Today in world-historical perspective (why not?)

[JackRiddler]

Just stumbled upon this discussion and was surprised to discover that I am already somehow embroiled in it. Is this a mistaken appellation?

Yes, very very sorry! I meant Ben D, who replied above. I must furthermore apologize because this is the first I noticed that BrandonD and Ben D are two different posters. It's on me, yes. But since this is Internet and no one can see your pretty faces, one of you really ought to distinguish yourself from the other more vigorously in the username. (Which one of the two of you is the one doing all the oil company propaganda by the way? I mean, with the pro-pollution, climate denial stuff? I hope it's not both, since then you'd really have to understand why I'm having this trouble, besides that I'm gradually turning into an old fuck.)

===

As for the point, I have no trouble with egregore as a metaphor for a sociological concept, but this stuff where there is an actual demon served by adherents in rituals, who are then rewarded for it... absolute poison. Have you detected a manifest, living egregore? This is an ideology of helplessness. We can't change the situation on earth, people aren't responsible for it, unless somehow we can get a hold of the n-dimensional demon first. Or maybe it's pointless since the demon, god, whatever, is too powerful. We've never seen this demon, of course, but the enlightened and sensitive among us can intuit its presence, and its logic (in a kind of argument from evil: evil exists, so therefore must an undefined but malevolent life-vampire force that lives from it and provides a counterweight and a yang to the life-creators's yin of goodness and love). How does this differ in effect from the usual fairy tale of you'll get pie in the sky when you die so do your duty here on earth? The mystery ingredient holding disparate groups and interests together in coordinated action serving their power is interest + ideology, and how it works is easily seen. Please don't mystify. "Egregore" this way is a kind of service to the very power elite it supposedly confronts.

Or, maybe, I should just say it's the usual religious stuff. We know there are covens of these elite guys enacting such games (even if it's not always as dramatic as in Eyes Wide Shut, though in practice it's sometimes as criminal and abusive of the human livestock consumed by their Betters). Just so there are hierarchs of various official religions, pretending they're convening with their own god when they convene, pretending this deity speaks to them and no one else because they're so worshipful and worthy of it. Just so as millions mass on their holy days to commune and maybe meditate together (the useful part, beautiful even at those limited times when it lives up to its own hype about love and togetherness), and pretend they too are in a sense talking with or at least supplicating their all-powerful atomic Supremo who likes them because they like him, and who would smite'em if they didn't like him, or if they didn't behave.

The use of such ritual doesn't mean you should believe this stuff is real -- do you think very many of the elite ritual players do?! -- or, regardless of belief, that it's anything other than a process for constituting group identities, a means of becoming "made" men tied to each other. Evil? An enabler for it, sure. Like any kind of supremacism. Its impact on history is overrated. The devil won, if I may reverse it, on the day he convinced humanity he existed as a living, reigning being, and thus absolved them of their own wills and consciences.

.

[BrandonD]

Just stumbled upon this discussion and was surprised to discover that I am already somehow embroiled in it. Is this a mistaken appellation?

Yes, very very sorry. Meant Ben D, who replied above. I must furthermore apologize because this is the first I noticed that BrandonD and Ben D are two different posters. It's on me, yes, but since this is Internet and no one can see your pretty faces, one of you really ought to distinguish yourself from the other more in the username. (Which one of the two you is the one doing all the oil company propaganda by the way?)

.

I'm gonna have to guess Ben on that one, I'm no friend of the oil industry.

[Ben D]

Yeh OMH....that's sort of what I mean by the term 'Egregore'...though it needs mankind to manifest its ultimate goal as it feeds on their psychic energy...it is attempting to organize a planetary 'battery hen farm' of humans...a sustainable ecologically balanced planet whereby it becomes immortal as the human 'cells' that make up its manifested body are continuing being born, living and dying.

Which suggests an integrated symbiosis if we can benefit from the arrangement. Not a hierarchy at all? Then we are mistaking divine malfeasance as accidental self mutilation (or disease) and human power structures as divisions between higher organs and lesser tissues.

Yes, I believe 'holarchy' is the right term...though there is also hierarchy involved. The higher 'classes' may appear to benefit from such an arrangement with all the wealth and power they can imagine...but certainly not the lower whose life becomes that analogous to a battery hen....hellish. For those who find religion is without merit or mystery, please just skip this....this egregore is referred to as a 'beast' in biblical prophecy and is not destined to realize the immortality it works for over the millennia...and the human souls who do its bidding will drop a grade in the whole scheme of cosmic evolution.

[82_28]

Well, 82_28, Searcher08 and 8bitagent are a cadre of 8s.

[BrandonD]

Well, 82_28, Searcher08 and 8bitagent are a cadre of 8s.

Next up: the 8's versus the D's, no-holds-barred cage match.

[Ben D]

You guessed wrong Brandon, I'm also no fan of the oil industry....the mistake you made was to think Jack's confusion was limited to just not being able to see that Brandon and Ben are actually different, the problem apparently goes deeper.

That's alright Jack...we will leave it at that so no more off topic.

Here is link to some definitions for 'egregore' that Jeff Wells introduced us to in one of his blog posts...http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/gegregor.html

As a subjective and objective observer on the planet for too many years...I have learned somewhat to see and intuit something of that which lies behind the screen of 3D space time activity...and the concept of 'egregore' fits well....as does the beast metaphor of religious prophecy btw. The great irony I see is those who dismiss the esotericism of religion and mysticism as nonsense...generally end up doing the will of the egregore without knowing it.....preparing the planet for the beast!

Now since you already announced yourself as one who does think this stuff is nonsense...and I've indicated that such a position implies an ignorance of the deeper nature of reality (no offence meant, not am I offended by your skepticism)....so that's that, all is unfolding as it should.

[Sounder]

Sounder » 02 Jul 2014, 03:43 wrote:

If people want to know who is running things, just find out who is not being tapped. That would be a more useful and much smaller list.

My guess is, absolutely no one. There are doubtless those against whom the information yielded by the universal tapping is not being used, and they are, effectively, the protected core of the power elite. But if they make the wrong move, Robert Maxwells and Mikhail Kodhorkovskys and maybe even Rockefeller scions (depending on what that small plane crash last month was all about) can be sacrificed.

This does seem more reasonable than the (shallow) assertion that I put forward.




AD wrote….

It seems hard to flesh out all the nuances of these big questions in any sort of absolute way but it seems clear that Capital and the State are both central to the process of organizing human society.

They may be central while still being derivative, because ‘Capital’ and the ‘State’ derive from our mode of imagining the world, -turned into intellectual conceptual structures.

OMH wrote…

We all agree there exists a hierarchy, then in what form is the hierarchy capstoned?

With our split model of reality?

A machine that runs on its own is dependent upon outside resource and outside creation. We see the maintenance of the machine everyday.

But where does inside end and outside begin?


Jack wrote...

I'm actually interested in answering these questions using the available evidence of observable reality, which is why no simple answer will do for very long. Shorthands are unavoidable. The concept of the 1% has been handy recently in educating Americans about the obvious concentration of power to which they've developed a historic blindspot since the high point of their consciousness (which came and passed in the 1930s).

Power and capital are so concentrated that "the 1% of the 1%" are really what we're looking for here. The power elite, as Mills put it. But also, and this is so often ignored among us here on RI: It's just as important to look not only at the hands (plural!) on the steering wheels (plural), but the nature of the vehicles, and the surrounding terrains. These may and often are more important. (And granted also: insofar as vehicles and terrains are the right metaphors for structures themselves subject to change.)

I agree that the vehicles, terrains and metaphors are more useful to look at than are individual personalities. Imposition of a split model of reality is the metaphor I choose to show how certain factions, (who seem to understand the mechanics of these sorts of things), maintain power and control.

My assertion here has been that bringing diverse power centers and binding complex institutional workings together into coordinated action and development over time requires a) common interests and b) ideology (or mission). Pointless if you're not delineating these, how they develop, how they are applied and maintained, how they are pitched to various groups and classes.

What is the why?, as that Merovingian guy in the bad Matrix (II) said. Do not come here without a why.

I ‘can’ delineate these, show how they develop and are applied, maintained and pitched to various groups, but the metaphors used do not seem to appeal much too current mentalities.

[American Dream]

I think we should be very careful of spiritual authority claimed as being somehow "beyond" the material world...

Spiritual Qualities of Struggle



The ruling class has material power to structure society in its own selfish interests. Their material power over us comes in many forms, one being the cultural hegemony they have over our minds that they execute in our bourgeois public education system, where they teach us to celebrate the ‘brilliance’ of our slave-owning, bourgeois fore fathers who founded ‘democracy’. We are taught that this is the best and only system. There is no exploration of our ancestors and what other societies looked like before Europeans begin to colonize the world and give birth to the global capitalism that rules our world today. That knowledge is there, but it is knowledge that we must seek out and share, and we can! We must reclaim our minds and spirit to nurture visions and dreams of a different way of living. Different, but familiar; a way closer to our origins on this earth before capital and all its destruction and exploitation existed. We must carry these visions in practice challenging our material chains. We will no longer participate in this domination that alienates us from each other and ourselves. That alienates us from the earth and the abundance of nature. Understanding and valuing our own spirit and our collective spirit, and fighting for it in practice are what will change the world. Our spirit is material. It is our beating heart; our restless mind; it is our love frequencies interacting with each other and the environment. It is the inspiration to fight back against a foreign system birthed from spells of greed and hate.

http://chaka85.wordpress.com/2012/01/16 ... -struggle/

[brainpanhandler]

The potential results are explosive.

The inevitable results will be/are explosive, both literally and figuratively. The sociopatholigarchy has learned from history and retained those lessons. The rest of us have not, at least not in sufficient numbers.

A functioning system of empire that can sell itself to the world and sees long-term future prospects would not have engaged in the high-risk self-sabotage of conducting the Iraq invasion against the oppostion of its key overseas allies

The architects of the Iraq invasion were willing to take those risks (with other people's lives) because the long term future prospects of their power are critically underpinned by mideast oil. Without it there are no future prospects. None. Fuck the allies. Fuck the troops. Fuck the Iraqis. Fuck anybody and anything that prevents the empire from controlling middle east oil. Period. That trumps anything and everything else. And in the bargain the mic makes a fortune and the homeland can be cowed and pacified into submission in a "time of war". Kills a lot of birds with one stone.

No words I can write can adequately describe the depravity and bestiality of the sociopatholigarchy. I don't think it can be overestimated.

In other words, good luck.

I vacillate between general abject defeatism and a rare, fleeting glimmer of hope. Maybe I'll move to Ecuador. I hear good things about it.

[JackRiddler]

As a subjective and objective observer on the planet for too many years...I have learned somewhat to see and intuit something of that which lies behind the screen of 3D space time activity...

Get in line. I've been around a while too (though I wouldn't say too long!), I've been subjective and objective, balanced and whacked, comatose and euphoric, meditative and blind, and on and off a decent variety of drugs, and yet I've stuck with my youthful observation that being old doesn't necessarily lead to greater wisdom, and in fact many people get even dumber and meaner as they age. Surprise, surprise. The old often hate and destroy the young, and in justifying it invoke some supposed special insight they acquired while getting old. It also works the other way around; the young destroy the best of the old. Life's complicated. One of the easiest coping strategies is to condescendingly claim special yet vague, uncommunicable knowledge on the basis of a personal intuition that others can just accept.

The great irony I see is those who dismiss the esotericism of religion and mysticism as nonsense...generally end up doing the will of the egregore without knowing it.....preparing the planet for the beast!

It's the exact opposite, of course. Those who misinterpret the old wisdom as some kind of self-adaptive guidebook to literal reality are not preparing the planet for a pre-existing "beast." They are willingly adopting a patsy religion that facilitates the death-driven overlords who are building the real beast.

Now since you already announced yourself as one who does think this stuff is nonsense...

Ooh, I outed myself. I don't think it's nonsense. It can be a potentially useful way of thinking about the real world. When it's taken as literally and simplistically as you're proposing, however, it's worse than nonsense. It's a mystification that serves the Man.

and I've indicated that such a position implies an ignorance of the deeper nature of reality (no offence meant, not am I offended by your skepticism)

That's big of you! How do you stand being so full of shit? No offense meant. I just used my hard-earned access to the deeper nature of reality, using an insight you cannot understand, to determine that you are full of shit. I can't explain why, for to employ logical devices or facts would be an insult to the underlying mystical Truth. I can just See.

==

Apologies once again to BrandonD for the confusion. Ben D is indeed who I meant was the long-running oil company apologist, which is my so very-unfair way of saying he's been a constant presence in promoting the ideology of climate change denialism, albeit with a limited range of sophistry. Which, again, does not mean he is subjectively shilling for the oil companies, but only objectively serving their purposes and making himself a part of their propaganda campaigns. Sort of like how pretending, on the basis of no evidence, that one knows "egregore" is a literal truth objectively creates Cthulhu on earth.

But yes, that's off-topic. Both the identity mix-up and the climate denial stuff.

[JackRiddler]

Shout out to bph, thanks for the comments sounder, ditto AD, OMH and others.

Long as I'm doing big picture it occurs to me that in saying it's all about "interest" and "ideology," I leave out a third amalgam of the two. Ideology for example does not just come as propaganda produced cynically for the dumbing-down of the masses or for giving a sense of mission to target groups who are supposed to play a given role within the machinery. On a higher level it's a guide book for organizing perception and action, it puts the system in the system. It's a knowledge, a shared way, something alive and with its own imperatives (call that an egregore), a technocracy. The power elites in their need for collectivity debate what this thing really wants, what is the direction of its development, how can it be served? Ideas of what's coming next are projected on to the future so that they can be discovered in it, as though borrowed, and brought into present action as inevitabilities that we must begin to serve lest we perish (or lest we lose out individually in the omnipresent and perpetual fight of all against all). And so projected change becomes the overriding ruler, the capstone if you will, the imperative of the age. Technocratic realpolitik debates only about which choice is the one that we never have a choice but to make. Science is said to have pronounced it long ago.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Per Charles Hugh Smith:

In other words, the phantom financier claims of Wall Street now pose a strategic threat to the integrity of the U.S. and its Deep State.

The Deep State needs a functioning U.S. nation-state, and a mass uprising arising from the collapse of the state cannot be suppressed with a few whiffs of grapeshot. The collapse of global pre-eminence and state financing of food stamps and other social welfare programs directly threaten the Deep State.

The collapse of financier fortunes? While that would hurt some Yalie cronies, the Deep State is not Wall Street; it attracts those who prefer power to wealth and strategy to trading. I have no doubt whatsoever that the leadership of the Deep State would have no qualms about throwing bankers and financiers under the bus once they pose a strategic threat to the U.S. dollar and other financial interests vital to the Deep State, for example, keeping 300 million Americans distracted, placated and docile.

It’s certainly not lost on the Deep State that a palpable hatred of bankers, financiers and the Federal Reserve is taking root across the land. I know this is outside the mainstream, but I think it is increasingly likely that the financial system’s skimmers and swindlers are being recognized as potential strategic threats to the Deep State.

What is essential to the Deep State’s survival and supremacy and what is not essential? Are 10,000 obscenely wealthy financiers essential? No. Between saving the U.S. dollar and making whole the $100 trillion in nominal-value bets made by financiers in offshore shadow-banking accounts–there’s no contest.

Conventional wisdom has it that Wall Street dominates the state and the Fed. To the degree that these formal surface institutions can be influenced by lobbying, campaign contributions and plum positions, this is true. But these surface institutions only ratify and implement Deep State directives.

I know this sounds “impossible” within conventional narratives, but I am increasingly confident that the financiers’ phantom claims on real wealth will be thrown under the bus in the next global financial crisis. Look at it this way: there’s essentially nothing left to stripmine from the bottom 80%; most have been reduced to neofeudal debt-serfdom. Since the survival of the nation-state depends on the 80% remaining either passive or productive, the Deep State has a vital strategic interest in both the U.S. dollar and in maintaining the social welfare programs that enable the bottom 80%’s survival.

Via: http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar14/thr ... s3-14.html

Also excellent: http://www.oftwominds.com/blogfeb14/dol ... e2-14.html

[JackRiddler]

Wow wow wow, thanks WR. Wait, let me quote that so I'm not the last word for now:

Per Charles Hugh Smith:

In other words, the phantom financier claims of Wall Street now pose a strategic threat to the integrity of the U.S. and its Deep State.

The Deep State needs a functioning U.S. nation-state, and a mass uprising arising from the collapse of the state cannot be suppressed with a few whiffs of grapeshot. The collapse of global pre-eminence and state financing of food stamps and other social welfare programs directly threaten the Deep State.

The collapse of financier fortunes? While that would hurt some Yalie cronies, the Deep State is not Wall Street; it attracts those who prefer power to wealth and strategy to trading. I have no doubt whatsoever that the leadership of the Deep State would have no qualms about throwing bankers and financiers under the bus once they pose a strategic threat to the U.S. dollar and other financial interests vital to the Deep State, for example, keeping 300 million Americans distracted, placated and docile.

It’s certainly not lost on the Deep State that a palpable hatred of bankers, financiers and the Federal Reserve is taking root across the land. I know this is outside the mainstream, but I think it is increasingly likely that the financial system’s skimmers and swindlers are being recognized as potential strategic threats to the Deep State.

What is essential to the Deep State’s survival and supremacy and what is not essential? Are 10,000 obscenely wealthy financiers essential? No. Between saving the U.S. dollar and making whole the $100 trillion in nominal-value bets made by financiers in offshore shadow-banking accounts–there’s no contest.

Conventional wisdom has it that Wall Street dominates the state and the Fed. To the degree that these formal surface institutions can be influenced by lobbying, campaign contributions and plum positions, this is true. But these surface institutions only ratify and implement Deep State directives.

I know this sounds “impossible” within conventional narratives, but I am increasingly confident that the financiers’ phantom claims on real wealth will be thrown under the bus in the next global financial crisis. Look at it this way: there’s essentially nothing left to stripmine from the bottom 80%; most have been reduced to neofeudal debt-serfdom. Since the survival of the nation-state depends on the 80% remaining either passive or productive, the Deep State has a vital strategic interest in both the U.S. dollar and in maintaining the social welfare programs that enable the bottom 80%’s survival.

Via: http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar14/thr ... s3-14.html

Also excellent: http://www.oftwominds.com/blogfeb14/dol ... e2-14.html

[Occult Means Hidden]

[quote="[url=http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=546441#p546441]

and I've indicated that such a position implies an ignorance of the deeper nature of reality (no offence meant, not am I offended by your skepticism)

That's big of you! How do you stand being so full of shit? No offense meant. I just used my hard-earned access to the deeper nature of reality, using an insight you cannot understand, to determine that you are full of shit. I can't explain why, for to employ logical devices or facts would be an insult to the underlying mystical Truth. I can just See.

.

This is the point where the conversation breaks down. Since I share many sympathies with Ben D ideologically in this thread, i'm hesitant to contribute further because Jack may be hostile to my post too. Which in the grand scheme of things doesn't mean much, but isn't very conducive to a, you know, a conversation.

[brainpanhandler]

It is not an honest actor. Don't be led around by the nose.