During my media ethics course this week I launched into an epic rant that frightened some students.

The diatribe was inspired by a recent controversy covered by Boing Boing about the (mis)appropriation of a logo belonging to the infamous punk band, Crass (click here for the initial post and here for the follow-up). The backstory is that some fashion designer in London, Hardware, blatantly ripped off the Crass logo to convert it into some apolitical fashion icon (if you compare the current Hardware Website with the logo posted at Boing Boing, you will see that Hardware hastily fixed their plagiarism problem). Concurrently, for our class we watched The Greatest Movie Ever Sold by Morgan Spurlock (maker of Super Size Me), which has the subtitle, “He’s not selling out, he’s buying in.” In a nutshell, Spurlock made a movie about branding and product placement by branding and selling his “doc-buster” to advertisers. The question for my class about the film–and what spurned the epic rant–was, Can a critical film about marketing use branding to make its point?

I’ll get to Spurlock’s film momentarily. Returning to Crass, the logo controversy led me to YouTube where I found a documentary about the band. Watching it reminded my of how in the early 1980s Crass had been such an ethical influence on me as a young punk rocker. Crass fans were considered “peace punks” that were into the scene not for style, but to participate in oppositional politics and an alternative social movement. As an anarchist collective Crass practiced what they preached. Whenever they performed they donated whatever was left after expenses to local charity. They were truly a not-for-profit endeavor that wanted to live by their principle, “There is no authority but yourself.” In retrospect this phrase is not in-sync with ecology, which eschews such pronounced individualism, but the basic anti-authority stance is still valid.

Our culture should not be dictated by an economic ideology that has taken over virtually all realms of life (see the book Monoculture for a good overview of this point). Relatedly, I asked the class if it were anachronistic to have a strong anti-commercial stance that contradicts the prevailing paradigm that views privatization and the commercialization of public space as gospel. I have found that many students these days seem to accept the blanket marketing of their lives as the price for doing business as usual. Many have internalized the age-old justification for screwing over anyone: it’s just business. Indeed!

At Boing Boing commentators criticized Xeni Jardin (who posted about the Crass controversy) by arguing that it was hypocritical to promote open culture and remixing but then not apply the same standards when a fashion designer does it. My response is that we’re not talking about an absolute ideology that can’t differentiate between an open and closed commons. Crass were about sharing and generosity. Corporate theft from punk rockers is the opposite. It’s evil. There is a difference between fair use and plagiarism, which comes down to intent. What is the purpose of the appropriation technique? You can tell the difference by observing which act is participatory and which one is not. This is the thin red line of dissent versus exploitation, and fair play versus cheating.

Trailer for The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Click here if you can’t see it.

Which brings me to Spurlock’s documentary, a film that I essentially experienced as a major mind fuck. On the one hand, it does exactly what it sets out to do: it makes transparent the entire process of selling out. So in the process of making a film that is potentially a critique of marketing, the filmmaker must sell out. How does one reconcile this contradiction? Is it even possible? Has media criticism devolved into self-mockery?

One way for me to respond to this film is to go back to the problem of “postirony.” The term, coined in Alex Shakar, appears in the book The Savage Girl. It is described as follows:

“…Our culture has become so saturated with ironic doubt that it’s beginning to doubt its own mode of doubting. If everything is false, then by the same token anything can be taken as true, or at least as true enough. Truths are no longer absolute; they’re shifting, temporary, whatever serves the purpose of the moment. Postironists create their own sets of serviceable realities and live in them independent of any facets of the outside world that they choose to ignore….Practitioners of postironic consciousness blur the boundaries between irony and earnestness in ways we traditional ironists can barely understand, creating a state of consciousness wherein critical and uncritical responses are indistinguishable. Postirony seeks not to demystify but to befuddle, not to synthesize opposites but to suspend them, keeping open all possibilities at once. And we marketers, in forging a viable mode of postironic consumerism, must seek to foster in the consumer a mystical relationship with consumption. Through consumption consumers will be gods; outside of consumption they will be nothing: a perpetual oscillation between absolute control and absolute vulnerability, between grandeur and persecution.”

One way this insidious phenomena manifests itself is in the way marketers have appropriated culture jamming into their repertoire of manipulation. The classic example is Sprite’s Obey Your Thirst ad campaign that features celebrities making fun of themselves selling products. In media literacy parlance, these are the “wink, wink” and “flattery” persuasion techniques that essentially argue, “we marketers know we are full of crap, and we know that you know that we are a bunch of bull, so buy our product anyway!” Thankfully many see through this, but these techniques also do a lot of idealogical work. Essentially, this approach turns grassroots media activism and education into market research, undoing and refracting our legitimate critique into a hall of mirrors (for example, watch how this Fed Ex ad uses media literacy deconstruction techniques in its Super Bowl ad). In this way, capitalism has the incredibly capacity to absorb critique and then turn it on its critics (Occupy movement, watch out!).

So where does that leave us with Spurlock? The truth is, I think the film is a great tool for discussion, or what I like to call an “object-to-think-with.” For that, I believe it has educational value. I believe he is sincere and treats the subject with a lot of respect. (Check out Spurlock’s TED talk for more insight into his thinking about the film.)

But I still remain incredibly uncomfortable with its “truth in advertising” approach. My discomfort is grounded in an old school punk mentality–as outdated as it may seem–that there are lines that should not be crossed. One cannot “market” the revolution, as one major label A & R guy once promised Crass (they politely refused). What is at stake is the cultural commons, which is “all that we share.” As long as there is a commercial barrier between us and the access point to that shared space, then buying in really means fencing off. I still believe that there should be noncommercial spaces that are free from the nefarious influence of corporate power. The more we succumb to the temptation to allow corporations to mediate our methods of critique and engagement, the more we erode our capacity for culture to grow, learn and evolve. No one but a corrupt legal system bequeathed these corporations the right to take over our cultural life. Why do we continue enabling them?

OK, rant over. Thanks for listening!

Local news coverage by CBS (click here if you can’t see the video embed)

As a native Angeleno, one of my annual rituals is to watch the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. Though I have never witnessed it in person, I have checked out the scene in Pasadena the night before and know many artisans who design and build floats for the annual parade. This year was no different, with the exception that I wanted to share the nostalgia with my kids. However, now that I’m a bit of an ex-pat, I see things that were part of my past with a slightly defamiliarized perspective.

As the parents of former students have told me, media literacy ruins TV watching for the family. Though I wanted to convey my enthusiasm for the artisanship of Rose Parade floats to my daughter, I couldn’t remove my critical hat. I became highly sensitized to the more troubling aspects of the event’s televised broadcast. Before watching it I was keenly aware that an Occupy group planned to tail the parade with their own anti-corporate message, so I was hoping to see if the network coverage (in this case, NBC) would mention or cover the Occupiers. What transpired should be of little surprise to any seasoned media watcher.

The parade coverage opened with a flyover of a Northrop Grumman’s B-2 stealth bomber, ironically dubbed the Spirit. In a sense, Spirit is an apt name for it represents the “spirit” of a particular mode of thinking (as in zeitgeist, which means “spirit of the age”). At a cost of $1.5 billion each, the B-2 represents the absurdity of our social structure in which our government pays outrageous sums to an elite group of military contractors at the expense of a withering infrastructure. Anthropologists and historians of the future will note how incredibly insane such a social system is. Meanwhile, parade commentators Shaun Robinson and Al Roker fawned over the bomber arguing that for most of the audience it was the main attraction. Such death technology warship should not be surprising given that one of NBC’s primary shareholders is the military contractor General Electric.

The rest of the broadcast represented a seamless integration between the values of the military industrial complex and totalitarian capitalist ideology. The parade’s Grand Marshall, J. R. Martinez, is a bit of a rising media personality whose notoriety comes from his experience of overcoming the psychological damage of getting 40% of his body burned while deployed in Iraq. While I admire his perseverance and resilience, none of the discussion of this man’s tragic circumstances get contextualized by how unnecessary it was in the first place. No doubt, with stealth bombers getting applauded by pop culture punditry and parade organizers, these dirty little details need not be aired publicly. Martinez is a perfect metaphor for the denial of our sick system: get burned and disfigured and then turn it into corporate motivation for how to transcend the adversity of Empire’s reckless global behavior.

Meanwhile, each parade float was a mini-ad for its corporate sponsor. It was obvious that Roker’s canned commentary was essentially ad copy penned by the corporate overlords. Meanwhile, interspersed throughout the coverage was a noticeably higher ratio of advertising that mostly hawked product discounts and financial services for the newly poor. Though subtle (or not if you are media savvy), this was truly a hegemonic spectacle selling the ideology of the 1%. Good thing the Occupiers were there to counterbalance the message. Yet.. if you watched NBC, such a perspective didn’t exist. It was eliminated from the parade’s coverage.

This is a blatant example of how alternatives get excluded by the traditional power structure’s media system. Luckily, we no longer exist in a reality bubble of top-down communications. The complex ecology of our current social media allows for alternative perspectives to be shared horizontally. This is not to say that Occupy Rose Parade was entirely ignored. The LA Times and local news stations mentioned it, and those who were in attendance at the parade certainly had a chance to be exposed for the first time to the Occupy message. Not surprisingly, some critics disparaged the protestors for degrading a family event with politics. But in light of the parade’s default message of corporate and military domination, to not see the entire event as political represents a triumph of ideology.

Let’s hope that those who fail to see the political nature of mainstream media spectacles increasingly become the minority. Transforming and educating for a new perspective means we have lots of work to do. To begin with, its time to occupy the spirit of our age. I keep harping on the Occupy theme, but I believe it represents a concrete alternative to the mode of communication propagated by the hyper-capitalist take-over of the cultural commons.

Those who have followed this blog over the years have probably noticed a substantial drop in production. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that Facebook and Twitter have channeled some of the creative energy that the blog was used for in the past, such as linking and sharing. For this reason, I hope you will follow my Twitter account as well (@mediacology) or check out the box in the right column with my Twitter updates. I’m not a massive Twitterer, but usually that is where I filter things that I think others would be interested in.

The other reason has to do with my writing time getting eaten up by my current book project. I’m prioritizing my creative flow by channeling it into the book, but occasionally some half-baked thoughts surface and I find that blogging is a good way to process. Fingerscrossed, the manuscript is due in two weeks, so I’ll have a chance to get back into the flow again.

Peace out!

PS I posted the following request elsewhere. If you have any suggestions, please post in the comments section:

We all know intuitively and rationally that the no-longer mainstream media represent the interests of the 1% (re. the occupy wall st. meme). I would like to compile some stats to make this point more clearly. Aside from the most obvious fact of media consolidation, can anyone suggest a way to connect the 1% economy and media with some grounded statistics or facts?

Lots of buzz this week about the new Amazon Fire, the Kindle update primed to take a big bite out of Apple (OK, I couldn’t resist such a silly cliche). Upon viewing its first TV ad (posted above) I’m struck by the use of the fire metaphor for describing communications, something I’ve also been doing in response to the meme model of media. The idea of memes is too mechanical for me–it implies that an idea is an object that gets replicated from person to person. I prefer to think of an idea as a kind of flame that inspires or ignites new understandings, but doesn’t just repeat itself. My initial inspiration for this understanding comes from Buddhism which sees thoughts as impermanent.

Amazon borrows the concept from Voltaire, whose pithy little quote makes an excellent argument for how ideas belong to the public sphere and cannot be owned:

“The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”

Unfortunately, as DefectiveByDesign.org points out, Amazon’s digital rights management strategy is more about restriction than sharing. For example, even though you purchase books through its service, you don’t actually own them. You can’t trade, give away or resell them in the same way you can with physical books. By storing your media on its cloud drives, Amazon exerts complete control over your content and can delete books if they choose (it has happened). This also represents more of the creeping privatization of our data. We have to trust Amazon to not abuse their power of surveillance, data tracking and censorship. Remember that they deleted Wikileaks from their servers when it became politically uncomfortable.

While the media will likely focus on the titanic battle between our gods of capitalism– Amazon’s Jeff Bezos versus Apple’s Steve Jobs–our rights under their control freak purview will increasingly diminish. As the African proverb states, when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. So be mindful for how these new gadgets get fetishized in the absence of a healthy debate about their impact on the public sphere.

For what it’s worth, I own an iPad and I happen to like it, but I’m also not that impressed. I have been mostly disappointed by how limiting it is in terms of my power to create and do stuff with it. It is certainly a perfected media consumption device that makes reading Twitter and PDFs a great pleasure. But when it comes to making media, even something as basic as a PowerPoint presentation, forget it. Even my favorite presentation tool, Prezi, is rendered useless by the iPad (I can view Prezis with an app, but i can’t edit them because iPads don’t have Flash).

In sum, though I’m a fan of tablets for reading and viewing media, they reinforce old media regimes and increase the monopolization of our mediasphere. It’s probably why big media companies really love them. If we eventually migrate from flexible laptops to restricted tablets, it will probably mean a general regression to the one-to-many media model of old rather than to increased participation that should be the promise of the new. I hope I’m wrong.

One thing the reviewer points out is that Mediacology was not an easy read. Agreed! Mediacology was my first book and was done in the midst of heavy readings of McLuhan and the Media Ecology tradition. I was playing with academic jargon, perhaps as an exaggerated response to the boring newspaper journalism I had been doing for so many years before. Every venue demands a different style and over the years I have become schizophrenic from writing in so many different formats: punk fanzines, magazines, newspapers, blogs, academic journals, academic books and popular culture books. I’m hoping that I’m finally hitting a sweet spot between all of these with my current book project. But that remains to be seen. The main thing I realize is that my first book didn’t exactly practice what I preached: though I was calling for participatory educational practice, its language was a bit too inaccessible. Let’s hope I do a better job on the next round.

My Italian friends asked me if I wanted to to do something special for 9/11. I was ashamed to say that the memory conjured something that I didn’t want to re-experience: bloodlust, revenge and war. All I can remember is how the moment of compassion and empathy that the incident called for eroded as fast as war plans were drawn-up to invade Afghanistan. Ten years ago all I could think about was the impending world war that would be launched in the name of 9/11 victims and their families. Indeed, the mainstream media failed to give voice to the peacemakers and antiwar critics who predicated the inevitable folly, crucial voices that I’m afraid have been proven right by the course of history.

But for this post I didn’t want to focus on politics. Rather, I wanted to share with you a clip from a film that I feel is one of the most powerful polemics against political violence I’ve ever seen. It comes from the Italian film Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), directed by Marco Bellocchio (who, BTW, won last night’s lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival). Unfortunately there are no subtitles, so I will have to set it up for you.

The film is about when Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped in 1978 by the Red Brigades, a left-wing terrorist group. The movie depicts the 55 days of his captivity in Rome, focusing on his captors, four young brigadistas, and their relationship with the imprisoned Moro. The story zooms in on the conflicted brigadista, Anna Laura Braghetti, who is increasingly troubled by the fact that the Italian political establishment won’t negotiate a prisoner exchange–the condition for his release–which means that Moro will be sentenced to death by his captors and eventually murdered.

The clip I have posted above involves Braghetti (performed by Maya Sansa) reading Moro’s final letter to his wife. It is then ingeniously overlaid with a letter by a WWII partisan who was sentenced to death by the Nazis. She then has a shattering epiphany (1:50 in the clip) when she realizes that the senseless horror that is about to be inflicted on her captive is no different than the heartless political murders of the past. Bellocchio emphasizes this point by intercutting source footage of prisoner executions from the war. Cut to Pink FLoyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” for me it is one of cinema’s most poignant montages, a heartful rebuttal against the cold logic of terrorists and vengeful war machines.

I hope you have the patience to watch the entire clip. Even if you don’t understand the language, it is poetry in motion. Incidentally, it is possible to see a subtitled version of the film. If at all possible, I encourage you to watch it and learn more about this tragic moment in Italian history.

Al-Jazeer’s Empire on social networks and revolution. Features some excellent talking heads.

Meanwhile, NYU’s Jay Rosen has been a bit of a lightening rod in the debate between the so-called digital Utopians and the pessimists. He rounds up the debates on his blog here. I recommend following him on twitter.

What do I think? Any media that enters into a communication or language community will disturb it. By disturbance I mean an ecological disturbance as in when a new element enters into an ecosystem it becomes a new ecosystem. The fact is, the Internet is part of the system, so we can’t even speculate what the situation would be without it. Obviously it is a mix of both. But I like the point from Mark Poster (thanks Peter!) that the Internet is not a hammer, but a social space. Of course people make revolutions. But empathy is contagious and we can’t be empathetic with that which we do not know. Something is in the air, and certainly media are generating the wind.

I’m loath to make historical analogies, simply because every historical moment has its own unique characteristics that would not be possible if we impose nonexistent conditions. So as the clutch mechanism of time slips, it would be unfair to compare the unreal moment of democratic potential in Egypt with those events in Spain when the libertines of Catalunya tasted freedom but were feeling Franco’s fascist forces pushing against the edges of their dreams for autonomy. Unfortunately for the Republicans of Spain, history didn’t side with them, and the freedom fighters of the Spanish Civil War were crushed and wiped out as the world’s leaders stood by, or as was the case of Stalin and Hitler, made sure that they were destroyed.

So why are my thoughts on Spain during these days of North Africa’s fight for democracy? As I read via the twitterverse the incredible ways in which everyday Egyptians are self-organizing to fill the space of a collapsed state, I’m reminded of George Orwell’s profound passages about free Barcelona during the early days of the Spanish Civil War (if you haven’t yet, you must read Homage to Catalonia). In it he describes a spirit of cooperation and brother/sisterhood that permeated cafes and barber shops alike, one in which a temporary autonomous zone of human potential was freed from the restraints of state terror and mechanized control. To behold such a space is a beautiful thing. To live it is a miracle. To unlearn it is impossible.

Now, one thing (among many, which makes this just a thought exercise) that differentiates the current situation from Spain in 1936 is the global interconnectedness of the events unfolding on our screens. Though the Republicans defending against Franco were shored up by a vast solidarity movement from around the world that sent volunteers and fighters to aid their embattled democracy, few could monitor and mobilize support in real time to prevent the horror that was unleashed by Franco and his allies. Though I’m not on the ground in Egypt to provide any physical assistance, through the Internet* I’m able to track, share, connect and extend an invaluable resource that drives any revolution: empathy.

I know it is vogue to decry net Utopianism, and to invoke something as woo-woo as “empathy” seems rather weak in comparison to the kinds of assistance that foreign brigadistas gave the Spanish Republicans. But I would argue that solidarity is a powerful force that feeds the people engaged in real struggle. The worse feeling is to be in an isolated cell somewhere, subject to random torture, knowing that you are completely alone and without help, as was the case for Spanish libertines who were abandoned after the fall of their republic. People are wired for connection and thrive from positive feedback. (For more about this, I highly recommend watching the Jeremy Rifkin’s RSA animation of his “empathic civilization” thesis.)

On this note, then, I want to balance some of the skepticism coming from the likes of Morozov who argue that net activism is as much a tool of repression as liberation. We could all point to Iran’s Green Revolution as an example of both the failure of the Net and empathy to save the situation. However, it is also not over, and the fact is that through our interconnectedness, we are stronger and more able to keep the struggle alive than to let it disappear into some dungeon in the periphery of an Iraqi or Afghan war zone. Let’s not shut down the optimism that empathy drives. And let’s not so quickly dismiss the role that media can play in supporting the hard work of organizing and rebelling that is now stripping old emperor’s of their illusions, parading them naked across the world’s screens.

PS A note on the strange irony of my historical analogy. Franco launched his attack on the Republic with his North African brigades.

* FYI, my own particular formula for monitoring events is a combination of Al Jazeera English’s Internet stream, the Guardian UK’s live news blog, Twitter, and Mother Jones’ “explainer” page. From these primary portals I’m able to link into a variety of sources. In particular I’ve been able to diversify my Twitter stream to be more inclusive of non-Western perspectives. Compared to the universe of American MSM, this is really a whole different reality. Here you get pointed questions from intelligent and independent thinkers who don’t feel compelled to ask the kinds of ridiculous questions that the Wolf Blitzer’s of the world are asking, such what role al-Qaeda has in the Jan. 25 movement. Give me a break. And while I’m at it, why hasn’t anyone in the MSM pointed out that new Egyptian VP Omar Suleiman was a key figure in the CIA’s rendition to torture program? Is the American press that cowardly?

In response to last weekend’s tragedy in Tucson, I feel fairly small and insignificant in terms of what I have to add to an already bloated mix of hyperbole and moral panic. But I do know what it’s like to have a gun pressed into my temple (a real one, this is not a figure of speech), so I feel a great deal of empathy for any victims of gun violence. The vile feeling of gun violence is indescribable, and once you have been victimized by it, you find yourself shying away from the ubiquitous presence of guns in-your-face imagery: from video game billboards to T-shirts. Sadly, this perverse sickness permeates our media and our culture, so it is very difficult to look away. Most often we have no choice.

In terms of the the war of words (sorry for the military-like metaphor) about the role of language in the mediapolis (to borrow a term from Roger Siverstone), I agree that it is impossible to prove whether or not the militant verbage and graphics of various national figures caused the shooter to commit this heinous act. I also agree we can’t blame society for every cowardly act by a human. But I don’t mean to align myself with this same defense emanating from the echo chamber’s most vociferous haters: O’Reily, Beck and Palin. Because this is a disingenuous defense. If Beck says you can’t prove Loughner listened to a word he said, this still does not excuse Beck from discharging sewage from his mouth, let alone pay him to do it. It may not poison me directly, but I sure don’t like the stink.

It would go against my own theory of media to argue that a pundit’s words can program someone to act in a certain way– this view is far too mechanistic and assumes that ideas are things that can be placed into people’s minds. Humans are not programmable computers. However, the general atmosphere can be poisoned by attitude which makes certain cultural expressions more acceptable than not. Words set tone and when amplified to the Nth degree they can frame cultural norms. Coke can’t prove that an ad convinced me to buy a coke, but that doesn’t deter them from crowding my mindspace with the idea of Coke.

The metaphors and disinformation deployed by the Right enables a certain level of self-interested intolerance to be permissible and pushes a cultural perspective that is not healthy for any community, be it Tucson, Baghdad or Kabul. Nor is it worthy of any culture that claims to be civilized. Likewise, these views are not accidentally detonated, but are in service of a hierarchical system predicated on fear. These acts of verbal bullying are a control strategy, and even more cynically, an economic one. Murdoch, who deserves a lot of blame for this toxic atmosphere, wouldn’t employ such strategies if they didn’t make big bucks.

Psychologists calls this “pre-conventional” behavior, the kind associated with little children who are incapable of understanding the needs of others. “Post-conventional” behavior is marked by empathy and the ability to look beyond self-interest, but this also requires critical thinking about one’s own beliefs. The Tucson massacre is begging for a post-conventional dialog. Will the mediapolis respond accordingly?

The reviews are mixed. The media pariahs showed their true colors, to be sure. For example, how crazy is the claim that criticizing Beck and Palin puts the Republic in danger? Hmm, their speech doesn’t endanger other people, but criticism of them does? Which way are they going to have it? Moreover, deployment of the dreaded blood libel and lynch claim seems like a bit of paranoid thinking for a bunch of rich people who get paid millions to rant incoherently. To claim they were victimized at a time when the guns were aimed at other people and to equate their plight with the persecution of blacks or jews is really despicable. Have you ever heard such privileged elites whine so much?

I don’t mean to sound like a hypocrite here, but this is one situation where my capacity for empathy is really stretched. We can chalk it up to the sad rantings of confused, suffering and narcissistic individuals. On the other hand we are obliged not to be rugs: psychic boundaries are important. In light of the state of our planet, if ever there was a need for a time out for media cry babies, it would be now.

From a media ethics point of view, polluting the public sphere with lies, hypocrisy and hatred constitutes irresponsibility. This is not a call for censorship, but for restraint and basic human dignity. Right speech (not right-wing speech), from a Buddhist point of view means refraining from lies, harmful speech, gossip and slander. There is an ethical and practical reason for this. The moral reason is the gold standard of Kantian ethics and the Christian tradition: don’t do onto others that which you would not want done to yourself. Words included. The practical reason is quite simple: harmful speech will always bite you in the ass. Such is the case with Beck and Palin who are now having to defend there diminished characters, attempting to salvage their parasitic media personas in hopes that people will look beyond their hypocrisy and verbal misdeeds. No doubt many will, and that is simply the tragic result of demagoguery that mixes codes and flattery to appease the closed reality of traumatized, hardcore nut cases.

I have a fairly simple syllogism for media ethics. It is as follows:

1) We are all interconnected.

2) As interconnected beings, we live in communities.

3) Healthy communities require communication to function well.

4) For communication to work we need trust.

5) Trust requires credibility and reciprocity.

Is this too much to ask for? If our economic structure, and hence media system, cannot get past point one, then our reality is in serious need of a make-over. In the very least we can start with the premise that words are energy. The difficult question we must all ask ourselves is, What is the quality of energy we want to share? The Mayan greeting, Lak’ech, means “I am another yourself.” Imagine if all of us started our interactions in such a way…

“The Buddha was famous for remaining silent when he was asked any of fourteen questions, questions like “Are the self and the world eternal? Are the self and the world not eternal? Do the self and the world have an end? Do the self and the world not have an end?” Although much has been written about the deep meaning of his noble silence, one of the more plausible interpretations (which actually occurs in a Buddhist text) is that the Buddha remained silent because he knew whatever he said, he would be misunderstood. If he said that the world was eternal, people might get discouraged and not practice because they would conclude that they could never get out of samsara. If he said that the world would end, people might not practice because they felt they could just wait around for samsara to end naturally.”

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., “From The Academy” Click on the link to read more by professor Lopez (not relation to me).

There’s an old saying, one that was the motto for the infamous Barrington Hall co-op in Berkeley: “Those who know don’t tell, those who tell don’t know.” This is can be applied to so many facets of our lives. If you are a writer and someone asks you, what are you writing?, often to speak of the work is to invoke the energy of it, which is deflating when you sit down to actually write out your ideas. If you speak them, why do you need to write them? This of course is only relevant if you are engaged in the traditional practice of individual authorship. For many other kinds of creative work (especially the kind that many of us are engaged in), sharing is a conditon for evolution.

But more to the point of this particular dharma lesson, there is the issue of labeling, as Lopez’s longer piece discusses (linked above). To be a “true” Buddhist, you don’t label what you do, because the practice of Buddhism is beyond dualism (saying “this” is “that,” and so on). Dualism is not wrong–we need to survive and function in the world and discernment is absolutely necessary. But attaching dualism to reality as opposed to understanding that this style of thinking is just a cognitive tool to organize perception, we start to believe the labels are reality as opposed to the phenomena that emerged the labeling. Likewise, naming something thingifies it, a prerequisite for its commodification.

More importantly, as described in the above anecdote, the Buddha believed such questions only create more suffering. Do we really need to know how the universe was created? Is it necessary to think through this idea in order to live a full and happy life? He wanted to simplify our approach to the world so that we do not get caught up in such large unsolvable, unknowable problems.

Which brings me to my most important point: conspiracy.

Students often ask what I believe about 9/11. I reply that it is impossible to know, and rather than get caught up in this or that theory, I focus instead on a creative response to what the event has created for us in the world. I can certainly point to a number of patterns that help explain what happened, and I do have a working storyline concerning “blowback” (the karma of international politics in which the arms and training you give to warring parties comes back to bite you in the ass later on, as was the case with the Taliban).

There are certainly dozens of plausible explanations that would explain how the towers fell. And when you go to the Twin Towers site in lower Manhattan you can feel that regardless of who caused it, it was an act of tremendous black magic. Now that this has been unleashed upon the world, what is the appropriate response?

The problem I have with getting caught up in conspiracy theories is how quickly they darken the spirit. They immediately drain all our energy and consume us with fear and powerlessness. If the point of the initial act of 9/11 was to overcome us with terror and victimization, then it worked–as long as we maintain this kind of attitude. So the only response that can dissipate the intent behind the action is to counter with an ethic of love and compassion for the “other.” Hard as it may seem, does the world need more paranoia and hatred?

I tend to stay away from grand narratives, for the very idea of “history” is Western concept that views time as linear progress. The myth of progress has justified the invention of every hideous technology and its adjunct ideology. How many of these conspiracy stories tend to have a beginning, middle and end? Is life a three act play?

We also must speak truth to power, so silence does not mean standing by while atrocities and injustice foul the world. But parcel your energy carefully. To paraphrase the Dalai Lama’s response as to why he does not advocate violence against the Chinese government, he said you can use any rationale to justify violence, but it will never sit well in your heart. You will go to war against yourself. We cannot let these invisible power brokers destroy our minds and hearts.

Robert Anton Wilson once said that he didn’t believe in the power of secret societies because to do so gave them power over his life. He preferred to think of his personal network as a kind of powerful cabal. So why not you? Aren’t you and your friends and colleagues worthy of respect and reverence that is given over to people that we can’t or never will know? Do we want to let these unseen beings rule our lives and drain our energy?

Please, what ever you do, don’t feed the energy vampires!