Getting on with getting on
Connecting thinkers and everyone
I couldn’t do a better job of characterizing our current situation than Alexander Beiner does:
Politics, like culture, has become about the Spectacle…the Spectacle offers us chaos and the death of democracy on one side, or Davos-friendly globalism and technocracy on the other. There’s no invitation to anything new. No serious engagement with electoral reform, no experimentation with radically different economic structures, no re-evaluation of the metaphysical foundations that underlie our politics…we won’t find authentic hope in a culture built on a fantasy of endless progress, endless growth, and no real endings. Only by laying to rest our old assumptions and the systems they birthed can we open the way for the new…It is time to risk it all. Time to acknowledge that the world is broken and we can create something new. New visions can’t be held back forever. As the world becomes more complex, and the spectacle gets ever brighter, our optimism becomes ever more nauseous until we purge. What’s left then is the space for true hope. A space impossible to ignore, embedded as it is in our souls.
From True Hope vs Simulated Hope: Kamala, Kursk and Kits - The Bigger Picture.
That’s where Beiner stops. So does everyone else. You can’t find ideas in play for where-to-from-here. I wish I was as good at getting what I talk about to be seen as I am at presenting what should be seen, where, as of last week, I went from talking about possibilities that could be done to advocating for something specific to actually do.
Weird is a great word. I’ve touted Beiner before, and this is what I’ve gotten back from him:
“You’ve been quite pushy, regularly insinuating that because you bought my book I am obliged to promote your work on my Substack. If you want to establish collaborations with people in the future, my advice would be making an approach in which you explain how it is mutually beneficial to both parties - the way you went about it rubbed me the wrong way and I'm confident others would feel the same. You're doing interesting work and I wish you the best of luck with it, and I think you could gain solid collaborations with a different approach.”
I said:
“I recommended my subscribers subscribe to you, and I even did one of my weekly posts about you: Dealing with the bigger picture. Reciprocating would very much have been in the scheme of things. Please god your confidence – what a snotty thing to say – is misguided.”
With my basic advocacy being for savvy people to think together, it was disheartening to hit a wall instead of engaging an ally. AND, he is still so good. I loved his book, that’s about the experimental program he was in with high dose MDMA.
These are the comments I made on his pieces that led to his critique. If you have feedback that helps me understand why he called me pushy when I thought of us as collegial, please post a comment here.
I'm a pre-publication buyer of “The Bigger Picture,” appreciating your good mind and jealous of you being in a such a radical program, although I come from the days when there were no programs and I give thanks to psychedelics and ecstasy without enrollment in any supervised programs for them. You enter a realm that has its way! Check me out to see if you like what I'm saying about turning the world around. Love to be thinking with you. I've got a dossier of what we-the-people can do to get us operating from a higher state of consciousness and see if that's interesting to you.
The Ego Doesn't Die: Why Western spirituality is so confused, and what to do about it - The Bigger Picture.
Reading the questions here, I want to tell everyone the answers are in your wonderful book. It's special even to people who are familiar with the subject.
Well, that was a chock-full package and maybe everyone is still reeling trying to take it all in. Let me add to your idea of story: "For example, the Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime isn’t just a story, or a creation myth; it’s an access point to a truer reality that contextualizes and defines this reality." Love your links and here's one for you to add: "Everything will change if we adopt the Universe Story": Stories for Life.
Myth and Metrics: How social media robs us of ritual, and how to revive it - The Bigger Picture.
I come to your aid. This is my post today about my essay contest to come up with ideas for what to do. They were to be written as if it was 2050 when the world was working to tell how that came about, starting with something the writer did. I got 175 submissions and these are my picks for the best ones. Take heart: And the candidates are...here!
For an unqualified uplift, Brad Blanton, a subscriber whose of body of work is about big pictures, turned me on to his daughter, Carsie Blanton, who could be our official songbird: Rich People (Live at Red Rocks).
This week I did my third Zoom with veteran broadcaster, Richard Dugan. We talked some about what I wrote last week, advocating for the smartest people to think together and for Marianne Williamson to get millions of people signatory to the Beloved Community:
Here are things to pass on to people who aren’t planning on voting for Harris that could change their minds to help her, warts and all, get elected:
From Thom Hartmann: Jill Stein: The Grifter Who May Hand Trump the White House Again. How one woman’s ego Is endangering Democracy and destroying the Green Party…
From Daniel Drasin: The World's longest run-on sentence nails Trump
To help get this Substack seen, please, please, please:
Like this post!
Restack it! (It’s for Substack writers to post this to their subscribers.)
Share this on Substack and on social media sites:
Join our conversation:
When you comment for the first time, you’ll be asked to Create a Profile. With that registration you can comment on any Substack.
Your reach out to him was on point and intelligent. Hopefully he will see that, like others have, and see how valuable you are in solving what's wrong.
Suzanne, many people have been laying it on the line to improve the world for a long time. From individuals as famed as Gandhi, or persecuted as Roger Hallum destined for four years in a British prison for planning to shut down the M5 around London, to organizations like Greenpeace where individuals risk their lives, there are countless examples. Unfortunately, as you, I am certain well-know, societies fatten and prosper on the backs of victims with the victors taking the spoils, and the bribed looking away. The bribed in this case is the vanishing middle-class. Having taken everything they can from every country in the world, the ruling class is now eating its own. That's me and you. They have also destroyed the planet, and consequently we are rapidly heading towards economic shrinkage, and global societal upheaval at unimaginable scale.
The patterns of injustice in settled societies of course cross every culture and thousands of years. In every case, they end in blood.
Thinkers are great, and occasionally have positive effects. MLK was certainly one, but we still have a society that shoots young black men in the back and practices systemized racism. As the Earth becomes more inhospitable from burning fossil fuels, we face unprecedented problems, including failing agricultural harvests. Many places in the world now depend on the government delivering water with trucks. We can no longer succeed (if you call the way we live success) by expansion, we must shrink, and history shows the only way for the oppressed to make change is to throw their bodies into the gears of the machine. So far, the only ones who seem to have an inclination to do this are the misled Trump supporters.
Furthermore, polling of voter issues as usual shows little to no recognition of climate change and planetary overshoot, now the determiners of our future. We are no longer in charge. Should we survive Trump, it appears we will not change course as radically and quickly as we need to. Our political leadership is too cowardly to tell the truth, IF they even see it. COP29 is in a matter of days, and the oil clowns wish to burn more oil than ever.
When people in complacent countries like the US finally get off their fat asses, the majority won't even understand why they're in trouble. They'll just know they can't afford rent, insurance and that the grocery store shelves are bare. Sorry, that's how I see it.