In your second point, addicted people, even youngsters, generally know their addiction isn’t good for them in the long run, but they are dependent upon the addictive substance or behavior just to get through the next hour, the next day. Such people need much more support (from before they were even born) than education about what’s good for them. In the moment, it is the lesser of evils, as they lack the metaphysical essentials like love, trust, esteem, hope . . .

Right?

1. China’s rise offers another example of what happens when nations become prosperous. If the Chinese were previously an example of a people who had relatively little addiction or money in the past, capitalism and consumerism might be credited with financing their drug use more than eroding their culture. Would their long history and deep culture - with socially supportive qualities that made low drug use possible - dissolve so quickly? We may be giving too much credit to greed and capitalism. Both the human condition and transcendence are said to be unbounded by material wealth and prosperity. Doesn’t prosperity just amplify the same desires and actions that many people already have inside themselves?

2. I do think stress, dislocation, isolation and immaturity correlate with addiction. The young, isolated and over-worked feature prominently in drug and alcohol abuse cases. However, there are many correlates that shouldn’t be ignored in a complex discussion looking for causal factors in worldwide addiction. For instance, many lack an education about addiction, underestimate health risks and heavily discount the future.

I like the ideas brought up and I think more ideas should be explored and allowed into the discussion. Should we be talking about the value of education and how to develop maturity?

http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford.html

Think about love. Think about the kindness of love, the comfort of love, the acceptance and warmth of love, the simplicity and generosity and forgiveness of love. Think about the gentleness of love, the patience of love, the compassion of love. Think about the refuge and relief of love. Think about love.

That, I believe, is God. Love itself, perfect, eternal and infinite, flowing among all of us, shared as our birthright, our love uniting us and living on within God. There is nothing to fear. It’s love itself that is the God we seek, here within all of us and living on forever. Love has always been here.

The rest, I believe, is nature. Our bodies and our minds, the self we identify as soul, heredity and upbringing, all part of nature. There is no evil, only nature, a broad scape from marvels of beauty to tragic aberrations, all nature, all fleeting. All of nature shares the same preoccupations at its own level…we seek food, continuation of our species, pleasure, safety, status and territory. Those are the things of nature and the joys they give us are the gifts of nature.

But our greatest days are made of love, in hours of unbearable loss, it’s love that comforts us. We thrive on it, we long for it. With love, we do what we would have thought impossible, through love we make the miracles that others are praying for. It’s through our own love that God comes into the world.

Our prayers have already been answered. We have been given love, it is already here for us. Hunger and sickness, sadness and loneliness, fear and cruelty…what we can’t overcome with love, we can comfort with love so that none suffer alone and abandoned.

This, I believe, is our purpose. To free our love from the fearful cautions of nature, to let love dissolve the divisions that separate us, to look for love in every other being and find God. With love, we live as in heaven.

Think about love often, nurture love within yourself, give over some time of your days to meditate on love, to pray that we will have more love. Think about love and pray that one day we will all have the love we need for all the world.

This is not a religion and there is no need for money, preachers, books, or buildings. The truth is in love itself and the only outward sign of love is love. This is for you, offered in hope that it will help. The person who wrote this is an ordinary person of unexceptional virtue who will say nothing further.

loveisthegodweseek.org

Your focus on best practices beyond existing agendas, at a meta level, is what the new paradigm is about. Thank you for articulating it in these terms. But what do you think will get people off the agenda track to that meta level?

The spirituality of the left bears within itself a deep retributivism. This is why the left is so inactive and so strangely complicit with the prison problem. A retributive spirituality produces a tolerance for imprisonment as punishment, which will already remain a superficial and illusory kind of enforcement that produces crocodile tears and nothing but the lowest level of avoidance. Ultimately simply a bad behaviorism, it also is in bed with war machines.

The “new paradigm” has to have the following features:

* intractable problems must be recognized as occurring in a situation in which conservatism and the right have “one foot in the good”. The Iraq wars, for example, and the usually forgotten but most lethal sanctions on Iraq had feet in the good: never reducible to imperialism (the dominant caricature wielded so fruitlessly by the left), these massive, institutional measures, like the prisons, retained positive and righteous (and not mere “right”) features: they dealt with brutal dictators, installed democracy (and not simply new bad guys to play with) and issued in the name of safety.

The new paradigm has to include two essential and irreducible features: thought must be elevated as a value to the point that it is able to transcend the cartoonish level of caricature and reduction, with its hopes for a return to simpler times and argumentation. Nonviolence, the other of these two insurmountable desiderata, must be held out and maintained in thought. In so doing, it may then develop its almost automatic prima facie developments and inherent destiny, that of the deconstruction of retributive justice and the limiting of both caricature and, ultimately, the division between the right and left that ultimately reduces change to a matter of forces and taking sides in order to push agendas. Don’t worry, it yields a leftism anyhow, but it does so because of the best practices it evolves.

At a practical level, the dominant theme should become best practices. Programs and policies should be vaunted because they are best practices and not — even never — because they are “left”. This enables the humanization of discourse and contest.

When society is exposed to information such as what is provided in this piece: we will begin to free ourselves from the delusion and ignorance that keeps us trapped in dysfunction, while at the same time actively evolving toward a world based in knowledge and wisdom.

Thank you for this work. May it continue unimpeded.

I suffered 2.5 years with someone with NPD. The betrayals, the vengeance, the emotional devastation he caused still lives with me 2 years after we split. This man is evil, and I never thought I’d say that about anyone. Unfortunately I still have to deal with him because oaf a legal matter, but am grateful I am no longer with him. I sincerely feel if I did stay I would have had a nervous breakdown.

Listening to this podcast has made me realize this affliction was present in my mother, nothing was good enough for her. Not my brothers who had achieved fame for their work, and certainly not me. Criticism was part of everyday life with my mother.

I now understand why I was attracted to that cruel man. I only hope I can beware of anyone else with this disorder. Healing has been a long road, and continues to this day.

Thank you so much for this information. It affirms everything I have undergone and allows me to realize this was not something in my head, I was not responsible for their behaviour and I could not change them.

We are better off to stay far away from such malevolent people. Unfortunately they come off as charismatic so most people will not recognize them, but thanks to your podcast, we are all the wiser.

Sometimes people leave the country with a child to escape problems such as this. It would be illegal to do so, so I really can’t recommend it, even though that’s probably what I would do if I were you.

We Americans have been living in a most luxurious way here this last half century. So I think people are ambivalent about real change, deep change, change that would make the cycles you speak of obsolete. I’m talking about societies that are not neurotic, but that have hygiene and a few other good things that have come out of the “age of progress.”

Carol Burnett says that “Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.” (And yet we have an overpopulated planet!) We can birth a new way of life.

Marx did not live in our time and place. What’s required now are loving and creative whole systems thinkers considering everything from psychology to conservation to design. I am drawn to the philosophy and practicality of permaculture.

The Left Forum covered a lot of ground, many topics, many fragments with a rallying cry for victory over capitalism, but without a vision and discussion of what comes along with that, what comes after, how to handle such a victory. What’s the offering? Not clear.

What’s needed is practical whole systems thinking and design by people who are psychospiritually mature and loving and whose work can really show the way, rather than show eloquence or ideology or identity.

Plato: Symposium circa 385–380BC

I have always noticed since starting to hang out with people on this side of things that it is so so easy for them to be divided-and-ruled. There are so many identity issues that people wear on their sleeves. And they easily fall into the trap of being easily offended. I have seen people break down panel discussions with important topics of information for us about other cultures and other countries because of unfortunate choices of words made by the uninitiated or unsophisticated, only to drag us into a long emotional discussion about our own sick culture, which we already know about!

I have also read quotes about how easily the labor movement leaders in the 1960s-70s allowed themselves to be divided-and-ruled over gender and sexual preference. There is a famous quote of some labor leader denigrating the New York Delegation to the Dems saying something like “only 1 labor leader, 4 fags, and 4 women…” etc. They don’t see they do it to themselves, and wonder why the money has been redistributed to the Top.

A George Pataki fundraiser event has all the colours of the rainbow present, rich ones, American Dream type immigrants, with no Kosher food, but awkward off-colour jokes from gangly older white men clearly out of place in midtown Manhattan and speaking with Freudian slips from the unconscious, but nobody takes offense. Everybody is there for ONE reason, not identity politics, but LOW TAXES! Which they’ve got all these decades!

There are a lot of issues with this Left Forum. The one that bothered me the most was how easily people said “let the system implode”. They disengage from all the levers we have to use to make this constitutional democracy work. Especially the Courts. When I suggested in a session the use of litigation to push constitutional interpretation, I got my head bitten off by an Old Communist! Trouble is, their idealized collapse will be very ugly here.

An old 1950s Regnery Press book I have here showcasing the German executive class behind the NAZI industries and white washing capitalism basically said “the left and communists offered no alternative, they wanted Hitler elected so the whole system would blow up and their Marxian dream come true.” I don’t know how true that was then, but I am certainly hearing echoes of it at Left Forum amongst those old folks!

Their desired breakdown will be a social collapse I doubt any of them really can imagine. There is no real left alternative power to counterbalance the hard right for all these divide-and-rule reasons you cite, unlike when FDR pushed through his New Deal. The backers of McCarthy took care of that, which means people like these old communists will be in jail in a few years if the 2010 Midterms with Citizen’s United unleashed is any gauge! They should think it through a little more, and be grateful we have a nominal constitutional democracy to salvage here, in which we could have more plurality of political viewpoint and balance of power if we challenged using all the levers available to us, rather than a single party totalitarian communist system. We have a single party totalitarian capitalist system now. From the vibe you get from some of these people, they definitely want Totalitarian, and they definitely don’t value anybody with a new viewpoint post Marx/Trotsky! Trouble is totalitarian doesn’t work. It creates another Oligarchy and eventually topples over! They don’t get that!

How old is your sociopathic child?

That is a very tough situation you speak of and I appreciate your bringing it up here on the blog.

Sociopathy is a lot like radiation: you want to get away from it and may try to, but it’s here, there and everywhere, effecting everyone. When it’s right inside your home, what do you do? Who can help you?

I’m told that there is no evidence that any therapies or behavioral programs work to change the sociopath and if the crimes remain crimes of the heart, there are no legal channels that can help, either. These are fundamental issues societies always come up against.

I saw a talk by Ed Tick on video recently. He’s the founder of Soldier’s Heart, a program to help veterans with PTSD. He said that everyone is traumatized by war, except for sociopaths.

I would educate your 8-year-old about what to look for and how to respond. Keep them separated as best as you can. Understand that the sociopath not only does not care, but cannot care; it’s a disability of the brain. Don’t take it personally; anticipate betrayal; do your best.

Great questions and comments.

Bravo!

CV,

My own orientation is in harmony with your last paragraph and in keeping with Buddhist philosophy/psychology.

Are you living this way yourself, on the land, simply, sharing? I wonder how like-minded people are faring in their ways of life.

Best, Jari

I take the buddhas approach to the human dillema. First you realize nothing really matters in the end. that the universe continues on its path to nowhere with or without life on earth. then you come back to the human realm to help others.

Most people feel the only way they can help change things is through consumption of products or donating to NPOs. So there is some good to Mr. Rall’s ideas of revolution. His book might get some people to genuinely think outside the box. Because unless we buy all of our food and materials from permaculture farms and local stores within our town, we’re causing further unnecessary destruction of the environment. Consumerism is killing off more animals (including ourselves) than eating organic Grassfed local beef ever could. For example, the use of monocropping in both organic and non-organic farms has been wiping out the bee population world wide. The dissapearance of bees will lead to the extinction of a large chunk of plant and animal species. The growing of genetically modified crops throughout the world is contaminating ecosystems. It’s been shown to cause sterility, mutations and death in animals.

Those who are aware can let go of consumer culture and lead by example. If the rich want to take the middle class’s money and jobs then why not fight back through effortless action? A good place to start is Masanobu Fukuokas “do nothing” method of farming, which uses native seeds and lets the surrounding ecosystem do most of the work (One Straw Revolution). Sharing, trading , teaching skills, living simply, building communities etc. There are effective non-violent approaches that can be taken.