The all-encompassing Chapter Zero

In terms of human wisdom, understanding what a human being is and what life is for, we [Westerners] really have hit rock bottom. And as a result, you can see that people are extremely unhappy, anxious, suicidal … I mean the young are being left without anything to encourage them except more technical information. This is awful! It’s … it’s a tragedy! And unless we’re able to do something very soon, this civilisation will collapse. – Iain McGilchrist

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. – Pema Chodron

We begin with reality as astounding, undeniable fact; none could be more incontrovertible or extravagantly different to the alternative: pure nothingness. There is thus no surer ground from which to start our journey.

But we encounter the unknown with our very first step: What is reality? Mechanistic and meaningless, or alive and meaningful? Answering this question is the uncompleted task of ontology. There is still no final pronouncement on what reality is. The ontological jury is still deliberating, hotly, as it has been for millennia.

In the open spaces of this uncertainty, one of my goals at Truth Transparent is to persuade you that my own ontological knowing – reality is life, is alive, is consciousness, is God – is not only a feasible position to hold, but also that it offers the most explanatory power; materialism/physicalism cannot accommodate consciousness, but a consciousness-based ontology can elegantly accommodate ‘matter’: energy, forces, particles, etc. It also happens to be a position shared by many big hitters in the field, all of whom punch far above my own philosophical and intellectual skills. And, most importantly of all, it is highly relevant to the basic questions Truth Transparent asks:

• What is the struggle of life about?
• What does it mean to be a civilised human being?
• What are we capable of?

Truth Transparent examines everything through the refracting lens of these questions.

One aspect of what this ontological position asserts, generally speaking, is that subjectivity, or perspective, or awareness, is fundamental. Subjectivity, it claims, is part of the very ‘stuff’ of reality. It is this aspect – this riposte to the mechanistic worldview of materialism – that I’m pointedly foregrounding right at the beginning of our journey. It is a kind of disclosure; fundamental subjectivity – awareness, attention, focus – could scarcely be more important to the totality of my position.

I know this assertion upsets most Westerners. Nonetheless, I dare invite you onto this apparently fanciful terrain as my first act. I cannot do otherwise: The embittered, divisive warring in which we Westerners are again miring the whole world is doing too much harm for no good reason. Sadly, tragically, it could not be more historically predictable. The pattern just keeps on repeating even though we seem not to want our lives to be this way. Only the fewest of us would openly claim to enjoy embittered enmity. Because this is self-evidently so, I cannot help but want to examine this stubbornly repeating pattern of civilisational rise, decay, war and collapse.

I want to know what locomotes this apparently blind process, what makes civilisation’s dawn-to-decadence, promise-to-collapse melody its most essential; I love civilisation and want to play my part to help it to evolve a little further. What is the nature of our civilisational challenge, what are we looking at?

The first obvious culprit one hits upon right away is human nature. And to a degree, our nature is indeed responsible for what ails us; how could it be otherwise! But the human-nature trope is far from the whole story and can mislead more than it illuminates. After all, it’s not clear what human nature is. As we have already seen, we don’t know what reality is, so a little open-minded humility in our opinions on human nature is warranted.

The argument I advance at this site is that the way civilisation’s amassed power becomes irresistibly, even systemically attractive is a central piece of the puzzle we are piecing together. For example, there are pivotal differences between how hunter-gatherer bands and civilisational peoples interact with their respective environments, differences that are key to this enquiry. There is something in how civilisation’s structuring properties influence human behaviour – in city states and nation states and multinational blocs, institutions and corporations – that seems to make the allure of total power over others systemically impossible to resist. We could reasonably argue there is nothing we civilised folk value more than power over others. Or rather, that there’s nothing people attracted to rule and management value more.

Or perhaps it really is most of us. Life can be experienced as a miserable affair when we feel ourselves at the mercy of everything around us, a life in which not one thing that is not us cares about us like we do. Isn’t this the pervasive civilisational (Hobbesian) mindset of fundamental scarcity, of endless struggle, of ceaseless war? I vaguely recall a line from The Princess Bride: “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.” I suspect this reflexive sense of life as an unremittingly hard challenge pervades civilised human experience across the millennia. Perhaps it is our nature after all.

Or one side of it at least.

Iain McGilchrist, whom I discovered only recently, has a sense of and sensibilities about these matters that closely echo my own, even though we walked very different paths to develop our respective positions. He roots the reflexive perspective I touch on above in an imbalanced relationship between the brain’s hemispheres, an imbalance in which the left hemisphere dominates. At the heart of his thoroughgoing account of left brain’s “way of being” is its tight focus on grabbing, getting and manipulating. The left brain, among a wide variety of attributes and qualities, also happens to be incapable of admitting error and correcting course. To my mind, these two core properties go a significant way to explaining civlisation’s apparently inbuilt difficulties in establishing and maintaining a wise and mature handling of its own power. I find McGilchrist’s widely and deeply informed observations on the qualities and properties of the brain’s hemispheres both persuasive and pertinent. Consequently, his work plays a large role in this article. (His work is most certainly not a platitudinal rehash of pop-psychology folklore on this infamous subject matter.)

The left-hemisphere’s acquisitive modus operandi segues us to the second cornerstone of Truth Transparent’s enquiry: money, that deceiving enabler of infinite acquisition. In my view, money is power’s most loyal partner, its truest expression in the form of civilisational control tool, where I mean “control” synonymously with “power over others”. Money and power go together, it seems to me, hand in glove.

Consequently, money is the left brain’s most intoxicating seducer; it promises and delivers astronomical accumulations of ‘wealth’, accumulations that can be both precisely measured and leveraged to gain yet more control over one’s world. It thus slowly and inexorably focusses and imprisons the left brain’s habits of thought and ways of being in a great ivory castle of echo-chamber institutions and capital investments that guard and sustain that ‘wealth’, that lofty security. This long-running, multiply compounding devil’s pact sets in motion a narrowing worldview cul-de-sac that reenforces and inflates the left brain’s hubristic tendencies.

Money, in addition to its civilisation-building efficacy, is also excellent at making devil’s pacts so devilish, lawyers so legalistic and politicians so polished. It also balloons the gap between rich and poor, and thus makes the fall from social grace for society’s most powerful so terrifyingly high. Consequently, it is systemically and compoundingly ‘addictive’. (It is worth pointing out that brain research reveals addiction to be a left-hemisphere phenomenon.)

Ergo: Left-brain modus operandi + Civilisation => Deepening and culturally contagious left-brain imbalance and creeping addiction to totalising power.

It is a match made in heaven. Civilisation is a constructed process, a series of large-scale projects with which it makes and remakes itself over time. Money makes this possible (for now). Its most natural project partner, the left brain, is in part about the required fine manipulation of the environment (grabbing and getting is the crudest expression of this), and is thus most at home in a world it can manipulate fully: civilisation (so the hope). To wit:

The left hemisphere likes things that are man-made. Things we make are also more certain: we know them inside out, because we put them together. They are not, like living things, constantly changing and moving, beyond our grasp. – McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2019 (pp. 79-80). Kindle Edition. [Emphasis in original.]

Money, a tool we made, is pivotal to civilisation’s Ozymandian accomplishments … so far so clear. But like all tools, money comes with a price (negative effects), one of which is extraordinarily exacerbated different life outcomes for rich and poor (concepts money creates). These differences are highly redolent of, indeed they are a function of, that infamous civilisational antipathy between rulers and ruled. This tension brings us to one of civilisation’s foundational institutions: banking, money’s smithy. Put very simply, banking is the process by which money is created and destroyed. Obviously, this power tool also comes with a price.

As Lord Acton put it, “The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.” Because civilisation is about control and power over the environment, increasing safety, increasing predictability and stability; because that power is best projected and protected with money and control of its smithy; because these interdependent phenomena are systemically addictive to the left hemisphere, it follows that civilisational evolution, or progress, has a very hard time preventing the steady emergence of an inescapable, and finally crippling, tension between rulers and ruled, not to mention a strong tendency towards dictatorship and, with the advent of mass communication and mass formation, totalitarianism.

No matter how radiant our civilisational dawn, it always seems to darken into oligarchy and despotism … because money.

Love of money is the root of all evil, it is said, and there’s nothing the left brain loves more than that which gives it fine control over its world. Whence, I’m arguing, historical cyclicality. Whence the apparent intractability, the naturalness of the problem under investigation at this site. Of course it is not the case that money itself is evil, but then only evil is itself evil, which is a profoundly abstract statement. No, the problem with money is its systemic effects, its costs, which is true of everything, obviously. Equally true of course is that the beauty of money is its positive systemic effects, but the fine details of all this are examined in other Truth Transparent articles. My concern here is to paint a sufficiently clear overview of the main themes.

In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R. H. Tawney observes that systems “prepare for their own overthrow with a preliminary period of petrification.” Such petrification reflects the way the left hemisphere is incapable of admitting error, incapable of course correction. Its invariable response is to double down on whatever plan is blowing up in its surprised but intransigent face. William Ophuls’ assessment of civilisation in Immoderate Greatness is bleak: “As a process, civilization resembles a long-running economic bubble. Civilizations convert found or conquered ecological wealth into economic wealth and population growth.” Conversion into economic wealth is of course only possible with the tool of money involved.  Again, all of this is highly redolent of left-brain purblindness and shortsightedness, and very familiar to anyone who has studied this sort of material at any depth.

So how does the left brain bring about the imbalance McGilchrist examines in his work? It feels wholly out of sorts in the world of the right hemisphere, which is home to precisely the qualities needed to rebalance individual humans and whole civilisation back to health. It judges that domain as a capable servant judges its bungling master. It craves specificity and exact measurement. It is also, as stated, about grabbing and getting what it needs to survive. To do this well, it helps to have a gung-ho, who-dares-wins, don’t-bother-me-now mindset ably assisted by excellent focus, aim, and precise manipulation of its world. Put together, these and similar factors mean the left brain will opportunistically usurp the right and ignore its input forever and a day. Or until everything breaks under its arid rule.

The right hemisphere is openly, vigilantly aware of the big picture (“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”). It maintains horizon-wide vigilance about how things are developing Out There – threats and opportunities alike. It intuits its environment’s rhythms and ever-changing disposition, cares about both its own needs and the needs of others, so errs on the side of caution and patience, compassionately; it is intimately aware of complexity, of subtle pros and cons, of nuance, of differing perspectives, feels itself part of a beautifully mysterious whole, and happily accepts uncertainty, for these and other reasons. But it does not control speech. Hence, it can be silenced, suppressed, cast into the shadows.

In other words, honest and nuanced assessment of each situation’s ever-shifting complexity is natural to the right brain, but anathema to the blinkered left, which finds right-brain concerns nannying and superfluous to the task at hand. In a civilisational setting, one in which immediate predatory dangers are as good as eradicated, there would surely be a tendency over time to downplay the right brain’s observations and sensibilities, to devalue its utility. It would tend to be experienced as a cry-wolf fantasist, a pointless drag on progress, of adding no value, etc. As a result, its gifts – insight, appreciation of wisdom, mature acceptance of paradox, poetry, art, music, big-picture vision, nuance, patience – would be increasingly suppressed and then atrophy across the broader culture.

Over the long term then, the right hemisphere’s way of being would be gradually condemned to obscurity in the wake of the glittering civilisational successes won by the left’s way of being. Bureaucracies and legalese would flourish to pathocratic excess, to weigh more and more heavily on a nation state’s citizens, their weight experienced as inflexible and over-complicated prescriptions rather than humane and adaptively organic guidance, as bewildering legalistic interference rather than moral and ethical compassion. A left-brained civilisation becomes, in effect, an oppression of those more organically human and perhaps ‘wild’ factors that must, from the left brain’s perspective, be tightly managed to ensure maximal stability and predictability. Instead of right-hemisphere patience and calm, a left-brain-dominated world ends up frantically busy yet mired in an entangling humdrum of meaningless, mechanical repetition.

This is the all-to-familiar Kafkaesque hellscape we know from literature and film. It is the satanic nadir of the eschatological arc so poetically recounted in The Book of Revelation.  It is also richly in evidence in my broad research into this dynamic (e.g. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules; Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Tell Us Is Possible; Frankopan, The Silk Roads; Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed; Kropotkin, Mutual Aid). I also think it is plain common sense; sustained imbalance leads to poor outcomes. Which is why our cultural blindness to its obviousness is so remarkable. The road back to health, to healthful and vital balance, is as obviously needed as it is difficult to want. We have sunk so deep into the swamps of the left brain’s world, we pale when shown the daunting hills and mountains of the way back out.

We Western civilised, we left-brain dominated homo sapiens sapiens, won’t stop until we are stopped. Nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. What we Westerners and westernised need to appreciate is the value of the right brain; we need to value wisdom. Wisdom is priceless, cannot be measured in money, and defies simple definition. Its value is thus incomprehensible to our left hemisphere, which grants itself apparently endless license to double down on its folly with the amassed power of whatever civilisation du jour it runs; power is, in part, the actionable potential to forestall correction. The more power you have, the easier it is to get away with murder. And because you have to break human eggs to make societal omelettes, getting away with murder is an absolutely must-have freedom for left-brain-dominated civilisations and their nation states, those monopolies on force.

The sad sum of all this is that neither the way out, nor the fact of the problem itself, can be perceived by the problem’s cause – left-brain-weighted imbalance. Further, this blindness is aided and abetted by the power craved by the left-brain predilections civilisation systemically favours. Consequently, civilisation must in part entail the ever-present risk of a multi-faceted, multi-compounding positive feedback loop that can last centuries, as described in the Ophuls quote above. McGilchrist again:

My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture. – Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2019 (p. 3). Kindle Edition.

However, systems can become unstable and enter a situation in which ‘positive feedback’ obtains – in other words, a move in one direction, rather than producing a move in the opposite direction, serves to promote further moves in the same direction, and a snowballing effect occurs. The right hemisphere, then, is capable of freeing us through negative feedback. The left hemisphere tends to positive feedback, and we can become stuck. Ibid, p. 87

It is also through grasping things that we grant things certainty and fixity: when they are either uncertain or unfixed, we say we ‘cannot put our finger on it’, we ‘haven’t got a hold of it’. This too is an important aspect of the world according to the left hemisphere. – Ibid, p. 112

To my mind, these three quotes together reflect three defining qualities of civilisation: power, hubris and manipulation. My core argument is that civilisational power systemically enables the left hemisphere to gain ascendancy, but that this very power is then condemned to thwart the left brain’s hubristic ambition for eternal majesty by tugging it ever more strongly towards oligarchy and, nowadays, with modern mass-communication technologies, totalitarianism. This is a positive-feedback loop because the left brain cannot recognise its error and correct course; it is hyper-focussed on grabbing and getting by nature. If the right brain’s role fails to maintain its rightful ascendancy in its role as wise master, everything the left-brain built in brief harmony with the right will eventually collapse. As the saying has it, pride before a fall.

A clumsy comparison between the sad fate of the dodo and the fate of the United States might help to illustrate what I’m driving at. Is the US’ power in fact as untested as the dodo’s trusting curiosity and friendliness? Both enjoy or enjoyed the protection of isolation by surrounding oceanic waters. Both have an erroneous sense of self; one all powerful, the other eternally safe. In the absence of the needed exposure to danger, the dodo had no cautious instinct or defence against the humans that arrived out of nowhere and slaughtered them. Similarly, is the US – and by extension the West more generally, now beginning to taste, without being able to properly identify it, its own demise?

How battle hardened is the US, how wise? Geographically, it could not be more different to Russia, which is situated in the heart of the Eurasian landmass with rich and deep experience of handling variously threatening enemies and fractious allies on its long border for centuries. Have the respective geopolitical wisdoms of Western Europe and the UK atrophied, shielded and protected by the wide skirts of US military bluster and financial incontinence? And while US bluster is backed by real US naval and air-force power, those strengths are fading relative to Russian and Chinese military power, and are anyway not sufficiently effective against peer rivals as geographically distant as those two. World War III could be the result of this volatile geopolitical tension, which continues to suck China, Iran and of course the wider Middle East (West Asia) into its orbit. For this tension to ease, the West must course-correct by letting go of its left-brain craving for total global dominance. If the US does correct course and no WWIII occurs, can a future geopolitical architecture, one perhaps arranged around something like the multipolarity of the BRICS system, be sustainably wise and civilised?

The line of enquiry I have come to find most fruitful in this regard is to examine core and common civilisational values – the third cornerstone of our enquiry –, as illuminated by civilisation's subjective relationship with power. How does civilisation experience its power? How can civilisation become consciously – i.e. culturally – aware of that power as existentially dangerous, and keep that awareness institutionally vital and effective across centuries?

As argued above, a systemic value preference for fine-grained and full control tends to become totalising over time. It must therefore include increasing control by rulers over the ruled. These classes, created by civilisation, are systemically pitted against each other, seemingly in perpetuity (e.g. Claessen and Skalník (editors), The Early State; Mumford, The Myth of the Machine; Hudson, Forgive Them Their Debts; Rocker, Nationalism and Culture; Sahlins and Graeber, On Kings; Kropotkin, Mutual Aid). In light this common systemic necessity, I have come to understand civilisation’s repeating boom-bust pattern as a long running, multi-epochal War of Value. Money, introduced as central to my broader argument above, measures and stores that value. You could therefore say that money owns value. Therefore, if you control money, you control value. This is a pivotal point, a Leitfaden that runs right through Truth Transparent.

It’s time for a timeout before we get carried away with these apparently clear-cut connections. We ought to briefly turn our attention to the bleeding obvious: Because living things emerge, grow and transition to other states of being (‘die’) – without exception –, is it utopian to want to do something to stop it? Yes it is. Change is also an ontological fundamental, of which decay and demise (entropy) are healthy and inescapable aspects.

But it is not the healthy fact of decay itself that troubles us. What bedevils civilisation is the risk and strong systemic tendency of imbalance between the left and right hemispherical ways of apprehending and responding to reality. As McGilchrist argues, just because the left hemisphere dooms the mind it dominates when it wins control of a given human’s personality, and is immeasurably more dangerous when it gains control of a whole civilisation, does not mean we should excise it. The left provides the means by which the right can properly act in the world. The wise response, then, is to re-embrace and give proper attention to the right hemisphere’s gifts: appreciation of wisdom, intuition, big-picture thinking, mature acceptance of paradox, deep intelligence, self-sacrifice, etc. And because humanity now has mass global destruction in its gift – in a frightening variety of ways – re-embracing the right-hemisphere’s offerings could not be more important (to us). Therefore, properly understanding the conditions that contribute to the apparently inexorable way the left hemisphere comes to dominate and reject the right in the civilisational context is, I believe, an existentially urgent undertaking.

Indeed, evidence of a kind of cultural rigor mortis in the West could not be more plain, at least to those with right-brain eyes to see. As the right-brain’s influence recedes, so the left’s influence grows, and with it a congenital inability to see the error of its ways, a process that leads inexorably to intractable intolerance. To paraphrase Arendt, if there’s something you’re not allowed to say, you’re living in a tyranny. Tyranny is thus the political expression of the left brain unchecked by the wisdom of the right, all across a given society. By way of illustrating left-brain inflexibility, here's another quote from McGilchrist:

So extreme can this phenomenon be [stroke damage to right hemisphere] that the sufferer may fail to acknowledge the existence of anyone standing to his left, the left half of the face of a clock, or the left page of a newspaper or book, and will even neglect to wash, shave or dress the left half of the body, sometimes going so far as to deny that it exists at all. […] But you do not get the mirror-image of the neglect phenomenon after a left-hemisphere stroke, because in that case the still-functioning right hemisphere supplies a whole body, and a whole world, to the sufferer. – Ibid, p. 45.

The right hemisphere’s way of being can appreciate the left’s, but not vice versa. As such it is logically unarguable that the right must be granted ascendancy in our personalities and cultures, and that this ascendancy must be sustained. Once it takes control, all the left brain can do by its nature is silence the right. I believe, as does McGilchrist, this is exactly what we see right across the West, and in westernised nations.

This brings us to the two trinities I use to make the essence of my case more graphically comprehensible. The first is power<->money<->value, which I hope does a good enough job of capturing some of the essential way of being that characterises the left hemisphere. The trinity I created for the right hemisphere is love<->wisdom<->health.

I’m proposing the power-based trinity as a lexical graphic to represent the systemic, and perhaps also reflexive, civilisational requirement for control. Obviously, the power reflex is not inherently bad and I am not at all arguing against civilisation, but I do want the first trinity at least to suggest the insidious dangers of corruption, so selected a trio of concepts that together effect a somewhat negative or treacherous tint.

However, I also see value, its third element, as a pivot between the two trinities; value, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder, is irreducibly subjective, and as such induces a certain quality of mulling over or pondering that could lead to deliberate – i.e. consciously or semi-consciously experienced – communications between the left and right hemispheres. Because my position holds reality as fundamentally subjective, I think it appropriate to propose value as a kind of conceptual or rhetorical bridge between the hemispheres. Value is to my mind the conceptual territory to which we should be paying most careful attention. If I might be ironically tautological about this, the value of this approach will be felt in the fullness of the site’s content. This article is a closer examination of how my ontotlogical position equates to a pragmatics of love, and how that pragmatics relates to the themes examined in this one.

With the basic elements behind us, and to get a fuller sense of the nature of the task the West, and perhaps all humanity, faces, let’s now drill a little deeper into the ideas foregrounded above.

While it is clear to me and many others that the West teeters at the edge of collapse, it is less clear how true this is of other civilisations / nation states, e.g. Chinese and Russian. I don’t have the time or resources to study this in depth, nor am I concerned in this work with the important differences and interconnections between civilisation, culture, nation state, etc., but things like collapsing population-replacement rates across the developed world suggest something is wrong globally. In other words, I have a persistent sense that the challenges faced by the West confront all civilised humanity one way or another. The core themes are common to civilisation generally; work for wage, value as money as price, scarcity and plenitude, freedom, the deep importance of meaningful lives, excessive bureaucracy, democracy and representation, privacy and secrecy, consciousness and materialism, theism and atheism, AI robot overlords, etc.

But my world is the West, so it receives the vast majority of my attention. Deep in its waters and carried on its tides as I am, I imagine I can taste it unconsciously fuelling the nihilistic fever of its encroaching doom. It seems to revel in its madness, or yearn for release from its ossifying soullessness. As one, its many peoples twitch and writhe with the whole’s every spasm. So many are anxious and depressed, cynical, embittered, deeply mistrustful and polarised across multiple axes, powerless to act while core values are openly abused to the point of satanic defilement. Caught up in this maelstrom as we are – we are this maelstrom –, accepting that reality is much more than what the left-brain-dominated West propagates and amplifies as loudly and pervasively as it does – and calls normal – seems an impossible task. But if we do want to rescue the great good the West has created and can still create, we must at least try. The West is home to my favourite places on Earth.

Even when you have no chance of success, it’s right to do what’s right. Right action is its own reward. But in my view there is still hope for the West. In a human individual with severe damage to the right-hemisphere, there is little to be done but cope. Civilisations and cultures, however, don’t have brains in the biological sense; it should therefore be a matter of shifting our appreciation to what the right hemisphere offers to get things back on a healthier course. It will be like rediscovering a forgotten land. This realignment can begin for each of us when we extricate ourselves from the all-consuming maelstrom and learn to see our challenge, and world, clearly, “see” as in understand, and “clearly” as in openly, just as intuition ‘sees’. This manner of seeing comfortably and naturally accommodates uncertainty and paradox, and finds the consequent wonderment and awe replenishing, life-affirming, vital.

The War of Value can only be properly apprehended and understood from this calmer, quieter place – though to the left-brain a distinctly eerie one –, an ideational landscape rather like what you have before you at this site. If we want to accomplish deep understanding of the West’s breakdown, we must physically, psychologically and psychically remove ourselves from the field of battle and make an earnest attempt to dispassionately-compassionately accept reality as it is – with intuition and empathy calmly engaged – and then allow it into us in all its impossibly rich context, as unmolested by ideology as we can.

This is by no means easy. Most of us in the West are likely shell-shocked by recent historical events, not to mention the generalised decay and nihilism. Much of the propaganda that propelled us into whichever battle camp we ‘chose’ likely still churns within us and must be identified and dispelled. And yet the growing popularity of thoughtful and skeptical independent-media outlets across the internet inviting us to reconsider everything we thought we knew suggests more and more of us are beginning to doubt.

Well … long live doubt. Used wisely, it is an excellent guide.

‘I don’t know’ is a liberating stance to adopt, once we have accepted and become comfortable with it. It sets a needed undoing in motion that can lead to healthy, open-minded skepticism, an attitude that reveals and opens far more doors than fearful or fanatical obedience to  ideology ever could, and is far healthier than nihilistic cynicism.

In other words, humility is one of the most important ingredients for healthily navigating these dangerously interesting times. Humility is a quality the left brain cannot value. But, if we make an earnest attempt to understand the relevant arguments, we can learn to want to appreciate and foster our own humility, and that wanting can be a great fillip for effecting meaningful personal change.

To repeat, value’s cultural judge and jury – money – is highly redolent of the broader left-brain issues I emphasise above: mechanistic obsession with power-based control, a price-based sense of value, greedy ambition as positive-feedback loop, a cultural inability to effectively value phenomena like wisdom and humility. Being both measure and store of value – I’m not aware of another measure that also stores what it measures; e.g. grams don’t store weight, miles per hour don’t store speed –, money represents an incredibly powerful social technology. But as should be clear to everyone by now, power tends to corrupt. To quote someone’s response to one of my comments under a Naked Capitalism article, “A long time ago money started talking. No one’s been able to shut it up since.” I find this observation redolent of how our monkey-mind left brain’s ceaseless chatter slowly comes to drown out the vital stillness of the right brain, and how hard it is to win that stillness back after we have become enmeshed in its frantic and restless other half.

Money is such a powerful tool and idea that it subsumes everything in its path. Over time it has come to profoundly influence how we see reality, what we imagine is possible, what we desire, how we understand human nature, etc. – and so insidiously! Hardly anyone recognises – or wants to – that we have been blinded to the full richness of life largely because of what money is and does. Left to its own devices, money cannot help but impoverish.

It’s normal for people to uncritically accept their nation’s myths and academic explanations of money without considering that money is in fact a man-made social technology and not an eternal force of nature. We’re all too busy making a living, and very few of us want to be seen by our peers as crazed weirdos banging on about the money system. Typically, we have to be forced or cleverly coaxed to learn what money really is.

In other words, escaping the vast and invisible web of Money The Idea takes determined and sustained effort, much like shifting one’s way of being from decades of left-brain dominance to take in ever more of the right brain’s way of being.

To repeat, rescuing the West from itself is a mighty undertaking. To have any chance of success, we have to steel ourselves for the arduous swim against money’s mighty tides; together, we are the ebbs and flows we must swim against. And it doesn’t help matters that correctly submitting to the process of unlearning – without which the process will simply confuse and irritate – is a devilishly difficult thing to do. Paradoxical concepts like effortless effort and empty richness are par for the course in this endeavour.

To help find the courage to submit into this process, it helps to remember the simple and undeniable fact of beauty. Beauty is something we instinctively value far more than money. “In each experience of beauty, we are being prepared for eternity” (Martin Shaw). “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate” (Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare).

There is no mistaking an encounter with beauty. It can make us weep for joy and laugh in awe. In the end, it is beauty we hope for, strive for, or rather are daring to let go back into.  It does not inhere in energy, or in force, or in DNA, endorphins or psychedelic drugs. Beauty is an experienced response we cannot deny. It is inherent in consciousness as a potential recognition, a rich and profound connection with something that is too true to define. To try is to risk insult, is to risk offending something impossibly fragile and impossibly strong. It is the ultimate value against which all other values are ‘measured’. Indeed, so pivotal is it, we could replace “health” in the love<->wisdom<->health trinity with “beauty” and convey a very similarly nuanced message. But for reasons that will become apparent in Truth Transparent, I prefer “health” for my ambitions with this site.

Remembering that beauty is real and fundamental is a valuable friend in this noble undertaking. After all, the reward for our efforts will never be some sort of ultimate escape or limitless financial security; there is no such thing as total freedom or total safety; such are left-brain fancies. In fact there are no ends at all, only our ever-evolving means, our interdependent and co-evolving ways of being. And there are countless answers to the more important questions. So the process of revaluing our right hemisphere’s way of being is thus about embracing uncertainty rather than gaining more certainty, though there is an indescribable clarity or peace in that uncertainty. Rich humility entails the development of increasingly wise questions alongside a willingness to listen, openly, to different perspectives. This is how wisdom evolves. This is how we enrich our experience of our world.

As Niels Bohr put it: “The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.” Part of humility is accepting uncertainty and seeing its beauty; to repeat, there is nothing more restrictive than narrow fanatical conviction, nothing more resolutely blind to beauty. The more authentic your humility, the easier it becomes to find uncertainty beautiful, the more beauty you can see in reality, and the easier it is for love to abide in you. Love is the absolute that frees, the ultimate exception that has no strict opposite, that gently invites obedience without any demand and with no need for power. It rises in natural authority above everything else solely from the fact of its undeniable and overwhelming beauty.

Even though the left-brain does not want to accept any of this, we will never be rid of the need for faith; we cannot know everything. This trivial fact encodes a wondrous mystery; as you begin to develop your own unique, supple and evolving faith, you become less susceptible to stagnant faith and falling prey to other people’s barren dogmas. As your humility and wisdom deepen, so your immunity to deception and propaganda strengthens. Such strengths are priceless in their supple vitality; they expose the fake authority of tyranny and drain strength from money’s grip on our strangled imaginations. As money’s hold on our minds weakens, so we will begin again to talk to each other, listen to each other’s thoughts, and learn deliberately, earnestly, to help each other out of money’s web. “Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins.” (Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda (1965, 1973 reprint), p6.)

Systemically, money needs scarcity to be needed. Plenitude – enough to go around for all – is anathema to money. Scarcity is the ‘problem’ the social technology of money manages, recreates  in its image, and sustains. Through money’s eyes, life is a fight for scarce resources, which, as I argue above, is part of how the left brain apprehends its world, with precision manipulation and narrow, goal-oriented focus its tools. Interestingly, Blake penned the following wisdom as a proverb of Hell: “Bring out number, weight, and measure in a year of dearth.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).  It implies, of course, that when there’s enough to go around, nobody bothers counting. It is a very old observation.

Paradoxically though, scarcity is also the teacher we need to keep us on the right track. But what particular kind of scarcity, how we relate to it, what we learn from it, are in fact matters that can be addressed outside money’s left-brain rule. This is one of the key areas where our right-brain imaginations need to be reactivated, as inspired by the constraint liberates maxim that I feel describes one of the many essences of earthly existence.

Under money’s rule, scarcity is the first requirement for profit; only scarcity yields a price above zero. And because money is value, what we value above all is money-profit. Consequently, we are willing to sacrifice much at its altar. Profit determines what we deem desirable and feasible, but can we properly measure money-profit’s real-world costs, can we fully understand the damage money does through the lens of those money-governed cultural reflexes that value it so highly? Or are we blind to the damage money does?

When measuring value, money’s price pronouncements leave out much important information, just as price/arithmetic must when measuring the subjective world. While money-as-price does a good job of managing and sustaining economic scarcity, it cannot rid reality of subjectivity. Contrary to the arguments made in mainstream economics, value cannot be measured, not fully, and I mean here both exchange and utility value (and really these distinctions mislead as much as they helpfully delineate). Nor, strictly speaking, can value be immutably stored.

One corollary of this is that nothing can have intrinsic value, just as nothing can have intrinsic beauty; experience and appreciation of beauty is necessarily relational, just as all reality is relational. To emerge, subjective qualities require an observer – a subject separate in some way from the beautiful or valued object. Only via subjective appreciation can an opinion or valuation of an object be formed, regardless of how we might try to abstract this process into ‘objective’ market-based price discovery mechanisms (e.g. Keen, Debunking Economics; Heinsohn and Steiger, Eigentum, Zins und Geld; Senf, Der Nebel um das Geld; Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years; Eisenstein, Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity).

A nugget of gold existing alone in an infinite void not only can have no value, it can have no meaning whatsoever. To repeat, value, like reality, is relational. And should a price for that nugget be discovered in a ‘free’ market, there will always be subjective responses to that price that are as rich and varied as the individuals responding. Notionally separating those unpredictable and immeasurable responses off from the price-based valuation does not make valuation objective; on the contrary, it attenuates it, strips it of its fuller, contextual meanings.

More profoundly still and getting back into the depths of ontology, the very idea of discreet objects somehow created by and sustained in an infinite void – Newtonian physics – is an assumed mental construct born of multiple left-brain habits of thought (Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity; Capra, The Web of Life and The Turning Point). This assumed construct represents an intellectual framework of which we must be consciously aware if we are to get our heads around the cost of money and all that arises from it, understand how and why money emerged, and how best to address the set of interconnected crises we face.

More pragmatically, we need to understand how issues of power always attend the process of establishing a culturally reflexive sense of value within a civilisation; there is simply too much at stake for it to be otherwise. Over the last several millennia of progressing from the “fierce egalitarianism” of hunter-gatherers (Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest) to slowly establish nation states and international corporations and institutions, we have, thanks in very large part to the dazzling success of money, built social structures of mind-numbing complexity, from which we have created ever more valuable products to fuel further progress, all of which must be protected and sustained by any means necessary. We sit like a collective but fractious human-dragon hybrid atop a mountain of treasures, and guard it jealously with everything we have. Or rather, the rulers do. And yet we are all creatures of the same system, the system that produces the rulers that guard the treasures that make our lives worth living. Or so we reflexively think.

If our wealth evaporates, our civilisation evaporates with it, rulers and ruled alike. Control of a civilisation’s or nation’s reflexive understanding of value, as but one factor of the process of sustaining those systems that produce that value, that wealth, is obviously a key battleground. Change the definition of value deeply enough, and all that wealth would disappear. Stable coherence of society over time thus depends on stable management of its collective or cultural sense of value. This requires power, which money buys, and this as a very pernicious positive-feedback loop we call ‘perpetual economic growth’.

Let me reemphasise the point about controlling value definitions. As argued, in its deepest functioning, money does precisely this; it controls our perception of value. We see value through the lens of money, the lens of price. And yet despite this, money is not wealth, no matter how much we might want to believe otherwise. As I ask in one of the graphics on the home page of Truth Transparent, if you were to steal all the world’s money and take it to the moon, how wealthy would you be?

I don’t believe the following description is extravagant, even though it could find no home in mainstream economics: Money is a notion functioning as a symbol whose primary power lies in governing how we reflexively perceive value. Money is first and foremost a social phenomenon whose utility pertains primarily to power, power as civilisation reflexively/systemically understands it. It follows then that the group that controls money creation, definition, distribution, and ebb and flow, controls value and value perceptions. In theory, at least.

Control and consensus can never be total, though this obvious fact is something the hubristic left brain cannot accept, whence the dysfunctional phenomenon of totalitarianism, hierarchy’s misbegotten offspring. The power<->money<->value trinity under examination at this site, the nexus that can corrupt towards all manner of tyranny, happens to be an emergent facet of hierarchical social organisation. Speaking very generally and in contradistinction to egalitarianism, hierarchical modes of social organisation are characterised by close and sustained control of their system’s output, first and foremost in the interests of a ruling ‘elite’: a caste that hierarchical social systems necessarily create and sustain, by definition. Close control requires power.

A ruling caste may be cynical or noble in response to the fact that it feels the heat of responsibility for that vast operations of a nation state, or civilisation, far more immediately than the ruled, which is of course systemically constrained. A ruling caste is also far more richly rewarded than the ruled; it has far more to lose if the system fails, has its hands firmly on the wealth-distribution levers, and is as good at self-justification as any group. One downstream and ever-present consequence of these factors – the risk of losing it all compounded by the dark attraction of the extra power needed to stave off that loss – is a structurally insatiable appetite for ever more power. This corrupting systemic tendency should not be underestimated, and should be foregrounded to become common knowledge throughout a given culture. But it is the irritating right brain with its refined instinctual and intuitive vigilance that senses this dysfunction. The left brain will hear none of it. This is civilisation’s perennial challenge. To repeat, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

And of course all this is as natural as a rain forest, regardless of whether we deem it cynical, noble or pathocratic. Invariably, some complex control mechanism is required to sustain any living system. In the case of hierarchical social systems, that role primarily falls to a ruling caste. In egalitarian social systems, by way of contrast, there is no institutionalised class of rulers, therefore control of this mode’s wealth/value output (mostly food and tools, though also its wisdom, history, mythology and songs) is organised for the general and ‘fair’ benefit of all members, organically, by all members, and ruthlessly so; if you stubbornly refuse to conform to the group’s ways for long enough, you will be ejected from the band, or killed – though there is little ultimate difference between the two punishments.

Sadly, we tend not to notice such features of social organisation. They are easy enough to understand, just artfully ignored or carefully-partially concealed. Typically, we are neither educated nor encouraged to critically examine the core operant principles and necessary costs of the system we grow up in, to look dispassionately upon the nation we were born into, or even at nation states generally, either as living systems or as constructed and deliberately maintained mechanical processes. Our education proceeds from certain core assumptions about ‘king and country’ we are discouraged from questioning too deeply. One way or another we are, as young children, asked to swear allegiance to The Flag before we know what doing so even means. But to repeat, there is nothing fundamentally sinister about this, except to the extent money’s power corrupts the whole as left-brain imbalance threatens to set in across the broader culture.

Again, though it is far from easy to penetrate these intermingling fogs once our habits of thought have been embedded in us by time, it is nonetheless an existentially important undertaking. Getting our responses right to the challenges we face requires a thoroughgoing reassessment of what the West is, which means a deep understanding of what civilisation is. Thoroughgoing means beginning with ontological fundamentals, and from there identifying key civilisational concepts and how they influence our perceptions, hopes and expectations. This introductory article is an outline of this undertaking, an undertaking I see as pragmatic rather than academic or philosophical. Perhaps it sounds pretentious or romantic, but I see Truth Transparent as an attempt at a pragmatics of love.

To conclude, my efforts here aim to paint a high-altitude perspective, but also a penetrating one. I hope to establish a bird’s eye view of reality as it currently manifests on Earth via lines of enquiry such as: what are nation states, what do they do, and why did they emerge? The same basic questions are asked of markets, institutional education, money, economics, etc., with money’s possessive corruption of value a pivotal concept orienting the whole endeavour.

It is important to point out as this article draws to a close that I am not indulging in a moral judgement of the West, of money, or of the left brain. I hope to bring into focus neutrally functional properties of hierarchical social systems and their systemic need to control their citizenry’s value perceptions as a crucial part of maintaining cohesion and stability over great tracts of time. This systemic need comes with a rich array of costs and threats. Nevertheless, one key question with obvious moral overtones I will ask is this: How sustainable are such social hierarchies in that they seem very susceptible to left-brain dominance and its tendency to pathocratic modes of governance by inexorably favouring the ‘psychopathic’ side of human nature (e.g. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary; Dreher, Live Not By Lies; Łobaczewski, Political Ponerology; Sahlins and Graeber, On Kings)?

History’s War of Value is not linear. Neither is its morality simple or clear cut. The interlocking historical momenta giving rise to complex social hierarchies are unpredictable and richly detailed, but have invariably derived their locomotive power from the generation and distribution of value: that which is valued by the group. Value is not captured by money alone, nor is it produced by economic activity alone. Religion deals with value too, as does ideology, as do all endeavours undertaken by humans in groups that have some common goal – a valued goal –; any group must stay cohesive to achieve its goals / produce its value. Those members of the group most effective in reaching the group’s goals are thus most valuable to the group and will – unless we are talking about hunter gatherer societies who are fiercely egalitarian – receive relatively more of the bounty the group’s efforts produce. Whether this is ‘fair’ is not as important as its long-term consequences, nor as relevant as the bio-social pressures constantly generated by perpetual change. Perpetual change is another important aspect of this work, and will be examined under the category of “group dynamics”.

To summarise this introductory article in a single paragraph: Civilisation loves control, our brain’s left-hemisphere loves control. Civilisation, among many other things, generates more and more wealth. This wealth, which includes statecraft and unceasing technological advance, affords increasing social complexity and population growth. Concomitant with this growth, power grows and grows; it is needed to keep large groups of people cohesive, obedient, controllable; if they are not controllable, civilisation is impossible. This amassed power then attracts ‘psychopaths’ to those groups that control all that power and wealth. Pathocratic/ponerogenic forces are then set in motion, whereupon corruption becomes the name of the game. In other words, civilisation has in its ‘DNA’ the seductive and structural architecture that gives the left brain everything it thinks it wants. But the left brain cannot see that this is dangerously dysfunctional, which makes it systemically psychopathic, rigid, doomed … while valuable input from the right hemisphere is silenced or ridiculed. Because we now have weapons of mass destruction and leave far too heavy an environmental footprint on the biosphere that sustains us, we urgently need to figure out how to give the right-brain its head, and lastingly so.

Truth Transparent is a complex journey as a book. It is a book in the form of a non-linearly arranged collection of interconnecting articles that rest on this one. It attempts a penetrating examination of what Consciousness-As-Reality implies pragmatically, how this ontological position helps us better understand power and money, and, consequently, how Western civilisation, Western politics and geopolitics, might be renewed and recreated by learning to revere the love<->wisdom<->health trinity described above.

COMMENT POLICY: Be civil, polite and respectful, or I will take whatever action I deem necessary.