Discussion about this post

User's avatar
SQ's avatar

How I love your Newsletters! You write and think so clearly. I thank you, thank you, thank you for all your hard work. It's not easy to write long essays with so much information captured so perfectly.

It has been a very hard last 6 years, but I do think 2026 is going to be much better.

God bless you and keep you protected in His armor.

Happy New Year, Doc!

Expand full comment
Steve Martin's avatar

Getting ready to 'celebrate' the new year here in Japan. So much of what you have written mirrors myself and my changes. Will have to comment more later.

Much thanks for this.

Keep up the good fight, and Yoi Otoshiyo!

Back to this after more than my share of sushi and tempura.

After reading again and thinking a bit more. Though I haven't read him lately ... agree that Jeff Childers is among the best thinkers and writers on Substack, and I like your intellectual humility.

I guess my only hedge is in believing Trump has anything dearer to his heart than himself. I drunk myself into a stupor and cried the first time he was elected, and was hopeful when Obama took the throne. But in retrospect, I was rather naive in taking either of them at face value ... and I suspect time will reveal how much more damage the Obama administration did than Trump's. But I also suspect predatory self-interest is what drives most (if not all) politicians ... anyone who aspires to concentrations of para-social power beyond Dunbar's number.

Living 43 years in Japan now, I have seen similar group dynamics at the local institutional level (NPOs and academia), and at the scale of national politics. I lean close to the likes of Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Menken, Chris Hedges, Howard Zinn, (or Mark Twain and Stephen Hawking in their later years) and have become jaded about any political process being able to avoid the Cluster B-dark triads among us ... but in that, I am with you on the power of music and poetry to affect the collective subconscious in a way that help from the powerful can not.

I was chatting with a new potential collaborator a few hours ago, and shared with him the following sentiment — that as an individual, I have been sleep-walking most of my life, partially because of my temperament, but partially due to propagandistic design. Much like the metaphorical message of The Matrix or Plato's Cave, I suspect we have always been in a forever-war of mankind against its own worst nature ... more or less small-scale, altruistic idealists against large-scale apex predators whose behavior is ultimately sociopathic.

Back when Chomsky was beginning to lose his status as a force to be reckoned with, he began his 2010 Chapel Hill speech, 'Human Intelligence and the Environment', by recounting the dabate about the Fermi Paradox between Carl Sagan and evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. While Mayr conceded the statistical probability of alien life, he hedged that by saying it would probably not have 'human-like intelligence' ... and said the evolutionary record would suggest that human intelligence will prove to be a fatal mutation of a species on its way out. I suspect that what nuclear weapons failed to do has logarithmically increased thanks to A.I., DEWs, CRISPR, robotics, nano-technology, and so on. What can be weaponized probably already has been.

In the vast scale of time and space, humanity has been but a blink, and though there have been a few individuals I have loved, I can easily imagine an alien life form in the future looking at our remains and summing up as a species along the lines of Macbeth ... “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

But on a positive note, I like that Jurassic Park thingy ... 'Life finds a way'.

Cheers from Japan Emanuel, and as if either of us had a choice ... keep up the good fight!

Expand full comment
20 more comments...

No posts

Ready for more?