Bitter Tonic Known as Truth (eBook)
270 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-5003-8 (ISBN)
Emanuel Pastreich has emerged over the last two decades as the leading voice for rationality in domestic policy, strategy in diplomacy, and science in health and security, he distinguishes himself through his stress on long-term planning and his advocacy for addressing the real social, cultural, economic, technological and environmental dangers that we face at home and abroad, not those cooked up by think tanks and consulting firms taking orders from private equity. Pastreich set himself apart from the other candidates in the 2020 presidential election as the only candidate focused on the COVID-19 operation, 9/11 truth, the threat of climate and biodiversity collapse, the use of IT, nano and bio technologies to manipulate and destroy human society, the exponential concentration of wealth, the push for enslavement of the citizens by the super-rich, and the for-profit arms race. Pastreich refused to take money from the rich and powerful, and he was not discouraged when the corrupt media ignored his carefully crafted speeches and policy proposals. He considers the truth to be the most powerful weapon in his arsenal, one that must be articulated by a nation-wide movement-not by a political party or a public intellectual promoted by dark forces behind the curtains. Pastreich is committed to reviving the traditions of internationalism, NOT globalism, and of a democratic economy that were pursued by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Eugene Debs, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy in their writings and actions. He demands that the trillions given to multinational banks and corporations over the last ten years be returned, that conglomerates like Amazon and Facebook be run as regulated cooperatives, and that the assets of fossil fuel corporations be seized immediately, and their owners and administrators charged for the criminal action of presenting fraudulent information to the government and to the people concerning the catastrophic damage to the environment resulting from their products. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, raised in Saint Louis, Missouri, Pastreich attended Lowell High School in San Francisco. He graduated from Yale College in 1987 in the major of Chinese literature and spent a year at National Taiwan University. His obtained his master's degree from University of Tokyo and his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. Pastreich started his career at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor, arguing that Americans must have a sophisticated understanding of Asia in order to respond to the challenges of the 21st century. He currently serves as president of the Asia Institute, a think tank focused on diplomacy, security and technology with offices in Washington D.C., Seoul, and Tokyo. A candidate for president in the Green Party in 2023, and an independent candidate for president now, Pastreich is the only American politician who is fluent in Japanese, Korean and Chinese. He has two children and he recently remarried following the tragic death of his first wife of 26 years.
This collection of speeches by Emanuel Pastreich from his "e;Fear No Evil"e; campaign leading up to the 2024 presidential election includes statements that touch on every critical crisis faced by the United States. Pastreich suggests, quite literally, that the only medicine for the spiritual and institutional illnesses our nation suffers from, as a republic possessed by the evil spirits of ancient empires, is the bitter tonic known as truth. A glance at just a page of this book will make it obvious to the most casual reader why Emanuel Pastreich was able to garner such support even when he refused to take a penny from corporations, billionaires, and lobbyists, even when he spoke the truth about 9.11, the Federal Reserve, and operation COVID-19 to a degree that other candidates did not dare do even in their guarded luxurious homes. www.emanuelpastreich24.orgPastreich writes, "e;We face together similar challenges at the political, the economic, the cultural, and the spiritual levels. The pressures and the threats seem overwhelming at times because the traditions in America we thought were made of solid marble have grown soft and mushy beneath our feet in a culture of indulgence and greed. But for all the hypocrisy and selfishness that sadly blinds our neighbors, our friends, and even our families, we can sense that truth and justice are leading us forward even as our foes seem so overwhelming. The truth is, as I heard it said somewhere, that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you and it waits for you to unlock it and thereby to transform our nation. What is required is the bravery to confront the truth, the compassion to find commonalities with our neighbors, the righteousness to stand up for what is decent even when the corrupt and sick is promoted everywhere, the tenacity to carry on the battle for months, years, and decades until those who were blind start to see what we stand for, and the decisiveness to realize today what others thought will take centuries. We Americans will not let this nation be reduced to a moral wasteland. We will not allow a handful of the rich to employ banks of supercomputers, running sophisticated algorithms, to manipulate and to dumb down our people, to use hidden persuaders in movies and dramas that induce narcissism and self-centeredness in our children, to run mass media campaigns to distract us from the current crisis by obsessing over the insignificant, to fabricate financial crises that destroy our lives, nor will we allow them to launch false-flag operations that will herd us into a Gaza of the soul. We will not permit them to wall us in on all sides with economic bankruptcy, institutional collapse, cultural banality, spiritual depravity, intellectual barbarism, or physical slavery. We will not follow the cardboard messiahs that they have prepared carefully for us backstage, nor will we use the flawed logic they feed to us through their public intellectuals and talk shows so to confuse us, nor will we fall for the cultural, racial, or identity conflicts that they have stirred up in order to divide us against each other. Nothing will stop us from coming together, e pluribus unum, coming together to build a new nation, one that is built up from the basement of solid moral fiber, that follows exactly the plans that we have all agreed on; a mansion for the people that is built, not out of money and debt, not out of pornography, social media, and games, not out of weapons systems and surveillance technology, not out of offshore trusts and billionaire funds, but built out of the stuff of the human soul, and build by our people, each and every one of us, gathering together to write a new contract which binds us together as equal partners for the common good within a new nation state that follows the spirit and the word of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."e;
“When Technology Buried Science in a Shallow Grave”
February 22, 2021
Even young children can sense that we live in an age in which literally none of the information available is reliable or believable. Information on a global scale is subject to Gresham’s Law: low-quality information spreads everywhere and the truth is hoarded by the few.
What went wrong, and why?
In a sense, the original sin was the confusion of science, the philosophical pursuit of the truth by means of confirmation of accuracy through systematic experiments, with technology, the tools, and the systems based on tools, that serve to create an effect, or to complete a task.
Technology is not science. The Internet, and the supercomputers that lurk behind it, are employed by the rich and powerful to create a virtual reality for us with the intention of convincing us that the images and the effects generated by technology have some relationship to the truth; to science. They want to reassure us that everything is fine when it is not.
If we want to find our way out of this nightmare, we must first recognize that technology today has become the complete opposite of science: a distraction, or a weapon employed to render us passive and ignorant.
As Paul Goodman wrote, “Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.” It is the moral aspect of technology that should be foremost in our minds, and not the gaudy special effects that enchant; that pretend to be science.
Before we develop a smartphone, a satellite system, or a supercomputer, we must first employ the scientific method to determine what the impact of that technology will be over the long term on the earth and on humanity. Such a combination of science and technology literally never happens.
Today, thousands of supercomputers calculate the worth of derivatives as part of a money game for the extremely wealthy, a fixed round of poker. Few supercomputers are calculating how the use of massive amounts of electricity to power the next generation of AI will affect the climate over the next fifty years, or what the impact of the use of plastics will be on the oceans for that the next century, or what the prospects for the production of food for future generations will be in light of the rapid degradation of soil.
Supercomputers are being employed to calculate profit, and not sustainability, and they are so assigned for a political, not scientific reason. Technology serves as a sheepskin for the most ruthless forms of economic exploitation. The powerful know that if AI were focused on sustainability over centuries, the answer from its calculations would be that we should stop using AI if we wished to survive.
We confuse science with technology at our peril.
How to dumb down youth
Our youth are told by the corrupt media that they must prepare for a technology-driven future that is inevitable, that is coming in accord with some law of nature. They are exhorted to prepare for a supposed Fourth Industrial Revolution that will somehow improve their lives, even as their jobs are automated away, as their minds are destroyed by video games, pornography, and online gambling.
When the bankers and CEOs call it the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they are not kidding. It is a revolution in which a tiny handful of people seize control of the means of production, and the ideological apparatus for the entire earth.
We are bombarded, against our will, with information produced without review by third parties and corporations. Much of it is spurious and misleading. The content of movies and dramas, of commercials and advertisements, promotes waste and indulgence and glorifies the idle lives of the rich.
We are forced to rely on corporate-controlled sources like Google or the New York Times for information, and we are not told that these organizations have a long history of providing false information for profit. The entire media-education-advertising complex has been mobilized to promote campaigns to dumb down people and to encourage anti-intellectual sentiments. The drive to force all education to be conducted online speeds up this dangerous trend.
How many times have you heard old-timers remark that young people are self-centered, superficial, and isolated? The assumption underlying this statement is that youth, who are our future, have gone bad because of the poor choices that they have made.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Those youth are identified by corporations as the target for a decadent consumer culture that encourages them to buy, and to be distracted by services that they must pay for. They cannot escape from this unrelenting ideology because corporations are free to pump this trash into the lives of youth, from nursery school on. There is no force present to defend our children.
The main purpose of the games, the pornography, the foolish and shallow television programs citizens are subject to is not sales.
No. Much of this disinformation is offered to us for free because the purpose is to alter our thinking. The funding of the media by advertising from corporations allows them to dictate to journalists the content of their articles, to make journalists present consumption and development in a positive light, even as it destroys the environment and alienates our citizens.
The ultimate product is the viewer or reader, not the item presented in the ad. The reader is rendered up to the investment banks and multinational corporations, as a prostrate consumer, not a citizen, a dependent and limited individual with no moral compass to guide him, incapable of distinguishing images from reality. We desperately need to interact with others. We need jobs that let us work together with others to create a better world.
Technology could help, but it does not because it has no relationship to science, and it has no moral content anymore.
In our daily lives, our interactions with the world are limited to prerecorded messages, automated checkouts, and online classes.
Our culture could be changed if we wanted to change it. The fact that most people cannot read books or focus for more than 10 minutes on a topic is a result of habits created by exposure to technology that could be reversed if there were a will.
We could treat serious issues in a serious manner in our society, and we could discuss the history of how we got here, the reality of how our society works, and the wisdom of learning for oneself through art, music, philosophy, and literature. We could give more emphasis to the wisdom passed on to us by our parents and grandparents than to the superficial sayings of those made famous by the media.
The murder weapon can be found in the hands of the advertising firms, and the puppeteers behind the screen of media. They create a false reality that degrades; they label those who tell the truth false. They make sure that the citizen faces a wasteland on every TV channel, in every newspaper, in every corner of every mall and every office building. Their destruction of intellectual inquiry made possible the rise of clown tyrants and laid the foundations for a media circus dominated by the willful and the indulgent.
We can trace this war on intellectual inquiry back to the efforts of Sigmund Freud’s disciple Edward Bernays in the 1950s to develop concrete methods for manipulating the public through powerful images and simplistic slogans. Bernays gave corporations long-term strategies to make use of weaknesses in human psychology to turn citizens into consumers who are drawn to conventional interpretations presented by authority figures.
The manipulation of the human mind by the powerful has a long history. Yet the situation would not have become so dire if our seduction by the stunts of computers, by the legerdemain of mechanical reproduction had not blinded us to the murder of scientific inquiry.
How the Super-Rich Destroy Our Minds
The death of science is an extension of the death of philosophy. Universities are extirpating philosophy departments left and right, supposedly because they can no longer find jobs for their graduates. The study of philosophy is treated in the media as a quaint field for the impractical. In reality, however, philosophy must be the foundation for all understanding. Without an understanding of the invisible principles according to which the universe and human institutions function, our society drifts, our government becomes an unmoored ship, and we slide into treacherous straits.
The death of philosophy means that the visible ― the hurricane, the mass shooting, the speech by a politician ― is the only thing that registers in our minds. Climate change, cultural decadence, and political mannerism, the most serious dangers we face, seem like abstractions that do not even enter our discussions.
Without a philosophical foundation, without a methodology for confirming what is true, science is reduced to visual stimulation and rhetoric.
The destruction of the intellectual
The obsession with the seen, and the neglect of the invisible and the abstract is related to the precipitous decline of the intellectual in society.
...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 16.3.2024 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
| ISBN-13 | 979-8-3509-5003-8 / 9798350950038 |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
EPUB (Ohne DRM)Größe: 4,4 MB
Digital Rights Management: ohne DRM
Dieses eBook enthält kein DRM oder Kopierschutz. Eine Weitergabe an Dritte ist jedoch rechtlich nicht zulässig, weil Sie beim Kauf nur die Rechte an der persönlichen Nutzung erwerben.
Dateiformat: EPUB (Electronic Publication)
EPUB ist ein offener Standard für eBooks und eignet sich besonders zur Darstellung von Belletristik und Sachbüchern. Der Fließtext wird dynamisch an die Display- und Schriftgröße angepasst. Auch für mobile Lesegeräte ist EPUB daher gut geeignet.
Systemvoraussetzungen:
PC/Mac: Mit einem PC oder Mac können Sie dieses eBook lesen. Sie benötigen dafür die kostenlose Software Adobe Digital Editions.
eReader: Dieses eBook kann mit (fast) allen eBook-Readern gelesen werden. Mit dem amazon-Kindle ist es aber nicht kompatibel.
Smartphone/Tablet: Egal ob Apple oder Android, dieses eBook können Sie lesen. Sie benötigen dafür eine kostenlose App.
Geräteliste und zusätzliche Hinweise
Buying eBooks from abroad
For tax law reasons we can sell eBooks just within Germany and Switzerland. Regrettably we cannot fulfill eBook-orders from other countries.
aus dem Bereich
