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Latter-Day Myths

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9

Yes, our post tribal history is replete, with blood curdling repetition.

Today, we kill in Ukraine.
Yesterday, in Iraq.
And the Day before, in……..?

Go ahead, fill in the blanks, decade by decade, or century by century.

And yet we cling to the duly Consecrated Myths of ‘Progress’ and “Civilisation”.

Time we broke with that abysmal claptrap.

And get real.

Enlightenment?

That veneer is not even skin deep.

We remain , as ever, bloodthirsty neanderthals.

*

I have said it before: we are inveterate myth-making animals.

We scorn, in supercilious, abject, contempt, the myths of our forebears.

Whilst worshipping our own delusions, in equally breathless adoration.

*

Consider our own EM (EuroModernist) myths.

Liberty, equality, democracy….etc.

These have always been fanciful idylls most of us swear by, than actual endowments.

For few things could be further from the truth.

We have loyally absorbed political slogans self-proclaiming the high virtue of the system.

They are part of what Chomsky once called the ‘manufacture of consent’: today, I would call it machinofacture of the same.

And few care to seriously examine their empirical (and theoretical) validity.

It never occurs to the many that these might be canny tools of mass control, or weapons of mass deception.

The governors can pull back, abrogate , suspend , such ‘rights’, willy nilly.

But rights that can be annulled, at will, are not rights, but privileges.

And the privileged have always had rights, in all systems.

*

Few even know that Habeas Corpus , dating back to the Magna Carta, lies suspended.

Ask yourself: are we a democracy?

Take a look at the Princeton/Northwestern study (https://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us-is-an-oligarchy-2014-4 )

We appear to have a govt of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.

And yet, like hapless turkeys, we still , fervently, vote for Xmas.

Or, do we have equality?

How many more Afro-ams have to be murdered by the state for us to doubt such slogans?

Are we law-governed, in a ‘rules based order‘ ?

How many international laws have the US/UK not broken, continuously, in the past 200 years, to this day?

It is little short of a travesty.

*

As I often say it, we are still , in praxis, little better than chimps.

Chimps who affect high airs.

What a grim parody!

The EM governors have affected higher airs than any other on the planet, while looting, scavenging, and ransacking , the resources of others.

It is all really quite grotty.

*

At any rate, as the world crumbles around us, it behooves us to examine some of the many myths that we have taken for granted.

We might yet learn something, however late.

Could be time to curb your dogma?

[© R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

Contrasts

In numerous such pieces, I have held up the template of simple tribal society (STS) against the modus of EuroModernism (EM) , the mire that we are all enveloped in, within the Modern World.

I do not, incidentally, idealise any form of human existence.

Life is a losing game, under any system.

The violence of nature, and (the threat of) male violence, keep us all in a veritable hellscape.

But , there are some societal forms closer to our inner geist, and some not at all close.

So the only (irrefutable) argument I make is that STS is where our human essence is most fully gratified, where family, kindred and community , nurture all its members within a matrix of Affective ties.

It is where male violence is, to some extent, ‘tamed’ – intra-tribe – by affective bonds.

No other social system has ever come even remotely close to achieving that.

Bears thinking.

The contrast drawn is, also, of an organic community vs the formal ‘nation-state‘ dystopia we are trapped in.

STS is the exact antipode to our EM existence: free of its anomie, angst, and alienation.

Think about that.

As a realist, I proffer no panaceas, or utopias.

If there is any hint of a norm here , it is that I am suggesting that living in conformity with our essential human nature may be somewhat more authentic than living in a system that violently, and systematically, inverts, subverts, and thwarts, our innate/inner drives.

The state of simply Being,, under such circs., may well be more benign compared to the endless charades, masquerades, stresses, and strains , of ‘Becoming‘ – as demanded by the system we are subject to.

My point is not to ‘revert’ to a STS, but rather to draw important , indeed vital, lessons from it about who we really are as anthropic beings, worlds apart from who we think we are under misanthropic EM suppositions.

Once we grasp that, we can then reprioritise life and living, and reanimate, revitalise it, against the dreary, sullen , dudgeon that the EM wasteland imposes on us all.

There is no other way to overcome its dreadful alienation than to recapture the Affective Life all over again, rescuing it from the false allures of system-driven cupidity, ambition, and (senseless) achievement.

We may then glean , in metaphor, that we are mammals forced into donning reptilian guises.

Worse, it’s a consummate Death Machine, that kills the spirit long before it atrophies all our capabilities.

*

There could have been many, autonomous, Paths to Modernism, but the European Empire(s) precluded all other options by dint of their imposed version on the non-European world.

Most ‘progressives’ are still sold on EM ,fully immersed in its chimerical , utopian, temptings, to this day (all but unaware of
the pulls and pressures of the Paradigm that Rules us).

Like Sysiphus, they keep struggling, doggedly, up that hill , dreaming of imminent redemption.

They have a long way to go, I fear, to decolonise their minds.

*

Here is a documentary made by a brilliant ex-student of mine that tells of the stark contrasts between the two worlds, simply, succinctly. and graphically.
I suggest watching it.
http://www.kanyini.com/
Scroll down the page to the link that lets you watch the entire film.
It is a little less than an hr. long.
Then, think about it.

You just might begin to question the costs/benefits of the Great EM Parable of ‘Progress’?.

PS I rather think that if/when you tire of the
frenetic toggle of buying/selling, wheeling/dealing, huffing/puffing, pushing/shoving, and all those ethereal delights of everyday EM living, you might be prompted to take my Argument a bit more seriously. Of course, I can’t really be sure.

[© R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

Homo Sapiens?

From a crevice
in the
crannied wall

springs a
blossom sweet
and tall

*

The mint
of nature
ever fresh

renews
in healing
gravity

excesses
of mortal
flesh

*

As we tug
tussle
and vie

as we do
and doing
die

she never
asks us
why

being far
far
too shy

*

Like a nurse
on the
bloody field

but heaves
a doleful
sigh

bearing
sustenance
to all

as we
fight flail
and fall

whisp’ring
so so
tremulously

What fools
these mortals
be!

*

Lets fall
a vapid
tear

waiting
ever
patiently

for fogs
of ignorance
to clear

*

Even though
she must
know

since far
away
and long
ago

’twas ever
the way with
us

and will
ever
remain so

for that
is who we
are

but angry
chimps
at war

[© R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

The 3D World

Yes, it is a 3D world.

The extant forces are:

De-dollarisation.

De-colonisation

De-polarisation.

*

The Third force, above, is critical to humanity.

Most welcome the emergent , Multi-polar, world.

It is , admittedly, an improvement on the era of unilateral hegemony.

But it is no idyll.

A multi-polar world will still, over time, cumulate power at the poles.

And then , there is trouble.

*

Besides, the idea of a ‘balance of terror’ , a uniquely masculinist notion, which underlies multipolarity, bodes ill.

We need to be done with ‘poles’ altogether.

A heavily armed, self-conscious , ‘super-power’ is like a barracuda, ready to go into heat ,at the slightest provocation.

So, a non-polar, depolarised, world is an important desideratum.

*

Unfortunately, the EM world will not give us that.

EuroModernism was built by the (mis)governing elites, stadially, upon the nation-state dyad (inaugurated, for us all, by the Treaty of Westphalia) .

And that dyad is precisely the ever-standing impetus for conflict.

Unlike the Frostian trope, ‘good fences do NOT make good neighbors‘, but, instead, ensure intermittent boundary disputation(s), especially in context of an economic machine that is ever thirsting for global resources.

*

A certain philosophical depth is needed to grasp the above.

I do not expect it, thereby, to be widely understood.

I do believe that women , qua women , and native peoples, still untouched by the virus of EM, will get the point, easily: as these constituencies were never quite fully absorbed into the EM consensus.

*

Some precepts – verifiable empirically – have to be taken as self-evident, despite the strong counter-weight of tendentious ideologies/interests that support meretricious ideas nurturing their own parochial objectives.

EM seeks homogeneity , and so erases all difference, gender, culture, ethnicity, etc, so it can manage and control us all that much more easily, for commerce, and societal engineering, etc..

But culture is difference.

And humans are, first and foremost, affective, cultural, entities, that seek a finetuned differentiation to preserve a primal, local, identity.

The (specious) universalism of EM – that so deceives the ‘progressive’ imagination – is a sham and a fraud, to achieve but the goals of dominance, manipulation, and empire.

We never were, and never will be, thank goodness!, ‘One World’.

Perish that dispiriting thought!

Instead, we should celebrate – what remains of – our natural/social diversity.

The rousing phrase ‘Vive la difference!’, has never had more relevance , and immediacy.

The WEF Plan to globalise the world into the dire hellscape of an imposed, crass , uniformity needs be questioned now with all due, even imperative, haste.

Dystopia, regrettably, is the ineluctable Endgame of the entire entropic EM saga of myopic , misanthropic, misadventurism.

We are all, sadly, worse off for it.

[© R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

The Road Taken

Some are marked
for splendor
I revelled in
decline

Some feed on
fame and fortune
I feted
on repine

Some waded
in ambrosia
I reared away
from wine

Some leapt
to seek Excalibur
I lay in
swamps supine

Some rushed
wanton to Arcady
I stood waiting
for a sign

Some gorged to
their earthly fill
I supped on
dreams divine

Some hankered
for another’s weal
I yielded
what was mine

*

Some feasted deep
on bounty fair
I’m still fasting
by the shrine

I may never have
the golden grail
but the crown of
thorns is mine

[© R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

The Last Crisis?

We are living through the Last Crisis of Late (European) Modernity (EM).

A system constructed on Two self-subverting scaffolds, Asocial Individualism (AI) and Avaricious Adversarialism(AA) is simply bound to implode.

A human society simply cannot be sustained on that basis.

This was the egregious error of the European Enlightentment.

It had a grossly flawed understanding of human nature.

*

All our latter-day crises stem from those false, initial premises.

These cannot be mended by deploying any item in the (E)Modernist tool-kit, be it liberal, conservative, or, socialist.

As Einstein pointed out, issues can never be resolved using the same means as those that created the problem(s).

*

But, who dares to think outside the box?

No happy emoluments await one in that perilous enterprise.
EM teaches us to question everything – except EM.

So we continue , within the system, to chase our own tails, all but merrily.

*

Against the fallacies of EM, I have suggested the following postulates, for serious reflection.

1. We are NOT Asocial Individualists, nor are we Avaricious Adversarials , except when forced onto that Procrustean bed by force and fraud.

2. We flourish best in Gemeinschaft formations, rather than in Modernist<emGessellschaft corrals.

Human integrity loses its pith and meaning when we depart from face-to-face relations.

3. We are affective, communal, cooperative, convivial beings rather than competitive, covetous, rationalist calculators of personal worth and well-being, as EM decrees us to be (A Buddhist qua Buddhist cannot pass a Micro-Econ Exam without having to concede that ‘more is better‘).

4. Nation and State are imposed entities ( The Treaty of Westphalia institutionalised that dual for all of us), by ruling elites, corresponding to their need for tribute, taxation, and territory.

5. Human societies are built from below on the basis of family, kinship, and community: only (some ) native peoples still live within that healing matrix. Most of us live in the engineered alienation of the modern nation state, which is amongst the endemic causes of all modern conflicts.

6. Human societies evolve spontaneously requiring no plan, no agenda, no manifests. We build societies much like ants and bees, instinctually.

7.Instincts are the fabled dog that does not bark in EM discourse, advisedly: to accept that is to admit we are organic beings with organic needs: so we may not be ‘engineered’ to conform to this or that political fantasy

8. The meretricious EM idylls of liberty, democracy, equality, et al are all modes of decoys and detours , diverting us from the brute facts of EM oppression (tying most of us to the Wheel of Permanent Drudgery) , so we safely expend our lives in a fine frenzy, seeking chimera that are ever denied and/or delayed.

9. Like Sysiphus we still carry those burdens, up the hill, in vain hopes of an imminent good (EM utopias, like heaven – which they replaced, historically – always lie, safely, beyond the present). That , alas, never arrives.

*

Stepping off the EM treadmill is equivalent to breathing, again, for the first time: understanding ourselves, our needs, and the grim nature of the spin of the system.

Life can then be redirected, within a clear vision of who we are, to providing for our real, communal, needs , unfiltered by the endless, ever more extortionist demands of the system for our labor, our time, our minds, our fealties, and our resources.

As I have said before, EM ideas of who we are are no less than a dire libel upon the human race.

They turned, over time, a Band of Convivials into an unhappy Company of Strangers.

*

You can see much of this for yourself: look around you, the people you work with, the people you work for, the people you know, the people you live close to – what are the ties that bind you to them , and vice versa?

Excise the forces of necessity – commerce and power– from those equations, above, and what is the residual?

What happened to the life-endowing desiderata of your Affective Life</em>?

It’s nothing less than a grisly travesty.

The Good Life cannot be built upon anomie, alienation, and angst.

Those are precisely the states of being that the system generates, on an ever ascending scale.

The Amoral Society is built by shredding any and all sources of societal empathy, a situation near-perfected today in the US .

Its grim data of daily mass-murder and mayhem , not to mention the frozen tundra of its social relations, stand as tragic, irrefutable, testimony to that.

It goes beyond even the ghoulish to realise that all this stands as the very Template of Progress within the EM world.

Dystopia, intended or not, is its necessary, ultimate , consequence.

[© R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

Earth Day?

Reflections On The Planet’s Day of Birth

(For Guy McPherson)

Evening mists

at morn

gloaming dusk

at dawn

Sun keeps

burning low

the moon just

lost its glow

Nature’s weary

of time

as I work this

wayward rhyme

*

An era is

passing on

ere long will

all be gone

Who left to

witness bear

to wake wonder

or care?

*

What price that

grail of gold?

what left neither

bought nor sold?

Seas

restless churn

forests

silent burn

The stars do

fade away

nothing surreal

can stay?

*

End of the world

is nigh?

forlorn both

earth and sky

Save the heart

in endless quest

beyond requital

or rest

Though wan

and woebegone

still softly

sojourns on

[© R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

The Crux

The crux of my critique is simplicity itself.

The ontological/epistemic basis of ALL EM theorising is patently false.

As such, ALL of EM social theory is wrong.

They read nature, mostly (subject to correction by latter-day quantum ideas) right, but ‘human nature’ (noting the oxymoron) wrong.

Why?

Because they ‘deduced’ so called ‘human nature’ by simply examining themselves (and extrapolating) , in context, of the adversarial, avaricious, dog-eat-dog, world they lived in (similar to Hobbes assuming a ‘state of nature’ that actually reflected English societal life, and Smith , looking into his heart, and seeing a Glasgovian ‘propensity to truck and barter’ sealed within it: ditto with Freud taking the traits of his effete, Viennese, clientele , to be universal, etc.).

Their economics, politics, and social theory was, thereby, at once, particularistic and perverse; not even vaguely general, and far, far , from being universal.

In just the same way that an adequate physics is a sine qua non of getting chemistry and biology right, a true anthropology is needed to theorise economy and society, accurately

Whence the Himalayan blunders of EM ‘economics’, Freudian ‘psychology’, and so forth.

*

So what is the truth?

We are , instinctually, affective, heat-seeking, convivial, communal, co-operative, mammals, content with home , hearth , family, and kinship , before rogue ‘animal spirits’ of men – yes, men– extend and expend themselves in corralling power and wealth, leading to the subversion of our primal, tribal, gemeinschaft, social forms into the familiar class-ridden, exploitative, gesellschaft formations of empire-state-and nation (or, ESN, roughly in that historical order).

The simple, tribal form is eminently the domain where the ‘paradigm of femininity’ POF (nurturance) thrives, whereas ESN formations are where the ‘paradigm of masculinity’, or POM (domination, exploitation, expropriation) reigns.

Slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, in European history, are all in the latter mold: in the non-European world they had mirror counterparts in various tributary, imperial, formations.

So EM , or European Modernism, within which the non-tribal world lives today , is in the latter POM cast, ever restless, ever chafing, ever crusading for more, recklessly expansionist, and predatory; and , ultimately, destructive of ALL forms of life.

Those of us trapped within its nihilist ideology suffer the EM languishments of angst, anomie, and alienation, doomed to struggle, suffer, and perish , unrequited.

What a waste of (the abundant potential of )human life!

*

If you think I exaggerate, consider who, or rather what, gave us WW1 and WW2 , and now are, in giddy madness, rushing us all into WW3.

Neither Non-European (non EM) societies, nor their ideologies, are capable of even thinking in such exterminist terms.

The (so-called) barbarians, of yore, Mongols, Huns, et al. were structurally incapable of such dire, rank , overweening , misanthropy.

For all their stupendous ravages, they still left the world – ecological and societal – mostly intact.

That is more than the EM Hegemons of today would care to guarantee, in lapidary insouciance, even to their very own posterity.

Evil Incarnate, and yet for being Amoral, unaware/uncaring of it all.

*

If such are the fruits of ‘enlightenment’, perhaps the world might have been safer if Europe had remained unenlightened, rapt in ignorant slumbers?

If this is what, in the net, ‘progress’ produces, one can hardly abstain from relentless interrogation of the meretricious idyll.

So called ‘growth’ and ‘development’, the key watchwords of this litany, are but the cover for a simpler, more primal, EM urge: imperial expansion.

In sum, I am far from unaware of the benefits of EM, such as they are: I just happen to think that they are simply not , in human and evolutionary terms, anywhere near being even remotely cost -effective.

Human life and human needs are altogether simple, even banal: it is EM ideologues who, steeped in masochistic discontent, and cumulationist drives, concocted its entirely suppositional, vainglorious, overbearing, ‘complexity’ and pseudo-sophistication.

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

The Post Human Society

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110455311/html

The Work ( Writ in 1992/Published in 2015, by De Gruyter ), in belles-lettristic form, constitutes the set of my initial, affective , preliminary, reactions to the cultural logos of the Lead Hegemon of EuroModernism.

I have since refined these first impressions, developing a Transcendent Critique of Eurocentrism, but this work was an important first step.

It is free to download, for the interested, as per the link provided, above.

Ps readers can judge for themselves how much of what I say there remains applicable to this day.

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

Dolor of Gaia

Oft did I travel in the haunts of old

memories warm lienholders though cold

by Stygian charnels b’neath leafy groves

beside seething beaches sultry coves

reminisced deep recalling such forms

shadows departed dead antic norms

pleated of travesty latticed of spite

impassable glooms split by tendrils of light

O the dim worlds entered all unprepared

guilty innocent where no one is spared

beseeched high heavens found heavens all bare

as dystopic disorder reigned everywhere

What penances expiate our sordid sins

what love absolves afore prayer begins?

what fair deeds of charity still remain

to repeal forever our birthmarks of Cain?

upon the planet’s long wrenched breast

there be no redemption nor any sweet rest

she ready casts off our worn mortal coils

curtailing our trespass moribunding our toils

touch her once more prostrate at her feet

in Homeric despair are we made obsolete

Forfeit all mercy she doles us our due

O in Homeric dolor she bids us adieu

in fealty to Others as Mother to All

She lets go the Lapsarian Children of Baal

[©R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

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