Letters Found in a Broken Time Machine re: How Humans Talked Themselves Off the Ledge and Got Started on the Path to Level 1 Civilization
"Is there a point to my act? I would say there is. I have to." -- Bill Hicks
In February 2022, I started posting on Substack a new series I called “DPDP— Designs, Plans, Dreams and Prayers”. Now that it’s February 2023, it seems like a good occasion to celebrate my first year of DPDP, to look back on the 20+ articles I posted, notice the ground I’ve covered and think about where I may be headed next.
Last July I wrote the best introduction to my quirky way of looking at the world so far. In my awkwardly-entitled essay “The Problem of Evil Revisited, On the Corner of Goodness and Epic-ness, The Urge to Montage and The Infinite Key Lime Pie”, I speculated that perhaps there’s a semblance of perfection in our worldly existence that is based not on happiness, pleasure, joy and love (these elements are sadly not as prevalent as we might wish), but rather on the notion that our striving toward such goals makes for a good life in much the same way movie characters’ plots, intrigues and challenges make for an engaging and worthwhile film.
I further supposed that if we look at the history of humanity as though it were a plot arc in a movie, we might be at a point of crisis that, in movies, often gives rise to a montage sequence in which the main character takes on a lengthy disciplined process of self-improvement in order to prepare for a major challenge.
Of course, movies don’t show every athlete’s push-up, every dancer’s stretching exercise or every writer’s crumpled page tossed into a waste-basket. The art of filmmaking collects defining momentary images and compresses days, weeks and months into a minute or two, often with a kick-ass sound-track. Perhaps this article, such as it is (just add your own favorite sound track) represents a montage of my first year of writing DPDP. With a little luck, maybe it will serve as a virtual “trailer” for the blog that will give you a taste of what it’s about.
The trick to being effective in this world is to continually (1) Sense the state of the world around you, (2) intelligently and compassionately choose a wise and do-able plan of action, (3) implement the plan, and then repeat this “sense-decide-act” loop as long as you’re able to, hopefully having fun when your results are “close enough” to what you intended.
That being so, I put a lot of attention into figuring out the state of the world, which, it turns out, isn’t nearly as easy as is generally imagined.
In “A Conspirituality Curriculum”, I present a collection of radical ideas that tend to provoke ire from establishment narrators. The world, as I see it, is far from what the dominant voices in our culture tell us it is, especially when it comes to matters of wealth and power, health and spirituality. There are some who would have us believe that these kinds of ideas are just a bunch of “right wing conspiracy theories”, but in “The Core of Conspirituality” I point out that Conspirituality is neither left nor right, but a term coined by researchers Ward & Voas to describe an internet subculture they’d observed that appeared to espouse a fusion of ideas from both conspiracy studies and new-age spirituality.
Establishment narrators can be quite vicious in their attacks on radical ideas that challenge narratives they’re selling. At times, when their attacks are against specific people, they have appeared to me to cross a line into hate speech. In “Conspirituality and the Ethic of Freedom of Religion” I argue that, even though Conspiritualist views are typically based on evidence and testimony from experts, witnesses and whistleblowers, they are ALSO beliefs which, because their subject matter overlaps topics commonly associated with religion, should be afforded the same protections afforded all religions, such as freedom from persecution. In other words, our detractors can’t have it both ways— either our views are evidence-based facts that should be accepted as true or our views are faith-based religious beliefs that should be respected and not maligned or made the target of hate speech.
The best religions remain connected to the real world and undertake missions that often involve charity, social justice, health care, peace and even political change (although some governments try to restrict organized religions from being involved in the latter). In “Martin’s 33 Progressive Demands”, I outlined a platform for progressive political action that embraces ideals about social programs, social justice, peace, environmental protection, appropriate technology, election reforms and truth-telling. These initiatives represent a fusion of Environmental Protection and Christian Service that adherents of Pope Francis’s encyclical “Laudato Si” would likely be quite comfortable with.
I also wrote about a couple of political strategies that might help make some of these aims possible. In “How-To Restore Democracy in America with Operation #BlueSpatula”, I outlined a plan to relocate about five million voters from high-rent, highly-populated and overwhelmingly blue states like California to lower-rent, sparsely-populated and historically red states like Montana and the Dakotas. At the time, it seemed like a good way to address the problem of overrepresentation of Republicans in the Senate and Electoral College and to wrest control of the Senate from Mitch McConnell who was letting hundreds of bills passed by the House languish on his desk.
Since then, however, with Democratic positions on the Ukraine conflict and COVID policy trending into the unconscionable, I have since become less sure that giving control of Congress to Democrats would pave the way for needed reforms, so I began to focus entirely on Progressives (Greens and Berniecrats). In “#VoterUprising: A DIY Direct Democracy Approach to Unite the American Progressive Movement”, I suggested a way to unite Progressives behind key issues (instead of contentious 3rd parties or ephemeral candidates) and use Ballot Initiatives (aka Propositions) to harness Post-Bernie Progressive political momentum to drive needed reforms and keep progressives engaged in electoral politics after the extremely disappointing actions of the Democratic Establishment relating to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
As it turned out, my resistance to the mainstream COVID narratives is what actually gave rise to my Substack channel. In February of 2022, I wrote a piece on my old Medium.com blog entitled “Debunking The Guardian’s Joe Rogan Hit Piece” (later republished on Substack) in which I dissected six arguments against Rogan offered by Linda Geddes’ opinion piece and rebutted each one. Although my commentary was rational and polite, Medium decided that I had somehow violated Medium’s rules and flagged my article with a red banner saying “This story is under investigation or was found in violation” so, either their ongoing investigation is taking a very long time to complete (the red banner is still there) or they concluded that something I said was “disinformation”. I haven’t inquired further to find out what I wrote that triggered their red banner because, with the #TwitterFiles revelations, it has since become only too obvious how ridiculous the standard free-speech suppression policies became during the COVID-19 pandemic on a wide range of social media platforms.
I would later write more about COVID when, during my travels in Mexico (March 2022), I contracted COVID and was able to put the much-disputed knowledge of FLCCC.org’s recommended protocols to good use. In Mexico, both Ivermectin (IVM) and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) were available over-the-counter at any pharmacy and I was able to recover after one day of bed rest and four more days of feeling slowed down enough to test negative and return to the U.S. That article, “My MexiCOVID Adventure (Or Vaya Con Drogas)”, quickly became my most popular article on Substack to date. Since my microcosm personal experience with COVID was, like all personal experiences, “anecdotal”, I later rounded out my macrocosm views on COVID in “Elon Musk Calls for Prosecution of Fauci” after Musk’s famous “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” tweet of December 11, 2022.
Censorship, however, did not end with Musk’s take-over of Twitter. Far from it. Censorship on Twitter was the theme of my October article, “Measuring Censorship: Leveraging Analytics to Gauge Effects of Twitter’s ‘De-Boosting’ (aka ‘Shadow-banning’) Algorithms” in which I hypothesized that the degree of censorship on Twitter might be estimated as a number inversely proportional to one’s average engagement rate. In other words, the more Twitter censors you, the more your tweets are limited to your most ardent supporters and the higher your average engagement rate goes. I metaphorically compared this relationship between censorship and engagement rates to Physics’ laws of gasses in which temperature and compression are interrelated in a, perhaps, similar way.
I have to admit, however, that my thoughts about censorship have, at times, been much less dispassionately theoretical and more psychological and brooding. When independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone wrote about how damaging censorship has been to our society, I felt I needed to take that theme a step further and compare the effects of censorship on authors to the well-known psychological abuses of shunning and ostracizing in “Big-Tech Censorship Using Algorithms and Gatekeepers is Psychological Abuse”.
These times we’re in are often difficult in a number of ways. Sometimes we feel like we are the few sane people living in an insane world wishing that what others say about us — that we are insane people living in their relatively sane world— were true. Life would be so much simpler if we could conclude all of our concerns about the state of the world and the woeful inadequacy of our society’s institutions to address said concerns were completely misplaced. What a walk in the park life would be is we could only realize that the problem isn’t the whole world and that the problem is, instead, confined to the insides of our own skulls. In spite of the proximity of the “it’s in your head” diagnosis, it does have the advantage of reducing the size of the problem by several orders of magnitude. Wouldn’t that be nice?
But those of us who seek truth at any cost are, unfortunately, not as common as we would hope. In “When Logic Fails and Psychology Rules”, I surveyed concepts from Psychology that often appear to be more dominant determinants of peoples’ perceptions than observation, logic and rationality. Now that I’ve read Mattias Desmet’s “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”, I must say I’m inclined to re-visit and expand on the role of Psychology. I feel it will be a fruitful path, but all I can say right now is that Desmet’s formulation of the foundations of totalitarianism suggest that, if we want to be truly radical, we can begin simply by insisting on face-to-face interactions with the people in our lives instead of technology-mediated “connections”. If we want to smash the power of the forming totalitarian culture, we can simply smash isolationism whenever it appears. We can invite people to share meals with us, talk deeply to people in person, share hugs with them and make it so they can really feel our presence in their lives. Of course, these things were very important to me before I read Desmet’s book, but they’re even more so now.
When we are intensely concerned about corruption in high places, we often get accused of indulging in “negative thinking”. In “The Eternal Sunshine of the Dots-Connected Mind” I explore how, when “conspiracy theories” are true, it’s actually positive thinking, because it shines a light on problems and solutions that have been suppressed, the upsides of which are often profound.
For example, even cursory analysis of the history of the Ukraine conflict reveals that the U.S.’s sponsorship of the 2014 color revolution (coup) there was understandably provocative to Russia, especially after considering assurances that NATO would not be expanded if Russia (then the USSR) agreed to the reunification of Germany. Independent journalists have been reporting about how Ukrainian military forces are often behind civilian attacks in Ukraine’s eastern, predominantly ethnically Russian provinces. It has even been widely reported that Ukrainian forces include large numbers of Neo-Nazis. All of these assertions tend to be classified as “negative thinking” by those who adhere to the imperative of forcefully removing all Russian forces from the Ukraine. But, it appears several of the Eastern provinces have already voted, by large majorities, to re-join Russia (although, of course, these elections are vehemently dismissed by the warhawks pushing to uphold the existing regime in Kiev). But, what if a negotiated peace is possible? What if that peace were the best possible outcome for the people who actually live in Eastern Ukraine? Wouldn’t that be “positive thinking” to discuss and promote that outcome? In “Perceptions of Human Rights and Justice Determine Success of Independence Movements”, I wrote what the mainstream probably considers heresy— mainly that we should let ethnically Russian Ukrainians determine their own fate.
This introduction to and review of DPDP — Designs, Plans, Dreams and Prayers— has certainly included prayerful topics related to Conspirituality, political plans and dreams of a better world, but, so far it’s a bit thin on designs. As a retired software analyst, I would say I’m more of a scientist and inventor (I’ve authored a couple of patents) than I am any kind of minister or political leader. So, the problem of global warming1 is one that I think about often.
In “Climate Change Strategy: Harvesting Methane Deposits in the Arctic Ocean as They Thaw and Bubble Up”, I propose a way to mitigate the problem of self-mining arctic methane by making it the fuel of the tail-end of the fossil-fuel era. First, if we don’t burn it, it will be released directly into the atmosphere where it will have about twenty times the global warming impact as it would have if burned. Unfortunately, because the oceans are warming enough to destabilize the crystalline methane formations under the ocean, “leaving it in the ground” is an option we’re already too late to choose.
An inordinate and growing amount of electricity is being consumed by the global gold rush for mining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In “BizPlan: Why Waste Energy Mining Bitcoin, When We Could Replace Electric Space Heaters with Distributed Bitcoin Mining Servers?” , I proposed the creation of a tech start-up that would distribute mining of cryptocurrencies by installing mining servers in the homes of people who use electricity for space heating. Since the cost of creating information is zero if you’re already using the power to create heat, this could eliminate the cost of electricity for the bitcoin mining company. The people living in the homes who pay for the electricity for heating could be given a modest percentage of the value of any bitcoins successfully mined in their homes as a small “jackpot” prize. This idea was inspired during the Texas power outages when people were in danger of freezing in blacked-out suburbs while the downtown financial districts continued shining brightly with their presumed rooms full of digital servers.
2022 brought several new directions for me personally. In addition to my DPDP writing project, I also began living full time in an intentional community and have traveled to visit a few other spiritual communities and permaculture farms from Ajijic to Orcas Island. In August, I attended a “Convergence” that included representatives from several other permaculture communities where I presented a paper about how Oregon’s Land Use Planning Policies could be updated to offer better support to rural communities that could focus on land stewardship for both organic farming and sustainable forestry. The paper is also in DPDP as “Oregon's Land Use Policies Haven't Kept Up with Public-Interest Goals for Food, Water, Housing & Energy Security or Pandemic & Wildfire Resilience”.
I see intentional communities as laboratories for developing new ways of life that offer people better connections to the Earth, to the land and nature around them, to fellow community members and to the highest and best aspects of themselves, whether or not one chooses to call that a spiritual growth path. So, when a dear friend of mine asked me to join him in a writing project to outline “how humanity wins from where we are now”, I was eager to include intentional communities as part of that outline. That writing project grew to become “An Open-Source, Sociocratic, Corruption-Resistant Model for Humanity to Survive the 6th Mass Extinction” in which I describe how an interdependent network of intentional communities might leverage principles from the Open-Source Software movement and apply them to help manage many decentralized community functions to enhance self-reliance of communities with regard to food production, manufacturing, economic activity and trade and so on.
For 2023, I still plan to write about Designs, Plans, Dreams and Prayers, however the focus will be a little more human-scale and less global. Or, rather, I’ll be following the old imperative to “Think Globally, Act Locally” but, paradoxically, I also feel called to travel more to help build my community and build connections between intentional communities. I’ll also be continuing to apply what I’ve learned about spirituality and health in my own life so I can be better resourced to serve my extended community in ways that lead back to solving, at a grassroots level some of the big problems we’ve been contemplating in 2022 and before.
It’s a privilege to be able to write for you, my online community, and I’m grateful for your time reading and consideration of ideas I’m passionate about. I hope to add some premium content this year so, for example, you’ll be able to listen to my writing in audio format while you’re gardening, driving or out walking. If that sounds like something you’d like to support, please let me know what kinds of content you’d most like to see (and hear) here. I often call the process I’ve been following for the past 12 years a “Journey in Truth”, but it’s not a solitary journey. There have been many friends on Facebook and Twitter over the years, some of whom have evolved into real-life friends and I am full of gratitude thinking of all the people and places I’ve connected with in this journey. Thank you.
About the broken time machine. Even though the time machine I’m in only has one forward gear, no reverse gear and only fleeting moments of “Park” when time seems to stand still for a perfect moment, I’d like to think some of the ideas that come to me are from, if not the future, at least a (possible) future and my articles, blog posts and “letters” are stories that might be told to students someday as part of the history about how humanity survived the era we are in and went on to thrive in harmony with the Earth and with each other. That is the prayer I choose to close with, the thread I try to follow.
Martin Truther
Feb 15, 2023
I usually reject the term “climate change” since it tends to deflect from the fact that the cause of the changes is heating due to greenhouse gas emissions and the term tends to minimize the harmful effects that we’ve only begun to experience,