Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land – Twenty-Four
PSYCHIC ENTROPY
IS THERE A Way Out OF NOWHERE LAND?
JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
Originally © October 17, 2016/August 28, 2021
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
In this final segment and the Afterword, we complete the commentary of the PAST IMPERFECT, PRESENT RIDICULOUS, and FUTURE PERFECT. The possibility that human beings may soon be marginalized in the name of progress is no longer a farfetched consideration. The narrative of these twenty-four episodes has been essentially a peripatetic walk through time culminating in the clumsy attempt of the United States to redress a catastrophic wrong (i.e., the 9/11 Osama bin Landen’s Aikido attack on the New York City Twin Towers and the United States Military Pentagon in Washington, DC) leading to a preemptive attack of Iraq to punish that nation for its alleged association with ben Landen and for having weapons of mass destruction, which proved a fairy tale of the CIA, compounded in the process by an attempt to convert Iraq into a “kinder, gentler” society to mirror the West, particularly the United States.
The long shadow of Christianity and its utopian zeal is seen in the presumptive strategy that clings to the United States like a shadow since 1945 when America emerged serendipitously as the lone superpower on the planet seeing the utopian dream of progress through a cloudy ethnocentric lens.
America’s ignorance of the world has manifested itself in psychic entropy to confirm the status of NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND. American physicist Stephen Hawking writes:
Just like a computer, we must remember things in order in which entropy increases. This makes the Second Law of Thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can’t have a safer bet than that!
Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in "FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" (1990):
To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.
This is an invitation to turn Psychic Entropy on its head to serve rather than continue to be enslaved to the reckless dissonance of the times. This is clearly in evidence as semiotics and semantics signs, meanings, and codes that guide people's lives have been corrupted to justify the radical behavioral change in terms of sex-role identity. Turning Psyche Entropy inside out:
To wit, such designations as male and female, boy and girl, man and woman, husband and wife of different genders, and Homo sapiens being of one species. Instead, this finds boys wanting to be girls, and girls wanting to be boys, using hormones to change their appearance if not changing their sexual anatomy by submitting to surgical sex-changing identity. Boys want to play girls’ sports, and girls want to play traditional boys’ sports. Boys want to dress like girls and girls want to dress like boys. Blacks want to be whites, and whites want to be black, or some other Homo sapiens’ identity. Happiness has turned into pill dependency while self-regard has transmogrified into self-hate. Nobel Laureate for Literature (1946), Swiss-German novelist, poet, and painter, Herman Hesse, writes:
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”
British philosopher, semiotician, and semanticist John Locke (1632 – 1704) anticipated when the general public could go off the rails, penning “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1695) which relates to personal identity. Locke claimed what makes me the same person over time, despite all the differences made to my appearance and character by the passage of the years is that we have an immortal soul which remains invariant through the accidental and oftentimes misguided circumstances of our self-perception.
Accordingly, it is the soul, not the body, that carries our personhood. This implies “a person” and a “human being” is not the same thing. Indeed, Locke treated the concept of a person as a forensic concept, that is, relating to our DNA, fingerprints, biology, pathology, etc. To the question of personal identity, he claimed it consists of “consciousness of being the same person over time.” This consciousness is constituted by self-awareness, memory, and self-regarding interests in the future. Locke introduced the word “consciousness” into English by this theory.
In the final book of the Essay Locke gives his account of the nature of knowledge which in turn guides behavior. This he says consists in “the perception of the connection among ideas and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists.”
When the connection or disagreement among ideas is immediately obvious, Locke calls it “intuitive knowledge.” When reasoning is required to see the connection or opposition, he calls it “demonstrative knowledge.” His theory is almost exactly what we commonly think of as empirical knowledge, the knowledge that arises in us because of the causal interactions between the world and our sense organs. Generally, perception is a mainly reliable source of information about our world and beyond (The Fisher Paradigm©™, 2018, looks at this concept in pragmatic empirical terms of everyday life).
Personal identity and the common good has been misappropriated from the individual by political identity and political correctness where the politics of resentment cloud the freedom of free choice with persons wanting to abort their DNA and the landmarks of their culture for the surreal.
Francis Fukuyama reminds us in “Identity Politics” (2018) that identity and identity politics are of a fairly recent province popularized by the psychologist Erik Erikson in the 1950s, a man who left Europe without academic credentials, assumed a new name and new identity, finding a home in our most prestigious academic institutions, while becoming a spokesman for the multitude who felt their identity had been stolen.
No longer is maturity and aging gracefully a badge of honor. Now, age is denied as an absolute by those who submit to elective plastic surgery often turning the so obsessed to more resemble zombies. Meanwhile, work has been given a bad name as the State promises to protect its citizens from work as well as pain, and failure, or the necessity of making choices and experiencing the consequences of their actions.
If we accept the State’s promise, all we have to give up is our freedom, individualism, and independence. Political correctness has been on steroids for decades but it now appears more resolute to change our lexicon by removing such terms as Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Easter, and the designations of male and female, man and woman from the language. At the same time, it would eliminate the celebration of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthday, Columbus Day, and many other such cultural-historical days from the calendar. Given this retreat from history, it is only a matter of time before the busts of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt will be dynamited into oblivion on Mount Rushmore.
Spanish philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” History is part of our personal identity.
Psychic Entropy goes from high disorder to the point of fanatical order. It can be reversed by negative entropy which is a matter of creative renewal. We are on the cusp of that matter as we live in an age where no one is in charge. Our cell phones and our apps with scores if not thousands of friends has become a societal pacifier leaving little time or inclination to read books, certainly such difficult books and writing as Herman Hesse. I write:
The West is in decline as Oswald Spengler suggested more than one hundred years ago, but what he may not have envisioned is that self-indulgent man, a product of this Psychic Entropic run amuck may one day find man near his journey end (see Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man, 2015). The earth is becoming a very different place than it has been since the arrival of man. While humans are unlikely to become extinct, the world in which they have evolved is rapidly vanishing.
Psychic Entropy is real. We have seen in modern times going from high disorder to fixated low disorder attempting to establish a sense of being in control when everything is out of control. What once constituted leadership is now simply a struggle for power and dominance at any cost. Decision-making has become chimerical in its conclusions often being inconsistent with unrealistic situational demands. We see this in corpocracy be the institution the government, academia, the military, business, and industry, or the public health industry as each has lost its way to becoming essentially political.
While position power is now atavistically replaced by knowledge power, the possessors of this power of the majority of the citizens and not those at the top of what is now an anachronistic organizational structure. The dominant virtue of enterprise is artificial in the sense of being dependent on prevailing social convention. Artificial virtue, or the appearance of advocating virtue when vice, iniquity, faintheartedness, fearfulness, and timidity prevail, according to English philosopher David Hume (1711 – 1776) points to consistent conformity to socially espoused norms that often no longer apply, leaving society to slip from the Past Imperfect and Present Ridiculous to envisioning a miraculous Future Perfect, a climate that couldn’t be more suitable to Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land.
While this appears to be the general climate of the United States at the moment, quietly and unobtrusively one industry has managed to thrive no matter the prevailing cultural climate and that is the farm industry, which is the subject of the AFTERWORD in terms of how it has always dealt with Psychic Entropy.
THE COMFORT OF RHETORIC
Dante’s decision seven hundred years ago to write his great poem not in Latin but in what he called the vulgar eloquence – Italian, the language of the people – and the innovation in the following century of printing from movable type represent landmarks in the secularization of society, as well as an affront to the hegemony of priests and oligarchy tyrants. The impact of today’s emerging technologies promises to be no less revolutionary, perhaps even more so. The technology of printing enhanced the value of literacy, encouraged widespread learning, and became the sine qua non of modern civilization. New technologies will have an even greater effect, narrowing the notorious gap between the educated rich and the unlettered poor and distributing the benefits as well as the hazards of our civilization to everyone on earth.
American cultural critic John Leonard (1939 – 2008), “Cri de Coeur,” The New York Review (February 8, 2001)
“There are ample opportunities to help create a more humane and decent world if we choose to act upon them. A democratic communications policy would seek to develop means of expression and interaction that reflect the interests of and concerns of the general population, and to encourage their self-education and their individual and collective action.”
American journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers (born 1934), American journalist and political commentator, A World of Ideas (in a 1989 interview of Noam Chomsky).
WHY NO WAY OUT?
We have overwhelming data to solve our problems, but instead of solving our problems with this providential abundance we mask our difficulties and compound our problems with disinformation.
Novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) was prescient long before the computer age:
“Is it true that mankind demands, and will always demand a miracle, mystery, and authority?” He answers: “Surely it is true. Today man gets his sense of the miraculous from science and machinery, radio, airplanes, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish man’s sense of the miraculous as magic did the past.”
John Gray in Straw Dogs (2002) concurs:
“Today for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody ‘miracle, mystery, and authority.’ Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will, at last, be realized. Sickness and aging will be abolished, scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles.
“But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.”
German economist, sociologist, philosopher, and political scientist Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) scored utopianism as unscientific yet his “scientific socialism” resembles alchemy, not chemistry, but magic, which is utopian, as he believed that technology could transmute the base metal of human nature into metaphorical gold. Moreover, he saw no danger in the expansion of human numbers for he saw no limit to productivity with the abolition of scarcity, private property, the family, the state, and the division of labor. Paradoxically, while he saw religion as the “opium of the masses,” his ideology was consistent with that of Christianity and its deism, which he rejected.
It would appear there is no way out because man does not seem willing to accept that he is an animal no different than a cow or a horse or a tree when it comes to nature. Naturalist E. O. Wilson (born 1929) envisions the next century and saw a closing of the “Age of the Mammals,” and new age as one characterized by biological impoverishment, an “Age of Loneliness.” How so?
According to John Gray, humans co-opt over 40 percent of the Earth’s living tissue. We see this in dried-up lakes, treeless mountains, polluted oceans, toxic atmospheres, and melting ice caps. We are now seven billion souls on earth today. In the not too distant future, we will be twelve billion souls. When there is little available potable water or food supply, energy sources will cease to be the critical mass driving societies to war. It will be potable water.
The synthetic world that humans have created will mirror their collective solitude as there are no exits from the creative fiction of Nowhere Land. New mystics will surely appear suggesting empty spaces in which those that survive can open themselves to something outside their solipsism, possibly a colony in outer space. John Gray suggests these mystics should be ignored for a monastery of scientists is not where peace will be found but by citizens of this small planet communing with nature in the company of other animals, not seeing these creatures as inferior but as beings who have never been inclined to separate themselves from nature or its rhythm and renewal.
PSYCHIC ENTROPY
Entropy: A thermodynamic property that is the measure of a system's thermal energy per unit of temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state. This is another way to refer to entropy.
Psychotherapist Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) created the concept of “Psychic Energy” claiming since our experience is confined to relatively closed systems, we are never in a position to observe absolute psychological entropy. But the more the psychological system is closed, the more the phenomenon of entropy is manifest. A system is closed when no energy from outside can be fed into it; only in such a system can entropy occur. An example would be mental disturbances characteristic of intense seclusion from the environment or the dulling of the psychological affect in schizophrenia.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (born 1934) incorporated Jung’s psychic entropy theory into his “flow theory” of optimal experience in positive psychology where psychic entropy is interpreted as a disorder in mental consciousness that produces a conflict with an individual’s goals. He writes:
“Emotions refer to the internal states of consciousness. Negative emotions like sadness, fear, anxiety, or boredom produce psychic entropy in the mind, that is, a state in which we cannot use attention effectively to deal with external tasks because we need it to restore an inner subjective order.”
We see elements of this in American psychologist Leon Festinger’s (1919 – 1989) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957) where he argues we make new information fit with information already indicating in our closed mind. This incompatibility (dissonance) could happen when you do something that goes against a value that’s important to you. Or maybe you learn a new piece of information that disagrees with a long-standing belief or opinion. As humans, we generally prefer for our world to make sense, so cognitive dissonance can be distressing. That’s why we often respond to cognitive dissonance by doing mental gymnastics to feel like things make sense again when they don’t.
We see it also evident in American philosopher Alan Bloom’s (1930 – 1992) Closing of the American Mind (1987) where he shows how American higher education has produced psychic entropy by reinforcing cultural biases, myths, and barriers to reality instead of opening young minds to a world beyond their cultural conditioning.
Then there is American academic psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi’s (born 1966) A First Rate Madness (2011) in which he contends that great leaders such as Lincoln, General Sherman, Churchill, Gandhi, FDR, JFK, among others, demonstrate palpable evidence of mental illness, where the singularity of their minds blocks out reality to pursue a closed-minded course of madness to epitomize psychic entropy.
We saw psychic entropy on display when the George W. Bush administration relied on the Central Intelligence Agency’s director George Tenet (born 1953) to accept the CIA director’s “slam dunk” metaphor that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or WMDs). It was wishful thinking culminating in General Colin Powell (born 1937) taking the fall when asked to give a speech of assurance to the United Nation’s Security Council on February 5, 2003, that Iraq, indeed, had WMDs. A tragic comedy of errors followed.
HEGEMONY/IMPERIALISM/PSYCHIC ENTROPY
The missionary zeal neoconservatives in the Bush administration had been building a frenzy since 9/11. Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952) in Birth of Reason (1968) writes:
The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend because he has not have the imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.
In this “Information Age,” while John Leonard and Noam Chomsky would suggest a way of getting beyond the madness of total reliance on technology, which still proves – in the case of the CIA – just this side of guesstimates can however be catastrophic in consequence. American conservative cultural and political commentator David Brooks (born 1961) writes:
“For decades, the US intelligence community has propagated the myth that it possesses analytical methods that must be insulated pristinely from the hurly-burly world of politics. Rather than rely on a conference-load of game theories or risk assessment officers, when it comes to understanding the world of things and menaces . . . I’d trust anyone who has read a Dostoyevsky novel over the past five years.”
Inside this critique is the fact that those in government, especially in the 21st century, have been irredeemably bad when it comes to prescience. This transcended from bad to worst with the preemptive invasion of Iraq on faulty intelligence and then escalated into the insanity, which has become the “War on Terror.”
English philosopher historian John Gray sees The Iraq War as serving an economic system that he deems “casino capitalism” where long-term investment has been replaced with ubiquitous gambling. Evidence is that the war, which has already cost multi-$billions will ineludibly be written off as a bad debt. He writes:
“If there is a symbol that captures America in Iraq, it is not the colonial institutions of former times, it is Enron, which vanished leaving nothing behind.”
[Enron was a small company formed by Kenneth Lay in 1985 merging Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, two relatively modest regional companies. Kenneth Lay then hired Jeffrey Skilling as a consultant in 1990. Soon after, he was made chairman and chief executive officer of Enron Finance Corp. In 1991, Skilling became chairman of Enron Gas Services Company, the result of the merger of Enron Gas Marketing and Enron Finance Corp. Skilling developed a staff of executives who were able to use accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting to hide billions of dollars in debt from failed deals and projects.
The esteemed accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, became complicit in this scandal, which resulted in the bankruptcy of Enron Corporation and the dissolution of Arthur Andersen. Enron shareholders filed a $40 billion lawsuit after Enron stock fell from US$90.75 in June 2000 to $1 by the end of November 2001.
Several Enron employees (24 in all) were convicted of fraudulent practices including Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, who went to prison. Kenneth Lay could have been sentenced to a prison term of 45 years but died in 2005 before sentencing. Enron’s utopia’s underbelly of deceit led to a giant corporation vanishing without a trace, leaving only the nightmare of swindled stockholders facing the future a lot poorer.]
Enron was financial fraud in which rational deception was apparent. What of the fiasco that has become the Iraq War, and by extension the aftermath of that preemptive invasion on the faulty CIA claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Let us peruse this utopian scenario of psychic entropy.
IRAQ: WHERE PRUDENCE FAILED
Once Islam terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City and severely damaged the US Military Pentagon on September 11, 2001, claiming three thousand lives, the temperament of the nation’s leadership demonstrated a lack of maturity and perspective. Moreover, technology, which had risen to the order of the high church, failed the CIA, the Bush Administration, and the US Congress. The majority in Congress with a closed mind was on board to teach the terrorist a lesson by invading Iraq. It mattered little that the terrorist came out of Saudi Arabia, an ally, and not from Iraq. A tragedy of errors followed that has continued through President Barak Obama’s administration. It is as if the American blind spot is the inclination to treat its myths as reality and acting on them as if a whim in a state of being unhinged.
From America’s first Puritan settlement in 1628 to the present, the United States has seen itself with missionary zeal as the “redeemer nation.” American novelist Herman Melville (1819 – 1891) echoed this sentiment in White Jacket (1924):
“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time, we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”
English Puritan lawyer John Winthrop (1587 - 1649), founder of the Puritan Colony on Massachusetts Bay stated, “We must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill.” The United States President Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) then echoed these sentiments on November 20, 1914, in his speech to the American people on Neutrality: “America is the house of the Lord and the city on a hill.” He saw the eventual entrance of the United States into WWI as “salvation” to the Allies.
This mindset of Christian rectitude drove “born again Christian” President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. This passion to right a wrong has fallen apart like a house of cards. It was a knee-jerk reaction to a terrible wrong (9/11) with shoddy information. Just as the computer is still dependent upon information submitted, faulty thinking is bound to produce suspect solutions.
America’s ruinous invasion of Iraq is seen by philosopher John Gray as more than a fusion of the utopianism of Bush, but as an “exotic and highly toxic blend of beliefs, none of them grounded in any observable reality . . . a type of ‘liberal imperialism’ based on human rights.”
Where this gets murky is when a government applies its liberal ideal of self-determination and democracy as justification for questioning the legitimacy of a government for human rights violations. Incredibly, once this assessment is made, it goes forward with a good conscience to override that government’s claim to sovereign authority.
Even with all the negative consequences of the Iraq War, the Bush administration with the support of most Americans defended the rightness of its military intervention to overthrow the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Canadian political author Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) wrote in The New York Times three months before this preemptive invasion of Iraq:
“America’s empire is not like empires of the past, built on colonies, conquest, and the white man’s burden . . . The 21st-century imperium is the new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy, enforced by the most awesome power the world has ever known . . . Regime change is an imperial task par excellence since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state. The Bush administration would ask, what moral authority rests with the sovereign who murders and ethnically cleanses his own people has twice invaded neighboring countries and usurps his people’s wealth to build palaces and lethal weapons?”
Given this scenario, who can question the righteousness of the good and the tyranny of the bad? "The War on Terror” was launched with this righteous sentiment and a score of years later few would disagree that things are worse today than they were in the beginning. There is a word in medicine that describes this propensity, iatrogenic, or the cure was worse than the disease.
It is hard for the West to accept that democracy is not for everyone or that the world is not one contiguous common civilization. Iraq had something approaching stability between its three major groups: Kurds, Shia and Sunni. This tenuous bond was decimated with the Iraq War. The West then compounded the situation by inadvertently creating a vacuum with the withdrawal of mainly American and British forces from the country prematurely leading to the metastasis of ISSI and al-Qaeda as a gestation center for a worldwide jihadist.
Australian political columnist Tom Switzer (born 1971) writes:
“The unintended consequences of the war were not just the dear costs in blood, treasure, and prestige for the United States. Nor were they the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi civilians. They were what amounted to a strategic victory for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The human brain is finite in processing information. Therefore, human coping is limited. There are two limiting conditions in our cranial cellular congress to cope with reality. The brain's capacity to process information is finite, and the machinery with which to do it is not a conscious unity. When the space requirements of problems fit the network there, things go well. When they do not, things go awry.
“Tehran’s presence in the Shia South, moreover, was felt well before the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Recall that General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Brigade, spearheaded Iran’s political and military involvement in Iraq a decade ago. Recall, too, al-Maliki’s debt to Iran in helping secure his presidency in 2006.
“By toppling a Sunni regime and bringing democracy to Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition brought to an end the sectarian imbalance that had been in place for generations. The Baathists, like the Hashemites, British, and Ottomans before them had kept in place minority rule, giving Sunni Arabs a disproportionate share of power and resources while brutally suppressing Shia and Kurds.
“The invasion in 2003 meant that the majority Shia became the new winners in post-Saddam Iraq, and the minority Sunnis the new losers. The former turned to their Shia brethren in Tehran for support; the latter turned to a Sunni insurgency that has morphed into a plethora of Sunni jihadists, including the Islamic State.”
President George Bush sent Paul Berman to manage the transition of Iraq after the initial victory in 2003 resulting in the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein. Berman was a trained historian and neoconservative technocrat who knew nothing about the discipline of Organizational Development (OD) in social/industrial psychology with its assessment and implementation tools that could have proved useful. OD would not have acted until:
· A thorough understanding of the apocalyptical Islam religions of Iraq and the region were thoroughly perused including the historical relationship of Shia and Sunni and the Kurds to each other, along with the source of the cultural/religious/political conflicts between them in terms of secular and theocratic Islam;
· Unobtrusive data and measurement of the situation had been collected involving extensive personal interviews of the principals including members of the Saddam Hussein government, the military, and the industrial/commercial establishment. This would also include Process Flow Analysis of the demographics history, culture, languages, ethnicities, and long-term/short-term assessment of the Sunni, Shia, and Turk populations at every level of society;
· Surveys, interviews, and direct observation of key elements of the previous political structure including the military, administrative, as well as Iraqi allies and adversaries of government;
· Personnel of nationals of the three dominant groups, as well as the military and political operatives, had been properly vetted;
· Establishing a reasonable transitional time before making any firm commitments to final designators.
· Establishing a strategic and tactical format and process to bring on board critical components of the former administration including the military.
· Foster cooperation with warring factions. This means seeing through surface issues to natural barriers between the factions.
· Determining major concerns that need addressing and redressing immediately; then developing a conflict resolution strategy in which all the factions have adequate representation.
OD aims to make the client self-sufficient. The prescription for establishing that objective cannot be adequately determined until the situation is sufficiently defined and the readiness of the factions involved appropriately assessed.
OD serves – in this case, the Iraqi people and nation – with no interest in promoting one faction at the expense of another. Politics are involved but the psychological climate that is created will be the final arbiter to self-sufficiency.
This did not happen. Instead, the Bush administration launched its regime change of Iraq as if a holy crusade. The banner of the “War on Terror” provocatively promoted human rights and women’s rights across the Muslim world when the United States had entered a hostile environment, first as invaders and now as occupiers with the solipsistic hubris that America was a “savior nation” and knew best. Again John Gray writes in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death of Utopia (2007):
Paul Berman gave vent to this sublime vision in 2003. It contained no inkling that the result of the overthrow of secular despotism in Iraq would be a mix of anarchy and theocracy. The impossibility of liberalism in Afghanistan – which has only ever had something resembling a modern state when Soviet forces imposed, with enormous cruelty, a version of Enlightenment despotism on parts of the country – was too disturbing to contemplate. All the liberal causes that were wrapped up in the ‘war on terror’ were inherently desirable, and so – it seemed to follow – practically realizable. In their attitudes to regime change, neo-conservatives have been at one with many liberals. Regime change was an instrument of progress …
Nasr Iranian-American academic Vali Reza in The Shia Revival (2006) observes:
The Shia still fear Sunni rule, and Sunnis rue their loss of power and dream of climbing back to the top . . . Each has a different vision of the past and a different dream for the future. There are still scores to settle, decades of them.
Gray goes on to point out that overthrowing tyranny may bring democracy temporarily without advancing liberty. No constitution can impose freedom where it is not wanted or where it is no longer valued. Nor can the secular tyranny that was destroyed be reinvented.
Several blunders followed Bergman’s management of the interim government in transition. The army was disbanded with all its weapons, and soon this became a force with which to reckon. He disbanded some religious groups and left the Sunni minority, which had maintained a stable if a draconian balance between these three Islamic groups -- Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds -- for decades. In an instant, this was summarily destroyed.
American analysts have suggested that perhaps a three-way partition of Iraq is the solution. The idea of a split of Iraq into three states has seemingly only added fuel to the fire as Shia, Sunni, and Kurds are already vicious rivals for power and natural resources, mainly oil.
In any case, the Sunni minority would be likely to lose everything. To wit, the United States is powerless in the face of anarchy, religious and tribal tension between the three groups that the invasion has created. But perhaps the greatest faux pas was to create a vacuum by dismantling the state and the military of Iraq that Iraq’s bitter enemy, Iran, could now exploit for its purposes. President Barak Obama added icing to this Iranian cake when he withdrew all American troops from Iraq without convincing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri-a-Maliki (born 1950), a Shia Muslin, that it would thwart Iran’s attempt to export its terrorism to Iraq and beyond.
GLOBAL TERRORISM AND THE DECLINE OF THE WEST?
There have always been terrorists, but terrorism seems to have been spiked and gone global since the Iraq War. The United States reacted to 9/11 precipitously and emphatically with the preemptive invasion of that country. Does this mean that sovereign states no longer are relevant?
In this new system of justification, the clear suggestion is that market zones have more relevance than the value of nation-states. Does this mean that states that do not behave consistently with the order prescribed by the West they can be attacked? This may sound facetious but the American system, its democracy, and capitalistic economy have been spreading throughout the world since WWII imposing its will sometimes subtly and otherwise not.
There is a pervasive component of utopia in nostalgia for a world without religious and ethnic divisions, a world in which new technologies erase differences. Emperor Constantine of The Roman Empire converted to Christianity in 312 and the Roman Empire adopted the Christian faith in 380. A century later Rome was sacked and the “Dark Ages” followed with Emperor Charlemagne crowned the Holy Roman Empire in 800.
In operational terms, as the sovereignty of many states has diminished including Great Britain, France, Germany, and many other sovereign states, the burden on The United States has grown. This scenario accelerated the decline of Rome, and now with American power integral to the globalization of society, and other states heavily dependent on the US for security, subsistence, and development could this be the formula for the decline of the United States?
China, India, and Russia are behaving as the US has in using global markets to enhance its authority and power. The world outside the United States wants what it has, and it wants it now.
While the “War on Terror” goes nowhere as this is as inevitable as the sun will rise tomorrow, disruptive and tragic as suicide bombers and other bombings are, the most catastrophic risk of the future is nuclear terrorists. Using “suitcase bombs” or “dirty bombs” (conventional bombs with radioactive waste), terrorists could kill hundreds of thousands of people and paralyze social and economic life in an instant.
There is no suitable strategy, no high-tech surveillance methodology, or concerted effort to annihilate the terrorists or lessen the threat other than to understand those who would go to such extremes from their perspectives which appears they believe they have nothing to lose.
It would be pure insanity “to take Iran out” for Iran unlike other countries in the region is a fairly cohesive state. It is the home of an ancient and rich Persian culture and civilization. Should the next President of the United States attempt to destroy Iran, it could trigger an upheaval in the Islam states in the Middle East, including Pakistan and Afghanistan that would make the current situation seem like nothing at all.
It has become the discourse of the West to link terrorism with Arab culture and an Islamic cult of martyrdom. Gray writes:
Islam is a religion, not a culture, and most of the people who live in the “Islamic world” are not Arabs . . . Suicide terrorism is not a pathology that afflicts any particular culture nor has it any close connections with religion . . . Much terrorism is like other types of warfare. Nearly always, wars are fought within or across cultural boundaries.
We make no progress in the dialogue by calling Iran an “evil empire” or looking for simplistic formulae to deal with adversaries who have agendas that differ from our own. This, too, is OD.
Gray adds:
The “war on terror” is a symptom of a mentality that anticipates an unprecedented change in human affairs – the end of history, the passing of the sovereign state, the universal acceptance of democracy, and the defeat of evil. This is the central myth of apocalyptic religion framed in political terms, and the common factor underlying the failed utopian projects of the past decades . . . Apocalypse failed to arrive, and history went on as before but with an added dash of blood.
In this commentary of 24 related essays, we have been going from the “Past Imperfect” through the “Present Ridiculous,” and despite the fanfare of a secular society, religions persist often in all their violence but even more frequently in religious misunderstanding.
Yet, it is science and not religion that has come to be viewed as the vehicle of revelations. Science is now prominent and will be increasingly so in the “Future Perfect” world. Science is the instrument for forming reliable beliefs in which these beliefs are meant to mirror the world, not as “it is, but as it ought to be.
Religion is a human instrument. While science solves mysteries of nature, religion embraces the mystical to nourish the life of the spirit. Science deals with certainties while religion entertains doubts.
Doubts are part of the garment of everyday life. Science and religion serve different needs which may pull in different directions but are equally necessary. The irreducible reality of religion is apparent in the apocalyptic shadow of Christianity. Science or religion can't escape this shadow as it is evident in the common belief in utopian progress and the “Cut & Control” commitment to soaring beyond the norm whatever the costs.
Secular mythmakers differ little from those of religion; all ultimately resort to violence even terrorism. Over the past two centuries, the storyline has been human progress with the clash of dark forces destined for destruction from German Nazism to communist Marxism to ISSI and al-Qaeda terrorism.
Followers of Marxism believed humanity could only advance through a series of catastrophic revolutions; followers of Nazism conspired to eliminate the Jewish race and establish a semi-divine immortal state of Anglo-Saxons; followers of ISSI and al-Qaeda believed the entire Western culture needs to be destroyed and a new Islamic state and culture must become the dominant force in the world.
The aims of each of these secular or semi-religious movements reflect the powerful influence of “The Age of Enlightenment,” an intellectual and scientific movement of 18th century Europe that was characterized by a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues. The belief was that once poverty was eradicated and education was universal that social equality and political repression would vanish, and formal religion would be no more important than a personal hobby. The shadow of Christianity is equally apparent here as well. Alas, in the future as in the past, there will be authoritarian states and liberal republics, theocratic democracies, and secular tyrannies, imperialistic empires, and city-states in the mix. But there will also be something quite different, which is the subject of The Afterword. People close to the earth have always managed to subsist in whatever insane political climate of their times because they know in being close to nature and the land they are close to God however He is defined.
THE AFTERWORD
WHY THE FARM INDUSTRY IS SPECIAL IN TERMS OF PSYCHIC ENTROPY
The farm industry has never had a series of international trade unions to support and defend its interests. Over the past centuries, farmers across the continent have had to deal with fickled nature: from draughts to torrential rains, from soil erosions to insect infestations, from too hot to too cold fluctuating climates, from forest fires and crop failures to soil erosions, from total dependence on animal power to managing the expense and complex intricacies of machine farming, from mysterious small crop yields to inadequate understanding of genetic vulnerabilities of plants.
While this appears to be the general climate of the United States at the moment, quietly and unobtrusively one industry has managed to thrive no matter the prevailing cultural climate and that is the farm industry, which is the subject of the AFTERWORD in terms of how it has always dealt with Psychic Entropy.
THE COMFORT OF RHETORIC
Dante’s decision seven hundred years ago to write his great poem not in Latin but in what he called the vulgar eloquence – Italian, the language of the people – and the innovation in the following century of printing from movable type represent landmarks in the secularization of society, as well as an affront to the hegemony of priests and oligarchy tyrants. The impact of today’s emerging technologies promises to be no less revolutionary, perhaps even more so. The technology of printing enhanced the value of literacy, encouraged widespread learning, and became the sine qua non of modern civilization. New technologies will have an even greater effect, narrowing the notorious gap between the educated rich and the unlettered poor and distributing the benefits as well as the hazards of our civilization to everyone on earth.
American cultural critic John Leonard (1939 – 2008), “Cri de Coeur,” The New York Review (February 8, 2001)
“There are ample opportunities to help create a more humane and decent world if we choose to act upon them. A democratic communications policy would seek to develop means of expression and interaction that reflect the interests of and concerns of the general population, and to encourage their self-education and their individual and collective action.”
American journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers (born 1934), American journalist and political commentator, A World of Ideas (in a 1989 interview of Noam Chomsky).
WHY NO WAY OUT?
We have overwhelming data to solve our problems, but instead of solving our problems with this providential abundance we mask our difficulties and compound our problems with disinformation.
Novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) was prescient long before the computer age:
“Is it true that mankind demands, and will always demand a miracle, mystery, and authority?” He answers: “Surely it is true. Today man gets his sense of the miraculous from science and machinery, radio, airplanes, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish man’s sense of the miraculous as magic did the past.”
John Gray in Straw Dogs (2002) concurs:
“Today for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody ‘miracle, mystery, and authority.’ Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will, at last, be realized. Sickness and aging will be abolished, scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles.
“But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.”
German economist, sociologist, philosopher, and political scientist Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) scored utopianism as unscientific yet his “scientific socialism” resembles alchemy, not chemistry, but magic, which is utopian, as he believed that technology could transmute the base metal of human nature into metaphorical gold. Moreover, he saw no danger in the expansion of human numbers for he saw no limit to productivity with the abolition of scarcity, private property, the family, the state, and the division of labor. Paradoxically, while he saw religion as the “opium of the masses,” his ideology was consistent with that of Christianity and its deism, which he rejected.
It would appear there is no way out because man does not seem willing to accept that he is an animal no different than a cow or a horse or a tree when it comes to nature. Naturalist E. O. Wilson (born 1929) envisions the next century and saw a closing of the “Age of the Mammals,” and new age as one characterized by biological impoverishment, an “Age of Loneliness.” How so?
According to John Gray, humans co-opt over 40 percent of the Earth’s living tissue. We see this in dried-up lakes, treeless mountains, polluted oceans, toxic atmospheres, and melting ice caps. We are now seven billion souls on earth today. In the not too distant future, we will be twelve billion souls. When there is little available potable water or food supply, energy sources will cease to be the critical mass driving societies to war. It will be potable water.
The synthetic world that humans have created will mirror their collective solitude as there are no exits from the creative fiction of Nowhere Land. New mystics will surely appear suggesting empty spaces in which those that survive can open themselves to something outside their solipsism, possibly a colony in outer space. John Gray suggests these mystics should be ignored for a monastery of scientists is not where peace will be found but by citizens of this small planet communing with nature in the company of other animals, not seeing these creatures as inferior but as beings who have never been inclined to separate themselves from nature or its rhythm and renewal.
PSYCHIC ENTROPY
Entropy: A thermodynamic property that is the measure of a system's thermal energy per unit of temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state. This is another way to refer to entropy.
Psychotherapist Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) created the concept of “Psychic Energy” claiming since our experience is confined to relatively closed systems, we are never in a position to observe absolute psychological entropy. But the more the psychological system is closed, the more the phenomenon of entropy is manifest. A system is closed when no energy from outside can be fed into it; only in such a system can entropy occur. An example would be mental disturbances characteristic of intense seclusion from the environment or the dulling of the psychological affect in schizophrenia.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (born 1934) incorporated Jung’s psychic entropy theory into his “flow theory” of optimal experience in positive psychology where psychic entropy is interpreted as a disorder in mental consciousness that produces a conflict with an individual’s goals. He writes:
“Emotions refer to the internal states of consciousness. Negative emotions like sadness, fear, anxiety, or boredom produce psychic entropy in the mind, that is, a state in which we cannot use attention effectively to deal with external tasks because we need it to restore an inner subjective order.”
We see elements of this in American psychologist Leon Festinger’s (1919 – 1989) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957) where he argues we make new information fit with information already indicating in our closed mind. This incompatibility (dissonance) could happen when you do something that goes against a value that’s important to you. Or maybe you learn a new piece of information that disagrees with a long-standing belief or opinion. As humans, we generally prefer for our world to make sense, so cognitive dissonance can be distressing. That’s why we often respond to cognitive dissonance by doing mental gymnastics to feel like things make sense again when they don’t.
We see it also evident in American philosopher Alan Bloom’s (1930 – 1992) Closing of the American Mind (1987) where he shows how American higher education has produced psychic entropy by reinforcing cultural biases, myths, and barriers to reality instead of opening young minds to a world beyond their cultural conditioning.
Then there is American academic psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi’s (born 1966) A First Rate Madness (2011) in which he contends that great leaders such as Lincoln, General Sherman, Churchill, Gandhi, FDR, JFK, among others, demonstrate palpable evidence of mental illness, where the singularity of their minds blocks out reality to pursue a closed-minded course of madness to epitomize psychic entropy.
Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
We saw psychic entropy on display when the George W. Bush administration relied on the Central Intelligence Agency’s director George Tenet (born 1953) to accept the CIA director’s “slam dunk” metaphor that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or WMDs). It was wishful thinking culminating in General Colin Powell (born 1937) taking the fall when asked to give a speech of assurance to the United Nation’s Security Council on February 5, 2003, that Iraq, indeed, had WMDs. A tragic comedy of errors followed.
HEGEMONY/IMPERIALISM/PSYCHIC ENTROPY
The missionary zeal neoconservatives in the Bush administration had been building a frenzy since 9/11. Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952) in Birth of Reason (1968) writes:
The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend because he has not have the imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.
In this “Information Age,” while John Leonard and Noam Chomsky would suggest a way of getting beyond the madness of total reliance on technology, which still proves – in the case of the CIA – just this side of guesstimates can however be catastrophic in consequence. American conservative cultural and political commentator David Brooks (born 1961) writes:
“For decades, the US intelligence community has propagated the myth that it possesses analytical methods that must be insulated pristinely from the hurly-burly world of politics. Rather than rely on a conference-load of game theories or risk assessment officers, when it comes to understanding the world of things and menaces . . . I’d trust anyone who has read a Dostoyevsky novel over the past five years.”
Inside this critique is the fact that those in government, especially in the 21st century, have been irredeemably bad when it comes to prescience. This transcended from bad to worst with the preemptive invasion of Iraq on faulty intelligence and then escalated into the insanity, which has become the “War on Terror.”
English philosopher historian John Gray sees The Iraq War as serving an economic system that he deems “casino capitalism” where long-term investment has been replaced with ubiquitous gambling. Evidence is that the war, which has already cost multi-$billions will ineludibly be written off as a bad debt. He writes:
“If there is a symbol that captures America in Iraq, it is not the colonial institutions of former times, it is Enron, which vanished leaving nothing behind.”
Workers at “ground zero” after the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City
[Enron was a small company formed by Kenneth Lay in 1985 merging Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, two relatively modest regional companies. Kenneth Lay then hired Jeffrey Skilling as a consultant in 1990. Soon after, he was made chairman and chief executive officer of Enron Finance Corp. In 1991, Skilling became chairman of Enron Gas Services Company, the result of the merger of Enron Gas Marketing and Enron Finance Corp. Skilling developed a staff of executives who were able to use accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting to hide billions of dollars in debt from failed deals and projects.
The esteemed accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, became complicit in this scandal, which resulted in the bankruptcy of Enron Corporation and the dissolution of Arthur Andersen. Enron shareholders filed a $40 billion lawsuit after Enron stock fell from US$90.75 in June 2000 to $1 by the end of November 2001.
The monumental collapse of ENRON
Several Enron employees (24 in all) were convicted of fraudulent practices including Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, who went to prison. Kenneth Lay could have been sentenced to a prison term of 45 years but died in 2005 before sentencing. Enron’s utopia’s underbelly of deceit led to a giant corporation vanishing without a trace, leaving only the nightmare of swindled stockholders facing the future a lot poorer.]
Enron was financial fraud in which rational deception was apparent. What of the fiasco that has become the Iraq War, and by extension the aftermath of that preemptive invasion on the faulty CIA claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Let us peruse this utopian scenario of psychic entropy.
IRAQ: WHERE PRUDENCE FAILED
Once Islam terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City and severely damaged the US Military Pentagon on September 11, 2001, claiming three thousand lives, the temperament of the nation’s leadership demonstrated a lack of maturity and perspective. Moreover, technology, which had risen to the order of the high church, failed the CIA, the Bush Administration, and the US Congress. The majority in Congress with a closed mind was on board to teach the terrorist a lesson by invading Iraq. It mattered little that the terrorist came out of Saudi Arabia, an ally, and not from Iraq. A tragedy of errors followed that has continued through President Barak Obama’s administration. It is as if the American blind spot is the inclination to treat its myths as reality and acting on them as if a whim in a state of being unhinged.
From America’s first Puritan settlement in 1628 to the present, the United States has seen itself with missionary zeal as the “redeemer nation.” American novelist Herman Melville (1819 – 1891) echoed this sentiment in White Jacket (1924):
“We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time, we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”
English Puritan lawyer John Winthrop (1587 - 1649), founder of the Puritan Colony on Massachusetts Bay stated, “We must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill.” The United States President Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) then echoed these sentiments on November 20, 1914, in his speech to the American people on Neutrality: “America is the house of the Lord and the city on a hill.” He saw the eventual entrance of the United States into WWI as “salvation” to the Allies.
This mindset of Christian rectitude drove “born again Christian” President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. This passion to right a wrong has fallen apart like a house of cards. It was a knee-jerk reaction to a terrible wrong (9/11) with shoddy information. Just as the computer is still dependent upon information submitted, faulty thinking is bound to produce suspect solutions.
America’s ruinous invasion of Iraq is seen by philosopher John Gray as more than a fusion of the utopianism of Bush, but as an “exotic and highly toxic blend of beliefs, none of them grounded in any observable reality . . . a type of ‘liberal imperialism’ based on human rights.”
Where this gets murky is when a government applies its liberal ideal of self-determination and democracy as justification for questioning the legitimacy of a government for human rights violations. Incredibly, once this assessment is made, it goes forward with a good conscience to override that government’s claim to sovereign authority.
Even with all the negative consequences of the Iraq War, the Bush administration with the support of most Americans defended the rightness of its military intervention to overthrow the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Canadian political author Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) wrote in The New York Times three months before this preemptive invasion of Iraq:
“America’s empire is not like empires of the past, built on colonies, conquest, and the white man’s burden . . . The 21st-century imperium is the new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy, enforced by the most awesome power the world has ever known . . . Regime change is an imperial task par excellence since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state. The Bush administration would ask, what moral authority rests with the sovereign who murders and ethnically cleanses his own people has twice invaded neighboring countries and usurps his people’s wealth to build palaces and lethal weapons?”
Given this scenario, who can question the righteousness of the good and the tyranny of the bad? "The War on Terror” was launched with this righteous sentiment and a score of years later few would disagree that things are worse today than they were in the beginning. There is a word in medicine that describes this propensity, iatrogenic, or the cure was worse than the disease.
It is hard for the West to accept that democracy is not for everyone or that the world is not one contiguous common civilization. Iraq had something approaching stability between its three major groups: Kurds, Shia and Sunni. This tenuous bond was decimated with the Iraq War. The West then compounded the situation by inadvertently creating a vacuum with the withdrawal of mainly American and British forces from the country prematurely leading to the metastasis of ISSI and al-Qaeda as a gestation center for a worldwide jihadist.
Australian political columnist Tom Switzer (born 1971) writes:
“The unintended consequences of the war were not just the dear costs in blood, treasure, and prestige for the United States. Nor were they the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi civilians. They were what amounted to a strategic victory for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“Tehran’s presence in the Shia South, moreover, was felt well before the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Recall that General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Brigade, spearheaded Iran’s political and military involvement in Iraq a decade ago. Recall, too, al-Maliki’s debt to Iran in helping secure his presidency in 2006.
“By toppling a Sunni regime and bringing democracy to Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition brought to an end the sectarian imbalance that had been in place for generations. The Baathists, like the Hashemites, British, and Ottomans before them had kept in place minority rule, giving Sunni Arabs a disproportionate share of power and resources while brutally suppressing Shia and Kurds.
“The invasion in 2003 meant that the majority Shia became the new winners in post-Saddam Iraq, and the minority Sunnis the new losers. The former turned to their Shia brethren in Tehran for support; the latter turned to a Sunni insurgency that has morphed into a plethora of Sunni jihadists, including the Islamic State.”
President George Bush sent Paul Berman to manage the transition of Iraq after the initial victory in 2003 resulting in the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein. Berman was a trained historian and neoconservative technocrat who knew nothing about the discipline of Organizational Development (OD) in social/industrial psychology with its assessment and implementation tools that could have proved useful. OD would not have acted until:
· A thorough understanding of the apocalyptical Islam religions of Iraq and the region were thoroughly perused including the historical relationship of Shia and Sunni and the Kurds to each other, along with the source of the cultural/religious/political conflicts between them in terms of secular and theocratic Islam;
· Unobtrusive data and measurement of the situation had been collected involving extensive personal interviews of the principals including members of the Saddam Hussein government, the military, and the industrial/commercial establishment. This would also include Process Flow Analysis of the demographics history, culture, languages, ethnicities, and long-term/short-term assessment of the Sunni, Shia, and Turk populations at every level of society;
· Surveys, interviews, and direct observation of key elements of the previous political structure including the military, administrative, as well as Iraqi allies and adversaries of government;
· Personnel of nationals of the three dominant groups, as well as the military and political operatives, had been properly vetted;
· Establishing a reasonable transitional time before making any firm commitments to final designators.
· Establishing a strategic and tactical format and process to bring on board critical components of the former administration including the military.
· Foster cooperation with warring factions. This means seeing through surface issues to natural barriers between the factions.
· Determining major concerns that need addressing and redressing immediately; then developing a conflict resolution strategy in which all the factions have adequate representation.
OD aims to make the client self-sufficient. The prescription for establishing that objective cannot be adequately determined until the situation is sufficiently defined and the readiness of the factions involved appropriately assessed.
OD serves – in this case, the Iraqi people and nation – with no interest in promoting one faction at the expense of another. Politics are involved but the psychological climate that is created will be the final arbiter to self-sufficiency.
This did not happen. Instead, the Bush administration launched its regime change of Iraq as if a holy crusade. The banner of the “War on Terror” provocatively promoted human rights and women’s rights across the Muslim world when the United States had entered a hostile environment, first as invaders and now as occupiers with the solipsistic hubris that America was a “savior nation” and knew best. Again John Gray writes in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death of Utopia (2007):
Paul Berman gave vent to this sublime vision in 2003. It contained no inkling that the result of the overthrow of secular despotism in Iraq would be a mix of anarchy and theocracy. The impossibility of liberalism in Afghanistan – which has only ever had something resembling a modern state when Soviet forces imposed, with enormous cruelty, a version of Enlightenment despotism on parts of the country – was too disturbing to contemplate. All the liberal causes that were wrapped up in the ‘war on terror’ were inherently desirable, and so – it seemed to follow – practically realizable. In their attitudes to regime change, neo-conservatives have been at one with many liberals. Regime change was an instrument of progress …
Nasr Iranian-American academic Vali Reza in The Shia Revival (2006) observes:
The Shia still fear Sunni rule, and Sunnis rue their loss of power and dream of climbing back to the top . . . Each has a different vision of the past and a different dream for the future. There are still scores to settle, decades of them.
Gray goes on to point out that overthrowing tyranny may bring democracy temporarily without advancing liberty. No constitution can impose freedom where it is not wanted or where it is no longer valued. Nor can the secular tyranny that was destroyed be reinvented.
Several blunders followed Bergman’s management of the interim government in transition. The army was disbanded with all its weapons, and soon this became a force with which to reckon. He disbanded some religious groups and left the Sunni minority, which had maintained a stable if a draconian balance between these three Islamic groups -- Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds -- for decades. In an instant, this was summarily destroyed.
American analysts have suggested that perhaps a three-way partition of Iraq is the solution. The idea of a split of Iraq into three states has seemingly only added fuel to the fire as Shia, Sunni, and Kurds are already vicious rivals for power and natural resources, mainly oil.
In any case, the Sunni minority would be likely to lose everything. To wit, the United States is powerless in the face of anarchy, religious and tribal tension between the three groups that the invasion has created. But perhaps the greatest faux pas was to create a vacuum by dismantling the state and the military of Iraq that Iraq’s bitter enemy, Iran, could now exploit for its purposes. President Barak Obama added icing to this Iranian cake when he withdrew all American troops from Iraq without convincing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri-a-Maliki (born 1950), a Shia Muslin, that it would thwart Iran’s attempt to export its terrorism to Iraq and beyond.
GLOBAL TERRORISM AND THE DECLINE OF THE WEST?
There have always been terrorists, but terrorism seems to have been spiked and gone global since the Iraq War. The United States reacted to 9/11 precipitously and emphatically with the preemptive invasion of that country. Does this mean that sovereign states no longer are relevant?
In this new system of justification, the clear suggestion is that market zones have more relevance than the value of nation-states. Does this mean that states that do not behave consistently with the order prescribed by the West they can be attacked? This may sound facetious but the American system, its democracy, and capitalistic economy have been spreading throughout the world since WWII imposing its will sometimes subtly and otherwise not.
There is a pervasive component of utopia in nostalgia for a world without religious and ethnic divisions, a world in which new technologies erase differences. Emperor Constantine of The Roman Empire converted to Christianity in 312 and the Roman Empire adopted the Christian faith in 380. A century later Rome was sacked and the “Dark Ages” followed with Emperor Charlemagne crowned the Holy Roman Empire in 800.
In operational terms, as the sovereignty of many states has diminished including Great Britain, France, Germany, and many other sovereign states, the burden on The United States has grown. This scenario accelerated the decline of Rome, and now with American power integral to the globalization of society, and other states heavily dependent on the US for security, subsistence, and development could this be the formula for the decline of the United States?
China, India, and Russia are behaving as the US has in using global markets to enhance its authority and power. The world outside the United States wants what it has, and it wants it now.
While the “War on Terror” goes nowhere as this is as inevitable as the sun will rise tomorrow, disruptive and tragic as suicide bombers and other bombings are, the most catastrophic risk of the future is nuclear terrorists. Using “suitcase bombs” or “dirty bombs” (conventional bombs with radioactive waste), terrorists could kill hundreds of thousands of people and paralyze social and economic life in an instant.
There is no suitable strategy, no high-tech surveillance methodology, or concerted effort to annihilate the terrorists or lessen the threat other than to understand those who would go to such extremes from their perspectives which appears they believe they have nothing to lose.
It would be pure insanity “to take Iran out” for Iran unlike other countries in the region is a fairly cohesive state. It is the home of an ancient and rich Persian culture and civilization. Should the next President of the United States attempt to destroy Iran, it could trigger an upheaval in the Islam states in the Middle East, including Pakistan and Afghanistan that would make the current situation seem like nothing at all.
It has become the discourse of the West to link terrorism with Arab culture and an Islamic cult of martyrdom. Gray writes:
Islam is a religion, not a culture, and most of the people who live in the “Islamic world” are not Arabs . . . Suicide terrorism is not a pathology that afflicts any particular culture nor has it any close connections with religion . . . Much terrorism is like other types of warfare. Nearly always, wars are fought within or across cultural boundaries.
We make no progress in the dialogue by calling Iran an “evil empire” or looking for simplistic formulae to deal with adversaries who have agendas that differ from our own. This, too, is OD.
Gray adds:
The “war on terror” is a symptom of a mentality that anticipates an unprecedented change in human affairs – the end of history, the passing of the sovereign state, the universal acceptance of democracy, and the defeat of evil. This is the central myth of apocalyptic religion framed in political terms, and the common factor underlying the failed utopian projects of the past decades . . . Apocalypse failed to arrive, and history went on as before but with an added dash of blood.
In this commentary of 24 related essays, we have been going from the “Past Imperfect” through the “Present Ridiculous,” and despite the fanfare of a secular society, religions persist often in all their violence but even more frequently in religious misunderstanding.
Yet, it is science and not religion that has come to be viewed as the vehicle of revelations. Science is now prominent and will be increasingly so in the “Future Perfect” world. Science is the instrument for forming reliable beliefs in which these beliefs are meant to mirror the world, not as “it is, but as it ought to be.
Religion is a human instrument. While science solves mysteries of nature, religion embraces the mystical to nourish the life of the spirit. Science deals with certainties while religion entertains doubts.
Doubts are part of the garment of everyday life. Science and religion serve different needs which may pull in different directions but are equally necessary. The irreducible reality of religion is apparent in the apocalyptic shadow of Christianity. Science or religion can't escape this shadow as it is evident in the common belief in utopian progress and the “Cut & Control” commitment to soaring beyond the norm whatever the costs.
Secular mythmakers differ little from those of religion; all ultimately resort to violence even terrorism. Over the past two centuries, the storyline has been human progress with the clash of dark forces destined for destruction from German Nazism to communist Marxism to ISSI and al-Qaeda terrorism.
Followers of Marxism believed humanity could only advance through a series of catastrophic revolutions; followers of Nazism conspired to eliminate the Jewish race and establish a semi-divine immortal state of Anglo-Saxons; followers of ISSI and al-Qaeda believed the entire Western culture needs to be destroyed and a new Islamic state and culture must become the dominant force in the world.
The aims of each of these secular or semi-religious movements reflect the powerful influence of “The Age of Enlightenment,” an intellectual and scientific movement of 18th century Europe that was characterized by a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues. The belief was that once poverty was eradicated and education was universal that social equality and political repression would vanish, and formal religion would be no more important than a personal hobby. The shadow of Christianity is equally apparent here as well. Alas, in the future as in the past, there will be authoritarian states and liberal republics, theocratic democracies, and secular tyrannies, imperialistic empires, and city-states in the mix. But there will also be something quite different, which is the subject of The Afterword. People close to the earth have always managed to subsist in whatever insane political climate of their times because they know in being close to nature and the land they are close to God however He is defined.
THE AFTERWORD
ROBOTIC FARMER
WHY THE FARM INDUSTRY IS SPECIAL IN TERMS OF PSYCHIC ENTROPY
The farm industry has never had a series of international trade unions to support and defend its interests. Over the past centuries, farmers across the continent have had to deal with fickled nature: from draughts to torrential rains, from soil erosions to insect infestations, from too hot to too cold fluctuating climates, from forest fires and crop failures to soil erosions, from total dependence on animal power to managing the expense and complex intricacies of machine farming, from mysterious small crop yields to inadequate understanding of genetic vulnerabilities of plants.
Farmers have always been associated with a quiet industry of individualism, independence, and freedom to the stoic demands of farm labor as they chose to farm as vocation and avocation with little or no inclination to bring attention to themselves or this disposition.
Farmers are one with the land and have remained so over time, adjusting to the dependence of the general public on their ability to meet its ever-increasing demands.
Farmers found the advantage of rotating crops on the land and allowing the land to remain fallow to regain the land's vigor; discovered the benefit of irrigation and showering crops with water overnight when the temperature drops to freezing. They invented and/or invested in new machinery to make farming more efficient and sent their sons and daughters off to college to study agriculture and return with new tools to enhance farming technology. They used pesticides and herbicides economically to ward off such possible crop devastations. While being suspect of the agribusiness and the corporate industry, they realized that this was reality and something they need to embrace rather than fight to survive and still be able to husband their crops and operate their farms.
Farmers have demonstrated that they follow the empirical pragmatic wisdom of psychologist William James (1842 – 1910) who posits the idea that the human experience of emotion arises from physiological changes in response to external events that have been experienced. While not drawing attention to this inherent characteristic, farmers, alone, have mastered Psychic Entropy overtime to their advantage.
THE GENESIS OF AMERICAN FARMING
In 1900, just under 40 percent of the total US population of 76 million lived on farms, and 60 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, the respective figures are only about 1.312 percent of Americans are farmers supporting a population of 330 million, while some 20 percent of Americans still live in what is deemed rural areas.
The United States had between six and seven million farms from 1910 to 1940. Today, there are less than 2 million.
The predominant economic sectors in which most Americans are found are 20 percent in industry and 79 percent in social and governmental services.
Farmers are rich in the United States, but this too is deceiving. Corporate farming now dominates in what is now known as “agribusiness.” The richest farmer with the biggest farm is none other than Bill Gates of Microsoft with 269,000 acres of farmland growing potatoes and carrots. He has 70,000 acres of farmland in North Louisiana where he grows soybeans, corn, and cotton.
Another possible surprise about the contemporary American workforce is that, while women only represent half the population, women hold more jobs than men and occupy 50.04 percent of working positions. Stated another way, there are now 109,000 more women working than men.
Today, the education and health service industry employ the largest number of people in the United States with 34.1 million employed in the education and health care industries.
Agriculture with its scientific management and well-educated farmers has become more proficient and quietly the most taken-for-granted industry in the American culture. When I was a chemist at Standard Brands, Inc. in Clinton, Iowa, a farm community, I found myself one Saturday in Dewitt, Clinton, a small farming community in Clinton County having breakfast in a country kitchen-type restaurant. In conversation with four other men eating breakfast, I learned they were all farmers, and had received agricultural degrees from Iowa State University, one of the esteemed agricultural scientific centers of the country. When I shared this with my colleagues back at work, they were surprised that I was surprised. “What did you think,” one said, “that it was a miracle that we eat so well?”
Agriculture serves as the backbone of the economy of any country, without which it would collapse and face a serious financial breakdown. Exporting of cars and other factory equipment by United States producers is a distant second to agricultural products sold to the world. The United States is rich in highly cultivated land that sufficiently supports a strong economy.
Agriculture is not simply the cultivation of crops but also the farming of plants and animals, cattle and fish. Americans see their country as “the breadbasket of the world” when China has more arable land. Agriculture is also a brewing industry and a source of income for millions of Americans so employed.
Agricultural was chosen to profile the other side of Psychic Entropy where negative entropy has quietly been employed to improve the efficiency, productivity, and the yield of the land through technology, scientific management, rotation of crops, harnessing new methodology including robotics, automation, and hybridization to attain the best quality of crop yield and profit. At the University of Iowa, I had classmates who were children of farmers who were becoming medical doctors, dentists, and other professionals at their parents’ insistence when all they wanted to do is be farmers. They confessed to me that being close to the land was like being close to God, and nothing made them happier.
And aside from this nervous dance to oblivion that seems to consume so many Americans with Psychic Entropy, African American George Washington Carver (1865 – 1943) came to Iowa State in 1891 and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1894. Because of his excellence in botany and horticulture, he was appointed to the Iowa State faculty, becoming the university’s first African American faculty member. He went on to an illustrious career in agricultural science, far ahead of his time.
Nowhere Man is forever lost between a posteriori with his observations and experiments and a priori and his methods of reasoning.
Farmers found the advantage of rotating crops on the land and allowing the land to remain fallow to regain the land's vigor; discovered the benefit of irrigation and showering crops with water overnight when the temperature drops to freezing. They invented and/or invested in new machinery to make farming more efficient and sent their sons and daughters off to college to study agriculture and return with new tools to enhance farming technology. They used pesticides and herbicides economically to ward off such possible crop devastations. While being suspect of the agribusiness and the corporate industry, they realized that this was reality and something they need to embrace rather than fight to survive and still be able to husband their crops and operate their farms.
Farmers have demonstrated that they follow the empirical pragmatic wisdom of psychologist William James (1842 – 1910) who posits the idea that the human experience of emotion arises from physiological changes in response to external events that have been experienced. While not drawing attention to this inherent characteristic, farmers, alone, have mastered Psychic Entropy overtime to their advantage.
THE GENESIS OF AMERICAN FARMING
In 1900, just under 40 percent of the total US population of 76 million lived on farms, and 60 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, the respective figures are only about 1.312 percent of Americans are farmers supporting a population of 330 million, while some 20 percent of Americans still live in what is deemed rural areas.
The United States had between six and seven million farms from 1910 to 1940. Today, there are less than 2 million.
The predominant economic sectors in which most Americans are found are 20 percent in industry and 79 percent in social and governmental services.
Farmers are rich in the United States, but this too is deceiving. Corporate farming now dominates in what is now known as “agribusiness.” The richest farmer with the biggest farm is none other than Bill Gates of Microsoft with 269,000 acres of farmland growing potatoes and carrots. He has 70,000 acres of farmland in North Louisiana where he grows soybeans, corn, and cotton.
Another possible surprise about the contemporary American workforce is that, while women only represent half the population, women hold more jobs than men and occupy 50.04 percent of working positions. Stated another way, there are now 109,000 more women working than men.
Today, the education and health service industry employ the largest number of people in the United States with 34.1 million employed in the education and health care industries.
Agriculture with its scientific management and well-educated farmers has become more proficient and quietly the most taken-for-granted industry in the American culture. When I was a chemist at Standard Brands, Inc. in Clinton, Iowa, a farm community, I found myself one Saturday in Dewitt, Clinton, a small farming community in Clinton County having breakfast in a country kitchen-type restaurant. In conversation with four other men eating breakfast, I learned they were all farmers, and had received agricultural degrees from Iowa State University, one of the esteemed agricultural scientific centers of the country. When I shared this with my colleagues back at work, they were surprised that I was surprised. “What did you think,” one said, “that it was a miracle that we eat so well?”
Agriculture serves as the backbone of the economy of any country, without which it would collapse and face a serious financial breakdown. Exporting of cars and other factory equipment by United States producers is a distant second to agricultural products sold to the world. The United States is rich in highly cultivated land that sufficiently supports a strong economy.
Agriculture is not simply the cultivation of crops but also the farming of plants and animals, cattle and fish. Americans see their country as “the breadbasket of the world” when China has more arable land. Agriculture is also a brewing industry and a source of income for millions of Americans so employed.
Agricultural was chosen to profile the other side of Psychic Entropy where negative entropy has quietly been employed to improve the efficiency, productivity, and the yield of the land through technology, scientific management, rotation of crops, harnessing new methodology including robotics, automation, and hybridization to attain the best quality of crop yield and profit. At the University of Iowa, I had classmates who were children of farmers who were becoming medical doctors, dentists, and other professionals at their parents’ insistence when all they wanted to do is be farmers. They confessed to me that being close to the land was like being close to God, and nothing made them happier.
And aside from this nervous dance to oblivion that seems to consume so many Americans with Psychic Entropy, African American George Washington Carver (1865 – 1943) came to Iowa State in 1891 and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1894. Because of his excellence in botany and horticulture, he was appointed to the Iowa State faculty, becoming the university’s first African American faculty member. He went on to an illustrious career in agricultural science, far ahead of his time.
