What Is The Real Fight – How Do We Really Win It?

Note for new readers – auto-estimated reading times are greatly exaggerated (lots of pix/links)

Hey Folks!

I’ve been trying for quite awhile to understand the nature of our modern fights – everything from our philosophical, economic and political struggles, to the fate of (and contest between) nations.

The reason I can’t leave this subject alone is simple – absolutely everyone is wrong (me included, to be clear), and we actually aren’t even having any of the right (that is, the real) arguments yet.

I am convinced that the reason we feel so helpless, and bad things usually seem to work fine (that is, badly), where good things fail and are destroyed too easily, is that our focus and attention is deliberately scrambled by BigWar/BigMedia and (very expensively promoted) culture games.

One big problem is language. Not only do we almost always believe that patterns of words and models of reality actually are the thing they attempt to describe (which is not ever true) we don’t come anywhere close to agreeing on the meaning of many of our favourite fighting words.

The most telling and destructive example here is the thing that makes the culture war a perfect protection for our insane war-lustful rulers, oligarchs and over-all corrupters of our democracies.

When a person on the right says ‘left’ angrily, they mean tyranny – and when a person on the left says ‘right’ that way, they mean exactly the same always dangerous thing. This does not mean they are really the same, outside of that big misunderstanding, but it does demonstrate a human thing. Tribalism allows us to ignore the evil on our own side, and see only that on the other. (which is why it makes us stupid, which is why the rich like to promote both sides of it at once (makes it far easier to herd us, like the animals they think we are) which is why I oppose it – neverendingly).

To be super clear – both sides have always had both tendencies, aspirational and despotic. The Libertarian right stood for the rights of the individual citizen to defy the state on principle for a century, and many still hold that association – the left stood for the workers struggling against the exploitative and degrading corporations, for roughly that same century or so. Both of these were always entirely valid fights (in fact, both were parts of the same long-term fight against monopolists and tyrants – who likewise, come always as a pair).

To be just a little snarky to both sides at once, one could make a strong argument that both tribes are now hopelessly delusional, lost in nostalgia (for a time and a cause which they almost entirely misunderstand, anyhow).

I say this because more than a half a century ago the political left sold-out to one clan of oligarchs (banking and the big-debt big government that drives their profit) while the political right sold out to another clan of oligarchs (lawyers/corporate monopolists) which means that at this point, no genuine citizen will on either side is ever represented seriously, in terms of policy. (Which alone proves our culture wars are a distraction, and not the real fight).

Another big problem is attitude and belief – that is, because our common attitudes are now so narrow, selfish and resentful, and our patterns of speech and attention maximize our indignation, we mostly aren’t even trying to make sense or do good anymore, just to complain, expertly.

It is important for us to remember that our last big cultural media cycle was about lust (also an opponent of healthy balance and overall character growth, when made too much a focus).

For Gen Xers like me, and boomers too, it is easy to notice that something is wrong, when the current is constant anger and frustration (even with those who could be our dearest friends and loves, and thus transcend and heal it altogether).

Lust, the subliminal keynote of advertising from the 1950s on, but absolutely out in the open by the 1970s – only fading out slowly this war-filled century – really was a lot more fun a mass social sin than our modern combination of fear and anger are. But I see no reason to assume that it was any more organic than our modern state of fury is. Lust sold consumer goods. Anger sells war.

The question isn’t – what is the cultural tone of the age? But – what do they need us to feel?

Or – to take this from an artistic angle – every period of art has many artists who are chasing the thing that sells, and everyone hears about (many of whom are insincere talentless hacks and finks) and a few who just do the thing they do, because that is the thing which seems self-evidently necessary to them (how real work presents).

Sometimes critical tastes catch up with them. This happened to many talented realists who were working during the heyday of abstract expressionism, who were only discovered and finally appreciated in their old age, after decades of working in total obscurity and poverty – but working hard and steady all the same, all those years – because their driver was never money or ‘likes’.

But sometimes a fantastic artist works their whole life and is never seen or noticed at all, even though their work was outstanding. Often because it did not serve the market (commercial model of what art is) and only served art itself, no other master (neither Mammon nor Moloch).

I grew up in a commune and spent my twenties reading history and leftist theory (disliked Marx, loved Engels, and finally gave up somewhere around Plekhanov). Even then I had some serious reservations about the theories (first doubts are worthy doubts, keep them!) but I could already see our system was not the fairness and general thriving engine it claimed to be, and I wanted to understand how alternate theoretical approaches did, did not, and also might or might not work.

While reading this stuff, I was also doing a lot of Kundalini yoga, reading a ton of ancient and modern mysticism, and had several runs at LSD (though it is worth saying that deep meditations long after psychedelics, did much more for me than the psychedelics themselves, which broke a door open, that it is better to enter-through with the invisible knock of earning – hard work as that is).

For my pals on the right – please don’t run away – I’m about to make you happy – I just had to establish that one cannot have clearer leftist working-class intellectual qualifications than I do.

So, having established that, let me share the weirdly clear insight which finally hit me yesterday – though I’ve been trying to characterize this one for a couple of decades.

What is wrong with modern feminism, ‘anti-racism’ (actually a rebirth of racism) and (fake) ‘leftism’ – is every single one of them now presents in a form which has already sold out, before showing up.

A theory of female living which measures every quantity and economic unit and counts no other value as real or worthy of consideration, is actually a theory of mass female capitulation to the tyranny of technologist-monopolists, and cannot possibly be anything, or lead anywhere, else.

From a mystical perspective, we are talking about a coven of powerful witches who enter the fray agreeing to stay strictly in the realm of materialism and market forces – renouncing all magic.

That is to say – simply by their own shared self-definitions – they have all decided to be stupid losers.

(can bratty whininess ever be far behind determined self-harm on such an epic scale?)

Yeah, I’m just going to say it clearly – women have some magical properties and characteristics which are really important to their strength and thriving. Women who insist this isn’t so are brainwashed (that is, power-robbed) fools.

This error is just as true of EVERYONE (I point to modern feminism because it is especially self-harmful and righteous, it is not at all unique in foolish pre-capitulation, by allowing others to frame THEM).

So now here’s something incredibly important that tribalists on the right miss about the huge numbers of sincere people who remain on the left (not the idiot-left you see on BigWar/BigMedia – I’m talking about the folks who are trying to solve their own problems and those of their community themselves, not begging for bigger clunkier institutions to quash more rights and freedoms).

Huge numbers of people on the left think of the left as the defender of civil liberties and individual rights, and the right as the political force which hates citizen thriving.

Thing is, huge numbers on the right (and also many independents) no longer see anything like that, in any political expression of the left at all. They think of the left as the thing which stands against the individual, and against rights and community uniqueness and thriving in particular.

Now – because this is a point much argued about in some circles, let me try to be super clear. There absolutely are a ton of important differences between the left and right, even in their very best and highest expressions (neither of which get any air-time at all, on BigWar/BigMedia).

BUT – those highest expressions of both sides, actually rely on the same set of general citizen rights, in order to make their case by demonstration. Not spouting a theory, but living it and proving it.

If we enter paranoid, with nothing but self-interest to guide us, and we learn to enjoy complaint (and to think being upset, every day of our lives, is somehow normal or even heroic) we can absolutely feast ourselves on the worst sides of the hated other, and there is always tons of horrific material on offer, to feed our fury (continued wilful ignorance).

The worst on the right absolutely do want dictatorship, and so do the worst on the left – and so do the powerful scumbags who own the BigWar/BigMedia we still somehow believe, even after it has lied us into disaster after disaster for a quarter of a century without even a pause for breath.

I’ve made this point before – but not for awhile. For older people, it is very easy to see how cellphones have messed-up the thinking and thriving of young people, not least by getting in-between their hearts and the direct (instead of digitally mediated and displaced) experience of their own lives.

But what we older people have to realize is that we are just as addled and hypnotized by television, as the younger folks are by anything on their phones. And how many times does a ‘paper of record’ have to lie, to no longer deserve that designation? Are we into comparative infinities?

If a friend lies to us and gets us beaten up and robbed, over and over, we stop listening to that friend. But somehow, the New York Times (which ran front page stories in WWII from a known Nazi, because he had ‘great sources’) continues to define the consensual world, even after decades of new lies on behalf of warmongers and anti-citizen monopolists. Which is to say, the CIA finally won the ‘control of the narrative’ they’ve been seeking since the mid-sixties. Not, we should be clear, to convey one dominating message, but to muddy all messages, so no one can ever tell what is really going on, until it is too late for their objections to stop the gigantic crime.

No wait – didn’t I just caution against entering paranoid? Yes I did – and this ain’t that – this is realism, folks. Paranoia is ultimately about the definition and emotional understanding of self.

I mentioned spending my twenties reading socialism and mysticism, but I sometimes wonder if my even earlier reading habits didn’t do me far more good (and in a funny way inoculate me against the dogma which captured and sickened the minds of so many friends, over the years).

As a much younger book crazy kid I was nuts for Plato and Francis Bacon, and found the way they both stretched my mind (Plato right hemisphere and Bacon left?) to be exciting and useful.

I ended up spending my life split between creative work and technical work – pursuing both the maximum humane and intuitive and the most practical possible confrontation with hard reality.

Again – one of my crucial qualifiers is needed here. What I’m talking about is seeking a better balance, not some empirical orthodoxy of goodness and badness. Corrective feedback is what keeps a system running, instead of going into a runaway failure and burning out – ask a tech!

So – what is a person?

Are we just a bag of meat that walks and talks? If so, do we really have any right to resist whichever slaughterhouse the rich choose to direct us toward? (currently another great civilizational war, fought solely to preserve the power of our own civilization’s worst parasites).

There’s a very big topic (future essay) which I must touch on simply, here – many on the right are people of sincere faith, and have useful shared language to discuss matters of the soul, and at least try to respect that not-measurable and not scientifically provable quality of every human being.

The old left used to have deep respect for this, because they had a shared respect for spirit, embodied in a kind of worker’s consciousness, which has not existed in the west for decades (one of the saddest culture-deaths, of many, that we Xers have watched).

Again – I’m not trying to say this is the same thing – I’m trying to say starting from reverence for things beyond the individual as a number or a work-unit, respecting dignity and integrity, just like the basic citizens rights to do and solve for ourselves, which benefit left and right in common, are a unifying principle which satisfies more than one socially useful expression. All boats rise stuff.

There is no one correct way of thinking and there never has been. There is especially no such thing as an enlightened intolerant orthodoxy of compassion, all orthodoxies remain prisons!

There is no perfect politics. There is no ideal system of economy, there is no perfect philosophy or way of being, not even a perfect relationship between two people who are perfectly suited.

That just isn’t the way reality works. What we can have is worthwhile struggle, and that is not about complaining to the manager, or begging government to force-fix our lives, it is about slowly becoming our truest selves, not what the TV cellphone or anyone else thinks we should be.

Because young people have had every last thing about life commodified in advance, they have come to place emotional weight in places where they are not ever likely to find satisfaction or growth.

I want to be a social media hero is an aspiration which is doomed to fail for almost everyone. I want to be a hero to my spouse and kids, good to my friends, and useful to my community? That’s a plan that (through much imperfection and struggle) absolutely does brings real practical and enduring magic into millions of otherwise normal lives.

Love is a unique fuel for our will, which can make us capable of greater strength and sacrifice than we would ever dare to reach for, let alone grow into, if we weren’t first filled with that love and magic. That precious thing which is more than can be measured.

This substitution of the immediate and very practical for the abstract, fantastic and unreachable, isn’t a new phenomena. It was long ago noticed that money often substitutes for the emotional weight of social favour, in less alienated and industrial societies. When you have hard and good times, you realize that having plenty of money somehow feels like a vote of general approval from the community. But having very little indeed feels like being banished from your family and tribe, with all backs turned against you. It is not ever just broke – we are always heartbroken too!

But symbols still aren’t the things they represent, and performances aren’t realities. We are never going to find happiness by falling in love with the shadow a beautiful woman casts on a wall!

The really frustrating thing is that both the popular and political left no longer have any deep respect for the sacred at all. But right away I must rush to note – very few people on the left have zero spiritual ideas – it is just that they prefer an entirely consumerist (fake) version of spirituality, where they pick and choose the bits they like from many religions, and sacrifice nothing at all for any. This, sad to say, completely robs it of any spiritual value whatsoever. I mean that – completely.

But – fear not – because there is actually one great and also normal place to meet across tribes, which absolutely acknowledges the crucial reality of those things far beyond any measurement.

Love is the one magic we actually can have and do share, and the driver of all our striving, growth and self-overcoming. But only if we sacrifice for and to it, faithfully. (not self-destructively – exactly the opposite - it is self-becomingly!)

Even as an atheist, when I am standing in love, I feel one central piece of every faith I’ve studied.

I know I sound loopy to some, for coming back to themes like love, when I’m trying to talk about politics and social ills. There are lots of fancier philosophical systems which offer the same idea, but as much as I love weird specialist language, I love clarity way more. The fact that love is the real magic in life, which gives our life and our struggles deeper meaning, is the most important and obvious truth that we no longer talk about, and many younger people, tragically, don’t even believe exists.

I first started dating my wife Catherine almost forty three years ago. We were both freshly hurt by personal tragedy, so we spent awhile becoming friends and establishing trust, first, which has remained a superb foundation throughout our marriage – buddies first and last!

When I look at her today, I can still see the beautiful woman I first started courting, but I can also see her many years before I knew her, as a nervous little five year old ballerina – that’s just how marriage works. Over the years, she has grown to become many new and different people, and so have I, and we have always embraced the growth and change, even when it surprised us. Love is the garden which best supports your own becoming. It also gives you reason to grow, when you realize you aren’t being what you should or want to be, for the other.

The most important thing though, is that recognizing that we are not the single most important thing in the universe is seeing TRUTH. And it is so important, so basic and so powerful a truth, that most of the world of reality, compassion, practical effort and work achieved, lies beyond it.

The bridge of fools (the Rubicon, for math geeks – or is the Rubicon the bridge of fools for history geeks?)

People on the left who are more about anger than love really are scary. I grew up in a commune that turned into a cult, and what I saw convinced me – madness collectivizes way easier and faster than aspiration – and soon destroys all the higher goals, even when their word-ghosts remain.

People on the right who are more about anger than love? Same deal. That ain’t principle, just arson.

BUT – people who are about love, on left and right, can both recognize, and see the importance of defending, common rights which all citizens need, so we can make our own efforts count, and make our lives and communities better, without being sapped or blocked by despot-monopolists.

The enemy is despotism itself – and there are despot factions on both sides (though I swear in both cases they are merely the loudest and most promoted, not the majorities, who are far saner).

The goal is a world where citizens get to work out the shape and direction of society and community by their own demonstrated will, energy and action, instead of surrendering to being herded like lambs to the slaughter by industry/NSC think-tank (and increasingly BigTech oligarch) plans for our ultimate profitability, whether as Pets or as Meat (or currently, both).

No really, folks. There is no democracy in the west, or there would be no wars, and no corruption of politics by our own oligarch class. Instead we see nothing but parties owned by oligarchs, who have spent years making us pivot the whole western world toward great war, against all popular will.

Yes folks – We are already living in a dictatorship (how better would you define it?)

So – the question is – can we defeat warmongers and monopolists with fury and mobs?

Do we really want to win the fight for humanity? Are we really determined to serve as tribalist proxy warriors, as our entire civilization burns to the ground, when we could be quenching fires and rebuilding with that same energy? (and having a f#ck of a lot more fun, simply by being useful).

We need love hearts for this – there is no other way to get it right, or to find the big team needed.

We need to be able to see beyond self, to sacrifice cheerfully, without complaint or resentment, to share and build (no, not communism – just a bit of practical ad-hoc barnraising-style teamwork!)

With team-mates like this, respect for rights and practical plans are possible, even with huge divergences in philosophy. If we let the screamers lead things – we all go off the lemming cliff!

Now I should mention a particularly fine lecture I watched the other day, which helped inspire the distillation of this piece. I think I can admit I have an intellectual crush on prof Jiang, as he is popularly known. Not least because, as an intellectual who never did high school or university, he is exactly the kind of professor I like to imagine every university student gets (a fantasy, I know – but that’s a tragedy, because it should be nothing but joy in knowledge, every single class you take).

In his introductory lecture on ‘great books’ he does an extraordinary job of sketching out the whole point of reading great books – the transformation of the human soul, no less! But he does it in a way so wide-ranging and multi-angled that it must have left attentive students breathless!

One of the reasons his thinking appeals to me so much, is that he has clearly read deeply into many different areas of study and thought (I swooned when be brought up Julian Jaynes!), where so many of our modern talking heads are deep but narrow. So overspecialized, they see nothing!

People with obvious enthusiasm for learning, and for posing ever more challenging and useful questions, end up seeing forests and trees and birds and songs and weather and forage and ambush and shelter, where the specialists are still stuck discussing the wonders of “the Larch.”

He also does something that I like to do myself (though I think he does it better). He likes to put challenging ideas in a pithy way that provokes an instinctive rejection in us, but then makes us work to think-through the reasoning of our objection, and make sure there actually is some!

A lot of what we’re wrong about feels emotionally precious to us. We very rarely respond well to rejection of our ideas. But sometimes, when we meet a new idea of obvious strength and use, we recognize we need to abandon old illusions we liked, to make new room in our mental toolkit!

Emotionally, this feels like gaining something new, not being asked to give up an old treasure. And it is, I am convinced, the most important underlying skill in all great teaching (imparting the will to learn).

Render unto Caesar, your political analysis.

Just before wrapping up, I want to touch on something important, because it is hard for people on the left to hear and understand, but also very important, in order for them to be able to show simple respect to those of faith, and thus (just that easily) earn enough trust to cooperate with them.

Many leftists openly celebrate their contempt for religion (I was one of these fools myself, for years, I’m ashamed to say) in a way which is pure tribalism and also logically flawed. The biggest lazy cliche is to blame religion for many wars, over the centuries. You can only believe this until you start reading history thoughtfully, at which point you see a whole bunch of other factors operating alongside – economic, social, tribal/regional (competition with others, for resources) etc.

The easiest analogy for this false-moral oversimplified framing is the way we so casually demonize China, Russia and Iran in the west, without ever asking – I wonder what they’d be like if we in the west, with all of our extraordinary starting advantages, hadn’t been trying to outright destroy them, for more than three quarters of a century now?

Less paranoid, less social control and less militaristic are all very safe bets, just to start. Which is to say – absolutely everything we hate most about them, is at least one part our fault.

But just as with all tribalist bad-magic, we put all our evil onto ‘the hated other’ and thus (and just that fast) we become evil. (Jung’s language for and insights on this stuff are truly fantastic, but again, I want to stay simple/clear).

So – when we are looking at history, we need to clearly distinguish the organized political entities with religious names, which indeed were often despotic, greed and power-based and sometimes openly genocidal (Cathars), from the faith itself and the long line of philosophical development of the time.

Much as it irks the old leftist in me to admit it, the most important early western philosophy comes from the ancient Greeks through (and then much explored and developed by) first Islam, and then later the Catholic church, and ignoring this extraordinarily rich, many centuries-and-cultures invested intellectual heritage, makes us all a whole lot dumber, for no possible gain whatsoever.

The reason deep thought from hundreds, or even thousands of years ago, is still fresh and relevant to human life today, is that such works always did ignore the shadows on the wall – and instead tried to engage with those far more subtle and life-imbued realities which project them.

The non-measurable (and thus non taxable or controllable) greater dimension to life. The thing we know is infinitely more than us – transcending love – in whatever form we can find and nurture inside our hearts, and share the life-force hearth-glow of, with other hearts nearby.

So – why exactly am I such an asshole, anyhow? Why do I insist on being deliberately irritating about false-sacred categories of tribalist dogma, and pointing out that stupidity is now universal (meaning sanctimony is now obsolete)?

Because I want us to win. I want love to win. I want humans together to beat evil monopolists. I want us to shut down the war machine and say no we won’t, and don’t you ever try to start one again.

I have been reading history and revolutions, failed and otherwise for decades, and there is simply no way our two fake cop-out tribes will ever get this right. They aren’t even designed to do that. They are actually designed to serve eternal imbalance, the kind of long term social breakdown and widespread community mistrust which serves despot-monopolists and no one else on earth.

What we want is healthy sustainable growth in quality of life and human dignity.

And yes I know we all define that very differently in a lot of ways – that ain’t my point.

My point is that the monopolists and despots want the opposite kind of life for all of us.

We really do have a common enemy – but it ain’t either of us!

That is to say – the loud fake idiots of both tribes must be ignored and transcended, so the people who know they aren’t the centre of the universe, but are wise enough to serve something greater, can meet and cooperate and trust one another, despite all the furious rhetoric of the idiot-hordes.

And why do I believe this is possible, despite both sides now having tons of great (BigWar/BigMedia promoted) evidence that the other side is now dangerously insane?

Because love is the thing that can make us say – I have reservations, but I’m going to set aside those feelings, because my duty says we all need to do this, and duty comes before feelings.

Now this final point is one I have made before, but it belongs here for sure. We actually do have several well-known figures from our recent history who teach us exactly how powerful and politically dangerous, serious principled and unyielding love can be and is.

Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton all spent years organizing in the black community. Malcolm in particular began his career as a preacher with some astoundingly racist language about white people (arguably meant to snap black people out of a subservient trance).

Martin Luther King appealed directly to the American heart and decency, in a way which was both highly courageous and also impressively disciplined (not just him, but fellow marchers too). He won a real and important change (which was then almost instantly coopted by big-debt corporatists, as the holding down the underclass in the name of charity industrial complex was born).

Fred Hampton was probably the second most important intellectual and political mind in the Black Panther Party after Stokely Carmichael. (I’ll link to more about all three, below).

The thing is, all three of these men were outstanding organizers and posed a real challenge to state power (it was Malcolm X who J Edgar Hoover most feared might be a ‘black Jesus’.)

But every one of these three extraordinary men did something even more impressive, just before they were finally killed – by the state directly, in Hampton’s case, and indirectly in Malcolm X’s death, because Elijah Mohamed’s number two was secretly FBI (just like Hampton’s bodyguard).

With everything they knew, all the organizing power and energy they could gather and direct, they still found the will and the love to grow again, humbly, in a very big (real, not shadows) way.

In Malcolm X’s case it was the Haj which did it. Taking the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca required of any Muslim who is able, he encountered white, black and asian people all meeting together in shared faith and he had an epiphany which utterly destroyed his own racism.

I have read all of his speeches after this epiphany (and many from before, also) and the change was profound. He was no longer interested in one tribe against another (a game which can always be manipulated by the powerful, or if it gets dangerous, simply demonized and expunged) he now wanted blacks and whites both to do better, together. He saw the system for what it was and recognized that white people too were just cogs and units to capitalism. Not slavers, but hapless pawns.

In Martin Luther King’s case it was the war in Vietnam which broke his heart, and made him grow further in courage and moral clarity than he had gone before (though that was already a long way, and a lot of courage).

His still powerful Riverside speech, where he recognized the American state as the greatest purveyor of war and destruction in the entire world was a landmark of wisdom and truth-telling.

Fred Hampton worked a different scale – not operating on the national consciousness, his work was more like union organizing (and in Chicago, that was an approach that made sense in the 1970s). He was one of the leading thinkers who helped the Panthers leave behind their early incarnation as an assertive gun-rights group, and instead offer community programs, organized and run by people in the community they served.

This alone – making the Panthers neighbourhood good-guys, instead of scary blacks with guns, was already seen as threatening, by those in power (the obvious and the hidden ones, both).

But then he too had an epiphany, when he realized the poor Irish and hispanic communities were in just as bad a state as the poor blacks he was trying to raise up, and he started working with the people who were organizing those communities, to create shared aspirations for better.

All three were killed within months of their greatest achievements in love.

Nothing is more dangerous to the oppressive state, to tyrannies, or to monopolist oligarchs, than the ability to know the world that casts the shadow, the world of surpassing love itself, is the world where we most truly exist, and which all those of great heart are called upon to serve.

Knowing that, we become a part of the greater and immortal. Unstoppable, even in death. (with the exact same days and energy we could also use to shop, mope, complain and choose uselessness – and mostly do).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have to confess the deluge of maybe stories and screwed up strategies (and all the downstream disasters from these, which are not even slightly guesswork) are hurting my head right now. Still monitoring many sources (Sean Foo Mark Wauck and The Duran are daily essentials) but everything in the geopolitical world is up in the air now – we’re trapped in Schrodinger’s news-cycle, so I don’t have a big collection of links for you today – just a few tasty things.

But first, I’m having fun with this bibliography thing – so let’s start there, once again.

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

May just be the best ever (and certainly one of the most darkly funny) fictional take on the deep madness of the war state. The fact that Vonnegut’s brother was a scientist working on crazy projects much like this, and the strangely enchanted culture he invents, to contrast against our worldview, makes it hit all the sweeter and harder.

The Natural Way To Draw – Nicolaides

Working as an art model for a dozen years I sat for and talked to a lot of art instructors. Every single one of them had high respect for this book, and “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” (by Betty Edwards). Both are absolute masterpieces of enablement, even for people who think they have no artistic talent. If you have an art kid, get them both (and they’ll ace first year art school)

The Book (on the taboo against knowing who you are) – Alan Watts

As I’ve mentioned, I’m an atheist who reads a lot of theology (certainly, more than most atheists!) – again, because I put duty ahead of feelings, and strong useful thought ahead of general labels.

But this is a piece of purest theology which will not offend any atheist at all, because Watts does something especially inviting and embracing – he does not insist on a framework, but rather invites us to recognize a greater reality being inadequately described by so many of our frames.

The Wisdom of the Idiots – Idries Shah

This is the first book of Sufi stories and wisdom I ever encountered, and still my most beloved. The form feels almost like fairy tales, but the themes are so subtle, and so obviously about true things that we aren’t good at discussing, you won’t be able to put it down, or stop re-reading it.

Flight To Arras – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I know everyone loves “The Little Prince” (me included), but as an airplane keener, I read everything the man published (that was translated into English). Exupery was not only a writer, but also a civil pilot in the early days of aviation, when courage, skill and luck were most called for. This phase of his writing richly portrayed a vanished heroic age, when new things were still being tried, and new risks taken. Flight to Arras (1942) is the last adult work he published while he was alive (second last before The Little Prince 1943). His writing is outstanding, his insights delicious, but most impressively he manages to tell an action story, a tragedy, and also a deep meditation on the fall of a great nation and empire (his own, France) with great intelligence throughout – plus, exquisite concision! (a talent popular writers lost, mid 20^th century) Easy and short read, too (just 100 pages or so) – but unforgettable, all the same!

For those who don’t know – Exupery was killed flying a reconnaissance mission in WWII (because he insisted on flying, they didn’t want him taking the risk). Some new evidence suggests that knowing it was the last flight they would allow him, he may have taken a detour to fly over the home where he grew up and may even have lost his life, because of that entirely in-character offering to sentiment and connection.

Now here’s that extraordinary lecture from Professor Jiang. I swear, if I had been in that class as a young man I would have danced, run and jumped all the way home (or, straight to the library!)

Great Books – Part One – Professor Jiang

(“Predictive History” on Youtoob and Substack)

Here’s my own piece about the Panthers and the cost and threat to illegitimate power, of real and transcending love

The Context of Emory Douglas

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August 1, 2020

Note: these images were photographed at the Ryerson Image Centre (which does expressly allow non-flash photography) as part of their excellent 2017 show:

And finally, here’s a weird short film I made a few years ago, which seems to hold up.