A critical thinking framework developed by psychologists can help teach mental skills necessary for our times.

PAUL RATNER 12 May, 2020

Graphic: Paul RatnerCredit: Elder / Paul

• Researchers propose six levels of critical thinkers: Unreflective thinkers, Challenged thinkers, Beginning thinkers, Practicing thinkers, Advanced thinkers, and Master thinkers.
• The framework comes from educational psychologists Linda Elder and Richard Paul.
• Teaching critical thinking skills is a crucial challenge in our times.

The coronavirus has not only decimated our populations, its spread has also attacked the very nature of truth and stoked inherent tensions between many different groups of people, both at local and international levels. Spawning widespread conspiracy theories and obfuscation by governments, the virus has also been a vivid demonstration of the need for teaching critical thinking skills necessary to survive in the 21st century. The stage theory of critical thinking development, devised by psychologists Linda Elder and Richard Paul, can help us gauge the sophistication of our current mental approaches and provides a roadmap to the thinking of others.

The researchers identified six predictable levels of critical thinkers, from ones lower in depth and effort to the advanced mind-masters, who are always steps ahead.

As the scientists write, moving up on this pyramid of thinking “is dependent upon a necessary level of commitment on the part of an individual to develop as a critical thinker.” Using your mind more effectively is not automatic and “is unlikely to take place “subconsciously.” In other words – you have to put in the work and keep doing it, or you’ll lose the faculty.

Here’s how the stages of intellectual development break down:

Stage One: The Unreflective Thinker

These are people who don’t reflect about thinking and the effect it has on their lives. As such, they form opinions and make decisions based on prejudices and misconceptions while their thinking doesn’t improve.

Unreflective thinkers lack crucial skills that would allow them to parse their thought processes. They also do not apply standards like accuracy, relevance, precision, and logic in a consistent fashion.

How many such people are out there? You probably can guess based on social media comments. As Elder and Paul write, “it is perfectly possible for students to graduate from high school, or even college, and still be largely unreflective thinkers.”

Stage Two: The Challenged Thinker

This next level up thinker has awareness of the importance of thinking on their existence and knows that deficiencies in thinking can bring about major issues. As the psychologists explain, to solve a problem, you must first admit you have one.

People at this intellectual stage begin to understand that “high quality thinking requires deliberate reflective thinking about thinking”, and can acknowledge that their own mental processes might have many flaws. They might not be able to identify all the flaws, however.

A challenged thinker may have a sense that solid thinking involves navigating assumptions, inferences, and points of view, but only on an initial level. They may also be able to spot some instances of their own self-deception. The true difficulty for thinkers of this category is in not “believing that their thinking is better than it actually is, making it more difficult to recognize the problems inherent in poor thinking,” explain the researchers.

Stage Three: The Beginning Thinker

Thinkers at this level can go beyond the nascent intellectual humility and actively look to take control of their thinking across areas of their lives. They know that their own thinking can have blind spots and other problems and take steps to address those, but in a limited capacity.

Beginning thinkers place more value in reason, becoming self-aware in their thoughts. They may also be able to start looking at the concepts and biases underlying their ideas. Additionally, such thinkers develop higher internal standards of clarity, accuracy and logic, realizing that their ego plays a key role in their decisions.

Another big aspect that differentiates this stronger thinker – some ability to take criticism of their mental approach, even though they still have work to do and might lack clear enough solutions to the issues they spot.

Stage Four: The Practicing Thinker

This more experienced kind of thinker not only appreciates their own deficiencies, but has skills to deal with them. A thinker of this level will practice better thinking habits and will analyze their mental processes with regularity.

While they might be able to express their mind’s strengths and weaknesses, as a negative, practicing thinkers might still not have a systematic way of gaining insight into their thoughts and can fall prey to egocentric and self-deceptive reasoning.

How do you get to this stage? An important trait to gain, say the psychologists, is “intellectual perseverance.” This quality can provide “the impetus for developing a realistic plan for systematic practice (with a view to taking greater command of one’s thinking).”

“We must teach in such a way that students come to understand the power in knowing that whenever humans reason, they have no choice but to use certain predictable structures of thought: that thinking is inevitably driven by the questions, that we seek answers to questions for some purpose, that to answer questions, we need information, that to use information we must interpret it (i.e., by making inferences), and that our inferences, in turn, are based on assumptions, and have implications, all of which involves ideas or concepts within some point of view,” explain Elder and Paul.

Stage Five: The Advanced Thinker

One doesn’t typically get to this stage until college and beyond, estimate the scientists. This higher-level thinker would have strong habits that would allow them to analyze their thinking with insight about different areas of life. They would be fair-minded and able to spot the prejudicial aspects in the points of view of others and their own understanding.

While they’d have a good handle on the role of their ego in the idea flow, such thinkers might still not be able to grasp all the influences that affect their mentality.

The advanced thinker is at ease with self-critique and does so systematically, looking to improve. Among key traits required for this level are “intellectual insight” to develop new thought habits, “intellectual integrity” to “recognize areas of inconsistency and contradiction in one’s life,” intellectual empathy” to put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them, and the “intellectual courage” to confront ideas and beliefs they don’t necessarily believe in and have negative emotions towards.

Stage Six: The Master Thinker

This is the super-thinker, the one who is totally in control of how they process information and make decisions. Such people constantly seek to improve their thought skills, and through experience “regularly raise their thinking to the level of conscious realization.”

A master thinker achieves great insights into deep mental levels, strongly committed to being fair and gaining control over their own egocentrism.

Such a high-level thinker also exhibits superior practical knowledge and insight, always re-examining their assumptions for weaknesses, logic, and biases.

And, of course, a master thinker wouldn’t get upset with being intellectually confronted and spends a considerable amount of time analyzing their own responses.

“Why is this so important? Precisely because the human mind, left to its own, pursues that which is immediately easy, that which is comfortable, and that which serves its selfish interests. At the same time, it naturally resists that which is difficult to understand, that which involves complexity, that which requires entering the thinking and predicaments of others,” write the researchers.

So how do you become a master thinker? The psychologists think most students will never get there. But a lifetime of practicing the best intellectual traits can get you to that point when “people of good sense seek out master thinkers, for they recognize and value the ability of master thinkers to think through complex issues with judgment and insight.”

The significance of critical thinking in our daily lives, especially in these confusing times, so rife with quick and often-misleading information, cannot be overstated. The decisions we make today can truly be life and death.

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In Pfizer We Trust?

By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest

November 20, 2020 (dcreport.org)

Philip Mattera

The world is in love with Pfizer and Moderna; me, not so much. The two pharmaceutical companies have announced amazing results in their separate efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

Pfizer first announced that its product appeared to be 90% effective, only to be upstaged days later by Moderna and its claim of 94.5%. Pfizer then revised its efficacy rate to 95%.

Like everyone else, I am eager to see progress made in the fight against COVID-19. But there is a part of me that wonders whether these announcements, coming in record-breaking time, are too good to be true.

Don’t get me wrong—I am not a vaccine skeptic. I recently got my flu shot and previously was inoculated against shingles and pneumonia.

Yet I am wary when it comes to grand pronouncements by large corporations about advances that will generate vast amounts of profit. This is particularly the case with large drug companies, which have a long history of deception and malfeasance.

Pfizer’s track record is filled with cases in which it was accused of misleading regulators and the public about the safety of its products.

Pfizer is a prime example. Its track record is filled with cases in which it was accused of misleading regulators and the public about the safety of its products.

In the early 1990s, for example, Pfizer was embroiled in a controversy about scores of fatalities linked to heart valves produced by its Shiley division. In 1992 it agreed to pay up to $205 million to settle thousands of lawsuits. In 1994 the company agreed to pay $10.75 million to settle Justice Department charges that it lied to regulators in seeking approval for the valves.

Heart Attacks

In 2005, Pfizer had to stop advertising its arthritis medication Celebrex after a study showed that high doses were associated with an increased risk of heart attacks. Pfizer’s claims about the safety of the drug were further undermined when it came to light that the company had conducted a clinical trial back in 1999 that also pointed to the cardiac risk but which Pfizer kept secret.

Pfizer, which was a pioneer in the once-controversial practice of advertising pharmaceuticals, frequently has been accused of making false or misleading claims about its products. It has paid millions of dollars to resolve state and federal allegations about these practices.

Unapproved Drugs

It paid even larger amounts in cases involving allegations that the company promoted its drugs for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. These include a $2.3 billion settlement in 2009 that covered criminal as well as civil allegations. Pfizer’s subsidiary Wyeth settled its own criminal-civil illegal marketing case for $490 million four years later. In 2016 Wyeth paid another $784 million to settle allegations that it reported false pricing information to the federal government.

Moderna has not been around long enough to get into much trouble, but other companies working on vaccines have track records similar to Pfizer’s. These include Johnson & Johnson, whose penalty total on Violation Tracker is $4.2 billion, AstraZeneca ($1.1 billion), GlaxoSmithKline ($4.4 billion) and Sanofi ($641 million).

We may have no choice but to depend on companies such as these to develop and produce the vaccines we need to overcome COVID-19. Fortunately, their efficacy and safety claims will be subject to review by presumably independent experts before the vaccines are put into general distribution. I will continue to have my doubts about Pfizer, but I’m willing to trust Anthony Fauci, the doctor and immunologist who gained fame and the president’s wrath for being perceived as a straight coronavirus shooter.

Chris Roberts  November 22, 2020 (msn.com)

How COVID-19 Is Helping Bankroll Magic Mushroom Legalization

© Provided by The Daily Beast Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty

Election Day saw a string of huge wins for drug policy reform across the country, but nowhere went further than Oregon. Along with decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs—all drugs, across the board—voters there became the first to legalize adult access to psilocybin mushrooms.

In a very direct way, the COVID-19 pandemic helped make all this happen.

Polling repeatedly shows the drug war is vastly unpopular. And drug reform is a rare example of a true bipartisan issue. But so far in the U.S., most actual policy change on drugs has come at the ballot box.

Winning over voters requires huge sums of money. And David Bronner, the ponytailed, vegan chief executive of his family business, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, says he was able to write checks totaling more than $6.4 million towards drug-war reform campaigns in three states and Washington, D.C., this year because the pandemic has been very good for the soap business.

Last year, the company reported a record $129 million in revenue. In 2020, sales are on track to increase by 50 percent, Bronner told The Daily Beast during a recent phone interview. That opened the spigot wide for major strides on access to shrooms and weed, while working to end arrests for heroin and meth, too.

Specifically, according to Bronner, the cash influx meant much bigger than anticipated checks for medical psilocybin legalization ($3.4 million) and drug-decriminalization ($1 million) campaigns in Oregon. Also part of his spending spree: a mushroom decriminalization measure in D.C. ($650,000), and cannabis legalization efforts in Montana and South Dakota ($1.4 million total).

“Obviously, it sucks overall, but in this regard, it was good timing,” Bronner told The Daily Beast of the pandemic-legalization link. “We would at most be spending half that, ordinarily.”

In all, Dr. Bronner’s made $6.685 million in political donations this year, all funneled through New Approach PAC, a D.C.-based 527 nonprofit that’s been bankrolling drug reform efforts for years, according to IRS filings. (Bronner gives so much money that he briefly lost count; in an earlier conversation, he said he’d only given $5 million, underestimating his own efforts by more than 20 percent. “I guess it was that much!” Bronner said Friday. “Hard to keep track.”)

It remains to be seen whether the COVID windfall will be a “new normal” for the company, but flush with victory as well as some cash, Bronner is now in a unique position. If he wants to, he can pick which states are next to push drug policy reform past merely creating a commercial marijuana industry.

Though Bronner arguably deserves props for donating via a more transparent 527 nonprofit—rather than an opaque 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4), “political nonprofits” that the Center for Responsive Politics calls vehicles for “dark money”—his approach is no solution to America’s campaign-finance morass, where venture capitalists pay to make the laws legislators won’t. And there are fair questions to be asked when any business titan throws around so much cash, even on issues with broad support from public health experts.

Still, the guy is getting results, however piecemeal.

It will be some time before Oregonians can legally use mushrooms, of course. Measure 109, the successful ballot initiative on that front, requires the Oregon Health Authority to regulate growers as well as therapists, who would provide psilocybin during licensed therapy sessions, but not before a two-year planning process is over.

By that time, more states may be joining the party.

Next up for psilocybin legalization, Bronner says, is Washington state in 2022. Then, in 2024, maybe California and Colorado, cash willing.

“We’re at an inflection point in the culture… but really, it’s a function of the firepower available,” Bronner said.

With that caveat, if it is Washington, Oregon might just have been an amuse-bouche. “I think.” he added, “we can push it even further.”

As an activist political bankroller, Bronner is something like a Charles Koch or a Robert Mercer, but for drug policy reform. And in this pantheon, he sticks out. Drug legalization has always relied on the generosity of a select few, but until now, they have largely been besuited tycoons: financier and far-right target George Soros, “Prince of the Pit” Richard Dennis, the late Progressive Auto Insurance founder Peter Lewis, and the late University of Phoenix founder John Sperling.

Bronner doesn’t look like them. Nor does he act like them: In 2012, he was arrested for protesting Barack Obama, locking himself in a cage with some illegal hemp plants in front of the White House.

Drug Policy Alliance, which draws much of its funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundation, is still arguably the major player in the drug-reform and legalization space. But Bronner was the chief backer of Measure 109, the mushroom initiative, which raised north of $3 million total, $2.75 million from Bronner-backed New Approach PAC, as the most recent campaign finance filings show. (The rest of the $3.4 million he contributed to that effort came in after the most recent disclosure deadlines, according to Graham Boyd, New Approach’s political director.)

While Bronner’s $1 million check to Measure 110, the across-the-board drug decriminalization effort, shamed Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg—whose Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative gave “only” $500,000—DPA’s political arm, Drug Policy Action, was the main bankroller there, records show.

In the future, Bronner wants closer coordination with legalization’s other funders. “If we all line up as one grand coalition, we can run twice as many ballot measures in any given cycle,” he said. “We’re working hard on figuring that out.”

But for now, this is where we are: Soros, Zuck, and the weirdo hippie soap-maker from San Diego. This is who’s paying to end the drug war. And it’s working.

“It’s safe to say DC Initiative 81 wouldn’t have gotten far without him,” said Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “His money has been a big asset in moving the ball down the field, and I’m sure it will be a big help in Washington state.”© Provided by The Daily Beast Police detain David Bronner after cutting open a cage he was protesting from inside on a street near the White House in Washington, DC, on June 11, 2012. JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty

In Oregon, Portland-based therapists Sheri and Tom Eckert had been pursuing mushroom legalization since last year. In normal times, they might have been able to win with a bootstrapped, purely grassroots effort. But grabbing signatures and running a door-to-door campaign, without media buys, would have been way harder under the pandemic. When Bronner arrived, he brought expertise and advice—as well as dollars.

“Beyond the big donations, David was fully involved as part of our strategic advisory committee,” Tom Eckert said. “He’s both a team player and a difference maker, which is what we needed. I’m sure our success in Oregon will be seen as a template for the rest of the country, as we feel it should be.”

Right now, Bronner’s plan is to do in Washington what was done in Oregon, but in one fell swoop: packaging the drug-decriminalization seen in Measure 110 together with Measure 109’s legalized psilocybin therapy, in one ballot initiative. (Whether that will be too much all at once for voters to swallow remains to be seen.)

With marijuana legalization, the technique has been to move slowly, with medical cannabis preceding commercial recreational pot. That was the move with mushrooms in Oregon. But that all could change: This cycle, South Dakota became the first state to bypass medical marijuana legalization as an incremental step and go straight for adult use.

Bronner’s goal is to eventually allow adults in America to legally use mushrooms at concerts and at home as well as in therapy settings. That might happen sooner rather than later, if Americans keep buying his soap.

“It’s moving faster than I would have thought,” Bronner said. “I would not have thought we’d be ready for the kind of reforms we’re seeing, and it’s gratifying. I just think we can go further in 2022 and 2024.”

(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd.)

(Prepared by Rick Thomas, H.W., M. Right click on “Open image in New Tab” for a larger view.)

MoonWobble December 2020

Click here to see the chart:  MoonWobble Dec 2020   *** General suggestions / observations ***• This cycle is based on empirical data meaning enough data was observed and recorded to make it possible to suggest attitudes and  reactions.  Keep in mind that we all have free will and thus results will vary from one individual to another.• The graph shows the energy high at the beginning of the cycle (not unlike any other astrological aspect) followed by a slow down before it gets strong and again this reflects years of tracking and noting feedback from our many students.• If you are making a decision during this time you might want to let it set for a day or two then check your decision again to see if it still makes sense. However, you can feel into the ebb and flow and find good times to work on self emotionally in both the low and high points. Impatience, emotion and acts without thinking are common.• With practice you can feel when the energy is there to help bring completion to tasks, goals and projects you may be working on. Aloha, The ProsperosCopyright © 2020 The Prosperos, All rights reserved.

DarWilliamsVEVO Music video by Dar Williams performing What Do You Hear In These Sounds. (C) 1997 Razor & Tie

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Song

What Do You Hear in These Sounds (Live)

Artist

Dar Williams

Writers

Dar Williams

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TuneCore, UMG (on behalf of Dar Williams Records); BMG Rights Management (US), LLC, LatinAutorPerf, CMRRA, ARESA, and 2 Music Rights Societies

Lyrics:

I don’t go to therapy to find out if I’m a freak
I go and I find the one and only answer every week
And it’s just me and all the memories to follow
Down any course that fits within a fifty minute hour
And we fathom all the mysteries, explicit and inherent
When I hit a rut, she says to try the other parent
And she’s so kind, I think she wants to tell me something,
But she knows that its much better if I get it for myself
And she saysWhat do you hear in these sounds?
What do you hear in these sounds?I say I hear a doubt, with the voice of true believing
And the promises to stay, and the footsteps that are leaving
And she says “Oh, ” I say, “What?” she says, “Exactly, “
I say, “What, you think I’m angry
Does that mean you think I’m angry?”
She says “Look, you come here every week
With jigsaw pieces of your past
Its all on little soundbites and voices out of photographs
And that’s all yours, that’s the guide, that’s the map
So tell me, where does the arrow point to?
Who invented roses?”
AndWhat do you hear in these sounds?
What do you hear in these sounds?And when I talk about therapy, I know what people think
That it only makes you selfish and in love with your shrink
But oh how I loved everybody else
When I finally got to talk so much about myselfAnd I wake up and I ask myself what state I’m in
And I say well I’m lucky, ’cause I am like East Berlin
I had this wall and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks
And I could hear their radio
And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing
And they’d know that I was scared
They’d would know that I was guessing
But the wall came down and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling
And their calling out just like me, andThe stories that nobody hears, and
I collect these sounds in my ears, and
That’s what I hear in these sounds, and
That’s what I hear in these,
That’s what I hear in these sounds.

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Dar Williams
What Do You Hear in These Sounds lyrics © BMG Rights Management

The HillThe Hill Astrophysicist, Dr. Joe Pesce, discusses the most magnetic stars in the universe. He also shines light on evidence of a fast radio burst that likely traveled to Earth from a particular type of neutron star in our Milky Way galaxy. About Rising: Rising is a weekday morning show with bipartisan hosts that breaks the mold of morning TV by taking viewers inside the halls of Washington power like never before. The show leans into the day’s political cycle with cutting edge analysis from DC insiders who can predict what is going to happen. It also sets the day’s political agenda by breaking exclusive news with a team of scoop-driven reporters and demanding answers during interviews with the country’s most important political newsmakers. Follow Rising on social media: Website: Hill.TV Facebook: facebook.com/HillTVLive/ Instagram: @HillTVLive Twitter: @HillTVLive Follow Saagar Enjeti & Krystal Ball on social media: Twitter: @esaagar and @krystalball Instagram: @esaagar and @krystalmball

NOVEMBER 20, 2020 (counterpunch.org)

BY JONATHAN COOK

Photograph Source: Nick from Bristol – CC BY 2.0

Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the relationship between society and the individual.

In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to adapt to the society they lived in. Rather, society itself could become so pathological, so detached from a normative way of life, that it induced a deep-seated alienation and a form of collective insanity among its members. In modern western societies, where automation and mass consumption betray basic human needs, insanity might not be an aberration but the norm.

Fromm wrote:

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

Challenging definition

This is still a very challenging idea to anyone raised on the view that sanity is defined by consensus, that it embraces whatever the mainstream prefers, and that insanity applies only to those living outside those norms. It is a definition that diagnoses the vast majority of us today as insane.

When Fromm wrote his book, Europe was emerging from the ruins of the Second World War. It was a time of reconstruction, not only physically and financially, but legally and emotionally. International institutions like the United Nations had recently been formed to uphold international law, curb national greed and aggression, and embody a new commitment to universal human rights.

It was a time of hope and expectation. Greater industrialisation spurred by the war effort and intensified extraction of fossil fuels meant economies were beginning to boom, a vision of the welfare state was being born, and a technocratic class promoting a more generous social democracy were replacing the old patrician class.

It was at this historic juncture that Fromm chose to write a book telling the western world that most of us were insane.

Degrees of insanity

If that was clear to Fromm in 1955, it ought to be much clearer to us today, as buffoon autocrats stride the world stage like characters from a Marx Brothers movie; as international law is being intentionally unravelled to restore the right of western nations to invade and plunder; and as the physical world demonstrates through extreme weather events that the long-ignored science of climate change – and much other human-inspired destruction of the natural world – can no longer be denied.

And yet our commitment to our insanity seems as strong as ever – possibly stronger. Sounding like the captain of the Titanic, the unreconstructed British liberal writer Sunny Hundal memorably gave voice to this madness a few years back when he wrote in defence of the catastrophic status quo:

If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter?

As the clock ticks away, the urgent goal for each of us is to gain a deep, permanent insight into our own insanity. It doesn’t matter that our neighbours, family and friends think as we do. The ideological system we were born into, that fed us our values and beliefs as surely as our mothers fed us milk, is insane. And because we cannot step outside of that ideological bubble – because our lives depend on submitting to this infrastructure of insanity – our madness persists, even as we think of ourselves as sane.

Our world is not one of the sane versus the insane, but of the less insane versus the more insane.

Intimate portrait

Which is why I recommend the new documentary I Am Greta, a very intimate portrait of the Swedish child environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

Before everyone gets started, let me point out that I Am Greta is not about the climate emergency. That is simply the background noise as the film charts the personal journey begun by this 15-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome in staging a weekly lone protest outside the Swedish parliament. Withdrawn and depressed by the implications of the compulsive research she has done on the environment, she rapidly finds herself thrust into the centre of global attention by her simple, heart-felt statements of the obvious.

The schoolgirl shunned as insane by classmates suddenly finds the world drawn to the very qualities that previously singled her out as weird: her stillness, her focus, her refusal to equivocate or to be impressed.

Footage of her father desperately trying to get her to take a break and eat something, if only a banana, as she joins yet another climate march, or of her curling up in a ball on her bed, needing to be silent, after an argument with her father over the time she has spent crafting another speech to world leaders may quieten those certain she is simply a dupe of the fossil fuel industries – or, more likely, it will not.

But the fruitless debates about whether Thunberg is being used are irrelevant to this film. That is not where its point or its power lies.

Through Thunberg’s eyes

For 90 minutes we live in Thunberg’s shoes, we see the world through her strange eyes. For 90 minutes we are allowed to live inside the head of someone so sane that we can briefly grasp – if we are open to her world – quite how insane each of us truly is. We see ourselves from the outside, through the vision of someone whose Asperger’s has allowed her to “see through the static”, as she too generously terms our delusions. She is the small, still centre of simple awareness buffeted in a sea of insanity.

Watching Thunberg wander alone – unimpressed, often appalled – through the castles and palaces of world leaders, through the economic forums of the global technocratic elite, through the streets where she is acclaimed, the varied nature of our collective insanity comes ever more sharply into focus.

Four forms of insanity the adult world adopts in response to Thunberg, the child soothsayer, are on show. In its varied guises, this insanity derives from unexamined fear.

The first – and most predictable – is exemplified by the right, who angrily revile her for putting in jeopardy the ideological system of capitalism they revere as their new religion in a godless world. She is an apostate, provoking their curses and insults.

The second group are liberal world leaders and the technocratic class who run our global institutions. Their job, for which they are so richly rewarded, is to pay lip service, entirely in bad faith, to the causes Thunberg espouses for real. They are supposed to be managing the planet for future generations, and therefore have the biggest investment in recruiting her to their side, not least to dissipate the energy she mobilises that they worry could rapidly turn against them.

One of the film’s early scenes is Thunberg’s meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, shortly after she has started making headlines.

Beforehand, Macron’s adviser tries to pump Thunberg for information on other world leaders she has met. His unease at her reply that this her first such invitation is tangible. As Thunberg herself seems only too aware when they finally meet, Macron is there simply for the photoshoot. Trying to make inane small talk with someone incapable of such irrelevancies, Macron can’t help but raise an eyebrow in discomfort, and possibly mild reproof, as Thunberg concedes that the media reports of her travelling everywhere by train are right.

Cynically insane

The third group are the adults who line the streets for a selfie with Thunberg, or shout out their adulation, loading it on to her shoulders like a heavy burden – and one she signally refuses to accept. Every time someone at a march tells her she is special, brave or a hero, she immediately tells them they too are brave. It is not her responsibility to fix the climate for the rest of us, and to think otherwise is a form of infantilism.

The fourth group are entirely absent from the film, but not from the responses to it and to her. These are the “cynically insane”, those who want to load on to Thunberg a burden of a different kind. Aware of the way we have been manipulated by our politicians and media, and the corporations that now own both, they are committed to a different kind of religion – one that can see no good anywhere. Everything is polluted and dirty. Because they have lost their own innocence, all innocence must be murdered.

This is a form of insanity no different from the other groups. It denies that anything can be good. It refuses to listen to anything and anyone. It denies that sanity is possible at all. It is its own form of autism – locked away in a personal world from which there can be no escape – that, paradoxically, Thunberg herself has managed to overcome through her deep connection to the natural world.

As long as we can medicalise Thunberg as someone suffering from Asperger’s, we do not need to think about whether we are really the insane ones.

Bursting bubbles

Long ago economists made us aware of financial bubbles, the expression of insanity from investors as they pursue profit without regard to real world forces. Such investors are finally forced to confront reality – and the pain it brings – when the bubble bursts. As it always does.

We are in an ideological bubble – and one that will burst as surely as the financial kind. Thunberg is that still, small voice of sanity outside the bubble. We can listen to her, without fear, without reproach, without adulation, without cynicism. Or we can carry on with our insane games until the bubble explodes.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

by Richard Blanco

November 19, 2020 (onbeing.org)

Original Air Date November 27, 2019

On Being with Krista Tippett

The Cuban American civil engineer turned writer, Richard Blanco, straddles the many ways a sense of place merges with human emotion to make home and belonging — personal and communal. The most recent — and very resonant — question he’s asked by way of poetry is: how to love a country? At Chautauqua, Krista invited him to speak and read from his books. Blanco’s wit, thoughtfulness, and elegance captivated the crowd.

Link to podcast: https://onbeing.org/programs/richard-blanco-how-to-love-a-country/

European School of Theosophy

The revolutionary Idea of Consciousness Evolution in H. P. Blavatsky’s Esoteric Philosophy by Tim Rudbøg PhD

We are all familiar with the idea of evolution or the biological origin and development of the various species found throughout nature, but notions such as ‘spiritual evolution’ and the ‘evolution of consciousness’ have equally revolutionized human self-understanding these past couple of centuries.  Many philosophers, scientists, and a wide number of spiritual thinkers now embrace some version of the idea that human consciousness changes and evolves over time. The consciousness of the individual clearly changes from childhood to adulthood; and on a collective scale, human consciousness evolves as our species undergoes different forms of societal structures. Already on the first page of Isis Unveiled (1877), Blavatsky was critical of a one-sided biological evolution when she wrote: ‘it cannot be unreasonable to infer and believe that a faculty of perception is also growing in man’.  This lecture will discuss Blavatsky’s notion of consciousness evolution and show how her revolutionary perspectives in The Secret Doctrine (1888) have in a very fundamental way  been instrumental for the discussions and perspectives that emerged in the twentieth century and continue to inform current debates about consciousness, spirituality, and evolution.

BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Tim Rudbøg is an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of <em>The Copenhagen Center for the Study of Theosophy and Esotericism </em>sponsored by the Blavatsky Trust. Rudbøg is a trained historian of religions and has for over twenty years had an interest in Theosophy. His current major research project is focused on Blavatsky’s <em>The Secret Doctrine </em>and intellectual history and builds on his prize winning PhD thesis from the University of Exeter, which was dedicated to the study of the major themes in H. P. Blavatsky textual corpus. Rudbøg’s other work and publications have equally focused on topics such as Blavatsky’s Esoteric Instructions and the notion of an ageless wisdom and on the academic study of Western esotericism. Among his most recent works to be published in 2019 is his co-edited anthology <em>Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society 1875-1900, Oxford University Press.

Marianne Williamson Following my interview with Andrew Yang on The Marianne Williamson Podcast, I answered listener questions. Here’s one from someone who asks, “What is one spiritual principle, individually and as a nation, we can draw from as we navigate these challenging times?” Thank you to everyone sending in questions. If you have something that needs answering, email me at Marianne@KastMedia.com. I answer two or three on every podcast Subscribe to The Marianne Williamson Podcast YouTube Channel:  https://bit.ly/3lEb6JT Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/36qnqH4 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2JV8pW4 Follow Marianne on Social Media Twitter: https://twitter.com/marwilliamson Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/williamsonma… Instagram: https://instagram.com/mariannewilliamson