What’s going on here ? (2)

1. Pragmatism versus ideology

I’m foremost a thinker and a painter And I want to make clear from the get go that painting does not happen in a void. You certainly withdraw to a certain extent from the societal noise. But the societal noise is never far away and it somehow always finds a way to creep back into your mind. So the mind is never really totally detached from what is going on in human affairs. And so, whatever the views of the artist about what art is all about, the fact of the matter is that the act of painting itself can’t avoid to be tainted by what is going on around the image maker. In other words art is not a think on itself. Art is an integral part of societal life. And once this idea is firmly ingrained in the mind “art for art’s sake” appears for what it truly is: an aberration.

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What this means, more broadly, is that the societal noise is permanently confronting the views that the mind believes in or the views that it elaborated over the past decades. Daily reality confronts indeed your closely held views and you are basically left with two strategies. Or you close your mind to the facts and focus on strengthening the belief that makes up your views. This is called following an ideological path. Or you adapt your views to the facts. This is called following a pragmatic path. I personally rejected ideologies in my youth and since then I strove to adapt my views to the facts while more broadly searching to understand how reality works.


Pragmatism means that you adjust your views to the present reality in order to ensure coherence in the process of your thinking. In other words injecting reality in the process of thinking coheres your ideas and erases the contradictions from the worldview that forms into the mind. This contrasts with the ideological path which rejects facts that contradict one’s worldview in order to keep coherence inside the belief system. In other words rejecting reality coheres your beliefs and erases the contradictions from the worldview shared by the members of the group you belong to.


What we discover here is that reality and belief both strengthen the worldview. The difference resides in whose worldview is being strengthened. Reality strengthens the worldview that is affirming in the mind of the individual who is searching to understanding the working of reality while belief strengthens the group worldview that is being shared by the individual with the members of the group he belongs to.


At this point of the reasoning we have to clarify the notion of individual or group worldview.


In tribal societies tribesman adhered to the animistic worldview of their tribe and had no inkling about a possible individual view of things. In the next historical era during the age of empires and kingdoms it has been observed that a religious worldview was being shared by all citizens within any given society. The same process was being observed in China but the individuals did not share a religious worldview they shared instead what is called ‘Chinese traditional culture’ which is composed of the late animist culture that was adopted by their original empire plus all the add-ons that had been stacked over it since then.


Things started to change in Europe with the advent of Early-Modernity when long distance merchants felt obliged to adhere to ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ in order to avoid going out of business. The reason of capital was contradicting the societal worldview of the time: catholic Christianity. Because of the totalitarian nature of the Christian institutions the adherence to ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ remained confined to the long distance merchants during the first centuries of Early-Modernity. But the vast richness that they accumulated soon fostered the envy of all and after 5-6 centuries this envy had spread to the whole body of Western societies. I mean everyone wanted to become rich and you discover that even the monks in the universities were under the spell of this envy of possessing material stuff which gradually drove academic research to venture out of the study of metaphysics in order to tinker with technological inventions in the hope of generating fortunes. In a next logical step researchers in the humanities integrated “the reason” that is at work within capital into a holistic system of thinking that came to be known as “rationalism”.


Rationalism systematically integrated reasoning about the facts into the tinkering with technological inventions and this process is what gave rise to what is known as science. In summary we discover that the emergence of science is the result of 3 forces:

1. the conversion by long distance merchants to “the reason that is at work within capital” proved to Western minds that the adherence to the reason of capital is what procures richness
2. envy and greed motivated the initial tinkering with technological inventions
3. rationalism systematically integrated the reasoning about facts into the craving to tinker with technological inventions which resulted in a technological explosion that gave way to the industrial revolution

But all this would not have been possible without the input by Christianity of the notion of the self into individual minds during what is called the dark ages. This was done in order to combat the traditional communalism of animist beliefs that was shared by people at large within the territories composing the Roman empire including Western Europe.


This sketch of societal evolution gives an overview about the passage from societally shared worldviews to an era of individualism that was open to the illusion of worldviews being based on the reasoning about facts by the individuals. But the fact that the individuals were given to reason about facts did not transform their reasoning into societally shared worldviews. The new governing elites, the intellectuals scientists and big capital holders, had thought that science would come to be shared by all after having shoveled antiquated religious beliefs in the garbage bin of history. This illusion was founded on a misunderstanding of what is a worldview and what is its role and this illusion persists till this very day in the minds of atheist scientists.


A worldview is a narrative that is being shared by all citizens of a given society. What counts here is “societally shared narrative”. Scientists and atheists attack religions because their narratives are not based on the observation of the facts and are thus not reflecting the truth. But but but… a “societally shared narrative” does not need to reflect scientific truth. Its only objective is to glue the minds of the citizens around a shared belief. The finality of a worldview has nothing to do with scientific truth. Its finality is to ensure the necessary societal cohesion so that societies can reproduce over the generations.


The couple rationalism-science maximized the potential of the reason of capital and this eventually resulted in:

1. a massification of the market with its counterpart consumerism that transformed the working of the minds of citizens into the present hyper- individualism that resulted in Western societal atomization
2. a complete control of the minds through the ideologies of neoliberalism in the economic field and postmodernism in the cultural field
3. in a context of Western atomized societies where the individuals feel they know better than anyone else these ideologies manipulate the minds which simply excludes the possibility of real individual deep thinking. The thinking is indeed imprisoned within these ideologies and nothing outside of its walls is attainable any longer.  And that’s why Late-Modern Western societies are transforming into dystopias. And so the idea, that democratic societies are a universal ideal of societal governance, is shown for what it really is: an ideological mirage...

At this point we understand how modern societies abandoned the traditional societal system of shared worldviews that fostered trust and enhanced societal cohesion and because science felt short on that plane the governing elite had only one recourse which was to trap their citizens:

1. a constant barrage of propaganda manipulates the minds into believing what the governing elites want their populations to believe
2. the mainstream media was made the mouthpiece of power by displacing real news by fake news
3. independent thinkers were banned from all media big platforms and relegated on the margins of the system
4. sprouting wild grass was systematically mowed down through repression by a judicial system that is at the service of big capital and its servants
5. any wild grass that escapes the judicial mowing is seen as presenting a risk of proving to observing eyes that TINA is a lie (TINA = Thatcher's “There Is No Alternative”) and so it must be eliminated by a police that has been militarized for the occasion

After this clarification about the notion of individual or group worldview let’s come back to reality and pragmatism.


The most urgent question nowadays is how to counter the 5 modalities, just mentioned, of the trap set by big capital and its servants to control the world population. Science, technology and consumerism, have handicapped the reach of all past ideological worldviews which have further been contaminated by power in order to participate in the enforcement of their trap. Reality and pragmatism are thus the only alternative left to those who want to counter the 5 modalities of this trap.


But we observe that, after practicing for decades the strategy of confrontation and adjustment of the mind to reality, our views are paradoxically strengthening into quasi-certainties that can easily petrify into a new ideological path. Pragmatism requires thus discipline in order to avoid falling into this new ideological trap. And the required discipline consists in keeping the minds open – to the fact that our life systems (habitat) form no more than a tiny ensemble in the whole universe which puts the truth about reality out of our reach – to the fact that we have to ensure the coherence of our thinking in order to possibly survive while minimizing our suffering and maximizing our pleasure inside this tiny ensemble – to the fact that to avoid falling in the trap of rationalizing petrified beliefs we have to avoid picking some facts at the exclusion of others.


This series of articles relates to this process of ‘confrontation of the mind to the present reality’ and ‘the resulting necessity to adjust our quasi-certainties’. Being a European, who lived for over a decade in the USA, and who lives presently in China my mind is particularly alerted – first by the intensification of “misunderstanding” between the societies of China and the USA – and secondly by the fact that, facing the contradictions related to the relations between China and the US, the rest of the world is starting to re-order its relations with those 2 countries.


These 2 facts are weighing heavily on the world’s systems of societal governance and on the formation of the future of human affairs. No doubt about that. But we are also forced to recognize today that something even more fundamental is at work than the contradictions affecting the governance-world of human affairs. Modern science has suddenly discovered that everything is interrelated. And so humanity is slowly forced to awake to this new perception of reality – that our species is not really the center of concern of what moves the whole universe – that our actions are backfiring into the 6th mass extinction of life on earth from which humanity is not immune – and that the governance-world of human affairs, what we might call civilization, is thus itself vulnerable today to collapse and extinction.


In other words we are living in a particularly dramatic time of transition from what the world is presently to what the world will be tomorrow. I call this the transition from Modernity to After-Modernity. And two factors tower over the landscape of this transition:

1. the contradictions affecting the ‘governance-world’ and its vulnerability to collapse through a financial crash followed by an economic depression that results in social upheaval which, I fear, the decision-makers in our system of governance will try to resist through war
2. the broader context of the mass extinction of life on earth and how this is going to impact the acceleration of the contradictions of the ‘governance-world’ until those systems of governance collapse

Those of us, who over the last decades have been observing the transformations taking place in the habitat of humanity and the adaptation of the ‘governance-world’, know in all certainty that from this transition will emerge a totally different world and that if humanity survives its numbers will nevertheless have dwindled to a small fraction of its present levels but there is also the real possibility that human life will go extinct.


The subject is immensely vast. Many articles and books are being published nowadays on limited segments of this changing reality. But what we generally miss is a pragmatic view that connects all the moving parts in the landscape of this transition in order to reach a holistic view of where we are heading. This creates a void that unfortunately is filled with a flow of propaganda by Western societal elites that individual minds experience difficulties to counter …


I do not pretend to have found the holy grail and to propose such a holistic pragmatic view. Writing, for me, is a way to clarify my own thinking. It imposes me to clarify the formation of my personal views about the present state of human affairs and how this impacts societal evolution as it enters the future and how this, in turn, impacts the artist in his image making. This whole process concludes with a text. What to do with it? I have two choices – or deleting it from my computer – or sharing it with those who might be interested by such an approach.


This text is not a scientific article to justify a financial grant or an academic position. It is more like a search for knowledge about the transition I talked about here. But what I just wrote implies that science and knowledge are completely different things. Let’s now examine what differentiates science and knowledge.




science versus knowledge


1. About their finality (capital surpluses versus human well-being)
For tens of thousands of years humanity considered knowledge as the product of a strategy whose finality was to increase human happiness by relieving the individuals from suffering. This contrasts with science that was conceived, in the recent centuries, as the product of a strategy to increase the profits of those who invest in financing scientific research and technological development.


2. About their nature (knowings versus knowledge)
Science is being financed by investors, or by institutions acting as their public servants, with the hope to return them profits. As such science is limited to the acquisition of “knowings” about very narrow segments of reality that are destined to help investors to reduce the costs of their actual productions or to develop totally new productions. Science is thus at the service of capital and its public servants.
In contrast the finality of knowledge is to ensure human well-being. Starting with tribal societies, along the entire span of societal evolution, men of knowledge strove to understand – the interactions between all the elements within their society’s habitat – the interactions of their societies’ habitat with the wider ensembles in the Universe. Viewed in this very particular sense knowledge relates to the understanding of the impact, of the universe as a whole and of the interactions between all the elements in the local habitat, on human society and its individual members.
The nature of science is quite different. Science functions as a service supplied to capital holders, or their representative corporations or the state institutions that are their guarantors, in order to allow them to increase their profits. Some scientists might consider, for reason of personal attachment to moral or other principles, that their role is larger and more noble but their research is nevertheless always financed or by capital holders or by their servants who expect returns on their investments. And if scientists want to address larger or more noble finalities than increasing the profits of their financiers they are forced to do it outside of the institutions receiving the grants that pay for their monthly wages. But then, fact is that, the nature of their work becomes estranged from the nature of science per se and their quest becomes more like a quest for knowledge.
In contrast to science the nature of knowledge is to uncover the impact on human well-being of – environmental and universal factors – and factors that are at work in the minds and bodies of the individuals. And the mastery by the mind, of the knowledge about how human well-being is affected by the interactions between all the elements in the local environment as well as in the larger ensembles, is considered to be the highest form of knowledge. It is called wisdom. And the reason why the man of knowledge strove to attain such a wisdom is because his societal mission was to render knowledge services to his fellow citizens in their search – to reduce their suffering – and to gain happiness. Succeeding in this knowledge mission furthermore helped to increase the cohesion of the group which means that the group was allowed to reproduce over the generations. Wisdom is thus the mastery to reduce the suffering of the individuals and to increase their happiness in order to ensure their ultimate goal which is to keep the group on a path of resilience.
Science does not care about societal resilience. It is not financed to care about it.


3. About the obligations they impose (no responsibility versus the precautionary principle)
The investors’ role is first and foremost to avoid the loss of their investment while the finality of their investment is primarily to realize a surplus. Corporate laws clearly state that the prime obligation of managers is to generate profits for the shareholders of their enterprise. And science is a service that helps to foster the generation of profit. While corporate law is mum about responsibilities for external damages caused by the activities of corporations the fact of the matter is that corporate history proves without a shred of a doubt that corporations generally come to know about the damages, or externalities, that they cause. But corporations nevertheless do everything in their power to deflect their responsibilities for such damages including the use of science to hide them or to hide the corporations’ responsibilities in causing them in the first place. Tobacco and fossil fuels come to mind here.
In contrast the role of the men of knowledge was to ensure the well-being of their fellow citizens. And so they concentrated on trying to counter negative impacts on their groups that might originate – in the body-mind of the individuals, – in the interactions between the elements in their local habitat – in interactions with bigger ensembles. Understanding that everything is interrelated, that human well-being can be disrupted, and mastering the remedies against such disruptions is called wisdom. Wisdom helps to avoid the rise of such negative outside factors or side-effects and this particular role of knowledge was construed primarily as a “precautionary principle” meant to exclude the possibility of any human actions that could lead to the rise of side-effects that would affect the generations to come. The precautionary principle was in application in tribal societies but was starting to be ignored after completion of the transition from tribal to power societies. Modernity finally threw the principle in the dustbin of history and with time passing so-called advanced societies simply forgot about the precautionary principle. Now in Late-Modernity we start to discover that our ignorance comes at price and that the price could eventually be the existence of our species.
Science, unfortunately, has never risen to the height of wisdom… it ignores the possibility that something like wisdom or the precautionary principle might even exist and this explains why, in our present dire circumstances, there is such a popular backlash against science and the societal elites. But qualifying this backlash with the derogatory term populism is simply ignoring the responsibility of scientists and of the governing elites in the creation of this societal mess in the first place. The fact of the matter is that many red signs are signaling that Western populations have lost patience. They are not taking this irresponsibility any longer. And bewildered scientists and governing elites are exposed in their complete nakedness facing the Late-Modern popular rebellion at the urns and on the streets…




news versus propaganda


What I describe in this part 1 “pragmatism versus ideology” is the struggle that is taking place in the minds of the individuals who search for answers to their existential questions and to the working of their societies. That struggle implies an individual effort that most people reject as being too heavy a burden thus preferring to go along with the noise coming out of the societal machine. This means that most citizens are willingly gullible and are accepting that the propaganda of their elites represents the truth about all there is. Such a sorry state of affairs is the logical outcome of over a century of propaganda by big capital and its servants that has incessantly hammered in the citizen’s minds the so-called virtues of a liberal capitalist system that is idolizing individualism, materialism consumerism, egoism and hedonism while rejecting – all grand narratives addressing what reality is all about – all systems of governance that address the balancing of the citizens’ interests with the interests of their societies – and the precautionary principle to minimize the side-effects of human actions.


It was no accident that TINA emerged at the same time as postmodernism… (TINA being Thatcher's “There Is No Alternative”). They were the economic and cultural - ideological answers of big capital against the opponents to the globalization of their reach to the whole world. Big capital won but, after the consequences of globalization started to be manifest, a group of nationalists finally splintered that now is tentatively channeling popular anger into MAGA, Brexit, and other nationalist adventures.


The large scale manipulation of the minds of their citizens, over the 2 past centuries, transformed Western societies into gigantic consumption machines of the goods and services offered to them by the corporations owned by big capital. And science gained high-esteem for being the exclusive service provider of knowings meant to increase the profits of corporations and in the last instance of big capital holders who own them.


But over the last 70 years knowledge, as well as the arts, have been banned from the market for ideas which demoted them on the margins of the consumption machine. And so any ideological opposition to TINA and postmodernism were essentially isolated which explains how propaganda had a complete free reign in diffusing fake-news.


With the advent of large scale internet coverage, after the year 2000, knowledge, for the first time in the whole of Modernity, gained access to a channel of mass diffusion and within less than a decade it had gained a mass following. But a backlash by big capital and its servants is in the works and the story of the extradition of Julian Assange to the USA is at the center of it. The idea of big capital and its servants, in its exercise of power, is – to reimpose the free reign of their propaganda by eliminating knowledge from the big internet platforms – and to frighten reporters and writers to dare speak the truth and divulge their shenanigans and their crimes against humanity. This is a last ditch effort at perpetuating their institutions of power against knowledge that fosters the emergence of new instruments of societal interactions (open-source technology versus proprietary technology, crypto-currencies against fiat-currencies, localism versus capitalism, news versus fake-news, crafts versus art for the market, natural and holistic medicine against pharmaceutic industries, and so on and on).


The rejection of facts, and reality, in the West is an integral part of that strategy of power conservation by big capital holders and their servants. But it can only end in a world conflict that would devastate, not only societies but also, the earth. There is an extreme urgency today for the world to recognize the following:

• climate change and the 6th mass extinction condemn the systems of Modernity and, if humanity wants to survive, life must necessarily be produced locally and not by corporations in far-away factories
• societal atomization and the polarization between ‘haves and haves-not’ forces humanity to open-source technology and to reject the proprietary model in order to avoid the split of societies into dual paths that would seek to annihilate each other: – a large mass of individuals who have become useless for a system based on the fiction of the reason of capital and who are thus seen as disturbing – a small group of capital holders, seconded by technicians in science and in public governance, whose ambition is to capture the principle of life as their exclusive privilege.
• localism and open-source technology value the collaboration of all and set the conditions for a possible collaboration between local groups around the world.
• big capital holders, scientists and other servant elites share the responsibility for creating the mess humanity finds itself in Late-Modernity. The populations of the world have to let it be known loud and clear that the responsibility of those elites will eventually be sanctioned by the natural law that is derived from the universal primacy that is recognized to the principle of life.

The recognition of the urgency, as exposed here above, is a condemnation of Modernity and its foundational axiom ‘the reason that is at work within capital’. Without such a condemnation and rejection the survival of humanity is at stake. If we love our children we owe them to shout loud and clear our condemnation.


Such a condemnation opens a path to a new societal way of life that would:

• eliminate the risks of human annihilation at the hand of nation-states
• maximize the chances of humanity to survive the multiple side-effects of Modernity that are presently converging