COOL KIDS, HOT POLICIES.

THANKS FOR THE TANKS.
12/27/07.
On Dec 26 2007, Paul Krugman observed in his blog that: “Back in 2003 all the Kewl Kids, as a lot of my friends call them, thought that to suggest that Bush was misleading us into war was, you know, shrill — it marked you as not being a Serious Person. And here’s the thing: they still do. Even now, it’s better for your reputation not to have noticed … that we had some dangerous people running the country. If you noticed … it’s not a sign that maybe you had good judgment.” http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/memories-of-2003/.

Indeed there is a problem with US kids being so “cool” about war and aggression. But why should one expect otherwise? They have been programmed that way by their elders, and now they boldly go ever beyond.

There are some unsettling parallels between the “kewl kids” in the USA during the 2003-2007 period, as their country went overseas to take part in the death of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, and the cool kids of the Hitlerjugend, as their own country became increasingly nasty.

Both sorts of kids were carefully programmed to care only about a reduced set of materialistic instructions, and to view information and analysis, and a passion for them, as the enemy, and to have absolute faith in the way the leaders of their countries did things.

How this was achieved was similar. Young minds are curious, and have to be occupied, so the will to study and critique at school was replaced by something else, the will to compete, but not with minds, and not for idealistic purposes. Just like the young in the Hitlerjugend, young US citizens, instead of spending a lot of time at school critiquing history and past and present modes of thinking, thus learning to think deeper, and better, than the preceding generation, have been pushed into superstitious religions, and into collective sports, and taught a world where pecuniary profit dominates. They were made to engage in mindless activities all day long, rather into deep thinking and studying. They mentally regressed, and worrying about evil in government has, indeed, become “shrill”.

Instead of being enticed to become good studies, young US citizens, like young Germans two generations ago, were enticed to become good sports. That’s a preliminary to military training, and the general acceptance of the military emotional frame of mind. It’s a pre military socialization of sort. By a natural emotional generalization pre militarized youth have been led to feel that it’s the Nazi, or the US team out there, fighting to win. It’s morally incorrect to doubt victory, or to ponder why one should win; that would be an act of bad faith against the “home team”.

In the end, one ends up with a “cool” US population which “supports the troops”. So did the Hitlerjugend: it was not about whether it was right or wrong to send the troops to foreign lands, it was all about “supporting” them, right or wrong.

The cool US kids feel subconsciously their government and army are overseas, submitting and dominating oil rich countries, so that US kids can fill up their tanks, and drive to the mall. That’s all what their shrunken little minds need to know. They are careful to let no passion disrupt that complicit passivity.

Patrice Ayme.

Tyranosopher.

HOW PLUTOCRACY IS BORN.

12/23/07. 

“The Economist” published an article criticizing Paul Krugman (NYT editorialist and famous economist, professor at Princeton), and claiming instead that: “The very rich are not that different from you and me; or less different, perhaps, than they used to be.” Krugman has been observing what all the percentage charts on how riches are spread out indicate: a recent, increasing, dramatic, imbalance in the USA.

In its counterattack, “The Economist” launches on a red herring, and rides it to hell in reverence to their subterranean God and provider, Pluto. Their big counter argument is purely materialistic: that a small TV and a big TV are still showing the same show. But, similarly, “The Economist” could have observed that a small pail for a denizen of the vulgum and a huge gilded bath for Nero were still baths, containing the same chemical, water. Fair enough: “The Economist” knows how to sound deep and precise to mesmerize the naive. And to be totally irrelevant to the problem at hand, which is whether the USA is turning into a plutocracy.

The point about INEQUALITY OF RICHES, indeed, was that NERO LED ROME BY THE NOSE, and the Populus Romanus did NOT. Rome was born a half democracy, but by the time the Rich had got immensely rich, lo and behold, the poor had lost CONTROL NOT JUST OF ITS MATERIAL WEALTH, BUT, OUTRIGHT, OF ITS DESTINY. That is what a pluto-cracy is: the rich-commands. The Roman Rich decided to go wage wars in foreign lands, conquer, kill the natives, and exploit the survivors. For example, the Roman Rich ended up attacking not just Gaul, but Iraq (then called Mesopotamia). Wars of choice against foreign countries don’t just bring the spoils, they keep the fascism up. By definition fascism is the mental submission of the many to the very few, and is the natural mindset aristocracy, oligarchy, or plutocracy need.

In other words, although “The Economist” would like us to forget this, there are OTHER, MORE IMPORTANT types of inequalities than just wealth and income. Wealth and income LEAD to these more fundamental inequalities. And a few inequities besides. For example, in the USA, the rich can pay to get out of a jail, while his less fortunate co-defendant will stay emprisoned (under the exact same charge, and it could be murder). US citizens have been imprinted to find this fair, and are unaware that this is a manifestation of plutocracy. In the USA, literally, the rich can get away with murder.

Primate societies are organized by inequality, and the human ones are no exception. Such inequality is not about who has the most wealth. There is no materialistic wealth among monkeys. Instead PRIMATE INEQUALITY IS ABOUT WHO COMMANDS AND ENJOYS RESPECT. The Bush family got away from using Auschwitz slave labor to build its own wealth, and every day they enjoy the intense fear and respect which makes 300 millions US citizens terrorized by just the evocation of such a drastic fact.

The US oligarchy decided to go invade the Middle East, to go get itself some oil, and made uo the US mind to do so. What the US population truly wanted there was irrelevant. The US population was made to have the emotions and the ideas the US Rich wanted it to exhibit. Rich US citizens are fortunate enough to be able to program at will the emotions of their sheep; they own the media, and the data, and the hearts. (“The Economist” is also mesmerized by the Rich, such is its profession: it’s completely dependent upon seducing the wealthy, which it does by presenting as gifts precious ideas that the wealthy can sometimes use to justify its rule).

So what matters is not so much income and material wealth inequality (as The Economist harps on in a diversionary tactics), but the fact that, in some conditions, in some doomed countries, a state of plutocracy is fatally entered: then the RICH COMMANDS, THE POOR OBEYS. the Rich does not just command bodies, but minds. Thus once entered, plutocracy is not easily exited: the minds are made, a culture of submission has been spawned.

Examples of the stickiness of plutocracy abounds. In Rome the plutocracy not only caused regime change, but kept on going to smoothly become one of the main source of feudal aristocracy. The later went on for well over a millennium. Plutocracy can be more or less excessive (it was more excessive in France than Britain, hence the greater violence of the French revolution, relative to the British one).

The Russian aristoplutocracy was born out of the ferocious freedom war against the Mongols of the Golden Horde, so it reached even greater excesses, when the reason for its ferocity had vanished. And for centuries these excesses fed on themselves. Thus, when Lenin and company came into power, all the structures of mental submission, which were deeply anchored in the Russian psyche and culture, kept on going, and so Russia submitted to the Red Terror for the same reasons, and in the same ways, as it had submitted to the White Terror before. After parliamentary democracy came, those mental structures of submission were still in place, and Russia submitted to the instantly made oligarchs. Russia was anxious to submit, Russia could not do without authority figures crushing the moujiks… (Putin and his friends have argued this to some extent, to justify their own muscular rule: since Russia wants to be dominated, it may as well be Putin, who has its interest at heart, so he says, and prepares it to full democracy in the fullness of time.)

In the USA, even the excellent university system has become a device for the Rich (a source of servants, a way to network the Rich with itself). “The Economist” begrudgingly has admitted this more than once (even running a cover story on it).

There is a built-in reason for increasing disparity in wealth, which has to do with the nature of the exponential function. That is why the “death tax” was invented, sometimes back in the neolithic; it curbs the transgenerational build up of wealth (of the sort which converted Rome into a plutocracy).

Everything indicates that the USA is not far from the plutocratic stage. The control of the popular assembly (“Congress”) by the supposed opposition changed nothing with respect to the most major US policies. An examination of who leads the opposition, and how rich they are, shows why the Rich are well in control. And so on.

Plutocracy was the cause of the “Decline and Fall” of Rome (Gibbons correctly accused Christianity, but Christianity itself was a consequence of fascism, itself a consequence of plutocracy). The reasons for Rome’s downfall are very deep, and would apply just the same to the USA.

Patrice Ayme
Tyranosopher
Patriceayme.com

CHANGE OF PARADIGMS ARE MOTIVATED BY CATASTROPHE, NOT LOCAL LOGICS; THE EXAMPLE OF HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS:

CHANGE OF PARADIGMS ARE MOTIVATED BY CATASTROPHE, NOT LOCAL LOGICS; THE EXAMPLE OF THE INSTAURATION OF MAJOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS IN EUROPE, AND WHY THE USA IS STUCK:
(12/21/07).

Paul Krugman deplores in his blog (Dec 19, 2007, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com): …” if national health reform is going to happen, it will be as the result of a no-holds-barred fight …The president’s role will have to be far more confrontational, involve far more twisting of arms and rallying of the public against the special interests…My worries about Obama are that he doesn’t seem to understand this — that he thinks that in 2009, as president, he can broker a national health care reform the same way that as a state legislator, in 2003, he brokered a deal that mollified the insurance industry. That’s a recipe for getting nowhere.”

Well, the problem is not just with Obama. It’s unfair to pick him out. The US population may simply being not stressed out enough to free itself from the idea that the life of US citizens should be a source of profits for a few fortunate individuals. Such is the American way.

PASSION IS WHAT GETS THE MIND TO MOVE, AND NEW LOGICS TO BUILD UP. The word “emotion” (ex-movere) means to “move out”. One moves out of one’s old mind, that is, and this requires a lot of energy. The motivation (i.e., movement) comes from strong pain and reward. Sheep had less ability to enjoy passion, relative to wolves. Wolves have to be more intelligent, so they can catch sheep, so wolves’ minds have to be able to change faster and more appropriately, which is done by experiencing more mind melting emotion. that is why we feel closer to wolves than to sheep, and we have canines as pets, rather than sheep. 

The universal health care systems found in major European countries were built after the Second World War devastated the societies in question. Many aspects of society were reworked from scratch with dictatorial methodology. Health care was one of them. There was neither time, nor money to waste. Enormous forces decided what was right in health care, and implemented it. There was no conversation with would be profiteers such as insurers. The goal was to provide the best health care possible to all, not to create another center of profits in society.

The German national health care system, still arguably one of the very best in the world, a single payer system, had been created before WW I, by fiat under the fascist Second German Reich, once again proving the point: massive change can only come from massive force.

In the present day USA, health care is often withheld while the private, money making insurers are consulted. If, to its sorrow, a private US insurer allows some health act to proceed, the insurer duly consigns this act as a “loss”. A health care act is viewed as a “loss”, not something society gained from. There is something deeply wrong emotionally here. Such “losses” are contained in the present system: a little while back an individual at the head of a failing US Health Maintenance Organization got a yearly compensation of more than 1.5 billion dollars, more than the GDP of many a country. If some guy in France got $1.5 billion for supposedly organizing health care and maintaining it, the National Assembly would meet the next day to pass a law to confiscate immediately his ill earned treasure.

To make life and death of the many a matter of profit and luxury for the few is what the US society achieved. One has to go back to imperial Rome to find such depravation. Turning ill health into profits at the cost of life is depraved. In imperial Rome there was an industry of private torturing, and slave recovery. To improve society, should one have conversed with them, and reach a compromise?

Getting together with the so called insurance “industry” to decide what health care should be, is as smart as sheep getting together with wolves to decide what sheep care should be. The sheep are talking about their health, and the wolves agree to the healthy lunch coming their way.

As Voltaire insisted, one should crush infamy. There is no need for conversation with, and tolerance of, infamy. Infamy should be crushed, that’s all. There is no point conversing with vampires draining human life to support their wealth. The fact is, the US insurance and HMO industries kill people, statistically speaking (US health care is #37 and sinking). It may not be as obvious as what happened in concentration camps, but it’s the same general idea. The Nazis put people in concentration camps for a variety of reasons, they claimed, but, in most cases, the real reason was to rip them off, and redistribute their riches to fellow Nazis, and their supporters.

A buzz word with negative connotations was created by those who live well from their compatriots’ failing health; “single-payer system”. That’s supposed to be terrible, socialist, a failure. But the German system is “single-payer”, and it has worked well for a century.

The French system covers 100% of BASIC CARE with governmental insurance; private insurance covers what’s not basic, or more comfortable ways to do the basics (ultra fast care, private clinics, etc.). The French government negotiates the price, and legitimacy, of drugs with private industry. thus, differently from what happens in the USA, private industry does not have marketing costs (which are enormous in the USA), and it can redirect that money to research. The end result is an efficient health care system which is superior to that in the US in all dimensions (cheap, fast, ultra modern, etc.). To prevent drug abuse, French citizens have a “carte vitale”, a computerized card which keep a check on treatments (it helps with reimbursements, but is not necessary: foreigners get free health care in France, including free ambulance helicopter… as long as it is not obviously premeditated… even then, the french system is so much cheaper, and state of the art, foreigners opt to come and pay procedures from their own pocket). The health care system is completely free in all ways for seniors (all treatments, all drugs). Multi millionaire health professionals are rarer in France than in the USA (but they do exist).

Far from being collectivist, universal health care systems are individualistic, since they free the individual from the collective of the sort of oligarchy which profits from the failing health of others in the USA.

As long as US citizens do not see their system massively failing, it’s unlikely they will have the nerve to change it: that would mean quitting the True Man Show, where everything nice and true is whatever the rich gave America, and that world is best. US citizens have been persuaded they live in the best of all possible worlds, contributing to their make belief happiness. Why would they change anything to this paradise?

So the real crux of the matter is this: how to change sheep into wolves, when they want to believe only in what they known?

Patrice Ayme
Tyranosopher.
Patriceayme.com
Patriceayme.wordpress.com

SECULARISM IS THE FUNDAMENTAL RELIGION.

RESPECTING RELIGION STARTS WITH RESPECTING SECULARISM, THE FUNDAMENTAL RELIGION. 12/15/07.

THE DEFINITION OF A RELIGION:

What is the definition of a religion? Cicero thought it had to do with re-legare (re-read). So superficial an interpretation is silly. The modern sense of “recognition of, obedience to, and worship of a higher, unseen power” so as to RE-LIGARE (tie-again) psychologically people together is the most general, and is retained by more recent thinkers. Rather prosaically, the higher, unseen power could just be a higher culture or wisdom. It does not need superstitious priests to evoke it. Philosophers can do just fine (Draco and Solon, at the origins of Sparta and Athens, being examples).

According to this definition, a “religion” is any set of cultural networks of metapsychological beliefs and emotions inclusive enough to impel human behavior beyond what basic psychobiology provides with (example: everybody wants to feed, that’s psychobiology, but hungry people have to be religiously conditioned to not steal other people’s food, sights unseen). By metapsychological, we mean that those roots of psychology do not have any cause themselves: they are the axioms of cultural psychology, and can have less causal input than the axioms of mathematics (mathematical axioms are established because they are found empirically to be useful; religious axioms are not necessarily useful in ways which can be easily explained; in this vision, psychology has two morphogenetical roots, one biological, the other cultural; they partly overlap and interact, causing further complexities).

This very general definition of religion is made necessary by the fact that, like chimpanzees, but much more than chimpanzees, human beings are not just animals. HUMAN BEINGS ARE ALSO CULTURAL CREATURES. The cultural capacity of humans is amazing: brought up by wolves, a human will absorb canine culture, dominate it, and become leader. Without culture, chimpanzees die, and much more so human beings. In human beings, the gigantic gap between what they can figure out by themselves psychobiologically (like learning to walk, and even then…) and what they have to know to survive (and which is learned from culture), this gigantic culturally filled abyss, is CROWNED BY RELIGION. Thus religion is ubiquitous: TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE RELIGIOUS. This is so true that even movements which started by loudly proclaiming themselves “anti religious” such as Stalinism, Nazism, or Maoism, turned into religions of their own, resurrecting for the occasion all the excesses of the Inquisition (it was no accident the SS were dressed in black like inquisitors, but conscious mimicry).

Those who pretend that some other human group is not religious are thus embarked on the oldest and strongest of inter tribal interaction, namely denying that the tribe they do not belong to is really made of human beings.

According to this very inclusive definition, a religion does not have to be all encompassing: it could be just a partial motivation, or a partial explanation of the universe. Historically it often happened that several religions have been worshipped by a population (some Roman emperors, while officially Pontifex Maximus were closet Christians (and conversely); an inspection of an individual such as Charlemagne show his highest motivations and beliefs to be Secular, Catholic, Pagan, and even a bit… Jewish; the modern Japanese, besides being Secularist, often appreciate also simultaneously three other religions: Shinto, Zen, Christian; Islam recognizes that where the sacred Muslim texts do not reach, local traditional beliefs should take over…).

SECULARISM IS THE FIRST, LESS SUPERSTITIOUS RELIGION, BUT IT’S A RELIGION NEVERTHELESS:

A further order can be established on the set of all religions, according to how superstitious they are. Super-stition means to above-stand: implicitly, above the real world. Superstition is not what mathematicians know as a well ordering (different superstitions cannot be necessarily compared to each other), but it has a first element, namely SECULARISM. Thus, it’s the less superstitious of all religions. Secularism is by definition the set of all the metapsychology necessary for the psychobiology to exploit the world optimally in the AGE (“seculum”, a span of 120 years). It’s the set of all cultural primary causes necessary to do so. Secularism thus rests on the fact that BEING IMMENSELY CULTURAL, HOMO IS IMMENSELY TECHNOLOGICAL. The opportunities, and difficulties presented to human beings change the age, because their technology changes, and is, overall, ever more powerful. One of the greatest set of discoveries was the mastery of fire (it took more than a million years, and is still ongoing with thermonuclear fire). Isolated prehistoric populations were able to thrive during many horrendous glaciations in Europe only because of very advanced technology; without it, they would not have resisted the frosts of early August.

This means that secularism is itself technology dependent. Different secularisms from different ages are different. Obsolete secularism can turn into superstition. It may have made sense to not eat pigs among desert dwellers in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, because they had not enough firewood to properly cook them, and they got infested by the deadly parasite; this was correct secularism then. Judeo-Islamism turned this empirically grounded cultural axiom in a superstitious principle: “never eat pig, pig is dirty”. By super-stition is meant anything which stands above the world, and has lost its connection to it. The interdiction “never eat pig” did so, when it was forgotten it had to do with some specific disease, and stopped making sense (in the sense of being part of a logical chain of cuses and effects).

Confucianism, and some forms of Buddhism (including the original one) are not much, or not at all superstitious. Thus they were certainly just of their age, and nothing more (i.e., secularist). Nowadays they are somewhat quaint, because the age has changed so much, and became much more complex.

ROMAN EMPEROR CONSTANTINE, THE CREATOR OF CHRISTIANITY, insisted that Paganism was a “superstitio”, and Christianity was not. That was obviously erroneous, but his point of view can be understood in the sense that the old Greco-Romans were plagued by superstitions all day long, and, from this perspective, Constantine’s Christianity was very economical: one had to believe arbitrarily only very few totally empirically unbelievable things (“God died on the cross, as the Son, to save mankind, but is coming back soon, etc… “), and one did not have to fear the wrath of flocks of birds, black cats and ladders anymore…

Secularism was stealthily imposed by the Merovingian and Carolingian empires.

SECULARISM BECAME THE FUNDAMENT OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (that was a big progress over fanatical Athens with her hubristic religion, and saved the world from civilization devouring “Orthodox Catholicism”). Since secularism is compatible with, and can hide behind, superstitious religions, it allowed for the thriving of state controlled Judaism and Catholicism, as long as the activities of the later were compatible with the main secular aims the Franks had set for themselves (all things about the practice of happiness).

Those who do not respect secularism, the fundamental religion, do not respect the essence of humanity. They are just being tribal. And, nowadays, TRIBAL MEANS TROUBLE.

Patrice Ayme
Tyranosopher.com

TRUTH HAS MORE POWER THAN BOMBS DO.

…In light of the USA playing with fire, dividere et imperare, with Muslim fundamentalism…

As Obama, or Sarkozy, may be suggesting, what’s fundamentally needed is more intrusion of truth in politics, especially international politics. Truth allows to see further, and find solutions in time to the bleakest situations which would otherwise unfold.

For oil and country, some smart operators in the USA, thought, generations ago, that it would be smart to support the Muslim Fundamentalists, against all enemies, foreign and domestic, of the USA. For peace and prosperity, it was a long term disastrous computation. it would seem that those smart creatures, those spawns of the devil, saw this from afar, and they thought: “Who cares? If disaster there will be, the disaster will be theirs, not ours! Who are these people anyway?”

This crude racism extended from base cruelty, to complete stupidity: “How could such monkeys ever threaten us? They are not smart, they believe whatever is in an old book, and why don’t we teach that silly bin Laden to bomb public buildings, for a bigger bang, to get rid of our competitors, the Soviet state capitalists?”

The smarts started with the worst of the worse, ibn Saud’s Wahabbism. In exchange, they got oil, and money for their pockets.

The notion that supporting religious fundamentalism was a blatant contradiction with the SECULAR PROGRESSIVE tradition of Western Europe was nonchalantly disregarded by the spawns of the devil (everything would be OK, as long as the monkeys get their bananas). Thus the USA worked against the core philosophical doctrine of the West, with the hoped for result of causing total confusion. This is one of the reason the USA became so hated. Everybody could feel that something was amiss. What did the USA truly want? -people asked themselves. They did know what was going on, but they saw they were increasingly exploited. Religious mobs in Iran working (secretly) for the CIA (without knowing it), that was a bit too deep to be grasped…

The Western European doctrine of secular progress has now been adopted worldwide, with increasing success (e.g., by China, or India). But often not by countries the USA was allowed to mess up with, precisely because the US message, that secular progress was not the way, was made to divide (hence rule). Never mind that, inside the USA, secular progress unifies and rules.

On the face of it, the USA intervened in Afghanistan to fight the people who wanted to put girls in schools. Now it’s in Afghanistan to put girls in school (one would hope). Which is which? And if US religion is so great, why is not Afghan religion great too?

The USA, since ever and ever, told the Pakistani that it was OK to have a Muslim military regime, and to intervene in Afghanistan, and, for a long time, helped them with nuclear weapons (until 1990). Why was that better than democracy? If Saddam Hussein was an atrocious dictator because he had made a war America asked him to (against Iran: the USA is always looking for people to attack Iran, maybe it has to do with Iran having the world’s second gas reserves), and if Saddam was a terrible person for dreaming of atom bombs every night God made, then why Musharraf, from a long tradition of Pakistani dictators doing in Afghanistan the war the USA asked them to do, stuffed with nukes as he is, so good?

People want to know. PEOPLE KNOW THAT TRUTH TO THE PEOPLE IS POWER TO THE PEOPLE.

If the USA wants power, it has to supply truth, not bombs. In truth, it was a very dangerous game to excite and support Muslim Fundamentalists to get to control Middle East oil, and one had to be ready for war without end, should one opt for that strategy.

Patrice Ayme
Tyranosopher.com
Patrice Ayme, Hautes Alpes — 07 November 2007