from my unique history) that leads to a different flavour of (ever changing) ‘conclusion’. Recently, I listened to Rupert Sheldrake refer to himself as a trinitarian. As he explained what he meant, I realised it echoed my take on the nature of reality. What fascinates me is how different thinkers can use different terms to describe the same dynamic: ternary/alterity from you/Derrida, trinitarian from Sheldrake/Christianity, complexity from me/Tom Campbell. On the issue of binary opposites, Jung also heavily stressed the third Hegelian thing, the unifying or synthesising aspect/consequence of the supposed opposition, and it was Jung who rescued me from Descartes a few decades ago. When I started reading Derrida for my MA, I felt like I had found an intellectual companion. I shall read more,… Read more »
Wow: I’m humbled. Not are we on the same songsheet, or singing the same song, but we are on the same line in the chorus! Yogacara confronts us with two epistemic genealogies: the way of the liberational and the way of bondage; the evolute and the involute. No need to establish which one we are collectively on? These could be equated with the objective, non-Self, the unreifiable (the cessation of causal phenomena): and the subjective, Self, and reifiable world of subjective phenomenalisation; the common ‘textual’ worldview. We can now postulate a third ‘syncretic’ (transcendent of all prior belief systems): or higher order non-reducible ‘synthetic’: of both and neither Self nor not-Self: and escape the closed semiotic languistic prison which is a binary “bad infinity”? Perhaps we should consider another major aspect before shouting ‘Eureka’: the historic past. Because time is a semiosis of self too. The categorisation of experience is… Read more »
Yes, I believe so! Eureka! But of course with that reward made richer by the knowledge that evolution doesn’t end, at least not for a very long ‘time’ yet. I’m seeing ‘pure’ as what Tom Campbell calls “being level”. This is the authentic ‘centre’ we are tasked with finding our way to, with the obstacles of beliefs, ego and fear barring our way with great determination and obfuscation. My sense though is that the being level – ‘purity’ – evolves as we learn from our struggles with ego, belief and fear. So, for me, the purity is complex not complicated, rich not cluttered, perceives cleanly and non-judgementally once we operate from it. I think of this chap as Self with and for Other and thus for the healthy evolution of the whole. There’s something I want to add now, and that’s quality of consciousness, a metaphor of Campbell’s I find… Read more »
It is the LOVE of money that is the root of all Evil, which is why the insatiably greedy, those condemned by every religion and philosophy (with a few exceptions, that we dare not mention), are the cancer metastases who created the primary tumour, capitalism, that is consuming Life on Earth, all in order to turn it into the dead stuff of money, or fake ‘wealth’.
1 Timothy 6:10
“with a few exceptions, that we dare not mention”
So dare.
That’s the correct quote, but I disagree with it. I see greed not as the inevitable expression of something true about ‘human nature’, but as a semi-rational response to scarcity-based thinking. When we all fear that there’s not enough to go around, one manifestation of that fear, both socially in institutions and law and economics etc., as in human individuals as behaviours, is greed. While fear rules, it can’t be any other way. That logic leads me to love as the answer, as naff as that sounds. It is compassionate concern for others (love) rather than fearful protection of self that properly heals or dissipates that fear. We choose to try to follow that path, which is where free will comes in. Without free will, reality falls apart. In other words, you can’t love money. You can fearfully lust for it, be entranced by desire for what it appears to… Read more »
Democracy could if it had the will, legislate against the flagrant gaming of it which America epitomizes. Zero tolerance for bribes, lobbying, influence peddling, conflict of interest… But for the ruling class you describe, it would be a declaration of war…on them. That’s why eventually revolutions happen. Agree with your summary Phillip.