Being and Politics

The ancient discipline I'm studying developed over time and was fully formed over a thousand years before James Watt lit the first fire under the boiler of his first steam engine, initiating the modern industrial age, an era of incredible productivity, horrible destructiveness, and an utter absence of introspection and self-knowledge.

The ancient Indian sages visualized the human being as a multi-layered organism, with its successive depths of being nested inside the superficial body, as the successively smaller Russian nesting dolls are enclosed within one another. The human body encloses its vital functions (pranamaya) -- breath, digestion, the heartbeat, and so forth. Inside that is the mental body of thought and the intellect, which in its turn encloses the body of the personality and ego. The deepest aspect of the human, beyond the ego, is the anandamaya -- the heart and soul.

Obviously, the study of politics and history engages us at the third level of our beings, that of thought, intellect, and the mental activities involving apprehension. And here again, consulting the ancient Indic sages leads to contemplation of another suite of five -- the five modes of mental apprehension. Patanjali listed them as understanding, error, imagination, deep sleep, and memory. In our own study of politics and history, only four of these modalities ever come into play, since deep sleep hasn't been part of anyone's political repertoire since Strom Thurmond died.

In understanding politics (or deliberately misunderstanding them, as the case may be), we try to understand the evidence of our senses and of faithful testimony. Failure to do so leads only to error. Likewise, we try to bring to our analyses a true assessment of accurately-related historical events. Misrepresenting history, or imagining it differently than what it actually was, leads to erroneous, false, or deliberately dishonest conclusions.

Looking at the last 100 years of American history, two things stand out.

There have been two world-shattering, global economic crises in the last century, both of which had their origins in this country. Both were caused by a class of American speculators whose greed and hysteria verged on psychosis, and whose incapacity for introspection or insight rendered them blind to any aspect of reality except immediate cash profit. Their tendency to sell any assets they acquired as quickly as possible, pocketing the difference between the purchase price and the sale price, indicates that they knew they were embarked on a criminal enterprise.

The enormous mountains of debt generated by both these episodes led to a sudden, catastrophic shrinking of the money supply, and subsequent collapse of demand for goods and services which people could no longer afford, at which point workers engaged in the production of those goods and services lost their jobs, further fueling the downward cycle.

Anyone looking for another cause for the present crisis or the disaster of the 1930's is guilty of either intentional or unintentional dishonesty (the latter is sometimes called "denial"), and is to be neither believed nor trusted by anyone who has any interest in truth, honesty, or understanding.

Likewise, the last 60 years especially have seen an increasing tendency for the U.S. government to engage in invasions of foreign countries. Over time the reasoning put forward to justify this aggression, which now appears continuous and perpetual, has gone from questionable, to weak, to duplicitous, to ridiculous. Behind this habit of aggression are the enormous standing U.S. military establishment headquartered in the Pentagon, and its umbilically-connected offspring, the corporations and industries engaged in war production and war profiteering.

These two sources of mischief must be addressed and remedied if we're to progress as a nation. That is to say, the possibility of any political progress depends on this.

Before we can solve our problems, we need to accurately and (especially) honestly assess their origin. This is exactly what most of the people talking about politics in this country, from professional pundits to "the man on the street" seek to avoid, and I no longer have anything to say to them.