The problem may be more difficult to understand than to solve. Beneath the veneer of civilization, in the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human. Paul Shepard, “Nature and Madness” As the linguist and philosopher George Lakoff has been telling us for many years now, … Continue reading Fighting Primal with Primal
If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins. Wendell Berry You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller Before we get into what could be called a “rural strategy” for de-Trumping our non-urban areas in America, let’s do a quick recap of the overall scheme … Continue reading De-Trumping Rural America
You are captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity. This is what prevents them: they are unable to find the bars of the cage. Daniel Quinn The child who is not embraced by the … Continue reading Last Chance Moonshot – Part 2: Bigger Home Bases
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967) The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide … Continue reading Last Chance Moonshot – Part 1: Basic Income
Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future…Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in … Continue reading Election 2024: The Aftermath
As we come down the home stretch of the shitshow that is the 2024 Presidential election, it has become clear that our problem is not just Trump, or his legion of followers, or even the entire American political system, which has tipped over completely into plutocratic servitude. What is really crippling us is a dysfunctional set of ideas, a system of zombie ideas so entrenched … Continue reading Hard to Kill: Zombie Ideas That Need Slaying
No plea to return to ‘normality’ or the ‘everyday’ is now worthwhile. Only the extraordinary can save us. Gregory Claeys The real question is: How much truth can I stand? Nietzsche The 2024 presidential race is an unusual animal, in that there are really no On-the-Fence voters this time around. A recent Quinnipiac poll had Undecideds at 1%, the same number that refused to answer, … Continue reading How Should Biden Win?
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller This past week, Donald Trump won the NH primary, all but locking up his candidacy for the fall. So we’re fated for a rematch that most Americans want no part of, and the odds are that Trump will come out on … Continue reading A Different Game: A New Liberal Playbook
I want to leave my country without leaving my home. Kirkpatrick Sale We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. Joni Mitchell A couple months ago, my wife and I finally got down to Costa Rica on vacation, for 10 glorious days. We have been trying to get there for a while now, but you know… pandemic and post-pandemic and all that. As we … Continue reading Our Civilization’s Crisis of Place
The order which has been taken for granted suddenly appears queer and contingent. There is an appearance of the contingency of order. This is the main value of utopias. At a time when everything is blocked by systems which have failed but which cannot be beaten…utopia is our resource. The utopia seems to say something plausible, but it also says something that is crazy. By … Continue reading Recapitulation: How to Save the World
Entropolitan 