The Future of Democracy

Commons
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Thanks, Ed, for receiving the question from the space that it was given. And where are we asking our questions from?

If we are asking our questions from the edge of our maps we are probably going to get a lot of perplexing emptiness, wide eyed stares, pregnant silences, and if communicating in writing there are ellipses and etceteras. Metaphor is often what happens…which is why I pointed to the crashed piano that Kate came up with.

We might share these mixed metaphors ( Klein bottles, mobius strips, crashed pianos, etc,) as a different kind of boundary object that we can enfold in a different kind of discourse that would compliment, rather than replace the more cognitive, analytics that the author puts on admirable display here in this article you have posted.

If we have good maps to follow by all means let’s use them. If you don’t have a sense of the territory, (mine is getting pretty fuzzy) a good place to start is “What do I/you/we want to have happen?”

That may have lots of different answers, responses, gut feels, and " gosh…I don’t know…" And that is a very good place to be, depending on the company you are keeping. Some people are very unsettled by a question they have never heard before. Like most politicians, they want to spin something…that they have already spun before.

Luckily, my friend I mentioned previously doesn’t have Covid and is feeling good. We will go down to the edge of the Hudson River, this bright, brisk, Sunday morning, and sit near to where the Indians sold the isle of Manhatta to the Dutch for a handful of beads…a few centuries ago…at the beginning of a great historical, mutation in consciousness…

It will be cold, but the sun is up and we will dress warm with a good cup of coffee and some blank sheets of paper and some colored pencils and we will ask clean questions and try to make sense of a world run amok in the way that people who don’t have a good map often do…they start to think in more open ways, the way they did when they were children ( who by the way can learn three languages without an accent) We can notice, perhaps, if our questions are coming from a curious place…and if your conversational partner is supportive…how the structure of desire and how it is expressed can be very fluid and dynamic and… that’s fluid and dynamic … like what?

And then ( if you are lucky) you can breathe the cold air, and touch the visionary within each of us…who dreamed a dream…and could implement that dream through various scenarios co-evolving with others…like the Dutch did with the Lenape tribe, the original people who lived here…the Lenape hunted on this Island but abandoned it in the winter as it was too cold…could they understand what the Dutch with the big boats and the muskets could want it for? And the colored beads were a real novelty for them…

I am taking the new magical potion created by the good Dr. Zach Bush and it is working. I feel the little critters in my gut are re-modeling the downtown areas in my sensorium…a curious sensation. They are a very creative crew, cleaning up the wreck produced by toxins, and years of badly absorbed junk information. A necessary re-modeling by benevolent aliens.

And now that I learn that 50% of the DNA in the gut bacteria is not human I am really fascinated by what happens next?

And who are we that we can come up with such weird ideas???

And what difference does knowing and sharing our weird ideas make, to each other, to our environment, to the bacteria in our gut, to our children, to the future of democracy?

I will take good notes…

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Kate,

Thank you ever so much for the detailed portrayal of your situation. You had mentioned your living part-time in the Czech Republic, and of course, as an ex-pat myself and knowing any number of different flavors of ex-pats over the years, one develops a notion of what “living abroad” means. It’s always very different in detail, which is why I appreciate you having straightened out the picture that was hanging on my mental wall.

Rules for residency vary greatly from one EU country to another. Even though I had had a permanent residency visa the first time I lived here in Germany. It was a long process of temporary visas, then a permanent one; what helped, of course, is that I had a contract with a German school and was paying into the healthcare and social-security systems. Having married a German citizen accelerated the process only slightly, but it had a positive effect on decision making. That all went away six months after when we moved to CA in 1983. Being ignorant as I am so often in life, I didn’t realize that it might have been possible to maintain a residency in Germany during that time (due to laws on how one may register such with local authorities) and everything would have picked up where it left off upon our return in 1997, but such was not the case, and I had to start all over again.

Some of the rules changed during our absence, and when I first applied again for a residency visa, I “was read the riot act” by the young civil servant in Stuttgart who made it clear that if I lost my job in the first year here, I’d be deported. I didn’t, so I wasn’t, but when I renewed my US passport in 2006 (the visa was stamped in my passport), my wife was required to come to the Immigration Office to countersign the receipt. It was only in 2016 that I was granted a permanent-resident permit, allowing me to stay here and not requiring my wife to countersign anymore.

Of course, the point of this overlong digression is simply to highlight how tricky the negotiation of residency status can be. I have not idea how the Czechs handle it, but I can well imagine that it is anything but simple. Moreover, the rules for EU citizens are much more lenient than for those of us who are non-EU aliens. Due to my own personal experience, you can understand that I may have developed some very strong views on citizenship and residency “rights” (if I may use the term). I sympathize deeply with your situation, and empathize intensely with your plight. I was fortunate, but I am also keenly aware that the slightest deviation from the “set path” can cause one to end up in an absolutely Kafkan limbo that one never imagined possible. The pandemic has added another dimension to the insanity to say the least.

The pandemic has changed more things than most of us are comfortable acknowledging, but your approach to teaching visual arts online is a noble and worthy undertaking. Being one of the most visual-arts-challenged people on the planet (which Johnny can attest to: he’s tried more than once to coax something out of me in various CCafés without much success), I’m in no position to make any kind of meaningful assessment, but I felt more comfortable with what you are doing in your introductory videos than anything I ever experienced in school. I’m an (almost fanatical) advocate of flipping the curriculum in primary and secondary schools; that is, starting with art (in all it forms) and then moving toward math and science (whereby much of the latter could be “snuck into” the former in a meaningful but unobtrusive way). I sincerely hope that many of those you are speaking to hear you.

Heh, heh, heh … very kindly put.

It is very clear to me that much is not right with the world, and hasn’t been for quite some time (most of our unwritten and written history?). I may be overstating my case, but that’s the curmudgeon speaking. I also firmly believe that we moderns have gotten ourselves into a particularly dangerous pickle, and it’s not going to be easy for us to get out of it without wreaking a lot of havoc and causing one helluva lot of damage. (But even so, the hermeticist still hopes.) Nevertheless, I also think that we have everything we need to accomplish the feat, whether we realize it or not. And that’s part of the “problem”: too few realize and recognize that the world in which we live is in large part of our making; consequently, we have the wherewithal to make it different, but we may not have the will.

What disturbs be overall is the lack of anything resembling critical thinking skills in wide swaths of the population. I agree: we have been fed primarily on a steady diet of corporate and special interests, but it was possible to sift, sort, choose, and extract what was the kernels of “truth” in that diet. With the advent of the internet and the Googles and Facebooks of this world, the situation changed drastically. Not only did the selection of facts and information shift, the algorithms these entities created distorted that selection in unimaginable ways. Consensus reality was indeed faulty and fragile, but it was an agreed starting point, and that, too, has gone away. What we’re left with, generally speaking, is only distrust. Even if you have the critical faculties needed to negotiate the world today, it is getting ever more difficult to trust anyone or anything, including one’s own reason.

So, building on what I heard Marco saying in his insightful and hopeful post, what “we” (read: everybody, whether they like it or not) has to do is build trust. I don’t know how that is done on a massive scale; I only know how hard it is at a personal level. Being not only a hermeticist and curmudgeon, I’m also a fool and I bring a sound portion of trust to every encounter I have with another human being. As the curmudgeon can attest: the vast majority of these encounters are not dissatisfying, they are downright disappointing. That bothers me a lot less now than it used to. But where trust can be sown, the fruits thereof can be grown. Some harvests are more bountiful than others, it goes without saying.

Truth be told, I have no patience for anything that smacks of conspiracy. Modern human beings are not a very cooperative sort. Oh sure, you can get just about anyone to do anything with the right incentives, but to do so overtime in cooperation with other individuals is an impossible challenge. They have to deal with distrust every bit as much as everyone else. That’s what I think drives modern “tribalism”, to use a shorthand term for a pseudophenomenon: for all our self-proclaimed individualism, most people I know what to belong to some kind of group, maybe any kind so as not to be alone anymore. It used to be the Masons or the bowling league or a neighborhood card club, but today, they are more often megachurches or militias or gangs or wings of a particular political party. What appears to outsiders as monolithic is, I’m sure, when seen from within, more likely a rather rickety conglomeration of wannabe. But that doesn’t really matter: belonging is belonging. We have to deal with everyone from where they are, whether we like it or not or whether we like where they are or not.

What this means, then, that I have to take every encounter I have with another as a singular and unique event. Even in those cases, say within the family, where I know that a certain degree of trust has been attained, it is nevertheless put to the test each time anew. But even there the lines of development are not straight, but zig-zagged. Outside the family, in the public sphere, well, mileage varies significantly. 'Tis a tedious process … and time-consuming to boot, but for the moment, I don’t have a better plan.

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Hey, Johnny, as always a plethora of responses, but for now could you possibly connect me with a link/url to the Zack talk and the probiotic you are referrring to? I did see a long video of his, but that was a while ago, and I don’t remember any mention of a very specific probiotic that one could “take”. Might be a newer talk? Can you point me there?
Thanks for a great conversation here, as always.

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Here is a brief description of the product I have started using, three teaspoons a day, of a very bland liquid, some kind of enzyme that strengthens the gut which leaks a lot as we age in culture that lives off of soils poisoned by pesticides. It comes in a big bottle, a two months supply. After five days I can report that I do feel a positive difference in the gut and the brain connection, I am in a good mood and keeping quite active. I’m interested in staying in good shape under the stressful conditions we are all suffering from. This is a long term commitment as it takes about ten months to repair the gut in most people for a host of reasons he explores. Zach recommends fermented foods but cautions against probiotics as we need a lot of different ones and the use of one specific kind can produce imbalances. I hope this is helpful and I am hoping that his ideas get circulated as his approach is the antidote to the disease factory model promoted by the CDC. Good luck!

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My effort with you, Ed, was like following a recipe in the kitchen. It was not about skill in drawing and I didn’t ask for a drawing I asked for “a representation that makes sense to you.”

Moving from language and verbal discourse to the visual system, working with a 2d surface and lines and curves and colors and shapes and sizes, and interplay between different kinds of vibrations can be externalized. This is to enter the ineffable between syntax and semantics.

To ask an adult to make a drawing is to invite a traumatic episode as " I don’t draw" is a condition most adults have imposed upon themselves. I didn’t ask that of you.

Metaphor is talking about one thing in terms of another thing. That is what I invited you to do when I asked for a representation of a metaphor that makes sense to you. It is entering into a much deeper unity and diversity as others are sharing their representations, too. This practice can create trust.

And this is a metaphor…and a trust that can be sown…and fruits can be grown…and some harvests are more bountiful than others…

And is there anything else about harvests…and what were harvests before bountiful harvests? …and what happens after bountiful harvests???

These clean questions are officered in a certain rhythm, hence the insertion of ( … ).

We can move between mediums, linguistic, gestural, vocal , wrtitten… diagramatic…

“what can be shown” according to Wittgenstein" cannot be said."

In order to advance the case being made for critical thinking skills, a simple doodle on a cocktail napkin, (as Einstein made of himself, straddling an imaginary beam of light, moving at the speed of light, with a mirror held in his hand in front of him) that kind of thought experiment is working beyond language…where logic and world touch one another…

And is there a relationship between language and concept and life? There is!

AND WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO? If you can’t make a drawing ( or a representation that makes sense to you) it is my experience that you can’t think critically about it. Thinking Integrally could transfer digital to analogue communiques from the field with ease. Thinking Integrally is to know the difference that makes a difference and sharing that difference without triggering traumatic episodes and polarity responses.

We need, in my view, more than critical thinking skills. If you can’t make a sketch of it you probably are not going to be able to create it. Unless ye become as little children ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven…

Little children are the guardians of the Magical…and the emerging Imaginal Age…

AND IS THERE A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ALL OF THIS ( CRASHED PIANOS…FRUTIS AND HARVESTS, MOBIUS STRIPS, KLEIN BOTTLES ) AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY?

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Thanks, John. I do find myself wishing for more details, eg what exactly is in the bottle, and how more exactly does it bring about the promised benefits? This is my usual skepticism around such products. I will look into this further.
Glad you are feeling benefits!

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The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine…

– Anonymous observer from 18th century England, speaking the truth about power…

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Thanks for this wisdom speech, offered in such a witty manner. Though it appears as a simple maxim, it resonates with this thread, as we are working with language and the future of democracy. These clever lines from the anonymous poet brings attention to the Commons. Water, air, oceans, and language itself are not owned by anyone. Can we re- organize our shared attentional spaces so that we can trace out these hidden patterns that connect us? It is not too late. The nihilists on Wall Street would like you to think so. Thanks, again, for returning to the circle, TJ, after a long absence. We missed your historical expertise.

During the winter of our discontent that is coming up ahead, we will need all of the hearts and minds of our small, struggling community to recreate conditions for a more perfect union. I imagine our circle overlaps with other communities who are also working with the patterning instinct. The intensity is being felt everywhere. Something weird is happening. We could break through if there are enough persons who can hold the tension. It is very tempting to go back to sleep.

I took a long bike ride from downtown Manhattan, through midtown, and Central Park to the tip of Harlem to get a hard to find book, at the last scholarly bookstore, near Columbia. I got the used book at a good price and rode my bike back downtown. The shops are empty during the Christmas peak, there are no public toilets and no place to sit and have cup of coffee. At the library they take your temperature with a camera that focuses on your forehead. It feels very Orwellian.

The book is The Logical Structure of the World by Carnap. Very difficult but necessary for me to study. Wish me luck. Keeping the intellect agile is a pre-requisite for dealing with this mutation in our collective consciousness. Although the society is in the grips of an uncertain future the skies, the trees, in the Park are still spectacular. If we can tap into some sense of beauty each day,maybe, we can still seize the day!

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AND THAT’S THE TRUTH MY FRIEND FROM A DIFFERENT MOTHER!

In Beauty I Walk

Step Back-Move Forward
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Yes, to sleep the days away while apparently awake, AND paradoxically to barely sleep at night, to forget our dreams, to miss out on that fertility and re-weaving. Sleeping and dreaming in the night heals what is needed to keep awake and creative and compassionate all day, don’t you think?

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I do think so, Ariadne, and I’m glad you’re stirring in your neck of the woods. I just awoke, refreshed, after a delicious power nap. I went out earlier to do shopping and pick up a loan at the library and we had a flurry of snow. I have a pile of books, a chunk of chocolate ( no sugar) with a hot cup of ginger tea, and a nice, gray, cold day to look at outside the window. Life is good.

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Love little glimpses of each others’ lives that we catch here. I spend many hours each days gazing into the leaves of the Laurel Fig outside my window where many avian clans converge, cheer each other on, warm up for further explorations of our quieter neighborhood now that we are on “official orders to stay at home”. I do that anyhow, my only sojourns are to my community garden area or to the fields/bird sanctuary/estuary about a mile from here. Once a week, a human drops food at my door from the local Co-op! She is a very young person doing this as a volunteer service to older, founding members of this beautiful food/culture hub, who have no cars and barely any energy! :slight_smile: I just finished editing another chapter of a friends’ book on Listening, and now trying to catch up with podcasts and community meeting agendas and finally, finally, a bit of my own writing.
Something I often feel these days is the simultaneous pull in several directions at once…which is kind of anguishing, to be honest, in view of “so little time” and yet never ever wanting to rush, to force!
We live between ever-regenerating poles, perpetually balancing and re-balancing… all the while longing for radical Wholeness.

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Morning Labyrinth
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Walking the Labyrinth for Five Straight Days…Feeling the Earth Move:

Lyrics

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down
I feel my heart start to trembling
Whenever you’re around

Ooh, baby, when I see your face
Mellow as the month of May
Oh, darling, I can’t stand it
When you look at me that way

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down
I feel my heart start to trembling
Whenever you’re around

Ooh, darling, when you’re near me
And you tenderly call my name
I know that my emotions
Are something I just can’t tame
I’ve just got to have you, baby, uh huh huh uh huh huh yeah

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down, a’tumbling down
I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down, a’tumbling down
I just lose control
Down to my very soul
I get hot and cold, all over, all over, all over, all over
I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down, a’tumbling down
I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down, a’tumbling down,
A’tumbling down, a’tumbling down, a’tumbling down, a’tumbling down, tumbling down!

From A Life Time Ago & a Similar with a Difference in Theses Bones,Blood & Heart-Beat In This Time OF!!!

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Neither are the latest rounds of ‘overturn the election’ madness likely to lead anywhere but the angel of history is in a sour mood this afternoon and demands an additional “speaking.”
Apparently to some who have tasted it power must be a drug so very much more addictive than opioids or crack cocaine. As my father says, “There is no noble idea of God or man that power can’t [rape].” (He uses a different four-letter word.)

I am cautiously optimistic about democracy; I think the benefits of the idea can still fire the imagination and inspire the good fight. But it is a fragile thing, like a planet on which water can stay liquid. The conditions must be right. For success, there must be a relative level of general social affluence: the top “have-lots” and the bottom “have-nots” must be vastly outnumbered by the middle “have-enoughs.” It is more often than not this middle group which must preserve the notion that individual liberty and vibrant communal life are two sides of the same coin: local markets, small businesses, people with a voice and a stake in neighborhoods with sidewalks, civic responsibility, engagement with the arts… from the farm to the metropolis, a breathing meshwork in which people matter at every “level” of administration…
OR, to step away from rosy utopian visions, where there is at least a common framework for inevitable conflicts to be resolved, enough of a consensus to tolerate lack of agreement and to support commitment to negotiation and compromise…
It is a tall order, but possible.

Yet the angel of history is in a sour mood. He knows that humans are capable of narcissism and greed, of callous disregard for suffering so long as someone else is doing that suffering, of short-sighted betrayals of high ideals, of sheer hypocrisy where self-interest is at stake. Of the corrupting nature of power itself for both the powerful and the powerless who would slit a throat for a piece of the illusive glory of all-too-human gods.

Democracy likely has a future. But right now I am tossing a coin in the air over whether my cherished United States of America lives to be 250.
Call it.

@Michael_Stumpf Yes, “We’ll always have Carole King,” as Humphrey Bogart said. :grin: That song literally is “A Life Time Ago” for me - I’m not much older than it!

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keepOnTruckin
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Sour & Sweet is the Ways of the Angel of History and yet it is with this Angel I walk into the Wonder of it All .

To flip a coin is to Be Free in the Wonder!
Thank U

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As I finish wiping down the groceries, I think of generations and open ends of possibilities. Come what may, let those who Wonder keep on truckin’ indeed.

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Democracy has no future under Capitalism, We are in the late stages of Empire, it is crumbling fast.

In India a national strike happened, recently, the largest in human history. The labor unions and the farmers stopped the neo-libs from securing a power grab by the billionaire elites. 250,000,000 workers were undistracted by the attempt to manipulate them with ethnic hatreds. This gigantic event was unreported here in USA. I wonder why?

I find it very odd that a conservative Supreme Court has supported LGBTQ rights in 2020, as well as deny Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. It’s weird. I don’t know if they would overturn Roe vs. Wade. Recently, Polish women have marched in the streets to protect abortion rights and they won. I’m sure this popular uprising in Poland would be repeated here in the USA. Precedence creates a very strong groove. That’s why we have to think long term, remain vigilant and learn from other countries.

The state of Mississippi has outlawed the confederate flag! Now, that is something that I never thought would happen. The crack is small at first but then it gets bigger. We are seeing splits happening everywhere.

A young lady at a Black Lives Matter rally said, " Electoral Politics is like wiping your ass. That’s what you do to keep the fascists out." She convinced me that voting is a tool. I heard Susan Sarandon is starting a third party this year after the DNC destroyed Bernie’s chances to win. Progressives are not welcome in the current set up. If Sarandon could do this maybe she would get Oprah to run ? Sisters are doin’ it for themselves. Stranger things have happened.

Are Capitalism and Democracy compatible? We have seen the havoc that Covid has done to any sense of confidence that the old style politics can accomplish anything. We are in a great peril but if we know what we want ( as the united workers in India displayed), we might make something interesting happen. The workers in our country have an unprecedented opportunity as they have demonstrated how essential they are. Who needs another hedge fund manager? We need cashiers and stock clerks.

The middle class is not very good at this, for they have too much to loose, as they cling to bullshit jobs. But when they see that they are not going to make it the top they are very likely to feel some solidarity with the working class and start to wake up, too.

Even a small majority who can triangulate from the margins can create a different atmosphere. Politics pivots around gesture and affects. I am for a Cosmopolitan Socialism. Or even a Libertarian Socialism. We need to drop the tired rhetoric of the frozen left vs right. We are starting to thaw out these hardened categories.

That poor Angel of History. I hope he gets a chance to take a nap but probably not anytime soon.

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Fukuyama teased him in the early 1990s with an “end of history”; he’s not falling for that crap again. :smile: But maybe, just maybe, from time to time we can give him something other than wreckage to survey… And that just might happen where an elite is no longer allowed to divide and rule, speaking of not falling for crap…

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I agree but they are not going to step down politely. It might get nastier. That is the irony of this charade. As the elites argue for ‘reform’ ( meaning get rid of social security while they privatize everything), they forgot that they may not be needed either. AI will make them obsolete, too. And so they have destroyed the market with their irrational exuberance. The Slave can do without a Master, but the Master is utterly dependent on the creativity of the slaves. We begin to catch a glimpse of another reality. This can be unsettling and it is also very refreshing.

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Shouldn’t this more accurately be referred to as a potential second party? After all, in the American form of government, there really isn’t room for more than two parties. It’s a very rational system that was set up there.

Nevertheless, we should not overlook the fact that a very large segment of the US population is perfectly fine with abandoning democracy altogether and willingly moving to authoritarianism. Granted, this isn’t true of_all_ of Trump’s supporters, but just as any shareholder in a publicly traded corporation who acquires a minimum of 20% of a company’s stock must be reported to the SEC because they are now considered to hold “controlling interest” in the company, I’m sure the number screeching for the overturning of a fair election is at least 20%. And let us not forget that at least 18 Attorneys General have been willing to stand up and join with Texas’ frivolous lawsuit which is probably the most undemocratic act to manifest out of the current circus.

I’m with TJ in wondering if the USA is going to make it to 250.

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