[Recent poem. Image by Alexey Kljatov. ]
Is you is or is you ain’t
When you breathe
is it you
breathing
or is there
a you
being breathed?
The day you stop breathing
is it you
airless, deceased
or is it you,
unmoved,
seeing its cessation?
Is you is or is you ain’t
•March 3, 2026 • 1 CommentGood Morning
•February 23, 2026 • 1 Comment
[poem from last year's batch]
Good morning
and the brain overflowing
like a cup the Zen master
pours insight into
thick with the fog
of thought congealed
with feelings and books
a conditioned machine
of the memory I think I am
chugging along without me
like my disassembling body.
Time to empty the cup,
rather, find the formless cup
of emptiness, the space
between thoughts, lines, breaths,
re-membering the stillness
I am, even as I forget.
No Mind, No Self. Meditation and Philosophy
•February 15, 2026 • Leave a Comment
[Another attempt at clarification and ‘pointing’, with respect to the questions of ‘self’, identity, consciousness, spacious awareness, the difference between philosophising and ‘meditating’, the conceptual and non-conceptual … A previous attempt can be found in my July 2023 blog. Photo ‘Afternoon Soliloquy’ by my friend the late Chris Donaldson, 1993.]
NO MIND, NO SELF. MEDITATION AND PHILOSOPHY
Lost in Thought
It would seem most of us are usually lost in thought. I certainly am. Without really being aware of it, we are engaged in almost constant self-talk, mind chatter, rumination, interpretation, memory, judgement. Most of the time we are so identified with this thinking and inner chatter that we are not even aware we are actually doing this. At least in our materially rich, industrialised countries, it just seems our ‘normal’ state of being.
Philosophers of course take this mind activity to another level. As professionals of constant thinking and word production, they are truly lost in thought, with the usual thought content being abstract concepts, ideas. They specialise in having thoughts about thoughts, ideas about ideas.
Most; like the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes, explicitly see themselves from the outside, as no more than ‘things that think’ (res cogitans), which is of course just another concept, another thought. They like to claim and argue about these abstract concepts and ideas.
It seems they cannot step back and simply be aware, consciously observe without immediately thinking, analysing, without conceptualising. Thus they see everything from the outside, through the filter of a concept. The perceived and conceptualised then becomes a, potentially infinite, series of separate, third-person objects, things.
On whatever level, not just philosophers but all of us are of course caught up in this conceptualising and reifying our direct sensory perceptions.
On the few occasions philosophers do step back and introspectively turn inwards, they, again like Descartes, tend to say they can only be certain of one perceived phenomenon: the fact that they are thinking.
They then quickly start talking about more abstract concepts, external third-person things, like subject, self, identity, consciousness, mind and body etc. Thus again verbalising, objectifying the internal process of direct experiencing, they are, without realising it, identifying with their thoughts and conceptualising, and thus unconsciously locating themselves outside their first-person, subjective inner process of observing and being conscious itself.
This consciousness or being conscious becomes a reified thing, a concept that they then find troublingly impossible to deduce from their other guiding concepts of things like matter, molecules, neurons, brain, cerebral cortex. ‘Consciousness’ then famously becomes their materialist ‘hard problem’ (David Chalmers): how can ‘stuff’, a material thing like a brain, ‘produce’ immaterial consciousness, thoughts or feelings?
David Hume and the Buddha
One partial, and famous, exception to this usual objectifying philosophical and scientific procedure was the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. He reported that when he looked inside he found, like Gautama Buddha two thousand years ago, no entity, no object or thing that thinks (Descartes’ res cogitans), no self or soul. In fact he found no thing at all. No personality, subject, ego. Nothing, i.e. no thing. All he found were subtle, fleeting, complex processes or aggregations of perceiving, feeling, wanting, thinking, associating, comparing.
No Mind, No -Self, or Meditation
Of course, like the words in this essay, it may be objected that these are all objectifying words and concepts too. Indeed they are. However, they are here being used in an attempt to point, not towards other concepts, and thus ‘philosophise’, but towards direct, actual experiences, ones all can experience simply and empirically when they dispassionately observe inner processes, i.e. ‘meditate’, or more exactly, be aware of their always-present awareness.
Hume’s observation seems to be an empirical ‘scientific’ description of the experience of calm, disinterested inward observing. Also sometimes called ‘meditation’. Interestingly, this no-self observation is also made both in neuroscience (e.g. Brian Hood, ‘The Self Illusion’) and in Buddhism’s Three Aspects of Existence doctrine of ‘anatta’ or ‘anatman’ or no-self.
Some Buddhist spiritual teaching or ‘psychology’ speaks of these observed inner processes not as any ‘self’ entity but as coming in clusters, patterns or ‘aggregates’ (‘skandhas’). These are seen as energised or driven by repetitive patterns of reactive, conditioned responses and attachments that have somehow imprinted themselves as habitual memory loops, dispositions, self-talk narratives, sometimes trans-generationally.
These skandhas are ultimately linked to pleasure/displeasure, desiring, wanting or craving, fearing. When identified with, these aggregations or habitual response patterns easily become dispositions, an illusory sense of self or I, a personality, character, an ego. All are continually reinforced by stories and self-talk (my life, my experiences, my traumas, my problems, my desires etc.)
Disidentifying from these reactive patterns, realising this false sense of self as an illusion without any unchanging, autonomous substrate or substance or ‘thinginess’ is what defines spiritual liberation or enlightenment (bodhi, moksha, sartori) in all non-dual spiritual traditions.
Our Original Nature: Spacious Awareness
Thus disidentified from these habitual thought-feeling patterns, one is what one really is: ‘original’ or ‘Buddha nature’, unmanifest, unborn, undying, no entity, no me-thing, a spacious awareness, a formless no-thingness, Presence or Formlessness or Emptiness (‘sunyata’) within which all transient forms or phenomena, including sensory, emotional and thought forms, appear and disappear.
Consciously observing without thinking, ‘meditating’, we realise we are no-thing, the empty, eternal sky of dispassionate observation, the spacious formlessness and alert but calm awareness or consciousness through which pass all the many diverse clouds of thoughts, feelings, volitions, personal dramas and stories, lives and deaths.
All these are but transient waves, powerful waves we may often identify with and feel overwhelmed by, and yet only apparent waves within our eternal unmoved ocean of stillness and (back-) ground of awareness. . (Jesus may point to this using the expression ‘the kingdom of God within you’, St Paul speak of the ‘peace that passeth all understanding’).
The only reality: the eternal Now
Eternity, the timeless, us? Again, let us step back, look inside (directly ‘in-see’) and consider the empirical facts we observe.
We observe how what we call time, present, past and future, are, like our illusory sense of self as an I- or me-thing, also not entities, objects, forms or things we can see and locate. Rather they are just concepts made of memories and imaginings based on memories, they are narratives, self-talk, thoughts. As with the self, we cannot actually experience the past or future, time itself, as real things.
We realise we can actually never experience anything but what is going on in the very present moment, the Now. A Now in which we may replay the thoughts of the past we call memories or imagine thoughts of possible events we call the future.
We realise both memories of the past and imaginings or expectations of the future can only be experienced right now in the present moment. Past and future exist nowhere else. Not perceiving this, we create an illusion of time, but to stand outside and see our unconscious creation of time is to be outside time in Timelessness. The timeless Now is really all there is …
This direct awareness of Now beyond thought is thus outside time, timeless, eternal, and simply another name for who we really are: Buddha nature, no self, aware spaciousness
A bird calls, a breeze arises, fades. A leaf falls. The moon’s reflection leaves the pond water unsullied. The bird’s flight leaves no trace.
The C Word Taboo
•February 4, 2026 • 5 Comments
The C Word Taboo
In the current conjuncture, it is easier to imagine an end to the world than to imagine an end to capitalism (Frederic Jameson, Seeds of Time, 1994).
- Maria, Bill, Joe, Lin-lin and Amina
Maria has had her workload increased at the child care centre: it’s now six infants instead of three
Bill has to wear a surveillance watch and is penalised if he takes too long getting parcels at the Amazon warehouse
Joe is a farmer contracted to sell to Woolworths at a price lower than his competitors that barely covers his rising costs; he has to clear more land and use chemicals to maximise his output and make some kind of profit.
Lin-lin is a graphic designer now unemployed because her employer has decided AI is cheaper.
Amina is a young worker in a textile sweatshop in Bangla Desh and earns 35c an hour (not enough to cover food and accommodation), and 40c for a shirt retailing in our rich world for $10. (A living wage for textile workers would increase the price of a $10 T-shirt by 10c).
Although Maria, Bill, Joe, Lin-lin and Amina don’t know each other, they share a common fate: they are all caught in the vice of capitalism. All are suffering because their employers or contractors are not interested in their well-being but in their own need to cut costs, maintain or increase profits within a competitive market system. This is not personal or optional, it is what the system demands.
- The C-Word Taboo
It is doubtful that Maria, Bill, Joe, Lin-lin or Amina will use the word ‘capitalism’ and see themselves as its victims. Why is the word almost never mentioned, even by progressives? Is there a kind of social taboo around using this word? If so, why? In whose interests is this apparent conspiracy of silence by which capitalism is made invisible?
Consider our contemporary world and its deep, interdependent crises. Climate catastrophe, ecocide, toxification, the collapse of life support systems and thus civilisation. Far-right populism and fascism, crisis of liberal democracy, stratospheric inequality (with 1% owning almost half the world’s wealth). Uncontrolled, run-away technology, epidemics of loneliness and mental health issues, loss of social trust and cohesion.
Can anything be changed in all this without naming and understanding the economic and social system directly or indirectly creating these dysfunctions, capitalism?
Granted, it is often hard to understand systems. Unlike the simple, material phenomena and individual actions of daily life, they seem invisible. You can’t ‘see’ a system. You can’t ‘see’ a relationship. But you can sense and understand both. So, here is an attempt at a simple, very general definition of capitalism.
- General Definition of Capitalism
Capitalism is a social and economic system in which Capital reigns.
Capital is money that MUST grow, accumulate, make a profit.
Capital grows by, ultimately, extracting or exploiting ever more resources, natural and human.
This usually happens in cycles of boom, bust, quit until potentially everything has been degraded, destroyed and/or turned into a profit-making commodity to be bought and sold. Society has then become a total market society in which Capital and commodities reign, a society in which ‘things are in the saddle and ride mankind.’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Capitalism is a class system in which the few ultra-rich owners, managers and beneficiaries of Big Capital have the power and rule over everyone else and make all the key decisions. Capitalism is inherently oligarchic and undemocratic.
Capitalism has from the outset been based on the plunder and looting of both nature and the Global South.
- Capital as Amoral Cancer
Capitalism is the ultimate driver of our life-threatening climate, ecological, democratic and civilisational crisis, a crisis unprecedented in its depth and scope.
It is the ultimate driver because of Capital’s inherent need to perpetually grow and accumulate and this simply cannot be on a finite planet. It is pathological. ‘Infinite growth’ is, as the saying goes, the ideology of the cancer cell. Like a malignant cancer cell, it needs to be limited, controlled or eliminated so healthy cells and beings can thrive.
Whatever its own PR hype, Capital is inherently amoral. It can care about nothing but its own growth.
In 2022 one senior US ‘investment’ banker broke through the PR hype and spelled things out. The average loan length at his bank was seven years, so: ‘Who cares if Miami is six metres under water in 100 years? What happens to the planet in year seven is actually irrelevant to our loan book.’ (P. Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, p. 636)
In 1991 World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers suggested that the economic logic behind dumping toxic waste in lower-wage countries is ‘impeccable,’ arguing that such actions could be justified based on capitalist cost-benefit analyses related to pollution and health impacts merely on poor people. He wrote: ‘a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.’
Similarly, a draft economic chapter to a 1995 IPCC report calculating the cost-benefit ratios of climate change policies valued a dead American or European at $1.5 million, a dead citizen from a ‘low-income’ country at $150,000, and that although there would be five times as many deaths in the poor nations, the ‘dollar mortality cost’ of our OECD (rich-world) deaths would be twice as great.
This amoral social system is historically new, its mechanism unknown to previous societies which were all based on some kind of spiritual belief and morality.
Trade, markets, money, even interest-taking (‘usury’) were all known, but they never ruled economics, much less society, as they do now under capitalism, and especially under its current version called neoliberalism.
- Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is industrial capitalism’s latest iteration, beginning with Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan in the 1970s after the end of the post-war growth boom and welfare state consensus.
Neoliberalism has been a conscious class war from above. Its aim: to shift wealth and power back to Capital after its temporary weakening by the Great Depression, World War II, Social Democracy and its Keynesian, interventionist welfare state and downward wealth redistribution.
Its radical liberal ideology was formulated by economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in the 1940s and then throughout the 1950s and 60s propagated by Big Capital-funded think tanks, lobby groups, conferences, academics, cartoon and print propaganda (e.g. Reader’s Digest with eight million subscribers), often via secretive ‘dark money’ donations. By the 1970s there were about 500 Capital-funded neoliberal propaganda think tanks in over ninety countries.
The key aim: to wind back the ‘tyranny’ of state regulation of Capital and intervention benefitting labour and the poor. Capital (aka ‘the market’) should be ‘free’, i.e. allowed to do what it liked. Capital should regain complete power and renewed upward wealth redistribution to the ultra-rich.
Neoliberalism’s chance came after the end of the post-war growth boom and the ‘stagflation’ crisis of state-interventionist Keynesianism in the 1970s, particularly after Nixon’s abandoning of fixed exchange rates and the inflationary oil price shock of 1973. Chicago economist and Hayek-student Milton Friedman became an enthusiastic supporter of brutal Chilean dictator Pinochet’s and President Reagan’s new neoliberal (‘monetarist’) policies.
Reagan’s policies were spelled out for him as two thousand proposals in the twenty-volume ‘Mandate for Leadership’ document by the Heritage Foundation, a Big-Capital-funded neoliberal think-tank: shrink the social welfare state and public services, tax cuts for the rich while massively increasing military spending and Presidential executive powers.
Tne new ‘third way’ Social Democrats (Hawke-Keating, Clinton, Blair), originally working-class-oriented parties, quickly jettisoned Keynesianism and pursued the same neoliberal policies of deregulating Capital (often as ‘self-regulation’ or ‘let the markets decide’) and weakening union collective bargaining (‘enterprise bargaining’). Supposedly ‘opposing’ parties became the two wings of the one neoliberal party, differing in only relatively minor details.
The labour market was made more ‘flexible’ and precarious and the social safety net weakened, state assets were privatised and ‘managerialised’ or public services reduced (‘expanding opportunity, not bureaucracy’), the state entered ‘private-public partnerships’ and pursued free trade and offshoring etc. Real wages stagnated or went down, many became the dual-income working poor as wealth and income inequality soared to new heights.
With Social Democracy now also neoliberal, politics and representative democracy became totally one-dimensional, a de facto One-Party state even more dependent on vacuous spin-doctoring, and increasingly lost any legitimacy in the eyes of the marginalised. This also increased with the outright lies of the Iraq invasion and, rather than punishment, the state bail-out of speculative finance Capital in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.
- Neoliberalism, Democracy Crisis and Far-Right Populism
With a lack of true party-political choice and no prospect of relief from declining real wages and living standards under neoliberalism, many people became susceptible to right-wing media- and demagogue-led distractions, conspiracy fictions and scapegoating. Authoritarian ‘strongmen’ fulminate against ‘woke’ culture and experts, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, transgender people and often promise a ‘return to traditional values’ or ‘greatness’ of the nation.
Having taken over and delegitimised representative democracy, neoliberalism now ushers in a new form of authoritarianism, autocracy, and potentially, fascism. Not only real-estate billionaire Trump but Silicon Valley capitalists like Thiel and Musk are open about their autocratic desires. Musk lauded the German far-right AfD for maintaining ‘German values’ against immigration, Thiel noted that ‘I no longer believe that freedom [for Capital to do what it likes] and democracy are compatible.’
Trump is one such autocratic demagogue (like Putin, Orban, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Modi, Bolsonaro, Milei). His campaign team was largely composed of people from the neoliberal think-tanks funded by the far-right Koch brothers, Exxon and others. As Monbiot and Hutchison put it: ‘In other words, the lobby groups funded by oligarchs and corporations were no longer influencing the government. They were the government.’ (The Invisible Doctrine, p. 66)
As with Reagan, his policies were also written for him by the Koch-brothers- and Big-Capital-funded Heritage Institute (under the same title ‘Mandate for Leadership’).
This time its capitalist neoliberal agenda included far-right Christian Nationalist ‘culture war’ elements against ‘woke’ diversity and equality programs, abortion rights, ‘cultural Marxism’. Otherwise, the neoliberal agenda included radically cutting government size and spending that supports effective public services and support for the poor, the dismantling of the liberal elements and departments within the state and their replacement by far-right Trump-loyalists, the radical extension of Presidential executive power, reduced/flat tax rates, the repeal of any support for decarbonisation and climate change policies, massive increases in military spending.
As we are now seeing, far from being identified with freedom and democracy, capitalism and neoliberalism, always the oligarchy of the wealthy, obviously can, and often do, take the political form of outright autocracy or fascism. Conversely, a truly democratic, socially just and ecologically sustainable world would necessarily be a post-capitalist one.
Nine Spells for my Grandsons
•January 4, 2026 • Leave a Comment
[Recent poem. Some spells for the new year...]
Nine Spells for my Grandsons
May the air not load your lungs with plastic
May starry sable nights still sing to your clear eyes
May fine food from fertile fields still fill you
May the love, quirks, challenges
of real people people your days
May real songbirds and dogs faithfully dog your steps
through the vertigos of the virtual
May books and trees still curl your minds inwards, enfold you
in the calm aura of their presence
May you remember you are the silent sky within
May your Being not be lost in your doing
May you remember
A Brief Moment of Sanity
•December 24, 2025 • 1 Comment
[Recent poem about the famous Christmas truce and fraternisation on the western front in !914. 'One World or None', still an obvious lesson we as a species and human family seem to be having great difficulties in learning. Do we really need the immense pain and suffering of all these further local and global catastrophes before we awaken to our next evolutionary step to higher-deeper consciousness so absent from the public sphere but already present in many of us? So unnecessary. Have a great Christmas, festive season, New Year. Peter]
A Brief Moment of Sanity
The trench stank of latrine and terror.
Mud caked leggings in thick brown scabs,
our boots heavy with the wet weight of doom.
Our days rolled over us in tsunamis of roar,
infernal symphonies laced with arpeggios
of screams, whimpering, brief silences
that sneered at our longing for forest,
meadow, stream. Our birdsong metallic,
cynical as a sniper’s sudden exclamation
mark shattering a careless head.
Our only relief the tedium of waiting
that stalked our hours like a boring friend.
Until that night, that first Christmas Eve.
It started with the Krauts. Faint crystals
of sound floated through the icy space
between us like ghostly, dreaming stars.
‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft, einsam wacht ...’
Somethin stirred, some long-buried sense,
a slow widening of our cells and souls.
This singing rippled with a deep stillness,
a sad, soft majesty of innocence.
Our Silent Night, holy Night responded
with the blood-rush of an unstoppable antiphon
like a lover awakened to a word of love.
Still singing, we downed guns, climbed
the walls of bloodied earth, cut through
the barbed fangs of fear and hate, walked,
amazed, taller now, the snow-slushed
no-man’s land of separation and sorrow.
We shook hands that, like ours, once
baked bread, fished fish, dug coal,
tousled a child’s play-drenched hair.
We swapped cigarettes, peered into
the formal sepia faces of wife and child
that calmly mocked the old word: ‘enemy’.
We showed our own, frozen fingers
pointing at names, ages, relationship.
A football appeared, and no-man’s land
became the friendly field of everyman.
As we stumbled through the ice-mulched
mud in our greatcoats like happy bears,
we suddenly were alive again,
and no one kept the score.
Later, our gentlemen officers raged,
as if their world had come to its feared end.
Firing resumed. We obeyed.
He
•December 18, 2025 • 2 Comments
[Recent rhyming villanelle for the season. Wishing all readers a peaceful festive season and 2026]
He
never said he’d return to fulfil some doctrine.
His followers never really understood
as he pointed to the Kingdom of Heaven within.
Never cared if his mother was a virgin.
Just went around doing much good.
Never said he’d return to fulfil some doctrine.
Never counted warbling angels on any pin.
Just a humble carpenter, appreciated fine wood.
Pointed to the Kingdom of Heaven already within.
No Calvin, no self-righteous hater of sin.
Raised the low up wherever he could.
Never said he’d return to fulfil some doctrine.
Never ever called himself king.
Crucified, shed very human blood.
Pointed to the Kingdom of Heaven within.
This misunderstood sage so lost in the din
of conversions, crusades, wars’ merciless mud
never said he’d return to fulfil some doctrine,
just pointed to the Kingdom of Heaven within.
Plague Sonnet
•December 8, 2025 • Leave a Comment
Plague Sonnet
The first pandemonia in Italian hospitals,
Wuhan-wafted, blue plastic-gowned nurses
sleeping slumped in concrete corners curled
in fetal exhaustion, in London myriads
emerging from cocooned buildings at dusk
to clap NHS heroines, the church-like emptiness
of lonely shelves of pasta, toilet rolls, loud
demonstrations melding freedom and insanity.
And, suddenly, poverty eliminated, dominance
of overpaid, useless work revealed in the essentiality
of underpaid cleaners, truckies, teachers, tradies,
the skies unscratched by holiday flights, dolphins
returning to now-clear waters in Venice lagoon,
the essential ability to sit quietly in a silent room.
Metamorphoses
•December 4, 2025 • Leave a Comment
[Fairly recent childhood poem. Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children's Games 1560]
Metamorphoses
I was seven when I walked
into poverty. Two houses up,
or down.
Inside, a distraught plastic bucket
pinged with cold rain from the ceiling.
But Richard, same age, a head-length shorter,
there proudly showed me his pupating pets
in a shoe box filled with their acrid stench,
spidery silk threads, fretted mulberry leaves.
I can’t remember any transformation,
metamorphosis
into winged beauty bursting to fly
free above childhood’s treeless street.
At home, watching me eat my breakfast,
his hunger whispered he wished he was like me.
At Philip’s up the road around a corner
drawn curtains defied the blessings of light,
shut in the sour depression of dead air.
Rat busy-bodies scuttled among junk rusting in the yard.
Sometimes snot yo-yoed precariously
from the snub-nose supporting his fogged glasses.
We were largely happy together there
on Palmer Street in our boyish boisterousness,
our unknown changes, the first
shy inklings of our invisibly unfolding wings
drying in the rising sun of our hidden expectations,
each day a fresh possibility of play,
an old chant, taunt or ritual,
a new sight, sensation, idea,
some new occasion for tears
of laughter or desolation.
Ken Knabb, The Hive Mind against Trump
•November 26, 2025 • Leave a Comment
[The usual lucid, common-sense, undogmatic, utopian thoughts one can always expect from situationist Ken Knabb. Taken from Ken’s admirable Bureau of Public Secrets website. Image courtesy of libcom.]
Hive Mind Strikes Back
— Collaborative Resistance to Trumpian Fascism —
At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, I noted:
This is the first time in history that such a momentous event has taken place with virtually everyone on earth aware of it at the same time. And it is playing out while much of humanity is obliged to stay at home, where they can hardly avoid reflecting on the situation and sharing their reflections with others. . . . Millions of people are using this pause to investigate and critique the system’s fiascos, and they are doing this at a time when practically everyone else in the world is obsessively focused on the same issues. I think this first ever global discussion about our society is potentially more important than the particular crisis that happened to trigger it. . . . We need to be aware that this is happening, aware that what is going on within us and among us is potentially more promising than all the farcical political dramas we are watching so intently. [Pregnant Pause: Remarks on the Corona Crisis]
Five years later we find ourselves in the middle of another crisis which has impacted us even more dramatically than that earlier one. This new crisis has also provoked widespread debate about our society, but there are two key differences: rather than being a unexpected natural disaster affecting the whole world, it is an intentionally provoked political crisis in a single country (with the rest of the world looking on in puzzlement and horror); and the popular response has been much more active and participatory.
Three weeks after Trump’s second election, I wrote:
The latest result of this pseudo-democratic spectacle is that after more than a year of nonstop campaign blather, costing billions of dollars and monopolizing people’s attention all over the world, 77 million people in a supposedly modern and literate country have chosen to reelect a sick and desperate little man who has already been convicted of multiple felonies and indicted for many more (including for treason); a vicious man who has openly threatened to take vengeance on virtually anyone who isn’t totally in his camp; a vain man who has surrounded himself by fawning toadies even less likely to restrain him than the ones in his previous administration; a man with such delusions of grandeur that he never admits a mistake — with one notable exception: he has said that during his first term he made the mistake of being too nice. [Trump’s Spectacular Comeback]
After some speculations about what might be ahead, I concluded:
There are so many possibilities that I have no idea where this situation will lead, and I doubt if anyone else does. Millions of people have been sharing all sorts of responses to the shock, discussing what went wrong and offering suggestions as to how best to respond, politically or personally. I’ve been impressed and encouraged by how thoughtful and pertinent many of them are. Some may be rather naïve, some may contradict each other, but I’m not too concerned about that. There’s room for all sorts of projects, big or small, and all sorts of tactics, moderate or radical. People will sort out which things work and which don’t.
And so they have been doing.
During the first few weeks I, like just about everyone else, was surprised by how quickly and brazenly the new regime proceeded with illegal, maniacal, and even fascistic actions. Each day we were presented with new outrages and insanities, all happening so fast that it was hard to keep up. But almost immediately there were lots of popular responses, ranging from huge national demonstrations to smaller and more focused actions on all sorts of terrains.
As I followed the events, wondering if I might write something further, I found that virtually every fact I thought about calling attention to had already become common knowledge, and virtually every idea I came up with had already been articulated by others.
But looking at the overall process, I was struck by how these actions were being publicized and discussed in real time by the people taking part in them; and how many of those people were carrying out those actions with little or no outside leadership; and how the multitude of different ideas were being spontaneously sifted and sorted into coherent tactics and projects. As in other social crises, many people’s first impulse was to find public figures who might explain to them what was going on and tell them what needed to be done about it. And they did indeed find and share various sources of ideas and information that they found credible and useful. But as the communications went to and fro, many of them began to take a more active part, coming up with their own ideas and in some cases implementing them. And amid this flux of ideas and actions and interactions, there was a sort of survival of the fittest: certain ideas and tactics emerged that were so clearly appropriate that they were almost immediately recognized and acted on by thousands or even millions of people. Not in lockstep like soldiers, but as flexible groupings of people maintaining their own diverse views and styles while cooperating in joint or parallel projects.
This started me thinking about the notion of “hive mind.” That term was of course originally coined to describe the instinctive collective sense that social insects such as bees and ants seem to have; but by extension it has also come to refer to human networks where people seem to manifest some sort of collective intelligence arising out of shared networks of information and ideas.
Wikipedia (itself a splendid example of shared intelligence) notes that hive mind has several rather different connotations. What I’m talking about here is definitely not “groupmind,” where people are programmed into all thinking alike. It roughly corresponds what Wikipedia calls collaborative intelligence. In contrast to “collective intelligence,” where there is generally a central coordinator, collaborative intelligence is decentralized. Although the process may be rough and seemingly chaotic, the net result of countless individual experiences, interactions, and debates sometimes enables masses of people to arrive at practical conclusions (this works, that doesn’t) without any formal decision-making procedures or top-down directives.
During the last three decades such networks have been enormously extended and speeded up by the development of the Internet and the various forms of social media, where ideas and information can be shared almost instantaneously to millions of people around the world. Among other things, they have facilitated radical social movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy.
It seems to me that we’ve seen a lot of collaborative intelligence in the various anti-Trump actions during the last twelve months. Below I’ve mentioned just a few examples. Note that in most of these cases the spontaneous self-organization of masses of people has been more important than the coordinating role of national organizations. There are virtually no significant leaders. There may indeed be a few politicians and celebrities who get in the news for speaking out, or a few prominent experts or analysts who people resort to for information or suggestions, but they’re not really leading anyone. People compare and contrast them, choosing those they find the most useful and reliable and ignoring the others. The actual “movers” of most of the actions usually turn out to be loose volunteer groupings of ordinary people serving as little more than contact persons. If you go to their websites, they typically encourage you to seek out other people or groups in your local communities and to take part in those projects that appeal to you. Except for the virtually unanimous agreement to maintain nonviolence, there are no rules and everyone is welcome regardless of their views as long as they’re opposed to the Trump regime (or even merely to some aspects of that regime).
The “No Kings” protests. Drawing 5 million people (June 14) and then 7 million (October 18) in more than 2000 towns and cities around the country, these were the largest mass demonstrations in American history. They were initiated or supported by a coalition of more than two hundred national organizations, but the actual gatherings have mostly been organized locally and autonomously. While many other protests have focused on particular issues, these huge rallies have functioned as big-tent gatherings — terrains where diverse people, groups, issues, and perspectives can all jostle together, debate, and share experiences. They also serve to counteract the feelings of isolation and helplessness the regime tries to foster, and the safety in numbers reassures people that they can take part without too much risk. (Hive mind is virtually impossible to surveil or control or co-opt.)
Immigrant support and anti-ICE actions. This issue has involved tense confrontations on many fronts. At the national level, legal actions have challenged the kidnapping and deportation of immigrants (documented or not), including to the torture prison in El Salvador. Despite the conservative leanings of many federal judges (many of whom were appointed by Bush or Trump), they have almost invariably ruled against the Trump regime’s actions, often adding scathing rebukes of the bad faith of the regime’s legal arguments and of its repeated failures to implement court orders. Meanwhile, Democratic state and local governments and various social justice organizations have responded with legal and logistical support; local communities have reached out with all sorts of improvised actions to help and reassure their immigrant friends and neighbors in whatever modest ways they can; and last but not least, thousands of individuals have courageously monitored ICE actions, organized ways to warn people of ICE presence, and even maneuvered to block or slow down ICE vehicles, risking arrest for their supposedly illegal actions (as if kidnapping wasn’t a far more serious crime). See, for example, these two articles: Immigration crackdown inspires uniquely Chicago pushback that’s now a model for other cities and Another Undaunted City: Charlotte defends democracy and decency.
The Gaza protests. The continuing mass murders in Gaza during the last two years have shocked millions of people and shifted a majority of the US population from its previous automatic support of Israel to widespread outrage against it. But note that although large American majorities (including a majority of Jewish Americans and the great majority of Democratic voters) are now opposed to the Gaza genocide, most Democratic politicians have remained subservient to AIPAC (the powerful pro-Israel lobby) — a glaring example of the disconnect between the masses of people and the political establishments that pretend to represent them.
The “Tesla Takedown” protests. These took advantage of the fact that one particular series of outrages — the accessing of public records and trashing of public services by the unelected and unaccountable “Department of Government Efficiency” — could be personalized, since it happened to be led by the richest person in the world. The boycotts and demonstrations at Tesla dealerships in the US and around the world crashed Tesla sales and stock valuation, leading to Elon Musk’s withdrawal from Washington and to his (temporary) split with Trump. Even though Musk is so rich that none of that mattered much to him financially, it felt like the protesters won that battle: It is very unusual to see one’s actions directly impact a billionaire corporation.
The Jimmy Kimmel boycotts. Most boycotts never get off the ground, and when they do it’s usually the result of months of planning and publicity, trying to convince masses of people that, among so many issues clamoring for attention, the particular issue merits their support. But when the Trump regime pressured Disney+/Hulu to drop Jimmy Kimmel’s popular television program, a lot of people were so infuriated that they independently and immediately canceled their subscriptions and let everyone else know about it — which inspired thousands of others to do the same, and so on. In less than a week more than 3 million customers canceled their subscriptions to Disney+/Hulu, those two companies caved, and Kimmel was back on the air with higher ratings than ever. See the Wikipedia article Suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
The Epstein Files. This particular issue has upset even many of the MAGAs, since part of the propaganda they have been fed for years was that Democratic politicians were listed in the Epstein Files and supposedly Trump was going to expose them once he got back into office. When the new Trump administration refused to release those files (because Trump himself was intimately associated with Epstein) the MAGAs had a lot of trouble processing it. Noticing this weak spot, anti-Trump people publicized and satirized the issue on every occasion. In mid-November this issue finally broke through the Republican congressional obstruction, and it seems to be dramatically accelerating the collapse of the MAGA coalition.
Nonviolence. Except for a few isolated incidents of vandalism (if you call that violence), all of these movements have been totally nonviolent. In the present context violent actions are so obviously counterproductive that they are almost universally recognized as the work of provocateurs (or possibly of a few thoughtless radicals who have not considered the actual effects of their actions).
Humor. Protests have always included satirical signs and slogans, but rarely to such a degree as now. The guy in Portland who thought of showing up in a frog costume inspired countless others around the country to do likewise — an amusing and effective way to undermine the regime’s claim that anti-Trump protesters are dangerous and violent criminals and that major cities are being destroyed by chaotic insurrections. It must be admitted, however, that Trump’s rants and self-glorifications are so delirious that it’s hard for any satire to keep up. In fact, it’s often difficult to tell which is satire and which is reality.
Self-care. A simple but valuable counsel was widely shared from the very beginning: Pace yourself. Don’t guilt-trip yourself and overdo it and get so OD’d that you end up dropping out. Pick a few doable projects that particularly appeal to you, while continuing to do what you need to do to take care of yourself and your loved ones and to carry on as human a life as possible under the circumstances.
So many other outrages and absurdities could be mentioned, any one of which in previous eras would have monopolized the headlines for weeks and resulted in shamefaced resignations by those responsible. Here, for example, is just the opening paragraph of one of Heather Cox Richardson’s informative daily newsletters:
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) continues to try to pin the upcoming catastrophic lapse in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding on the Democrats. But with the U.S. Department of Agriculture sitting on $6 billion in funds Congress appropriated for just such an event, the Treasury finding $20 billion to prop up Trump ally Javier Milei in Argentina, Johnson refusing to bring the House into regular session to negotiate an end to the government shutdown, and President Donald J. Trump demanding $230 million in damages from the American taxpayer, bulldozing the East Wing of the White House to build a gold-plated ballroom that will dwarf the existing White House, and traveling to Asia, where South Korean leadership courted him by giving him a gold crown and serving him brownies topped with edible gold, blaming any funding shortfall on Democrats is a hard sell. [October 30, 2025]
It’s been hard to keep up. One of the main issues we face is the fact that we’re forced to face so many different issues. What we’re going through is so vast and confusing and rapidly changing that no one can pretend to grasp it all, let alone present a comprehensive account of it. I’m not proposing “hive mind” as some innovative theoretical concept that will explain everything. It’s simply a vivid and humorous image designed to call people’s attention to what they themselves are already doing.
Whatever you want to call it, the current anti-Trump movement has drawn in millions of people and spontaneously come up with all sorts of good projects and tactics. I don’t care whether they’re moderate or radical, so much as that people are getting involved and doing the best they can. Political awareness and political engagement are spreading to millions of people who used to be relatively unpolitical. It may seem pretty trivial to just sign a few petitions or attend a few rallies while others are getting arrested or deported, but that is more than most people used to do. And once they dip their toe in the water, they may decide to wade in further and start swimming.
One indication of this widespread awareness is that in writing this piece I don’t have to describe or explain very much. Most of the matters I’ve mentioned are already widely known, and in many cases pretty well understood. In fact, most of what I’m saying here is just paraphrasing points that countless others have already made, or at most suggesting a few broader contexts that may help them better understand what they are already doing. That’s what the situationists meant when they said: “Our ideas are in everybody’s mind.”
* * *
Although most people taking part in anti-Trump actions are quite aware of many of the flaws of the Democratic Party, I think it’s safe to say that virtually all of them believe that under the present circumstances it is imperative that the Democrats defeat the Republicans in the coming elections.
I happen to share that view. So do many (though not all) of my situationist, anarchist, and ultraleftist friends, who, like me, are normally very dubious about that party and about electoral politics in general.
I encourage everyone to continue to give the Democratic Party all the criticisms it so richly deserves. Nothing will be gained by whitewashing it. I’m not going to go into all its corruptions and complicities here, or all the sordid nuances of political maneuvering in Congress; they are already being observed and debated by far more people than used to pay attention to such matters. I will just note that while many Democratic Party pundits were cluelessly advocating “moving to the center,” Bernie Sanders and AOC’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour was attended by huge audiences around the country (many of them in red states) and Zohran Mamdani, supported by more than 100,000 volunteers, was decisively elected as mayor of New York City despite tens of millions of dollars of attack ads by his opponents and the hostility of the Democratic establishment. Those kinds of programs and those kinds of campaigns are the future of the Democratic Party, if it has any future.
In any case, during the coming year millions of people will be fervently focused on (1) primarying some of the worst Democrats and then (2) getting the maximum number of Democrats elected in the fall elections. As those elections approach, there will be more widespread awareness of the Republicans’ ongoing vote-suppression efforts, which have up till now been overshadowed by all their other outrages. They may already have swung the 2024 election to Trump (see Greg Palast’s article Trump Lost, Vote Suppression Won). In any case, the Republicans have even more threatening measures in view, including eliminating mail-in voting and, most importantly, requiring voter IDs that would effectively prevent tens of millions of American citizens from voting. Trump has openly bragged that if the Republicans can pass these new measures, “we’ll never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election again.”
But those elections are still a year away. Meanwhile, there are plenty of issues that need to be dealt with now, without relying on the politicians. If you want the Democrats to do well in the next elections, the best thing you can do is support popular movements that force them to try to keep up with you. If you focus mostly on candidates and your candidates win, they may or may not follow through with their campaign promises; if your candidates lose, most of your efforts are down the drain. If you focus mostly on raising awareness of issues, that increased awareness will tend to help your candidates, but it will still be there whether your candidates win or lose.
Mass movements that focus more actively on issues are sometimes called “social strikes.” Such movements may function somewhat like a labor strike, but without necessarily involving work stoppages. While workers have the powerful leverage of stopping work, other sectors of the population can also exert significant leverage by other means.
Jeremy Brecher has recently written several informative pieces on social strikes. In Social Strikes vs. MAGA Tyranny he outlines the nature of social strikes and how they might relate to our present situation. In Social Strike for Social Self-Defense he presents four cases where social strikes actually brought down dictatorial regimes. Two them (Philippines 1986 and Serbia 2000) were responses to dictators’ attempts to steal elections. A 2024 social strike in South Korea nixed an attempted presidential coup. A 2019 “people’s impeachment” movement in Puerto Rico forced the resignation of a corrupt governor.
Other such movements have raised more general social issues, including two notable ones in France: the anti-CPE movement (2006) and the Gilets Jaunes movement (Yellow Vests or Yellow Jackets) of 2018-2020. For an overview of tactics and strategies in these and other types of “radical situations,” see chapter 3 of The Joy of Revolution.
Boycotts are one of the basic tactics that spontaneously occur to masses of people in these situations. Sometimes they succeed dramatically, as in the Jimmy Kimmel affair, or at least have a significant impact, as in the Tesla boycott. But in most cases it’s very difficult to carry out large-scale boycotts. Most billionaires are more anonymous than Musk, and in any case their ownership is spread into so many mutually interlinked multinational corporations that we can’t even keep track of them all, let alone boycott them all.
In a world where a few billionaires own or control practically everything, it’s difficult to make any significant change without tackling everything at once.
The most direct way to do that is a general strike. During the October 18 “No Kings” day, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson called for a national general strike against the Trump regime. That may seem like quite a stretch under the present circumstances, but it’s nice that the idea is being bandied about.
General strikes are rare, but they have happened, including in the United States. (See Jeremy Brecher’s book Strike!) The most significant one in modern times was the May 1968 wildcat general strike in France, when more than 11 million workers occupied most of the factories in the country, despite the opposition of all the political parties (left or right) and all the labor unions. If you are curious about how that happened and how it played out, see René Viénet’s profusely illustrated book Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement: France, May ’68. For a brilliant in-depth analysis, see Guy Debord’s article The Beginning of an Era. To get a little taste of what it felt like, see May 1968 Graffiti.
In my previous piece on Trump I briefly cited Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. I’m not going to say any more about that connection here. Instead, I encourage you to read a series of short blog articles by Eric Fattor that explain, in much more detail than I did, how those two books illuminate the whole bizarre Trump experience. You can start here and work back, but you will probably find it clearer if you start here and work forward.
* * *
Almost more sickening than Trump’s actions is the fact that such a large percentage of the American population has gone along with them so gleefully. The question is often posed: Are these people evil or are they just stupid? Some of them seem to be both. But I’m inclined to give most of them the benefit of the doubt and see them as people who, due to circumstances beyond their control or understanding, have let themselves be swayed by a constant diet of media manipulation. Especially those living in regions where they’re rarely exposed to any other perspectives.
Unfortunately, whether they’re to blame or not, this type of manipulation can habituate people into becoming pretty nasty. They may start out as justifiably upset about undeniably real problems; but once they’ve been convinced to blame those problems on scapegoats, they may find it increasingly addictive to experience the thrill of vengeance against the imagined crimes of those scapegoats. And once they’ve gone there, it’s hard to turn them around. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.’’ If the MAGAs don’t have the courage to admit that they’ve been bamboozled, they may have a hard time repressing it after Trump is gone — like in Germany after World War II, when large segments of the population were going around pretending that they had always been opposed to Hitler.
As for the billionaires and their highly paid mouthpieces who are orchestrating all this: “I don’t know what word in the English language — I can’t find one that applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life so they can put a few more dollars into their highly overstuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t begin to approach it.” (Noam Chomsky)
Fortunately, there’s a lot more resistance to Trump than there was to Hitler. Partly because Hitler moved more gradually — it was years before the Nazis dared to openly do the sorts of things the Trump regime is already doing. The Nazis took care to hide most of their crimes; Trump posts his and brags about them.
The main reason the Trump regime has gotten so extreme so fast is that they’re in a race against time. The longer they’re in power, the more opposition they arouse. Their only hope is to carry out such rapid multifront attacks that they can destroy things and consolidate their power before sufficient opposition arises to prevent them.
All governments lie a lot of the time, and they usually get away with it. But a point may arrive when the sheer quantity of lies becomes not just unbelievable, but unworkable, and the whole edifice of bullshit falls apart. That is already starting to happen and it’s unlikely that Trump or any of his cronies can stop it, though they can meanwhile continue to cause a terrible amount of damage and suffering.
Because Trump has built a personality cult, not a movement. His mental health has been deteriorating for years (very visibly in the last few months) and he also appears to be in very poor physical condition. Before his term is over, he is likely to become so glaringly incapacitated that even his supporters will be obliged to admit that it’s impossible for him to function. When that happens, the MAGA coalition will splinter into its mutually contradictory tendencies. None of those tendencies have much coherence, and many of the key figures and their agents and accomplices will be terrified about their risk of accountability for the crimes against humanity they have so brazenly perpetrated, and rush to throw each other under the bus. Most of Trump’s cronies have no qualifications beyond being skillful ass-kissers, and the few who do have none of his charisma. The only thing uniting them is their fealty to Trump.
There is one respect in which Trump’s delusions of grandeur may turn out to have a kernel of truth. He may go down in history as the person who brought into the open more glaringly than ever before the utter insanity of a social system in which such an ugly and idiotic farce could occur.
Meanwhile, all of you who have been working against him in such a wonderful variety of ways: Please keep doing what you’re doing!
But don’t stop there.
KEN KNABB
November 25, 2025
memengineering 
