Wednesday, August 21, 2024

 

Wellness as Tyranny: The Cult of Toxic Happiness

Be happy.  Think of your wellness.  Across organisations, private and public entities, government bodies and social clubs, the cult of contrived happiness abounds with ritualistic, clotting repetition.  In such cases, the forced grin, the pressured smile, the affected giggle, have become part of a project of puppeteering, manipulation and manufacture.  Critics of such approaches are ostracised, treated as leprous reminders of reality.

The cult of orchestrated happiness is intended to veil, covering the moonscape scars and lingering mutilations of life.  The forced smile, as it has so often been, repels reality.  It is also intended as a transferral of responsibility for problems one complains about to the complainant.  To be happy by design is to excuse defect and injustice, casually skipping over larger imperfections.  “Toxic positivity,” writes Mita Mallick, “is the idea that no matter how bad or stressful a situation, no matter how difficult the circumstances are, you can change your outcome simply by being positive and thinking positively.”

Mallick goes on to suggest that when toxic positivity, as a practice, makes its unwelcome appearance, “we put the responsibility on individuals to endure and persevere in toxic, dysfunctional and broken structures and systems.”  Negative views are shunned, seen as unhelpful and disruptive.  Their holders, in turn, are encouraged to feel shame, guilt and cherish immaturity.

The nature of such forced happiness has become industrialised and marketed.  Rina Raphael, who has studied the wellness industry, notes its effects on certain groups as well.  Women, she argues, are being sedated “with consumerist self-care”.  Stress can be banished as an act of faith and salvation, dispelled through yoga classes or taking soothing bubble baths.  The actual culprit – the issue of overwork, for instance – can be ignored.  Even more critically, forget the collective dimension at play, which the wellness market reduces to a matter of individual action and choice.

Tim Lott also reminds us that this has roots in a specific understanding of economic organisation.  He takes the prod to capitalism, where happiness is aim and object, involving shopping, playing, exercising, granting funds to charity and such.  Companies ensure that workplaces include gimmicks, distractions, and treats in the name of building the resilience of their worker bees: the workplace, for instance, modelled on a nightclub, with open bars and zones of mandatory tranquillity.  The workplace, monitored by such creepily absurd commissars as the “funsultants”, have become a domain for the wellness police, agents of what the late Barbara Ehrenreich called the “epidemic of wellness”.

Ehrenreich, in her snappy book Natural Causes, offered a mischievous critique of such an epidemic in the context of postponing death.  “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation … and take every possible measure to postpone it.”  On the other hand, “you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”  Sober words of philosophical sting which, sadly, have done little to arrest the growth of the wellness industry.

Toxic happiness, the cult of happiness, has become an imperative of iron clad worth.  Carl Cederström and AndrĂ© Spicer note in The Wellness Syndrome that even the most mundane tasks of the day must be seen as acts of improvement and wellness.  “When we engage in boring activities, such as washing up at home, we should think of them as improving our mindfulness.  Even baking a loaf of bread is now recast as a way of nurturing our wellbeing.”

The cult of forced happiness acts as a conscious program to defang and dilute opposition, maligning critics who refuse to join the fascists of the grin, the authoritarians of the forced smiled.  It stiffens the sinews of groupthink and discourages naysayers who wish to challenge organisational behaviour or correct errors.  Whistleblowers worried about reporting corporate malfeasance or criminality in government organisations find themselves hounded and scolded for not being loyal in patriotic silence.  They should have tasted wellness and its therapeutic properties.  To be unhappy, it follows, is to be critical and dangerously free.

Wellness as a principle of organisational behaviour has also become a rigid legal component.  Employers remind their employees that they must take time off, rush off on annual leave and ensure that the organisation does not labour under “liabilities” that will cut into budgets and raise questions about the quality of the workplace.  Most cringingly of all, many employers insist that the public holiday becomes the perfect point at which to take that leave.

Unhappiness has become the hunted enemy, and stomped upon.  The time has come for a constructive sense of informed unhappiness to take over, the sulky, the gravely sullen and the profoundly introspective to have their time in necessary bleakness.  Wellness industry, begoneFacebookTwitter

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.comRead other articles by Binoy.

 

150,000+ Guns and Weapons to Israeli Settlers Since October 7

It is farcical to suggest a distinction between settler and state violence: They are part of the same settler-colonial structure, and not only complement each other but depend on one another.
— Fathi Nimer, The West Bank: Settler Colonial Spillover of the Gaza Genocide

While Israel continues its brutal genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, armed Israeli settlers, backed by the Israeli government, continue to expand illegal settlements in the West Bank. Our new visual captures how the Israeli government has transferred hundreds of thousands of guns and other weapons to Israeli settlers since October 7, as settler violence against Palestinian communities skyrockets with impunity.

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Visualizing Palestine is the intersection of communication, social sciences, technology, design and urban studies for social justice. Visualizing Palestine uses creative visuals to describe a factual rights-based narrative of Palestine/Israel. Read other articles by Visualizing Palestine, or visit Visualizing Palestine's website.

 

Sacred Ping Pong


Sport: Ambassador of peace (Soviet Union 1970s)

Rumi: Come out of the circle of time into the circle of love.

I have taken up ping pong as my sole viable remaining sport in my 70s. It really was made for frustrated sedentary has-beens. I played real tennis till tennis elbow set in, but even the thought of lurching, run around asphalt (let alone falling) makes it easy to shift into a scaled-down version. The paddle weighs almost nothing, the ball nothing. You play for an hour without noticing the time. Unless you have bodily aches and pains making anything unpleasant. But even then, if they’re not too serious, you don’t notice the pain (e.g., sciatica) so much, you don’t suffer.

From the start, I told Marty, ‘let’s not bother scoring. Let’s just make every rally the best.’

It was rocky at the beginning. Cheap paddles. But never boring. Boring is doing something you don’t want to do, prostituting your time, or worse, when you prefer your tech virtual reality to real life. As low tech retirees, we didn’t have to worry on that count. We did improve. Indeed, I look forward to each journey out of my low tech virtual reality.

Ping pong praxis

We’re taught we must ‘keep score’, the goal is to ‘win’. But why must your other be your opponent? Our two rules: keep the ball in play, and keep the play interesting. Balance challenge vs stability, a controlled disequilibrium. After playing for four years, tactics and strategy have become apparent. Without the worry of being ‘out’, your range of shots increases dramatically. I love to hit deep, as if defying gravity, going to the limit. We volley for a change of pace and keep a collective score for fun. When the fire alarm went off one day, we transferred the game to a spot of green outside and volleyed. It turned out to be a delight to play on the grass and we had lots of friendly cheerleading.

Our hits are slower, looking for elegance, style. It’s beautiful to watch a ball bounce high and deep, it rises and rushes to greet your friendly paddle. Hitting wide or too deep is fine if it’s still returnable. It’s fun to rush around to hit a deep lob 20′ away to the distant table. Like launching a rocket to planet Earth from the asteroid belt. Landing smartly on a corner is like docking your craft to the space station.

Shots are often funny, crazy, flying away into the distance. We cause some consternation and more delight from passing residents in the common room. A good rally is like a game in itself. Both players win. The outsider shots are just more cardiovascular workout, and on soft vinyl, not hateful cement.

How to end a rally? Usually from a really bad shot into the ‘jungle’ (stacked chairs) or the Bermuda Triangle (meeting tables pushed together). If the rally has gone on for a while, I like to lob it and end with a volley at the net, a flourish, hoping to keep the volley going 3-4 times and even returning to rally mode. Volleys are fun and not so strenuous as in real tennis. I continue to be amazed at the strange things gravity and movement do.

Courtesy and laughter are the basic mode, the high you get from synergy, the 1 + 1 > 2, the connection, cooperation. The only competition is with yourself to push you to excel. All rallies are win-win.

So ping pong is praxis. Practical politics, skills enacted, embodied, realized, put into practice, in a nonalienated world, where you consciously build your life/ universe based on mutual agreement. ‘No force in ping pong.’

Boundaries?

Why artificially create boundaries? If I’m polite and not a nuisance, I can retrieve the ball from across the room between the feet of the mahjong players. (Very, very serious. They rarely crack a smile even as I reach in among their feet.) No need to put up a wall. It’s nice to visit and say hello, excuse myself if the ball lands on someone’s lap or head. An apology is like a free gift. No need for arms (except the real ones, to delicately retrieve an errant ball). You can go abroad, the ‘near abroad’ to play. The Soviet Union was a model that way. Ukrainians and Russians, Armenians and Azeris, Georgians and Abkhazians, lived in peaceful coexistence until the West finally succeeded in bring it down, proudly boasting of freedom and democracy.

It was a kind of planned (forced) gift economy (Spartan mass consumerism), and foundered on the impossibility of forcing people to be nice and not to compare apples (capitalism) and oranges (communism). There was no private property, infrastructure was public, and sport and games were central to Soviet life. It will be remembered for the thousands of top athletes, artists, and scientists it produced.


My translation: Russian and Ukrainian living in harmony before capitalism poisoned everything (1950s)

A hint of how a gift economy differs from our private property/ scarcity-based society. But force in general is a bad idea and the internally peaceful, borderless Soviet Union collapsed. Its story was better than ours (at least for socialists) but it wasn’t enough to undermine our very old, very powerful story of separation and scarcity.

Vita ludens

We play for fun and to bond. All life is (or should be) ludens, playful, leisurely, fun. Our cosmic motivation is curiosity, exploring limits, loosening inhibitions to creativity, creative dialogue with environment, reimagining the world, not enslaved to a preset end. The end emerges through process itself. Pause for a moment. That’s exactly what a new born infant is/ does. Is it still the way you live?

The value of play (of life!) is not so much the motor skills or problem-solving techniques it develops; what is learned is the ability to concentrate and focus attention unsparingly on the task at hand, without regard for limitations—no tiredness, no rushing, no need to abandon a hot idea in the middle to go on to something else. Untrammeled creativity that comes from within. Experience the unsparing focus of play as a feeling of timelessness. Entrainment. It undoes the artificial self/ other, mind/ body, in our Age of Separation. The task absorbs us, organic agents of the universe’s own creative process. Through us, the universe creates itself.  Sacred ping pong.

No need for willpower to stay focused and overcome natural desires. In play we are natural desire manifest (if we get out of the automaton syndrome). There’s no useful goal. It’s not ‘youth is the time for play’, but ‘play keeps us youthful‘. When you impose arbitrary rules, limits, then our bodies/ minds suffer, harden (think: arteries hardening). Qualities of childhood play are the same as for creativity of the adult. We are the universe’s channel for play. Language, art, math, technology originated in play. Abstract language allows us to imagine, create, play with our inner reality. What might be.

But adult play is a pale imitation of children’s play. We play but in a game gone wrong, and can’t extricate ourselves. Our separation from nature, our puny Cartesian self-and-other is not how the real world works. Think: Play, a dance of energy and information. After a near-death experience, a person develops an unhurried, playful attitude to life, cherishing each moment.1

Nature ‘grew’ animals/ us. How can we conceive of the bizarre, the beautiful, all unrepeatable, millions of species as random? What an insult! But not pre-designed. The idea of a blueprint for the human eye (any eye) is ridiculous. The peacock (man) is a marvel of creativity. It is clearly not random but there is no invoker. It emerged spontaneously out of the creativity of Earth, nature, the universe, if you like, God’s creative inspiration. And that goes doubly for Man. The conscious self-aware human is the emergent whole mind-soul-body. No blueprint. Just trust mother nature.

I was born with my gifts latent. They emerged as I interacted with my environment and activated them to serve the purpose I have here, also an emergent property, something between me, God and nature. No central command dictating, just as there is no central command in the cell, where the ‘brain’ is the membrane, the interphase with the outside, the other. There is no central command in our brains.2 i.e., you are what others make of you, what ‘nature calls’ for, through life’s opportunities and the world’s needs. Darwin’s survival. Lamarck’s higher purpose which we must seek out, i.e., through humility, curiosity, not control. We think we are the master engineers, but you engineer nature at great peril. Nature is wondrously nonlinear. We are helplessly linear, and anything we do will have nonlinear, chaos-producing effects. When we try to impose our linear thinking, rigid rules, we defy nature’s laws and changeability. Natives intuit nature and only obey a law they can break.3

Quantum ping pong

Newton defined our enlightenment world as an impersonal one of force and time-space; his laws of motion – the laws of everything (until they weren’t). Ping pong thumbs its nose at this worldview. The virtually weightless ball defies gravity. My puny forehand can catapult the missile into deep outer-space. Time disappears when you are ‘in the flow’. Table tennis was invented in 1870s by colonial officers, then adopted by nouveau riche at home in imperial Britannia, as a post-prandial diversion. Not skipping a beat, in 1883, Slazenger filed a patent for a net for table tennis. ‘Ping pong’ was trademarked in 1901. Sigh. Greed, private property moved in on the backs of imperial playtime.

The problem was the ball. Clunky cricket or golf balls were too heavy. Technology to the rescue. Celluloid was used to make light, sturdy balls in the US, also in 1901, and ping pong never looked back. There are 300 million players around the world today. It is the sixth most popular game, and recognized as an Olympic sport in 1988. It is not so popular in the US. People are too spread out. Driving a car to play ping pong is, well, silly. Americans and globally, those who are part of our Newtonian worldview, like sports, but professional sports, like everything in capitalism, specialized, superstars, money-making. There’s no money in the masses playing ping pong for free. So we have spectator versions of all sports. Thank God ping pong doesn’t have much sex appeal, glamor, danger, so it is more or less forgotten, not coopted, poisoned.

Newton was stuck in separation mode: we are isolated automatons moving around independently in a random world. Along came Einstein and quantum physics and we find we are in an indeterminate world all connected. Our subduing of nature is a deception. Our tamed version of things makes them smaller, even dead, and disposable. We intuit this lack, but instead of rejecting the deception, we pile it on higher and deeper. More tech. Better TV to get the best experience. Lol. No longer do we sense the mystery of the unknown, but rather are left with a catalogue of the known, everything private property.

Ping pong is radical, revolutionary, anarchistic, animistic. We know deep down that private property is theft, and enjoy the sense of freedom when we enter the tireless, property-less primordial realm. Escape into the timeless, when no rules interrupt the flow, where the play creates beauty as it proceeds, like the Mandelbrot set, nonlinear evolutionary beauty which just is, unprovably beautiful.4

Rules ruin the flow except at the highest level of play when competition acts to heighten the beauty, mutual control (you have to hit brilliantly to stay alive, every moment a life/ death moment, martialing all skills at once). The only property, reality, is bat-ball-table. You are your partner merged with the ball in a dance. All are ‘commons’. We use our gifts and leave nature in the same primal state. The gift economy. The perfect sport. No infrastructure (you can volley anywhere, outdoors), almost no space, so no built-in physical limits that constrict, make expensive, tied to scarcity culture.

Left/ right hemispheres

Ping pong is a constant reminder that left-hemisphere rationality is just a superficial rationalization of real decision-making in the unconscious sympathetic (fight or flight) system. As my ace partner, Jason, prepares for a smash, I notice my paddle is already in position before I have a chance to think. To my surprise, I often scoop a deep shot to my backhand with my physical ‘back hand’ without any left brain instruction. Glimpses of another Eric. We are ruled by cold hard reason (but secretly function ‘without rhyme or reason’, marching to a different tune). Newtonian mass determined by forces acting on us (but constantly undermined by our irrational right hemisphere).

This is agriculture thinking. Nature is violent, stingy, we must extract as much as possible, save some, pay the master, lord for the privilege of being alive. The left hemisphere is the wrong place for vita ludens. That requires the heart for knowing and deciding. A beautiful rally you feel in the heart, not so much head, but the head respects, admires. It grudgingly admits the right hemisphere is, well, right, at least occasionally. It’s good to have a goal, especially if it’s creating beauty. Save the rational stuff for later.

No scoring, no force. Just skill, perfecting your skills, your goal – to create beauty. Force never works in ping pong (or in any social relation). A gentle tap at the right time and place is exquisite, a smash … boring. Smashes all look the same. Like Tolstoy’s bad marriages. The ball is very sensitive. You hear it scream in pain if you whack it too hard. ‘Good’ easily turns into ‘bad’, so pay attention! It is a loving relationship with the ball.

The universe you share with your partner has its dangers – the ‘jungle’ (of stacked chairs), the caves in the cliff face (shelves of library books, where the ball often retreats for a quick read up on organic chemistry or a kidney flush. Yew!). It plays hide&seek, launches into the sky, falling chicken-little style with a spectacular crash, scales peaks (ceiling speaker, piano). Saturnalia. An inverted parody of ‘out there’ ‘reality’. Overcome defeat with a string of beautiful, crazy shots. Collapse in laughter, the ‘high’ point of a good session.

In our post-Newtonian world, the observer is inseparable from the observed, so ‘is’ (I am isolated observer) is a lie. You are the ball, rushing over the net into the arms of your partner’s bat. Flying back in a ‘deadly’ beeline for your head. BAM! You’re dead! đŸ™‚ Each hit unique. Experiments not repeatable. The scientific method doesn’t work. The flash-bulb snapshot of the ball heading for your eyeballs, imprinted for every on your mind. The left hemisphere mostly taking a break, letting your ball return without any conscious willing. Time as a succession of infinitely brief instants, process (motion, acceleration), but NOT reduced to dead numbers. You, the ball and your partner are timeless.

The flash bulbs are rare moments, when a well aimed drive comes straight at you, you see the inner workings of your brain. Our rational brain automatically takes snapshots, objectifies, measures, compares, competes. The how is analyzed ‘post mortem’, but you’ll never fully understand the trajectory, the action, as it is nonlinear, full of feedback upon feedback. But that’s ok. It’s all a game. You can objectify, analyze, but the best players don’t need that. You can’t analyze joy, freedom.

The norm is a smooth left hemisphere film following a right hemisphere film script, where the real decisions are made to maintain the complex, balanced disequilibrium of life, always adjusting, hopefully alerting us to any runaway linear process undermining the whole and leading to collapse.

Child’s play

Do our adult games help there? It seems not. They are pushing all the wrong buttons: everyone isolated, dead automatons, half of whom are losers, taking Earth hostage as private property, with usury to accelerate the theft and destroy us all in war, famine and environmental collapse.

Time for a new game, a new story.

We need to leave behind this worldview of nature as cruel, of competition, zero-sum, as our way of life. We come into a world where everything, in the first place, your life, is a gift. How do you respond to a gift? Gratitude. And when it’s a really big gift, say your life, you are awed, humbled. How did those first good feelings become selfishness and arrogance? We all agree childhood should be a time of joy and play. Play is how we practice being adults.

So how did adults manage to bury play, turn it into passive spectator sports, competitive, dangerous, full of rich winners and poor losers? It must have something to do with this agriculture thinking, life as a zero-sum game which, if we include nature, becomes a negative sum game, where we ‘game’ nature, steal from nature and others and destroy both in the pursuit of lifeless gold.

This is a false view. The child knows the world is one of abundance. It is only as rules pile up, and his range of play limited and channeled into competitive simulations of our scarcity-obsessed world, that he forgets. The timeless magic of ping pong takes away these deadening limits and reminds me that nature is my generous, playful friend, not an enemy to be fought, resisted. When I lose balance, I’m relaxed as I fall and pick myself up and have a laugh at my declining abilities.

I would go a step farther and get rid of all professional sports. Have your competitions locally and friendly, making sure there is always a consolation prize. There are millions of excellent players to watch without the cult adulation of artificial heroes, earning obscene amounts of money, providing ‘copy’ for journalists to wax about, whose private lives we snoop on instead of cultivating our own. And why all the mindless travel of big, expensive teams constantly filling the sky with CO2 in endless pursuit of their Rosebud? Sorry, there is no Rosebud, meaning, to a trumped-up distraction. Corona should have been a wake-up call. We can celebrate our local community and perhaps know the ‘stars’ personally. By eliminating highly paid millionaire superstars, we can have dozens of local professional ‘stars’, be one yourself.

Ping pong living

Technology is definitely not Darwin’s random but rather adaptive. It is achieved through awareness of purpose, guided by trial-and-error and narrowing your search. Nonlinear so we automatically rely on intuition. For scientists, evolution is random, for creationists, it is the work of God. Both think only man has intentionality. But what if evolution has intentionality in some sleight-of-hand way?

Darwin famously pointed out the uniqueness of the peacock, where its beauty is through ‘sexual selection’. Rather than taking his example to the logical conclusion, that ALL females ‘fall in love’, creating beauty. That we all, every atom and toad, operate on love. That it literally makes the world go round. Lynn Margulis and many other scientists now see cooperation as the driving force of evolution in both human society and nature. Nature’s ‘law of everything’ operates on the same principles as human social evolution. We are emergent beings part of a complex, very nonlinear web of life.

 

Bottom-up emergent evolution, not random imposed top-down hierarchical evolution.5 We don’t need to separate the human realm. We are part of nature. No need to build a tower to the sky. Sky is everywhere. What we do need is a miracle, i.e., a new sense of what is possible, born from surrender from the attempt to control, manage life. A miracle happens when life overwhelms you and you do the unimaginable (an alcoholic humbly surrenders and turns around his life). Let go of old ways of being (isolated, owning, having). Withdraw from the apparatus of the machine. See the love that bathes the world. Love of being alive, love of living beings. Stop thinking in terms of how much x is ‘worth’. Comparing. Competing. Think Rumi or McCartney, ‘All you need is love’.

Your goal is beauty, service, fun, self-expression. The collapse of the Newtonian world-machine reunites us with the world. We fall in love with it again, our first impressions coming back to us. Love biological life and our personal lives. Love the world and our time in it. We have been frightened into rejecting both, accepting as a result their plunder: the reduction of the living world to resources, things, money and reduction of our time to commodified hours, jobs, the grim necessity of making a living and turning nature, all of our commons, into dead private property.

Ping pong diplomacy

Hearing the steady stream of jingoism now, vilifying Putin and Russia, it ‘hit’ me how this Cold War political system is like competitive ping pong. Defeat your opponent by all ‘legal’ means, be ruthless, hostile. Intimidate him. Better yet, trick him, lie. We’re all fair ‘game’ (i.e., game = victim). War is merely politics by other means. War is good. It makes profits and should kill somewhere far away, ‘creates’ jobs. You see how we distort these words. To game someone is to make a fool of him. Profit originally did not mean exploiting others. We create jobs with no concern about how the things we make will be used. Our thinking is reductionist, reducing everything to money.

The logic of imperialism is the same Etonian cricket competitiveness which pervades all our games. At least in the 19th century variety among the elite, there were principles of modesty and fair play. The era of superstardom, superpowers, had to wait till our civilization had reached its limits of destructive force in the 20th century, when diplomacy collapsed and we were in capitalism’s death grip, in an increasingly totalitarian world.

This war mentality pervades our ‘civilization’. Life is war and Britannia rules the waves, i.e., waves the rules. Ha! The rulers can change the rules as they like. What kind of a game is that? How can a jingoistic, one-sided war mentality ever lead to peace? Peace is impossible if the ‘law of the jungle’6 reigns, where everyone is a slave to the system, where the rules are stacked to ‘keep order’. People are actually happier during real wartime than during peacetime under capitalism.

All nations need friendly contact, especially with neighbours. Before the rise of capitalism, that was done through ceremonial exchange of gifts. Sports are a great way to do that too, but why automatically compete? Gift giving wasn’t about winning-losing. The point is friendship, fun and health.

In ping pong, without the worry of being ‘out’ (i.e., not fitting in, poor, wrong colour), your range of shots increases dramatically as does your partner. Hey! It’s DEI.7 Ditto foreign relations and life in general. You trust your partner without complicated rules or a referee. And not everything can or should be legislated. The circumstances change and the way to deal with problems is courtesy and mutual understanding. Sometimes it’s okay to break the rule. We never walk away frustrated or a ‘loser’ from our ping pong, and, after four years, it just gets better. The end? You play till you’ve run out of inspiration, generally about an hour. End on a high point of enjoyment, go home and do your exercises for good measure.

In my books, ping pong is superior to all other racket sports, especially pickleball, which is a fitting metaphor for imperialism. Noisy, aggressive, takes over tennis courts, false sense of superiority, shortcut on aging. It presses all the wrong buttons. Ping pong praxis has economic, political, environmental, health benefits. #1 is demonetizing. Screw capitalism. #2. Eliminating scoring opens the competition to alternatives: paintball-style ‘killing’ the opponent, most bizarre shots, volleys, crazy rebounds off pillars, hitting the inadvertently musical railings, funny shots. Another is Jason’s ‘double clutch’.8 The goal is to keep the ball in play, i.e., cooperative. If boring, then push the bounds, throw in a wild card. No stasis. Homeostasis, i.e., controlled disequilibrium, an ever-changing balance between stability and creativity.

New story time

Of course, we grow up, leave behind ‘childish things’, we suddenly shoot up, grow into adults, but don’t keep growing. The teen years are difficult, challenging, full of competition, striving, jockeying for a place in the adult hierarchy, but thankfully they come to an end and we go back into an equilibrium relationship with the environment, our neocortex continuing to mature (hopefully) towards wisdom. Our new position is more like our infancy than our teen years. We find a huge complex world that we can explore with our newly refined mind-body.

Similarly, our society has followed such a trajectory, growing frantically for 500 years as our societies mature, but that dangerous exponential growth is coming to an end, as we monetize every inch of the globe in search of profit. Which makes ping pong all the more vital to our vita ludens. It thumbs its nose at our obsession with growth, property, money.

Old people, like children, are not concerned with this anymore. We naturally return to gift economy thinking, aware of how dependent and vulnerable we are, not isolated individuals in control, grateful to have these last moments of awe at what we must leave behind. People that make this transition back to gift thinking are the happiest. ‘You can’t take it with you’ govern us again, as it did before all the adult stories messed things up.

Our story of scarcity and private property (they are one and the same) is well past its due date. We can start with ping pong, reminding us that life is for play, that we need to reconceive work as play, that if we maximize anything, it should be laughter and joy, not dead property. Eisenstein calls for a technology of love in the Age of Reunion. P2P, LETS, Freecycle.9 End your game with a mutual flourish, like a full cadence at the end of dazzling scherzo. Create beauty or at the very least, comic relief. The law of sacred ping pong: better him <=> better me.

* See Harnessing human nature to save the world.

ENDNOTES:

  • 1
    Some people recovering from a lightning strike find they have sudden new artistic abilities, such as playing the piano, as if dormant genes are switched on.
  • 2
    Descartes confidently (and wrongly) identified the pineal gland as the home of the self, lost as he was in the new paradigm of the isolated, ethereal soul in the world of matter.
  • 3
    David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,2021. Breaking rules and making new rules are a child’s earliest activities.
  • 4
    A two-dimensional set with a relatively simple definition that exhibits great complexity, especially as it is magnified.
  • 5
    My inspiration is Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self, 2007.
  • 6
    Our perverse characterization of nature as a scary jungle. We create our scary capitalism, the real ‘law of the jungle’.
  • 7
    When you pop the ball and it’s still in reach, hit it back without a bounce.
  • 8
    Diversity, equality, inclusive. Without the school marm pretense.
  • 9
    Peer to Peer, e.g., OpenOffice free software, i.e., for the love of it. Local Exchange Trading System. Freecycle.org ‘pay forward’ barter website.FacebookTwitter
Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to ImperialismRead other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

 AU CONTRAIRE 

Iran: Key to World Peace

From what is read and what is said, Iran is the major sponsor of international terrorism — creating turmoil, preventing peace, and wanting to dominate the Middle East. One problem with the accepted scenario is that the facts do not coincide with the assumptions.

Except for revenging terrorist attacks by Iranian dissidents and Israeli intelligence and military services, the Islamic Republic has not harmed anybody in the Western nations. In the last 200 years, Iran has fought only one war ─ a defensive battle against aggressor Iraq. It has assisted friendly nations in their conflicts with other nations, similar to United States actions, but on a smaller scale. The demise of Ayatollah Khomeini established a refreshed Islamic Republic that promoted cordial relations with nations who were willing to return the cordiality. Iran has not sought hegemony, economic advantage, or extension of its influence to others than those who desire the influence.

Do a somersault and find the real Iran. The real Iran has tried to cooperate with the United States and other nations and bring peace and stability to the Middle East.

This does not excuse Iran’s semi-autocratic regime and human rights violations, no more than they can be excused in nations with whom the United States has friendly relations — Israel, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Mexico, Tajikistan, and others. For American diplomats, the concept of “cannot excuse” is an excuse for not engaging in diplomacy and resolving problems with Iran. The results have been disasters — harm to American society, harm to the American people, and an unending voyage to calamities.

Designating Iran as the greatest menace to peace assumes there is peace in the Middle East. Is there peace and has there been peace since the words Middle East entered the lexicon? The conflagrations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria would have existed without the presence of the Islamic Republic; the former two wars occurred due to United States’ invasions in those nations. Is the Islamic Republic responsible for Israel’s continuous wars with its neighbors and for Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the Emirates battles with their own citizens and quarrels they had with Yemen and Gaddafi’s Libya. The Islamic Republic and its well-educated and alert citizens have not initiated a war against another nation and their restraint holds the key to Middle East peace. The United States refusal to allow the key to unlock the cages that maintain the doves of peace is one of the great tragedies of the century. This was shown in the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Unlike America, Iran had special connections and interests in Afghanistan. After the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. officials responsible for preparing the war in Afghanistan, solicited help to unseat the Taliban and establish a stable government in Kabul. Iran had organized the resistance by the Northern Alliance and provided the Alliance arms and funding, which helped topple the Taliban regime.  In an interview with Iranian Press Service (IPS), Flynt Leverett, senior director for Middle East affairs in the National Security Council (NSC), said, “The Iranians had real contacts with important players in Afghanistan and were prepared to use their influence in constructive ways in coordination with the United States.”

Because the Northern Alliance played a significant role in driving the Taliban out of Kabul in November 2001, they demanded 60 percent of the portfolios in an interim government and blocked agreement with other opposition groups. According to the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Dobbins, Iran played a “decisive role” in persuading the Northern Alliance delegation to compromise its demands.

Dobbins, J. (2009). “Negotiating with Iran: Reflections from Personal Experience,” The Washington Quarterly, 33(1), 149–162.

The Northern Alliance delegate, Younis Qanooni, on instructions from Kabul, was insisting that his faction not only retain the three most important ministries—defense, foreign affairs, and interior—but also hold three-fourths of the total. These demands were unacceptable to the other three Afghan factions represented in Bonn. Unless the Northern Alliance demand could be significantly reduced, there was no way the resultant government could be portrayed as broadly based and representative.

Finally Iranian representative, Javad Zarif, stood up, and signaled Qanooni to join him in the corner of the room. They spoke in whispers for no more than a minute. Qanooni then returned to the table and offered to give up two ministries. He also agreed to create three new ones that could be awarded to other factions. We had a deal. For the following six months, Afghanistan would be governed by an interim administration composed of 29 department heads plus a chairman. Sixteen of these posts would go to the Northern Alliance, just slightly more than half.

Dobbins worked with Iranian negotiators in Bonn and related that at a donors conference in Tokyo, in January, 2002, Iran pledged $540 million in assistance to Afghanistan.

Dobbins writes:

Emerging from a larger gathering in Tokyo, one of the Iranian representatives took me aside to reaffirm his government’s desire to continue to cooperate on Afghanistan. I agreed that this would be desirable, but warned that Iranian behavior in other areas represented an obstacle to cooperation. Furthermore, I cautioned him by saying that my brief only extends to Afghanistan. He replied by saying, “We know that. We would like to work on these other issues with the appropriate people in your government.”

On returning to Washington, O’Neill and I reported these conversations, to then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and cabinet level colleagues, and to the Middle Eastern Bureau at the Department of State (DOS). No one evinced any interest. The Iranians received no private reply. Instead, they received a very public answer. One week later, in his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush named Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, an “axis of evil.” How arch-enemies Iran and Iraq could form any axis, evil or otherwise, was never explained.

How would the Afghanistan fiasco have played out if the American governments cooperated with the Iranian governments? No analysis can supply a definite and credible answer; clues are available.

The result of 20 years of U.S. occupation and battle in Afghanistan resulted in nearly 111,000 civilians killed or injured, more than 64,100 national military and police killed, about 2500 American soldiers killed and 20,660 injured in action, and $1 trillion spent by the U.S. in all phases of a conflict that ended with the Taliban return to power. The only accomplishment of the twenty years of strife had Osama bin Laden leave the isolated, uncomfortable, and rugged mountain caves in Tora Bora for a comfortable and well-equipped walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a gift from Pakistan intelligence. Note that the al-Qaeda leader did not flee to U.S. adversary, Iran; he joined his family in U.S. friendly, Pakistan. The 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan was a catastrophe and anything is better than a catastrophe.

More than any other nation Iran had justifiable reasons for wanting a stable, friendly, and economically secure government in Afghanistan.

  • Iran had previous problems with the Taliban and did not want to repeat them.
  • Terrorists enter Iran from Afghanistan and cause havoc to the Islamic Republic.
  • Iran and the Afghan government created a free trading zone on their border and Iran wanted to continue to continue to exploit the arrangement.
  • In 2017, Iran surpassed Pakistan as Afghanistan’s top trade partner and, in 2019, Iranian exports reached $1.24 billion.
  • Iran had funded construction of the 90-mile (140 kilometer) line from Khaf in northeastern Iran to Ghoryan in western Afghanistan.
  • Iran and Afghanistan had several mutual problems that needed, and still need, close contact to resolve. Among them are water distribution, poppy production in Afghanistan, export of opium to Iran, and refugee flow to Iran. “Between 1979 and 2014, Iran claims to have lost some 4,000 security forces fighting heavily armed drug traffickers along its eastern border. In 2019, Iran seized more heroin and illicit morphine than any other country, according to U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.”
  • Iran shared ethnic, linguistic and religious links with millions of Afghan Shi’a and was interested in their protection.

More than any other nation, Iran had assets to assist in achieving a stable, friendly, peaceful, and economically secure government in Afghanistan.

  • Iran was a large source of foreign direct investment, and provided millions of dollars for Afghanistan’s western provinces to build roads, electrical grids, schools, and health clinics.
  • Afghanistan found Iran could assist Afghanistan in trade. “On April 2016, Iran, Afghanistan and India signed an agreement to develop the Chabahar port in southeastern Iran as a trading hub for all three nations.  Afghan goods would be transported to the Iranian port by rail, and then be shipped to India by sea. The first phase of the port was inaugurated in 2017.”
  • Iran had knowledge of Taliban personnel, arrangements, and activities. It had contacts and informants who could provide intelligence.
  • Not sure if they would acquiesce, but the Iranians could accommodate bases from which to attack the Taliban and to which fighters could retreat.

The U.S. State Department learned nothing from its disjointed and catastrophic actions in Afghanistan. It repeated the same worthless and aggressive policy in its invasion of Iraq.

After supporting Iraq against Iran in the 1980s Iraq-Iran war, the U.S. declared war in 1991 against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and performed a first in the history of foreign policy ─ helping a nation that wars against a nation that is not doing any harm to you, and then attacking the nation that it helped do the harm to the nation that was not harming you. The U.S. continued with sanctions against the nation it previously supported, Iraq, and then, in 2003, engaged it in another war, finally ending up with the nation it initially wanted to contain, Iran, essentially winning the war without firing another shot, and gaining influence in Iraq; another example of a U.S. policy toward Iran that backfired. Foreign policy at its finest.

While stumbling and fumbling its way into destroying Iraq, the U.S. managed to have al-Qaeda (remember them, the guys that America invaded Afghanistan to defeat) reconstitute itself in Iraq. This renewed al-Qaeda, “organized a wave of attacks, often suicide bombings, that targeted security forces, government institutions, and Iraqi civilians.” The American military was forced to use Iraq’s notorious militias, known as “Awakening Councils,” to expel the al-Qaeda organization; a short-lived victory that led to the formation of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS).

A statement by the ever-unaware President Trump, in a January 8, 2020 speech, argued the US had been responsible for defeating ISIS and the Islamic Republic should realize that it is in their benefit to work with the United States in making sure ISIS remained defeated. The US spent years and billions of dollars in training an Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left it to a small contingent of ISIS forces. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. Events energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, which, with cooperation from Iran and personal assistance from Major General Qasem Soleimani, was able to retake Tikrit and Ramadi, push ISIS out of Fallujah, and eventually play a leading role in ISIS’ defeat in Mosul. The U.S. honored Soleimani’s efforts by assassinating him ─ one of the most vicious crimes in history ─ and commended Iran by continually sanctioning it. No good deed goes unpunished.

As in Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic assisted in the re-building of Iraq. As far back as 2012, The Guardian reported that “Iran is one of Iraq’s most important regional economic partners, with an annual trade volume between the two sides standing at $8bn to $10b.” The U.S. confused competitive advantage with diabolical meddling and regarded Iran as a troubling factor in the Fertile Crescent, even though the inhabitants of Mesopotamia considered the United States as the troublemaker in the region. Iran had leverage in Iraq that could not be ignored nor easily combated.

Why is the Islamic Republic, sanctioned, vilified, and isolated? One clue is that almost all references to Iran in the U.S. media succeed with the phrase, “leading state sponsor of terrorism.” The phrase is stuck onto the word Iran as if by Velcro and all the words are one word. How does this coincidental commonality occur?

It occurs because the Zionist press distributes most reports on Iran to the American media. Israel has used U.S. support to subdue Israel’s adversaries — Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Iraq —and  has turned its national army to coerce Iran, the last man standing, into battle. It has turned its worldwide army of thought controllers to vilify Iran and entice Western powers to remove the Islamic member of the “axis of evil” from the map. Blind the world to reality.

Substitute the nation Israel for the nation Iran in each of the salient accusations made against Iran and the accusations become correct. Nowhere do the facts and historical narrative demonstrate that Iran has disrupted peace and stability by any of the combining factors. Israel is present in all the factors. During the 2016 presidential campaign, contender Donald Trump said, “Many nations, including allies, ripped off the US.” Doesn’t Donald Trump, in his support for apartheid Israel, know that he verified his statement? Bet on the wrong horse and you are sure to lose.

The following table summarizes the factors and clarifies the issues.

Iran ─ Key to World Peace

Resolving Iran’s oppression of its people and Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians are separate topics and cannot be resolved together. Permitting Israel to subdue Iran might dispatch the Ayatollahs, but enables the genocide of the Palestinian people, and allows Israel additional opportunities of expansion and continuous threats to other nations. The Zionist influence on Western governments and media will be enhanced.

Separating Iran’s internal oppression from its external policies allows using a challenging force to overcome an unchallenged destructive power. Which is more important and expedient — continually scolding and sanctioning Iran for its oppressive behavior or energizing an Iran that might repel the Israel juggernaut and push Israelis to realize they can no longer survive as a criminal enterprise and can become a “shining light on the Mediterranean,” a part of a truly democratic and bi-national state?

Analysis shows Iran has not displayed characteristics of a “major sponsor of international terrorism — creating turmoil, preventing peace, and wanting to dominate the Middle East.” The only international directives against Iran are sanctions and human rights violations. Israel displays all the characteristics falsely attributed to Iran plus recipient of tens of Resolutions and decisions by International agencies that accuse Israel and its leaders of aspects of genocide, war crimes, apartheid, illegal occupation, and crimes against humanity. The U.S. fought World War II to defeat Nazism, then allows its traits to arise again and gives support to its features ─ an enormous betrayal to the American public.

The defeated Nazi German state evolved into the German Democratic Republic. The defeated Israeli state will evolve into the Middle East Democratic Republic. The world will breathe easier and less concerned that events can spiral out of control and can usher in Armageddon. The multitude of arrogant Jewish organizations that served a foreign state will disappear. Jews will not display divided loyalty and will not arouse suspicion. They will no longer pose as victims who demand special attention but will express themselves as support for those who need attention. Washington DC will no longer be referenced as “occupied Zionist territory.”

Preventing Iran’s defeat does not strengthen Iran’s image or its government’s oppressive tactics. Just the opposite. With the threat of Israel removed, Hezbollah, Palestinians, and Assad’s Syria will have less need to be reliant on Tehran and will turn move favorably to the United States.

Counterfeit U.S. policies have led to continuous warfare in the Middle East, unnecessary sacrifice of U.S. lives, economic disturbances, and waste of taxpayer money. In the cauldron of corruption and autocracies, which pits Sunni against Shi’a, Gulf States and Saudi Arabia against Iran, religious extremists against moderates, and Israel against all, the United States makes its choice of allies. Whom does Washington support — those who are the most repressive, most corrupt, most militaristic, most prone to cause Middle East instability — Israel, cited by Osama bin Laden as a principal reason for Al Qaeda terrorism and Saudi Arabia, a principal supplier of al-Qaeda terrorists. A less resentful outlook on Iran yields a revised perspective of a violent, unstable, and disturbed Middle East. Israel would finally be recognized as the major cause of chaos to the region.

If Israel claims God permits it to ignore international law, murder whomever at will, and threaten all civilization, then even the devil should be approached to replace Israel with a law-abiding nation. Iran, similar to a multitude of nations, might be a problem; Israel is THE PROBLEM.




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Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com.  He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in AmericaNot until They Were GoneThink Tanks of DCThe Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.