Absolutism: Pabulum For The Insecure?

Two things are for sure, the first is that the elite citizens of the U.S.eh?, in general, believe everything is fine and dandy, and the second thing that is for sure is that people in the know have an extremely opposite view.

That the notion of the fundamental insecurity of civilization has been institutionalized as a false notion can be felt, to some degree, by the statement of world famous Senator John McCain during the 2008 presidential election (just before the worst recession in U.S.eh? history hit very hard), when he said in response to a journalist's question, "what economic problems?", then topped it off with "the economy is just fine".

His running mate could only add, when asked what she thought of it, "I don't know what that is, I can't see the bank from my house".

Her "drill baby drill" policies were the policies that Barak Obama decried during his presidential campaign, yet has now embraced as his own policies as fully as can be accomplished in a short three years as president.

That is "the American Dream" at the moment, an institutionalized trance, a virtual hypnotic stupor, brought on purposefully by the massive engines of deceit running amok within the meme complexes of current civilization.

In an optimistic appraisal of reality, a scientific paper says that food prices will double by 2030, while perhaps a less optimistic appraisal says two Earths will be required by that time to produce that food.

So, we can expect the most oft used phrase in the current "halls of vision" ("worse than previously thought") to continue to be news headlines repeatedly.

Below are examples which show that current political cognition is inept for dealing with problems that are beyond our habitual political considerations.

The first:

The best example of this would probably be the story of Chang and Eng Bunker, "the Siamese Twins," so called because they were from Siam (now Thailand). Chang and Eng were joined by just a bit of liver and some skin. One April day in 1843, Chang married Adelaide Yates, while brother Eng married sister Sallie Yates. Based on the fact that Chang and Adelaide had 10 children, and Eng and Sallie 12, it's fair to say the brothers had sex.

At the autopsy of the Bunker twins, one of the anatomists opined that their active sex lives "shocked the moral sense of the community" -- even though the truth is that the Bunkers' neighbors appeared to have just accepted the situation. A little known fact is that the Bunker wives' father originally objected to his daughters marrying the twins not because they were conjoined, but because they were Asian. (This was, after all, the antebellum American South.)

Yet in the nineteenth century, when doctors discussed whether the twins Millie and Christina McCoy could marry, one spoke for many: "Physically there are no serious objections ... but morally there was a most decided one." When, in the 1930s, Violet Hilton sought to get a marriage license while conjoined to her sister Daisy, she was repeatedly refused.

The same discomfort generally carries through to our own time.

(Atlantic Monthly). Another example:

Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.

(Twins Share a Mind, emphasis added). There are significant portions of the two girls' brains that are common to both of them, just as with the male twins who also have a different organ common to both of them.

The question "would it be appropriate for the two / four to have sex with each other?" would surely jar an absolutist's ability to reason this out.

These examples show not only a new meaning for "united states", but they also show that not all "united states" are the same.

We can go back to the civil war in the U.S.eh? to see that one person's "united" is another person's "bound", and thus ponder our current state of affairs anew.

In New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, a case in the U.S. Supreme Court during the not-so-great depression, Justice Brandeis in his dissent lamented about the Supreme proclivity to denude the power of the states' ability to experiment:

There must be power in the states and the nation to remould, through experimentation, our economic practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs. I cannot believe that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, or the states which ratified it, intended to deprive us of the power to correct the evils of technological unemployment and excess productive capacity which have attended progress in the useful arts.

To stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to the nation. It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

(285 U.S. 262, 1932). The thoughtful Justice Brandeis said that the states are experimenters, free to find their own truth that could be different than the truth of the other states, and maybe even better.

The militarized groupthink of The Bound States of America is not good for us because we need to be in a state where we might be able to think our way out of various impending calamities, which is unfortunately not the current state we are in.

We are not in Kansas anymore Inhofe.

The Farm is famous in some circles for various solutions, but when it first was developing as an experiment the FBI spied on it for 20 years under J. Edgar Hoover:

Why do police agencies fear, and consequently target for subversion, experimental communities? That fear is abundantly evident in the documents which today are being made public for the first time. It is also evident in the protracted struggle, at great expense, which the government undertook to prevent their release. In this paper, I'll address both of those misguided efforts in some detail.

What may now be observed is that the obsessive and neurotic character of J. Edgar Hoover, and the legacy of institutional paranoia which he bequeathed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, drove the FBI to harass the founders of The Farm from the very beginning. That The Farm persevered in the face of this harassment and overcame the obstacles the government imposed is a testament to the courage and integrity of the core group of founders, most notably Stephen Gaskin.

What was the basis for Hoover's fear? Well, perhaps it evolved over his half century as America's top cop.

(Bates, Hoover and The Farm). The toxins of power have generated several meme complexes that have become viral.