Power: A Radical View

I think that the issue might be sourcing David R. Hawkins. See this: http://www.spiritualteachers.org/david_hawkins.htm and http://www.energygrid.com/spirit/2007/09ap-davidhawkins.html

Also consider the descriptions of schizoidal psychopathy and the warnings about same in "Political Ponerology".
 
Laura said:
I think that the issue might be sourcing David R. Hawkins. See this: http://www.spiritualteachers.org/david_hawkins.htm and http://www.energygrid.com/spirit/2007/09ap-davidhawkins.html

Also consider the descriptions of schizoidal psychopathy and the warnings about same in "Political Ponerology".

That sounds about right. For me, the litmus test that every person must pass is whether or not they can explain an idea in plain speech and analogy/allegory/simile. If you can't tell a story that even a child could understand, then you don't really know what you are talking about. Truths are simple, and can be expressed in any communication medium.

Political Ponerology - Chapter 4 said:
A schizoid’s ponerological activity should be evaluated in two aspects. On the small scale, such people cause their families trouble, easily turn into tools of intrigue in the hands of clever and unscrupulous individuals, and generally do a poor job of raising children. Their tendency to see human reality in the doctrinaire and simplistic manner they consider “proper” – i.e. “black or white” – transforms their frequently good intentions into bad results. However, their ponerogenic role can have macrosocial implications if their attitude toward human reality and their tendency to invent great doctrines are put to paper and duplicated in large editions.

In spite of their typical deficits, or even an openly schizoidal declaration, their readers do not realize what the authors’ characters are really like. Ignorant of the true condition of the author, such uninformed readers tend to interpret such works in a manner corresponding to their own nature. The minds of normal people tend toward corrective interpretation due to the participation of their own richer, psychological world view.

At the same time, many other readers critically reject such works with moral disgust but without being aware of the specific cause.

An analysis of the role played by Karl Marx’s works easily reveals all the above-mentioned types of apperception and the social reactions which engendered animosity between large groups of people.

When reading any of those disturbingly divisive works, we should examine them carefully for any of these characteristic deficits, or even an openly formulated schizoid declaration. Such a process will enable us to gain a proper critical distance from the contents and make it easier to dig the potentially valuable elements out of the doctrinaire material. If this is done by two or more people who represent greatly divergent interpretations, their methods of perception will come closer together, and the causes of dissent will dissipate. Such a project might be attempted as a psychological experiment and for purposes of proper mental hygiene.

This description is seminal, so I don't think it takes into account other fundamental aspects of Schizoidia, like Linear Thinking. To a schizoid, it seems to me, that everything is on a scale of 1 to 10, and they invariably place themselves, or people they like on the 10 side, and then everyone else must "prove" that they are at least greater than 1. Everything is a 1 dimensional spectrum of good vs evil, a vs b. When they pay lip-service to 2 and 3 dimensional concepts, these are always explained as outside, or above the linear scale.

That doesn't mean that linearity doesn't exist. But it seems that often, linearity, left vs right, scales of 0 to 1000 and so on are at the core of their theories. This kind of thinking also dominates modern politics. People are degrees of left, right and center. When this is a consistent aspect of their theories from start to finish, then it could be an indication that they are schizoidal. It's not a guarantee of course, and simply including a nod to some linear idea, for instance A and B influences is demonstrative and is used as a simile, but is only one part of a complete theory with many additional dimensions.

The most interesting thing about Hawkins is the whitewash of his wikipedia entry. That raises all manner of red flags.

Of course, whenever a new "teacher" pops up, I am always reminded of this:

Matthew 24:4-14 said:
4 Jesus answered: Watch out that no one deceives you.
5 For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many.
6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.
7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.
8 All these are the beginning of birth pains."

9 Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me.
10 At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other,
11 and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.
12 Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold,
13 but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.
14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
 

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Atreides said:
For me, the litmus test that every person must pass is whether or not they can explain an idea in plain speech and analogy/allegory/simile. If you can't tell a story that even a child could understand, then you don't really know what you are talking about. Truths are simple, and can be expressed in any communication medium.
I agree, the value of simplification as a skill is vastly overlooked and underestimated. I think it mostly has to do with the fact once one sees the simplification, or the "answer", they take it either at face value only, or as a mere convenience and the "how you get there" part is forgotten and not considered in other situations or contexts. I've noticed it depends a lot Being and Presence to really utilize, to be vigilant and receptive to "unseen patterns" as they occur in daily life. A good, but contrived, example is a ditsy Physics Professor that messes up while cooking. He should know that denser foods will cook slower, that cutting up accordingly will increase the surface area and offset the density, and so on and so on. But he doesn't utilize or perhaps even think of what he learned in first year undergrad (maybe because he only knows how to apply physics in equations), and spends an hour where he could take maybe 15 minutes instead.

A kind of converse, I've found to have at least some truth, is that being able to listen to another's analogy/allegory/simile is a litmus of the degree of linear thinking and personality as well, though you have to consider topical identification as well (e.g. trying to tell a stout vegan that plants defend themselves probably isn't gonna work). But generally, one can tell a lot about by reactions to simplified or allegoric explanations relatively quickly if you do it right, by which I mean having External Considering and Strategic Enclosure. Out of the responses where the allegory is not understood, there are two particularly telling spectrums, one being requests for further explanation, and the other is explanations of or around the allegory itself.
 
How to win the war for your mind

Brandon Smith
Alt Market
Wed, 02 Jan 2013

All battles, all wars, all fistfights and bar brawls, all conflicts in every place and in every time (except those conflicts in which both sides answer to the same puppeteer) begin and end as battles of the mind. No struggle is determined on strength of arms alone. In fact, the technologically advanced adversary with all his fancy firepower is often more vulnerable than his low-tech counterparts. This fact is, of course, counterintuitive to our Western manner of thinking, which teaches us to believe that the man with the bigger gun (or the bigger predator drone) always wins. Sadly, we have had to suffer through multiple defeats and overdrawn occupations in Asia to learn otherwise. One of the great unspoken truths of our era is the reality that the modernization of warfare has changed little the manner in which wars are won. Since the beginning of history, intelligence, force of will, and guiding principles are the dominant factors in any campaign.

“World views in collision » is what first came to my mind when considering this topic (power). This thread provides interesting explanations on how a world view topples and prevails on another one. It helps us understand the different levels of subtlety of domination and thus gives tools to protect oneself against it. Once again, “knowledge protects”.

If we look at the current world events, we may realize that in the last instance, it is world views that are struggling. For example NWO is an ideology based on religious beliefs. Another example is usury. It is accepted in the jewish and protestant texts but not in catholic and islamic ones (currently some catholic and muslim countries are under attack. Greece, Spain and Italy financially, and Syria, Libya militarily...). Religion is the pretense to economy, and economy is the means of domination.

2 things before my questions :

Laura wrote in High Strangeness :

“What amazes us is the sudden turn from the rational beginning to the irrational illusion. Irrationality and illusion are revealed by the intolerance and cruelty with which they are expressed. We observe that human thought systems show tolerance as long as they adhere to reality. The more the thought process is removed far from reality, the more intolerance and cruelty are needed to guarantee its continued existence.” (page 361)

And we also have in "Power: A Radical View" by Steven Lukes

power is at its most effective when least observable.

The question i would like to ask is about the power of capitalism. In the current Bank Era, if we consider that the only way to solve the problems of capitalism is to get out of capitalism, its only way to continue existing is to become authoritarian. ie _http://www.sott.net/article/263010-No-need-to-pretend-anymore-JP-Morgan-calls-for-authoritarian-regimes-in-Europe. Questions :

-Is this authoritarian turn a symbol of loss of power? And maybe the beginning of the end?
-Can it continue existing otherwise?

Thanks ;D
 
I'm reviving this thread because I've recently obtained C. Wright Mills books "The Causes of WW III" and "The Power Elite" which are amazing reading considering the time he was writing and how applicable these works are today. I highly recommend both of them. When I'm a bit more recovered from my mishap, I'll look for some good quotes unless someone else can pull some out first.
 
Fred J. Cook's book The Warfare State (NY: Macmillan, 1962) seems to have some similar themes to what I can remember of C. Wright Mill's The Power Elite. I did have a copy of The Power Elite, but not at present. Here are some quotes from The Warfare State:

From Chapter IV: "Madison Avenue in Uniform":

The crutch of the Warfare State is propaganda. We must be taught to fear and to hate or we will not agree to regiment out lives, to bear the enormous burdens of ever heavier taxation to pay for ever more costly Military hardware - and to do this at the expense of domestic programs like medical care and education and healthy urban development. As Goebbels had demonstrated so well under Hitler, propaganda is the art of induced belief; and if you propagandized vociferously enough, if you hammered the message home with endless repetition, the public could be brainwashed to believe almost anything the government wanted it to believe. In the end, what had started out as a madman's illogic became the sane man's common sense.

Never had the American people been subjected to such a propaganda barrage. Their first experience with it was to come in the years immediately after World War II, and the underlying objective was to be the establishment of that "permanent war economy" so ardently desired by both the Military and Big Business. If this war economy was to become a reality, if it was to insure the blessings of continued prosperity, it was obvious that we must have a large and permanently established Military to consume the materiel the factories would supply. And if this was to be the order of the new day, the American people must be brought to break with all the traditions of their past; their innate distrust of militarism must be overcome. This could only be done if they could be convinced of the reality of that ever-present menace Hamilton had perceived to be the culture ground of military castes. It was, obviously, a tremendous job for propaganda. And propaganda went quickly to work.
[. . .]
The extent to which the American people had been propagandized to induce them to discard the nonmilitary tradition of centuries has been but imperfectly understood. Even less appreciated has been the significance implicit in the mere use of propaganda on such a scale by the Military. This signified nothing less than a radical shift in the basis of power. The voting booth would be retained, so would the democratic trappings of our society; but, increasingly, all the vital decisions would be influenced and pre-determined by the uniform - by men whose professional judgment it would be positively unpatriotic to question.

It would not matter which of the major parties happened to be in power, for each was equally vulnerable to the pressures generated by the new propaganda techniques. The people's money, funneled into the hands of the Military in prodigious amounts, could and would be used to indoctrinate the people in the desired patterns of belief. Let's consider for a moment how radical was this entire procedure, how complete was the break with every lofty American ideal. Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, virtually all the Founding Fathers, had agreed on the conception that the Military should be strictly limited in its power; that its function should be solely to executethe policies laid down by controlling civilian authority - not to determine them. But once the Military entered the propaganda field, this fundamental philosophic tenet of American democracy was discarded. Congress could no longer hold a check-rein on the Military, for the Military now went over the heads of Congressmen to propagandize the electorate on whom those Congressmen depended for votes. Popular attitudes would be molded and determined by men trading upon the prestige of the uniform. In essence, this meant that the Military servant, with Madison Avenue as his shield and torch-bearer, had acquired the whip hand over his supposed civilian masters.

This fateful and inevitable sequence was clearly foreseen at the time, and it says much for the budding power of the military-industrial complex that even perceptive vision and a forthright statement of principle by a Congressional committee could be buried, practically unnoticed, under the propaganda avalanche.
[. . .]
[. . .]
In the rabbit warren of the Pentagon, publicity branches and bureaus spread in octopus fashion. Each was designed to pluck a special nerve controlling a segment of public reaction. No media that was influential in creating and channeling public opinion was overlooked. Even the most legitimate of these publicity tentacles often played a subtle role in purveying the views of the Brass. This was the special press department which maintained newsroom in the Pentagon for major newspapers and wire services. It issued news releases to daily and weekly newspapers, but it also managed to suggest ideas, to ploant questions that might be asked appropriate representatives of the Military to get into the headlines the particular Pentagon line of the moment. If this line was startling enough, it would then create its own snowballing pattern of news, requiring comment from civilian secretaries, Congressmen, perhaps even the President.
[. . .]
[. . .]
[. . .]
The members of Congress were not alone in exhibiting this worshipful complex of our times. Big businessmen and the preponderance of the nation's press have joined the claque that cheers on the Brass. This conjunction of high-level interests showed itself revealingly on April 26, 1951, at the annual dinner of the Bureau of Advertising of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. Charles E. (General Electric) Wilson, who had been called back to Washington by Truman as Defense Mobilization Director, was the speaker. He congratulated the publishers for their co-operation in publishing "millions of words laying down the premise . . . that the free world is in mortal danger . . . If the people were not convinced of that it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert that danger . . . With the support of public opinion as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good start. But the mobilization job cannot be completed unless such support is continuous . . . It is our job - yours and mine - to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build America's might."

Yes, sir, we were "off to a good start" on that "permanent war economy" Wilson had visualized in 1944, but it would take "continuous" effort to "keep our people convinced."
- The Warfare State, by Fred J. Cook (1962).

Mr Fred J. Cook's The Warfare State is one of the most important and also one of the most terrifying documents that I have ever read. His thesis is that the "military industrial complex" has become so powerful in the United States that no government can stand against it, and is, at the same time, so insane that it is quite ready to advocate what is called a "pre-emptive" war against the Soviet State. The evidence he adduces is massive and unanswerable except by plain abuse.
- from the Preface by Bertrand Russell.
 
Guess I gotta get that one, too!

Thanks for the excerpts.
 
Never had the American people been subjected to such a propaganda barrage. Their first experience with it was to come in the years immediately after World War II, and the underlying objective was to be the establishment of that "permanent war economy" so ardently desired by both the Military and Big Business. If this war economy was to become a reality, if it was to insure the blessings of continued prosperity, it was obvious that we must have a large and permanently established Military to consume the materiel the factories would supply. And if this was to be the order of the new day, the American people must be brought to break with all the traditions of their past; their innate distrust of militarism must be overcome. This could only be done if they could be convinced of the reality of that ever-present menace Hamilton had perceived to be the culture ground of military castes. It was, obviously, a tremendous job for propaganda. And propaganda went quickly to work.
- The Warfare State, by Fred J. Cook (1962).

Chomsky would be an important writer now for an analysis of how the media works in alliance with the interests of an elite. Chomsky seems to differ though in whether the years after World War II were a time when there was a lot of propaganda activity in some form happening in the US. Maybe Chomsky's theoretical analysis of how the media works is very good and accurate, but the use he puts that analysis to is compromised.
According to the Guardian, "Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the Humanities."
Whether Chomsky is so popular and influential that there must be something wrong with him has been discussed well I think in this thread:
https://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,1352.msg7109.html#msg7109
Maybe it is a bit like the leaders of the NWO are sitting around and one of them says, "What are we going to do about all these smart, intellectual types who see right through our propaganda, and who know that the media is nothing but lies?", and another one says, "We'll give 'em Chomsky".
In fact, the Reagan administration was forced to create a major propaganda office, the Office of Public Diplomacy: it's not the first one in American history, it's the second, the first was during the Wilson administration in 1917. But this one was much larger, much more extensive, it was a major effort at indoctrinating the public. The Kennedy administration never had to do that, because they could trust that the population would be supportive of any form of violence and aggression they decided to carry out.
[Chomsky's tone seems characteristically dogmatic and assertive, which is all very well if he has his facts right.]
- Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power NY: New Press, 2002. Page 2. (This and the following quotes are all from discussions with Chomsky at Rowe, Massachusetts in 1989.)

There are several other unflattering references to Kennedy in the first ten pages:

For instance, compare two Presidential administrations in the 1960s and 1980, the Kennedy administration and the Reagan administration. Now, in a sense they had a lot in common, contrary to what everyone says. Both came into office on fraudulent denunciations of their predecessors as being wimpish and weak and letting the Russians get ahead of us - there was a fraudulent "missile gap" in the Kennedy case, a fraudulent "window of vulnerability" in the Reagan case. Both were characterized by a major escalation of the arms race, which means more international violence and increased taxpayer subsidies to advanced industry at home through military spending. Both were jingoist, both tried to whip up fear in the general population through a lot of militarist hysteria and jingoism. Both launched highly aggressive foreign policies around the world - Kennedy substantially increased the level of violence in Latin America; the plague of repression that culminated in the 1980s under Reagan was in fact largely a result of his initiatives.
- page 1.
So for example Kennedy could invade Cuba and launch the world's to-date major international terrorist operation against them - which went of for years, probably is still going on. He was able to invade South Vietnam, which he did after all: Kennedy sent the American Air Force to bomb and napalm South Vietnam and defoliate the country, and he sent troops to crush the peasant independence movement there.
- page 2.

Operation MONGOOSE. Right after the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt failed, Kennedy launched a major terrorist operation against Cuba [beginning November 30, 1961]. It was huge [. . .] and it was totally illegal. I mean, international law we can't even talk about, but even by domestic law it was illegal, because it was a C.I.A. operation taking place on American territory [. . .] it involved blowing up hotels, sinking fishing boars, blowing up industrial installations, bombing airplanes. This was a very serious terrorist operation. The part of it that became well known was the assassination attempts - there were eight known assassination attempts on Castro. A lot of this stuff came out in the Senate Church Committee hearings in 1975, and other parts were uncovered through some good investigative reporting.
- page 8.

No, they [the Russians] didn't react [to the US raising the national security alert level to the second highest level]. See, we would have seen if they'd reacted, and Kennedy probably would have shot off the missiles.
- pages 9-10.

So these quotes probably seem far off the mark in regards to an accurate portrayal of Kennedy and his motives, but at the same time Chomsky presents OSIT pretty good descriptions of how the media works:

Well, if you look at these larger media outlets, they have some crucial features in common. First of all, the agenda-setting institutions are big corporations; in fact, they're mega-corporations, which are highly profitable - and for the most part they're linked into even bigger conglomerates. And they, like other corporations, have a product to sell and a market they want to sell it to: the product is audiences, and the market is advertisers. So the economic structure of a newspaper is that is sells readers to other businesses. See, they're not really trying to sell newspapers to people - in fact, very often a journal that's in financial trouble will try to cut down its circulation, and what they'll try to do is up-scale their readership, because that increases advertising rates. So what they're doing is selling audiences to other businesses, and for the agenda-setting media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, they're in fact selling very pfivileged, elite audiences to other businesses - overwhelmingly their readers are members of the so-called "political class," which is the class that makes decisions in our society.
- page 14.

Well, essentially in Manufacturing Consent what we were doing was contrasting two models: how the media ought to function, and how they do function. The former model is the more or less conventional one: it's what the New York Times recently referred to in a book review as the "traditional Jeffersonian role of the media as a counter-weight to government" - in other words, a cantankerous, obstinate, ubiquitous press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningful control over the political process. That's the standard conception of the media in the United States, and it's what most of the people in the media themselves take for granted. The alternative conception is that the media will present a picture of the world which defends and inculcates the economic, social and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic economy, and who therefore also largely control the government. According to this "Propaganda Model," the media serve their societal purpose by things like the way they select topics, distribute their concerns, frame issues, filter information, focus their analyses, through emphasis, tone, and a whole range of other techniques like that.
- page 15.

Well, I once asked another editor I know at the Boston Globe why their coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is so awful - and it is. He just laughed and said, " How many Arab advertisers do you think we have?"
- page 22.
For people to call it "conspiracy theory" is part of the effort to prevent an understanding of how the world works, in my view - "conspiracy theory" has become the intellectual equivalent of a four-letter word: it's something people say when they don't want you to think about what's really going on.
- page 26.

On the idea of the power elite, several Amazon customer reviews of C. Wright Mills The Power Elite (2000 edition) also recommend books by G. William Domhoff, author of Who Rules America: The Triumph of the Corporate Rich (2013), The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America (1990), The Bohemian Grove and other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness (1974) and other titles.

The 2000 edition of C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite has a new afterword by Alan Wolfe which is mostly readable in the Amazon "Look Inside" preview. The afterword takes some issues with how static the elite is considered to be, pointing out that the list of top 40 biggest companies has changed over the decades, with Wall Mart and some computer tech companies now taking high places (non-existent in the 1950s), and General Motors falling down the ranks: _http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Elite-Wright-Mills/dp/0195133544/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412849674&sr=8-1&keywords=wright+mills+power+elite)
The policy-making elites of the U.S. were, and remain, captives of a small coterie of cult-like groups such as the CFR; they engineeered the destuction of our industrial base and the handing over of advanced technology to the murderous Chinese regime. (Obama is at this moment blubbering about "human rights" for the Egyptians shortly after groveling before the Chinese dictator, who just tossed Nobel Peace Prize winner Lu Xiaobo into a dungeon for speech crimes). Books that ignore this reality are either by operatives of these elites or by lap dog academics who look to curry favor with them (get a ticket to "the club" like the globalist cheerleader Thomas Friedman).

The best alternatives are the works of G.William Domhoff, who authored the first political science paper ever written about the CFR in 1976 (the other poli scis told him the CFR was a private organization and thus not relevant to poli sci!). Domhoff actually got a job as a waiter at the Bohemian Grove as part of his research. Watch out for academics who assign reading lists loaded up with the likes of Mills/Chomsky/Zinn(sky), they are studies in irrelevance (Chomsky actually called the CFR a "nothing" organization and Zinn stated he saw no reason to further examine the 9/11 Commission's farcical report).
- from an Amazon customer review, by Mark T. [Although Domhoff himself on his website also seems to disagree with a conspiratorial view of power - _http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/theory/conspiracy.html]
 
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