Who’s Afraid of the Great Reset?

By Karl North | November 6, 2021

In a recent piece I said, “Great Reset narratives reveal that transnational capital and national ruling elites realize the implications of degrowth. Hence, they are planning degrowth for us that preserves growth and prosperity for them.” Because their agenda calls for a major systemic shift in resource allocation, a centralized digital currency and other draconian policies that will be obvious to everyone, I see a number of reasons why such attempts could fail.

The limits of managing complexity

From the beginning of the scientific age in the 17^th century, scientists found that achieving predictable results of experiments in the real world was impossible because the variable they wished to understand is usually emmeshed in a complex of causal relations.

So, they retreated to laboratory conditions where they could reduce the variables in play to manageable few. When even minor changes in complex systems like global society yield inevitable unexpected consequences (for example the many fizzled CIA-orchestrated color revolutions), major ones are likely to spin out of control in many directions. This is the predicament that attempts at systemic-level change agendas like The Great Reset plan cannot avoid.

False flags no longer work

As for the false flag scare campaigns they need to compel submission to a top-down system revolution, elites have worn out their usual options. The Mideast wars were profitable, but never popular, and the Islamic threat is less likely to work a second time.

The pandemic narrative did scare a lot of people into blind obedience because the threat it fabricated was a domestic one, but daily experience with “the virus” and its “solutions” is gradually exposing the lies of the official pandemic narrative. Like your three-week old bottle of milk, the covid campaign of fear and tyranny has passed its sell-by date, which its creators may not have thought through. People are beginning to smell a rat, or simply get tired of all the social shackles. Accelerating the unraveling of the official pandemic narrative are two powerful videos, Plandemic Part 1, the most viewed and banned documentary of all time, featuring Dr. Judith A. Mikovits, one of the leading medical professionals who are fighting back against the official covid narrative, and  Plandemic 2/Indoctornation, with David Martin, a leading investigator of corruption in high places, which thoroughly documents the criminality that the covid phenomenon has exposed in the medical industrial establishment.[1]

China bashing is all noise

Constantly amplifying Washington imperial propaganda for years, the mass media have built up a reservoir of hostility toward China and Russia. But the latter, having great success simply waiting as the West self-destructs, are content to be patient and roll with the rhetorical punches and sabre rattling thrown their way. After years of failure to provoke aggressive behavior from Russia and China, the threat of foreign aggression is wearing thin in the Western world. And the US military is in such bad shape (as its high command is well aware) that a US attack on the sovereign territory of these nuclear powers is out of the question.

The clock is ticking

It may be too late for an elaborate reset plan to succeed. Several simultaneous deepening crises are each reinforcing the others and reaching tipping points in a global economy that unrestrained profit-seeking has pushed to the limits of fragility. The money printing and debt financing that is artificially keeping the system going has reached an end point where its ultimate negative consequences are now appearing. Meanwhile the economic damage that the covid caper created is still unfolding. Oil geologists say that the world is close to the point where energy production can no longer keep up with consumption; hence, the economic drag of resource depletion is becoming so visible that it cannot be ignored. The combined effect on domestic economic security – inflation, unemployment and supply chain failures – is building social unrest within nation states: waves of strikes and sick-outs, regular demonstrations in Europe against tyrannical policies, signs of sectoral and local rejection of central government policies, and individuals simply opting out of the system.

The explosion of counter narratives

Over the last few decades, the US mass media have been consolidated into a pyramid controlled from the top by a small cartel of corporations like CNN and NBC, themselves controlled by a few global investment corporations like Blackrock and Vanguard.[2] Because of monopoly control, different media could no longer scoop each other with the results of investigative journalism; thus the media cartel was able to deliver the same narrative throughout the media pyramid – a set of daily messages whose content serves the political interests of its class owners in the transnational elite. And from the beginning of the digital age, the dominant internet media platforms like Facebook and YouTube have been under monopoly control of digital technology billionaires.

However, growing awareness that the mass media is openly serving the political propaganda interests of its owners has discredited it as a source of reliable news, and stimulated a search for independent sources. On the internet, the growth of economical alternative media platforms to replace the Silicon Valley monopolies is rapidly spreading independent information sources and narratives that are eroding the credibility of all major societal institutions and their policies, not just mass media.[3] And the elites cannot easily shut down the internet – their power and profits depend on its existence.

In sum, any grandiose system restructuring that transnational elites are trying will likely be complicated by uncontrollable unrest within nation states. Short of declaring global dictatorship, what is a desperate ruling elite to do?

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[1] https://sovren.media/video/plandemic-part-1-20.html

https://plandemicseries.com/plandemic-english-subtitles/

[2] See the well documented video documentary Monopoly: Who Owns the World

https://rumble.com/vmyx1n-monopoly-who-owns-the-world-documentary-by-tim-gielen.html

[3] Examples are https://www.peakprosperity.com/ and https://titaniclifeboatacademy.org/

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What props up the delusion of growth paradigm?

By Karl North | September 19, 2021

The general trend in the global economy has been toward lower growth and productivity in the last half century. This trend is easily explained in biophysical economics as due to 1) increasing scarcity of finite resources due to depletion, itself the result of massive consumption in the modern age, and 2) erosion of carrying capacity due to many types of ecological damage from the era of massive consumption of natural resources.  Conventional economists have nothing in their economic worldview to explain the trend, so they hide their failure with jargon words like ‘stagflation’ or ‘secular stagnation’, which don’t explain anything.

Faced with a trend, critical to the future of industrial society, that they cannot explain, economists have offered solutions that naturally don’t work, but appear to perpetuate growth by artificial means. A solid literature has developed to expose these solutions as illusory. This essay will summarize some of its conclusions, which may be particularly useful to those who may have been inclined to believe the illusions propagated by governments and the mass media.

Debt-based growth

Money printing, hiding under labels like bailouts of too-big-to-fail central banks and quantitative easing, which started with the financial crisis of 2008, accelerated recently as a policy response of a fabricated “pandemic”[1]. The policy response did habituate the public to house arrest under false pretenses and other violations of the Bill of Rights.

But money printing produced little growth in the US except briefly in economically nonviable enterprises like extraction of unconventional oil, or in the weapons economy where a decades-long fear campaign has sustained a bloated defense budget while driving the US government deeper into debt. Otherwise, the main effect has been to create dangerous bubbles in the rentier economy (an oxymoron), which consists primarily of the stock market, including speculative markets like currency and derivatives, and real estate. This process will continue until an inevitable crash brings about a new era of austerity.

Rigged statistics

Key government statistics like unemployment, inflation and gross domestic production (GDP) that mass media have taught the public to rely on as measures of the health of the economy have been defined in a way that deceives. This deception has been exposed in efforts like Shadowstats that have revealed unemployment and inflation that is relevant to the prosperity of most people to be 2-5 times greater than in government statistics. GDP includes bubble “production” in the rentier economy and derivatives, none of which measure growth in real wealth. Thus, GDP is useful to the investor class but has misled the public as an assessment of most people’s standard of living despite how it is represented in the mass media and government. The success of rigged statistics is declining along with credibility in all mainstream institutions.

Energy alternatives

Along with many others, elsewhere[2] I have argued the impossibility of building energy alternatives to a scale that would support an industrial society. However, to summarize:

1. The energy return on energy invested (EROEI) of alternatives is too low to sustain industrial economies.
2. Even if it were possible to significantly replace fossil fuels with other energy sources, that would perpetuate the industrial economy and its resource depletion, eventually bringing down the industrial economy.
3. The cost of conversion of the economy and infrastructure to new sources of energy itself entails sacrifices that 1) the global economy in its present decline can no longer afford, and 2) that already impoverished masses could not survive.

For now, the official narrative of endless growth continues to persuade most of the public that some sort of energy will be available to sustain industrial society. Different subnarratives are promoted according to political persuasion. Liberals have been induced see planetary overshoot mostly in terms of climate change, and so tend to support energy alternatives. Conservatives have been convinced to distrust government plans, and so tend to count on private enterprise to deliver more oil. Some Western transnational elites appear to understand the resource depletion problem, hence are promoting a “great reset” (see a discussion of this phenomenon below).

Technocratic solutions

“Great reset” narratives reveal that transnational capital and national ruling elites realize the implications of degrowth. Hence, they are planning degrowth for us that preserves growth and prosperity for them. These narratives hide technocratic totalitarian degrowth plans behind propaganda that promotes the ‘reset’ as green and socially just. So far, this propaganda is aimed at political liberals who have tended to accept the totalitarian aspects as a necessary ‘war economy’. Conservatives, suspicious of anything promoted as liberal, are actually more sensitive to the ‘big government’/fascist nature of elite plans.

Conclusion

At this juncture, some stories of the official narrative are becoming increasingly discredited in some quarters of society, while the delusions are holding well in others. And original delusions are often replaced by equally illusory subnarratives. It should be remembered that the core narrative that veils the concentration of wealth and power in a transnational financial elite has penetrated Western culture for over a century, passed down from one generation to the next, and is therefore deeply embedded. At this point it is therefore an open question when the dominant social order will crumble, and what will replace it.

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[1] https://www.unz.com/proberts/how-the-covid-pandemic-was-orchestrated/

[2] Energy and Sustainability in Late Modern Society (http://karlnorth.com/?p=1244)

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End Games of Modern Civilization: false flag scare strategies and global cultural revolutions

By Karl North | May 10, 2021

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it… – Santayana

…First as tragedy, then as farce. – Karl Marx

Modern civilization is an interactive and interdependent whole that ties together, however loosely, specific energy drivers, technologies, physical and social structures, ways of living and cultural beliefs and values. Elements distinctive of this whole are fossil energy sources, energy intensive technologies, large urban centers that feed on rural peripheries, global political economies, a reductionist way of knowing and related worldview and belief/value systems. As this whole begins to disappear and be replaced by other forms of civilization, those who hope to navigate this process need the holistic perspective to identify its end games and how to circumvent them.[1] This essay will describe key end games currently in progress, their interdependency and trajectory.

Because things in a whole hang together, most everything in modern civilization, because it is driven ultimately by energy and natural resource depletion, is entering or will enter an end game, although in local variations at different times, places and rates. For most people, the reigning worldview of endless resources and growth will obscure the dead-end nature of these processes until late in the game.

The Marxian caution to view the present as history appears to gain the least traction in the US. Here, history tends to reduce in the collective consciousness to what happened last week. No amount of exposé of last week’s bundle of lies in the corporate controlled media seems to cure Americans of the habit of acceptance of this week’s media stories as depictions of the real world. With that understanding, some of the end games and their historical antecedents recounted below  may come as less of a surprise.

Resources

Oil is essential to run an industrial economy because it has functions – as in transportation – that are not replaceable with other energy sources in an affordable way. Momentarily, the use of cheap credit to spawn economically nonviable tight oil production in North America has disguised the decline of most planetary oil production. That “fracking” and tar sands game is now ending.

Reliance falls mistakenly on alternatives – primarily nuclear power and wind and solar electricity. These alternatives are launched with great fanfare but will run aground eventually for several reasons. First, they are too energy intensive, making their net energy delivery too low to sustain Western industrial economies, which are themselves already in decline due to rising resource scarcity. Leading attempts at wind and solar in Europe have already stalled. Full energy cost accounting has revealed almost no net energy, again far too low to sustain those industrial economies.[2] Nuclear power, to avoid rapid depletion of its raw material sources, must use a technology that recycles its fuel in a breeder reactor system. Russia, the leading developer, has yet to achieve a commercially viable complete recycling system. Other efforts, notably in France and the US, have failed and been abandoned. Second, all of these alternative energy sources require the existence of the full panoply of functions of industrial economies, which are going away. Third, they contribute to catabolic collapse: any significant investment and build out of these energy sources and the costly conversion of whole economic systems to use them will massively consume and deplete the energy and raw materials on which modern civilization depends to survive. So, the end result of such efforts solves nothing, but actually accelerates the decline.

The fate of globalism: the economy

Both the global economy and attempts at global governance are costly luxuries of the fossil fuel age, and are thus entering an end game. Early in the oil age, transport costs centered industry around sources of energy, raw materials and cheap water transportation – in the upper Mississippi valley in the US, for example, or the Ruhr/Rhine region of Europe. In today’s global economy, an era of cheap energy and international capital’s incessant drive to maximize profits have allowed it to scatter the many parts of industrial production – from resource extraction to component production to final assembly and retail markets – to wherever in the world profits are greatest. The result – the progressive deindustrialization and impoverishment of the mature industrial societies of US, Western Europe and Japan – is destabilizing those societies. As the general public in these societies begins to realize that the transnational capitalist class always put its class interest ahead of theirs, revolts are developing in many nations to take back sovereignty in its several forms – political, economic, ethnic and control of natural resources.

Today, as the end of the oil age causes resource costs to permanently rise, it is weakening supply chains and economies of scale, thus shrinking the global economy in a snowballing process of decomplexification. The resultant combination of rising inflation at the same time as national economies are shrinking is causing demand destruction, starting with the discretionary sectors of mature industrial societies, which contracts employment and economic activity further in a reinforcing feedback loop, thus aggravating social unrest.

The fate of globalism: governance

For over a century, governance and social control in the Western world has been achieved largely via mind control. Ruling classes have used their control of major institutions – governments, mass media and the knowledge industry – to manipulate information the public receives. In the US, for example, these institutions deliver a constant narrative of how the world  works, doctored to serve ruling class interests. This narrative has been highly successful, so that consequently most Americans entertain a view of their society and the world that resembles a Never-neverland of heroic Peter Pans, evil pirates, and Tinkerbell fairy tales. Elite control of the mass media has relegated serious critical analysis of its established narratives to the margins of the information business.

However, in these times of instability and economic decline, ruling elites encounter increasing problems of governance and even social control. To obtain public support for their harsh agendas, they have resorted to violent measures camouflaged in false flags, outright fabrications and cover stories.

Most of the public is naturally averse to war, but ruling elites often need wars to expand imperial hegemony. Also, they foment wars because the inevitable rapid turnover in product demand and the common practice of selling weapons to both combatants makes the war industry one of the most lucrative sectors of an economy. Hence, a pattern of false flag type deceptions has occurred to scare publics and stampede them into acceptance of war policies.

The first of these in my life (I was three at the time) occurred when the US high command learned that a Japanese naval fleet was en route to attack the US fleet in Pearl Harbor. Keeping the US military command in Hawaii in the dark, and Pearl Harbor therefore undefended, they allowed the Japanese attack to proceed, destroying much of the US Pacific fleet and personnel. This US-engineered catastrophe (and mass murder) achieved the expected result – public support for the declaration of war against Japan.

When Americans elected a president in 1960 who intended to end the war in Vietnam and refused to back a CIA-orchestrated invasion of Cuba, he was assassinated, an inside job revealed in a massive investigative literature, while a patsy who was a CIA asset was fingered in the cover story to take the fall.

The pattern continued with the Tonkin Gulf story, a fabrication that justified the full-fledged entry of the US into the Indochina wars in the 1960s, and in 2001 with the demolition of three sky scrapers in NYC Trade Tower complex, a crime of mass murder never subjected to a normal official investigation of evidence. Exposed later in a vast literature as an inside job, it was immediately blamed on Arabs in a prepared cover story fed to the mainstream media, and used to justify a US hegemonist agenda, labeled the “war on terror” for domestic consumption, of invading seven countries in five years, most of which wars occurred or are still in progress.

As the “war on terror story” unraveled and began to lose its scare value, elites have resorted to keep Americans fearful and submissive by fabricating domestic terror events, which in reality never happened. The Sandy Hook “school shooting” the “Boston marathon massacre” the Las Vegas hotel “shooting”, the Charlottesville “white supremacist attacks” and others designed to  cow Europeans into submission , have all been exposed by meticulous private investigators as fitting this pattern.[3]

The current solution of the international capitalist class to the deepening crisis of control of the revolting masses is a global cultural revolution consisting of a grab bag of racial justice and green new deal programs. These are combined with the ‘Re-set’ – the replacement of a withering manufacturing base by automation, and high-tech digitalization of everyday life – the cashless, cardless economy, automated social credit scoring and the complete disappearance of private property for the masses (but saved for the elites). All this is being combined with more submissiveness-building false flag scare campaigns like the annual Corona infectious respiratory disease wave magnified into a “pandemic”, to justify a “lockdown” (a term for a weapon used to quell prison unrest) of whole societies, to habituate Western civilization to ever-increasing poverty and the eventual demise of modern industrial society.

At the same time, big tech and big business are using their control of increasingly digital media platforms to first create a culture war that pits identity groups against each other and thus atomizes the working classes, thwarting any chance to unify and resist the class warfare of the rich. Then they block all criticism, now mostly relegated to the internet, from reaching the public by deplatforming dissenters from the official narrative. In the US the culture war has worked as designed: it has generated an emotionally driven hysterical liberalism that begets pseudo-revolutionaries à la BLM/Antifa, and is reminiscent of the crazed liberal ferment turned nihilist in pre-revolutionary Russia that Dostoyevsky described so well in his novel, The Possessed. One recent commentator expressed it thus:

The “woke” are tools to fracture nations, a people, patriotism, social norms, families, morality, the future & anything which could possibly hinder the progress of the 600 odd (multi-billionaire) families who rule this planet.

Culture wars tend to get out of control, as Mao Tse Tung discovered in 1976. Witness the absurdity of “liberals” incited in a year-long rant by the Democratic Party hierarchy and the mainstream media in concert, to instigate violence all across Dem Party controlled states and cities last year (2020), while constantly accusing “deplorables” of white supremacist violence that is strangely nonexistent to date. To make up for that, liberals have fabricated a “white supremacist insurrection” out of a symbolic occupation of the Capitol in protest of an election, of which many such Capitol protest occupations have occurred over the years without anyone attacking them as an insurrection. How long can the absurdity of this blatantly elite-orchestrated campaign of polarization last before the social fabric gives way? What will elites do then?

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[1] Examples of this holistic perspective on modern civilization are few. One is Ruben Nelson’s works, such as Exploring Civilization Overshoot or  Civilizational Paradigm Change: The Modern Industrial Case

[2] Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 1

Germany’s renewable energy program, Energiewende, is a big, expensive failure

[3] James Fetzer has been a heavy lifter in this area, mainly for identifying highly scientific contributions from experts in fields relevant to the investigations, and bringing them together in a compelling narrative. In the now mature area of JFK assassination studies, his work has been especially useful. Once he turned to these endeavors, officialdom quickly denounced him as the kook professor (never mind his summa cum laude diploma from Princeton and an established reputation for contributions to the methodology and philosophy of science).

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Polarization in crisis: Nazi Germany and US today

By Karl North | March 3, 2021

Anna Segher’s short stories and especially her novel of political imprisonment and escape, The Seventh Cross, explore a progressive fracture of German society in the 1930s caused by the rise of the Nazi party. Reading her painstaking descriptions of where the ripple effects of the polarization catch individuals and whole social networks evokes constant parallels with a similar phenomenon with deep historical roots in the US, which multiple crises have accelerated in recent years. This essay will try to identify those parallels and thus improve understanding of current events.

Setting the stage

Most societies since the rise of civilization have been ruled by wealthy and powerful elites. They have used the time-tested tool of divide-and-rule to polarize the masses that they exploit into two or more groups who are persuaded to divert the blame for their suffering from the rulers themselves to each other. To achieve this goal, elites use their control of information to indoctrinate each group with competing fictional narratives, and eventually enlist one to destroy the other. In this way, elites maintain control over the masses they exploit. For example, ever since the rise of the bourgeois state, elite propaganda has tried to align small business and farmers as a petit bourgeoisie against the working class. Thus, in the US today, small retailers on Main Street have joined the Republican “business” Party despite being ruined by monopoly capital in the form of big box stores that remove shopping to peri-urban malls. And farmers generally are persuaded to vote Republican while many have been ­squeezed into bankruptcy by corporations and banks that exert monopoly control over farm inputs and crop purchases.

In the US, the original divide-and-rule strategy was what one politician (Ron Paul) has the honesty to call “the two-party dictatorship”, where each political party serves ruling class dictates in all the essentials, and the rules of the campaign game effectively forbid third parties from winning. Hence, governance in the US (and most of the Western world) becomes a stage show called democracy where politicians pretend to serve the people while mostly serving the ruling class. To put it crudely, liberals think the system will work if they just try harder, and conservatives think everything will be fine if government simply stops interfering with business.  As one citizen of a non-Western nation put it, “the difference between us and the West is that we know our system is not a democracy”.

Societies under elite rule are prone to bouts of crisis and revolt as exploitation intensifies. Under unrestrained capitalism, as practiced most clearly in the US, the goal of maximizing private profit whatever the cost tends to trump all other factors that might affect economic and political decisions in a more civilized system. When such social systems enter a crisis phase, elites intensify divide-and rule tactics. The extreme form of polarization in the US today is partly a ruling class creation in reaction to a deepening crisis of de-industrialization, imperial decline, debt financing and economic shrinkage whose underlying cause is global resource depletion.

In the Germany of the 1930s that Anna Segher described, polarization had progressed much farther than in today’s US. In the following sections I will describe the Germany as Segher saw it, then the polarization in the US today, and look for precursors in the latter that parallel what happened in Germany.

Postwar Europe

A war whose mainly imperial objectives had decimated populations on all sides, followed a decade later by a great economic depression, had discredited traditional elites and led to the rise of labor and other movements to fight for the interests of the common people. In the nations of the victors, by the 1930s socialist parties had gained power – the Front Populaire in France and the Labor Party in Britain. Defeated Germany, struggling under exorbitant war reparations, experienced economic stagnation, hyperinflation and widespread poverty. The National Socialist or Nazi Party offered a total program of economic reconstruction under government control, a minimal economic safety net, suppression of all opposition and patriotic revival that appealed to the devotion to order and regimentation in German culture.

Nazi Germany

Despite the existence of a strong labor movement, the Nazi Party gained a majority and control of the government, created several layers of social control, groups to operate at different levels to build a totalitarian militaristic state that would carry out the program and suppress all opposition. The SS was the highest level of police with the SD as its intelligence arm. The Gestapo was the secret police within the SS, eventually charged with rounding up “untermenschen”, categories of people deemed undesirable in German society, for imprisonment and slave labor in concentration camps. The SA or “brownshirts” was a paramilitary organization used to ferret out opponents and their organizations for imprisonment, which drove most opposition underground. The Hitler youth was an organization among whose functions was to keep watch for opposition and to snitch on their politically wayward neighbors and parents.

In such a tightly controlled society, the escape of seven inmates from a political prison, which is the theme of Seghers’ story, was a major symbolic victory for the opposition, so the authorities suppressed the news until most of the escapees had been captured. The escape could only succeed with the full support of an underground network. The escape therefore created a rapidly widening ripple effect in local society, like a stone thrown into a pond. All family and former associates of the escapees came under investigation and threat of imprisonment for potential collaboration to help the inmates navigate a path to safety. All escapees were recaptured but one. Much of the story revolves around his dangerous and tortuous path toward eventual freedom in the Netherlands. People who helped him in any way constantly were compelled to weigh the risks to themselves and family, as discovery of any part of the assistance network led to imprisonment and torture. Thus, the escape created a dilemma that split family members and friends, and exposed and dramatized the covert polarization of German society. It also demonstrated how totalitarian methods achieve social control through fear.

The US today

In the new millennium, the deepening crisis in the US that I outlined earlier remained unaddressed by government and ignored or obfuscated in the mainstream media. The result was growing disenchantment in the public with the pretend democracy of alternating two-party rule and growing distrust of the corporate media that consistently concealed the trend. In the 2016 election, the Trump campaign saw an opportunity to capture a constituency by directly voicing the most basic concerns of the public. Trump denounced the export of much of the industrial economy that had destroyed the standard of living of a large part of the wage-earning public. He condemned the waste of federal revenue on serial wars that delivered no benefits for most people. He criticized NATO. So doing, Trump broke with taboos that most politicians and media had respected for decades on issues potentially harmful to the interests of power elites.

Agents of the power elite in Washington foiled almost all efforts of the Trump administration to deliver on its agenda, but the agenda itself – to repatriate the troops, restore US industrial might, and defund the harassment of Russia on her borders – was dangerous and could not be allowed to stand. With a goal of discrediting the president and his agenda, a more aggressive polarization effort was launched. The intelligence establishment enlisted a willing Democratic Party, a hotbed of identity politics, in a project to discredit the Trump administration with a particular focus on the president’s violations of political correctness toward discriminated groups, and by extension, purported racism and other discrimination in his growing electoral base. Backed by a corporate media that dropped any remaining pretense of neutrality, the Dems tried to reduce the economic problems facing large segments of all identity groups to one of disrespect of minorities. To the exclusion of more basic issues, it championed the cause of minorities against an enemy, the Trump base, portrayed as racist, white male “deplorables”.

On the other hand, the Trump presidency, having never been able to deliver on its promises, has served as a false hero for conservatives who became disenchanted with standard Republican politics

Once this fault line of divide-and-rule was effective in diverting electoral politics from the class warfare that is destroying the living standard of large majorities of all identity groups, the goal became one of crushing the Trump presidency and suppressing dissent from the new polarization narrative. Supported by Dem office holders in several states, violent protests against police and property by corporate funded Black Lives Matter and Antifa “revolutionaries” left neighborhoods in ruins in cities across the country. Capitalist elites funded these movements for the same reason they funded the Tea Party movement several years ago – they enlisted ordinary citizens as useful idiots in exercises in false consciousness that deflected protest from the real causes of people’s suffering.[1]

In sum, ruling elites have effectively polarized society into groups that they have dressed in new clothes of false consciousness that deflect awareness of who is to blame for their plight. In effect, the emperor’s new clothes are now worn by the masses.

Parallels

Given the situation described above, what are the signs that the US is moving toward a society similar to the Germany that Anna Segher depicted: a totalitarian one-party state, institutionalized suppression of opposition and a widespread climate of fear that effectively achieves strict obedience?

If the 2020 electoral victory over the Trump presidency is an indicator, the new polarization may be working temporarily. But in the process, it left the two-party “democracy” in disarray and its narrative increasingly discredited. The Trump presidency hijacked a part of the Republican Party into a radical agenda that neither party had dared voice for decades. The unabashed mainstream media support for the Democratic Party further eroded the trust in the system and began to normalize the idea of a one-party state.

Another sign is the calls for a war on internal dissent, already given legal status nearly twenty years ago by the so-called patriot acts. Billionaires who control powerful internet media are openly suppressing dissent from the establishment narratives.

Questionable official narratives and directives on questions such as electoral fraud, climate change and the corona virus epidemic are supported by liberals and the now ascendent Democratic Party administration, which has politicized these issues. Clashes over these questions have split friends and families. Signs are appearing that the US is becoming a Nation of snitches: authorities have encouraged people to report violators of questionable directives and even denounce them to their face. Along with the suppression of dissenting views in the media and the attack on dissenters, including employees fired, these developments suggest a progression toward a climate of fear and strict obedience to a party line that is evocative of 1930s Germany.

All the signs noted above augment an existing creeping trend toward a police state for twenty years.  9/11 and the War on Terror yielded the Patriot Acts that legalized unlimited detention of citizens without trial. Police in the US are now equipped and trained to act like an occupation army, and have resorted increasingly to police violence and repressive curfews and lock-downs in isolated instances. Authorities used the Boston marathon bombing, a crime never really solved, to test out and habituate a million-fold urban population to a lock-down and a frightening and sinister house-to-house invasion of privacy by heavily armed militarized personnel. And in January 2021 we saw the choreographed spectacle of Congress meeting behind barbed wire with 25,000 troops protecting the Capitol.

The moves toward a surveillance state in the US, although not as widespread and draconian as the constant roundups for questioning and sometimes torture that Segher describes in Germany in the early 1930s, are clearly gathering momentum.

Conclusion

The example of Nazi Germany suggests that as a crisis of society intensifies, strategies of divide-and-rule by simple polarization no longer work. Then one pole becomes the permanent governing party and everyone in the other pole is designated as untermenschen and driven undergound, imprisoned or even exterminated. The evidence I have presented proposes the prospect of a similar outcome in the US.

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[1] More evidence of molding of false consciousness: Oligarchs like the Koch brothers have promoted authoritarian religious fundamentalism to the point where it governs the collective consciousness of nearly half of US citizens, who become foot soldiers waging war against science and voting for public policies that drive the country toward fascism. See my paper, What is Fascism

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Farm restoration – a Downeast Maine story

By Karl North | February 9, 2021

More a set of recalled vignettes than a systemic history, this essay will at least capture some of my photo archive in an explanatory framework.

Property purchase and rebuilding

As we drove up to the top of Ridge Rd. in Robbinston to the last visit on our hunt for a retirement farm in Maine, the vista that emerged of the New Brunswick hills across the St. Croix estuary two miles away got mentally fixed as a major determinant of our decision to relocate on the property we were about to see. A second determinant was that it included most of the built capital of a small working farm – farmhouse and outbuildings, hayfields, fenced pasture and haying equipment. This property would allow us to continue homesteading and even farming at a retirement level, as we had done commercially in New York state. A third determinant was to bring parts of the family together. My daughter’s family, who had moved to Maine from California, expressed a desire to find a place where we could all live. They agreed on the Robbinston property and we gave them a stake in it. But eventually they found the employment prospects here too daunting, and remained in southern Maine, closer to work in Boston.

At first glance the place looked to be in reasonably good shape. Only gradually did it emerge as a major fixer-upper. The current owners had bought an abandoned, worn out farm. Apparently they could not afford permanent restoration of the land and buildings, so they had settled for cosmetics and half solutions.

As a farmer of thirty plus years, my first instinct was to check out the main barn.

On entry it revealed an attractive structure in the old wooden-pegged post and beam style, a main bay rising to the roof and side bays with pens (one currently occupied by a small goat herd and a small milk cow and calf) and overhead hay lofts. The roofing asphalt appeared to be relatively recent. The manure and bedding had been building for years, which I saw as a major asset. All the places I have farmed started with worn out soils. On my previous farm in New York I had jump-started soil regeneration with bedding packs cleaned out of neighbors’ barns and free for the digging. Here was another such opportunity that came with the farm.

Closer inspection exposed so much deterioration in the barn that restoration would be a constant money sink. The recent reroofing hid rafters that were dangerously rotten, as my son-in law Wil discovered when he volunteered to dismantle the structure. The siding was so dilapidated that it had been covered with cheap tarps on the east and south sides (another half measure) to protect the barn interior from the formidable blasts of occasional nor’easters that come off the bay and hit this hilltop. The barn also occupied the best location for the house I had in mind for our move to Maine – a third opportunity to improve my amateur attempts at passive solar design. And the one story, open-sided pole barns I had built to create the previous farm in New York were far more convenient to work in. So, the barn was slated for demolition, a project that reportedly angered the previous owner, but luckily only discovered after the she had sold the property to us and moved to Michigan.

The current owners had given the old farmhouse a facelift of cheap vinyl siding and windows and a little insulation under the roof. But like most old farmhouses, it still devoured many cord of firewood, as I discovered camping in it while overseeing the construction of the new house on the property. But the roof leaked only around the chimneys and porch, so we decided to use it for storage and lodging any hardy visitors (to date there have been no hardy visitors).

We were able to pay cash for the place (bankers are usurious parasites) in early Spring 2011, and immediately conducted interviews with prospective builders. None were familiar with passive solar design but I found one who was enthusiastic to work from my drawings and homegrown blue prints. A friendly architect in Ithaca had given me a one-day crash course in drafting, but it turned out that the builder was better at working from the drawings than my laborious efforts to create blueprints to scale, despite their professional quality.

Barn demolition took longer than expected, Construction on the new house began in June with earth and foundation work by local people who were expert at their professions. To keep the carpenter crew happy until the foundation was ready for carpentry on July 4^th, I set them to building two pole barn sheds one for vehicles and equipment and the other for sheep.

As luck would have it, the builder had rounded up a construction crew each one of which had all the skills to be at ease with the elements of my passive solar design, which I described in detail in the last section of Three Farmhouses: A Study in Passive Solar Design. The team actually made some improvements and revisions for which I was grateful, changing the placement of the bedroom door, or crafting a attractive style for the insulating shutters, for example.

My initial relationship with the carpenter crew I would describe as standoffish polite, as locals tend to be with people from “away”. As team leader, the builder’s role was to handle all interaction with me. The crew did most of the work and deemed themselves superior in skills to the leader, but tolerated him as leader because he took on all the uninteresting clerical work: billing me, paying them, working with the other contractees and ordering a timely stream of construction materials. So, I rarely had a reason to interact directly with the crew. As general contractor I became somewhat acquainted with a number of contractees, but rarely with their crews. However, as architect of the rather unique house the crew was constructing, I had gained a bit of grudging status with the carpenters. I decided to improve on that by taking on two jobs: painting the cedar clapboards and other siding, and vacuuming up the mounds of sawdust after each day’s work on the interior. These were menial tasks beneath the responsibility of the crew, so they were happy to see me take them on.

Topics: Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy, Memoires, Uncategorized | 1 Comment » |

A holistic view of catabolic collapse

By Karl North | December 8, 2020

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” ~ H.L. Mencken

The graphic view of catabolic collapse as a serpent eating its tail was familiar to the ancients. Descriptions of collapse of industrial society tend to focus on our consumption and depletion of the natural resource base that is essential to its survival. An example is my synopsis of John Michael Greer’s description of catabolic collapse. As a holist however, I see a broader pattern of catabolism, some of whose processes I will describe in this essay.

Holism is a minority perspective and not well understood in an age where power elites have fostered the convenient fiction of a world of independent elements. The emergence of a scientific paradigm due to the initial success of the reductive method provided impetus for the spread of this atomistic thinking. In the reining Reagan/Thatcher worldview, the notion of society itself becomes a mirage – nothing but individuals each pursuing his self-interest.

Therefore, a brief digression may be needed to flesh out the holistic worldview. If we can sweep aside the dominant worldview reinforced under the official narrative, it becomes obvious that we inhabit a universe made up of complex clusters or webs of interacting and interdependent parts. Among humans, arrangements of social obligations knit together societies, however poorly in many cases today. The larger ecosystems we inhabit hold together thanks to intricate webs of mutual assistance that Ugo Bardi has honored with the label “holobionts”. If it were all competition, bloody in tooth and fang as the standard narrative portrays it, our universe would have collapsed long ago. Our greatest need is to gain clues as to how things in our universe change over time. To achieve any such understanding, it is necessary to investigate these complex wholes. Hence, in this essay we will look at how the wholes that make up the structures of modern society – their social, political, economic and cultural forms – change under catabolic collapse.

General considerations: a global view

In the history of the rise and fall of civilizations from the time of the ancient civilizations of the Near East, China and the New World to the present, a universal characteristic is that few of the citizens were aware of their collapse until long after they had begun to fail. Our current Industrial civilization began to fail decades ago, but again, few believe it is happening. The reasons are worth analyzing, in the hope that readers will become aware of the symptoms.

One obscuring circumstance is that different parts of the civilization fail at different times and rates. At the same time a constant narrative of information under elite control paints a distorted picture in the public mind to minimize each new crisis of the system. Because of the obvious relationship between the events and their false portrayal, in this essay I will attempt an integrated analysis that describes the overall effect.

Geographical differences

Geographical differences are due to differences in remaining reserves of energy and other resources, and differences in their rates of use and distribution. Also, the more unrestrained forms of capitalism cause more rapid failure, for several reasons.

Under laissez faire capitalism, a habit of little restraint on extravagant consumption of finite resources leads to early scarcities, with which a public used to seeing discretionary consumption as a necessity cannot cope. At first this can occur both in a core country like the US and at the same time in the nations most open to capitalist plunder of resources. Later in the global decline, an advantage in the less developed countries appears: peasant populations that were least integrated into the global economy, having retained more pre-industrial technologies, can better adapt to the collapse of industrial civilization.[1]

Also, the anything-goes capitalism practiced in the US has allowed the capitalist class to deindustrialize its economy in favor of investment in parts of the world where it can practice unregulated pillage of resources and exploit cheap labor, like Mexico or China. Globalization of the US model has infected US vassal industrial economies as well, starting with Europe and spreading elsewhere. Capitalist financial elites have temporarily mitigated the effects of deindustrialization by artificial means: debt financing of cheap imports from the emerging industrial economies. This cannot last. Revolts against deindustrialization and its effects on the prosperity and economic security of majorities are already occurring in the US and its European vassals.

Finally, a tradition of minimal public intervention makes these economies vulnerable to crises that require a centrally organized response: war, epidemics, environmental disasters or sudden financial collapse, for example.

While capital flight occurs in the mature industrial economies, emerging industrial economies – principally China and allied economies like Russia, Iran, possibly India and the East Asian economies – continue to experience growth for a time as long as markets remain strong for their products and natural resources remain. These countries are creating a multipolar counterweight against the declining unipolar system led by the US. As insurance against a failing US-led global system, they are building domestic markets and creating alternate international currency and financial transaction institutions to replace the ones previously dominated by Western global capitalists. Economic growth in the multipolar group is also affected by declining natural resources and is therefore temporary. Economies with less access to such resources, especially fossil energy, will experience degrowth soonest, as described below.

All the emerging economies have strong private sectors, including state-run sectors that act like capitalist businesses. China, for example, has state-controlled corporations of global stature that sell shares on stock markets and borrow from private banks. However, they typically have strong traditions of public oversight and economic planning that often give them an advantage over laissez-faire economies.

Differences in remaining reserves of resources

Russia has the largest land base and a large reserve of fossil fuels, minerals and forest. China is now on track to become the largest industrial economy by the end of the decade. The present economic alliance between China, Russia and others in the multipolar group has the potential to continue economic growth much longer than the rest of the world. On the other hand, the mature industrial economies – US, Europe, and Japan – having depleted much of their domestic resource base, have become increasingly reliant on imperial client states for resources. As these economies weaken due to deindustrialization, they will lose the capacity to control client states. Western elites are currently trying to maintain and even extend their hegemony with color revolutions and economic warfare they call “sanctions” in recalcitrant states. As the domestic economies of the Western imperialist states weaken, these efforts are gradually stalling out and the area of control of the Western Empire is shrinking. The global picture, therefore, is one of countries responding at different rates and times to a general situation of declining net energy.

Degrowth in the United States

Domestic oil production reached an all-time peak in 1970, as oil geologist King Hubert had predicted over a decade earlier. Control over the world oil price shifted to a consortium of foreign producers. People in the US began to experience degrowth in the 1970s due to rising energy costs and the resultant inflation, but most saw it as a temporary setback. Indeed, inflation stabilized with the dropping world oil price in the 1980s, and in conjunction with an economic ‘house cleaning’ forced by high interest rates, served to revive the economy. This mitigated the effects of deindustrialization that occurred as China opened up lucrative investment opportunities for Western capital (in exchange for massive transfer of technology rights).

However, the flight of heavy industry to the Asian Pacific rim and the Asian conquest of the US auto industry had created a permanent ‘rust belt’ in the center of the country. The Reagan – Bush – Clinton policies of the 1980s and 1990s transferred the tax burden downward and eroded the social safety net, and by the 2000s incessantly rising energy costs caused the brief return of prosperity to evaporate. The ruling elites used government policy to artificially prop up the economy, or at least a semblance of it.

Infrastructures

To meet daily necessities in an age of economic decline, resources once used to maintain infrastructures in the face of 2nd Law entropy can be diverted for a time. A farmer facing bankruptcy typically lets buildings and equipment gradually wear out, and thus puts off the inevitable. Likewise, in the whole country, the dilapidation of infrastructures – highways and bridges, and utilities like water, sanitation and electric grid has been going on for some time. Seen in conjunction with the decades-long export of heavy industry on the part of the investor elite, the very industrial capacity of our society may be permanently lost, weakening the nation in its foreign relations. For example, in a recent report to Congress, the Pentagon acknowledged that the US no longer had the capacity to wage a major war. Not only the industrial plant but the engineering skills were now deficient, incapable of a rapid buildup in the weapons industry such as was possible in WWII.

In another attempt to mitigate the loss of prosperity, financial elites have created a discount consumer economy of Walmarts, Kmarts and Dollar Stores to flood the US market with cheap imports from the industries they previously exported to cheap labor regions. They hide the drop in quality behind brand names of products once made in America.

The economic decline prompted another government intervention: cheap credit. One effect of virtually unlimited usury – the standard tool of socialism for the rich – was to accelerate the concentration of wealth at the top. Another was to artificially inflate stock markets and create financial bubbles – overheated sectors like real estate or non-viable industries like hydrofracked oil, which sustained a false perception of prosperity. The saturation and eventual abuse of credit spawned exploding credit bubbles and threw the financial sector into crisis, which the government parried initially with bailouts and eventually by steady money printing. The ultimate result will be the loss of the reserve status of the dollar, thus a dead-end street, propped up for now only by the global perception of the dollar as a safe haven for stored wealth. The weakening of the dollar currency and gradual loss of its reserve status will have several ripple effects, some of which are already beginning to occur. It will raise the cost of all imports, whatever their quality, and cause a further decline in prosperity. The US will lose its ability to use the dollar reserve currency as a weapon of political and economic control in client states of the empire. Thus the end of cheap energy and raw materials that began to bite decades ago has created a cascade of accelerating unexpected consequences, for which there is no solution.

Disaster Capitalism

As ruling powers discovered that they could control a society more easily by indoctrination than by force, and when electronic media were invented that could easily spread a potent message, they developed sophisticated narratives that worked wonders of manipulation and eventually created a fictional reality in the public mind. This means of social control has worked for a century, but began to lose traction as policies described above of cheap credit and war spending failed to revive the economy. As a result, ruling elites have used their control of media to distract from the failing economy by manufacturing mythical threats and engineering catastrophes – a kind of disaster capitalism – which they then use to fabricate episodes of fear. They use the climate of fear to justify wars and other policies that serve their interests.

Engineered fear attacks in the Western world started off in high gear at least 70 years ago with Cold War ideology, an attempt to manufacture the threat that ‘The Ruskies are Coming!’, when the real fear, in the hearts of our rulers, was that the idea of an alternative to capitalist wage slavery and debt peonage might spread. The McCarthy witch hunt was the great enabler. Added to that was the fabrication of a ChiCom threat starting in 1949, rather amusing, since for decades neither China or the West would have any truck with the other. With the demise of the USSR and the rise of partially secularized Muslim states taking increased control over their oil, the elite’s story tellers produced a scare detonated nicely by 9/11: the Great War on Terror. Then, with the success of the Trump campaign in 2016 it suddenly became the War on Populism, with Trump and his deplorables as the resurrection of Hitler. These days it’s a virus, one of allegedly over 150 floating around in the Corona category that cause seasonal epidemics, a convenient scapegoat for a collapsing economy.

The discredit of institutions

The growth of a population rebellious enough to support an unpredictable presidency like the Trump administration is evidence that disaster capitalism is not working anymore as a pacification strategy amidst growing economic insecurity and real poverty. Not limited to the US, revolt has spread throughout Western Europe, taking different forms – yellow vest movement in France, Brexit in the UK, renaissance of the radical right in Germany, and a general revolt against the anti-virus lockdown policies in most of Western Europe.

While ruling elites still manage to control government policy, their real challenge and fear is the growing revolt, which promises to continue regardless of the party in power. In the US, deep state operatives surrounded a politically inexperienced president and manipulated him into obedience. But they could not silence his speechifying or quell his ability to capture media time and stay in the public eye. Trump’s real threat was to voice criticism of the neoliberal system itself that, whether sincere or simply pandering to his base, few leaders since JFK had done, and thus gave direction and strength to a rebellion that had been weak and incoherent.

Elite reaction was to openly weaponize the mainstream media and the Democrat Party to take down the Trump administration. Never more than a propaganda arm of the ruling class, most of the media has thrown away all pretense of objectivity. In its attack on the working class base of the Trump presidency, the Democrat Party lost any façade of progressive liberalism that it previously enjoyed. These institutional losses of credibility further fuel the atmosphere of revolt in a vicious circle, a loss of credibility that promises to be long lasting.

Conclusion

The catabolic symbol of the snake eating its tail finds expression in all major institutions of a civilization that is experiencing the beginning of degrowth. It entails the erosion of cover stories like ‘free press’, ‘democracy’ ‘academic freedom’ ‘nonintervention’ and ‘sovereignty’. The Western ideal of liberalism itself is tarnished as self-proclaimed liberals openly embrace censorship and disregard for the rule of law at home and unauthorized wars abroad. Government and banker collusion to play tricks with monetary policy, foster unlimited usury and replace a real wealth economy with a speculative, debt economy is destroying the trust in money itself.

Perhaps the present state of affairs is best understood when placed in a larger historical context. Anthropologist David Graeber and political economist Michael Hudson think and write history in the holistic style of Spengler and Weber and the world systems school that uncovers patterns of civilizational change over la longue durée. More specifically, unlike much economics and political science today that caters to the ideological needs of ruling elites, they consider that the study of the production and distribution of wealth cannot be adequately understood apart from the study of the distribution and exercise of decision-making power. Their approach follows that of the early political economists like Adam Smith, Mill, Ricardo, Marx and even Locke and Hobbes.

Each seeing the subject from his own angle, Graeber and Hudson present a broad historical panorama of civilizations struggling with alternating conceptions of economic life and the morality of how social relations regarding obligations of exchange, credit and debt are handled.[2] Whenever the morality of exchange is characterized by a generalized sense of obligation based on favors owed (as in most families or healthy neighborhood community – which Marcel Mauss called a gift economy) or, at a larger social scale, custom or law regulate obligations according to status in a social hierarchy (as is the feudal hierarchy of the Middle Ages), inequality is relatively limited and is conducive to social peace. But they find that whenever the morality of economic relations is reduced to precise calculation, debt and usury are allowed free reign, and market values come to reign supreme, then endlessly rising inequality, eventual slavery of various sorts (including wage slavery and debt peonage), war, and civilizational collapse eventually follow, sometimes temporarily relieved by Jubilees, which erase indebtedness. They see the modern age, dating from the end of feudalism, as one dominated by the latter conception. If the modern age, as it crumbles, is to give way to something new, it will need a different moral basis of how humanity manages economic relations and the obligations that creates.

At the present historical juncture, where a nearly global form of civilization appears to be experiencing some sort of tipping point, the Graeber and Hudson studies are timely. Covering several millennia and forms of civilization from ancient China to modern Western Europe and North America, they record an array of attempts to deal with the definition of debt and obligation in social organization, which they see as central to the form a civilization takes. As such, they offer a range of possible futures to think about at a time when much thinking about these questions runs in narrow channels based on false assumptions.

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[1] The Peasants Shall Inherit the Earth

[2] Graeber, David. 2014. Debt, the first five thousand years.

Hudson, Michael. 2018 …and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year.

Topics: Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

Scenarios of Degrowth

By Karl North | November 25, 2020

Topics: Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

The quality of peasant life: a scenario for survival

By Karl North | November 17, 2020

Histories of peasant life that characterize it as nasty, brutish and short ignore the vast variety around the world of peasant quality of life and attendant differences in environment, social organization and culture. Differences of degree of overlordship alone range from several layers of overlords to complete autonomy. It is just this great variety, the fruit of adaptation to site-specific conditions, that offers peasant communities that retain elements of subsistence agriculture the chance to survive the demise of industrial civilization. For those who do not turn up their nose at learning a little social science, let me offer a synopsis of one case as an example: the Albigensian or Cathar heresy that emerged in late medieval southern France.

Conventional history of the phenomenon focuses almost exclusively on the religious doctrinal differences and the northern crusade that eventually crushed the renegade movement. However, as any anthropologist knows, religious divisions are often a signal for underlying differences of a cultural nature. In the late Middle Age, society in the south of France retained much of the richness and sophistication of the Roman Empire, whose eclectic mix of cultural beliefs from around the Mediterranean and beyond never penetrated deeply into the north. Thus, southern France was a natural breeding ground of deviance from the stark doctrines of the Church. It was not a coincidence that the core of the Albigensian movement was in Toulouse, on an old trade route between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and close to the foothills and mountains of the Pyrenees. Mountain people have often been hard to govern, and the Pyrenees provided both a breeding ground of heretics and a safe retreat as the crusade heated up. As we shall see, the difficulties of terrain, the distance from centers of power, and the inviting presence of the Spanish border allowed the peasantry in mountain villages to gain considerable autonomy.

The French peasantry experienced three layers of formal overlordship – King, Church and nobility. But in the 12th and 13th centuries the royalty and nobility, which the Church relied on to carry out its crusade against the renegades, were not as strong as they became later. Moreover, many of the southern nobility were “infected” with the heresy, and first had to be brought back “to the fold” to be of any use in the crusade.  The aristocracy often had trouble even extracting its tribute from villages located in its mountain lands; so stamping out the heretics in those places was often the least of their problems of governance.

In the Pyrenees, agrarian peasant villagers practiced mixed horticulture centered on livestock. As in many pastoral systems, the herd/flock is the savings bank; it is the source of wealth for trade and is included in the census of the population for taxation purposes. Villagers employed herders who managed flocks of many families and ranged far and wide, even across the border into Spain, moving flocks to higher altitude and back in the seasonal migration cycle – the transhumance. Villagers had relationships with traders and others in market towns in the lowlands on both sides of the border. Nobles rarely went up into the mountains, but governed indirectly through village headmen. So it was easy to hide flocks to avoid the tax count, and to trade on which side of the border best escaped the tax man. Relations in market towns would provide cover for trade deals that might be too revealing of wealth.

In the mountains, the ministry was often provided by circuit rider priests. Preachers of the heresy were often informal or defrocked priests who could hide in extended families, convert a whole village, and as the heresy hot spot became known to the authorities, escape to another village on the circuit, or cross the border if necessary.

These brief remarks that evidence considerable religious and political-economic autonomy barely graze the surface of the various freedoms from overlordship and the resultant quality of life that the mountain peasantry enjoyed. The primary source for further education on these matters is Montaillou: The world-famous portrait of life in a medieval millage by anthropologist Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. It is actually a portrait of the mountain peasantry and its lowland political, economic and religious relations in the whole region. Montaillou was the last village that actively supported the heresy, becoming the center of a revival nearly a century after the Church and its minions had crushed it elsewhere in France. This anthropologic work reveals that behind the religious autonomy a mountain peasantry had created a niche of more general self-sufficiency and self-rule that was political, economic and cultural, which protected it to a surprising degree from external forces of all kinds.

These two historical examples, from the Pyrenees and Bali, offer food for thought on the question of what forms of social organization and ecological integration will ensure the survival of the peasantry of the future.

Topics: Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy, Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Sustainability Assessment Tools, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

The Orange Revolution Comes Home to Roost?

By Karl North | August 30, 2020

The orange revolution, sometimes labeled simply ‘color revolution’, is a project of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an organization set up to facilitate the penetration of Western private capital in every part of the world.[1] As such, one of the tasks of the CIA is to destroy revolts against compliant governments, and to destabilize and eventually overthrow governments that resist Western imperial penetration in any way. The orange revolution is one of the CIA projects designed to achieve these goals. This essay explores the thesis that the current violence in the US against property and police, piggy-backed on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations, is an attempt at an orange revolution.

The orange revolution is rooted in attempts to block anti-capitalist movements in Western Europe spawned by the crisis of capitalist economies in the 1930s and just after WWII. The first attempt was called Operation Gladio, which carried out assassinations of conservative political leaders in Italy and blamed them on the leftist parties, successfully decimating the Italian left.[2] The success of Operation Gladio led the CIA to expand it into a diversity of subversive Cold War operations in Europe and other parts of the world.[3]

Attempts to overthrow governments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and more recently in the Arab world became known as orange revolutions. One of their trademarks is to piggyback violent extremist groups on peaceful protest demonstrations, to destabilize and spearhead the overthrow of elected governments. If this goal is not achieved, the back-up plan is to split a nation into separate parts and thus facilitate eventual capitalist penetration. Examples to date are Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. The risk of blowback in the use of extremists has led to loss of control in all these cases and others as well. As we will see, if there is an attempt to foment a US orange revolution against the current Trump administration, the same loss of control is occurring.

When the candidate of the ruling elites failed to capture the US presidency in 2016, they managed to harass the winner into continuing to follow their chosen foreign policies. The elite controlled mainstream media (MSM) , always a tool of mass deception, was ramped up to become the weapon of the opposing Democratic Party in a series of attempts to impeach the president, using false evidence. This succeeded in keeping the sitting administration off balance and more or less subservient to ruling class interests, but the president, emotionally unstable and incompetent to govern but expert at playing the MSM, remained a loose cannon. As the next election approached, the death of a black man at the hands of the police provided an opportunity to block the re-election of the Trump administration, or at least cause enough destruction of the social order to justify imposition of martial law.

Heavily funded by US corporations[4] and George Soros[5], the sponsor of orange revolution projects in Europe, the BLM umbrella organization fielded demonstrations around the nation against racist police violence. The MSM went into attack mode, encouraging the budding protest, and focusing on the peaceful demonstrations while minimizing reportage of the widespread violence to commercial and government property. The extremist fringe of white liberalism piggybacked on the demonstrations against racism, calling for revolution, trashing commercial property, pulling down statues of historical figures, and using the peaceful demonstrations as a cover for violent attacks on police stations, federal buildings and other symbols of law and order. Democratic politicians at city and state level supported the violence by allowing activists to declare “police-free zones”[6] and making vague calls for defunding the police. All this occurred against the backdrop of a collapsing economy and an out of control virus epidemic that is accelerating the collapse. Conditions are building that might support an insurrection.

What are the indications from these events that a budding orange revolution is taking place in the US? The CIA playbook of orange revolutions in other countries has sought regime change, or barring that, weakening states so that they partition into mini-fiefdoms that transnational capital can more easily manipulate. In the US, no highly organized movement with popular support exists on which to graft a violent, extremist spearhead such as occurred, for example, in Afghanistan, Syria, or the former Yugoslavia. US ruling elites have seized on BLM as pawns in an effort to discredit the Trump administration, using the MSM and the Democratic Party to magnify its effect, but much of the white working class and even parts of lower class minorities are either politically hostile to BLM, or are reacting negatively to the effects of the protest demonstrations across the country, as the following synopsis of investigative reporting will show.

Investigative reporter Michael Tracey crisscrossed the country talking to residents of neighborhoods trashed by extremist activists. His long interview and photo essay reveals interesting patterns that suggest a situation out of control from the perspective of orange revolution goals.[7] Tracey found that most of the destruction of commercial property occurred in low income neighborhoods, often to businesses owned by minorities residing in those neighborhoods. Local residents reported that the riot damage aggravated a local economic situation already in crisis. Tracey discovered a common pattern across the country where according to locals interviewed, mostly white activists from outside the neighborhoods carried out the initial destruction. Then, profiting from the weakened police protection, low income locals looted the trashed businesses. Interviews show that, far from supporting the demonstrations, local residents deplored the destruction and the lack of police protection. Many locally owned businesses had to put up “black owned” or “minority owned” signs to protect them from rioters:

Anecdotally, a retired academic friend in Minneapolis, one of the hardest hit cities, reports that due to the absence of police protection, burglars have initiated a crime wave in his upper middle class residential district. It shows how far the breakdown of law and order can spread.

If the immediate goal was to provoke a reaction from the Trump administration that could potentially be used against him in the electoral campaign, it succeeded. Federal agents were deployed, both overtly and covertly, to fight rioters in cities where local police had been enfeebled by BLM anti-police demonstrations backed by local authorities. But apart from an enraged outcry in the MSM, supported by liberals from neighborhoods not hurt by the violence, much of the lower income populace, including minorities, seems to support law and order more than they deplore police violence. This could work in favor of a Trump administration victory in November. To the extent that a BLM orchestrated uprising has gotten out of control and could backfire in the short run, it fits the pattern of blowback that has characterized orange revolutions elsewhere.

A long-term strategy of ruling elites has been divide-and-rule: in the case of the US to polarize the country racially or ethnically. The secondary goal is to divert attention from the deepening economic crisis caused by de-industrialization and by an underlying predicament: the depletion of the industrial resource base worldwide. If the immediate goal is to provoke enough disorder to justify a martial law or police state solution, that may succeed, but in ways that are impossible to predict, given the loss of control of the current unrest. One likely result, the US descending into a civil war, might backfire against a ruling class that needs a state sufficiently in control to continue funding the military industrial complex that defends financial class investments in the imperial periphery.

In conclusion, the success of ruling elites at polarizing the country and diverting attention from its deepening class warfare ironically make the success of a putative orange revolution hard to achieve in the short run. However, one characteristic of the CIA orange revolution playbook is a long gestation period of hybrid warfare leading up to a coup d’état intended to achieve its goals. The use of the BLM may be a trial balloon to develop strategy for the long haul.

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[1] Prouty, L. Fletcher, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World. Prouty is a former CIA officer who held a key position in the organization.

[2] Williams, Paul L., Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia.

[3] Cottrell, Richard, Gladii, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis.

[4] Corporate America Pledges $1.7 Billion to Black Lives Matter

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/politics/george-soros-racial-justice-organizations.html

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61533

[6] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/07/31/insane-seattle-moves-to-abolish-police-force-n2573513

[7] https://medium.com/@mtracey/two-months-since-the-riots-and-still-no-national-conversation-12a7e3e4e006

Topics: Political and Economic Organization, Uncategorized | No Comments » |

The Making of a Radical Worldview

By Karl North | July 20, 2020

Recently I was contacted by someone who had been drawn into the life of the alternative high school, Rochester Educational Alternatives, an experiment I attempted during our time in Rochester. A conversation ensued in which he wondered what in my background was responsible for my decision to create a radical alternative to public schooling. This slice of autobiography was my answer.

At about age 16-18 I began to question what I call the official narrative about how our society works – a narrative that comes all our lives in an endless flood from US leaders, mainstream media and most school education right up through doctoral level degree programs, especially in sensitive fields like economics, political science and history. For me, first questions revealed myths, generated more questions and revealed more myths in a domino effect. Spurred by experiences that I will describe in this essay, my disillusionment with the official narrative suffered exponential growth.  Not immediately clear was why this occurred in my case, and so rarely in others. My parents were scientists, apparently vaguely liberal, and rarely talked politics or social issues.

However, although I did not reflect on it until much later, my early childhood was unusual, partly due to deliberate parental choices. They were outdoors people in their free time, gardeners and tent campers, and unlike most of their professional class, elected to raise their children on a farm as the best chance of a healthy upbringing. In those war years they rented the ageing Victorian farmhouse on a working farm in New Jersey that produced a rotation of potatoes, wheat and alfalfa, managed and worked completely by a black farmer who was paid a pittance by the absent property owner and had to work with dilapidated machinery. South Jersey at that time was Dixieland. This black farm manager and his family lived in a shack with no plumbing or electricity behind the farm buildings. I followed him around everywhere as a 6-12-year-old, and he indulged my interest in all the exciting farm activities, letting me ride the machinery. He deliberately taught me things like how to cut seed potatoes properly, and a quick trick to tie off a sack of wheat or potatoes, and inadvertently taught me about living while black. As far as I know, I was the only white person to spend time with his family in their shack. He was my closest adult friend beyond my parents.

My parents were frugal New Englanders and did not go for the frills their income could have provided us, but we enjoyed some version of the upper middle-class standard of living. Hence the contrast between our farmhouse and the shack out back was stark, but I had no framework for understanding it for many years, not from my parents or school teachers or anyone else. The closest neighboring children my age were poor or working-class whites. The farm across the road produced that same crops with good machinery but were prosperous and wintered in Florida. I followed their teenager in his chores: milking the family cow, feeding their handful of pigs, collecting eggs for a side business for sale to us and the nearest general store. He and his older sister had riding horses. I think this unusual environment in early life began to color, much later, how I saw the world in later life.

My parents taught me how physical and biological things worked, and enough reading and numbers to feed my interest in building and growing things. As little of that hands-on activity was offered in school, I did well grade-wise and the school once considered having me skip a grade, but I quickly got bored. “Karl spends class time looking out the window” was the first-grade teacher’s explanation for flunking me in “citizenship” on my report card. I began to get a dim view of formal schooling. I was sustained in school luckily by excellent music teachers right up through high school.

Starting in my last year in high school, a series of experiences began to deepen my educational disillusionment and changed my perspective on US society. My father was given a sabbatical year off and decided to spend it interacting with colleagues in his field in Germany. The whole family went to Europe to take advantage of the experience. I spent the year as a boarding student at the Ecole Internationale de Genève. Joe Dassin, later to become a famous French pop singer, lived across the hall. The McCarthy witch hunts had destroyed his father Jules’ successful US career as a film maker, and the family moved to France where his films as a US expatriate made him famous again. In my ignorance of both US politics and European culture, I knew nothing of Joe’s family history until much later. We were both musically inclined, however, and created a quartet that performed black spirituals at a school event. An Ecolint tradition was to organize a mock UN session, for which the Geneva UN conference hall and its language translators were put at our disposal. Students each chose to represent a particular country. Joe captured the coveted role of Soviet representative, and played the role to the hilt.

Another innovative tradition at Ecolint was a kind of scavenger hunt competition. It sent teams of senior boys on their own with a small budget and a free rail pass all over Switzerland, solving problems set to us by the organizers at each stop to gain intelligence on where to go next. Joe, the cosmopolitan European, was disgusted to find himself teamed up with three naïve Americans including myself, but I learned a lot from him as we traveled together. The breadth of perspective and self-confidence achieved in those four days was dramatic, one that I have always tried to reproduce in designing learning projects as a teacher. That event is an example of the capacity for independent action and self-motivation expected of secondary and college age students in Europe, very different from the ‘in loco parentis’ approach common in the US.

Another example of the European approach that became a major learning event for me was the school’s decision on what to do with a few students like me left at school during spring vacation, when parents had signed up most students for expensive group tours. The school asked an Ecolint alumnus who was attending Geneva University to design a low-cost vacation for the remnant. His plan, which the school administration accepted without hesitation, was to lead the half dozen students, all from different national backgrounds and some barely acquainted with one another, on a walking tour around the coast of Corsica, camping out along the way on beaches or in barns in case of rain, and eating bread, cheese and other foods we might purchase in villages and from local peasant farmers. Like the scavenger hunt, this trip was a highly memorable experience. It put me in constant contact with another rural European landscape and people in a beautiful Mediterranean setting, and a wonderful daily group learning challenge in a deliberately unstructured way.

I came away from that year highly impressed with the much longer historical depth of European society and culture, evident in its landscapes and centuries-old architecture, and in its approach to education, compared to the US. I was intent on returning to Europe as soon as possible for more learning from living in foreign places.

My undergraduate years were marked by two interruptions that gradually made me a critic of what was called the ‘liberal arts education’. I came to view it as a smorgasbord taught by specialists who mostly had not the breadth of enough general education to help students connect the dots into the holistic approach that I was beginning to see was a necessary tool for learning about the world and navigating intelligently through life.

The first interruption came at the end of my freshman year when a combination of poor course counseling, a broken leg in a skiing accident and my own misjudgment of my intellecual talents led the school to require a leave of absence to gain a better grip on my educational goals. At that point all I wanted to do was return to Europe, but was not enterprising enough to find a way to support myself. Instead, because by leaving college I automatically became eligible for the draft, I was pressured into volunteering for two years in the army. This turned into a major educational event, for I was thrown in daily association with the very lower class with whom I had lived my early childhood, but had been separated from in college tracking in secondary school, and in the prestigious liberal arts college itself, full of students from affluent classes. Moreover, of the three radio operators in our unit beside myself, the black one was by far the best, reputed to be the fastest Morse code guy in the regiment. He was the first black person I had contact with since early childhood, and became friends despite the racial tensions kept barely under control by the army discipline and regimentation. One time he and I were asked to take a jeep to the regimental field camp deep into the state of Virginia, a hundred miles south of the main army base in Maryland. I was still so naïve that when we stopped at a restaurant for lunch he laughed when I asked why he refused to enter. We were traveling in Dixieland in 1959 – and in restaurants, no niggers allowed.

Because of my unusual childhood, I discovered that blacks sensed that I was approachable, at least enough to be engaged in conversation. The other black in our communications platoon, who inhabited a neighboring cubicle in the dormitory, liked to tell me about his career strategy for moving up in the service, and leaving ghetto life behind. He had invested in tailored versions of army fatigues or work clothes, starched laundering, and had become the spiffiest dresser in the platoon, with boots spit-shined like mirrors.

I was a good radio operator but a lackadaisical soldier, and the army was so relieved that the end of my service approached that they let me out a month early “to readapt to college life”. Actually, after two years of rubbing shoulders with a class of people for whom army life was an improvement, the general run of students back in my prestigious liberal arts college struck me as incredibly insensible to how most of the world lives.

I now had a better plan for weathering higher education, this time with an interruption of my own design. I had taken courses in French Literature and European history in the army, and was the only French major who spoke passable French, with which I persuaded the department and Wesleyan University to let me enter a Junior year in Paris program, for credit.

Meanwhile as a sophomore I had discovered Norman O. Brown, later to emerge for some as a sixties counter-culture hero, and perhaps the only transdisciplinary polymath on the faculty. He had sallied forth from his obscure position in the classics department to teach a course that delivered a resounding critique of Western Civilization, bringing to bear history, Marxian political economy, Freudian depth psychology, anthropology, and of course Greco-Roman classical literature and mythology, a course based on his most well-known book, Life Against Death. Loathed by all the faculty whose fields he had invaded, he eventually left for Berkeley, and thence to Rochester University, where I reconnected with him as an anthropology graduate student there, and sat in on his course (again).

The Paris of 1960 was perfect for the making of a US radical. The culture available ranged from Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the bookstalls by the Seine to large academic bookstores devoted to leftist literature, to a broad spectrum of journalism unknown in the United States. One eye opener was that the European editions of even Time and Newsweek were markedly different from the US editions my parents subscribed to back home. The tone and substance in the latter generally conformed to the values and beliefs of the official narrative, a set of fairy tales that most Americans who lived in foreign countries for any length of time would no longer swallow.

I enrolled in a course on Marx at the Institute des Sciences Politiques. The French colonies were declaring independence, Algeria was winning its war of liberation, and that fall an alliance of students and labor unions organized a huge demonstration in Paris for Algerian independence. The demonstration was brutally crushed by the Paris police whose head had been a Nazi collaborator during the war. The De Gaulle government had declared in favor of Algerian independence, so the right-wing army officer faction leading the fight in Algeria to keep it French threatened to overthrow the French government.  Every morning for a while I walked past machine gun emplacements at street corners, to protect the prime minister’s residence, whose back garden opened on the block where I lived.

I was fluent in French, but the Sorbonne was overrun with foreign students, so the French students mostly ignored us. Instead I found French acquaintances in low income retail workers who lunched by the Seine on nice days – midinettes they were called. One invited me to fancy Sunday dinner with her family. They got me drunk on many different wines and took me on a tour of the palace of Versailles. A gay French arts student once tried to pick me up, but eventually gave up and introduced me to a female friend of his, also a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. They got me accepted at the student restaurant at their school, a rollicking place with better food than the gloomy student restaurant I had been assigned to as a foreigner. In the Spring I met an unemployed film crew worker from Avignon. We hitched a produce truck heading back south at midnight from the main Paris Market, borrowed his brother’s Lambretta in Avignon, and rode on it through Spain for a month living on a shoestring, staying mostly in youth hostels or beaches. Hitch hiking back from Avignon after the trip, I traveled with a nun for the whole two-day ride to Paris. At night she dropped me off at the local youth hostel and picked me up in the morning.

By the time I returned to the US from France, I saw a senior year in college as a distinct anticlimax, an ordeal to be endured. My fiancé and I already had decided to seek a teaching job in Africa that avoided the Peace Corps. My regular college work suffered because my time was taken with studying African affairs at night with a visiting professor for no credit, because the college did not offer such courses. I almost flunked out (again) because I failed to finish an assigned paper for an independent study course, run by the only other Marxist on the faculty, an old guy hidden away in the French department. It was actually an interesting project, studying the Paris Commune of 1870 via one of its newspapers, but my focus of study had already become Africa. I had learned that the better one is prepared for living in a foreign society, the deeper the experience.

By the time we reached our jobs teaching secondary school English as a foreign language in the left-leaning Republique du Mali, I was conversant enough with French culture and with the political economy of the decolonization process in which we were immersed to make the two years in Africa a valuable learning process. Occasional close encounters with the US diplomatic community in Mali sharpened my critique of US foreign policy. The bloated staff running a small USAID program made the Malians suspicious that they were all CIA. So, the Malians banned all unchaperoned US diplomatic community travel beyond the capital city and closed down the USIA library. As employees of the Malian Ministry of Education, Jane and I were almost the only Americans who had the run of the country. On breaks from teaching we visited Malian teachers we had met in a summer intensive language program and the family homes of our students, who came from all over the country as far as Timbuktu. We explored other countries in West Africa. On close inspection I saw most formal political decolonization as a cover for continuation of the previous colonial economy and its pillage. Once a USAID guy I did not know learned of our travels, invited us to dinner and tried to interrogate us.

The culture shock of every return to the US from living abroad had a radicalizing effect from which I never really recovered. On our return to the US this time I had enrolled for a degree in anthropology at Indiana University, the only department that accepted me after my lackluster undergraduate performance. The school had one of the best African Studies programs in the US, however, with old Africa hands from Europe and elsewhere among the visiting faculty. I met a Belgian who had lived through the “independence” of the Belgian Congo. He regaled me with stories of US interference and the CIA orchestrated assassination of its first president, Patrice Lumumba. I joined the campus SDS chapter, a ragtag ‘new left’ group of ‘expatriates’ from the West and East coasts, and was asked to organize its first local antiwar demonstration, on Hiroshima Day. I started writing articles for our chapter newsletter, and for the publication of the SDS national organization. I wanted to bring to the New Left an appreciation of the African decolonization experience and its impact on Black organizations in the US like the Black Panthers.

In a course I took in applied anthropology the teacher described at length his experience attached to a USAID project in Peru that was rebuilding a community after an earthquake. Based on his knowledge of the local Quechuan language and peasant culture, he had warned USAID that everything they built would be of little use to the Peruvian peasants because it was so ignorant of their needs and the environmental challenges of tropical life. USAID built it anyway and the peasants either ignored the results or adapted them to other purposes than what the project leaders had intended. I was impressed with this teacher’s critique and got him to back me in an independent study: an attempt at an ethnography of a low income white community on the edge of town in a low partly swampy hollow full of trailers, shabby dwellings and fundamentalist churches, overshadowed by a couple of smoky electronics factories on higher ground that employed some of the residents. We moved into the neighborhood to better practice ‘participant-observation’ ethnography. Parallel to that project, I engaged some SDS people in a community development project in the same neighborhood. Neither project got very far, but we all discovered the challenges and pitfalls of such endeavors. The white ghetto community mostly treated us like the foreigners that we were in a real sense, and either ripped us off or ignored us. The congregation of the fundamentalist church service that I attended was friendly and welcomed my presence. Otherwise we might as well have been from Africa, or Mars. More naivete lost.

For an easterner like myself, the Midwest working class encountered during the two years in Indiana increasingly confronted us radicals with a wall of indoctrination to the super-patriotism of the official narrative, which it seemed that an antiwar or anti-capitalist movement would continually fail to penetrate. More generally, in the face of a highly successful ability of ruling elites to control the information most of the public receives, I began to be disillusioned with the prospects of raising class consciousness in regard to any national policy goals whatsoever, and started to focus more on the discovery of constituencies disaffected enough to want to build local, alternative institutions, like intentional communities,  schools or news media. The academia in which I had planned to make a career came under intense critical scrutiny during the student uprisings of the Sixties, leading me to finally decide to leave it.

Up to the end of the 1960s my radicalism had been mostly limited to a critique of US society, inspired intellectually by the systemic methods of Marxian political economy, and stimulated in practice by the life experiences related above. At that point my critique began to expand, encouraged by an increasingly serious devotion to the study of the science of ecosystems, and by a decision to become a farmer.

Ecosystem science taught me that our species is governed by the same rules of nature as all others, the implications of which for the future of industrial society I began to realize are so momentous that few people have dared contemplate them. Most critical political economy and in fact most conventional social science still fails to fully realize the limitations that nature’s rules impose on the human species.

The decision to become a farmer resulted from my desire to distance my life as much as possible from the mainstream institutions of capitalist society with which I had become disillusioned. It was attractive also because of my familiarity with rural farming life learned as a small child. At that juncture I felt a need to retreat from the US and its problems, and fond memories of the European countryside led to a farming apprenticeship in France. Immersion in the European back-to-the-land movement during those six years provided an education in cooperative projects and their pitfalls.

By our return to the US in 1980, we had acquired enough knowledge to mount a small farming operation that provided both a livelihood and a niche product sufficiently sheltered from the monopoly controlled agricultural economy to allow experiments in agroecological farming methods and systems. My study of ecology guided my farm design. Based on these farming experiences I began to teach in the organic farming movement, which had a limited understanding of ecosystem processes. The US agricultural science community included almost no one trained in systems ecology, and therefore offered the organic movement little guidance. Living withing driving distance of the major agricultural school at Cornell, and more at home in academia than most organic farmers, I gradually fell into the organic movement role of outside agitator at Cornell, where my agroecology was esteemed too radical for most faculty ears.

Eventually, the systemic method of inquiry common to both systems ecology and Marxian political economy led me to take seriously the evidence that the universe is a highly connected entity, one that ‘functions in wholes’ and must be studied and managed as such, or court failure. I thus came to question the whole orientation of the advancement of knowledge since the Enlightenment, whose reductive method that had come to be accepted as “science”. By reducing understanding of causal relations to few variables (following the rule of ceteris paribus), several centuries of scientific inquiry had deliberately ignored the connectedness of the universe in its quest for predictive results. Even more limiting than reductionist science was the discovery that my explorations in the fledgling but growing field of complexity/systems science revealed unambiguous limitations on what any way of doing science can predict, and even what any kind of science can ultimately know about such a highly interconnected universe.

In sum, the worldview arrived at as related by the account in this essay has its ironies. By expanding my questioning of the official narrative, not only about how our society works, and how bound it is by nature’s rules, but even about the limits of knowledge in a complex universe, I have gained a view of the world that is shared by only a tiny minority of humanity, and consequently has little audience apart from that select few. Hence, we are reduced to preaching mostly to that choir. My awareness of the downsides of the habit of critical questioning is not new. After 10 years living in other, mostly Frenching speaking nations, and subsequent multiple trips to Cuba and Mexico armed with a working fluency in Spanish, I have come to realize that in several senses I have become a foreigner in my own country. Such is life, I guess.

Addendum

At some point in the above odyssey I began to write descriptions of the radical changes in my worldview. Here are links to a few of those writings ordered by subject matter, among many to be found on my website. These subjects are all interconnected as I view them, so there will be overlap – some titles appearing in more than one category.

1. Holism vs. reductionism and the compartmentalization of scientific inquiry

Economics as brain damage
The Age of Modernity and its Discontents
Through the Looking Glass: Adventures in Landgrant Land

2. Systems thinking and ecological perspective

Why Systems Thinking?

A systems view of Western policy today
What systems thinking reveals: from biology to political

3. Capitalist social system

What Is the Deep State?
Forces Driving the US Political Economy
The Alchemy of Language in the Pacification of the American People
Locked In: The Paradox of Capitalism
The Age of Modernity and its Discontents
A systems view of Western policy today

4. Energy depletion and cost accounting, and the future of industrial civilization

What is Sustainable?
Invisible Ships and Boiling Frogs: The End of Industrial Affluence
Humans Have Energetically Overpowered the Earth
The Age of Modernity and its Discontents
Why Trying to Save Industrial Civilization with Alternatives to Fossil Fuels Only Makes Things Worse
Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios

5. Agrarian futures

Human designs for ecosystem management and survival after the oil era

Food Production Systems in the Decline of the Industrial Age: A Call for a Socio-ecological Synthesis
Through the Looking Glass: Adventures in Landgrant Land
Implications for Agriculture of Peak Cheap Energy
Mass deception and the quest for a more sustainable agriculture
The Peasants Shall Inherit the Earth

Visioning County Food Production – Part One (of a six part series)

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I have been a student, a farmer, a business owner, and a teacher. Here I will explore and educate about systems thinking learning and design tools for a sustainable future.

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