“The Unseen Presence of Victorious Corruption”

Sometimes there are words that make music, without sound or rhythm, just by the truth they present.

Joseph Conrad uses such musical words - “...the unseen presence of victorious corruption...” - in his story, The Heart of Darkness, when the narrator reaches the up-river station in the jungle and meets the dying station master, Mr. Kurtz. He describes his feeling about colonialist dehumanization, soulless science, commercial exploitation, slavery and murder as follows:

    “It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned to Kurtz for relief – positively for relief. ‘Nevertheless, I think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,’ I said with emphasis. He [another corrupt company official] started, dropped on me a heavy glance, said very quickly ‘He WAS,’ and turned his back on me. My hour of favour was over; I found myself lumped along with Kurtz as a partisan of methods for which the time was not right: I was unsound! Ah! But it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.

    “I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, I was ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night...”

This whole passage, even the whole book, is a masterpiece awe-inspiring art, but this phrase about the unseen presence of victorious corruption just rang my soul, seemed like it expressed my whole life.

Sven Lindqvist

I had recently finished reading Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide,” which treats of Conrad, the background at the end of the nineteenth century, and what happened in the next forty-five years. “Exterminate all the brutes,” are Kurtz’s words. Lindqvist had written:

    “And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew…

    “Everywhere knowledge is being suppressed, knowledge that, if it were to be made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves – everywhere there, ‘Heart of Darkness’ is being enacted…

    “You already know that: So do I. It is not knowledge that we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions...”

Lindqvist mentions how Conrad, who was friends with H.G. Wells at the time, had just read Wells’ new book, “The Invisible Man,” as he was writing “The Heart of Darkness” and this resonated with the “invisible” aspect of the “vile atmosphere.”

I first read the Conrad story when I was in my twenties, and then again when I was middle-aged, but when I read it now in my old age I am able to see infinitely more meaning and music in it. England and France especially, the atmosphere of Triumphant Progress at the turn of the century, then World War One and World War Two, the U.S. invasions of other countries, and the whole wretched 20^th century are more known to me than before. My earlier readings now seem pathetically bleak.

Just this one phrase, “...the unseen presence of victorious corruption...” - strikes a dominant chord of my experience on this planet from the time I first went away to school right up to my contact this afternoon with the medical and banking industries.

A Monumental Chris Hedges Speech

I had read a few of Chris Hedges’ articles during the

last few years and 

recently read his 2013 book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy but I confess that they really didn’t excite me very much, although I agreed with what he wrote, definitely. Perhaps I felt that what he was writing in the articles and book was just rather obviously true.

But last night I listened to one of his highly-praised speeches and it simply astounded me. It was mature, thorough, and comprehensive. He covered just about all the ground, particularly the response to the rejection you experience when you do tell the truth, and the first-shall-be-last thing that you really come to understand when you make the sacrifice. As I say, he just rang all bells. Here it is:

Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels," and the Elite

Steven Pinker came out with “The Better Angels of Our Nature” not long ago and numerous people, like Bill Gates, thought it was the greatest book ever written or something. Pinker made a bundle off it and became one of the one hundred most influential intellectuals in the world.

Steven Pinker

 So I read the book but was absolutely appalled that it was such a fraud and that the fraud had been so widely praised and accepted. It became one of those things for me like the Viet-Nam war or the invasion of Iraq that was so absurd that I once again had to face the fact that I am just not at home on this planet. I might as well be from Mars or outer space. The book was way beyond an emperor-has-no-clothes or Donald Trump kind of insanity. It was a message to me that, no, our situation is as bad as I see it to be, even worse. For the intellectual, book-reading elite to have so praised this book, and accepted it, left me with only the stars and the grass and the hills and the wind in the trees.

I have recently been reading an account of the US/CIA invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, in a book entitled “Can Governments Learn?”, by Lloyd Etheredge. The guys who planned that event were the best and the brightest – people like Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk. Kennedy’s biggest concern was “plausible deniability.” He actually thought that it would NOT get out to the world who was behind it. These people were the elite of the USA of their time, and the elite of our time are obviously every bit as absurd.

Anyway, I posted a review of the Pinker book on Amazon which you can find if you go there and scroll around a bit. I reread that review yesterday and thought it was excellent, so I reproduce it below for you:

A Flawed, Absurd Book

Valdemar Paradise on June 2, 2015

I read “The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes” and then read several reviews of it.

The most serious flaw in the book is the author's assertion that human action is the resultant of forces. He calls these forces “endogenous” and “exogenous,” which is another way of saying of nature and nurture or heredity and environment or wiring and programming. Another way of stating it, even more abstractly, is to say that human action is a dependent variable that is predictable from an independent variable. This basic scheme can be elaborated by multivariate analysis and weighting of factors, but it's still the attempt to predict human action. The book's numerous linear graphs all display two variables.

But the characteristically human thing is to insert a process of reflection in between the x and the y, during which the human contemplates alternative courses of action, sometimes over a very long period of time, and then chooses or constructs one which he or she may change after further reflection or new developments. This reflection process introduces historicity and futurity into our lives which would be impossible or uneconomical or unnecessary if our actions were just the playing out of forces. It also introduces intentionality, agency, agony, and alterity - phenomena that we all see directly, commonly, but which only academics deny – deny for non-academics, but not for themselves.

Which brings me to the second serious flaw - an inadequate account of what the author variously calls sympathy, empathy and perspective-taking. He devotes a lot of words to the subject and is aware that this is an area of the most persistent objections to the “forces” scheme. The author tries to deal with this and spends a lot of words on the subject which never really satisfy me or him. For example, he says that we get perspective by imagining the other's point of view. He is very careful with his words on that point – that we “imagine” the other's point of view. But this theory involves the epistemological or metaphysical problem of “solipsism,” or the "homunculus argument." The “looking glass self” as well as social darwinism, which he posits, are still very popular but careful thinkers saw through them a hundred years ago or more. He is far from any understanding that people are able to be in two places at once, as in quantum theory.

I was not able to find any mention in this discussion of what is loosely called “projection.” I refer to the idea that humans who refuse to acknowledge their own faults “project” or attribute those particular faults to others. The Freudians called it a defense mechanism and seem not to have accounted for it very acceptably, but I think there is no question that the observation is of something real and common. The existing theories of “projection” may not be very satisfying, or may be very complicated, but I think our common experience is that what gets people really angry and violent towards you is not really you, but something about themselves which they are trying to repress and which your reality elicits within themselves. All the bad stuff within the self is denied, repressed and then projected onto the enemy, thus justifying various forms of violence. I write “various forms of violence” here and reflect that I was not able to find any attempt to define “violence” in this book subtitled “The Decline of Violence and It's Causes.” I looked carefully for a definition of violence, given the scientificky smoke, but just could not find it. But then I found the author writing on his website that he quite deliberately does not define violence. An explicit, careful definition is quite consequential to Pinker's thesis about the decline of violence if you consider, as I do, what the supporters of the bankers and financiers and the 1% have done to us over the last decade or four, to be a form of violence. So Pinker simply and deliberately refuses even to try to define it, sensing that if he did so, it would completely destroy his book.

There is one more thing that comes to my mind right now and that is the author's unrestrained use of metaphor and simile. He refers in the title itself to “angels,” but you can see right away that he has no belief nor interest whatsoever in anything remotely like angels. He is clearly aware of the misuse of metaphor, as when he refers in quotes a few times to “hydraulic” theories such as of the flow of libido in classic Freudian psychoanalysis. But he himself is constantly doing it. Anyone who is truly serious about understanding humanity and who has seen how easily a mistaken metaphor can invalidate a sophisticated, highly-elaborated-over-many-years social theory, becomes extremely careful and reluctant about using metaphors. The subtle misuse of one metaphor can destroy an academic's entire life work. Attributing agency to genes, evolution, the system, culture, tradition, instincts, attitudes, needs, drives, forces, history, brains, time, space – a million other "factors" - can do that, too, so you become extremely careful about it. I think now of how Talcott Parsons, another Harvardian, and his acolytes spent so many years and so many words and so many people's lives and funds on positing “system prerequisites” as causing people's actions, and of how B. F. Skinner, another Harvardian, and his acolytes posited there being no such thing as thought or choice or selfhood or dignity, just conditioning.

My own view is that the depiction of the reality of this book, and of the reality of social sciences in the academy, would require a fiction/fantasy author of the highest ability.

Taking Time to Think about Trump, Obama and the Clintons

It’s not a dismissal of the value of impulse and intuition to hold that sometimes we just need time to think. In fact, it seems to me that respecting the need for time to think is a recognition of the value of impulse and intuition.

There has been a lot of early comment on the meaning of Donald Trump’s becoming President of the USA. None of it really “rang” for me during the first half year of his presidency, except for a few partial attempts. His own impulsive remarks are often self-contradictory, and so specific to certain contexts, that it just takes a long time to figure out their deeper, more universalistic meanings. The major corporate-news people have obviously been clueless, and others who pretended to understand what was going on, speaking with vehemence and superiority, were even more transparently empty.

So I imagine that you, as well as me, have felt a certain frustration, even despair, that you weren’t finding much outside insight to help you understand this remarkable event of Donald Trump becoming President of the U.S.A.

But I have been quite heartened recently by finding some speakers who are saying things that ring. Jimmy Dore and Thomas Frank are two that immediately come to mind but I see that there are others.

Here’s a sample of Dore:

The following is a good short sample of Frank but if you have an hour of time, try his book talk here which is comprehensive, articulate and fun.

It took me time to find them, because there have been so many others to consider who just did not get it. The establishment Democrats still have no grasp whatever, despite being “wicked smart” as Obama referred to his DNC head, Tom Perez, who followed his first choice of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

It took a long time for most of us to realize that Barack Obama was a Great Betrayer. I think now of how the Nobel Prize people impulsively gave out a Peace Price to Obama even before he got started. But you may even have had a feeling from his Nobel acceptance speech that he was a betrayer, or when he surrounded himself with Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Hillary Clinton, Timothy Geithner and Eric Holder – all really untrustworthy people themselves.

The Nobel Prize people did it quickly, because Obama’s words and win fit exactly with their own establishment assumptions about intellect and ideas they want to advance. I read Bob Dylan’s Nobel speech which has just become available. Dylan, another Great Betrayer, says nothing in that speech which is going to help anyone I know who is suffering, certainly not the people who are in deepest need.

The Viet-Nam war, and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, are slowly being recognized as impulsive crimes.

It takes me such a long time to reflect that these things take far more time to appreciate than I had understood at first but it has to be that way!

Blank Stares

Robert Reich's ten-point tweet of 17 March 2017 about his visiting Washington D.C. rings the right notes, particularly the tenth point:

10. Many people asked, bewilderedly, “How did this [Trump] happen?” When I suggest it had a lot to do with the 35-year-long decline of incomes of the bottom 60 percent; the growing sense, ever since the Wall Street bailout, that the game is rigged; and the utter failure of both Republicans and Democrats to reverse these trends — they give me blank stares.

I have been out of the USA for the past two months, in Canada, and was asked on several occasions the same essential question: “How did this happen?” And I spoke essentially the same words that Reich writes here and got the same blank stares.

Now, I get blank stares from people all the time, for almost everything I say. Some immediate instances come to mind:

- that the past is very much in the present and the future

- that the U.S. medical industry is a scandal

- that the rich people I know are predators upon the poor

- that the educated people I know do not have the remotest clue

- and how about TV? How can you not feel degraded by watching it?

If I ever say anything which I believe to be important or profound, I can be certain that I will get blank stares. There are people like Reich, yes, but I don't meet them in my travels or daily life.

Reich's tenth point is so obvious, so undeniable, so momentous, that it reminds me of the times of the wars in Viet-Nam and Iraq.

The Red River Valley & the Real Riel Resistance

The old Canadian folk song entitled “The Red River Valley” has become for me one of the greatest human artifacts, on the same ineffable level as Grimm's fairy tales, Bach, the Bible or Leonardo – way beyond any individual's life.

I've listened to forty or fifty renditions of it recently, and have the suspicion that it may be one of the most recorded songs in human history, although I have no way of knowing that. There are already too many recordings of it in YouTube for me to bear. The version I like best, and to which I've listened countless times over and over again, is this one by Stevie Nicks and Chris Isaak:

The Red River runs northward from below Fargo/Moorhead up through Winnipeg into Lake Winnipeg and the historical context of the song's origin was from 1870, plus or minus twenty years when the “Indians” were being “removed,” Canada was reaching from coast to coast, the Hudson's Bay Company was being bought out, there was the “French problem,” there was the threat of the “Americans” taking over that territory, and a spectacular explosion of greedy individualistic exploitation.

One history of the times that I like is Maggie Siggins' Riel: A Life of Revolution (1994). There are probably better accounts of those times but this one, focussing on the leader of the Métis (the mix of French and Indian) against Macdonald and “Anglo” Canada, but Siggins' 500 pages were a good start for me.

It also has surprized me that it has only been within the last twenty years or so that we have really understood that this was the context of the song, “The Red River Valley.” One very good historical account of the song's origin was done by the Manitoba Historical Society in 2013, The True Story of the Song “Red River Valley”

The predominant previous view was that it was a U.S. cowboy song about how lonely he was, even though it really didn't fit very well with the Marlboro Man imagery. But if you see it as a mature expression of love in the middle of military occupation and confrontation and the hanging of Louis Riel and what he symbolized, a song that takes a Métis woman's perspective, perhaps even written for that perspective from a sensitive soul from the Gaelic tradition, it becomes much more than a cowboy's whining. It becomes a transcendence of war by the human spirit, and the expression our wish for that transcendence.

I think of Riel's effort in that light, less as Rebellion and more as Resistance to Anglo domination.

The Lyrics:

From this valley they say you are going,
We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile,
For they say you are taking the sunshine
Which has brightened our pathways a while.

Chorus

Come and sit by my side if you love me;
Do not hasten to bid me adieu,
But remember the Red River Valley,
And the girl that has loved you so true.

I've been thinking a long time, my darling,
Of the sweet words you never would say,
Now, alas, must my fond hopes all vanish?
For they say you are going away.

Won't you think of the valley you're leaving,
Oh, how lonely and sad it will be,
Just think of the fond heart you're breaking,
And the grief you are causing to me.

From this valley they say you are going,
When you go, may your darling go too?
Would you leave her behind unprotected,
When she loves no one other than you.

As you go to your home by the ocean,
May you never forget those sweet hours,
That we spent in the Red River Valley,
And the love we exchanged 'mid the flowers.

I have promised you, darling, that never
Will a word from my lips cause you pain,
And my life, it will be yours forever,
If you only will love me again.

They will bury me where you have wandered,
Near the hills where the daffodils grow,
When you're gone from the Red River valley,
For I can't live without you I know.

 

The Best Analysis Yet of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

This article by Jason Linkins is the best analysis I've yet seen on the recent U.S. presidential elections.

One particularly astonishing, delightful, and even funny, aspect of the article is that is written in the vocabulary and concepts of the “educated” - the very people whom it identifies as the problem. I could barely believe it. Here are all the advanced tools being used to tell the truth, rather than to cover it up.

The “Comments” which follow the article, with a few remarkable exceptions, are not worth reading. I often find that letters to the editor and comments following blog pieces contain contain valuable insights that develop the theme but not so much in this instance.

I recall seeing the video of a young person asking Hillary as she passed if she would consider releasing to the public one of those quarter-of-a-million-dollars speeches she gave to the Vampire Squid. The young person did not use the term “Vampire Squid,” but was very respectful and straight. You could see from the look on Hillary's face that she was bright as could be, that she knew what was being asked. I wonder if she even suspected at that moment, as I did, that it was all over for her now, that she had just been destroyed.

The idea that the educated, the respected, the well-paid, are the problem seems just not to be deeply or widely understood. Such people are often referred to as “the elites” or “the professional class” or “the establishment.” The idea just isn't really believed. I often find while discussing the situation with my neighbors who are “angry” about the situation – say, of knowing that they will never be able to get for themselves or for their children proper dental care or even clothing, never mind education or “security.” They complain, are angry, but they still don't, underneath it all, realize nor believe that the professionals, the doctors, the well-paid, the respectables, are not truly competent. I include the humane qualities in the definition of competency.

I have long, earnest talks with these neighbors, and I see that they may recognize that the local car mechanic or roofer or painter or hair-dresser is an incompetent fake but they just rarely grasp that a well-paid professional is a fake. They still trust the authorities and experts and the “successful.” It's as if they haven't grown up in some way and feel that there is still a parent, a grown-up, who is still there.

Larry Summers comes to mind now as I close. Chief Economist at the World Bank. Secretary of the U. S. Treasury. President of Harvard. Highly-Paid and Extremely wealthy. Much-published. Very bright. Educated. Articulate. Connected. Can argue any point and win. A Democrat. 

My neighbors just can't seem to imagine that it's all waste, and actually turned against us.

I was talking with a house-painter yesterday who has serious medical problems, absolutely no money, and who is an enthusiastic Trump voter and supporter. His view of why he can't get medical care is that medical doctors are not getting paid enough, that all the regulations and Obama and malpractice insurance have made it impossible for medical doctors to make money, and therefore he can't get medical care. The poor doctors don't have enough money – that's his belief – they are in the same predicament he's in.