Privilege - a VERY long post

Privilege.

That’s a loaded word. Nobody alive, right now, doesn’t feel that load pressing on their soul.

I will back into this touchy subject by provisionally defining privilege as an ability. Privilege can be defined as: “The ability to do things, or have things, that other people cannot.” Let’s run with that.

We live in a nation where all men are (supposed to be) created equal, yet everyone can also see that ability is not equally distributed. Not everyone can play center for the Los Angeles Lakers; not everyone can run four miles in one hour; and, at least until 1920, not every adult in the United States could vote.

We have three very different kinds of ability here! The ability to play center for an NBA basketball team is heavily dependent upon your genetics, upon endowments you were born with. The ability to run four miles in one hour is given to many more people; if you work at it hard enough and long enough a good many men and women (although still a minority of the population) can run for that long. Working hard, even very hard, will not make you grow tall enough to play center in the NBA.

No adult woman in the United States, until 1920, had the “ability” to vote. Millions of adult men at that time could. I think we can agree this shows us a very different kind of “ability.”

The “ability” to vote? That’s a privilege; but it doesn’t DEFINE privilege.

Privilege can transcend race, political parties, gender, or income — although it’s usually drawn along those lines. The third kind of “ability” is the kind that counts in the discussion; the “ability” to tie your shoes is not the same as the “ability” to vote! The physical ability needed to pull a lever in a voting booth is far less than the ability to tie a shoe. If you are allowed to vote in an election, if you are FREE to vote, you have PRIVILEGE that a minor or a convicted felon does not.

Everything I’ve written seems obvious — it IS obvious — so why write about it? If we don’t wrestle with what privilege really IS, and distinguish it from what CURRENTLY causes it, as opposed to what ULTIMATELY causes it, we will have no chance of solving it.

Let us try to solve the privilege problem along the lines of Liberal and Conservative. What do Liberals believe and want?

It believes in four things:

1. Liberalism is individualist. It champions the moral primacy of the individual against the collective.

2. Liberalism is egalitarian. All human beings have the same moral status and moral worth.

3. Liberalism is universalist. All human beings have worth BECAUSE they are human beings.

4. Humanity and human life are capable of open-ended improvement, by the use of reason.

Classical Liberalism has a “want,” given to it by the philosopher John Stuart Mill; it calls for redistribution of wealth to those in need, and the promotion of the welfare state.

What do Conservatives believe and want?

Oddly enough, Conservatives believe in the same four points that Liberals do. Where they differ is asserting that the distribution of wealth should be effected by a free and un-government-regulated market, such a market being inherently more intelligent and appropriate than any acts of government.

Our next step would, typically, be to ask: which is better? Except that that question bypasses an even more important question: why do both Liberals and Conservatives consistently fail to do what they say they want?

Am I pointing to cheating welfare mothers? Nope, as a fundamental problem, they’re chicken feed. Do I mean bailed-out companies and banks? No I don’t. They’re a far BIGGER problem, but still — yes, still — small potatoes.

Let’s point, not to the “Elephant in the Room,” but to the “Whale in the Closet.”

War.

Both Liberals and Conservatives since, at least, 1914 LOVE war.

Where is the redistribution of wealth to the needy, in war? Where are producers of goods and producers of labor exchanging value-for-value, in war? That doesn’t happen. That (please forgive me) FUCKING doesn’t happen.

If we figure out why, at the very least since 1914, wars happen, believe it or not we can properly understand PRIVILEGE.

Stick with me, I’m heading somewhere. But we have to back up and ask why both Liberals and Conservatives do what they say they want? Is there something too idealistic about both pure Liberalism AND pure Conservatism? For most of human history, and for most of us human beings, I’m afraid the answer is yes.

War is the double-edged sword wielded by the Whale in the Closet. The Whale is called Status Quo.

Status Quo can be defined as “prevailing or pervasive social conditions.” It would take many books and articles to show the scope of Status Quo — it’s too big! I contend, even more than politics, even more than culture, it underlies everything. It isn’t bigger than religion, it isn’t bigger than science, it isn’t bigger than philosophy or history, but it touches every one of those things.

But is it a Good thing? Mostly yes; without social conditions set in place, we have chaos. When is Status Quo NOT good? When we have too much of it.

TOO MUCH of it? Too much Status Quo?? Sure.

What does Status Quo want? For things to stay the same. How does it keep things the same? By getting more and more of the same.

All groups, all organizations, all tribes/states/nations/governments, all cultures, take their cue from the Top. The prevailing social conditions — the Status Quo — is established by the Top. Why? Because the folks on Top want to STAY ON TOP. The Status Quo is set from the Top because those on Top want to STAY on Top.

If the Status Quo stays the Status Quo for too long, too much WEALTH and LIFE flow upward to, and are stolen and hoarded by, the Top. One example will suffice: when the one-hundred wealthiest people in the world have more wealth than the bottom three and one-half billion people, we have one handy marker shouting at us that we have TOO MUCH STATUS QUO.

Status Quo goes beyond political identification. For God’s sake, Liberals and Conservatives believe in EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS. They differ in the economic ways to make that happen. Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist is in the camp of Democratic Socialism because he’s seen too much money being “made” by companies and stolen by economic decisions that are capitalist in name only. Ayn Rand, the author of “The Fountainhead,” and “Atlas Shrugged,” is in the camp of Radical Capitalism because she was born in Russia twelve years before the Bolshevik Revolution, grew up in Russia under Lenin, and faced those horrors first-hand. BOTH of these highly intelligent and very admirable people advocate/advocated what they do because they saw the tyranny of the Status Quo — even as it came from seemingly OPPOSITE CAMPS.

Rand never became a part of the Status Quo, and would not have claimed such for herself, despite many prominent Republicans claiming to advocate for her ideas. Current Republicans quote Rand the way Christian Fascists quote the Bible; selectively and deceptively, to serve their own ends.

Hedges has never become part of the Status Quo because, in addition to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, he is an ordained minister; and because he believes in the basic tenets of classical liberalism AND HAS NEVER SOLD THEM OUT.

In Russia under Lenin, the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was the Status Quo. In the United States today “capitalism,” defined as “Increasing Amounts of Wealth to the Already Wealthy” is the Status Quo. Life in these United States, if you’re in the bottom 40% of the population, is horrible. If we put up with our horrible conditions, it’s because we behave like half-cooked frogs in a slowly-boiling pot. In another decade we may have the status of Dead Frogs in a Fully-Boiling pot, just like Russia under Lenin.

As you can see, the question of Privilege doesn’t get solved along the lines of Liberal OR Conservative. Too much “Liberalism” OR too much “Conservatism” leads to the formation of, solidifying, enshrining, and final deification of a Status Quo. And finally we have a working definition of Privilege that I can agree with:

Privilege is preferential or advantageous connection to the Status Quo.

The very existence of privilege AS A CULTURAL PROBLEM is a sign that the Status Quo has been in place, on top, for too long. George Orwell wrote the following in his novelette, “Animal Farm:”

“All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Really, that’s all that the people On Top really want; they want to skim wealth and life off the top so that they can have more than we do. And they want to keep things that way. Because if they DON’T keep things that way, they lose that position on top.

That’s where WAR comes in. When the arbiters of the Status Quo keep getting More and More of the Same, and the rest of the population keeps getting Less and Less of the Same, the Folks On Top start a war; they announce the existence of Enemies of the State, to keep the population in a constant fear. War, actual, imagined, or virtual, is the favorite way for the Folks On Top to STAY on Top, ever since World War I; when our world finally became One World and there were no more “new” or “untouched” lands for the Greco-Roman-European-American Empire to conquer and annex.

57% of the American discretionary income THAT WE KNOW ABOUT is devoted to war. Throughout human history people have had no trouble killing other human beings to Stay On Top. The innovation of World War I was, not only could the industrial war machine keep battles going for weeks on end (during the American Civil War battles rarely lasted beyond three days), but the propaganda machine that whipped up support for the war in America grew into an insatiable monster that “finds” new enemies around every corner, just when the old enemy has been vanquished. Essentially ALL of our media is part of this propaganda machine, and we have become used to the idea of constant enemies of the State and constant enemies within our borders as being NORMAL.

The reinforcement of the Status Quo, and the enforcement of privilege, has an analogy in the human body.

Chiropractic has a beautiful word to describe when your spine is out of alignment: subluxation, which means “deprived of light.” Classical chiropractic theory states that, when your body suffers a trauma, the physical effect of the trauma can persist in your body months and even years after the event has gone. A child roller-skating can fall on her backside, and the injury can keep interfering with the proper functioning of her body – until she sees a chiropractor.

That which chiropractic deals with CAN be handled in some ways by therapies other than chiropractic: yoga, meditation, massage, and Pilates exercise can all help alleviate old traumas. But I disagree with the physical trauma/accident origin of subluxation.

And my explanation is a quasi-ASTROLOGICAL one.

There is a form of astrology from China – born out of Taoist philosophy – that recognizes the acupuncture meridians as a mechanism of BEHAVIORAL CAUSE-AND-EFFECT.

Going REALLY FAST now…

1. What we know of as “The Year of the Dragon” is a year when the stomach acupuncture meridian is most active. Each of those twelve “Chinese Zodiac Animals” corresponds to one of the twelve major acupuncture meridians in your body.

2. Each of these meridians has specific EMOTIONS attached to them. In fact, it’s life energy – chi – flowing through the meridians, that causes emotions in the first place.

3. Everybody has four specific acupuncture meridians “turned on” at birth. If the emotions connected to those meridians get along with each other, your emotional life – your life, period – will be harmonious. If those emotions don’t get along, your life will have turmoil.

4. The meridians run along, inside, and on top of certain muscles; tensing and relaxing those muscles, filling them with or draining them of chi. As the body is an integrated whole, those muscles will push, pull, align and mis-align your spine; affecting your posture and AFFECTING YOUR BEHAVIOR.

5. We have a natural and universal tendency to regard the meridians pushes and pulls on our spine as THE EXPRESSION OF OUR PERSONALITY. If our meridians are harmonious, we see the world as a harmonious place – an appropriate reflection of our inner being. If we have emotional trauma after trauma layered over and locked in our bodies, we IDENTIFY with those traumas. Those traumas, we see them as WHAT WE ARE.

An accident in your youth can cause your spine to mis-align. But even major physical accidents cannot equal the pushes and pulls your own soul, by way of those “turned on” acupuncture meridians when you were born, will do to your spine every moment of your life. The astro-physiological explanation accounts for far more than any bruised shoulder or skinned knee.

A culture, a NATION, has prejudices, preferences, conflicts, and traumas layered over its body too! Contrast the mood of the United States on December 6, 1941, to the day after. Contrast the mood of the U.S. on September 10, 2001 to the day after! In time, a culture’s ability to adapt, adjust, and heal itself becomes impeded and compromised.

What part of our culture identifies most with our triumphs and traumas?

The Status Quo.

Our government can be considered the skeleton and muscles of the Status Quo. Since I was a young man our government has passed no significant legislation that does not further reinforce its control over the rest of us. That control, and not the reasons stated on the surface, is the reason such legislation has been passed in the first place. The Affordable Care Act? Its real purpose is not to use the most efficient means to make health care available to everyone, but to keep the pharmaceutical companies making billions of dollars off of suffering people, treating them as a cash crop. NAFTA? NAFTA gives corporations the ability to sue governments. When governments already bail out banks, to the tune of 7.7 TRILLION DOLLARS, for plunging our economy into the sewer, do we need to give companies MORE power to manage our national household?

So we see, against the backdrop of 240 years of emotional sediment, blocked light, and national trauma, a most intriguing – and alarming – presidential election.

As I first wrote these very words, Donald John Trump, a businessman who has never served in elected public office at any level, is the 45th President of the United States. He won with almost three million fewer popular votes than his opponent, and with more adults of voting age ABSTAINING FROM VOTING than had voted for either candidate. A superficial glance might convince one that his election has “upset the Status Quo.” I disagree.

Both Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton love war.

Both Trump and Clinton will deny that they love war. They “hate” it, but they will tell us: “Sometimes war is necessary.”

Bullshit.

When it needs a never-fail, survival strategy, the Status Quo resorts to war. Nothing keeps the folks-on-top on top, like war.

When a people, when a culture, sees meaning stamped out, sees lies treated like truth, sees friends and family lulled into unconsciousness, sees the denial of reality leading up to disaster, and see its wealth and their future stolen from them – by stealth and by law – the folks-on-top distract us all with the specter of war. If you are busy fighting an enemy outside, you forget you’re being raped by the enemy right over you and right next to you.

War never distracts a people forever; attacks on the enemy without, become oppression of the citizens, within. If you study your history, you will find this progression inevitable.

Donald Trump seems like a maverick compared to Hillary Rodham Clinton because the Status Quo shifts every now and then, and Trump rides the latest shift. The Status Quo is NOT being replaced.

Within the last, maybe twenty-four years, the seat of the Status Quo is now Online, which is to say, AWAY FROM THE PHYSICAL WORLD WE LIVE IN. My justification for stating this comes from more astrological thinking…

If you study astrology seriously, as the ancients did, and some of us moderns do, you will learn that the visible planets SIGNIFY things. The Sun signifies the ruler of a nation, fatherhood, the Yang polarity in Taoism. The Moon signifies the Queen, motherhood, the gathering of crowds, and the Yin polarity.

My thesis: when a new planet or heavenly body is discovered, its significations announce themselves, and TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

Part of what follows is my best understanding of the work of Robert Schmidt of Project Hindsight. If he says I have accidentally misinterpreted him; trust him, not me.

Schmidt saw that the discovery of the planet Uranus coincided almost exactly with the publication of The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. If I had to choose five of the greatest philosophers in Western History, my list would include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and I don’t know who should be number five. Kant’s Critique is a signal event in philosophy and human thought. Rigorously he took Being and Reason to – and beyond – any previous limits or boundaries. The Critique of Pure Reason left succeeding philosophers dumbfounded and unable to advance for maybe a decade after its publication.

The discovery of a new planet signals something new in natural history! Since human beings could look up into the stars, we have had only the Sun, Moon, and five planets. The Critique of Pure Reason transcended philosophy and Uranus transcended cosmology, with equally disruptive results. You will have to dive into the delights of Schmidt’s own intellectual construction to get the full story, but, in essence, Uranus TRANSCENDS the Sun.

What does it mean to TRANSCEND the Sun? How do you go beyond what the Sun means? Mr. Schmidt employed Plato’s axiomatic concept of Same/Other to arrange the seven classical planets along that spectrum. If the Moon stands in for the Other, the Sun stands in for the Same. If Uranus transcends the Sun, how do you transcend Sameness? How do you transcend Identity?

With the COMMON.

With the common, we have no tension, no dynamism. Life has no variety, and time goes slack. If the dynamism is gone, then why is Uranus associated in astrology (quite rightly) with sudden and unexpected disruption? The Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781, during what we call “The Age of Enlightenment.” In 1776 a brand new nation in one of its defining documents included this MOST Uranian sentiment, one I quoted at the beginning of this article:

All men are created equal.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But wait – Uranus has in our world an equally powerful downside:

All people can be treated like interchangeable parts.

BOTH of these Uranian sentiments go against what we think of as “The Natural Order.” Take the statement “All men are created equal.” Are all men equal in height? Are all men equal in weight? Is their strength the same? Is their skin color the same? Are MEN the same as WOMEN? Are their sexual preferences the same? Are their gender identifications the same? Is their intelligence the same? Is their inherited wealth the same? Does everybody speak the same language? What we call the Natural Order will ask all of these questions; and if we tally up the results we will have a whole bunch of “no” answers.

We understand that “all men are created equal” doesn’t exactly mean any of those questions. We understand “equality” to mean that, while all people are DIFFERENT, every person has the same essential worth; and should be treated as such in the eyes of the Law. With all the variety in human beings, treating everybody equally is a fiendishly difficult ethical, political, and practical problem.

If you ask anyone – anyone – if human beings should be treated like interchangeable parts, they will say NO. Yet, in practice, people are plugged in, or thrown away, like interchangeable parts all the time. The Industrial Revolution also came about roughly the same time as the discovery of Uranus. The first generation of peoples to work with the engines of mass-production did not like the work at all. For mass production to BE mass production the machinery of that production needs to be producing product constantly. “Why,” said those first industrial laborers, “Should I show up to work at the ‘factory’ AT THE SAME DAMNED TIME, EVERY DAMNED DAY?” The members of an agrarian society understood that when crops needed planting you had to plant them when the season was right. When the crops needed harvesting, everybody needed to pitch in until the harvest was in. Granted, by 1950, what we call “labor-saving devices” cut down very drastically on the amount of sheer work needing done, but once the harvest was tended to, and the chores done, your time belonged to YOU, in a way that anyone working in a factory, or in an office, or in a retail establishment today would now find unbelievable.

The Natural Order shows us that Sunrise is not the same as Sunset; Noon is not the same as Midnight. You don’t plant seeds in October and expect to harvest crops in January. But to a machine, day or night, rain or shine, every moment is THE SAME.

What made the Industrial Age work was – child labor. Machines in factories needed tending to; they could not – and still cannot – tend to themselves. It wasn’t the difficulty of factory work that made Agrarian Man walk off the job in those early days; it was the demand of Industry that you alter YOUR time to IT. Children, being more malleable, were more willing to adapt to the highly regular hours demanded by the factory.

WE ARE ALL DESCENDED FROM THOSE FIRST CHILD LABORERS. Because of them – and the factories that employed them – we think of forty hours a week, eight hours a day of work, as being NORMAL. No: as being NATURAL.

Something else has happened to time, which we also now think of as normal, which is another gift of Uranus. If every day, every hour, and every minute of the day is – essentially – THE SAME as any other, it doesn’t, by that standard, matter when you wake up, when you work, when you play, or when you eat or sleep. This leads to a life lived in shifts. We have overwhelming evidence that life lived according to natural rhythms promotes longevity, health, and well-being; but the Uranian “impulse” to uniformity denies that.

If we had all human lives lived in multiple shifts, that would be awful enough; but that is not the only way Uranus warps our experience of time. If every hour is treated like any other hour, then why shouldn’t ANY chunk of time be just like any OTHER chunk of time, regardless of duration? Why shouldn’t any HOUR be just like any MINUTE? The duration should be treated, then, like an accident that has no importance. Whether you have an hour or a minute, those spans of time are simply a chunk taken out of a continuum for GETTING SOMETHING DONE.

The Industrial Revolution treats time just like that. How many books could Gutenberg print in a day, compared to Random House? How many mouths could Auguste Escoffier feed in a day, compared to any McDonalds? In the time it takes for a carriage maker to make a horse-drawn carriage in 1600, Toyota can make thousands of automobiles.

When you have life lived in shifts, and spans of time are treated as interchangeable, you experience time BEING COMPRESSED.

The generation of humanity that grew up during the time Uranus was discovered is unique. Prior to 1781, the life you lived was the same as the life your father lived, which was the same as the life HIS father lived. A war, a famine, or a pestilence could change that life permanently, but when the suffering ended you expected to return to the life you led before you suffered.

Around the discovery of Uranus, for the first time in history, the life you lead became fundamentally different form the life your parents led! Just about every plot of a Jane Austen novel turns on this fact; that the lives her heroines led were, in some crucial way, a radical departure from their family past. For the first time in history, the live you led was no longer the life your parents led – it was DIFFERENT; and this change affected the entire generation – and all generations since.

Those changes have accelerated. Nobody can completely deny that, and the acceleration has yet to stop.

Can we see that the discovery of Uranus also followed along a shift in the status quo? Margaret Thatcher was quoted: “England was born of history, America born of philosophy.” Philosophy, from philosophia, the love of wisdom, has existed in Western culture since Anaximander. But it had never been the Leading Human Concern until Uranus was discovered. From 1776-1781 until a remarkably brief period of time afterward, the Status Quo shifted from the dynastic terms of history to the universally conscious terms of philosophy. But the Status Quo also shifted from the diversity of nature to the uniformity of industry. For the first time, the terms of the Status Quo were MANMADE.

Since Uranus was discovered, to now (2017), we have found hundreds of heavenly bodies new to mankind. I shall not try to list all of them here, and explain the hundreds of ways each of these bodies shifted the Status Quo. Let us jump back to Donald John Trump and investigate what heavenly body, and what shift in the Status Quo, onto whose coattails he now rides.

The vast majority of new heavenly bodies discovered since the turn of the 21st Century reside in the Kuiper Belt. Pluto barely makes it into this distant band of icy debris. We have found less than a dozen bodies large enough to – with near certainty – be termed “dwarf planets.” The International Astronomical Union, to the consternation of astrologers everywhere, demoted Pluto from “planet” status to “dwarf planet.” For the sake of my current discussion I will focus on the only dwarf planet anywhere near the size of Pluto: Eris, discovered in January of 2005.

Originally, Eris was thought to be slightly larger than Pluto. Our current reckoning places it slightly smaller. I think of Pluto and Eris as the King and Queen of the Kuiper Belt.

What do I regard as the primary signification of Eris? VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES. Virtual communities open and available to the average person – no unusual technical skill required.

See how many virtual communities began on and around the discovery of Eris: Second Life, Linked-In, World of Warcraft, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Donald Trumps favorite: Twitter. Unlike many of my astrological colleagues I do not favor the use of the planets name as a clue to the planets significations; but the mythological Eris was all about – discord.

Boy does that fit.

Make no mistake: multi-billionaire Donald Trump IS part of the Status Quo. The world and our culture support him very, very well; and like all late-stage supporters of the Status Quo he adores war. He has (as of 2-28-2017, when I wrote this), been rattling sabers more loudly than any three presidents in my lifetime.

But like a naturally autocratic business tycoon who has never held public office, he is throwing the rest of our government into turmoil. He vacations (very) frequently, ignores daily security briefings, has refused to divest himself of business connections that constitute conflict-of-interest, and he broadcasts to the entire virtual world exactly what he thinks and exactly how he feels on Twitter.

In 1994, when O.J. Simpson was tried for the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Lyle Goldman, prosecutor Marcia Clark based her case on the then new science of DNA analysis. Defense Attorney Johnny Cochran theatrically stuck to older methods – and won. But, from that time forward, our culture regards DNA evidence as conclusive. Mr. Trump broadcasts his thoughts to the entire virtual world, bypassing the news services. From now on, until the American Empire falls, the battle for political office will be fought almost entirely ONLINE, with all the discord, disinformation, emotional manipulation, and lightning-short attention spans that go along with it.

How do I sum this up?

1. Privilege is preferential or advantageous connection to the Status Quo.

2. Status Quo sets the prevailing social conditions of a culture or society, from the top.

3. The Status Quo wants things to stay the same because it wants to STAY ON TOP.

4. The Status Quo is like a human body, in that its vitality and adaptability decrease with age, experience, and trauma.

5. War is the inevitable last resort of a Status Quo that wants to stay on top past its expiration date. Since 1914 a constant flow of enemies of the state have been sought and our country manipulated into war to distract our citizens. We have entered a period where the Status Quo regards its own citizens to be the enemy to be kept at bay.

6. Shifts in the Status Quo accompany discoveries of new heavenly bodies. To the best of my knowledge, this thesis originates with me.

Right now, our nation – our entire culture – is in a crisis. Pardon my arrogance for thinking that nearly all discussions of privilege proceed from far too narrow and limited views of our problems. If we stick to the shallow, acute, and immediate, we will follow the empires of the past into death; and ten years, one hundred, or two hundred years from now we will keep making the same mistakes, and be no better off.