Science Fiction As Cultural Soft Power

Over the last several months, I've been listening to a lot of stories.  I have also listened to the reasons which authors give for wanting to tell a story, for wanting to become skilled at creating and delivering a story.  Why create stories?  I have become interested in the benefits which are experienced by the writers, and to me the most interesting of those benefits are not monetary.  Such benefits include the learning of strategic thinking through storytelling, learning to discover and explore the various possibilities in a possibility space, and learning to foresee the various ways people may react to a set of possibilities, as well as the motives for those reactions.  A writer who applies himself to sharpening his skill also gains the ability to craft his own narrative, thus taking control of his own narrative and preserving himself and his narrative from the voices of others who want to slander the writer and his people through their own narrative.  Learning to craft a good story aids the writer's projection of his own narrative into the world.  By this projection, the author creates a bridge between human beings.  I have come to believe that speculative fiction - particularly, science fiction - has unique advantages as a means of exploring possibilities of situations, and of the possible human reactions (and their motives) to those situational possibilities.  It also has unique advantages as a vehicle for human narratives.

These conclusions of mine have been formed by my introduction over the last year to Chinese science fiction.  That introduction came in a way that would make sense to most of us who have had to live through the last year as citizens of the United States.  It all started with the restrictions on life and movement which reality forced on us through the COVID-19 pandemic.  Being cut off from much in-person contact with others meant that I was to a large degree cut off from cognitive stimulation from other minds.  I engaged in a bit of binge-watching YouTube, but always felt terrible about the amount of time that thus got wasted.  And I'm not a Netflix kind of guy.  But I was open to listening to audiobooks, since I could work out, wash dishes, mow the lawn, etc. while listening.  So I turned to Librivox.  But most of the fiction on Librivox is characterized by the sort of triumphalist point of view common to 19th century authors who came from the "dominant culture", the point of view that people and communities of color find to be intensely annoying because it sings the praises of our oppressors.   I got very quickly tired of trying to listen to that trash.  However, Librivox did not seem to have very many audiobooks whose texts had been written by non-Western, nonwhite authors.  So I began searching for modern stories written by people from non-European cultures.  And I decided to stop being a cheapskate and to become willing to pay to buy recordings of such stories.  Thus I went to an indie audiobook site and discovered Liu Cixin.  I got hooked!    

I discovered that Liu Cixin's works of fiction were part of a massive display of burgeoning Chinese (and Asian) cultural soft power.  Liu is part of what is called a "new wave" of Chinese science fiction.  Other writers in this new wave include Ken Liu, Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Chen Qiufan, and Chen Chuncheng, to name a few.  These authors share some key common characteristics: all are quite educated.  All are able to think deeply, to explore deeply a space of possibilities and the possible human reactions to those possibilities.  All are able to write their explorations from a refreshingly non-Western perspective.  All are good, strong, entertaining writers!  Examples which struck me:

• Liu Cixin: The Three-Body trilogy (English title: Remembrance of Earth's Past) is his most famous work.  It was this trilogy that hooked me.  The trilogy concerns the social and technological challenges faced by humanity under the threat of an invasion from alien creatures who are as far advanced above us as a modern First-World nation is above a pack of monkeys.  (Two memorable quotes from the first book: "消灭人类暴政!" "世界属于三体!", and " 不要回答! 不要回答!! 不要回答!!!")  Liu has been compared to Arthur C. Clarke, but in my opinion he is much, much better.  For one thing, his characters are fully fleshed and deeply complex.  For those who have read the books, think of Ye Wenjie, of Luo Ji, of Cheng Xin, of the unforeseen effects of the psychic injury suffered by someone who is deeply violated by the people of her own country.  One other note: It has been reported that Netflix is in the process of screwing up (Oops!  I mean, "creating a movie adaptation of") Three Body, and that their adaptation may be released this year.  I hope that Chinese filmmakers create their own version as well.  Even though I do not speak Chinese, I think I will enjoy the Chinese version much better.

• Hao Jingfang: Ms. Hao is the author of a number of stories.  One of those stories, "Folding Beijing," is a commentary on the effects of inequality and of unequal distribution of privilege in a society.  The other, a novel titled Vagabonds, is a story about a group of kids from Mars who, as a result of a five-year stay on Earth as teenagers, become "Third Culture Kids" who are able to see the flaws in both the hyper-capitalist world of Earth and the stifling central planning of the Martian society.  This leads to conflicts which the kids must navigate.

• Chen Qiufan: Mr. Chen, who goes by the name Stanley Chan when outside China, is the author of Waste Tide, a novel which explores the ways in which even seemingly homogeneous societies create caste systems so that a small number of privileged people can benefit from the dirty work done by those without privilege.  In this case, the dirty work consists of the hand-intensive labor needed to support a low-cost e-waste recycling business and its resulting economy.

• Ken Liu: Mr. Liu is an American citizen of Chinese ancestry.  I got to listen to the audiobook version of his short story collection titled The Paper Menagerie.  Some of the stories that stood out to me concern a social media company that takes over the lives of everyone on earth, a "generation ship" traveling to another star and the heroic choice that saves it, and the consequences to a society that refuses to acknowledge its historical guilt for past injustices.

• Chen Chuncheng: Mr. Chen is the author of a number of short stories.  I read one of these yesterday between cleaning the house and fixing my backyard fence.  The story was titled, "A Cloudcutter's Diary".  I won't tell any more about it except to say that it was a trip!

Let us consider what has been accomplished by these writers and their narratives.  One of their accomplishments has been to refute the white supremacist narrative pushed by Trumpoids such as Fox News that tries to dehumanize the Chinese as monsters and that tries to depict Chinese society as some sort of monolithic monstrosity.  This refutation has been accomplished by telling deeply human stories about complex, deeply human Chinese characters.  (Think again of Ye Wenjie, for instance.)  These authors have presented the Chinese narrative in a compelling manner and from multiple perspectives.  They have also offered trenchant critique of many social and political systems (including their own!)  Their stories have begun to build a bridge between ordinary Westerners and ordinary Chinese people.  They have also provoked their readers into a more rigorous exploration of spaces of possibilities, which is a hallmark of good speculative fiction.  And very importantly, by their own example they have shown other historically marginalized nonwhite populations a path forward to personal and collective liberation by developing technical and scientific expertise in order to create beautifully good work.  Liu Cixin's characters in particular move me to regret every minute of my youth which was wasted in watching cartoons on TV instead of studying technically challenging subjects.  

Chinese SF writers are an example of what Asef Bayat describes as "the art of presence" in Life As Politics: the kind of excellence of work that forces a change in the narrative told against a historically marginalized people by a dominant society.  To quote:

"In this respect, I envision a strategy whereby every social group generates change in society through active citizenship in their immediate domains: children at home and at schools, students in colleges, teachers in classrooms, workers in factories, the poor in

their neighborhoods, athletes in stadiums, artists through their art, intellectuals through media, women at home and as public actors. Not only are they to voice their claims, broadcast violations done unto them, and make themselves heard, but also to take responsibility for excelling at what they do. An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world- class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry. Excellence is power; it is identity."

Note that when I read the word "authoritarian" this passage, I am not focusing primarily on the authoritarianism of China's current government under Xi Jinping, although that authoritarianism is something which we should definitely be concerned about.  I am rather focusing on the authoritarianism of the white supremacist Global Far Right which has had, among its ugliest manifestations, the United States under Donald Trump from 2017 to 2020 and Russia under Vladimir Putin. 

A surprising final note: consider the role of religion in the writings of these authors.  Reading them completely refutes the story we in the West have been told that China is rigidly and rigorously atheist, and that the Chinese government forbids any kind of religious expression.  The reality is not nearly as black-and-white.  It should rather be said that many Chinese are becoming open to spiritual explorations.  However, the white evangelical churches of the West should not construe this as "the opening of a missionary door" for the white evangelical message, but should take a good look at themselves to ask why on earth any reasonable person would want to listen to them, or believe in the sort of "jesus" they preach.  More on that in a future post.

The Sacking of The Libraries

Imagine if you will a scene in which a young Southern California boy and his mother are about to enter the Norwalk Library sometime during an evening of a school year shortly before the advent of the Internet.  (Note: I have nothing against the Norwalk Library - it's just that I happen to know where it is because I used to live in So. Cal.)  Let's say that the mom has taken the boy to the library so that he may search for books on treatments for mange in animals such as dogs and cats.  Let's also say that the boy needs this information in order to write a book report (remember those?) for his middle-school biology class.  However, just as the boy and his mom cross the threshold, a mysterious space-time bubble phenomenon transports them to a library built 50 or 60 years into the future.  Imagine that libraries of the future have been shaped by the evolution of commercial culture in ways that could not have been imagined by our hapless boy and mom pair.  

Thus, when the boy and mom go to an information terminal to look for books on veterinary medicine, the first thing they see is not the location of the books they desire, but rather a screenful of paid ads for vets, pet stores, pet treats, pet grooming supplies, cat and dog clothes, etc.  Bemused and befuddled by the screen, the boy and mom start walking around the library in search of a librarian.  Once they find her, they ask where the books on veterinary science are located.  The librarian asks whether they want to buy some dog or cat food while they are at the library, explaining that she gets a commission from every sale she makes.  Oh, and by the way, would they like a recommendation for a vet?  Perhaps some "natural, drug-free remedies"? Or maybe some shampoo?  In a state of both mounting confusion and mounting frustration, the mother of the boy grumbles that she is just looking for books written by veterinary authorities so that her son can write a book report for school.  "Besides," the mom says, "our family doesn't have any pets!"  Grudgingly, the librarian leads the mom and her son to the bookshelves that contain books on veterinary science and diseases in pets.  However, the boy and mom notice that most of these books are actually coupon books advertising veterinary services and pet hospitals in Southern California!  In desperation the boy and mom walk out, wondering what on earth happened to their library.  As they are walking through the parking lot to their car, a man sidles up to them and says, "I noticed that you were looking for information on treating mange.  You must like pets! I have some hamsters in the trunk of my car, and I'm willing to let you have one for a special low price..."

Although this scene may sound far-fetched, I'd like to suggest that this perverse "library of the future" accurately describes the state into which our society has increasingly evolved, and that this is a consequence of the monetization of information exchange.  The prime example of this is the evolution of the internet from its inception until now.  This evolution has been especially rapid and widespread during the last seven or eight years.  Perceptive souls can remember a time in which information that was transmitted electronically was not monetized, and those who provided information via the World Wide Web did so for reasons that had little to do with financial gain.  Indeed, the explosive growth of free exchange of information that occurred during the 1990's was a consequence not only of the growth of the Web, but also of the growth of the availability of technologies that allowed people to bypass traditional gatekeepers in order to publish their own creative content.  A case in point is the miniaturization and lowering of cost of technologies for recording and storage that allowed musicians to mass-produce recordings of their own performances without having to sign on to a record label.  (In fact, I own a few self-published CD's from such "indie" artists.)  Such technologies for self-publishing became known as "democratizing technologies" because they allowed large numbers of ordinary people to publish their creative content without needing access to costly centralized infrastructure.

The internet was originally born out of the need for large governmental agencies and public research institutions to share information easily and cheaply.  Yet the internet swiftly became one of the most powerful democratizing technologies, since it drastically reduced the cost any individual had to pay to reach a large audience quickly.  Moreover, the culture and worldview of the original architects of the internet prioritized its democratizing nature.  To quote from an Atlantic article titled, "The Rotting Internet Is A Collective Hallucination":

"The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct

freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise

massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or

expect to make money from their invention.  The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network ... Instead, they settled on the equivalent

of rules for how to bolt existing networks together.

"Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system,

operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow

any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able

to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the

network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key

was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of

whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to

frequent." (Emphasis added.)

Because access to the original internet was not centrally owned or controlled, the internet became self-curating.  In other words, websites naturally began to be ranked according to how many people found their content to be interesting or useful.  A website thus gathered many hits by being genuinely good.  Thus the early internet became a legitimate source of edification, education, often extremely high-quality information, and exhilaratingly interesting conversation between people who might not otherwise have connected with each other.  

But then certain individuals began to see how they could make money from this sudden outburst of connection and conversation.  The first monetizers were creators of centralized platforms for connecting people to each other.  These creators exploited a weakness of the proto-internet, namely the need for early participants to have somewhat deep knowledge of programming languages and things like Java and HTML.  Since most people did not have this knowledge, they welcomed such platforms as MySpace and Facebook which allowed people to connect with each other electronically without needing deep coding knowledge.  Once most users of the internet were aggregated by the owners of these platforms, it was only natural for corporations and capitalists to seek to monetize these platforms.  At first the monetization was rather clunky and clumsy.  (Remember when big corporations like the Ford Motor Company or Eaton were urging us to "like them on Facebook"?)  But the eventual form taken by platform monetization consisted of pushing advertising (both of the obvious kind and of more subtle, sneaky kinds) on these platforms.

Within the last seven or eight years, this pushing of advertising has conquered its final frontier: the monetization of search engines.  This is certainly true of Google (who are now owned by Alphabet Inc.).  But it is also true of Duck Duck Go, Bing, Brave, Smartpage, Yahoo, and every other advertiser-supported search provider.  Thus when one conducts a Web search using any of these engines, the top results are usually either ads or are webpages that have been monetized by hosting ads on them.  The mission of these advertiser-supported search platforms has thus changed from helping people effectively search for information.  The mission now is to direct people to advertising packaged as clickbait.  I'd like to suggest that this is leading to certain consequences which have possibly not been foreseen by the monetizers.

The first of these consequences is the increase in transaction costs, that is the costs involved in exchanges taking place in a given economy.   To quote from Transaction Costs, Institutions and Economic Performance by Douglass C. North:

"It is the cost of measuring the valuable attributes of the goods and services or the performance of agents in exchange that is the fundamental key to the cost of transacting."

In other words, in making an economic transaction between two parties, each party must spend time and resources to accurately determine what kind of value and how much of this value they are likely to get from the transaction.  When each side has unbiased information from impartial sources, the transaction costs are relatively low.  When the only information that is available comes from paid advertisers, the transaction costs become much higher, because part of the transaction costs consists of spending time trying to figure out how much the information sources are lying.  Case in point: about fifteen or twenty years ago, manufacturers of health supplements began to tout the health benefits of fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS).  Some of the things these manufacturers said began to be of interest to people suffering from intestinal disorders.  However, these sufferers were forced to take what they were hearing with a massive grain of salt, because some of the claims made about FOS were outlandish.  In order to make an informed decision regarding FOS, some of these sufferers turned to the internet, where they encountered a massive amount of unbelievable claims.  These sufferers were stymied until they discovered that FOS is also called inulin (not insulin), and they began to do Web searches with the keyword "inulin."  That was when they found the peer-reviewed papers from research institutions that enabled them to make an informed decision.  (Note: since then, things have undergone a further mutation.  Supplement manufacturers discovered that people were researching inulin and that searches for information on FOS were falling off.  So now these manufacturers have modified their Web advertising to push the fact that their products contain "inulin."  "A rose by any other name...")  From this we see the general principle that when people are faced with decisions regarding transactions that have potentially large consequences (either because of the money that must be spent or the effect of the transaction or both), an increase in transaction costs resulting from a decline in the quality of available information about the transaction leads to a decrease in the number and rate of transactions.  Or to put it simply, if when you walk into a market, you know that all the sellers in the market are lying to you, you tend to not want to spend your money.

The second consequence is a decrease in connected conversations resulting from the restriction of the free flow of free (as in free coffee) information.  Monetization of information flows often means that valuable and useful information is locked behind paywalls guarded by rent-seeking corporations.  This is especially true of the kind of academic knowledge formerly disseminated free of charge by publicly funded research institutions.  The flow of this knowledge is increasingly controlled by gatekeepers such as Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons Inc., the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and Science Direct.   The combination of monetization of the channels of conversation (through advertising) and monetization of the valuable things that may arise in any potential conversation (through rent-seeking and paywalls) produces a decrease in productive conversation.  This leads to a decrease in innovation within a society.  To see how innovation in the United States and the West has begun to decline, click here and here.  Note especially how at least one of these sources mentions the restriction of the free flow of information.  Also, a fictional case of this decrease can be found in a recent novel called Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang.  (Ms. Hao has a bachelors degree in physics and a doctorate in economics, is a mother of two, a social entrepreneur, a scholar who is part of a think tank in China, and a member of a new wave of Chinese science-fiction writers who have crafted extremely strong, thought-provoking and awesomely good stories.  More on the Chinese sci-fi phenomenon in another post.)  In that novel, set in the 22nd century, Mars has been colonized by humans (sorry, Elon Musk, but Ms. Hao doesn't mention you at all), and has successfully fought a war of independence to break away from the government and economy of Earth.  In her novel, Earth's economy is described as a hyper-monetized "information economy" obsessed with guarding "intellectual property" while the Martians have created a society of free information exchange in which citizens make contributions motivated solely by their desire to create.  As a result, the Martian society becomes more advanced technologically while Earth begins to stagnate.  Although this is a fictional example, I would argue that it reflects what is seen in real life in organizations, institutions, and societies in which the free flow of information is constrained.  Our problem in the West, particularly in the United States, is that we have failed to recognize the constraints which our very own hyper-capitalist system imposes on our own ability to have the sort of cross-disciplinary, spontaneous conversations in which disparate ideas collide to produce innovation.  The internet in its early days began to provide a forum for those sorts of productive conversations, but the monetization of the internet has begun to choke off those conversations.

I predict that this choking off will lead (perhaps has already begun to lead) to a third consequence: an increasing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, and an increasing push by many people to "get back to the garden"; that is a push by many people to re-create spaces in which neither information nor the channels of conversation are monetized.  I don't believe that I'm the only person who is becoming tired of high transaction costs.  And I don't believe that I'm the only one who is looking for a way to build spaces of connectedness and conversation that are free from the corruption of advertising and rent-seeking.   But those of us who seek to build such spaces must know that we must pay a price in sweat equity (that is, our own hard work) to build such spaces.  They don't come for free.  As the old internet adage goes, "If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product."  Perhaps some will need to work to build spaces in realspace where conversations between diverse partners can arise.  Such spaces will be the strongest form of the revival I am thinking of.  But such spaces may also be virtual.  However, for such virtual spaces to arise, the participants will need to learn to do for themselves many things which they have been taught to take for granted due to the ease of using centralized platforms for connection such as social media.  In the absence of these platforms, people who want to build networks of conversation and information exchange will have to take themselves back to the mindset that built the internet in the first place.  Some of us may have to learn coding (especially HTML); some of us will have to learn how to build our own Web crawlers.  Some of us may have to read books or take courses to learn these things.  Whether in realspace or in cyberspace, it will be interesting to see the ways in which groups of people reclaim spaces for constructive conversation.

Russia Must Not Be Allowed To Win

The Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have evolved into a war of attrition.  On the one hand is Putin's Russia, the revanchist monster which has thrown staggering amounts of men and materiel into its attempt to conquer a sovereign and free nation.  Many of these men have been killed and wounded, and much of the materiel has been destroyed.  Yet Russia still has men and materiel to blow on its stupid and evil endeavor.  On the other hand is Ukraine, a small nation which Putin had hoped to make into the first appetizer in his meal of devouring Europe (and after that, the world).  Ukraine has done mighty deeds in resisting the Russian monster, but the people of Ukraine are worn down by weeks of unrestrained war and an onslaught of crimes against humanity which have been perpetrated by Russia.

Russia must be taught that crime does not pay.  Russia must instead pay an unbearable price for its attempt to take over the world.  Therefore, the West must do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia loses completely and decisively in Ukraine.  The West must furthermore destroy Russian power so that Russia never again tries to exalt itself above the rest of the world in order to build a global empire.

A Few Thoughts On The Death of Betty Geftakys

My foray into blogging initially began while I was living in Southern California, in the aftermath of my departure from an abusive evangelical group known as "The Assemblies."  Those who want to find out more about the group can click here.  My first blog was an account of my experiences in that group (especially as an African-American in that group), and my thoughts and reflections upon leaving it.  When I left the Assemblies back in 2003, it was because I had come to realize that the family that was in charge of the group - namely, George and Betty Geftakys and their two sons - were a collection of crooks.  Back then I was under the impression that the Assemblies were an example of a "fringe" group that did not reflect white American evangelicalism as a whole, and that evangelicalism was, by and large, healthy - so that I believed that in order to heal from the damage I suffered, I simply needed to find a "healthy" church after leaving the Assemblies.  What a far cry from my attitude today, when most of the world can now see that white American evangelicalism is a disgusting barrel of monkeys, and that it has been so for a rather long time!

As I mentioned, the Assemblies were abusive.  This abuse was an outworking of the way in which the head family exploited the members, and an outworking also of the way we were taught to relate to each other in our bid to climb the ladder of church leadership.  But some small element of Scriptural truth managed to seep into the consciousness of most of us members - especially the part of Scripture that teaches that when you do wrong to others, you need to repent.  And that this repentance must involve making things right with the people you wronged.  So when the Assemblies were blown apart by scandals in 2003, many of us hoped, prayed, and half expected that George, Betty, and their two sons would sooner or later take that step of repentance.

In the years since my departure, George Geftakys died (in 2014), and his son David died (in 2017).  I learned today that George's wife Betty died just last month.  I am ashamed to admit that upon hearing of the deaths of each of these people, my first reaction was a rather strong feeling of schadenfreude.  Today I have once again needed to repent of that feeling.  For I still follow the Good Book, which says in part that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.  Yet as I read that same Good Book, I can't help but shudder at the thought of the legacy these people have left and the future that awaits them.  Their later years remind me of a chapter from a Chinese sci-fi book that I recently enjoyed, namely the Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.  The chapter in question is titled, "No One Repents."

The Boil That Must Be Lanced

The Russian invasion of Ukraine which began in late February is now in the midst of its fourth month.  This invasion is not some isolated sudden manifestation of evil, but rather merely the sharpest and most obvious sign of an ongoing, historical evil.  It is the manifestation of the deep-seated evil of Russian national narcissism.  The invasion has been accompanied by verbal threats made by Russia against others of its neighbors, including Poland, because these other nations are building up their defenses to prevent themselves from being invaded by Russia.  These threats, along with the invasion and all the Russian efforts before the invasion to subvert the governments of free and sovereign nations, are the manifestation of Russia's contempt for the entire non-Russian world, the manifestation of Russia's desire to be some sort of "Third Rome" that rules the entire earth and makes Russia great by trashing everyone else.

So we who are not Russian and who do not want to be turned into Russian subjects are once again confronted with the necessity of the task before us.  And we must not look at the world - or at Russia - through the rose-colored glasses of wish-fulfillment fantasy.  Rather, we must face our task with clear-eyed, hard-edged realism.  

We must not become enamored of the idea of "peace through negotiations."  Negotiations only work with people who have "better angels" that we can appeal to.  Putin's Russia has no "better angels."

We must face the fact that our task is to completely shatter present-day Russian power. 

We must create a situation in which Russia's ability to project either hard power or soft power (including cultural power) is annulled.  

Our efforts must continue without slacking until our goal is achieved.

And our goal must be pursued through the evolution of a strategy which combines a number of indirect approaches to cut off Russian power.  (Think of both Basil Liddell-Hart and Salvor Hardin.)  Here I want to re-emphasize the fact that a key component of our strategy must be to eliminate Western economic dependence on Russia as much as possible.  It is heartening to see that both Europe and the United States have begun to cut themselves off from dependence on Russian oil and gas.  This has brought a period of some pain and suffering in both Europe and the U.S.; however, it is opening up opportunities to create a sustainable global zero-carbon economy.  It is interesting that the emergence of such an economy will occur at the same time that Russia is demonstrating its own unwillingness to manage its own internal ecological affairs.  I fully expect that this year, while Putin continues to spend tens of millions of rubles on his futile war, he will fail to spend as much as a dime on preventing the sort of devastating Arctic wildfires that have burned in Russia over the last several years.  Putin's regime is a piece of garbage.

Lastly, our strategy must continue without wavering until the moment when the Russian people overthrow their megalomaniac, kleptocratic leaders and install a government that is willing to live in peace with the rest of humanity.

Mid-Air Self-Destruct

Over the last five or six weeks, I've been very, very busy.  (Being an entrepreneur is not exactly a good way to relax!)  So today's post will be short.  But I was motivated to write today's post by some news items of which I became aware during this past week.  

The news has to do with the ongoing revelations of massive sexual abuse in the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).  The most recent and comprehensive revelations were publicized in a report released this month by an independent investigating committee; however, this is by no means the first report of sexual misconduct and rape by clergy and members among the Southern Baptists.  (See this also.)  To me, the most notable case of Southern Baptist sexual misconduct concerns Paul Pressler, a retired Texas judge and Republican Party operative who figured prominently in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  It has been revealed that during Pressler's most active political periods, he was also raping boys in his church youth group, and that he was soliciting sex from adult men.  (He is by no means the only SBC pastor guilty of homosexual acts and pedophilia.  See Frankie Wiley and John Langworthy also.)  Paul Pressler had marketed himself as a champion of conservative Christian family values, which brings up a very interesting point that I will address shortly.  But before I address that point, let me add an item of news which falls on the heterosexual side of the rape/abuse line, namely, that many female victims of SBC rape were later forced by SBC leadership to get abortions in order to hide the evidence of the crimes committed against the victims.

And now the point I want to make.  People who study the history of the intersection of religion and politics in the United States should be well able to trace the means by which the Christian profession was transformed, from 1979 onward, into a political weapon of the Republican Party.  The overall strategy was quite simple, consisting of the following elements:

• The loud, strident proclamation that America is in danger of moral decline caused by "liberal" elements and the loss of "family values", particularly those values centering on sexual morality
• The loud, strident proclamation that America is in danger of losing its "liberty" due to threatening outside agents such as the Soviet Union (before the Soviets rolled over and died conveniently in 1989), or Muslims or illegals (who replaced the Soviets as bogeys after the Soviet collapse) or "socialists" (Oops! I mean, sssssssocialistssssss...) (One more parenthesis under this point - Soviet Russia was truly a thug nation, and I do not want to minimize the danger they posed.  But they were a gang that couldn't shoot straight much of the time, just like Putin's thug Russia is now.)
  
• The loud, strident proclamation that only the Republican Party could save America from losing its identity as a "city on a hill", because only the Republicans were willing to openly confess faithfulness to Jesus Christ
• The loud, strident proclamation that the duty of Christians in the United States was therefore to vote Republican and to support Republican solutions to the "crises" being sold to us - solutions which, of course, always involved building more prisons, locking up more people (especially the poor and nonwhite, regardless of whether or not they were actually guilty of any crime), procuring more guns, killing more "enemies", and giving more power to the obscenely rich.

I am ashamed to admit that for many years, I drank that Kool-Aid.  But even in my most Kool-Aid-intoxicated state, I had to notice that whenever I saw Republican candidates for office, they always seemed to be a "disease cure" that had massive undesirable side-effects.  For while the so-called "Christians" who handed out their so-called "Christian voter guides" to people of color like me always told us that we needed to vote for their candidates so that they might "save America from moral decline", closer observation always revealed that these candidates pushed policies designed to murder and oppress the poor and the nonwhite in this country.  Yet we were told that we needed to bear with these side effects because of the much greater importance of the disease these candidates were ostensibly seeking to "cure," the "great issues of our time" which these candidates were promising to address.

The ongoing revelations of ongoing sexual abuse - not only in the SBC, but throughout most of mainstream American evangelicalism - are yet one more proof that all of the assertions of the American Religious Right are utter crap, to borrow a phrase from Liu Cixin.

Listen up, white American evangelicals.  Your real message to all the rest of us is that God supposedly chose you from the foundation of the world to rule all the earth, and that He chose all the rest of us to be your punching bags, your doormats, your slaves, and your trash cans.  The reasons you offer for this supposed choice are that you are supposedly morally superior to everyone else, and that therefore God has granted you the right to re-enact the violent conquest by ancient Israel of the land of Canaan - except that nowadays, you take the place of the "people of promise" and that gives you the right to use the rest of us for target practice in order to "punish us for our evil." However, you're just as evil as the people you want to kill.  Your real agenda is and always has been white supremacy over the entire earth.  The "side effects" the rest of us suffered from voting for your candidates were always your real aim.  This is why you have the gall to tell us that we need to vote for your political candidates who promise to stamp out homosexuality even while you secretly practice the very sin you condemn.  This is why there will always be an avenue for abortion in the United States even if Roe vs Wade is overturned, because when your pastors rape each other's wives and daughters, you will always need some means of destroying the evidence of your crimes.  This is why you so zealously supported the presidency of a serial sex offender, serial adulterer, and serial crook named Donald John Trump.

And this is why you have lost all legitimacy with me.  Believe me, the loss has been a long time coming.  In 2006 I first began to see through you, and your support of Donald Trump was merely the icing on a poisonous cake.  Today, instead of attending any of your churches, I have done some housecleaning and some private Bible reading of my own, and I think I'll sit in my backyard and enjoy the sunshine while I make out my schedule for next week.  But I'll never again listen to any of your sermons.  Do you want to help the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ?  Then shut up.  Just. Shut. Up.

The Antidote To The Strongman Is Responsibility

Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has netted some impressive losses for Russia.  Among those losses are up to 17,000 Russian troops killed, over 40,000 Russian casualties (including soldiers who have been wounded, but not killed), pariah status among the nations of the world, crippling economic consequences, and a series of singular losses on the propaganda front.  But over the last week and a half, Russia has mounted a ferocious cyber-counterattack in order to retake the initiative in the information war.  So we have many, many "news" sites aligned with the Far Right (and blogs by Putin trolls who pretend to be, among other things, morbidly obese housewives) which are criticizing President Biden as weak or incompetent, or accusing Ukraine of developing bioweapons, or who are repeating the tired old Russian talking point that Russia's attack of Ukraine was designed to eliminate a potential "threat to Russia" either from NATO - which has not attacked Russia at all - or from the presence of independent, happy, self-reliant people on Russia's doorstep.  (In other words, "YOUR freedom is a threat to ME!")

The most recent weapon to be deployed in this information war is the threat of the "chaos" that may engulf the world if Russia is not allowed to get its way.  So there are Russian mouthpieces spouting threats of the end of the world, or the threat of nuclear war, or the threat of widespread economic breakdown as a result of the West's resistance against the imperial ambitions of Putin.  To be sure, there is some substance to those threats.  But that substance consists of the weaknesses of position which we in the West have created for ourselves as a result of allowing ourselves to become dependent on Russia for a number of the resources needed in our modern industrial economies.  We knew for decades that in depending on Russia for things like grain, oil, and fertilizer, we were relying on a regime that despises democracy and human rights, a regime that would use our dependence as a tool to try to subjugate us.  Putin's Russia would now try to persuade us that we have only the stark choice between the kind of "peace" that comes from capitulating to Putin versus starvation and shortage.  That, however, is false.

We have also known since the 1970's that the resource base of the societies and economies of the Global North would one day decline to the point where we would have to devise new ways of living - ways that are more suited to a world of limits.  Recognizing those limits is not the end of the world, and we don't need to have a meltdown when faced with the need to make necessary adjustments.  However, a meltdown is just what many of us have had (or, to use a British expression, too many of us have thrown a wobbly) whenever the need to learn to live within limits has been mentioned.  Our tantrums are provoked at the thought that our lives, our ambitions, our dreams, our cravings might to be subject to limits.  This is especially true of the privileged upper-middle-class members of the dominant culture.  And this leads to a danger.  For although we know, deep down, that everyone on earth will have to face a world of limits, the danger is that we will choose to believe strongmen and populists who promise us otherwise - men who promise that by waving a magic wand they and they alone can bring back the days of past glory if only we give ourselves entirely to the wishes of these men.  The experience of those of us who lived through the Trump years or through the disaster of post-Brexit Britain should be enough to teach us otherwise, but as Abe Lincoln once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time..."

The antidote to the false promise of the strongman and the populist is a willingness to accept the world as it is - that is, to make peace with reality - and to figure out the best and most moral way of living within the reality into which we have been placed.  Grab a clue: the present time of shortages and high prices was coming even without the West's sanctions against Russia.  Didn't anyone notice the shortages of 2020 or how gas prices were rising throughout all of 2021?  

P.S. I have at least three four blog posts in the oven.  Over the next month I hope to publish them.  One post will be an essay on the subject of populist leaders and how the pedagogy of the oppressed is designed to liberate the oppressed from the lies of the populist by teaching the oppressed to take personal and collective responsibility for our own lives.  (Today's post is a sneak preview.)  The second post will deal with the threat which false charity poses to genuine liberation.  The third post will be about programming search engines.  The fourth post will be a brief sketch of my experiences as a small business owner, as well as the things that moved me to pursue entrepreneurship.  Stay tuned.

The Case For Electrification In 2022

The geopolitical events of the last month have shown how foolish it has been for the free nations of the world to allow themselves to be hoodwinked into economic dependence on the regimes of tyrants.  In particular, we see how Russia has tried to use Western dependence on its fossil fuel resources as a means of dictating the internal affairs of the nations of Europe.  This has been one of the cornerstones of Russian imperialist strategy under Vladimir Putin.  It makes sense therefore when dealing with thieving little thugs like Putin to cut one's reliance on those thugs to zero.

So we come to the question of how the West can eliminate its reliance on Russian oil and gas in the quickest and most advantageous manner.  And in this regard, my mind was provoked recently by hearing of a few design and construction projects in the northern U.S. which are replacing natural gas-fired space conditioning equipment with all-electric, variable refrigerant flow heat pump HVAC systems at a number of government facilities.  Many of the facilities in question already have existing rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, which can be used to offset the energy cost of the new HVAC systems. 

These projects are an example of a larger trend in the architecture/construction industry and among facility managers to shift from buildings which use fossil fuels for space conditioning to buildings which use electricity only.  There are encouraging reports and studies which indicate that, given the current trends in the development of renewable energy sources and advances in HVAC systems, a shift to all-electric buildings can be significantly cheaper in the long run than maintaining buildings that continue to use fossil fuels.  I don't have time today for a detailed analysis of the literature on this subject, but I do intend to write a few posts that go into this subject in more detail as soon as I have time for more intense research.  However, for those who want to beat me to the punch (please do!), the following sources are a good place to start:

• A Case for Electrifying Heat In End-Use Residential Sector Towards Carbon-Free Buildings, Tolu O. Sodeinde, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019
• "Efficient Electrification Newsletter," Electric Power Research Institute, January/February 2020
• "Edison International Sustainability Report 2019", Edison International
• "NBI BETR Webinar, 2-22-2021", New Buildings Institute
• And, for something slightly more cautionary, "Increased Electrification of Heating and Weather Risk In the Nordic Power System," Trotter, et al, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, December 2021.

Of course, any large-scale transition to an all-electric society must rest on a foundation of cheap, widely available electricity from renewable resources.  Here we have research that shows a very optimistic picture, as stated in an April 2019 report from the German Energy Watch Group in partnership with the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (aka LUT University) in Finland.  The title of the report is Global Energy System Based on 100% Renewable Energy: Power, Heat, Transport and Desalination Sectors.  A key paragraph from that study is the following:

"A transition to a global 100% renewable energy system is no longer a matter of technical feasibility or economic viability, but one of political will. Not only do we need ambitious

targets, but also stable, long-term, and reliable policy frameworks, adapted to regional conditions and environments. We call on the global community to urgently pursue a forward-looking pathway towards net zero GHG emissions by launching a rapid change of the way we use natural resources and provide electricity, heat and transport." - Hans-Josef Fell.

One of the findings of the study is that regional energy independence can be achieved by the development of regional renewable energy resources, as described in the paragraph titled, "Electrification and Decentralisation Lead To More Efficiency."  This would eliminate or at least drastically reduce the need for import of energy by one region from other regions.

Clearly these topics deserve deep and urgent consideration!

Freire's Pedagogy: 2. Breaking The Sadistic Cycle

This post is a continuation of meditations and explorations of Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  To me, the consideration of this book follows logically from the consideration of strategic nonviolent resistance which I set forth in the series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  The first post in the current series on Freire's Pedagogy laid out the necessity of our present consideration.  To repeat some statements from that post, freedom from oppression is the goal of a liberation struggle based on strategic nonviolent resistance.  This liberation struggle cannot be successful if it is waged only by isolated individuals.  It must be waged by people in collective, interdependent relationship - that is, by people who have chosen to organize.  The question then becomes how to persuade people to organize - especially when the organizer discovers that it is often very hard to rouse oppressed people to liberating action.  Freire's book begins to explore why oppressed peoples so often act for a long time in ways that do not reflect a desire for freedom, but rather for its opposite, and what foundational work must be done to begin to liberate people in their minds so that they can begin to liberate themselves in actuality.

So we begin once again with a foundational question, namely, what is the purpose of freedom.  Freire answers this by stating that "the people's vocation" is to become more fully human.  I would put it thus: that our calling is to fulfill our ontogeny (that is, the reason why we were created as human beings) to the greatest extent possible.  Freire describes this pursuit as "the pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person."  However, this pursuit of self-affirmation requires the pursuer to shoulder the necessary costs of the pursuit, the necessary costs of being a responsible person.  It is the desire to have the self-affirmation without shouldering the costs which leads some people to become the oppressors of their fellows - that is, the owners of their fellows and of the fruits of the labors of their fellows.  

An example of this is found in the book Garden Graces written by George Grant, a white American evangelical author with Dominionist leanings.  In that book, Mr. Grant celebrates the life and intellectual accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson.  What is especially ironic is Mr. Grant's celebration of Jefferson's accomplishments in the realm of farming and gardening.  For while Jefferson is credited with being a master strategist and inventor in the realm of agriculture, the actual work of implementing Jefferson's ideas was done by African slaves.  Jefferson had the opportunity to develop and express his intellectual talents in the realm of husbandry, but his slaves, on the other hand, were forced by the threat of violence to simply do as they were told.  By that threat of violence - the threatened violence of the oppressor - these slaves were deprived of the opportunity to develop their own humanity, including the intellectual dimension of that humanity which Jefferson got to develop in himself.  

And so we come to a series of key statements made by Freire in his description of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed: 

• "Any situation in which "A" objectively exploits "B" or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individual's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human." - Pedagogy, page 55.

• "Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized." - Pedagogy, page 55.  Two observations regarding this statement: first, that in order to deaden their own consciences, the oppressors must convince themselves that their intended victims are not persons and are not human.  Second, consider the abundant historical examples that prove the statement that it is the oppressors who throw the first punch and initiate the violence - from the unprovoked murder of Abel by Cain to the unprovoked conquest of the American continent by Europeans to the unprovoked colonization of Africa and Asia by the European "great powers" to the most recent example - the unprovoked attack and invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

• The corollary to the previous statement: "For the oppressors, 'human beings' refers only to themselves; other people are 'things.'" - Pedagogy, page 57.

• "This behavior, this way of understanding the world and people (which necessarily makes the oppressors resist the installation of a new regime) is explained by their experience as a dominant class...Analysis of existential situations of oppression reveals that their inception lay in an act of violence—initiated by those with power. This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate. This climate creates in the oppressor a strongly possessive consciousness—possessive of the world and of men and women." - Pedagogy, page 58.  This possessive consciousness can be illustrated by examples.  A personal example is the experience I had several years ago at a technical office where I worked, in which I came in contact with a white South African man who had left South Africa shortly after apartheid ended.  It quickly became clear to me that he could not bring himself to see me as a fellow human being (I being a Black man), but rather as one of his former possessions who had somehow been stolen from him.  The daily sight of me - a degreed technical professional who had the same job rank and privileges as him - must have given him ulcers!  Another example, both contemporary and historical, is the warped Russian desire to possess and dominate the Baltic nations (not to mention the entire world), an attitude beautifully illustrated by Olga Doroshenko in her posts on Russian narcissism.

• "As beneficiaries of a situation of oppression, the oppressors cannot perceive that if having is a condition of being, it is a necessary condition for all women and men. This is why their generosity is false. Humanity is a "thing," and they possess it as an exclusive right, as inherited property. To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the "others," of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion." - Pedagogy, pages 58-59.  Not only is this a corollary to the previous statement, but this explains why oppressors consider the struggle for liberation to be an act of subversion - for that struggle subverts the supposed "property rights" of the oppressor.

• "If the humanization of the oppressed signifies subversion, so also does their freedom; hence the necessity for constant control. And the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate "things." This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to "in-animate" everything and everyone it encounters, in its eagerness to possess, unquestionably corresponds with a tendency to sadism." - Pedagogy, page 59.  This statement is the central point of today's post.  To define sadism, Freire quotes from Erich Fromm, who writes that "The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive."  This sadistic drive seeks to turn the animate, with its freedom and unpredictability, into the inanimate - thus killing it.  This is why the language of oppressors "smells like death," to paraphrase Srdja Popovic.

So Paulo Freire asserts that a central pillar of the oppressor's thinking is the desire to treat other human beings as mere objects, and to wholly possess these "objects", to bring these "objects" entirely under his control.  I say right now that the only Being who has a genuine right to call us His possessions is our Creator.  Allowing fallen, fallible men or women to have that right over us leads us very quickly to the experience of sadism.

This is why, in the struggle for liberation, the oppressed must not be led into the fallacy that says that oppressor and oppressed are merely two sides of the kind of bilateral disagreement in which each side shares blame and in which each side must make some compromises.  Such a fallacy will be preached by the oppressor the moment the oppressed succeed in mounting a challenge that seriously threatens the domination of the oppressor.  If you are in a disagreement with another person because you want to just live your life and mind your business while the other person wants to roast you over a barbecue and stick you between two pieces of bread, what sort of acceptable "compromise" can you reasonably work out?  What concessions should you make?

And this is also why in a struggle against an oppressor, appeasement will never work.  For if you respond to the threat of oppression by attempting to appease the oppressor, you will sooner or later come to a situation where, in the limit, you are totally dominated by the sadism of the oppressor and you find that you have become a masochist.  That is living death.

How to Help Ukraine

It is heartening to see the outpouring of sympathy for the people of Ukraine from many of the people of the West.  However, we must beware of Russian attempts to hijack and mislead those who want to provide material support to the people of Ukraine at this time.  Yesterday, for instance, I received a spam donations request message from a sender who spoofed the email address of a law firm in northern California.  I am not a particularly trusting type nowadays, so I called the law firm in question and found out that the email message was indeed fake.

For this reason I am glad that the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail has published an article listing a number of legitimate organizations to which we can donate in order to help the Ukrainian victims of Russian military aggression.  The link to that article is here.  The article also has information describing steps we can take to protect ourselves from Russian cyberattacks, particularly those that come via spam or phishing emails.

一个奇怪的案例

Note: please read yesterday's post also.

The conflict between China and the West is a conflict of centuries.  And over the last decade and a half, my sympathies have come to lie ever more with the Chinese.  However, the events of the last several weeks have forced those sympathies onto a knife edge.  For Chinese president Xi Jinping has chosen to become an ally of Russian president (and imperialist) Vladimir Putin.  In so doing, I would assert that he has begun to sell out both himself and his nation to a process of subjugation from which China managed to extricate itself only within the last seventy or eighty years.  And he has shown himself to be evil.

To understand the roots of the present conflict between China and the West (and of the sympathy for China which had until recently been growing in me), it is helpful to examine a bit of history.  And the history of European (and later, American) contact with China from the eighteenth century on has been a history of "breaking and entering", to use the lingo of cops.  That breaking and entering involved things like the use of British and American military power to force China to open its economy to trade with the West.  (This was almost exactly like the forced entry of the Japanese economy by the United States in the 1850's.)  This then led to economic, and later, military and political colonization of China.  The aftermath of breaking and entering is usually looting, and the nations of Europe, together with the United States, engaged in a long campaign of rapacious exploitation of China.  (See this and this also.) 

This breaking and entering, along with the resulting looting, was accompanied by a concerted attack on the Chinese soul.  This attack took two forms: the opium trade, and the forced entry of European and American Protestant missionaries into China.  The opium trade was the diabolical way in which Britain sought to correct the deficit it had run up in its trade for Chinese luxury goods.  European goods were not as good as Chinese goods, and the hard currency of European silver was running out, so the British substituted opium for silver, and ensnared millions of Chinese people in crippling addiction as a result.

The damage done by European and American missionaries was of a different sort.  It consisted first of a degrading and infantilizing treatment of Chinese people by the missionaries, a treatment whose source was a smug and arrogant attitude by the missionaries toward the Chinese, as captured in such statements as this:

"It may be interesting for you to know how I go about the country.  I dread laziness in the Chinese helpers.  I have already seen some of it.  If the foreigner rides, his Chinese brother will also expect to ride..." - Goforth of China, page 96.

It is only understandable that such an attitude would anger the native Chinese, for these missionaries did not come with the humility of Christ, but as part of a conquering imperial cabal, a cabal of imperious shovers of things down other peoples' throats.  When the inevitable backlash that was the Boxer Rebellion occurred, these same missionaries forced poor Chinese peasants to pay obscene reparations.  But the most galling thing was that these missionaries sought to teach the Chinese that their duty was to "submit to their earthly masters" (that is, to their European masters), even though these missionaries were citizens of nations which had never turned the other cheek or submitted to even the slightest imagined injustice without a bloody fight.

So we come to the events of the mid-20th century, in which a number of subjugated nonwhite nations were, by means nonviolent in some cases and violent in others, throwing off the yoke of their European oppressors.  At about the same time that the nonviolent Indian struggle for independence under Gandhi was coming to its climax, two leaders of armies in China were slugging it out with both foreign oppressors and with each other.  And it is important to note that neither Chiang Kai-Shek nor Mao Zedong were without a certain hostility toward the West.  Both men sought to establish a separate, self-sufficient Chinese identity.  But theirs was a duel between competing revolutions, a duel which Mao won.

One immediate result of Mao's victory was the beginning of a violent purge of historically corrupting Western influences from Chinese culture.  Thus drug users faced prison (and sometimes, death), drug dealers faced death (almost always), and missionaries faced both prison and death.  But in his drive to establish an ideologically pure expression of "revolution," Mao fell into the error described by Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

"However, the moment the new regime hardens into a dominating 'bureaucracy' the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation."

That is, Mao's revolution became "stagnant" and "turned against the people, using the old repressive, bureaucratic State apparatus."  This was one of the factors which caused Mao's China to stagnate economically and intellectually.  

It was this stagnation which his successor Deng Xiaoping sought to reverse by gradually loosening the strictures of Maoist China to allow more independent thinking, entrepreneurship, and creativity.  The result of Deng's changes was an explosion of prosperity within China, although it was unequally distributed, as noted in Deng's expression "Let some get rich first."  Yet this explosion of prosperity led to an explosion of national economic (and hence political) power, which led to a huge increase in Chinese soft power.  A final result of Deng's reforms was the emergence of a China every bit the peer of any nation of the West - a China that had decisively freed itself from white Anglo/American/European domination.  I suggest that this is what provoked the wrath and opposition of Donald Trump against China.  And because Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin, I suggest that Trump's economic aggression against China was an expression of Russian uneasiness about China's emerging power.  You see, China became the big fish that got away - a separate, non-Western, nonwhite, self-sufficient polity that could no longer be subjugated or exploited.

The loosening of strictures and the gradual encouragement of freedom in China was not without its challenges.  For there needed to be a healthy definition of freedom, and not the definition currently in fashion in the United States, where freedom means the freedom to become an addict of capitalist exploitation - that is, the freedom to become enslaved by means of one's addictions.  But the Chinese leadership was also left with a lingering insecurity about the possible effect on their people of any allegiance which might compete with unquestioned and total allegiance to the Chinese government.  This is why, for instance, opposition to Biblical Christianity (and to other religions not sponsored by the state) continues in China.

I do have a certain sympathy for that insecurity, although I also have a sharp criticism of that insecurity.  As a Christian, I am concerned by the persecution of Christians by the Chinese government over the last century - a persecution that continues to this day.  But I must also say that I perfectly understand the reasons for that persecution.  For if goons and thugs had done to me what European and American missionaries did to the Chinese people in the 19th and 20th centuries - if they had also tried to use the Bible to justify what their governments and big businesses and soldiers did - I too would be strongly tempted to reject what was being served up to me as "Christianity"!  In fact, this is what has happened to me as a Black man in my exposure to the toxicity of the white American Evangelical/Protestant church! It is a miracle that I am still a believer.  Every day I have to remind myself that all that garbage is not God's fault.

And yet as a Christian, I must confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of all, and that I must live out my life as a statement of subjection to Him.  I must also say that I support the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ.  And regardless of one's religious persuasion, I believe that everyone on earth will one day be forced to accept the fact that they are creatures made by a Creator and accountable ultimately to Him.

But the weakness of the Chinese insecurity is that the Chinese government, in its response to historical oppression, has set itself up as the god to whom its people must give their sole allegiance.  The presence of any other independent authority provokes feelings of massive insecurity among the rulers of China!

This means that the emergence of any sub-groups of self-sufficient, self-determining people among the Chinese population constitutes a threat.  Thus the presence of genuine democracy anywhere in the world, or the possibility of genuine democracy in China comprises a terrifying threat to the leadership of China.  This is why in allying China with Putin, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have shown themselves to be opposed to a world in which any independent group of democratically-organized people exists anywhere, lest awareness of such a group of democrats tempt the Chinese people to want such a free life for themselves.  For the revolution begun during the days of Mao has once again fallen into "bureaucratic" doldrums from which it has not yet been able to rescue itself.

This, then is the motivation of Xi Jinping's alliance with Vladimir Putin.  For Putin has the same desire to set himself up as a god in opposition to any other authority.  Hence, Putin has the same fear of a free society existing anywhere on earth.  Autocrats such as Putin wish to create a world in which responsible, independent self-determination is unimaginable because no examples of it can be found or seen anywhere, a world in which the only thing that can be seen is the autocracy of the autocrats.  But in allying himself with Putin to create such a world, Xi Jinping is about to discover that he has found a frenemy - or rather, that the frenemy has discovered Xi Jinping to be a chump.  And China may find itself ensnared in yet another relationship of subjugation to an earthly foreign power.   I think of recent studies that show the impact of ambivalent personal relationships on personal health.  Relationships with frenemies are a very world of ambiguity, and Putin has been known as a master of ambiguity.  I expect that Jinping's China will find itself valued only for how useful it is to Putin - while having to endure, from time to time, the dumping of narcissistic Russian ethnic hostility onto some of its citizens, as happened in 2020 during the initial outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.  China will be taken on quite a ride.  A certain tail will wag a certain dog.  And Xi Jinping may soon find himself leading quite the dog's life.

P.S.  I forgot to elaborate on the statement I made at the start of this post.  I said that my initial sympathies for China have been forced onto a knife edge by events of the past few weeks.  Let me explain a bit more.  If the government of China continues to support the government of Vladimir Putin IN ANY WAY, I will begin to BOYCOTT ALL Chinese-made goods to the maximum extent possible.  I will not do this with joy, for my sympathies toward the Chinese people remain steadfast.  It is their government, like the government of Russia, which must be resisted, as it is being run by thugs.

The Export of Misery

So...Russia has finally decided to go through with their invasion of Ukraine.  This is Russia's punishment of Ukraine for being Ukraine and not Russia - the revenge wrought by Russia for the intolerable narcissistic injury suffered by the Russians in their encounter with a people that has chosen its own separate identity.  Isn't that the way it always is with narcissists?  Their declaration is always, "You must die because you refuse to be an extension of me!"

God damn Putin's Russia.  And God damn Vladimir Putin, Alexandr Dugin, and the whole apparatus of which they are part.  God damn the Russian leadership's division of the world into zones of conquest arrogantly and presumptuously crisscrossed by Russian "red lines."

There is one silver lining in this present cloud - namely, that it has become blindingly obvious what sort of nation Russia has become and what sort of leadership it now has.  The advantage of stealth possessed by wolves successfully camouflaged in sheep's clothing disappears once the sheep costumes have been abandoned.  But there is also a danger - namely the danger that the depredation of the wolf will both continue and expand by means of a lack of moral courage of the sheep, particularly of the bellwethers, the rams of the flock.  This is what almost happened in the late 1930's when Adolf Hitler chose to play a game remarkably similar to the game now being played by Vladimir Putin.  In this re-run of that earlier game, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson's voice becomes merely a more rabid repeat of the sympathies expressed by Charles Lindbergh toward the Nazi party.  And as for the bellwethers - will the hard necessity of resistance be obfuscated by them as it was by Neville Chamberlain?  That is, will the West lull itself back to sleep with half-measures rather than facing the hard necessities - both moral and intellectual - of successful resistance, of successful defense of a separate identity that one can call one's own, of successful removal of a tyrannical threat?  In the days to come, it won't be good enough merely to say, "I tried."

A further note: many, many ordinary rank-and-file Russians have now begun to make their voices heard by standing against Putin and his narcissistic little war.  They themselves have stated boldly that they want to craft a separate identity of decency and morality for themselves.  They are rejecting the identity of "Putin's Russia."  Pray for them - many of them are now being arrested by Putin's apparatus of goons.  Speaking as I have of wolves in an earlier paragraph, I say now that Putin is expertly acting the part of a son of a dog.

The Stories Prophets Tell

My apologies to anyone who may have been disappointed by the sparseness of my recent posting.  I have come into a season in which once again, to use a favorite expression of mine, I am working like a dog.  But I thought I'd take time tonight to write a few words about something that recently came to my attention.  And I have some upcoming posts in the oven - soon, hopefully, they'll be "ready to eat."

In a previous post I mentioned that I have recently been enjoying some of the fiction of David Cornwell, who became famous under the pseudonym of John le Carre.  (le Carre gave us a kind of spy fiction that is actually palatable.  For a long time I had regarded the genre as simply about a bunch of guys in business suits trash talking each other while brandishing semiautomatic pistols.  Boring after a while...)  The most famous of his stories involve a character named George Smiley, through whom le Carre portrays the psychic cost of trying to achieve good ends by bad means.  The same theme runs through many others of le Carre's stories, particularly A Small Town In Germany.  Naturally I grew curious to learn more about Mr. le Carre, as I listened to BBC audio dramatizations of these stories, and later, as I watched the BBC video dramatizations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People.  What I discovered about le Carre was both intriguing and deeply refreshing - especially his political perspective.

For in describing the outcome of the Cold War, le Carre has often said that "the right side lost, but the wrong side won."  By this he means that the totalitarianism and autocracy of the Soviet Empire had to fall apart.  But in the West, there was nothing to replace it - no grand humanitarian vision that could have elevated all the peoples of the earth.  The West certainly offered nothing that could fill the vacuum left in Russia by the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Thus what happened was a shift from hyper-socialist economic and political control into hyper-capitalism.  Russia became an illustration of the Scripture which says, "Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places, seeking rest, and does not find it.  Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came'; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order.  Then it goes, and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first..."  For the best-positioned members of the Russian ruling class became the oligarchs and kleptocrats of the new order, and Putin became the chief kleptocrat.

Thus the ruling elite of Russia became very much like the wealthiest and most powerful denizens of the West - especially the wealthiest and most powerful Americans.  For the United States had long been in the process of losing its soul.  And so we come to an interview of Mr. le Carre which was conducted for the Fresh Air show on NPR in 2017.  In that interview, John le Carre said the following:

"Let's look, first of all, at the operation influence, if you like, and how that's exerted, what we suspect the Russians are doing, not only in the United States, what they did in Britain for the referendum, maybe in Britain for the election. They certainly interfered in Macron's election in France. So who are these forces? And what is really spooky, I think, and profoundly disturbing is they come from the West as well as the East - that there are oligarchs in the West who are so far to the right that they make a kind of natural cause with those on the other side of the world. Both of them have in common a great contempt for the ordinary conduct of democracy.

"They want to diminish it. They see it as their enemy. They see - they've made a dirty word of liberalism - one of the most inviting words in politics. They've - and so they're closing in on the same target from different points of view..." [Emphasis added]

Note le Carre's assertion - that the oligarchs of both the East and the West have begun to come together in common cause to destroy freedom throughout the world.   This was blindingly obvious during the reign of Donald Trump.  It has become even more blindingly obvious within the last two months.  For Fox News attack dog/talking head Tucker Carlson has boldly spoken in support of Vladimir Putin and against the independent sovereignty of Ukraine.  And a number of Republican politicians - who were historically well-known for their anti-communist and anti-Soviet stands - have suddenly gone quite soft (if not actually silent) on the crisis of Russian aggression against Ukraine and against the West. 

This has some rather interesting implications.  I would suspect that pro-Putin sentiment is quite high just now among many members of far-Right or white supremacist groups in the United States, as pro-Putin spokespersons managed to make significant headway among many white American evangelicals before and during the reign of Donald Trump.  These people should perhaps learn a lesson from the experiences of the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine who got what they were asking for in 2015, and have had to live with the consequences ever since.  Their initial support for Putin has soured, as they have discovered that Putin has not led them to the Promised Land.  They have discovered instead that they have been enslaved by means of sophistry.  (Isn't that frequently how slavery begins?)  The supporters of Putin in the United States will find the same experience waiting for them in due time.  For "the wise woman builds her house, but the foolish tears it down with her own hands."

But a more interesting complication awaits those who support this unholy joining of oligarchs.  For China and Russia have published a joint statement of intent to remake the world according to an image of their liking.  And that will very soon pose problems for those rank-and-file working-class rubes in the United States who hitched their wagon to the the Republican Party, to Donald Trump, and to the Global Far Right.  Under Trump, they were taught to hate China.  But under the coalescing leadership of the emerging league of global oligarchs, they will be forced to love China - not the rank-and-file people of China, mind you, but the autocratic leadership of China.  That is bound to induce some serious whiplash in the souls of many white supremacists and racists in the United States.  Ambulances should be standing by.

Putin's Trojan Horses

I have been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings for a while now.  I like her style and her clear-headedness regarding current events and the hucksters who drive many of these events.  She has done admirable work tracking the shenanigans of the right-wing/white supremacist doofuses who have infected not only the United States but the entire Global North as well.  Her latest post describes the increasingly violent threat posed by these idiots against decent people everywhere.  

I thought it good to add a reminder that the source, the main engine and the leadership of many far-Right/white supremacist organizations nowadays is Russia.  I suggest that the reason for the recent uptick in trouble from these groups is tied closely to the fact that Putin is no longer winning his geopolitical games, and wishes to expand his use of hybrid warfare in his assault against the West.  As I mentioned in my last post, Putin's Russia is now good for nothing.

What We All Are Getting From Your Tax Rubles

In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis speaks of pride as the deadliest of the sins.  And he notes how proud, arrogant people tend to turn off everyone they encounter.  As he puts it, "I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals.  There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else' and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves...The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit..."  I must confess that I myself am guilty of pride, and so I must temper my tendency to condemn pride when I see it in others.  And yet when I encounter those people whose pride - whose narcissism (both personal and national) - moves them to try to turn the world into their own special possession, I do tend to regard as guilt-free pleasure the eventual humiliation of such people.  So we come once again to Russia.

At the time of this writing, Ukraine still exists as a sovereign non-Russian country.  And the events of the last several weeks have shown that Russian president Vladimir Putin is not quite the chessmaster he had made himself out to be.  In fact, he has stumbled rather badly.  Now in the West, many of us have been brought up to believe that the governments of nations exist for the purpose of providing for the common good of their citizens, and that this purpose is the reason why citizens pay taxes.  So I thought it good to enumerate for you who are of the Russian people the things you are getting for your tax rubles.

First, you all know - just from looking around yourselves in day-to-day life - how things are going for you.  I too have some idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources.  What those sources tell me is that things are not going well for you who are citizens of Russia.  There is the botched response to COVID-19, there is the staggering wealth inequality, the surge in death rates across all regions in Russia, and the death of the Russian middle class.  There have also been awesome ecological disasters, such as the huge wildfires of 2019, 2020 and 2021.  I fully expect that this year, 2022, will see outbreaks of wildfires whose size and extent of damage will dwarf the damage done by the previous years' fires.  I also fully expect your government to do nothing to address these wildfires or any of the other crises I have mentioned.

So then, what exactly are your tax rubles buying?  Perhaps not for you, but for the rest of the world?  Here again I have a fairly strong idea, based on materials I have read from reliable sources.  I know that from at least 2010 until 2020, your tax rubles bought the destabilization of liberal democracies throughout the world.  I also know that your money bought the breaking of sovereign governments in many nations which had been part of the Soviet empire and had managed to break free and re-establish their own national identity after the Soviet collapse.  Such nations include Georgia, Belarus, and Montenegro, among others.  In each of these recaptured nations, the pro-Putin puppet governments have managed to reproduce the same little bits of Putinesque hell on earth that characterize daily life for most Russians.  Your government tried to do the same thing here in the United States, and so for four years we endured the piece-of-garbage presidency of Donald Trump.

Your government has been especially active in the wrongful spending of your money during the last twelve months.  During that time Putin has sent troops into the Czech Republic in order to destroy Czech defense plants.  He has sent troops into Kazakhstan in order to put down a civil resistance uprising against the pro-Putin government there.  Those troops have shot unarmed protesters.  Kazakhstan is interesting, because it is an oil-producing country whose mineral wealth is being stolen by Russia as the pro-Putin government rapes the country to enrich that thieving little man in his bunker.  (It is only natural that ordinary Kazakh citizens would object to this sort of thing.)  And he has sent troops to the Ukraine border in what he thought would be an easy bid to conquer Ukraine.  That bid has turned out to be not so easy.

For Putin has begun to buy a few unexpected things for himself along the way.  His soft power (as well as the soft power of Russia) has begun to erode.  Soft power is at its maximum when a people or nation genuinely demonstrates itself to be a model worthy of imitation because it brings genuinely good things to the world.  I think of Japan as a case in point.  I am a small business owner and recently I discovered some fascinating Japanese commercial cultural practices that make me think that Japan has some really cool people who are worth getting to know because they have something to offer.  I also think of Indonesia and the musical inventiveness which I have seen in some of the artists from that nation.  For instance, there is an Indonesian fingerstyle guitarist named Alip Ba Ta who in my opinion is the current reigning king of those who play an ax.  In short, there are nations which produce cultural or scientific or commercial artifacts which bring genuine pleasure or benefit to the world.  On the other hand, there is Russia as it now is under Putin.  Putin's Russia seems genuinely to be good for nothing.  Rather, to Putin, the rest of the world exists solely as a source of supply of living human victims to sacrifice on the altar of his narcissism.  We are not interested.