Cell913blog.com Post #2

Mandela’s life-long fight was for political, legal, and human rights equality for black Africans, Indians and Afrikanners. Class segregation, laws and regulations, court cases, investigations, prison sentences and even the death penalty all supported the policy of apartheid. His life story, in Long Walk into Freedom, details the many personal, legal, organizational, and even military and quasi-military strategies and tactics, the search for common ground among potential allies, both within South Africa and beyond, to the rest of Africa and even to the United Nations. Similar, if far less dramatic, historically significant and painful, movements have taken place for various causes in the over-all campaign for human rights around the world. Amnesty International, for one, is a robust, courageous, creative and penetrating non-profit on behalf those individuals who have been deprived of their legitimate human rights, in various jurisdictions. And their work needs both more dollars and more letters to be written on behalf of those without a political voice. Oppressors, as is their wont, are minimally, if at all, impressed and/or moved to change their abusive decisions, no matter the size or the clarity, the source or the duration of any and all campaigns to bring about the release of unjustified, illegitimate, illegal and both untenable and unfathomable detentions.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of well-meaning, honourable, integrous, authentic both individuals and non-governmental organizations, working 24-7-365 to combat global warming and climate change. They are finally getting some, still far too little, attention from the world media, many of whose organizations have already ‘committed’ to support the many initiatives designed to combat any increase in global temperatures. While 1.5 degrees Celsius has been the threshold beyond which climate scientists have warned us that extreme catastrophe is likely, we are now seeing more and more reports that it is highly unlikely we will hold to the 1.5 degree threshold. We already know that 2023 is the hottest year on record, confirmed by the UN official at the COP28 climate summit. Global temperature is projected to warm by about 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050) and 2-4 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. While these figures are both astounding and also somewhat abstract, (we do not think in degrees on a thermometer!), there is a serious, even existential risk to every person currently living on the planet, and certainly that risk also extends to any new-borns who will arrive in the next few decades.

Attempting to address this shared crisis, (we all breathe the same air, drink from the same water sources, and plant seeds in and harvest from the shared soil, under the same sky), governments and their various agencies, non-profits, for-profits and individuals are all (at least the majority) are finally acknowledging the dimensions, both in danger and in time, as well as in costs, to this crisis. The old arguments about the validity of ‘acid-rain’ back in the 1980’s seem more like an American-Canadian political ‘zit’ today, compared with the monumental size and danger we all face. No international body, integrating both governments and non-profits and for-profits, has been aggregated, organized, funded and set to carry out specific mandates, with both adequate funds, adequate and even muscular sanctions and increasingly needed educational programs that not only disseminate the available research (itself in a flowing river) but also design new delivery methods, monitoring systems to determine the effectiveness of the educational and informational efforts, in each country. Such a system/program would also be able to discern specific resistances, and begin the hard job of attempting to penetrate the most granite and impermeable of these resistances. (Start with the global coal industry, and the need for proponents of fossil fuels not only to open to other energy options, but to overcome traditional, deeply embedded dogmatic and psychological commitments to ‘how we do things here’ as a cultural, political, economic and ideological mantra.

The pace of the change we all need, does not apply only to the climate issues; it applies also to the cyber revolution, in which the technology has already surpassed both the cognitive appreciation of its power, now and in the future, but as importantly and consequently, the political/legal fences that must be erected around what is now the ‘wild-west’ of cyberspace. While there are admittedly, positive contributions we might expect from both AI and quantum computing, and these benefits are still evolving, there are also serious ethical and even potentially existential threats from the unleashing of these devices and their evolving and sharpening capacities. As a consequence of this gap in both our knowledge and certainly our comfort level, this galloping monster, in the hands of a very few highly trained, and highly creative and highly motivated men and women risk losing touch with the general public, a force on which most democracies have to depend.

We already each in our gut ‘know’ in ways that exceed, or defy, or even refute the kind of sociological, demographic, political and economic data in which we all swim daily, that we are experiencing a malaise whose dimensions seek and grasp in the fog for the kidn of data that warrant the collective, official attention of those charged with making decisions on our behalf. Doubtless, too, those men and women, in all countries, have the same ‘gut’ responses, as we do, and either sit on them for fear of awakening in the relevant “public” so much consternation that the costs of that would bring people into the street, with a ‘malaise’ that has no specific medical, legal, political, ideological or even theological or spiritual name.

We have become so dependent on such a name, for every thing that bothers us, to the point that we have, in the latest DSM

(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) designated ‘grief’ as a mental illness, needing treatment. This is only one single piece of data that calls out for its astounding degree of co-dependence of the culture on the medical model. And it is that very model that is suffocating and drowning then health care professionals and their respective institutions. We are all drowning in a psychology that has helped to shape our own demise. We have fallen into the collective, cognitive, social, political, economic, legal/medical swamp (no specific individual is responsible and we are not draining the swamp here). The swamp is the manner in which we ‘see’ and evaluate, and program, and educate and ‘treat’ each other….through collective eyes, ears, and brains that are dependent on and hold in high honour the literal, the empirical, the nominal and all that goes with it. If and whenever a piece of behaviour is deemed to be outside what we consider acceptable, moral, legal, ethical, healthy and learned, we deem it ‘abnormal’ both vernacularly, and professionally. We either criminalize, or medicalize that abnormality for ‘treatment’ both by the appropriate professionals and the appropriate system, and its relevant institutions. This ‘perception’ and the value systems, the supporting academic and professional practice protocols, the economic and financial systems, and the leaders in each of these respective ‘theatres’ are all engaged both consciously and clearly somewhat unconsciously in perpetuating this ‘ethos. James Hillman calls the ethos, or the culture, the anima mundi, the soul of the world.

Before, dear readers, you rush off into a frenetic frenzy worried about the occult, the mystical, and the astrographic outer limits of any visions you might have conjured from reading the last paragraph, please bear with this scribe.

Collective, willingly and somewhat unconsciously, we have all adopted what we have been taught, modelled, and fitted into, in our education, our careers, our families, our professions and our expectations of what the society ‘should’ or even ‘must’ look like. For those, like many of Mandela’s enemies, who considered his ANC to have been infiltrated by the Communists, this is not a revisiting of Marx’s Das Capital. Nor is it an updating of Mein Kampf, as some others will be wont to use that rhetorical bullet, much in the way many religionists have deployed scriptural verses as ‘bullets’ to shoot down their liberal opponents. We live in a culture in which ‘war’ and the unleased, ungoverned and ungovernable actions of pursuing a total win, in a zero sum game, give way, permit and even encourage the most horrendous of acts by humans against other humans, with a degree of both impunity and the complete absence of shame, to which no animal would submit or surrender. Any thought that ‘we’ have ‘dominion’ over the universe, evaporates when we compare ourselves to animals. And the arrogance that accompanies that literal theology, regardless of the sect, denomination, or religion itself, is part of what we are going to have to shed.

Indeed, whether its roots come from national and patriotic pride, or ethnic superiority, or linguistic nuance, or artistic professional training and experience, or from academic prowess, or even from ‘the right religion’ , these attitudes and the psychology that seeds and sustains them, will have to be re-considered, re-evaluated, and collectively on a global basis, reconfigured. Facing the convergence of global crises,  none of which bend to denial, or refutation, or erasure, or even moderation or amelioration, through incremental baby steps, this scribe is inviting each reader here present to revisit the cell of Nelson Mandela, in the state of mind, and the legal and hopeless state of the situation he and his comrades faced.

In the spirit of a 6 x 6 cell with bars on an outside window, sentenced to an unknown period of punishment for having willfully, consciously and deliberately confronted a system that was literally, and also metaphorically, spiritually, economically and politically “killing” the spirit of his people, let’s try to imagine, first what Mandela might have been considering, (as he ironically completed his legal exams from the University in London, while at Robben Island) and contemplated his options on behalf of his people.

It is the spirit of Mandela, irrespective of his legal education, or his specific tribal affiliations in the Transkei, or his specific and relevant and highly committed band of comrades, although certainly not without such support and determination, that we can all, through our imagination, put on the Madiba shirts, adopted from Indonesian batik clothing, made of cotton  or silk, and pick up the torch that he has ignited in the human spirit to defy similar, if national and not international, forces that were suffocating his people.

We can begin to ‘see’ ourselves differently, from a single ‘ego’ with a burden of multiple and necessary responsibilities, scratching out an existence, in the face of seemingly never-ending climatic, political, military, pharmaceutical, ideological, and especially narcissistic personal ambition, all of it having donned the robes of respectability, wealth, power, status, and both ambition and control. And those of us, without a voice, (the 99.5%) living in both developed countries (this scribe is in Canada on the border with America), and in developing countries, those with or without formal or gig employment, men and women, engaged in all forms of healthy and productive enterprises have to find a band of climate freedom fighters (think Bill McKibbon, and Gerta, allied with and joined to a band of freedom fighters (think Nader, Moore, Malala et cetera), joined to a band of legal and financial scholars with a commitment to the global “public interest” (think Trilateral Commission and what would be an imaginative reiteration of such a commission), a global media coalition, whose voice (think Ted Turner, not Rupert Murdoch)….all of whom have the interest and the commitment to fight the kind of opposition that Mandela and his band of freedom fighters faced, without losing either hope or determination…

Of course, all of this is quixote, coming from an imagination on steroids….but what are the alternatives? To limp along, piece-meal by piece-meal, in segregated silos of both data and thought, each of them protecting the interests of themselves, while protecting and preserving the ‘inside dope’ that holds each of the silos together.

Coming out of our silos, whether they are sanctuaries, mosques, synagogues, financial towers, academic ivy-clad cloisters, or even television and print newsrooms, pharma labs, or the millions of classrooms around the world. Let the children be heard! Let the people living on the streets of our cities be heard! Let the men and women from the seniors’ residences be heard! Let the millions of  silenced people, many of them government opponents, out of their cells, and out of their imprisonments…..let the bells peel and  the organs play and the bugles and trumpets blare, and the megaphones unleashed from the political correctness that threatens to impale us on our own ‘propriety’ and fiddles while Rome (at this moment, the whole world) burns. Some of the people in charge, it seems, see themselves as  arsonists who then want us to give them the gavel of power so they can put out the flames they have ignited, as our heroic rescuing ‘firefighters’.

And this arsonist image applies to those engaged in illegitimate and unjust war, murder, rape, bombing, drones, and the eradication of both nations and people, both with impunity and no risk of curtailment. It is the model of no risk, full impunity, full immunity, no accountability or responsibility that threatens us all…and focusing on a single “fire” in a single capital, in a single country, is proving to be perhaps theatrically interesting and magnetic, as is all car collisions and local factory fires. Nevertheless, such a fixation risks the macro global picture which needs the muscle, brain, imagination and political will of each of us.