Last fall, a few days before Halloween and about a month after the publication of Mind and Cosmos, the controversial new book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, several of the world's leading philosophers gathered with a group of cutting-edge scientists in the conference room of a charming inn in the Berkshires. They faced one another around a big table set with pitchers of iced water and trays of hard candies wrapped in cellophane and talked and talked, as public intellectuals do. PowerPoint was often brought into play.
The title of the "interdisciplinary workshop" was "Moving Naturalism Forward." For those of us who like to kill time sitting around pondering the nature of reality - personhood, God, moral judgment, free will, what have you - this was the Concert for Bangladesh. The biologist Richard Dawkins was there, author of The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene, and other bestselling books of popular science, and so was Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts and author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. So were the authors of Why Evolution is True, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, and The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions - all of them books that to one degree or another bring to a larger audience the world as scientists have discovered it to be.
Contemporary philosophers have a name for the way you and I see the world, a world filled with other people, with colors and sounds, sights and sensations, things that are good and things that are bad and things that are very good indeed: ourselves, who are able, more or less, to make our own way through life, by our own lights. Philosophers call this common view the "manifest image." Daniel Dennett pointed out at the conference that modern science, at least since the revelations of Darwin, has been piling up proof that the manifest image is not really accurate in any scientific sense. Rather science - this vast interlocking combine of genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, particle physics - tells us that the components of the manifest image are illusory.
Color, for instance: That azalea outside the window may look red to you, but in reality it has no color at all. The red comes from certain properties of the azalea that absorb some kinds of light and reflect other kinds of light, which are then received by the eye and transformed in our brains into a subjective experience of red. And sounds, too: Complex vibrations in the air are soundless in reality, but our ears are able to turn the vibrations into a car alarm or a cat's meow or, worse, the voice of Mariah Carey. These capacities of the human organism are evolutionary adaptations. Everything about human beings, by definition, is an evolutionary adaptation. Our sense that the colors and sounds exist "out there" and not merely in our brain is a convenient illusion that long ago increased the survival chances of our species. Powered by Darwin, modern science proceeds, in Dennett's phrase, as a "universal corrosive," destroying illusions all the way up and all the way down, dismantling our feelings of freedom and separate selfhood, our morals and beliefs, a mother's love and a patient's prayer: All in reality are just "molecules in motion."
The most famous, most succinct, and most pitiless summary of the manifest image's fraudulence was written nearly 20 years ago by the geneticist Francis Crick: " 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons."
This view is the "naturalism" that the workshoppers in the Berkshires were trying to move forward. Naturalism is also called "materialism," the view that only matter exists; or "reductionism," the view that all life, from tables to daydreams, is ultimately reducible to pure physics; or "determinism," the view that every phenomenon, including our own actions, is determined by a preexisting cause, which was itself determined by another cause, and so on back to the Big Bang. The naturalistic project has been greatly aided by neo-Darwinism, the application of Darwin's theory of natural selection to human behavior, including areas of life once assumed to be nonmaterial: emotions and thoughts and habits and perceptions. At the workshop the philosophers and scientists each added his own gloss to neo-Darwinian reductive naturalism or materialistic neo-Darwinian reductionism or naturalistic materialism or reductive determinism. They were unanimous in their solid certainty that materialism - as we'll call it here, to limit the number of isms - is the all-purpose explanation for life as we know it.
One notable division did arise among the participants, however. Some of the biologists thought the materialist view of the world should be taught and explained to the wider public in its true, high-octane, Crickian form. Then common, nonintellectual people might see that a purely random universe without purpose or free will or spiritual life of any kind isn't as bad as some superstitious people - religious people - have led them to believe.
Daniel Dennett took a different view. While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a "moist robot" - a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic - we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that "for general purposes" the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist - that colors and sounds exist, too - "just not in the way they think." They "exist in a special way," which is to say, ultimately, not at all.
On this point the discussion grew testy at times. I was reminded of the debate among British censors over the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover half a century ago. "Fine for you or me," one prosecutor is said to have remarked, "but is this the sort of thing you would leave lying about for your wife or servant to read?"
There was little else to disturb the materialists in their Berkshire contentment. Surveys have shown that vast majorities of philosophers and scientists call themselves naturalists or materialists. Nearly all popular science books, not only those written by the workshoppers, conclude that materialism offers the true picture of reality. The workshoppers seemed vexed, however, knowing that not everyone in their intellectual class had yet tumbled to the truth of neo-Darwinism. A video of the workshop shows Dennett complaining that a few - but only a few! - contemporary philosophers have stubbornly refused to incorporate the naturalistic conclusions of science into their philosophizing, continuing to play around with outmoded ideas like morality and sometimes even the soul.
"I am just appalled to see how, in spite of what I think is the progress we've made in the last 25 years, there's this sort of retrograde gang," he said, dropping his hands on the table. "They're going back to old-fashioned armchair philosophy with relish and eagerness. It's sickening. And they lure in other people. And their work isn't worth anything - it's cute and it's clever and it's not worth a damn."
There was an air of amused exasperation. "Will you name names?" one of the participants prodded, joking.
"No names!" Dennett said.
The philosopher Alex Rosenberg, author of The Atheist's Guide, leaned forward, unamused.
"And then there's some work that is neither cute nor clever," he said. "And it's by Tom Nagel."
There it was! Tom Nagel, whose Mind and Cosmos was already causing a derangement among philosophers in England and America.
Dennett sighed at the mention of the name, more in sorrow than in anger. His disgust seemed to drain from him, replaced by resignation. He looked at the table.
"Yes," said Dennett, "there is that."
Around the table, with the PowerPoint humming, they all seemed to heave a sad sigh - a deep, workshop sigh.
Tom, oh Tom . . . How did we lose Tom . . .
Thomas Nagel may be the most famous philosopher in the United States - a bit like being the best power forward in the Lullaby League, but still. His paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" was recognized as a classic when it was published in 1974. Today it is a staple of undergraduate philosophy classes. His books range with a light touch over ethics and politics and the philosophy of mind. His papers are admired not only for their philosophical provocations but also for their rare (among modern philosophers) simplicity and stylistic clarity, bordering sometimes on literary grace.
Nagel occupies an endowed chair at NYU as a University Professor, a rare and exalted position that frees him to teach whatever course he wants. Before coming to NYU he taught at Princeton for 15 years. He dabbles in the higher journalism, contributing articles frequently to the New York Review of Books and now and then to the New Republic. A confirmed atheist, he lacks what he calls the sensus divinitatis that leads some people to embrace the numinous. But he does possess a finely tuned sensus socialistis; his most notable excursion into politics was a book-length plea for the confiscation of wealth and its radical redistribution - a view that places him safely in the narrow strip of respectable political opinion among successful American academics.
For all this and more, Thomas Nagel is a prominent and heretofore respected member of the country's intellectual elite. And such men are not supposed to write books with subtitles like the one he tacked onto Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
Imagine if your local archbishop climbed into the pulpit and started reading from the Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. "What has gotten into Thomas Nagel?" demanded the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, on Twitter. (Yes, even Steven Pinker tweets.) Pinker inserted a link to a negative review of Nagel's book, which he said "exposed the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker." At the point where science, philosophy, and public discussion intersect - a dangerous intersection these days - it is simply taken for granted that by attacking naturalism Thomas Nagel has rendered himself an embarrassment to his colleagues and a traitor to his class.
The Guardian awarded Mind and Cosmos its prize for the Most Despised Science Book of 2012. The reviews were numerous and overwhelmingly negative; one of the kindest, in the British magazine Prospect, carried the defensive headline "Thomas Nagel is not crazy." (Really, he's not!) Most other reviewers weren't so sure about that. Almost before the ink was dry on Nagel's book the UC Berkeley economist and prominent blogger Brad DeLong could be found gathering the straw and wood for the ritual burning. DeLong is a great believer in neo-Darwinism. He has coined the popular term "jumped-up monkeys" to describe our species. (Monkeys because we're descended from primates; jumped-up because evolution has customized us with the ability to reason and the big brains that go with it.)
DeLong was particularly offended by Nagel's conviction that reason allows us to "grasp objective reality." A good materialist doesn't believe in objective reality, certainly not in the traditional sense. "Thomas Nagel is not smarter than we are," he wrote, responding to a reviewer who praised Nagel's intelligence. "In fact, he seems to me to be distinctly dumber than anybody who is running even an eight-bit virtual David Hume on his wetware." (What he means is, anybody who's read the work of David Hume, the father of modern materialism.) DeLong's readers gathered to jeer as the faggots were placed around the stake.
"Thomas Nagel is of absolutely no importance on this subject," wrote one. "He's a self-contradictory idiot," opined another. Some made simple appeals to authority and left it at that: "Haven't these guys ever heard of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett?" The hearts of still others were broken at seeing a man of Nagel's eminence sink so low. "It is sad that Nagel, whom my friends and I thought back in the 1960's could leap over tall buildings with a single bound, has tripped over the Bible and fallen on his face. Very sad."
Nagel doesn't mention the Bible in his new book - or in any of his books, from what I can tell - but among materialists the mere association of a thinking person with the Bible is an insult meant to wound, as Bertie Wooster would say. Directed at Nagel, a self-declared atheist, it is more revealing of the accuser than the accused. The hysterical insults were accompanied by an insistence that the book was so bad it shouldn't upset anyone.
"Evolutionists," one reviewer huffily wrote, "will feel they've been ravaged by a sheep." Many reviewers attacked the book on cultural as well as philosophical or scientific grounds, wondering aloud how a distinguished house like Oxford University Press could allow such a book to be published. The Philosophers' Magazine described it with the curious word "irresponsible." How so? In Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, the British philosopher John Dupré explained. Mind and Cosmos, he wrote, "will certainly lend comfort (and sell a lot of copies) to the religious enemies of Darwinism." Simon Blackburn of Cambridge University made the same point: "I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of 'intelligent design.' "
But what about fans of apostasy? You don't have to be a biblical fundamentalist or a young-earth creationist or an intelligent design enthusiast - I'm none of the above, for what it's worth - to find Mind and Cosmos exhilarating. "For a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe," Nagel writes. "It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection." The prima facie impression, reinforced by common sense, should carry more weight than the clerisy gives it. "I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life."
The incredulity is not simply a matter of scientific ignorance, as the materialists would have it. It arises from something more fundamental and intimate. The neo-Darwinian materialist account offers a picture of the world that is unrecognizable to us - a world without color or sound, and also a world without free will or consciousness or good and evil or selves or, when it comes to that, selflessness. "It flies in the face of common sense," he says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don't live in.
Nagel's tone is measured and tentative, but there's no disguising the book's renegade quality. There are flashes of exasperation and dismissive impatience. What's exhilarating is that the source of Nagel's exasperation is, so to speak, his own tribe: the "secular theoretical establishment and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates." The establishment today, he says, is devoted beyond all reason to a "dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against attacks from religion." I'm sure Nagel would recoil at the phrase, but Mind and Cosmos is a work of philosophical populism, defending our everyday understanding from the highly implausible worldview of a secular clerisy. His working assumption is, in today's intellectual climate, radical: If the materialist, neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense, then this is a mark against the orthodoxy, not against common sense. When a chain of reasoning leads us to deny the obvious, we should double-check the chain of reasoning before we give up on the obvious.
Nagel follows the materialist chain of reasoning all the way into the cul de sac where it inevitably winds up. Nagel's touchier critics have accused him of launching an assault on science, when really it is an assault on the nonscientific uses to which materialism has been put. Though he does praise intelligent design advocates for having the nerve to annoy the secular establishment, he's no creationist himself. He has no doubt that "we are products of the long history of the universe since the big bang, descended from bacteria through millions of years of natural selection." And he assumes that the self and the body go together. "So far as we can tell," he writes, "our mental lives, including our subjective experiences, and those of other creatures are strongly connected with and probably strictly dependent on physical events in our brains and on the physical interaction of our bodies with the rest of the physical world." To believe otherwise is to believe, as the materialists derisively say, in "spooky stuff." (Along with jumped-up monkeys and moist robots and countless other much-too-cute phrases, the use of spooky stuff proves that our popular science writers have spent a lot of time watching Scooby-Doo.) Nagel doesn't believe in spooky stuff.
Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn't go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding. Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well - in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.
But the success has gone to the materialists' heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can't quantify something, it doesn't exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial "manifest image" of our mental life is proved to be an illusion.
Here materialism bumps up against itself. Nagel insists that we know some things to exist even if materialism omits or ignores or is oblivious to them. Reductive materialism doesn't account for the "brute facts" of existence - it doesn't explain, for example, why the world exists at all, or how life arose from nonlife. Closer to home, it doesn't plausibly explain the fundamental beliefs we rely on as we go about our everyday business: the truth of our subjective experience, our ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren't. These failures, Nagel says, aren't just temporary gaps in our knowledge, waiting to be filled in by new discoveries in science. On its own terms, materialism cannot account for brute facts. Brute facts are irreducible, and materialism, which operates by breaking things down to their physical components, stands useless before them. "There is little or no possibility," he writes, "that these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics."
In a dazzling six-part tour de force rebutting Nagel's critics, the philosopher Edward Feser provided a good analogy to describe the basic materialist error - the attempt to stretch materialism from a working assumption into a comprehensive explanation of the world. Feser suggests a parody of materialist reasoning: "1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has. 2. Therefore we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that can be revealed" about metallic objects.
But of course a metal detector only detects the metallic content of an object; it tells us nothing about its color, size, weight, or shape. In the same way, Feser writes, the methods of "mechanistic science are as successful as they are in predicting and controlling natural phenomena precisely because they focus on only those aspects of nature susceptible to prediction and control."
Meanwhile, they ignore everything else. But this is a fatal weakness for a theory that aspires to be a comprehensive picture of the world. With magnetic resonance imaging, science can tell us which parts of my brain light up when, for example, I glimpse my daughter's face in a crowd; the bouncing neurons can be observed and measured. Science cannot quantify or describe the feelings I experience when I see my daughter. Yet the feelings are no less real than the neurons.
The point sounds more sentimental than it is. My bouncing neurons and my feelings of love and obligation are unquestionably bound together. But the difference between the neurons and the feelings, the material and the mental, is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind. And of the two, reductive materialism can capture only one.
"The world is an astonishing place," Nagel writes. "That it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it." Materialists are in the business of banishing astonishment; they want to demystify the world and human beings along with it, to show that everything we see as a mystery is reducible to components that aren't mysterious at all. And they cling to this ambition even in cases where doing so is obviously fruitless. Neo-Darwinism insists that every phenomenon, every species, every trait of every species, is the consequence of random chance, as natural selection requires. And yet, Nagel says, "certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world." (The italics are mine.)
Among these remarkable, nonaccidental things are many of the features of the manifest image. Consciousness itself, for example: You can't explain consciousness in evolutionary terms, Nagel says, without undermining the explanation itself. Evolution easily accounts for rudimentary kinds of awareness. Hundreds of thousands of years ago on the African savannah, where the earliest humans evolved the unique characteristics of our species, the ability to sense danger or to read signals from a potential mate would clearly help an organism survive.
So far, so good. But the human brain can do much more than this. It can perform calculus, hypothesize metaphysics, compose music - even develop a theory of evolution. None of these higher capacities has any evident survival value, certainly not hundreds of thousands of years ago when the chief aim of mental life was to avoid getting eaten. Could our brain have developed and sustained such nonadaptive abilities by the trial and error of natural selection, as neo-Darwinism insists? It's possible, but the odds, Nagel says, are "vanishingly small." If Nagel is right, the materialist is in a pickle. The conscious brain that is able to come up with neo-Darwinism as a universal explanation simultaneously makes neo-Darwinism, as a universal explanation, exceedingly unlikely.
A similar argument holds for our other cognitive capacities. "The evolution story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position," he writes. Neo-Darwinism tells us that we have the power of reason because reason was adaptive; it must have helped us survive, back in the day. Yet reason often conflicts with our intuition or our emotion - capacities that must also have been adaptive and essential for survival. Why should we "privilege" one capacity over another when reason and intuition conflict? On its own terms, the scheme of neo-Darwinism gives us no standard by which we should choose one adaptive capacity over the other. And yet neo-Darwinists insist we embrace neo-Darwinism because it conforms to our reason, even though it runs against our intuition. Their defense of reason is unreasonable.
So too our moral sense. We all of us have confidence, to one degree or another, that "our moral judgments are objectively valid" - that is, while our individual judgments might be right or wrong, what makes them right or wrong is real, not simply fantasy or opinion. Two and two really do make four. Why is this confidence inherent in our species? How was it adaptive? Neo-Darwinian materialists tell us that morality evolved as a survival mechanism (like everything else): We developed an instinct for behavior that would help us survive, and we called this behavior good as a means of reinforcing it. We did the reverse for behavior that would hurt our chances for survival: We called it bad. Neither type of behavior was good or bad in reality; such moral judgments are just useful tricks human beings have learned to play on ourselves.
Yet Nagel points out that our moral sense, even at the most basic level, developed a complexity far beyond anything needed for survival, even on the savannah - even in Manhattan. We are, as Nagel writes, "beings capable of thinking successfully about good and bad, right and wrong, and discovering moral and evaluative truths that do not depend on [our] own beliefs." And we behave accordingly, or try to. The odds that such a multilayered but nonadaptive capacity should become a characteristic of the species through natural selection are, again, implausibly long.
Nagel's reliance on "common sense" has roused in his critics a special contempt. One scientist, writing in the Huffington Post, calls it Nagel's "argument from ignorance." In the Nation, the philosophers Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg could only shake their heads at the once-great philosopher's retrogression from sophisticated thinking to common sense.
"This style of argument," they write, "does not, alas, have a promising history." Once upon a time, after all, our common-sense intuitions told us the sun traveled across the sky over a flat earth. Materialistic science has since taught us otherwise.
Not all intuitions are of the same kind, though. It is one thing for me to be mistaken in my intuition about the shape of the planet; it's another thing to be mistaken about whether I exist, or whether truth and falsehood exist independently of my say-so, or whether my "self" has some degree of control over my actions. Indeed, a person couldn't correct his mistaken intuitions unless these intuitions were correct - unless he was a rational self capable of distinguishing the true from the false and choosing one over the other. And it is the materialist attack on those intuitions - "common sense" - that Nagel finds absurd.
Leiter and Weisberg, like most of his other critics, were also agog that Nagel has the nerve to pronounce on matters that they consider purely scientific, far beyond his professional range. A philosopher doubting a scientist is a rare sight nowadays. With the general decline of the humanities and the success of the physical sciences, the relationship of scientists to philosophers of science has been reversed. As recently as the middle of the last century, philosophers like Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer might feel free to explain to scientists the philosophical implications of what they were doing. Today the power is all on the side of the scientists: One false move and it's back to your sandbox, philosophy boy.
And so some philosophers have retreated into the same sort of hyperspecialization that has rendered scientists from different subdisciplines practically incapable of communicating with each other. Now these philosophers, practicing what they call "experimental philosophy," can pride themselves on being just as incomprehensible as scientists. Other philosophers, like Dennett, have turned their field into a handmaiden of science: meekly and gratefully accepting whatever findings the scientists come up with - from brain scans to the Higgs boson - which they then use to demonstrate the superiority of hardheaded science to the airy musings of old-fashioned "armchair philosophy."
In this sense too Nagel is a throwback, daring not only to interpret science but to contradict scientists. He admits it's "strange" when he relies "on a philosophical claim to refute a scientific theory supported by empirical evidence." But he knows that when it comes to cosmology, scientists are just as likely to make an error of philosophy as philosophers are to make an error of science. And Nagel is accused of making large errors indeed. According to Leiter and Weisberg and the others, he is ignorant of how science is actually done these days.
Nagel, say Leiter and Weisberg, overestimates the importance of materialism, even as a scientific method. He's attacking a straw man. He writes as though "reductive materialism really were driving the scientific community." In truth, they say, most scientists reject theoretical reductionism. Fifty years ago, many philosophers and scientists might have believed that all the sciences were ultimately reducible to physics, but modern science doesn't work that way. Psychologists, for example, aren't trying to reduce psychology to biology; and biologists don't want to boil biology down to chemistry; and chemists don't want to reduce chemistry to physics. Indeed, an evolutionary biologist - even one who's a good materialist - won't refer to physics at all in the course of his work!
And this point is true, as Nagel himself writes in his book: Theoretical materialism, he says, "is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences." Researchers can believe in materialism or not, as they wish, and still make scientific progress. (This is another reason why it's unconvincing to cite scientific progress as evidence for the truth of materialism.) But the critics' point is also disingenuous. If materialism is true as an explanation of everything - and they insist it is - then psychological facts, for example, must be reducible to biology, and then down to chemistry, and finally down to physics. If they weren't reducible in this way, they would (ta-da!) be irreducible. And any fact that's irreducible would, by definition, be uncaused and undetermined; meaning it wouldn't be material. It might even be spooky stuff.
On this point Leiter and Weisberg were gently chided by the prominent biologist Jerry Coyne, who was also a workshopper in the Berkshires. He was delighted by their roasting of Nagel in the Nation, but he accused them of going wobbly on materialism - of shying away from the hard conclusions that reductive materialism demands. It's not surprising that scientists in various disciplines aren't actively trying to reduce all science to physics; that would be a theoretical problem that is only solvable in the distant future. However: "The view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics," he wrote, "must be true unless you're religious." Either we're molecules in motion or we're not.
You can sympathize with Leiter and Weisberg for fudging on materialism. As a philosophy of everything it is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it's lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions - understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots - wouldn't just be a materialist: He'd be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close.
Applied beyond its own usefulness as a scientific methodology, materialism is, as Nagel suggests, self-evidently absurd. Mind and Cosmos can be read as an extended paraphrase of Orwell's famous insult: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." Materialism can only be taken seriously as a philosophy through a heroic feat of cognitive dissonance; pretending, in our abstract, intellectual life, that values like truth and goodness have no objective content even as, in our private life, we try to learn what's really true and behave in a way we know to be good. Nagel has sealed his ostracism from the intelligentsia by idly speculating why his fellow intellectuals would undertake such a feat.
"The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions," he writes, "is due, I think, to the secular consensus that this is the only form of external understanding of ourselves that provides an alternative to theism."
In a recent review in the New York Review of Books of Where the Conflict Really Lies, by the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Nagel told how instinctively he recoils from theism, and how hungry he is for a reasonable alternative. "If I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true," he wrote, "the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith." He admits that he finds the evident failure of materialism as a worldview alarming - precisely because the alternative is, for a secular intellectual, unthinkable. He calls this intellectual tic "fear of religion."
"I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear," he wrote not long ago in an essay called "Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion." "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."
Nagel believes this "cosmic authority problem" is widely shared among intellectuals, and I believe him. It accounts for the stubbornness with which they cling to materialism - and for the hostility that greets an intellectual who starts to wander off from the herd. Materialism must be true because it "liberates us from religion." The positive mission Nagel undertakes in Mind and Cosmos is to outline, cautiously, a possible Third Way between theism and materialism, given that the first is unacceptable - emotionally, if not intellectually - and the second is untenable. Perhaps matter itself has a bias toward producing conscious creatures. Nature in that case would be "teleological" - not random, not fully subject to chance, but tending toward a particular end. Our mental life would be accounted for - phew! - without reference to God.
I don't think Nagel succeeds in finding his Third Way, and I doubt he or his successors ever will, but then I have biases of my own. There's no doubting the honesty and intellectual courage - the free thinking and ennobling good faith - that shine through his attempt.
Reader Comments
I love this debate and I'm intrigued at what sort of Third Way solutions there might be.
Oh, and materialist cultists are So Wrong Indeed. :-)
. . . present themselves as relevant:
1 - I think Nagel would do well to study this site at length in respect of Organic Portals, amoung other things ; and to stretch his mind to acclimate and subsequently integrate. I think he might find what Laura has written in respect of the mentative processes of OPs in general, and the likes of Dennet in particular, more than illuminating
2 - "Applied beyond its own usefulness as a scientific methodology, materialism is, as Nagel suggests, self-evidently absurd. Mind and Cosmos can be read as an extended paraphrase of Orwell's famous insult: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
Materialism can only be taken seriously as a philosophy through an heroic feat of cognitive dissonance; pretending -- in our abstract, intellectual life -- that values like truth and goodness have no objective content even as, in our private life, we try to learn what's really true and behave in a way we know to be good.
Nagel has sealed his ostracism from the intelligentsia by idly speculating why his fellow intellectuals would undertake such a feat.
"The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions," he writes, "is due, I think, to the secular consensus that this is the only form of external understanding of ourselves that provides an alternative to theism." "
Which statement is, if one thinks only briefly about it, a justification of one form of idiocy by using it to negate another. A foot race amoung non-starters, if you will . . .
3 - [Nagel] admits that he finds the evident failure of materialism as a worldview alarming - precisely because the alternative is, for a secular intellectual, unthinkable. He calls this intellectual tic 'fear of religion.' "I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear," he wrote not long ago in an essay called "Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion." "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."
Which of course drives one to the question: "A universe like what, a Universe 'administered' by a judgmental, demanding, smiting, blighting misogynist of a curmudgeon in a chair in the sky ? ?"
It seems to me Nagel would do well to reach sufficiently far afield to encounter, say, wonderment, perhaps even awe; roundly 'unscientific' though they might be considered by those indoctrinated beyond their intelligence to be.
A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions - understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots - wouldn't just be a materialist: He'd be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close.
I concur with Good Optics hinting at the mentation processes of OP's and the benefit of Thomas Nagel avaling himself of the research done by Laura
This mindset if you can call it that has been deliberately used by psychopaths to promoted there own worldview of reality, this is the research that gets funded and why we are now living in this nightmare of reductionist thinking, humanity is presented as nothing more than a machine that can be programmed to perform.
For there to be such a flurry of condemnation of Thomas Nagel he must be onto something, to admit that there is "something" beyond reductionist thinking makes there position tentative. Of course they will never reconsider there position ego's and reputation are at stake plus financial considerations rather than the search for truth and meaning.
Maybe Nagel knows that verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself. That mind set seems to be a problem only for certain Westerners trapped in classical science.
Robert Pirsig was also a philosopher of sorts though thoroughly grounded in reality. Pirsig's Quality and Nagel's Nature are both biased toward the Marvellous - meaning, "ahead of (their) time."
Einstein once began a wonderful quote with this phrase:
"In the temple of science are many mansions... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.'"
To the neo-Darwinists, materialists and David-Hume-empiricists: Agenda much?
Be it fear of God or any other, is but pain self-inflicted by deduction to those irreducible causes of nature by whatever name one wishes to place upon such 'intelligent design'. A scapegoat by any other name will inflict the same pain as any other, so at least Mr. N knows that he is the master of the whip that is the cause of that pain that never goes away, as those molecules register that sensation of the lack of delight Mr. N knows so well, but at least he is willing to admit it, whereas his fellow members of the herd seem unwilling to let go, but perhaps as molecules without mind, they are but brains unable to let go? For some, a mirror reflects nothing more than they want to see, for others it can reflect more, and it seems Mr. N sees more than he likes to see and isn't willing to deny that simple unproven fact as life within the bounds of the molecular world, but then perhaps he is a molecule in search of home as gravity tugs his little boat around the barren sea of eternity.
The lies are always told inversely - by leaving the truth out of the equation in the first place!
the 'neo-darwinists' and the whole spectrum of hardcore materialists are in fact just 'jumped-up monkeys'? They seem incapable of perceiving/transducing the broader range of signals normal humans can pick up from the cosmos. Maybe they're a kind of psychopath?
The sad part of it is, people spewing volumes and volumes of 'philosophy' (like this obvious A+ student, Nagel, or any of his counterparts; ie., the intelligentsia) make and take the money and the people merely living common-sensical unnotable lives (simple truths, decent honest work) are herded, ritually, into corners of despair and death.
Despair and death, of course, only after their life energy has been sucked voraciously out of them. One follows necessarily, the other in the New World Order.
In time, through 'evolution', only these intelligent NWO leeches will remain.
Then what will they do for fun?
I guess suck each other.
Psychopaths all, indeed.
Methinks even Niall, eh?
. . . and how they 'think.'
She has written very well on the topic and, although you almost certainly don't need reminding, the Cs have several times told us that OPs are, in effect, psychopaths of a lesser, i.e. not obviously 'broken,' sort.
In an old Cs session someone asked how they could know if they were or were not an OP. The Cs replied, essentially, "Can you feel another's pain?"
I'd love to hear Dennet et al. on the topic of feeling for another, or, feeling at all for that matter . . .
Materialism is suffering a very grave deficit, when considering LIFE itself.
Medical science, even at its best -- can only discern the presence or absence of life, in a human body. It's a simplifying binary equation applied to the most complex of all issues, one is either alive or dead -- supposedly the coffin lid and case are closed ( or open ).
LIFE is the bane of martialism, because it is expansive and not contractive.
Science has gotten up to the point of seeing life as on/off or with only two-valued black/white contrast. Yes, it is absurd to attempt to model life on something that cannot ever comprehend life itself. I was pleasantly bemused by both the author and Thomas Nagel's courage and whimsy, to cast hard and rational stones at the superficial imaginary edifice of materialism.
We unnecessarily strive for certainty, when science proves that that of itself is imaginary. We can increasingly hone on down the energy or position, but not both simultaneously. The proffered adamantine "position" of materialists is approaching infinitely energetic extremism -- but that is hardly news.
Life goes contrary to entropy -- but it cares not in wonderfully perturbing materialists, not even a single electron orbital is moved … figuratively ( of course ).
Namaste
This brouhaha looks much like the censorship of Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake over at the TED blog. Interesting story. Start at Sheldrake's site [Link]and look at the "The TED Controversy." Sheldrake's response is here [Link]You can then move on to TED's response to the controversy [Link]The comments section has some good reading.
Why I love SOTT. YOU SORRY, SORDID, HUMAN, TRUTH SEEKERS!
By any standard, (and to the extent this comes out as "elitish" or Nietzschean, please let me apoligize in advance), this is the most intelligent and esoteric article I've read in a while. I honestly expected - (pardon requested to the Sottites above) - that there would be no comments to same, due to its intellectually taxing nature. Thus, I was proud to see all the commentary discussion that followed.
The truth that runs through the article and the comments, is the is the constant awareness of this: "I don't f*cking know! - But I'm f*cking trying!."
And that search for truth,
Is the highest
That we can hope to achieve
In this life.
R.C.
So how far did "you" go ?
Crick: " 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons."
When you went the way as described by Crick - what did you discover ?
I would be interested to know where reached Nagel - e.g. at the seperation.... when the illusion of noise seperates from the outer other to the inner self and it's effect on time etc etc.
It seems Nagel is caught up in anthropomorphised, low-brow notions of the nature of God, but at least he is sending out some kind of feelers to reach past that. Hope he succeeds.
First, excellent article and thanks for putting this out there for those of us who were not familiar with what to me is the most horrific and dangerously insane "philosophy" to have been concocted by human egomaniacs. Thomas Nagel is the "voice in the wilderness" calling us to awaken to realize the utter folly being promoted by Dawkins, et al. While these attendees of the "Moving Naturalism Forward" meeting may not be overt psychopaths, their mindset and philosophy is, indeed, psychopathic. So long as it remains an intellectual exercise for them, they may be remain harmless, but as soon as their philosophy moves from their minds to social engineering, politics or human rights, humanity is likely to see horrors manifest that will make what happened in Nazi Germany look like a church picnic. The unbridled arrogance and absolute-zero cold inhumanity of these "intellectuals" is, perhaps, the most frightening thing I have read about in my entire life. Religious zealots have been perpetrators of horrific acts, but what these fellows could unleash would relegate the worst that humanity has done in the past to the little leagues when compared with what psychopaths of this caliber could propose and implement.
And pretty much they and their running mate OPs have already done everything about which you express concern.
As the Cs lately noted at this https://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,30858.0.html?PHPSESSID=390bb909d6486c29a2eba053313daf80 , "When science is used for killing they have lost their honor and their way."
Also, dig up Jon Rapopport's voluminous work on the Cartels for a 'schematic' of how the pyschopath/OP accretions of cretins go about their business.
Here's a [Link] to a Google search, and here's text from just one of the articles that search pulls:
"CARTELS THAT RUN THE WORLD"
By Jon Rappoport
FEBRUARY 7, 2012. The following information comes from insider interviews with Ellis Medavoy and Richard Bell, [assumed names] two people I interview extensively in my new product, "THE MATRIX REVEALED." This is just a brief taste of what they have to say...
Major institutions on this planet that control Military, Money, Energy, Government, Medical, Corporate, Media, and Education are becoming, more and more, global cartels, horizontally integrated across national borders.
This is more than a top-down command process. It's organically evolving. Three steps forward, two steps back. There is a great deal of competition among the components of a given cartel, but there is also cooperation. And in the long run, the see-saw is tipping in the direction of cooperation, as these entities realize they may well have more to gain that way.
I can't stress too strongly this EVOLVING process. All attempts to merely assume twelve men in a room run the planet fall woefully short.
Instead, over time, people who lead a powerful institution (like Energy, for example) look out and recognize more major players, and in this recognition there is an impulse to compete and win and destroy, but there is also an impulse to build commonality and therefore monopolize the entire territory.
During one conversation with retired master propagandist Ellis Medavoy, I asked him about the extent of mutual cooperation in his given field, psychological warfare. He responded:
"Twenty years ago, I would have said we were all operating separately and jealously. Each of us was mining his own contacts and building his false pictures of reality for the masses. But then things began to change. Globally. First of all, more of us were pushing the same holograms. And because communication and travel were speeding up so rapidly, we were working a lot of the same venues. We would run into each other more often. We began to share information. I mean, it was cautious. We weren't gushing with unbridled love, I assure you. The competitive factor was still strong. And we had fights. But through all that, we began to see through the fog, so to speak. We began to understand the effectiveness of cooperating. We would test each other with privileged information, to see if we could trust each other to keep it private. A tidbit here, a tidbit there.
"And you see, behind us, other groups were finding commonality, too. For example, in the area of medical propaganda, where I operated a lot of the time. And these groups saw they could join together for specific operations, on an international scale. They could push enormous lies globally, and everyone of their class would profit and gain wider control. So I would find myself working with a psy warfare guy from, say, France, or Germany in a joint venture. We would rub elbows. We'd be feeding from the same basic money trough.
"We'd both be briefed by a team of intelligence experts, and those experts would be of several nationalities. Slowly, I saw a new kind of umbrella structure emerging.
"See, suppose during the secret lead-up to a planned economic crisis [money cartel], you can distract everybody with a phony epidemic [medical cartel]. Do you see? Leaders perceive a reason to cooperate. Planners become more intelligent and clever. They reach across lines they never would have reached across before...
"You begin to see the outlines of a much more inclusive future structure. This is multi-front warfare."
Richard Bell, another former insider, said to me: "People like to assume that money is everything. If you can limit the amount of money the public has, eventually they weaken and cave in and they're easier to control. And this is certainly true. But on the other hand, as mega-corporations gain more power and range and markets, you have a clash, because those corporations, which are now cooperating in ways they never have, as a cartel in some respects, want customers for their products. They don't want abject poverty across the board. People have to be able to buy their products.
"So there is a heavy conflict. It's a conflict between elite bankers [money cartel] and mega-corporations [corporation cartel]. It needs to be resolved through advance planning, over the long term. So now you have these powerful men sitting down and talking in a new way. Other big-time players get involved, too [government, media, energy cartels, for example]."
This is just the beginning of what these people have to say about the Matrix in their interviews and how it REALLY works.
To order THE MATRIX REVEALED, you can click on the box in this email or find the box at the top of my home page at www.nomorefakenews.com
Jon Rappoport
qjrconsulting@gmail.com
JANUARY 30, 2012. WELL, FOLKS, HERE IT IS. THE PRODUCT MANY OF YOU HAVE BEEN ASKING ME TO PUT TOGETHER FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS.
FINALLY.
A HUGE COLLECTION OF MY OLD NEWSLETTER INTERVIEWS ON THE MATRIX AND WHO RUNS THE WORLD AND HOW.
BUT THAT'S JUST THE BEGINNING.
Because, for example, my full LOGIC COURSE is also included!
Read on for all the details.
To order the product, click on THE MATRIX REVEALED box in this email or the box on my home page at www.nomorefakenews.com
Thanks, Greg. You did great work putting it all together!
Jon
INTRODUCTION TO
THE MATRIX REVEALED
by Jon Rappoport
Copyright © 2012 by Jon Rappoport
Let me start with the nuts and bolts of this product. It is enormous in scope and size.
250 megabytes of information.
Over 1100 pages of text.
Ten and a half hours of audio.
The 2 bonuses alone are rather extraordinary:
My complete 18-lesson course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, which includes the teacher's manual and a CD to guide you. I was previously selling the course for $375. This is a new way to teach logic, the subject that has been missing from schools for decades.
The complete text (331 pages) of AIDS INC., the book that exposed a conspiracy of scientific fraud deep within the medical research establishment. The book has become a sought-after item, since its publication in 1988. It contains material about viruses, medical testing, and the invention of disease that is, now and in the future, vital to our understanding of phony epidemics arising in our midst. I assure you, the revelations in the book will surprise you; they cut much deeper and are more subtle than "virus made in a lab" scenarios.
The heart and soul of this product are the text interviews I conducted with Matrix-insiders, who have first-hand knowledge of how the major illusions of our world are put together:
EILLIS MEDAVOY, master of PR, propaganda, and deception, who worked for key controllers in the medical and political arenas. 28 interviews, 290 pages.
RICHARD BELL, financial analyst and trader, whose profound grasp of market manipulation and economic-rigging is formidable, to say the least. 16 interviews, 132 pages.
JACK TRUE, the most creative hypnotherapist on the face of the planet. Jack's anti-Matrix understanding of the mind and how to liberate it is unparalleled. His insights are unique, staggering. 43 interviews, 320 pages.
Then there are several more interviews with brilliant analysts of the Matrix, including recent conversations. 53 pages.
The ten and a half hours of mp3 audio are my solo presentation, based on these interviews and my own research. Title: The Multi-Dimensional Planetary Chessboard-The Matrix Vs. the Un-Conditioning of the Individual.
Here is some background on the product and my own history:
In 2001, I essentially left a career as an investigative reporter and rolled the dice on the emerging internet. I started a site called www.nomorefakenews.com
I didn't stop investigating and publishing, but my field of operation widened. My first big question was: WHO REALLY RUNS THE WORLD?
And my second was: WHOEVER THEY ARE, HOW DO THEY MANUFACTURE REALITY FOR THE POPULATION OF EARTH?
I was prepared to deal with these enormous questions, because I had contacts. These were people I had come to know well during my days as a reporter, writing for LA Weekly and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe-and also during a stint on radio at KPFK in Los Angeles.
These people, these contacts, were insiders.
They had deep knowledge in their fields:
PROPAGANDA; FINANCE; HYPNOTISM; MIND CONTROL; MEDICINE; INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS...
There was a catch. They were unwilling to be cited as on-the-record sources in my articles. They knew they would suffer consequences if they went public.
Once I started my website, I did extensive research to confirm the credentials of my insiders. I wanted to make sure they were who they said they were. I wanted to verify they had worked where they said they had worked. This was a laborious process.
When I was sure, I began to interview them.
I wasn't certain where all this would go.
Gradually, I realized I was getting VERY high-level information on The Matrix. But this was the real Matrix.
As one of my sources described it:
"Imagine a factory that turns out illusions. And these illusions are woven together to make up what we think the world is."
The actual Matrix involves a number of areas: government; money; energy; the military; intelligence agencies; medicine; mega-corporations; psychology and mind control; science...
I started a members-only newsletter, and word quickly spread. Every Friday, I would email a newsletter to subscribers. Many of these newsletters were interviews with my insiders.
It was quite a job, keeping up with writing (public) daily articles for my site and also putting out the (private) newsletter. I was also collating the high-level information from my sources and making maps of the expanding territory.
I saw that I was looking at global CARTELS. As you will discover in reading this material, these cartels are not frozen organizations. They are evolving.
So now I've had some very competent assistance, and I've assembled the most important newsletter-interviews for you.
But in addition to that, I'm publishing, for the first time, interviews that never made it into those newsletters. And I'm presenting interviews from very recent days as well.
It's very instructive to talk to people who have been there onthe inside. They are bright, they are informative, they convey the depth of situations they were involved with. They go beyond relaying dry facts, and in doing so, you learn how elite players play the game. You receive a rounded and three-dimensional picture of: the process of constructing The Matrix. How it's built.
In every case, each insider was relieved to be able to talk with utter frankness, with no fear that his words would be twisted or taken out of context or deleted. So you're getting the full story.
I met my first two insiders while I was writing my first book, AIDS INC., SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY, in 1987-88. The book was my initial experience in putting together a vast amount of data-which contradicted every official position on a supposedly rock-hard subject: medical science.
At the time, I didn't really understand how deep I was drilling down into a cardinal aspect of The Matrix. I only knew I was I digging up and exposing long-held delusions broadcast as facts by the Medical Cartel. These false realities went far beyond the subject of AIDS.
That first book of mine started as a pure lark. I had just published a piece in LA Weekly about certain televangelists and their support of an intentionally staged Armageddon in Israel. When the piece was published, I sat back and thought, "Where do I go from here? What could be weirder than this?"
Like other investigative reporters, I was excited by strange and bizarre stories that could blow readers' minds. I was motivated by that.
So, in 1987, I wondered what could be stranger than the Armageddon story I had just done.
Sitting in my Los Angeles studio, a thought popped into my head. "AIDS. I bet there's something about that whole thing that's pretty weird."
Little did I know...
That was my first big leap.
I had studied logic extensively in college. I had been taught by a philosophy professor who was a very generous soul and a relentless thinker. If you were an inch from accuracy, he would point it out, and he would give you the full reason and understanding that pulled you back to the straight and narrow.
Once I dove into research for AIDS INC., I was amazed at the sloppy thinking and contradiction that was posing as science.
And then I met my first two insiders.
Their basic message to me was: keep going; you're on the right track; we have a great deal more to share with you.
They weren't just talking about medical issues.
They were talking about the whole construction of reality from a number of angles.
Each of the insiders I have gotten to know over the subsequent years has a different personal story. They have all left their particular corner of The Matrix-Construction Group. Jack True, my late friend and colleague, was a different man altogether. He was never part of that Group. He was the most informed and brilliant researcher I've ever come across on the subject of the mind-the essential link that makes The Matrix work.
Jack started the ball rolling. He was instrumental in making the deal that got AIDS INC published. He introduced me to a few key figures along the way-insiders who proved invaluable.
Why did these insiders want to talk and spill secrets? Well, the process of interviewing them wasn't always easy. They could be thorny at times. But they all had seen, finally, the abyss toward which they were heading, toward which they were leading the population. And they pulled back.
So...
This Volume is for individuals.
Because:
Beyond The Matrix is true individual power.
Despite all the illusions, it has always been there.
It waits for you.
And it IS your power.
Jon Rappoport
Seven Cartels
Dec. 11, 2009
Jon Rappoport has sketched out a scenario in which seven specific cartels -- Energy, Government, Intelligence, Media, Medical, Military, and Money -- are involved in their own internal conflicts. He believes these cartels, which have all but rendered nation states obsolete, have been adversely affected by the events of 9-11-2001.
[Google for, download and read Webster Tarpley's, "9-11 Synthetic Terror, Manufactured in the USA" and, "George [H. W.] Bush - The Unauthorized Biography.
According to Jon, cooperation amoung cartels was stronger following World War II, when the specter of atomic annihilation was seen as a very bad idea, i.e. they could also be annihilated!
Mr. Rappoport’s article is quite speculative, but sufficiently plausible, well written, and quite possibly of such critical importance that it is included here in its entirety. It is, in essence, an example of The Fool’s Journey!
==========================
The cartels originated, more or less as fronts for older groups, older controllers. Over time these monopolies saw that they as the children were becoming more powerful than their parents. And therefore the parents became front groups for the cartels.
A few of the current front groups are the: UN, CIA, IMF, World Bank, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Skull and Bones, Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove, The Federal Reserve (US), and many governments.
Each cartel seeks global power over its area of operation. Usually, the cartels cooperate. But an ongoing conflict within the seven cartels over the events of 9/11 is becoming much more serious. Much more serious. The conflict is reflective of other problems which have remained unsolved, which are getting worse.
In these times of internal conflict at the top, cartel power tends to flow back down to the fronts, where it is hoped cooler heads will prevail. “The child has become slightly deranged, so the parents have to step in and carry the ball.” Inevitably, the cartels patch up their differences, and re-assume their PRIME top-dog role in running the planet.
But now a host of problems is surfacing. The older fronts, who are suddenly inheriting the task of running the show while the seven cartels wrangle with each another and kiss and make up, these older fronts are themselves in trouble. The older groups, the ones which created the cartels, are themselves weakening.
The Bohemian Grove, for example, has so diluted its membership that it no longer can call itself a real secret government. Many lower level players can come to the summer meetings in California and play weird games in the forest. The NY-based Council on Foreign Relations has fallen into near-senility at times. Its summer 2000 meeting on terrorism degenerated into a goofy puerile exercise in “brainstorming”, with no real leadership handling things. The Bilderbergers as well are getting old. The men who formerly planned many planetary OPS are, more and more, spinning their wheels, handling lower-level business deals, and reminiscing about glories past.
Skull and Bones at Yale has, like the Bohemian Grove, diluted its exclusive “first-family” membership, and it often loses the connective brotherly frat thread in the real world of commerce, where its members, after graduation, take their “rightful places” in the top echelons of society and government. The CIA is so awash in confusion that it can’t remember where it hid some of the bodies. It has spawned a number of unofficial islands of intelligence over the years, and those spinoffs often make their deals on their own.
The international banking and finance fraternity (i.e. Fed Reserve, Euro-banking groups, IMF, World Bank, stock and commodity and currency manipulators, etc.) has been slowly coming apart at the seams over the last ten years, especially in the area of the daily currency markets, where young lunatics are trading a trillion dollars a day like baseball cards. And the enormous multi-faceted business of CREDIT at every level of society all over the world --a terrific scam -- is now expanding to such gargantuan proportions that the controllers are in doubt about the consequences. As in, stare and look at the bubble growing and growing, stare at it in a state of paralysis and wonder how elastic it really is.
The Trilateral Commission reached its peak during the Jimmy Carter days, and has been in decline ever since. The once-vaunted non-profit foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, for example) have in many ways already done their dirty work. They have subverted the education system of the West, they have taken over medical research, they have successfully drained off billions in non-taxable $$ for their owners. Over the years, control of these foundations has passed into the hands of younger managers, who are consumed with organization and bureaucracy.
The UN has passed many ominous resolutions, but it too has faded in its ability to fulfill the overt dream of official world government. Although at some time an effort might be made -- a drastic effort to make the UN the savior of a planet in chaos, it is a bloated bureaucracy along a variety of fronts.
IMF continues to destroy weaker nations with its draconian policy of lending them money and then in effect taking over their governments when they can’t pay up, but again, how much more damage can the IMF do? It needs another planet to wreck. It has lost the edge of its keen and disgusting “vision” of overwhelming the weak on behalf of the strong.
I am giving you the bleakest picture of these front groups, these groups which are still very powerful. But they are in decline. They are getting tired. Their own inner energy has been depleted. They are no longer the same Huns racing across the landscape chopping down their enemies.
So now, when the cartels need them the most, these fronts are failing to take the reins in a definitive way.
BIG TROUBLE AT THE TOP
The older parents who created the cartels, and then had to stand aside when these children flexed their muscles, are now too confused to handle the crisis on behalf of the children.
And there is another factor.
These older fronts have lost their keen knowledge about important pieces of the real world-map of power. They no longer know where all the power actually is.
You can underline that last sentence a thousand times. [Or just read it several times!]
One very small example: These front groups (and the cartels) do not actually know what Osama bin Laden is up to. [And why would they care, merest fabrication that his persona actually is ? ?]
Perhaps you have seen an old film called, "Executive Action," it is probably the best movie ever made about the JFK assassination. At one point, Burt Lancaster, one of the assassination planners, says about Lee Oswald (who at that moment in the film is under discussion as a possible useful dupe): “This guy is in Mexico, he’s in Cuba, he’s in Russia, he’s working for the CIA, he could be a double agent, maybe he’s tripling. We’ll never know. But we can use him.” (paraphrase)
You use someone, but you don’t really know who he’s working for, of what he’s doing.
All right? Get the picture?
Now... when you have a declining center of power, the partial vacuum is filled by new blood, by people who are riveted by their own desire to take power for themselves. They don’t care about the old-boy network or the niceties or the tea in the library or the history of the East India Trading Company. They are on the march.
That is what has been happening for the last fifteen years, and now this trend is accelerating fast. Fast.
I will now use a word. Commit it to memory. It is a key word. It summarizes the growing trend at the top of power on this planet. Not just at the top, but at many levels of power. The word is: "Gangsterism."
Eat that word. Digest it. Think about it. Roll it around in your mind. "Gangsterism." Every man for himself. Form your own group. Make your own deal. Grab everything that isn’t nailed down.
We’re talking about the theft of trillions of dollars through outright stealing of US and other government budget money. (E.g., at the Pentagon: At least 2 trillion.) We’re talking about pension funds and budget money invested by governments all over the world in trading markets, and the profits are kept, hidden, stolen. We’re talking about trillions in street-drug money. We’re talking about oil deals cooked up by strung-together coalitions of heavy hitters (e.g., the Bush family, Cheney, et al). We’re talking about street gangs in the drug business, and Mafias all over the world. We’re talking about Chinese agents buying up companies. We’re talking about CIA money laundering of drug and arms money. We’re talking about arms dealers who keep selling weapons to every country that’s still breathing.
The arms trade is now so complex no one can make a map of it. Guns, rockets, bio/chem. weapons, missiles, nuke components, planes, tanks, the works. The actual manufacturers sell their products to a bewildering array of “agents” who then re-sell them to anybody and make out the paperwork, if they do it at all, in deceptive ways.
GANGSTERISM.
Terrorism is one form of Gangsterism. These terrorists are hitched to a whole host of countries, governments, ethnic rebels, oppressed populations, oil interests, intelligence groups. “Keep what you can steal from the victims” is a terrorist edict that is not lost on the actual ground-level operatives.
Religion which sanctifies murder is mixed into the equation, just as it was in the Middle Ages in Europe, when the soldiers of the Vatican plundered their way through the “infidels,” all in the name of religion of course.
It is also a cultural trend alive in the world. In the US, it proceeded through the “me” generation of the 1970s and came alive as the cocaine generation of the 1980s. Hit hard, get what you can, steal and rob, cheat and lie, because that’s the real meaning of “Capitalism.” Sell anything, any product, whether poisonous or useless or deceptive. Self-inflated, cocaine-drenched losers who were thought of as blights in their high schools took over Hollywood studios and music companies. They consorted with Mafia crooks. The Ivan Boeskys and Mike Milkens came to the fore in the world of corporate buyouts. They intoned homilies about “the redistribution of wealth.” Wall Street was infested with insider trading. The CIA, the Mafia, Texas businessmen and other lowlifes moved in and worked the S&L 500-billion-dollar theft. Clinton and Gore and Bush 1 and 2 smelled money everywhere and courted it. Ideals -- any ideals -- took a bath.
The cartels and their storefronts thought of Gangsterism as some kind of degenerate sub-human game, when it wasn’t played according to the rules of their own degenerate sub-human version of the same game -- but they miscalculated the signs. They didn’t see that this trend was leading to a huge wildcat splitting off of corrupt power.
And now they are scrambling to deal with it. The 9/11 attack was a green light given to an Operation which was supposed to have controllable consequences. But from another angle, 9/11 or something like it would have happened anyway as the result of a growing swelling trend: obscene Gangsterism.
To look at 9/11 more closely, the Go signal appears to have been given by cartel forces which had already secretly split off on their own as gangsters, in conjunction with “new friends”:
1) Forces which are intent on, among other things, overwhelming the so-called Third World with transnational corporate power and drugs and arms and depopulation;
2) A strung-together Go-Order force which included: certain Nazi types from the medical cartel who are working toward bio/chem depop under the cover story of “natural” disease in the Third World;
3) Military loons who are convinced war is the only thing that can “save” the meaning of what a human being is supposed to be (General Pattons on vast overdoses of crystal meth would be the engorged metaphor);
4) A few Chinese military/ political bigwigs, who see a war as a boon to their nationalistic goal of world control;
5) A variety of terrorists (e.g., Saddam) using Islam as a front for Attila the Hun operations formulated out of a deep desire to destroy the landscape, any Western landscape; and
6) Plunderers and other One World Order types who view the planet as an ongoing race war in which they must preserve the genetic purity of what God “really wants.” There is even a report that a secretive element of the Vatican is involved in 9/11, and that report is not chopped liver. It has significant merit.
All in all, breathtaking, if you like breathing sewer gas.
In the face of global Gangsterism, which reaches from boardrooms down to street-level action in South Central LA, the cartels are bewildered. All sorts of upper-mid-level players, like the Bushes and other semi-independent oil barons [ENRON?] and CIA freelancers and Russian Mafia types and street-drug chiefs see this situation, or intuitively sense this situation, as a chance to move up.
Deals and temporary alliances are flowing in all directions.
The seven cartels are facing their most intense challenge in... perhaps ever.
This is showtime.
The cards have been dealt; the money is on the table.
The new alliance between the US and Russian governments re Afghanistan and that oil pipeline -- this is just one move in a sea of moves. There are people within the cartels who are urging this particular US-Russian alliance on as a hopeful thing, to re-stabilize planetary control at a government-cartel level, which can then be expanded to suck up or destroy many of these wildcat power grabs.
But don’t count on it. Old Cold War hatreds, and the emergence of the Russian Mafia and its plethora of global crime connections, which reach up into many boardrooms and banks -- these are counter-elements that may shred the US-Russian “new deal.”
Attempts at cartelization of various global and national crime families is also underway.
From the perspective of this report, you can see what a crime it really is that the US government has never taken a real stand for freedom and prosperity of the individual in its American Foreign Policy over the last 80 years.
A US, which really stood for those ideals, would now be the best bulwark against the lunacy which is spreading in all directions like ink on a blotter.
No wonder the cartels and their store fronts have lost track of the centers of power around the world. As a small example, if a country run by a dictator is really run by a street-drug crime group, and if that crime group has ties to Wall Street banks that launder its money, and if those banks in turn are lending money to other governments which are also quite corrupt… the chain of power becomes a twisted wire that disappears and re-emerges in some very strange places.
As another example, an attempt to map out the S&L scandal in the US becomes a blizzard of names, many of which one has never encountered before. We are at a crossroads.
Now people like Bush and Frank Carlucci and Saddam and Tom Ridge and bin Laden and Texas businessman Walter Mischer and Don Tyson and George Tenet and a thousand other people stretch out horizontally in a maze of, Let’s make a deal.
All bets are off and all bets are on.
By wending through this labyrinth for years, searching for the common denominators and the areas of greatest power, one ultimately finds the cartels. And always there has been a feeling that power has been oozing out through the seams of the major cartel structures and infecting the planet through strange back channels.
Now the situation, as chaotic as it is at the moment, is clear. The Cartels have taken a series of heavy blows. They are threatened at the core. [By whom?]
They will, predictably, focus on increasing the strength of the single government cartel, globally, through the collective and cooperative fixing in place of a secret de facto world government. Not a building with an address or a dome, but an interlocking directorate dedicated to less freedom, fewer rights, more “emergencies, more “enemies” [Enemy Combatants], more direct control over the lives of citizens. To put on the lid.
This long-time ongoing project will be stepped up. The medical cartel will chip in with an extension of its AIDS operation and other staged “medical emergencies,” in order to paralyze people everywhere with the fear of unseeable germs. Germs which demand debilitating drugs and vaccines. The military cartel will try to hasten alliances between the armies of various nations so that the world moves closer to an armed camp. To, again, put on the lid.
We will see a faction of the cartels dedicated to purity and morality, a rooting out of corruption everywhere -- which will actually be an effort to kill off and neutralize those gangsters who have spun off from the central Gangsterism.
You will know these “pure ones” by the fact that freedom will not be a part of their program. They will use the word freedom, but it will be a counterfeit, it will be equated with purity and morality and loyalty and a dozen other things, none of which is actually freedom.
You will see efforts by many to huddle under the protective wing of some group which promises to protect them. These groups will be religious, political, financial, military, corporate, and so on.
If we track this immense and disparate overall corruption back through time, we see that it is rooted in two things: an ignorance, and an unwillingness, to find out what the human being actually is.
As abstract as this may sound, it is a crucial point.
At moments we catch glimpses of reality, of ourselves, of other people, of the world, of the universe, which suddenly take the lid off the puppet show and expose us to the sky and the stars and something much more fantastic. [E.g. pulling back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.] That something is in fact connected to what we are, our potential existence, our real power.
The denial and corruption of those secrets has placed us all in a shadow play run by the puppet masters, who are the ones most dedicated to denying the search for what we are.
The truth begins to dawn when we are in the most trouble.
This can be explained in a brief analogy from Plato. In his famous image of the cave, the human race sits facing the inner wall of the cave and sees only reflections cast by the sun outside. The sun is shining upon Ideas, or Eternal Forms, which are also outside the cave, and the humans inside see only the pale reflections of these Eternal Forms on the walls.
That is their reality.
In his famous essay, the Republic, Plato sketches out the ideal political state, in which all the fragmented and, he would say, dangerous impulses of Man are held in check. I believe on closer reading of Plato, he is actually setting out a plan by which the elite of this political state would guard its “naturally” greater knowledge of these Eternal Forms from the mass of “less intelligent” humans. Because the less intelligent ones would be driven into confusion and chaos by proximity to the Forms, they would unthinkingly resort to their most base impulses. [emphasis added]
Plato thinks his ideal political state should be constructed. He thinks this is the best way, and to his credit, he spells it out: A “perfect” fascism.
In distinction to Plato, it is suggested that: The Eternal Forms are a delusion. The elite is protecting a delusion. The “less intelligent ones” are, perhaps, looking at a series of shadows which are a delusion of a delusion -- but the most important fact is, everyone is in a state of sleep.
They all need to wake up.
If they can find out what they truly are, what they can truly do, they will wake up. And that road toward discovery is always blocked when the starting point for Reality is some external thing or series of things, like the so-called Eternal Forms, which are supposedly perfect, unchanging, which are supposedly the very wellsprings of all our thoughts. That is an enormous lie, one of the biggest ever told. [emphasis added]
Yet, ironically, the kind of dialogue Plato suggests in all his writings, if undertaken in a vastly expanded way, beyond his logic, has a chance of opening up the golden door. To anyone.
The shape of the United States was built originally by two types of people. The first, agents of the Vatican and [certain factions of] the Masons, sought independence from England so that they could control the destiny of this continent, so that they could become the new kings. The second, much smaller group, revolutionists within the revolutionists, had a different plan: The creation of personal freedom that could never be extinguished. And they succeeded in their time. They succeeded in framing a Constitution to obstruct any elite which wished to impose a series of external Eternal Forms on the people.
That was their work. They did it.
For those who demean freedom, or seek to append to it “more important principles,” one can only say this: There is only one appended principle: In being free, you may not infringe on another’s freedom! [This is fundamental; this is Common Law!]
From that point on, it is up to you. No one said it would be easy. No one said everyone would reach true self-realization in a span of short attention. No one said we would be exempt from abusing our freedom or smashing it on a rock. But freedom does not ultimately smash. It waits. For you.
That is its fascination. That is its challenge.
Just because you may not feel up to it, don’t pile foolish abuse on it. Don’t try to rationalize your present life by making yourself into a paragon of virtue in order to avoid freedom. Don’t become an agenda of endless morality. Don’t try to return to the imagined glory of a better time. This is the time.
These are the days.
The cartels and the men behind them are fatuously trying to set themselves up as those Eternal Forms. That is their work. That is what they have done with their freedom.
They can run but they can’t hide. They have helped spawn a new generation of corrupted idiots, criminals who are cloaking themselves in the symbol of Gangsterism. So the cartels are reaping their own whirlwind. From their own created offspring.
We have other places to go, other things to do, other powers to reclaim. About which powers, there are no limits. I mean exactly what I say.
JON RAPPOPORT
great article.
Like the man says, to reduce the totality of possibilities on the nature of the universe and our existence therein to just two - namely, full on IP-in-7-days vs. The Big Bang - is idiotic.
Evangelical atheists (and they invariably are...) are just as religious as the religious types; hilarious then that they don't see it.
Edward Feser's metal detector analogy if anything makes the point that it is only by scientific method that we can progress. Science makes a hypothesis and runs experimental tests to see if the tests are in accordance with the hypothesis. Hence the argument that "we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that can be revealed about metallic objects" means that "we have good reason that science can reveal to us everything that can be revealed about the things that science tests for". There isn't any other way we can obtain knowledge - the only alternative is blind faith.
is that their cutting-edge "scientists" (literally, "knowers") see no problem claiming that the matter and intrinsically connected energy they worship is 96% "dark" - that is, incapable of being perceived... wel, other than by its absence. Interestingly, one of the cornerstones of their beliefs is the nineteenth century experiments which proved the non-existence of the aether by not being able to detect it.
Scientists wear white gowns, in contrast to priestly black.