JR'S Free Thought Pages
No Gods ~ No Masters
~ No Bullshit
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JR'S Free Thought Pages |
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What is Enlightenment and Why Did it Fail The Dumb and Dumber Capitalist Crapification of the World By JR, August 4, 2025 Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Denis Diderot Scepticism is the first step towards truth - Denis Diderot The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits – Albert (Big Al) Einstein
In his 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?” German philosopher Immanuel Kant effectively summed up the basic idea thus: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” The emergence of the Age of Enlightenment (roughly 1685-1800) was an era of positive thinking about life liberated from the shackles and tyrannies of church and state domination, bringing people face to face with new realities of community, solidarity, real democracy and justice rarely if ever before considered. According to Kant (1724-1804), “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his nonage.” Nonage he construed as not caused by lack of intelligence but by self-inflicted “lack of determination and courage to use that resolve without another’s guidance.” He challenged the people: “Dare to know!” Hence for Kant Enlightenment is the capacity and courage to think critically and independently, to resist tradition, convention or authority as sources of wisdom and knowledge.He clearly asserts that the immaturity and credulity of our intellects is intimately bound to taking instructions from those in authority who may or may not be an authority – in anything. [1] This is particularly evident within our anti-intellectual greed ridden profit driven gangster capitalist cabals that have created an environmental and cultural wasteland of marketing useless crap and the lickspittle political pimps who enable the mafia banks, financial predators, rapacious corporations and other criminal entities. You realize this when you are about to cut your finely manicured lawn and the first disgusting sight that offends your eyeballs is a massive coiled mound of dog shit, indicative of not only a decline of intelligence, civility and decorum but of decency and minimalist ethical behaviour characteristic of capitalism. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the desecration and destruction of the earth’s ecosystems and out of control species extinction that includes even insects. With IQs in free fall, humans (aka homo saps) continue to copulate and create undisciplined kids but they will soon be on the extinction list as well. Kant promoted the notion of having the freedom and courage to use your own reason, to think for yourself!, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle cry of the Enlightenment. It was articulated by Kant in his famous 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?” Obstacles that can stand in our way in achieving maturity which Kant meant thinking for ourselves and include the individual, politics, society and culture. These are problems that concern academics as much as anyone else: In a letter to his sovereign Kant declared freely that he believed Rousseau to be correct in saying that rulers only tolerate those intellectuals who are happy to simply “adorn our chains with flowers” as many do in blindly accepting capricious authority. The primary problem lies in motivating and teaching people to learn how to thing logically and critically, dispense with intellectual immaturity and learn how to thing for yourself. This does not come naturally in childhood although there are anomalies, children with an insatiable curiosity and desire to know. Sadly, most people have the curiosity and intellect of a barnacle. The officer orders the solider, “Do not argue, stand at attention and recite the national anthem and oath of allegiance to the authority of the state. The Priest declares, do not argue with logic, simply have faith and believe! Kant attacked the various dogmas, allegiances, deadening cultural norms and hegemonies which are shackles of our minds, creating a form of what one might call brain rot. The steady bombardment of opinion and information may or may not be fact or genuine knowledge. The ongoing Scientific Revolution which seriously began during the seventeenth century (c. 1500-1700) in Europe beginning with Copernicus (1493-1543), Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and Pierre Laplace (1749-1829) precipitated a momentous transformative learning curve for humankind. Humanist philosophers, most of whom dispensed with gods and the supernatural, such as to name just a few: Francis Bacon, Voltaire, David Hume, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Leonhard Euler, Baron d’Holbach, Jean Meslier, and of course Immanuel Kant were at the forefront of this movement to freedom, justice, reason, scepticism, logic and empiricism. Combined with these icons of the Enlightenment are the rejection of arbitrary authority, credulity, religion and other endless superstitions which unfortunately are still with us causing widespread stupidity, ignorance and brain rot. Just watch the cultural wasteland of TV programming and its brain dead marketing depicting humans and their badly behaved children as out of control idiots combined with the mind numbing lotteries and gambling on pro sports with their cell phone. Sadly we are currently locked into a brain dead period posthumous anti-enlightenment, illogic, anti-intellectualism and a rerun of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism. The liberalism that was promoted by men such as Kant, John Stuart Mill and as late as the 1970s liberals such as John Rawls in his book “A Theory of Justice” and the respected Canadian liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) has during the past four or five decades become a rotting corpse. Education, science, logic, truth, critical thought and knowledge as valuable ends have been lost in a postmodern epistemic relativism, widespread credulity, superstition and conflation of fact and opinion. Moreover we are living on a finite overpopulated planet combined with a systemically corrupt infinite gangster capitalist growth model that is on the verge of economic and ecosystem collapse. The endless privatization of public services and BBBB iterations (Boom, Bubble, Bust and Bailout), financial parasitism called “neo-liberalism” is teetering on another economic meltdown of the algorithmically manipulated so-called “free market” which is a farce. In the modern capitalist West, accounts of Buddhism are solidly optimistic, an odd stance given the deep pessimistic origins of Buddhist philosophy and teaching. Most of these false conceptions focus on opaque positive thinking themes such as “mindfulness”, hope and optimism pap, faith in despotic deities and generally hypocritical ecological concern for all life forms but typically void of enlightenment values such as critical thinking, wisdom, compassion and the ethical life. Money and profit before all else and self-serving world views are the norms in our immoral pervasive capitalist immoral doctrines, creating an impossible environment for ethics and civilized behavior. Moreover, the capitalist world view is very remote from the Buddha’s own teachings as found in the Pali Canon and other Buddhist writings. Like his Indian contemporaries, the Buddha (c. 6th century BCE) described the lives of “unenlightened drones” like you and I, in grim terms – “burning” with the “fires” of hatred, greed, and self-delusion, feeding “suffering, anguish, and disaster”. Unenlightened existence is compared to being trapped in a whirlpool, treadmill or like a dog chained to a post desperately trying to escape. Existence, the Buddha taught, is suffering, since anxiety, “grasping-desire” and disappointment cannot be removed from our ignorant and delusional forms of life. Worse, all unenlightened people are corrupted by “canker, defilements”, and failings of all kinds. For the Buddha, unenlightened human existence is full of vile characteristics such as fear, greed, envy and endless acquisitiveness, conflict and war, also for profit of privileged elites which rarely if ever do the dirty work of mutilation and death. During World War II, to cite one horrific example, Russia suffered 27 million casualties, mostly the working classes, peasants and civilians as the well-off, commanding officers and rich industrialists were safe in their homes. This has been the case throughout the history of war which American decorated war hero Major General Smedley Butler referred to as ”rackets”. The Buddha also responds to the optimistic thought that enlightenment, and hence release, are possible. For most of us though, enlightenment is a dim and distant prospect and the long, hard path to it demands degrees of moral principle, caring for all life forms, commitment, compassion and sacrifice very few possess. Indeed, the Buddha is clear that enlightenment is exceptionally rare. Most of us, therefore, remain trapped within forms of life dominated by anxiety and craving exacerbated by the vile dogmas of capitalist avarice, desire, frustration and ignorance – “taints and wrong views” which intensify one another in a “fire” without end. The Buddha also accepted the optional pessimistic conviction that the moral and spiritual state of the world will deteriorate over time, the Buddha will be forgotten, his Dharma (teachings) distorted, and the Sangha monastic community and solidarity will descend into corruption and disorder: a dire result the Buddha called ‘the death of the Dharma’. These values such as the Buddhist sanctity of all life haven’t totally disappeared but are rare indeed. In his Two Faces of Liberalism, John Gray argues that a variety of political and social arrangements can favor tolerance towards what J S Mill called “experiments in living” that included socialism and anarchism. For this reason, we ought to value liberalism as covering a philosophical basis as perhaps approaching the ideal of tolerance and freedom more broadly than any other political philosophy. Liberalism is not necessarily, and at least for me, should not be about promoting a minimal state or any state at all, so much as attempting to remove those barriers to the full flourishing of the individual which inhibit so many lives in our grossly unjust, undemocratic and especially economically unequal societies. The problem with the state is its existence protects wealth and power, backed up by police, the infamous prison systems and even the military if requited. The United States of America for example calls itself a “democracy”. In consideration of the fact that it has 4% of the global population and yet incarcerates 25% of that very same global population speaks volumes against the claim to being a democracy however broadly defined. Esteemed Canadian liberal economist 6 feet 9 inch John Kenneth Galbraith taught at Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge in addition to being active in the Democratic Party in the United States when it could be described a genuine liberal political party. He served in the FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ administrations while writing several influential books. He was highly critical of political Conservatism referring it to an ideology of anti-enlightenment values, greed and authoritarianism in concert with Ayn Rand’s infamous oxymoronic book called “The Virtue of Selfishness”. [2] Galbraith believed that uncontrolled capitalism (aka neo-liberalism), especially the giant corporations and predatory banks required prudent regulation to diminish the damage of the out-of-control greed and power they inflict on society. Always a realist, he was more than aware of the ludicrous capture of regulatory agencies by the very companies that they were designed to regulate (the wolf guarding the hen house). Were he alive at the time he’d have been shocked at the disgraceful multi-trillion dollar government bailouts of mafia banks and criminal corporations following the global crash of 2007-09 that was caused by those very same banks and corporations; none were even prosecuted. They were granted “get out of jail free” cards, apparently “too big to fail” was the bullshit fed to the public by the lickspittle ass kissers in government. In his excellent book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump Corey Robin is a harsh cynical critic of political conservatism, depicting its systemic cynicism as essentially a justification for long-standing systemic power structures that can be traced back to theocracies and monarchies. The ideas are rigged by wealthy elites to defend present-day anti-democratic financial capitalist authoritarianism and hierarchies. In the early years of capitalism slave masters typically provided highly dubious reasons why slavery was necessary. After the slaughter of the Civil War in the US ostensibly fought over slavery was the racist policies of Jim Crow and many workplaces today which are only marginally better than slavery. I share a form of this cynicism because the empirical claims made by most sclerotic conservatives regarding human nature can’t be justified. With regard to capitalism only minor brief breakouts of any semblance of democracy arose only when there were threats from the political left such as the era following the Russian Revolution, the massive failure of corrupt bloated markets and the Great Depression. But the post World War II breakout of justice for the working classes was brief as by the 1980s those concessions were crushed, first by demolishing the trade unions. I also highly recommend a new book by Canadian MP Charlie Angus and his harsh but accurate critique of the reactionaries, criminal calcified conservatives and neo-fascist creeps who orchestrated the roll back called Dangerous Memory: The Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed. Here is the text of Chapter 9: The Crude Hard Facts that covers the nauseating 1980s which was the beginning of the far right wing onslaught, also highlighted by the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street (aka “Greed is Good”). The movie is child’s play in comparison to the world we now have created in 2025 with widespread corruption, gangster capitalist criminality, gambling on pro sports and UFC barbarism – and that’s just for starters – thanks especially to psychopaths from the 1980s such as Ronald Ray Gun, Margaret “There is no society” Thatcher and Lyin’ Brian “On the Take” Mulroney*. Chapter Nine from Charlie Angus’ new book: The Crude Hard Facts To be a punk in the early 1980s was to hate Margaret Thatcher. The decade was a time of larger-than-life political figures, but Thatcher stood larger than them all. In an era of defiant counter-revolutionaries—Reagan, Khomeini, John Paul—she was by far the most defiant. Thatcher treated those standing in her way as personal enemies—even those in her own party. She responded to the call for justice from the working class, racialized youth, and Irish nationalists with undisguised venom. And they hated her back. When the British SKA band the English Beat played their first Toronto show on October 3, 1980, every kid in the Masonic Temple boisterously sang along with the anthem “Stand down Margaret”—a call for the newly elected British prime minister to resign. It was the first in a long litany of punk songs denouncing Thatcher’s reign; no other politician has drawn anywhere near the cultural vitriol and rage. There was a multitude of songs about the “Iron Lady,” from the Poison Girls’ “Another Hero” (1981) to Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine” (1989). Elvis Costello promised to stand over the PM’s grave and “Tramp the Dirt Down” (1989), while indie rock band Hefner predicted that people would dance in the streets on “The Day That Thatcher Dies” (2000). In Canada, it would have been unthinkable to express such personal hate. Bruce Cockburn could accuse political leaders of not giving a flying fuck about the poor, but he didn’t mention any of them by name.1 This was Canada, after all. Real politics happened elsewhere. Canada and the UK seemed worlds apart in 1980, but ironically, Prime Ministers Thatcher and Pierre Trudeau were equally focused on the same issue: deciding who would reap the benefits from massive increases in oil production. Thatcher opted for privatization; Trudeau attempted to ensure that production benefited the Canadian people. They were radically different approaches, but both policies ended in roughly the same place: selling off the public interest, another destructive political tactic of the 1980s. Anthony Barnett writes that Thatcher’s economic “revolution” was only made possible by the huge oil revenues coming in from the North Sea oil fields. “Her ‘conviction’ would have been nothing but folly without the North Sea’s black gold. It was oil revenues that bankrolled the unemployment, the destruction of manufacturing, the high exchange rate, the termination of British coal mining, and the big-bang that turned London into a capital of global neo-liberalism.”2 In 1970, British Petroleum hit huge reserves of oil in the Forties Field of the North Sea. By the late 1970s, as the first revenues began to flow, it was apparent to Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan that the offshore rigs represented a once-in-a-century opportunity to resurrect economic and social life in Great Britain. But Callaghan wasn’t the one who would get to decide how that revenue was spent. On the eve of the 1979 general election, British labour unions launched a series of strikes that became known as the Winter of Discontent. This sank Callaghan’s pro-worker government and led to the election of the militantly anti-union Margaret Thatcher. When Thatcher came to power, the price of oil was a modest $13 a barrel. But the Iranian Revolution caused the price to jump to $39.50 a barrel.3 (This would be the equivalent of $150 a barrel in 2024.) It was a price jump that dwarfed the shock of the 1973 energy crisis and caused chaos in an economy already struggling with a recession. But it provided a spectacular windfall for Thatcher’s treasury, and was the key to the revolution she was about to unleash. At the time, the British media was focused on a series of race riots that had begun in Bristol in April 1980 and spread to cities across the island. Photos of young Black and white youth fighting police in the streets of Liverpool, Brixton, Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester captured the angry hopelessness of the inner cities and became iconic images of 1980s Britain. Oil revenues gave Thatcher the opportunity to invest in the inner cities to deal with the crisis of unemployment and alienation. Many British Conservatives urged her to take this approach. Consensus and solutions to Britain’s problems could be found, they argued. But Thatcher was not having it. She was determined to implement the shock doctrine of the Chicago School and tear down the foundations of the postwar welfare state. Her manifesto was blunt: “There is no such thing as society.”4 She was determined to promote individualism and self-interest over the common good. Like in the United States, the shock came quickly to the United Kingdom with the imposition of high interest rates and cuts to government programs. The nation tumbled into mass unemployment, but the economic crisis was only one of a multitude of problems confronting British society. In the infamous Maze Prison, prisoners from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began a series of hunger strikes that led to the harrowing deaths of ten young men. Compromises could have been reached to save their lives, but Thatcher was not going to blink. The needless cruelty of their deaths shocked people, and the global Irish Diaspora portrayed Thatcher as an unfeeling monster. To Conservative Party members who were increasingly concerned about her refusal to compromise, she was unwavering: “To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase ‘the U-turn,’ I have only one thing to say. You turn if you want to. This lady’s not for turning.”5 As 1982 dawned, some Conservative stalwarts were convinced Thatcher needed to be replaced. But then, in April 1982, the Argentine military junta launched a surprise invasion of the Falkland Islands. The ownership of the Falklands/Malvinas had been disputed ever since the British Empire took control in 1841. Conservative cabinet colleagues were worried that Thatcher’s bellicose response would lead to a military disaster. It seemed highly doubtful that the British navy could succeed halfway around the world against a well-armed enemy fighting in their own backyard. The Pentagon also predicted a humiliating defeat for the British.6 But Thatcher invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill and sent the Royal Navy to retake the islands. It could have gone either way, until the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano that drowned more than three hundred Argentine sailors. The British public was galvanized. Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands made her politically untouchable. She now brought the fight to the British working class. In 1984, Thatcher stared down the militant National Union of Mineworkers. What began as a fight over the closure of some depleted coal operations exploded into a total war between the trade unions and the British prime minister. By the time the strikes were over, an economic and regional rift had been driven into British politics that has never healed. A way of life for broad sections of England, Scotland, and Wales was systematically destroyed during the Thatcher years. During the 1980s, the once-mighty British coal industry shed 200,000 jobs, or nearly 90 percent of its workforce. And that was just the beginning. With the industrial unions in retreat, Thatcher rewrote labour laws to strip British workers of the ability to maintain the closed-shop system that secured union presence in the workplace. Worker precarity was now official state policy. But Thatcher’s real legacy was the way she squandered petroleum revenues. During her tenure, more than £70 billion flowed in from the North Sea rigs. She had the wealth to build a truly modern and inclusive state. Investments could have been made in the economically devastated towns of the north, where an entire generation of workers had been pushed to the margins. But she had no interest in upgrading hospitals, diversifying the economy, or fixing decaying infrastructure. Instead, the enormous oil wealth was given away in an orgy of winnings for speculators.7 By the end of Thatcher’s reign, the British treasury had nothing to show for the boom years as she systematically cut petroleum royalties down to nothing. She then sold off the public share in BP and Britoil. The public utility British Gas was sold off, as was British Telecom, in what was at the time the “largest privatization the world had ever seen.”8 British Airways was sold for £900 million. British Steel for £5 billion. Thatcher sold off public water utilities and a vast stock of public housing. These sales gave the illusion of robust government finances, but without reinvesting the funds, the public lost in the long term. Former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said that Thatcher’s economic vision amounted to little more than a “selling of the family silver.”9 Privatization was promoted as the means to promote greater investment in the private sector. An economic review in the Cambridge Journal of Economics notes that privatization was an “ideological” exercise that failed. During this frenzied yard sale of public assets, “the UK’s rate of gross investment by business was one of the lowest in the OECD.”10 The flush of oil money, coupled with huge tax cuts and the privatization of public utilities, created an overheated economy that resulted in the disastrous side effects of artificially high unemployment and low investment.11 At the end of Thatcher’s term, Britain had more unemployed people than when she came to power. But the wealth of those who benefited from the sell-off of public assets had skyrocketed. This was the so-called economic miracle of Thatcherism. Like Friedman, like Reagan, her “miracle” was to shift public wealth to the bank accounts of the emerging 1 percent while leaving public institutions weak and underfunded. She became a hero to an upcoming generation of young right-wing activists who believed the only role of government was to accelerate the accumulation of private wealth while reducing investments in public infrastructure. Thatcher’s decision to sell off the “family silver” came from a hardline ideological motivation. In Canada, a similar sell-off took place, but it started from a very different place. Where Thatcher pushed a privatized vision of resource development, the Trudeau government attempted to put in place “an energy program for the people of Canada.”12 At issue was the immense oil wealth of Alberta. The Canadian oil industry was largely run out of boardrooms in Houston. Nonetheless, Canadian taxpayers played a big role in supporting its expansion. When the industry expressed its wariness about sinking money into the Alberta tar sands, the federal government joined the provincial government of Peter Lougheed in using huge amounts of public money to build the infrastructure to make the tar sands viable. When the fledgling Syncrude oil sands operation looked like it would fail, the federal government stepped in with a 15 percent ownership stake.13 The Trudeau government put forth a plan to drive a pipeline to the Beaufort Sea to break the stranglehold of American control. The problem was that it ran through the environmentally sensitive Mackenzie Valley and the ecologically fragile Arctic waters. The pipeline faced fierce opposition from Indigenous communities, church groups, and civil society. When Frank Blair, president of Foothills Pipe Lines Ltd. of Calgary, went north to smooth things over, he was confronted by Dene chief Frank T’Seleie, who didn’t mince words. “You are the 20th-century General Custer,” he said. “You are coming with your troops to slaughter us and steal land that is rightfully ours. You are coming to destroy a people that have a history of 30,000 years. Why? For 20 years of gas? Are you really that insane?”14 The public backlash against the pipeline was so sustained that the project was shelved in 1977. Justice Thomas Berger, who was tasked to find a solution, reported that Canada needed to get serious about the obligation to undertake proper Indigenous consultation. For the first time, Canada’s petro-state agenda was blocked by Indigenous resistance. This was the first of many historic Indigenous wins that would redefine Canadian resource policy in the coming decades. Even with the failure of the Mackenzie Valley project, the Trudeau government was convinced that the oil fields of Western Canada could be developed to benefit the larger national interest. On October 28, 1980, finance minister Allan MacEachen stood in the House of Commons and announced the creation of the National Energy Program (nep) to “establish the basis for Canadians to seize control of their own energy future … [to] offer to Canadians, all Canadians, the real opportunity to participate … and to share in the benefits of [oil] industry expansion.”15 The nep limited the price that Canadian consumers could be charged for oil and natural gas while imposing an export tax on sales to the United States. A poll noted that 75 percent of the public supported government efforts to use state power and investment to increase Canadian ownership of the western oil fields.16 The government tasked the publicly owned company Petro-Canada with securing a larger Canadian stake in petroleum projects. This came in the form of a buyback clause giving Petro-Canada a 25 percent ownership stake in every project on federal Crown lands. Special tax incentives were put in place for any company that had more than 50 percent Canadian ownership to explore on federal lands. The response from the American oil giants was immediate. One oilman remembers that the morning after MacEachan’s speech, the oil companies in Alberta “just shut ’er down.”17 Companies like Exxon, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, Amoco, and Chevron suspended projects and froze investments that had been underway in the oil fields. Behind the scenes, Houston oil executives were working closely with the Reagan administration to send a message to Canada. Reagan made it clear that he wanted the nep “buried.” By August 1981, seven bills had been introduced to Congress to target Canada for economic retaliation.18 The nep was established as oil prices were at a peak, but oil production was overextended, and the world soon faced a major glut in production. By 1982, oil prices were falling globally. In Alberta, thousands of workers were laid off, leading to an exodus from the province. With mortgage rates at the already precipitously high rate of 15 percent, the shutdown of the oil sector caused a housing disaster that forced thirteen Alberta financial institutions into bankruptcy.19 The economic shock was never forgotten in Alberta, as successive right-wing governments reframed the larger economic crisis of the time as being caused by meddling from the federal government. Even forty years later, right-wing interests continue to use the Pierre Trudeau government’s intervention in the NEP to inflame regional alienation and conspiracies. Overlooked in this version of history is the role played by the corporate sector in putting an end to a nationalist and public interest focus on the Canadian economy. Their mouthpiece was the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), which had been recently established to advance corporate interests. The founding chairs were picked from Imperial Oil and Noranda Mines, a testament to the political muscle of Canada’s resource industries. In 1981, as the Friedman doctrine took hold in the United States and the UK, the BCNI hired an aggressive young conservative named Thomas d’Aquino to chart a more militant path for corporate Canada. D’Aquino’s lobbying efforts were immense, amounting to what many felt was the construction of a parallel government. Business writer Peter C. Newman described him as the “Prime Minister in waiting.”20 D’Aquino was determined to get the federal government out of the way of capital. Challenging the Trudeau government’s stumble over the nep was a crucial first step. He then began to push for a free trade agreement that would limit Canada’s ability to set a national agenda for the economy. In 1981, d’Aquino’s free trade message was still considered too radical for any of Canada’s political parties, but the times were dramatically changing. In 1982, as unemployment in Canada ran between 13 and 19 percent, Prime Minister Trudeau held a series of “fireside chats” where he laid out what he considered to be the new realities of the Canadian economy. Gone was the nationalist talk of using government economic policy to build an independent resource strategy. Instead, he spoke of the “tough new world of competition” and the need for Canadians to focus on the emerging global economy.21 As activist Tony Clarke writes, “Trudeau’s ‘sermonettes’ [as the Globe and Mail dubbed them at the time] had sent a signal about economic policymaking in Canada for the eighties … it was becoming clear that the interests of capital would predominate over labour and other sectors of society in the future. These trends signified the dawn of a new corporate agenda in the eighties.”22 The 1980s counter-revolution had arrived in Canada, and d’Aquino’s parallel government was in charge. So where are we, forty years from Thatcher’s privatization rush and Trudeau’s nep? In the 1980s, the long-standing belief that government should have a say in how resources are developed and services are delivered was soundly trashed. With the nep dead, successive Canadian governments followed the Thatcher road map of selling off the public stake in our petroleum resources. At the same time, the government provided billions in public money to sustain the expansion of the Fort McMurray tar pits, even though they have been identified as the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive petroleum source in the world.23 The only public stake that remains in the ownership of Canada’s oil fields belongs to communist China, as the Harper government approved two state-owned Chinese companies taking a 16 percent stake in Canada’s Syncrude operations.24 Attempts by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to rein in the massive emissions increases from the Alberta tar sands have been heavily resisted by the oil lobby and western premiers who continue to exploit the forty-year-old alienation caused by the nep. Canada remains the only country in the G7 whose emissions have not decreased, despite our numerous international commitments to address the crisis of rising methane and CO2 emissions from oil and gas.25 In the UK, the ghosts of the 1980s returned to haunt the 2020s when the nation faced a massive energy crisis and families found themselves unable to pay their energy bills. The situation became so dire that former Prime Minister Gordon Brown mused about the need to bring the nation’s energy companies back under public control.26 Brown was just one in a chorus of voices pushing the Conservative government to rethink the privatized model as insufficient to protect public interest and need. The slow-moving hurricane of the 1980s has hit Britain with gale-force winds. References from Chapter 9: 1 Bruce Cockburn, “Call It Democracy,” 1980. 2 Anthony Barnett, “Thatcher and the Words No One Mentions: North Sea Oil,” openDemocracy, April 8, 2013, opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/thatcher-and-words-no-one-mentions-north-sea-oil/. 3 “Oil Tops Inflation-Adjusted Record Set in 1980,” New York Times, March 4, 2008, nytimes.com/2008/03/04/business/worldbusiness/04oil.html. 4 Interview with Women’s Own, September 27, 1983. 5 Stewart, Bang!, 59. 6 Stewart, Bang!, 146. 7 Giuliano Garavani, “Thatcher’s North Sea: The Return of Cheap Oil and the ‘Neo-Liberalisation” of European Energy,” Contemporary European History 33, no. 1 (December 2022): 1–16, doi./org/10.1017/S0960777322000686. 8 Stewart, Bang!, 380. 9 Stewart, Bang!, 385. 10 Kevin Albertson and Paul Stepney, “1979 and All That: A 40-year Reassessment of Thatcher’s Legacy on Her Own Terms,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 44, no. 2 (March 2020): 312–42, doi.org/10.1093/cje/bez037. 11 Garavani, “Thatcher’s North Sea.” 12 Government of Canada, “The National Energy Program,” 1980, 5, publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2016/rncan-nrcan/M23-12-80-4-eng.pdf. 13 James Wilt, “A Brief History of the Public Money Propping Up the Alberta Oil Sands,” The Narwhal, May 16, 2018, thenarwhal.ca/brief-history-public-money-propping-alberta-oilsands/. 14 “Mackenzie Valley Pipeline: 37 Years of Negotiations,” cbc News, December 16, 2010, cbc.ca/news/business/mackenzie-valley-pipeline-37-years-of-negotiation-1.902366. 15 Government of Canada, “National Energy Program.” 16 Amelia M. Kiddle, ed., Energy in the Americas: Critical Reflections on Energy and History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2021), 228. 17 Licia Corbella, “Imagine If the nep Had Never Happened,” Calgary Herald, October 28, 2020, calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/corbella-imagine-if-the-national-energy-program-never-happened. 18 Clarke, Behind the Mitre, 41. 19 Corbella, “Imagine if the nep Had Never Happened.” 20 Peter C. Newman, “A Man of Influence,” Canadian Business, October 12, 2009. 21 Clarke, Behind the Mitre, 22. 22 Clarke, Behind the Mitre, 29. 23 Melissa Denchak, “The Dirty Fight Over Canadian Tar Sands Oil,” nrdc, December 31, 2015, nrdc.org/stories/dirty-fight-over-canadian-tar-sands-oil. 24 “Chinese Government Will Use Nexen’s Marketing Arm to Suppress Bitumen Prices, Warns Report,” Alberta Federation of Labour, December 10, 2012, afl.org/chinese_government_will_use_nexen_s_marketing_arm_to_suppress_bitumen_prices_warns_report. 25 Peter Zimonjic, “Liberal Government Set to Miss 2030 Emissions Targets, Says Environment Commissioner Audit,” CBC News, November 7, 2023, cbc.ca/news/politics/environment-comissioner-audit-emissions-charging-stations-1.7020689. 26 Gordon Brown, “We Must Tax Profits Now, Freeze Energy Prices and If Necessary Bring Suppliers into the Public Sector,” The Guardian, August 10, 2022, theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/10/tax-profits-freeze-energy-prices-bring-suppliers-into-public-sector-gordon-brown. ----------------------- Summing Up a FUBAR World A brief note of unavoidable pessimism on the future of greed ridden cancer capitalism and a dubious future on our grossly overpopulated increasingly unenlightened zombie world that believes technology will save us. Albeit a minority, there are enlightened informed people out there who know the game is over and that the elites and Wall Street/Bay Street scum are just pillaging whatever is left. The anarchists have the right ideas but how do you create a complete paradigm shift in thought and value. People are completely indoctrinated into the consumer acquisitive culture where the only thing that matters is the latest I-pad or dumb phone. The current infinite growth model of priority profit is unsustainable on a finite planet with every species but the homo sap on the extinction list but most of the deluded dunderheads and oppressed 99% are still locked into the paradigm that will soon explode in their faces. The stock market is a cruel joke, fuelled by repetitive booms-busts and bailouts combined with privatization and plunder of everything on the contaminated planet. Don’t you just love the ludicrous jargon of these financial parasites? Who came up with “too big to fail” and "quantitative easing"? Orwellian psycho-babble for " printing billions and handing over to Wall Street banking mafia to inflate a phoney manipulated bloated stock market. Of course corporations are still making shitloads in profits, primarily on the back of wage slaves who now toil for peanuts with Skip the Dishes, Door Dash and UBER. It cannot and will not last. Who the fuck will buy their products with wages in a free fall? If I were a young person today I'd be a revolutionary like the great Che Guevara, on the streets and raising holy hell. When will these dumb fucks wake up? Most are still living at home with Mommy and Daddy while they work at Walmart or MacDonald's while paying hundreds of thousands in tuition toward a worse than useless MBA and PhD in underwater basket weaving. We are experiencing the corporatization, marketing and commercialization of everything, including ourselves. It's like a river of mind destroying post modern toxic sludge polluting our minds and violating our privacy. Rarely a day goes by without an annoying telemarketing call, despite call blocking and a refusal to answer any phone call, unless it's a recognizable name on the call display. And our kids are lobotomizing themselves with endless useless technology such as i-pads and i-phones. Do these kids ever read a book? I doubt it. Business, advertising and marketing are becoming the bubonic plagues of the 20th and 21st centuries, as our lives and minds are endlessly invaded and debased by telemarketers and semi-literate pitch men. Television has been debased cultural wasteland for decades now, just hundreds of more channels to violate your psyche and destroy your intellect. Consider professional sports which have become as boring as mining for belly button lint as even gambling on pro sports has been legalized and now marketed ad infinitum. Pro Hockey is about as exciting as watching paint dry. No personalities in the game any longer, they're just robotic businessmen. Even the stupid fights are staged which reminds me of Don Rickles’ famous jibe: "I went to the fights last night and a hockey game broke out." Have any of you ever watched any of this barbarism called UFC (?) whereby two guys kick the shit out of one another in a cage with seemingly no rules, blood splattering all over the place until one guy lays there like a zombie, beaten to a pulp? I cannot watch that shit for more than a few seconds. I It merely another example of how far we've moved toward the dominance of spectacle and the moral abyss. As is the case with several plant and animal species becoming extinct each day, time for reflection, tranquility and privacy are quickly diminishing. Corporate logos and slogans appear anywhere there is an open slot of space-time and there's a banality of similitude no matter where you go in the world. For example, try watching a professional baseball game on TV as every inch of available ground and fencing is plastered with a corporate logo. At every available opportunity during the game there is a marketing intrusion: this pitching change is brought to you by Ford, the hitting stats are brought to you by Viagra, the seventh inning stretch is brought to you by God ("God Bless America, blah, blah") and even before the game begins one is forced to endure the mind bending banality of national anthems or military drills (sponsored by your government's current imperialistic war). If you are a member of the elite 1% you might even be able to afford a cheap $300 seat for a live game and watch it from a seat where you need an oxygen supply. For the .01% there are $300,000 a year sky boxes, complete with champagne, caviar and valet service. For those working class peons who grew up passionately playing any of these sports and can still tolerate the multi-millionaire prima donna robots who play them, the cost of attending a live game is prohibitive. Marketing has become so perverse that some desperate people have resorted to selling the space on parts of their bodies to corporate marketing, having tattooed their foreheads with company logos or promotional mottos. Why the fuck would anyone mutilate their already hideous anatomies with nose rings and tattoos? Stupid! Even the building in which the sport is played (often built with public funds) is sponsored by some mega-corporation: General Motors Place, Microsoft Coliseum, Met Life Stadium, Skip the Fucking Dishes, Dipstick Door Dash, etc, etc. Getting old and croaking isn’t such a bad prospect after all... This and a whole lot more are merely additional ugly factums among hundreds of thousands of others that point us to the unavoidable conclusion of the decent into depravity and the endless corruption of the kamikaze capitalist fascist police state while continue to live by comforting lies and palliatives. As Garry Leech says in his book "Capitalism: A Structural Genocide" and haunting video, "What are we waiting for, Let the Revolution Begin". Yeah it's just another ugly revelation among hundreds of thousands of others that point us to the unavoidable conclusion of the decent into depravity and endless corruption of the fascist corporatist surveillance state. We continue to live by comforting lies, conspiratorial fantasy and drug induced idiocy. The interesting thing about current globalized monetary policy is that, by buying up the toxic waste of banking toxic waste past and present (via Quantitative Easing or Q), as well as US Treasury bills and other government instruments of dubious “value”, the Federal Reserve Bank and Bank of Canada (once public entities) now controlled by the Mafioso Bankers is essentially pouring billions and trillions in cash through the major international banking institutions into the financial markets. Banks make billions every quarter gouging their customers with outrageous fees, trillions in bailouts for following their criminal scams, usurious interest rates on loans and credit, laundering dirty money. I personally have been involved in six (yeah the dirty half dozen) class action suits in the past 25 years and received basically nothing in compensation from the slick sacks of dog shit lawyers at RBC and TD. This and a whole lot more is why the rise in the already bloated market bears little or no relation to the economy as seen at street level by workers, pensioners and small businessmen. Add to the disconnect from wealth production (since the QE policy simply prints virtual money that eventually ends up in the financial markets), there is the usual situation which, following every recession, there are fewer workers re-hired due to technological advances and workplace “adjustments” which will be exacerbated by the next scam – AI.. Sound like science fiction or the Matrix? Well, it does indeed… but the difference is that this is reality which most of the unthinking masses have no understanding. However, despite the massive market bubble, there is so much money in so few hands that actually spending it is likely impossible; there are not enough durables and virtual elements available to prime the economy in light of the fact that when you impoverish the working and middle classes, the only persons able to ramp up buying are the super wealthy multi-millionaires and billionaires - too few to matter -especially if credit is not extended unconditionally to the lower orders as it is now. The overvalued bloated DJIA (Thieves of Wall Street) and TSE (Thieves of Bay Street) stock market averages are in fact the banks that earn billions every quarter by obscene fees, interest rates for gullible financially shackled consumers and the right to print endless money. Insider trading such as stock buybacks which were once deemed “insider” trading is one of the biggest swindles inflicted by banks throughout the vampire world. Never take the advice of these slimy geek parasites on business news networks like BNN (Bullshit News Network) who peddle stocks at the apex of their graphs. What I see emerging is a feudal system of 0.01% of the global population about 500,00 to 1,000,000 extremely rich assholes like Leon Skum, Bill Fucking Gates (now the biggest owner of US farm land) and Jeff Bozos who simply use the remaining wealth-creating sectors as a bank (hence the buoyancy of the financial markets) and shell out money to keep revolution from occurring by finding vast armies and creating sectors of virtual employment at the lowest possible pay levels… jobs that may or may not create real wealth (real wealth is marked by improvement in the production and use of energy surpluses which free up resources for non-essential activities of organic beings such as humans. With so much money in existence, there is – counter-intuitively – little inflation, except where it counts in the third world for energy to run equipment and produce food and of course food itself. Those elites, oligarchs the relatively rich who were lucky enough to have high paying careers in post WW II and good pensions do not suffer this problem much, but the third world does since the bulk of their wage slave income goes to housing, food and other staples. So, from the false freedoms of the liberal era of unions, social security, government healthcare, pensions, unemployment insurance and sundry (false because we were still slaves) are just treated better because our slave revolts were costly, we will move back to full-on techno-feudalism as Greek economist Yannis Varoufakis calls the capitalist global economy which never really left us. This is true at least if you ever worked in regular employment and it is clear that there was never any freedom if you wanted to be paid according to actual merit as opposed to how the intellectual mediocrities populated by bureaucrats, bosses and management (what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”) thought you ought to be paid. As with all other regimes throughout history the entire global socio-economic system is unjust, undemocratic and a blatant fabrication – hot steaming bovine excrement. Notwithstanding the fact that modern “liberals” and the typical sclerotic conservative would claim without a shred of evidence that such a view is predicated on not accepting human nature which, as we know from the fables of the Christian Religion of reward and punishment called Heaven and Hell that they call EVIL The key now is to destroy the entire global capitalist structure before it is too late and start over. We must reject all forms of hierarchy, bureaucracy and authoritarianism as we progress toward freedom which is the only genuine “free enterprise” (false euphemism for capitalist greed) available in the end. Then there is the dark side of most technology with AI the next big thing that will turn us into robots and zombies. Perhaps Ray Kurzweil is right - and I believe he is at least partially right - the world is leaping toward cyber-life anyway (hybrid machine-persons with machines eventually eliminating all organic matter over time. All that wonderful technology will prove to be just another form of slavery once our organic residuals are harnessed to silicon processing and virtual satisfaction; many scientists are actually worse than some of the no-nothing conservative know nothing politicians in our Bible thumping city of Chilliwack – as AI the new big intrusion with technocrats, engineers and scientists mindlessly promoting endless technological forms of intrusion into human decision making and this is not the act of encouraging technology as a decision-making tool as most reality fearing people (over 65% in the US alone) are already on mind altering drugs combined with their cell phone palliatives that they take to bed with them along with their gonad licking slobbering canines. Anyone old enough to have read Jacques Ellul warned of this closed system approach to progress in his somewhat flawed and outdated masterpiece The Technological Society (1954). Moreover, the deluded faith that technology is “progress” that will lead to the ultimate triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate that is becoming monopolized oligarchic elite of fat cat financial parasitic managers and con men is not only illusionary, but a global nightmare. Then there is AI. Real democracy is and always has been a farce and we are further from any semblance of it than at any time in history and when one considers the natural world is dying and your it’s not uncommon that your neighbour across the street is a full out psychopath, we are facing total illiterate dysfunction, free fall IQs, widespread ADHD and self-inflicted stupidity, chaos, mass paranoia from the corporatist surveillance police militarized state and ultimately- oblivion. Notes: [1] The battle against credulity which includes faith and hope and other delusions, are crucial to enlightened thinking. This doesn’t necessarily entail a wholesale rejection of belief, but rather scepticism in all things that are claimed without sufficient evidence and/or argument. Fact and opinion are not synonymous. Moreover, raw data and information in which we are deluged and bombarded endlessly with social media and the internet does not necessarily entail knowledge. People believe too easily such as belief in religion and other superstitions and supernatural gibberish. Most supernatural entities are not even defined coherently or conceptualized properly to even begin to believe in them. Who or what are heaven, hell, gods, angels, ghosts, goblins and demons – or the non-material “soul”, invented to justify “life after death” (a gross contradiction). In fact despite the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution about 85% of the global population continue to believe in world views that belong in the Dark Ages of the Medieval and Ancient Worlds. For me this indicates willed ignorance and stupidity. Read some Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky as cures against gullibility and faith. As the great mathematician and philosopher Russell once said: “One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.” In our anything goes capitalism combined with marketing bullshit and deceitful fabrications, credulity is a huge benefit for increased corporate profit. Do not follow Nike’s dumb slogan of “Just Do It”; instead, “Think First”. [2] I’ve never been able to find very little enlightenment regarding political conservatism, from its resistance to change, anti-enlightenment polemics, contempt for the poor and working classes and disdain for justice and real democracy. Most conservatives, other than many of the indoctrinated masses that have internalized their values, tend to be elitist, privileged and often wealthy, generally religious, authoritarian and typically adhere to only two rules: “might is right” and “what’s in it for me”? And why are so many conservatives willing to be bull shitted and cajoled into mindless patriotism, nationalism and support for fascism when threatened by the left and wave the flag for every war, none of which throughout history have ever been morally or legally warranted. Moreover, fascism as mentioned has always lurked within political conservatism and even right wing liberalism which even a few decades ago would be considered an oxymoron. But the neo-liberalism that replaced any modicum of uplift in traditional liberalism has aligned itself with the greed, exploitation and privilege of calcified conservatism and anything goes gangster capitalism which has become the calcified sclerotic standard for the 21st century. Conservatism is a right wing hierarchical/ oligarchic/aristocratic authoritarian political ideology for which I have never felt any attraction, particularly the mutant neo-con (focus on the “con”) “trickle down” mutation we have experienced over the past 40-45 years, culminating in the 2008 global financial, shameful bailouts of the financial and other corporate criminals responsible for the meltdown and apocalyptic dystopian economic disaster we are now facing coterminous with overpopulation, global heating, species extinction and environmental desecration for which conservatives and sell out liberals alike could give a rats ass. The philosophical justifications for such tyranny can be traced back to arch conservatives such as Edmund Burke who wrote a book condemning the bottom up Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité slogan of the French Revolution. Noam Chomsky who is invariably right on anything wrote a few years ago that: “There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term ‘conservatism’ can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country’s future.” Chris Hedges in his book The Death of the Liberal Class offers compelling arguments to the reasons for failure of classical liberalism that was epitomized in the works of philosophers such as John Stuart Mill in the 19th century and John Rawls in the 20th. Hedges’ book was written over ten years ago and the continued movement to the right wing and subsequent erosion of liberalism’s once held lofty ideas have reached the point at which it is barely distinguishable from calcified conservatism. Incidentally Hedges influential father was a liberal thinking Christian pastor who supported the civil rights movement, women’s rights and the rights of gays; Pulitzer prize winning journalist Hedges still refers to himself as Christian although has utter contempt for the Evangelical Christian right who he refers to as fanatics, charlatans and frauds. In an earlier book from 2008 called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America he exposes these ultra-conservative people as neo-fascist lunatics, a serious threat to any semblance or sliver of democracy that exists in the United States and who fantasize about re-establishing a global theocracy - taking us back to the pre-enlightenment pre-scientific Dark Ages when religion ruled.
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