BREAKDOWN = Strange Fruit of Capitalism’s Invisible Army: A Heritage of Stone ++ BREAKTHRU = Shifting from Domination to Partnership via eXtinction Rebellion

The following is an excerpt from the complete work at: https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/DtoPviaXR.html

breakdown = Strange Fruit of Capitalism’s Invisible Army: A Heritage of Stone
breakthru = Shifting from Domination to Partnership via eXtinction Rebellion
by David T. Ratcliffe
rat haus reality press
7 May 2019

    The day may come when time seems to hang suspended, when weeds cover our deserted streets and when the only sound is the arrogant squeak of the rat swarms, eager now for their turn at evolution. Someone from a distant place, searching through our artifacts, may chance upon a human skull. Perhaps he will pick it up, looking through the goggled sockets at the dusty hollow where a handful of gray tissue once took the measure of the universe.
    “Alas, poor man,” he might say. “A fellow of most infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. Where are your gibbets now? Your thumbscrews and your gallows? Your treasured hates and your fond cruelties?
    “What happened to your disinterested millions? Your uncommitted and uninvolved, your preoccupied and bored? Where are their private horizons and their mirrored worlds of self? Where is their splendid indifference today?
    “Now you can be silent forever.”

—Jim Garrison, A Heritage of Stone (1970)

“The transnationally operating LAWCAP in the early ’50s resurrected the twenty-year-dead FINCAP and its “capitalist” world and left only its American-flag-flying storefronts in the U.S.A. to cover its comprehensive financial withdrawal from the U.S.A. LAWCAP silently and invisibly moved capitalism’s big-time operations into the any-legally-propitious-elsewhere. With its invisibly operating CIA (Capitalism’s Invisible Army) LAWCAP exploited the unwitting citizens of the U.S.A. in order—they hoped—to destroy socialism.”

—Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (1981)

“Cultures are human creations, and you can play a role in accelerating the shift from domination to partnership worldwide. Let us break out of the domination trance that makes insensitivity, violence, and cruelty seem inevitable, and use our enormous capacities for creativity—as well as for consciousness and caring—to build the missing foundations for that more peaceful and equitable partnership future we so want and need—for ourselves, our children, and generations to come.”

—Riane Eisler, “Breaking Out of the Domination Trance” (2018)

“eXtinction Rebellion goes against all the rules. It’s a nonviolent direct action movement that says we are in danger of going extinct. And we are already sending many other species extinct at a colossal rate. We need to rebel against this. Any government which is committing us to possible extinction and exterminating ecosystems right, left, and center, is not a legitimate government. We don’t have to obey its rules anymore. We can nonviolently rebel against it.”

—Rupert Read, The Ethics of Climate Change (2019)

Before Words

What does it mean that we in the U.S. live in a society of illegitimate corporate governance wedded to denial of increasing global overheat, one of the vilest deceptions in history, and where, as formal federal policy, our unaccountable U.S. Intelligence Police, operate beyond the strictures of law and daily commit several hundred crimes including terrorism, assassination, torture, and systematic violations of human rights? A 1996 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report titled “IC 21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century” confirmed criminal actions are carried out every day by the Clandestine Service (CS) of the CIA: “The CS is the only part of the IC, indeed of the government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in countries around the world ... A safe estimate is that several hundred times every day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO (Directorate of Operations) officers engage in highly illegal activities.” As John Kelly wrote about this, “The report was the first official admission and definition of CIA covert operations as crimes which the committee, without explanation, equated with essential national security operations. In other words, the national security of the United States requires that more than one hundred thousand extremely serious crimes be committed every year.” This essay explores a primary root of this mind-bending criminal government lawlessness being a direct result and outgrowth of the assassination of President Kennedy by key elements within our Intelligence Police. Since 11-22-63 our law-breaking, illegitimate government continues to exponentially expand its death operations via policies carried out by CIA and Pentagon-based funding. For our species to survive this evolutionary moment, it is imperative to accelerate the shift from this collapsing dominator system to one based on partnership. As co-creators of our own evolution, we can choose the alternative of breakthrough rather than breakdown: that through employing all our imagination, intelligence, creativity, intuition, and wits, we can establish participatory structures of politics, economics, science, and spirituality to move into a Life respecting and caring partnership world. A critical factor in all this is the decades-in-the-making burning fuse of global overheat that must be addressed NOW if Life on Mother Earth that is not yet extinct—including our human family—has any chance to survive, much less further evolve....

A striking feature of our culture includes the specific set of illusions presented by commercial print and broadcast media which promote a chimerical representation of reality through omission, distortion, lack of contextual analysis, and disinforming opinion stated as obvious, incontestable fact. It is always our choice what lens we adopt to view the world and our place in it. Jim Garrison’s 1970 book, A Heritage of Stone provides a rich source of our genuine history, free of the inhumanity and suffocating control exercised by national security state managers whose allegiance is to LAWCAP’s U.S. Corporate Empire State. In a truly democratic society, this work would be a primary high school textbook for students to understand how their world actually works given prior struggles by those dedicated to finding and establishing ways for all on Earth to live in peaceful coexistence.

As District Attorney of New Orleans, Jim Garrison was the only Law Enforcement Officer in the United States who had the conscience, sense of duty, and the courage to conduct a trial for the assassination of President John Kennedy. Regarding what he learned from 1967 to 1969, “my staff and I found ourselves on a collision course with the most powerful force in the country. The battle that followed over those three years exposed us to a part of America that we never dreamed existed. It became very clear to me that this was no longer the country that I had grown up in as a boy. It was a nation controlled by an enormous domestic intelligence organization which would seek to discredit or destroy anyone who dared challenge its authority.” (p. 19)

By 1964, upon release of the Warren Report, “The Fix” was already in regarding commandeering U.S. media outlets to parrot the IP’s party line of a “random,” “senseless,” act of a “lone assassin” fairy tale for the extra-constitutional firing of the 35th President. By late 1963, the craft of deception as practiced by U.S. Intelligence Police, graduated to a supreme level of command whereby the actual authors of the crime released the carefully assembled cover story—notwithstanding such patently gross violations of fact as Newton’s second law of motion—to commercial press outlets within hours and days of the murder to hide the true sponsorship and operational control of the crime. However as Garrison pointed out in A Heritage of Stone, Chapter 2, Ornaments, if the assassination was the result of a lone drifter Marxist as the government proclaimed, why lock up all the sensitive evidence for a veritable lifetime?...

Given that the official pronouncement of Lee Oswald being the single, lone assassin came from the White House Situation Room to the new Presidential Party before 6pm on November 22, it can be understood how the extensive cover story which had been carefully planned, directed, and carried out long before November 1963, was now ready to go live and turn up the house lights on the decoy, first by fingering the prearranged scapegoat and then by murdering him before he was able to blow up the façade and tell what he knew about the situation from his vantage point.

A commission genuinely seeking the truth about the assassination would have taken particular note of the remarkable associations of this itinerant warehouse worker. In Dallas, his most frequent companion was an extremely sophisticated man who spoke five languages and had been an intelligence agent for France in World War II.[20] Obviously, such an individual would be most useful to contemporary American intelligence.... (p. 80)

In short, a committee of ordinary citizens exercising common sense would have necessarily perceived the accumulation of indications pointing to linkage of the accused assassin to an intelligence apparatus. Thus, a serious inquiry would have considered the implications of such an intelligence employee being on the scene. As the evidence began to indicate that he could not have accomplished the assassination but was instead set up to be trapped and blamed for it, there would have followed an inquiry into the involvement of the intelligence apparatus itself in the assassination. No committee of Americans would be happy with the task of having to confront this stark implication, but it is unlikely that men free of government connections would conclude that the truth should be hidden and the people fooled in the name of national security.... (pp. 81-2)

The intelligence activity itself is made to appear to be activity unrelated to intelligence by the use of a cover story. When a mission, such as an assassination, is accomplished, false sponsors are created by prior planning and by the planting of leads trailing away from the intelligence organization. These are to draw the attention of investigators who might want to dig below the surface of the cover story. At a more superficial level, an abundance of leads is planted by prior planning to provide a frame-up of the preselected scapegoat.

Our invisible government begins and ends with deception. Perceiving this deception is the key to understanding how the assassination of President Kennedy was accomplished. Understanding the motivation for his assassination is the key to understanding what has happened to America.... (p. 90)

The commission’s reluctance to examine information that Oswald was a government agent is reminiscent of its refusal to look at the photographs of the President’s autopsy. It is troublesome to imagine which would have been more injurious to the commission: finding out that the President was killed by a shot from the front when the scapegoat was positioned in the rear, or discovering that the official assassin was an undercover employee of a government agency when he had been governmentally depicted as a leftist.... (p. 117)

The resourcefulness of modern operational intelligence should not be underestimated. Facts are turned into cobwebs in the minds of witnesses while things which never happened are structured into occurrences which can be cemented into history. (p. 130)

The result of the cover story’s debut, relayed from the White House to the new Presidential Party on the afternoon of November 22, would become the historical record cemented into history with the October 1964 fraudulent Warren Report.

When a counterrevolution is occurring and a low level intelligence employee is being prepared for sacrifice so as to draw attention away from the power elite who are sponsoring a forthcoming assassination, it is perhaps old-fashioned to speak of the injustice being dealt to the scapegoat. Nevertheless, the observation must be made that the inhumanity demonstrated by the CIA, and the masked eminences for whom it performed was scarcely distinguishable from the inhumanity of the totalitarian governments which we had defeated in World War II. Actually we had taken the place of the totalitarian powers whom we had defeated. After our two decades as a superstate during the years of the cold war, we had become a different country.... (p. 133)

Employing subpoena power to conduct sworn testimony and the gathering and analysis of documentary evidence, the 1969 trial mounted by the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office contributed greatly to the historical record of essential facts concerning the assassination of the President. The autopsy of President Kennedy was never completed. Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck—one of the three pathologists present at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the night of November 22—stated under oath that Admirals and Generals who were present said they were in charge, and forbade the autopsy doctors from removing and examining the organs of the neck. In this way the neck wound, which had been identified by the civilian doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas as a probable wound of entrance, was never dissected in the sham autopsy controlled by U.S. Military Officers in Washington.

A probe of the neck wound by the pathologists in the Bethesda autopsy room would have revealed which way the truth lay. In retrospect, it is easy to see that this is precisely why no such probe was allowed. The neck wound, with the indications of a bullet entry but no exit, was to be the last real hurdle for the planners of the assassination. Afterward, the federal government would seize control of the investigation despite its complete lack of legal authority and that would be, in more ways than one, the end of the matter.

It was five years after the assassination, at the trial in New Orleans, that it was learned that the neck wound had never been examined. Colonel Pierre Finck, the Army pathologist subpoenaed from Washington by the District Attorney’s office, had an unusually retentive memory for details. He simply could not recall, however, who ordered the pathologists not to look at the wound in the neck.[25] Considering the historic occasion and considering the implications of such a strange order, one would think he would never forget the man who issued this command. Finck was able to remember that the man was a general and that he was not a doctor, but then his memory failed him. (p. 166)

“The inhumanity demonstrated by the CIA, and the masked eminences for whom it performed was scarcely distinguishable from the inhumanity of the totalitarian governments which we had defeated in World War II. Actually we had taken the place of the totalitarian powers whom we had defeated.”

The Opening of Chapter 1 and the book’s final Chapter, “The War Machine” presents an effective summation of why the 35th President of the United States was killed by elements of his own government. It is refreshing and liberating to read the simple, honest, direct language, so lacking in the present day looking-glass reality produced daily by the bulk of monetized corporate state media.

A man who cares too much for the human race may find himself living in a hostile environment. His humanity may not be regarded as dangerous so long as his voice cannot be heard by too many people, but if he is eloquent, or if he is in a position to affect the affairs of the nation, then his humanity will be regarded by some men as a great threat.

After the United States ascended to the position of the most powerful military nation in history, in the midst of its accumulation of the most effective death machinery of all time, there occurred the accident of the election of a President who regarded the entire human race with compassion. By the time this happened, the cold war had become our major industry, and the Central Intelligence Agency had become the clandestine arm of our military-industrial complex and, in the process, the most effective assassination machine in the world. (p. 25)

A successful coup d’état affects not merely the history of a nation but may change its power structure. With the killing of John Kennedy, the very position of the Presidency was drastically reduced in status. Henceforth, the President would be a broker for the war machine. He would be an advocate and spokesman for the Pentagon. All Presidents who followed Kennedy would have to know their impotence, no matter what their public role.

Until the work of the Kennedy assassins is undone, Presidents will come and go but the warfare machine and its extensive intelligence tentacles, domestic as well as foreign, will remain in control. The assassination reduced the President of the United States to a transient official, a servant of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to speak as often as possible about the nation’s desire for peace, while he serves as a business agent in Congress for the military and their hardware manufacturers.... (p. 180)

If the government were to take its gold bullion from Fort Knox, fly it to the Pacific in daily flights and drop it in the ocean, this would not be far removed from what has been accomplished by our adventure in Vietnam since the removal of President Kennedy. Even as the dollar approached the value of a postage stamp, the westward flights of troops and weapons into Asia were continued without abatement.

It was not possible to have price controls because the government could not admit it was engaged in war. Consequently, as the Vietnam War continued, the buying power of the dollar steadily descended. What the average American was able to retain at the end of the year was swept up by the heavy taxation, to pay for the Vietnam War and for the CIA’s adventures throughout the world.

Seven years after the assassination and the subsequent Vietnam escalation, our economy was showing the strain of too much war production and too much investment in warfare adventures. War production fails to add to the well being of the people and distorts the national economy by adding to its waste and reducing its efficiency. Real income falls as uncontrolled prices continue to rise. Insufficient money is available for the cities, and the standard of living of workers suffers. The quality of public education deteriorates. Billions of dollars that might have been available for our new schools and other social needs have in effect been dumped into the Pacific Ocean. The CIA and the Pentagon are not interested in new schools and social needs. These are death-oriented operations.... (p. 182)

It is inconceivable that men high in our government today are not fully aware of what really happened to John Kennedy and why it happened. If it can be understood outside Washington, it can be understood in Washington. Yet their sophisticated silence remains unbroken as they continue to play the game that all is well in America.

Their continued silence is eloquent testimony that the military and intelligence power elite, which sponsored the assassination and which then initiated the Vietnam escalation, continues to retain covert control of the nation. It is all too apparent that this force in our government believes that violence is the ultimate solution to any problem. This is why the present period is a most dangerous one for America and for the world....

Just as the cold war provides reasons for the existence of autocratic power, so does chaos within the nation operate as a source of power. As chaos continues, the populace will tend to be less concerned about abridgment of individual rights and will more willingly grant to a strong centralized government such power it claims it needs. Thus the warfare state may continue to appear to be relevant even after it has had to reduce its international adventures to some degree because the people are sick of war.

Such seeming relevance depends, however, upon the existence of chaos. The government’s domestic intelligence can supply chaos in good measure by stirring the embers wherever there is social discontent, and in a society depleted by years of war there will be much of that.... (p. 184)

In any event, we need no longer pretend that there is any mystery left about the assassination of John Kennedy. The cold war was the biggest business in America, worth eighty billion dollars a year as well as tremendous power to men in Washington. The President was murdered because he was genuinely seeking peace in a corrupt world. As tired as we are of the horror of the subject, all of us must address ourselves honestly to the meaning and implications of the assassination of John Kennedy, or all of us will pay the price of living in tyranny. (p. 185)

Garrison’s allegorical passage at the beginning envisions a non-Terran visiting Earth in a future timeline where our species effected our own extinction. It appears in Chapter 9, Nightfall. Except for the final line, it was originally written as the close of the Foreword he wrote for the 1966 book, Crime, Law and Corrections. Beneath the title of that FOREWORD is a centered line of text, A Heritage of Stone. Hence the summation of the 1970 book as distilled in its title, was originally composed as the introduction of Crime, Law and Corrections published four years earlier. A number of segments in the 1966 Foreword are reflected or exactly repeated in the 1970 Foreword.

Edited by Ralph Slovenko, one of Garrison’s former assistants, the 1966 criminology book is a well accepted volume with its intended audience of criminologists, prosecutors, and others in the profession. Serving five years during World War II, including combat in Europe, Garrison experienced first-hand the human capacity for evil expressed in the Nazi death camps, specifically Dachau. The following precedes the aforementioned allegory at the close of the Foreword:

What happened to your disinterested millions? Your uncommitted and uninvolved, your preoccupied and bored? Where are their private horizons and their mirrored worlds of self? Where is their splendid indifference today?

Now you can be silent forever.

Will we become silent forever? This question demands an answer from each of us. Steven Newcomb (Lenape/Shawnee) invites all “to walk with us on the Sacred Path, in honor of the first principle of our Original Nations: ‘Respect the Earth as our Mother and have a Sacred Regard for All Living Things.’” Oren Lyons (Onondaga) describes our situation in the following framework.

Maurice Strong who was the Secretary General of UNCED in 1992 in Rio asked me to repeat for him the instruction from the Peacemaker so that he could pass it on to the leaders of the world.[9] I said, Really. He says I think it’s a good instruction. So it goes, it’s very simple. The Peacemaker said to the assembled Chiefs that he had taken all this time to raise and instruct and give the Clans and the Nations and the responsibilities of the Women, responsibilities of the Men, responsibilities of the People—which is by far the largest responsibility. And he said that when you sit and you council for the welfare of the people think not of yourself nor of your family or even your generation, he said, but make your decisions on behalf of the seventh generation coming so they may enjoy what you have today.

It’s an instruction of responsibility. It was a very visionary instruction. It was a long-term instruction. It was one that looked seven generations and I’m talking the full life of a person. Not the generations they have today of twenty years or so. To us that’s not a generation.

So he was saying if you take care of the future you’ll be taking care of yourself. You yourself will have peace. Peace is what we want. Peace is what we’re after. The wars that are raging about now are violent, violent, I would say, examples of what happens when you refuse to acknowledge a better way of life. We have to do better if we’re going to survive.

I’ll tell you this: that the Earth is not going to disappear. They have a great regenerative power, this Earth. One of my good friends John Mohawk, young man, what I call resident intellect of the Iroquois; great, brilliant mind.[10] He said, I always thought that human beings are still a biological experiment. We’re here a short time. Haven’t been here long. In the time of the Earth, not very long at all and the Earth is not dependent on us, we’re dependent on it. So that if we choose to eradicate ourselves from this Earth by whatever means, the Earth goes nowhere and in time it will regenerate and all the lakes will be pristine, the rivers, the waters, the mountains. Everything will be green again. It’ll be peaceful. There may not be people but the Earth will regenerate. And you know why? Because the Earth has all the time in the world. And we don’t.

 

In 1966 Jim Garrison summarized his conclusions about man’s inhumanity to man as exemplified by his WWII experience, culminating with what he witnessed and felt at Dachau, and deepened with the ushering in of the age of nuclear weaponry, the ultimate killing machine that will, if not permanently abolished world-wide, produce a future where WE will “be silent forever.” As Garrison makes clear, our cruelty, detachment, and exponentially increasing violent capacity to terminate Life must be offset and superseded by enormous increase in compassion for and identification with the whole of our human family. How is such transformation and transcendence possible and how can it occur?

Buckminster Fuller devoted the bulk of his lifetime inquiring into the question, What would it take to make humanity a success in the universe? In her life’s work as author, cultural historian, systems scientist, and attorney, Riane Eisler has pioneered a multidisciplinary, systemic approach to the way forward if our species is to manifest success in the universe. In her book The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future (first published in 1987, the entire book is online), Eisler presents and details what she has called Cultural Transformation theory, proposing “that underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society.”

The first, which I call the dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy—the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking, may best be described as the partnership model. In this model—beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female—diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.⁵

Cultural Transformation theory further proposes that the original direction in the mainstream of our cultural evolution was toward partnership but that, following a period of chaos and almost total cultural disruption, there occurred a fundamental social shift. The greater availability of data on Western societies (due to the ethnocentric focus of Western social science) makes it possible to document this shift in more detail through the analysis of Western cultural evolution. However, there are also indications that this change in direction from a partnership to a dominator model was roughly paralleled in other parts of the world.⁶

The title The Chalice and the Blade derives from this cataclysmic turning point during the prehistory of Western civilization, when the direction of our cultural evolution was quite literally turned around. At this pivotal branching, the cultural evolution of societies that worshiped the life-generating and nurturing powers of the universe—in our time still symbolized by the ancient chalice or grail—was interrupted. There now appeared on the prehistoric horizon invaders from the peripheral areas of our globe who ushered in a very different form of social organization. As the University of California archaeologist Marija Gimbutas writes, these were people who worshiped “the lethal power of the blade”⁷—the power to take rather than give life that is the ultimate power to establish and enforce domination. (p. xvii)...

 

Writing about Hitler and Adolf Eichmann, Jim Garrison observed in the 1966 Foreword to Crime, Law and Corrections, “The minds of men who hate humanity reflect the world they experienced when they were young.” Riane Eisler has devoted a great deal of research, thought, and action to the human experience of childhood relations when young. As she describes in the 2018 article, “Breaking Out of the Domination Trance”,

we know from neuroscience that what children experience and observe in their family and other early relations directly impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, and these experiences and observations are directly shaped by the degree to which a cultural environment orients to partnership or domination.

Consider that when family relations based on chronic violations of human rights are considered normal and moral, they provide models for condoning such violations in other relations. And if these relations are violent, children learn that violence from those who are more powerful toward those who are less powerful is acceptable in dealing with conflicts and/or problems and to maintain or impose control. They learn this not only on an emotional and mental level but on a neural level.

Condoning—as well as being inured to—such chronic violations in our relations with our planetary home can be seen as a further extension of the violence of domination our current sociological foundations are based upon. Neural programming influence is foundational to the world we collectively co-create, interact with, and relate to. As John Trudell clearly expressed:

David Bohm was an uncommonly gifted physicist who made many contributions to science and philosophy. In a 1989 seminar on Dialogue and the Nature of Thought he touched upon the widespread condition of insensitivity to incoherence.

I think our whole society tries to stabilize itself by starting out to destroy sensitivity to incoherence starting with very young children. If people could see the vast incoherence that is going on in society they would be disturbed and they would feel the need to do something. If you’re not sensitive to it you don’t feel disturbed and you don’t feel you need to do anything.

I remember an instance, a daughter was telling her mother, “this school is terrible, the teacher is terrible, very inconsistent, doing all sorts of crazy things,” and so on. Finally the mother was saying, “You’d better stop this—in this house the teacher is always right.” Now she understood that the teacher was wrong obviously, but the message was, it was no use. Even the message may have been right in some sense, but still it illustrates that the predicament is that in order to avoid this sort of trouble, starting with very young children, we are trained to become insensitive to incoherence. If there is incoherence in our own behavior, we thereby also become insensitive to it.

Webster’s defines cohere as “to hold together”; coherence as “integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values.” Incoherence is lacking cohesion and the process of dis-integration. In our world incoherence is rampant in the runaway cults of materialism, militarism, and racism dominating culture and society. Some of the most potent forms are encapsulated in the following list.

Incoherence Indicators

And then there is the decades-in-the-making burning fuse of global overheat that must be addressed NOW if Life on Mother Earth that is not yet extinct—including our human family—has any chance to survive, much less further evolve. Time of Useful Consciousness Radio recently produced a two-part [I, II] program on the Extinction Rebellion movement presented by Dr. Rupert Read, speaking at a meeting in February at the University of East Anglia (UEA) where he teaches. A Professor of Philosophy, and a former Green Party Councillor (2004-11), Read covered a great deal of ground concerning our environmental crisis, facing societal collapse, and what to do about it.

After Words

In concert with its creation of Capitalism’s Invisible Army, LAWCAP’s decision at the close of the 1940s to start World War III in order to keep capitalism in business has, over the past 7 decades, resulted in the expanding dis-integration of our globally hegemonic civilization, industrial growth capitalism. In Silent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson identified human hubris and financial self-interest as the crux of the situation threatening all Life on Mother Earth. She dedicated the book to Albert Schweitzer quoting his wisdom, “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall, he will end by destroying the world.” In recent millenia constituting recorded human history, “Man,” collectively and tragically, did lose the capacity to foresee and forestall because the dominator model of social organization became embedded in the essence of most society’s relationships between the two halves—female and male—of humanity. In this way, the genius and limitless creativity each of us is born with, of mutual caring and sharing within an embedded partnership form of social organization, was suspended in the cultural evolution of our species. While the culture of domination and violence reinforce each other there are highly significant indicators that in our collective past, prior to recorded history, this kind of “power over” and control was not the operative form of human kind and human relationships. Again, from The Chalice & the Blade:

We know that art, particularly religious or mythical art, reflects not only peoples’ attitudes but also their particular form of culture and social organization. The Goddess-centered art we have been examining, with its striking absence of images of male domination or warfare, seems to have reflected a social order in which women, first as heads of clans and priestesses and later on in other important roles, played a central part, and in which both men and women worked together in equal partnership for the common good. If there was here no glorification of wrathful male deities or rulers carrying thunderbolts or arms, or of great conquerors dragging abject slaves about in chains, it is not unreasonable to infer it was because there were no counterparts for those images in real life.¹⁰ And if the central religious image was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life—rather than death and the fear of death—were dominant in society as well as art. (pp. 20-21)

More than 5 decades after Silent Spring was published, our dominator system is advancing further into its terminal apex. Time has run out. It is no longer possible to defer acting on behalf of ALL our relatives here, including our single, indivisible, supremely gifted and fragile human family. We must determine what transformational adaption we can collectively create and implement to finally respond in this exceedingly late hour to the emergency of global overheat as well as the other pressing incoherence indicators that must likewise be addressed in kind. The possible outcomes include our societies collapsing and the extinction of our species.

As the abbreviated enumeration of runaway criminal policies directed by and serving U.S. Empire Corporate State interests in 2nd Mvmt indicate, this is not a legitimate government serving the needs and aspirations of people, inextricably embedded in and utterly dependent upon the web of all Life Mother Earth conceives, bears, and nurtures. It is in fact wholly illegitimate given the federally sanctioned policies of murder, assassination, terrorism, and violation of the rights of humans—and all our other than human kin—with its relentless pursuit of endless so-called economic growth: still building massive infrastructure, still facilitating expansions in animal agriculture, still spending more on war-making than the next seven countries combined, still serving the entrenched corporate fossil fuel nexus, still making and implementing U.S. National Insecurity State of Mind policies by means of peddling fears of implacable, supremely evil enemies with an updated and largely unconscious U.S.-War-in-Vietnam-Era Mantra, It became necessary to destroy the Earth to save it, still bent on “modernizing” our nuclear weapons stockpile over the next 30 years with its projected costs of 1.2 trillion dollars, and still officially denying and ignoring the pressing reality of global overheat and its looming, unspeakable consequences. Willful U.S. criminal inaction on the ecological catastrophe threatening Life Security throughout Mother Earth requires nonviolent rebellion to change course away from the dead-end future of a mass extinction event while determining what options still exist to be acted upon in the face of this unfolding crisis era of ecological emergency we are by day sinking evermore deeply into.

The requirement for this regenerative process of collective involvement within our entire human family encompassing a truly democratic dynamic to determine best strategies to deal with and respond to the climate and ecological emergency becoming evermore dire can be a driver and catalyst for accelerating the shift from domination to partnership. There are many complements to the nonviolent rebellion picking up steam described above. See for example, Zachariah Mampilly speaking on “How Protest is Redefining Democracy Around the World” (2017, 10:16), Julia Bacha summarizing her work on “How Women Wage Conflict Without Violence” (2016, 10:34), and Yanis Varoufakis covering how “Capitalism Will Eat Democracy—Unless We Speak Up” (2015, 19:08). More than ever, we find ourselves living in the time of Koyaanisqatsi, the Hopi word meaning “crazy life,” “life out of balance,” “life disintegrating,” and “a state of life that calls for another way of living.” May we all continually awaken to and be renewed by recognition of our participation in and partaking of life at this unique time of Koyaanisqatsi.

Buckminster Fuller devoted the bulk of his lifetime inquiring into the question, What would it take to make humanity a success in the universe? The Basic Bio of his specific journey is mind-expanding and provocative in the best creative sense. The following from Critical Path is the conclusion (p. xxxviii) to its Introduction: Twilight of the World’s Power Structures.

Each year I receive and answer many hundreds of unsolicited letters from youth anxious to know what the little individual can do. One such letter from a young man named Michael—who is ten years old—asks whether I am a “doer or a thinker.” Although I never “tell” anyone what to do, I feel it quite relevant at this point to quote my letter to him explaining what I have been trying to do in the years since my adoption of my 1927-inaugurated self-disciplinary resolves. The letter, dated February 16, 1970, reads:

Dear Michael,

Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning “thinkers and doers.”

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done—that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don’t be disappointed if something doesn’t work. That is what you want to know—the truth about everything—and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their system.

Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools—and once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.

You have what is most important in life—initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.

Sincerely yours,    

Buckminster Fuller

The political and economic systems and the political and economic leaders of humanity are not in final examination; it is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity’s fate.You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can’t deceive your mind-self—for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all the truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible.

Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.

Imagine running out of imagine
Mistaking authority for power
Weaving lifes free spirit
Into patterns of control
—John Trudell, “Iktomi,”
Lines from a Mined Mind, p.259

by Dave Ratcliffe