Meditopia -- Chapter 13

hose who are inclined to ponder the state of our current political climate -- and few citizens appear to do so anymore with any depth -- generally fall into three distinct camps. There are those who are generally happy with the status quo and feel that whatever shortcomings arise, they can be fixed. In other words, they have faith in the self-healing mechanisms now in place. Secondly, there are those who feel a far more radical approach is required. The system has not been fixed, cannot be fixed, and will never be fixed -- and, therefore, the "People" will never be properly represented unless, again, we clear out the petri dish and start over. The third group are even more "radical" in the current understanding of the term, and we call them "anarchists." Advocates of anarchism come, as do we all, in 32 flavors and then some -- but it would probably be fair to say that their position represents the same cleaning out of the petri dish. But then we keep it clean.

This sounds good in principle, but it represents a swinging of the pendulum too far in the other direction. Meditopia is not about no government. It's about good government -- government that provides responsiveness and accountability to the common citizen, rather than mythological theater. It's about government that observes Natural Law and acts with a knowledge of the importance of endosomaticism. It's about acknowledging the dangers inherent in the centralization of power and authority and realizing that in any endosomatic-leaning society, people make decisions for themselves. It's all about community, and when you put all the pieces together, the best government comes from the networking of many communities, where the center of power is still localized. It's about creating a body of civic law that is so minimalistic, the thought of consensual crime (which abounds in the over 13,500 criminal laws now on the books in the U.S. -- and that's just on the federal side) is acknowledged for the absurdity it is. 2 - 3.

The Cruel Illusion of 'Entitlements'

The conventional among us will argue that the large portion of the U.S. budget that goes to "entitlements" (i.e. Social Security, Medicare, etc.) is proof of the beneficence of the system. Those who make this argument are careful not to mention that "social security" is a ponzi scheme -- that it is a mechanism to support what Tainter calls "legitimacy of government," but as with all systems that are parasitic, it must, by its nature, take more away from it than it gives back. The U.S. social security fund has been so rapaciously plundered that, as with Greider's observation about the facts of American democracy as a whole, the signs of its eventual collapse are "visible everywhere."

I liken social security as it is known and practiced in our Western democracies to a "generous robber." As you insert your key into the driver side lock on your car, you are accosted by a masked thief at gunpoint who tells you to give him your wallet. You instantly comply, as you have no real choice. He opens the wallet, takes out five "twenties" -- but instead of running off with his $100 gain, he must convince you that he's not really all that bad. So he takes two of the twenty dollar bills and hands them back to you. He may even take a few seconds to tell you that he did what he did out of necessity -- food, family (or to complete the metaphor, shall we add national defense, space exploration, huge corporate subsidies . . . you get the picture). Then he leaves, and you look into your hand at your $40 "entitlement," and as you watch your assailant slip into the night, you notice that the back of his shirt is imprinted with something eerily familiar.

It says, "Uncle Sam."

A beginner's understanding of the "cost ineffective" nature of centralized government can be obtained by reading any of a number of works by Nobel prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman. A good starting point is: Free to Choose, though Friedman leaves the problem bereft of anything extending the boundaries of "laissez faire." Apparently, his genius will not allow him to see the structural defects of "competitive capitalism," especially in the presence of a pseudo-democratic political system that will never, ever allow a real "free market" -- nor has it ever. Nonetheless, he will help crack your egg of illusion -- if you still hold to the thought that our government is a bargain. Truth is, it is rapacious in its employment of myriad "systems" of taxation -- most of them never appearing in any form on your tax return.

What is needed are discrete, localized "politi-cell" structures -- where the center of political gravity is decentralized. The advantages of public works in its economics of scale could still be accomplished through networking, but no centralized authority would have the power to exert itself over all the other communities. What would be helpful is a pre-existing model of political, endosomatic-leaning success that we can draw lessons from, and as it turns out, just a model already exists. The Iroquois Confederacy, the world's oldest living participatory democracy, has been operating successfully since August 31, 1142 A.D.. However, in terms of the maintenance of eco-sustainable, earth-friendly, endosomatic culture, the Iroquois claim that Native North American Indians "can probably lay claim to a tradition which reaches back to at least the end of the Pleistocene, [approx. 30,000 B.C.] and which, in all probability, goes back much further than that." 12. [Perhaps Precambrian 14.] Many elements of Iroquois democratic rule are almost recognizable when compared to our own twisted version of democracy -- for instance, all decisions affecting all tribes have to be agreed upon unanimously. (Although the founding fathers were influenced by Iroquois law, it appears to have played a small role -- I believe an unfortunately insignificant one.)

In the oral tradition that tells the history of the Iroquois Confederacy or "Six Nations Confederacy," a Huron prophet, Deganawida, was inspired with a plan "to end human beings' abuses of other human beings." This oral tradition, "Gayaneshakgowa," or "Great Binding Peace," tells of the founding of the Confederacy at a time of immense warfare and bloodshed between the various tribes. Although my knowledge of the tradition is inadequate to know all its nuances as it pertains to the use of resources, I suspect that, as in most conflicts, an "exosomatic leaning" relative to the Indian culture was most probably in vogue. Deganawida enlisted the help of a former Ononadaga chief, Hiawatha, to help carry his message in all its specifics to all the other nations.

The result was a detailed solution -- one that requires over a week to repeat by those who can still recite the Deganawida, but at its core is a solution with the simplicity of Occam's Razor: a forum will exist where all nations are represented, where "thinking will replace violence" and "reason will prevail," with a central geographic location easily reached by all. In acts that further showed an underlying endosomatic wisdom, the Confederacy was divided into clans, irrespective of the participants tribal origin. The clan names were taken from animal species with whom the Indians share their ecosystem: Turtle, Bear, Wolf, Heron, Hawk, Snipe, Beaver, Deer, and Eel. Political power is not invested primarily in men. In a move that reflected the wisdom of culture that respects the equal importance that male and female play in a culture in equilibrium, the women of the clans meet under the leadership of a clan mother and select the men who assemble as chiefs in the Grand Council. To insure peace among the different Indian nations, "the Peacemaker proposed that the People of the Longhouse would be united in a brotherhood so strong that the people of the Turtle clan of the Senecas would view the people of the Turtle clan of the Mohawks as their own blood kin, and as such it would be unlawful for a person of one of these nations to marry a person of the other who was of the same clan, just as it would be wrong for a person to marry a sibling." 9.

It is interesting that the Deganawida describe an early opponent to the Plan for Unity that created the Federation. The oral tradition describes him an Onondaga war chief whose name was Tadodaho. He was said to be an "embodiment" of evil -- one who had snakes woven into his hair to intimidate those around him. I believe this is Indian symbolism that, translated into the "language of the Axis," describes the "Darkness" that is progressive as you move from left to right on the Exosomatic Axis. In continuing the symbolism, the tradition tells of the emergence of Jikohnsaseh, a woman chief of the Cat (or Neutral) Nation. "She suggested that (Tadodaho) could be won over by being offered the chairmanship of the Great League. When the nations assembled to make their offer, Tadodaho accepted. Jikohnsaseh, who came to be described as the Mother of Nations or the Peace Queen, seized the horns of authority and placed them on Tadodaho's head in a gesture symbolic of the power of women in Iroquois polity." 10.

In comparing our own political and social order with that of the Iroquois Confederacy, several key features stand out -- and they show just how far we have allowed our worship of tools to remove us from the natural world. First, the strength of the "community" shines clearly among the Iroquois and nearly all indigenous tribes that one studies in North America. Their myths and symbolisms were rooted in the land and allowed them to have a deep and abiding relationship with the land. By contrast, our high entropy, high exosomatic culture has invested itself largely in the individual. As Joseph Campbell notes, " . . . in the leading modern centers of cultural creativity -- people have begun to take the existence of their supporting social orders for granted, and instead of aiming to defend and maintain the integrity of the community have begun to place at the center of concern the development and protection of the individual -- the individual, moreover, not as an organ of the state but as an end and entity in himself. This marks an extremely important, unprecedented shift of ground . . . " 11.

Political economists who follow the theories of "social capital," understand the implications of these developments. For social capital is the glue that holds together both physical and human capital and makes them productive. "It refers to features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. Social capital enhances the benefits of investment in physical and human capital." 13. The slow dying passage of American community is something social capital pioneer, Robert D. Putnam, makes clear in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Putnam is, however, a reformer without a sense of the tectonic plates in politics that contribute to the collapse in the first place. You can't fix life on the surface when the underlying plates are programmed to make life above instable. Investment in community, as Hume notes in his "farmer parable," is based on a confidence in reciprocity. If the power structure has a center of gravity that is located at the top of the pyramid -- where exosomaticity has created maximum centralization of authority -- the very forces that create community vibrancy and potency have already been sucked out. Putnam does a superior job of identifying the problem -- not providing the solution.

I realized this while running my family's food company, Lumen Foods (soybean.com). My employee number has fluctuated to anywhere between nine and forty-three employees over the past eighteen years -- (I founded the company in Lake Charles in 1986). After a while, I noticed that my wife and I were the only ones who ever went to a voting booth to fulfill our civic duty on election day. I had extensive talks with employees -- individually and in groups -- to uncover why there was such a dirth of interest in the electoral process. If I had to sum up the sentiments of my workers, it would be: "What does it matter who gets elected? And even if my vote changed who got elected -- what difference does that make to me or my life?" 15.

Centralized government and true democracy are contradictions in terms. The Iroquois understood this. That is why "tribal nationalism" was deliberately broken and destroyed with the institution of clans. The Indians understood that unless each and every citizen felt that his vote counted, that his opinion mattered -- or to borrow from Hume, that his effort in the field changed the fate of the crop, there could be no democracy -- there could be no such a thing as representative government -- there could be no peace -- there could be none of the blessings that follow from endosomaticity.

The political culture that makes a Meditopia possible would have good government -- with a political center of gravity that ascended no higher than a small city. Networking would be the order of the day. Such are the dictates of an endosomatically-leaning society.

William Greider, Who Will Tell The People, A Touchstone Book, New York, 1993. p. 11.
David Novak, Downtime: A Guide to Federal Incarceration, David Novak Consulting, Salt Lake City, UT, 2004 -- mentions the "13,500" criminal laws now on the books.
McWilliams, ibid. -- again, reference is made to the absurdity of consensual crimes.
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt), New York, 2003. Other recent works along the same lines: Rogue State and 9-11.
William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine; 2000. See "The U.S. versus the World at the United Nations," p. 184-199.
Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Metropolitan / Owl Book, New York; 2000. p. 7.
Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London, 1948. I bring this up in passing because it was used for so many years as a manifesto by conservative thinkers in the U.S. to hound their socially liberal counterparts. Since Weaver died in 1963, we are deprived of asking him how the interpretation of "absolute reality" in moral reasoning, as it has been applied, would square with our rising experience in the number and severity of encounters with "blowback."
Johnson, ibid., p. 191.
See http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/
naind/html/na_017500_iroquoisconf.htm.
Ibid.

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By, Penguin Group, New York, 1972. p. 24.
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/#BCtC. Taken from the "A Basic Call to Consciousness, The Hau de no sau nee Address to the Western World," Geneva, Switzerland, Autumn 1977.
http://www.prospect.org/print/V4/13/putnam-r.html

Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, The Hidden History of the Human Race, (The condensed edition of Forbidden Archeology), Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, Los Angeles, CA; 1996, Fourth Printing, 2002. p. 120-122, 267. Graham Hancock calls this "one of the landmark intellectual achievements of the late twentieth century." I have to admit, the idea of men living in the Precambrian era sounds insane -- and the 2.8 billion year old fossil evidence (again, that's billion, not million), found in pyrophyllite, of what is clearly of human (or higher) intelligence is just one instance: and in South Africa, no less. Nonetheless, the dating method would appear to yield an accurate approximation of age. (As an aside: my use of the phrase "or higher" would probably mean extraterrestial -- which got me thinking: you notice that in all the variations we discuss in our pop culture, ET's are never less intelligent, or less technically sophisticated than we are. In light of our poor husbandry of this planet, I suspect that on a deep level even WE know that in the universal scheme of things, we are not one of the Creator's more intelligent species. In some respects, you get a chance to connect with "this deeper level of Truth" upon studying Dr. Arthur David Horn's Humanity's Extraterrestrial Origins: ET Influences on Humankind's Biological and Cultural Evolution, A & L Horn, Lake Montezuma, Arizona; 1996.)
For those who think this reaction is isolated to those in lower socioeconomic strata, consider the experience of Dr. Daniel Goodenough of Harvard Medical School, which not long ago held three seminars on human health and global environment. The first seminar "was overflowing with energetic, aware, and concerned young medical students. Inexplicably, however, the second session was only half full. At the final seminar only half a dozen students showed up. When a perplexed Goodenough asked the students why attendance had fallen off so sharply, their responses were identical. The material was compelling, they said, but it engendered overwhelming personal reactions. The problems were so great -- and the ability of the students to affect them so remote -- that they could deal with their feelings of frustration and helplessness and depression only by staying away." Taken from Ross Gelbspan, The Heat is On: The Climate Crisis, The Cover-Up, and The Prescription, Perseus Books, Cambridge, Mass.; 1998, p. 172.