SOCIAL, CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CRITIQUE// Editor/Author, Larry N. Castellani, Ph.D.
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
THE WAR ON HEALTH, HEALING AND HAPPINESS
THE PEOPLE VS THE ELITISTS
WE ARE LIVING AT a structurally transformative juncture in world history. Whether the techno-bureaucratic rationalism of the international capitalist elite, or, the will of the democratic communitarian populism of the people prevails will determine the direction the limb of life will branch & turn for any foreseeable future.
At this turning point we can clearly grasp that the forces of authoritarian elitist totalization see their opportunity to finally destroy the spirit & discourse of 2000 years of democratic struggle. They see their excuse in a fictitiously exaggerated virus and posturing their quest for domination as humanitarian care for a world under attack by this putatively voracious lethal germ.
But it is a blatantly embarrassing non sequitur that the world should now be re- designed, even if there were an actually lethal pandemic. The fiction of this ruse has now begun to fall apart. The people are beginning to see that the destruction of all they have built as businesses, communities & individual lives is not worth sacrificing to fight a pseudo-scientifically imagined nemesis of life on earth.
The people on the whole are not that gullible though many are still under the hypnotic sway of a liberal mass media that practices an impossible moral purism and seem to believe their narrative of fear and doom. This media plays the role of mouthpiece for plutocratic talking points that feed the ideology & propaganda of the new medical fascists of Big Med, Big Pharma and the agents of the bio-political agenda of social control. They do this in the interest of mass centralized accumulation of capitalist profits & the final institutionalization of the Official Narratives of global control of the Experts, Specialists & academically brainwashed liberal Professionals.
The time to resist, speak out and act against all forms of domination, irrationality, legal violence and all the falsely innocent bureaucrats, police, officials & workers who claim they are "just doing their job." The workers who threw Jews into the concentration camp ovens were just "doing their jobs." Soldiers of the capitalist wars were 'just doing their jobs' following orders, murdering hundreds of thousands. Now is the time to reject effectively violent, lethal & immoral "law" that would have you succumb to executive authorities for authorities sake. Reject arbitrary authority, assume responsibility, creative agency & the mastery of democratic self-realization. This is the time of universal moral action & the refusal of repressive, irrational & perverted legal orders. This is the time of the purity of the peoples' democracy to arise & deny the bureaucratic-technocratic managerial elite their self-appointed superiority & let it be known that the "emperor has no clothes."
Friday, September 10, 2021
LIBERAL CULTURE DEGRADES INTO SELF-CONTRADICTION AND CONFLICT
Soldiers can't do their jobs: rules of engagement.
Friday, September 03, 2021
MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX LEANS TOWARD FASCISM
Mainstream liberal media promotes the medical "Matrix." It is medical authoritarianism. Our bodies become a dumping ground for Big Pharma's drugs & vaxxines & you pay for the privilege to store their toxic shit in your sacred flesh. Big Pharma wants to colonize your body & use "illness" created by a sick culture to justify pseudo-medicine. They don't want to heal let alone promote health. They want to suppress symptoms thus causing more & deeper illness & justifying evermore toxic non-solutions for your misery & suffering. The culture must be healed. The earth must be detoxified. Big Pharma & medical fascism must be fought. Mass media brainwashing must be exposed. We must return to the instinctual feeling of health, happiness, & subjective power, the "instinct" that Nietzsche called the greatest, truest human intelligence.
Thursday, September 02, 2021
THE REVOLUTIONARY TELOS OF ALL POLITICS
Now is the time to re-birth the communities of America as the "thousand points of light" for freedom & democracy. It is only in this new populist socio-political context that the spirit of authoritarianism can be put to rest. It is now across this country that the spirit of the new individual who finally & fully owns his/her power to embody & create health, happiness & abundance for all can be born. The fraudulent elitist authorities of pseudo-science, -medicine, - government, -education & -religion must be debunked & returned to the people in a revolution of authentic knowledge, power & leadership.
Thursday, July 01, 2021
VIRUSES, VITALITY AND VIRILITY
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
RECOVERING HUMAN AGENCY: SELF-RESPONSIBILITY, SOCIAL AWARENESS AND POLITICAL ACTION
Understanding this global phenomenon, call it the “viral effect,” is not about some sort of self-evident factualities versus conspiracy theory, as if these are the only two possible perspectives of thought. The former reifies “factuality” and becomes a mythic “factualism.” The later reifies the source of action, control and intent and imagines some “big brother” in cyberspace or nefarious bad-guy Illuminati in smoke-filled back rooms planning to orchestrate world change. Get real. The ‘viral effect’ is a mass mediated idea that is historically catalyzing global trends of divergence away from the Universalism or globalism, empire building, civilizational homogenization, totalitarian one-dimensionality, etc., etc. No medical facts will clarify what is happening at this historical turning point. We must rethink the whole of contemporary life and the parts of that whole in particular. We all can play a part in this or turn it over to the self-appointed emperors of existence. It’s time to re-appropriate one’s self in the deepest and broadest existential and spiritual sense. It’s the opportunity for every individual to become a player and not a pawn. One can be at play passionately in the fields of the Lord; or a minion worker bee passively responding to the “expert authorities” when they tell you to “believe,” “feel,” “act” as they see fit. The ‘viral effect’ is the opportunity to fully become a human being in thought, feeling and spirit and re-appropriate the living Self whose experience creates the real, constitutes the real and decides upon the reality to be created.
One aspect of this possibly emerging ‘new normal’ is the recognition of the institutional force or ideological force of official, ‘mass mediated’ authority/expertise/specialization. The medical aspect of the ‘viral effect’ is what we see in a few official experts such as Fauci, Birx and Gates commandeering the reality of what is going on and attempting to force or suggest universal political solutions: masking, social isolation, socio-economic shutdown. These actions are the result of a Liberal/Enlightenment psychology (become ideology) that imagines a universal solution to a health problem. Bill Gates states this most ludicrously when he claims that nothing can return to normal until there is universal global vaccination. This is the delusion of all delusions. This is a rich boy playing with his money and consequent power trying to make his vacuous existence meaningful and undoubtedly also enrich his bank account beyond all dreams.
But in keeping with the medical issue, what is at stake here in the face of the official authority/experts influencing health policy and socio-political action is the question of the locus of control of one’s health and the locus of control of one’s identity and self-understanding even and especially at the personal, subjective and spiritual level. In short the authentic ownership of one’s own body, mind and soul is at stake.
If for example, I make any comment on Facebook regarding the medical knowledge around the ‘viral effect’ someone will inevitably respond with a comment like “what medical school did you go to?” The challenge here is to prove my “expertise” in terms of institutional norms, traditions and practices. So I’m not allowed an informed opinion unless I am an “expert” whose authority comes from a recognized institution. Even though I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, have taught for 30 plus years at a college level, read constantly, think and write about politics, spirituality, culture, etc., my opinion means literally nothing unless I have been sanctified by the powers that be. This attitude and article of faith would mean the end of public discourse, critical thinking and democratic association. It means the end of any belief that public education prepares one and authorizes one to effectively and competently participate in public, political discourse. This worship of the “expert authorities” de-subjectivizes the individual, expropriates one’s mind and displaces one’s capacity for self-determination to the one’s “supposed to know,” the one’s who are allowed to claim to “know,” the Fauci’s, Birx’s, Gate’s, or, God forbid the Kanye West’s or Kim Kardashians! Knowledge and truth becomes specialized, institutionalized, compartmentalized. The “expert authorities” will tell you what is believable, what you can or should think, want and do; even what you should feel and therefore whether you are healthy or not.
Monday, March 15, 2021
Monday, February 01, 2021
TOWARD A POPULIST RESET OF AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONALISM
Friday, January 08, 2021
THE CENTER OF DEMOCRACY: Can It Hold?
If there is a center to democracy, so to speak, where or what is it? One candidate would be the 'will' to democracy. There has been in America a strong will to democracy. This exists in individuals as well as institutions and characterizes our history. However it would be a mistake to not acknowledge that there is a strong will which either opposes or diminishes the role or value of democracy. One might conclude that the will to democracy so exceeds that of its antagonists, that the center is holding and is not threatened. In fact its opponents, if not enemies, may well strengthen the democracy in being a corrective of sorts. Surely, democracy needs its correctives in that it is quite capable of lapsing into the tyranny of the crowd, the mistreatment of minorities and neglect of principle.
But can this democracy hold given the existing state of our will, the institutional structures and the practices which sustain it? Not to mention its opponents who do seem to be gaining ground in our recent political history. A troubling feature of existing practice is the method of choosing candidates for office. Harvard professor, Lawrence Lessig, maintains that financial control of the selection processes has devolved into a pre-selective process which limits and determines the outcome of the range and type of candidates. Moreover, he claims, that elected representatives then suffer under the clamor for funding thus becoming the mouthpiece of those who can afford to fund their campaigns. In short the campaign process is corrupted.
Let's just say that regarding the strength of the institutional framework, it is holding given that it was tested severely during the Trump administration. This is not to say that there are not problems with the structure given the ideological pressure from both major parties.
The Constitution itself would seem to hold except for the fact that the massive centralization and bureaucratization of power over against local autonomy and responsibility flies in the face of the federalist intent within this founding document. This leads to my last point regarding shoring up framework. Namely the role of the people and the "structure" that sustains their foundational primacy to democracy philosophically and historically.
It seems that the framework of the people's democracy can't be centered on 'Washington', that is, on political parties and salvational leaders. If 'all politics is local politics,' then all democracy is likewise local democracy. This means that power must be disseminated not by a third or fourth party but by the re-democratization and communalization of communities. There must be a thousand points of light blending into an energizing of democracy as one "light" of the people. More than power, however, there must be a re-absorption of wealth into the communities through the radical reduction of federal/centralist taxation. This money is the money of the people. The central funding of a military for defense and a minimalist central government to mediate disputes between communities and regions is obviously necessary and desireable. But the bureaucracy, the state, the military empire around the world and the practice of "socialism" for the rich must stop and must be deconstructed or, in other words, reduced on the basis of qualitative need and not arbitrary numbers of tax dollars.
The operative principle for communalizing, democratizing and empowering communities and thus enhancing democracy is that of "subsidiarity." This means that what can be done at home for survival and self-fufillment must be done at home. The centralist, wrongly named "Federal," government must be assigned its proper regulative as opposed to constitutive role. The American Constitution intends to constitute a federalism of the people, of communities, regions, localities. And though "republican," it did not intend to disempower politically, expropriate wealth or determine cultural life.
So in brief I have been talking about an enervation of democracy through, firstly, the deconstruction of the bureaucratic-technocratic centralist regime in Washington; secondly, the re-constitution of communities on the basis of the principles of subsidiarity and federalism. But lastly, the question of the individual arises in carrying out the democratic tasks.
It seems, then, that as long as public school system and the community college systems hold, then these are the places that education of individuals for democracy must take place. Instruction in Government, Civic participation, history of democracy and social being must be re-energized and in some cases brought back from the dead as in the case of Civics. So we are talking about an educational re-constitution of individuality as a fundamentally social and political individuality. This is the last plank of the three which could disseminatively "re-center" democracy as a people's democracy and as a genuine federalist democracy.
Lastly, let's note that one obstacle in this slow populist revolution toward a deeper democratization is dealing with the multiplication of cultures, languages, religions and ideologies in America. This multi-culturalism, once identified as a melting pot in America, is a great ideal presumably being realized. This is, to some extent, true but far from a difficulty solved. If a multi-culturalism is to be fully realized this too cannot be the job of government let alone the "culture" industry. Multi-culturalism can only be solved and treated as the opportunity that it is for deeper socialization and communalization at the community level. It will also be the place of a re-valuation of "national" values and the space of value creation in the communities.
There is obviously other central issues to be discussed such as the place of Law and its relation to the ethics of communities and the ethos of cultures. Also the role of parties is highly problematic and their "governance" by the billionaire class that preponderates toward the center and the top of society. But enough for now as to whether the center holds. It does. For now. At least as an idea and ideal if not a realized desire fulfilling its highest intended purpose.
It's future depends upon its re-configuration on a populist as opposed to centralist, globalist, bureaucratic or technocratic basis.
If there is a will to democracy, then it is a generalized will, one centered in the self-understanding of the interests of the people. Not the people as a class, a party, a culture or movement but the People as a principle and idea of freedom, sovereignty and self-determination.