Archive for the 'Hyper-Individualism' Category

Oct 08 2007

35% of US Americans Still Support Bush: Diagnosing the Insanity

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

bush

By Jason Miller

10/8/07

Cluster B Personality Disorders

1776.0 Americanistic Personality Disorder

The essential features of Americanistic Personality Disorder include pervasive patterns of extreme self-absorption, profound and long-term lapses in empathy, a deep disregard for the well-being of others, a powerful aversion to intellectual honesty and reality, and a grossly exaggerated sense of the importance of one’s self and one’s nation. These patterns emerge in infancy, manifest themselves in nearly all contexts, and often become pathological.

These patterns have also been characterized as sociopathic, or colloquially as the “Ugly American Syndrome.” Note that the latter terminology carries too benign a connotation to accurately describe an individual afflicted with such a dangerous perversion of character.

For this diagnosis to be given, the individual must be deeply immersed in the flag-waving, nationalistic, and militaristic fervor derived primarily from the nearly perpetual barrage of reality warping emanations of the “mainstream media,” most commonly through the medium of television. Typically indoctrinated from birth to believe that they are morally superior, exceptional human beings, these individuals suffer from severe egocentrism, a condition further engendered by the prevalence of the acutely toxic dominant paradigm known as capitalism.

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Aug 08 2007

Concerning Catastrophes and Cooperation

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

save

“Do we have a sufficient supply of self-control and compassion toward our unknown descendants to curb our boundless desire for ever more merchandise, petrol, electricity and offspring? Can we find some modicum of happiness within deliberately self-proscribed limits?”

By Emily Spence

8/8/07

Until fairly recently, anthropologists and geologists were greatly puzzled by an unusual finding. Their perplexity concerned the almost total disappearance of humankind many years ago. Finally, they were able to put together the various factors related to this happening and came up with the following scenario.

Over much of the Earth, crude stone tools have been found at the geological layer roughly corresponding to 74,000 years ago. Based on the various rock types used, their rate of wear and the number of implements uncovered in each setting, the population could be estimated for many regions of the globe. In addition, migration patterns could be charted based on similarities in tool designs combined with their varying quantities in assorted locales. As the seasons changed and the animal location shifted — so did the hunter-gatherers. The related movement could be mapped for several clans.

Then suddenly, signs of all tools, abruptly and completely, vanished across nearly the entire globe. The disappearance was almost completely universal except, for the most part, in one small region of Eastern Africa. At the same time, there existed, instead of the tools elsewhere, layer upon layer of volcanic ash corresponding to a time period many years in duration.

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Jul 15 2007

Slaves to Christ and Compassion Unite: Free Markets Must Prevail

Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to the latest high quality content available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

wall street

By Jason Miller

7/15/07

[Warning: Satire Ahead]

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

–John Maynard Keynes

If you’re nodding your head in agreement with Keynes and expecting validation of your opinion as you read this piece, you’re in for a rude awakening.

Forget the humanitarian, bleeding heart nonsense. Let’s reflect on the words of Thomas Sowell instead:

“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on ‘income distribution,’ the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”

We live in reality ladies and gentlemen. Not some utopian fantasy dreamt up by the likes of idealistic dreamers like Marx and Engels.

Ours is indeed a cold, cruel world. The sooner each of us accepts our lot, makes the most of it, and moves on, the better off we will all be. The ingenious and industrious Bill Gates deserves every penny he has. By the same token, the dregs of society inhabiting places like Skid Row and eating from dumpsters are reaping their just rewards for their depraved, lazy, and ignorant ways.

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Jul 05 2007

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Personal Gratification:

Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to the latest high quality content available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

rapaciousconsumption

“Here There Be Monsters”

Pastel on Paper: “Rapacious Consumption” by Ric Hall and Ron Schmitt

Essay by Jason Miller

7/5/07

“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

—John Quincy Adams

While it certainly was not his intent, Adams’ assertion serves to remind us of a truth revealed by vast oceans of tears, torrential rivers of blood, and formidable piles of human remains. Leaving murder, mayhem, and misery in its wake, America does “go abroad,” but not, as Adams noted, “in search of monsters to destroy.” What Adams failed to perceive, despite living in the midst of the Native American genocide and the abject evil of chattel slavery, is that America is the monster.

Yet like most monsters that exist outside the boundaries of imagination, the printed word, celluloid, or digital imagery, the United States and its denizens ostensibly appear rather harmless and mundane. In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that a fair number of people still perceive us as downright heroic, cloaked as we are in our beguiling raiment of freedom and democracy. Continue Reading »

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Jun 06 2007

The End of the Line

By Guy Zimmerman, Senior Editor of Arts and Culture with Cyrano’s Journal

6/1/07

From the VOXPOP section of Cyrano’s Journal

Capitalism, for all its effectiveness in certain arenas, is the source of potentially fatal imbalances in the ways human beings interact with others and with the environment. Capitalism is unspeakably cruel to those it enslaves, and it is a moral catastrophe for those it empowers. It should correctly be viewed as the socio-economic embodiment of the “3 poisons” of greed, hatred and ignorance given historical expression by the Enlightenment. The human species must move to an entirely different way of interacting with each other and with the geosphere, and the first step is clarity about where we are now and hence what this process will entail.

The rubric of “right” and “left” is itself a holdover from the 18th century and the French revolution and I suspect its usefulness is nearly over. In any event, in my last post I wasn’t at all promoting the right as successful in anything but defending the prerogatives of an utterly indefensible system. Change, when it comes, will certainly NOT come from those who are willing to turn a blind eye from the human and environmental devastation that is the by-product of Capital and its “success.” By raising the issue of nihilism I was simply trying to illuminate why the left has been able to muster so little traction against the right since the 1970s.

I do think the Neocons very consciously embrace the nihilism of Machiavelli, which is the seed out of which modern political thinking sprouts and which infects every branch of modern experience. What I find hopeful about Buddhism as the source for a new perspective by which progressive thinking can organize itself is how the dharma takes nihilism one step further, riding it to the end of the line, so to speak, where the mental trap of dualistic thinking can potentially be overcome. The Buddhist critique of capitalism, from this point of view, is total whereas the Marxist and Freudian critiques are only partial. The Buddhist picture of the relationship between man and experience, in other words, is untainted by the distorted (dualistic) thinking that gave rise to Capitalism in the first place.

Back to Machiavelli for a moment. The Prince was about how the true potentate, in order to maximize his or her power, must establish a new system of values that he or she uniquely embodies. It was written on behalf of the new mercantile (proto-Capitalist) oligarchs of 16th century Italy to help them cement their power in the modern age that had just begun to emerge. Modern thought - both Cartesian rationalism and the empiricism of Hobbes - can be viewed as different efforts to articulate the philosophical basis for the values needed for Capital to achieve its full glory.

In launching this enterprise, Machiavelli was combating the existing set of values that had been put in place by the previous “Prince.” And who was that “Prince?” My candidate would be the carpenter’s son from Galilee, Christ himself, who, albeit by a circuitous route, managed to inaugurate a system of values that held sway in the West for the preceding millennia. While I’m no defender (far from it) of any organized religion, Capitalism can truly be considered a demonic system, and was in fact seen this way by Luther and many others. It is fueled by the sublimation of greed and aggression rather than any real attempt to come to terms with them before they are given (sublimated) expression in the world.

But what I find interesting here is the trajectory, because what I’ve in effect been proposing is that we had better look to yet another “Prince” for a way out of the cul de sac western history has brought us to…and this prince is over 2500 years old. How’s that for a dialectic?

To recap the argument and bring it back down to earth…if you accept that Capitalism is the socio-economic embodiment of greed, aggression and ignorance given full sway…then to overcome Capitalism we need to find ways to counteract these same forces in ourselves and in our interactions with others…and it just so happens that a host of intelligent and articulate people have been developing such techniques for centuries, and probably we should check out what they’ve managed to uncover.

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May 30 2007

Need is a Nasty Word


By Sally Erickson

5/30/07

Sally Erickson, Producer of the documentary “What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire” writes of the extent to which we need each other in the face of collapse and how our programming for “rugged individualism” is not working and will not sustain us—Carolyn Baker

Say hello to the last throes of America’s collective dementia. No amount of medication in the form of alternative therapy, I mean alternative energy, is going to repair the years of abuse to our collective body and spirit by the machinations of Empire. Antidepressants, I mean anti-inflationary economics, are rapidly losing their effectiveness. We’ve reached peak insanity. We’re sunk. Thank the gods. It’s all downhill from here.

We need help.

I come from a quietly dysfunctional, but highly functioning, middle-class American family. My brother and sister have both had incomes way into six figures for decades. I think. It’s not polite to discuss income so I can only presume.

I never had the guts to go there, to make a lot of money. I never felt I had the right to profit wildly from the abusive and exploitative system we call American capitalism. Well before I understood the nature of the crimes that American wealth is based on, I knew something was very wrong.

I traveled to India briefly during college. On my first day there I faced a tiny child who reached out with pleading fingers, still in her mother’s arms. I felt sick inside. What right did I have to live….

(Click here to read the article in its entirety)

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