Politics, Power, Peril: Twenty-Four Assumptions for Discussion and Debate

© by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.

Closeup of page from a draft of Eisenhower’s farewell address, January 17, 1961. In the public domain.
  1. Politics is about the “distribution” of power;
  2. Power is the capacity to effect “change” through control and domination of power sources and distribution;
  3. “Asymmetric” distributions of power risk abuses of individual, group, and nation rights, privilege, and choice;
  4. “Governance” constitutes a structure, organization, and process for monitoring, distributing, and sustaining power;
  5. Vertical “governance” structures and processes are subject to abuse via hierarchical concentrations of power;
  6. Societal population sectors with disproportionate wealth, privilege, and position can establish power “hegemony” (i.e., excessive self-serving influences);
  7. “Hegemonic” power sanctions use of “force” both to maintain control, dominance, and influence, and to preserve the status quo favoring power bases;
  8. “Force” options used by those in power include violence, war, “total” war, assassination, false flags, propaganda, deceit, character defamation, and assassination;
  9. “Absolute” power may be invested in a dictator, secret government, established government-military-corporate-media-educational complex, and/or cabals of undemocratic sources;
  10. “Absolute” power corrupts “absolutely;”
  11. All forms of power corruption result in asymmetric distribution of rights, privileges, and opportunities;
  12. Power corruption is evident in cronyism, bribery, favoritism, secrecy, advantage, force, nepotism, tribalism, and excessive wealth accumulation;
  13. “Absolute” power does not yield readily to public criticism, disapproval, or condemnation;
  14. Legal, ethical, constitutional, and moral codes of power distribution are often “biased” in favor of those in power, resulting in “injustice;”
  15. Power “injustice” abuses result in reactive and compensatory uses of “force” by victims of “injustice,” including protests, rebellion, violence, and “allegations” and “accusations” of “terrorism.”
  16. “Non-violence” protests are the best choice among victims seeking redress from power abuses. If this non-violence fails to effect change, other forms of violent redress may be pursued by those dissatisfied by continued victimhood.
  17. “Injustice,” associated with power asymmetries, can be changed and neutralized by transparency, accountability, and equality among power sources;
  18. Inherited power sources are among the most egregious power abuses. These familial sources of power often continue generations of offense, and should be subject to public legal, ethical, and moral scrutiny and appraisal;
  19. Understanding and acceptance of assumptions about politics, power, and perils of power are essential requirements for citizenship;
  20. Liberation education, theology, psychology, and philosophy assertions and proposals, expressed eloquently in the work of pioneers, including Paulo Friere, Ignacio Martin-Baro, and Martin Luther King, Jr., contesting the sanctioning of power by corrupt national and international sources.
  21. If trust in governance is lost or abandoned because of power abuses, governance purpose, meaning, and “integrity” are subject to remediation;
  22. Integrity must be a guiding arbiter of individuals, groups, or nations involved in the distribution of power;
  23. Those elected to positions of power, based upon expressed political platforms and personal values, must be held to their expressions or should be compelled to resign on the basis of deceit, betrayal, and immoral election abuses;
  24. Terrorism, by and among terrorist individuals, groups, and/or nations, must be contextualized within a framework of mal-distribution and abuses of power.

I offer these 24 assumptions regarding politics, power, and peril to promote both public-forum and education-setting discussion and debate. World populations have now consciousness of the consequences of power asymmetries, especially preservation of entrenched financial interests through endless wars and military occupations by cabalistic Western powers. Cui Bono?

Throughout our world, civil, national, and international strife and struggle abound. Lies, deceit, and propaganda flood our minds, seeking acquiescence, submission, and control. At stake are anachronistic actions and ideologies of colonization, imperialism, and empire.

Tragically, these century-old disgraceful remnants remain and thrive amid government-corporate-military-media-education complexes. This anachronistic complex must be considered a “fascistic” concentration of power, seeking to homogenize populations for control, domination, and exploitation.

Institutions (i.e., religion, education, government, commerce, and media) created to support and preserve equality, justice, and opportunity, are now sources of human and natural peril. We stand and fall at the cusp of the world’s destruction, seemingly oblivious to tragic unfolding events, and helpless in our efforts to address them.

There are a score of hot wars occurring (e.g., Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Congo, Sudan, Nigeria, Israel-Palestine), dozens of failed states (e.g., USA, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Honduras, Pakistan), numerous examples of starvation, famine, and poverty (e.g., Somalia, Congo, Sudan, USA, Ethiopia, Libya).

Concerns for these situations have been spoken and written before, in both flawed and aspired documents seeking to improve the human condition. Perhaps we all need reminding of the Declaration of Independence, USA Constitution, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Gettysburg Address, Magna Carta, Sermon on the Mount, and all eloquent and inspiring words offered by gifted and courageous seekers of peace and justice.

What happened? Idealism lost! Connections denied! Solidarity mocked! History forgotten!

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

May 11, 2017

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Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 21 books and more than 300 articles, tech reports, and popular commentaries. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 15 May 2017. Reprinted with author’s permission.

Civilized, Barbarians, Savages, Part 3

By Antonio C. S. Rosa

Caricature of Darwin’s theory in the Punch almanac for 1882. In the public domain.

The three pillars of high finance and international movers are:

  1. oil,
  2. armaments (legal and illegal),
  3. drugs (legal and illegal).

International capitalism has become hopelessly dependent on the activities of organized crime, in fact adopting its Modus Operandi.

Government officials are hostage to their complicity with lobbies. The mafia entered the system and imposed its ethics. This state of affairs is not resolved with terrorism, but with radical changes not only in the paradigms of economic, political and social structures, but also and especially in the minds, in the individual consciences/consciousnesses that are beget in the womb of reality. We are the builders of our own realities–from the personal to the collective.

Need for an Alternative

For each Hitler there is a Gandhi. For each Trump there is a Nelson Mandela. For each Bolsonaro or Boris there is a Luther King. Those who are not part of the solution are, by necessity, part of the problem in a world with a record population of 8 billion interdependent beings where everyone affects everyone and nobody is an island. We represent a colony on earth—not a globalization construct, not merely numbers, statistics or resources to be exploited.

It is undeniable that societies classified as Civilized, First World or Developed, led by the USA and the West but spread throughout, retain the reins of world markets, politics, economics and culture, being the main producers of weapons, technology, science and atmospheric pollutants as well as wealth (or poverty, depending on the viewpoint) and materialistic values. As such, they also retain the greater share of responsibility for the misery that spreads throughout the so-called Third World. After the fragmentation of the former Soviet Union, the number of members of the underdeveloped has increased, not because poverty has expanded, but because the labels have changed places. In English, there is a rhyme: the West and the Rest.

We need a viable alternative–more benign–to the ‘trickle down’ economy, more aptly named ‘trickle up,’ which slowly and inexorably corrodes and erodes the spirit of nobility in everyone’s character, whether labeled or believed to be civilized, barbaric or savage. We become slaves to the monster we believe in, our Leviathan. The so-called Capitalist/Protestant ethics is outrageous, ignominious. God is not the God of the affluent, white people. This is an incongruity, heretic, unadulterated primitivism.

Our mental paradigm must change, both individually and collectively, towards cooperation, nonviolence, conflict resolution by peaceful means, and sharing–with equity and reciprocity–of the planet’s resources, instead of lethal competition for them; passing through the elimination of sick nationalisms and sociopathic and homicidal patriotisms that kill legally en masse. Our mental constructions must be modified by ourselves, by education, and not by the state. If there were no soldiers logically there would be no wars as generals do not fight each other. We must achieve a degree of civilization that does not require authority, police, justice, militarism or weapons of any type or size for collective control and destruction. Replaced by social servants, leaders. Utopia? I believe not; if we work for it.

United in our diversity and accepting our differences instead of dividing us into races, we may, in any future, acquire a Consciousness of Civilized Beings–and act on it. Without this shift in consciousness any other meaningful change is unlikely as Darwin’s myopic and ethnocentric theory will continue to influence our lives, private and public, and our spiritual (not religious) evolution.

I recommend the works of Prof. Johan Galtung.

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Antonio C. S. Rosa

Antonio Carlos da Silva Rosa (Antonio C. S. Rosa), born 1946, is founder-editor of the pioneering Peace Journalism website, TRANSCEND Media Service-TMS (from 2008), an assistant to Prof. Johan Galtung, Secretary of the International Board of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, and recipient of the Psychologists for Social Responsibility’s 2017 Anthony J. Marsella Prize for the Psychology of Peace and Social Justice. He is on the Global Advisory Board of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies and completed his B.A., M.A., and graduate Ph.D. work in the fields of Communication-Journalism and Political Science-Peace Studies/International Relations at the University of Hawai’i. Originally from Brazil, he lives presently in Porto, Portugal. Antonio was educated in the USA where he lived for 20 years; in Europe-India since 1994. Books: Transcender e Transformar: Uma Introdução ao Trabalho de Conflitos (from Johan Galtung, translation to Portuguese, 2004); Peace Journalism: 80 Galtung Editorials on War and Peace (2010, editor); Cobertura de Conflitos: Jornalismo para a Paz (from Johan Galtung, Jake Lynch & Annabel McGoldrick, translation to Portuguese, 2010). TMS articles by Mr. Rosa HERE. Videos HERE and HERE.

And ye shall inherit the whirlwind (or learn to live in gratitude and grace), Part 3

Bridge Interrupted by Reverend Dr. Doe West

by Stefan Schindler

We are free to become free.  This is the lesson taught by Socrates.  It is also the essence of Buddhism.  The word “Buddha” means “awake.”  Awakening, as Plato would say, is recollecting the sanity we were born with.  Nietzsche quotes Pindar: “Become who you are.”

We are inextricable strands in the holistic web of being and becoming.  Said the poet Byron: “Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part of me and of my soul, as I of them?”  John Lennon said: “I am the walrus.”

Whitehead said: “In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.”  To shake ourselves free from chains of illusion, William Blake –implicitly evoking Plato’s allegory of the cave – urges a cleansing of “the doors of perception.”  This has long been the virtue of Zen; and it is a sign of hope for human survival that the “mindfulness” movement is today finding widespread resonance in what Marshall McLuhan called “the global village.”

To give birth to a government by and for the people, we need a concerted effort, both individual and collective, to shatter the illusion that democracy and capitalism are synonymous.  The two terms desperately need to be separated: analyzed and evaluated on their own merits, and put together again only in a modest, enlightened, socially pragmatic fashion, in conjunction with – and this too is a crucial point – a radical dismemberment of the specious and misleading caricature of Marxist politics that has so long reigned supreme in the American psyche, placed there in service to the captains of capital.

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish teenager.  Imbued with ecological despair and courage of conscience, she is leading a global youth revolt against the status quo.  As the climate crisis intensifies, the glaciers melt, polar bears die, and the earth burns, she calls on politicians “to act as if your house is on fire.”  She was recently honored by Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, as a major world peacemaker and a voice for sanity and virtue. 

John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, John Lennon – the brightest lights of a generation shot out to assure the triumph of the corporate counter-revolution against The Spirit of The Sixties.  Giving peace a chance would not be an option. Yet, despite the victory of the mega-wealthy and the war-machines during the tragic course of the last half-century, there is a global undercurrent of awakening that daily increases in momentum.  More and more people are realizing that it is better to swim against the current than to be swept over the cliff.

If philosophy is the journey from the love of wisdom to the wisdom of love, so too is our collective journey to peace, justice, and survival.

Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says: I have become who I am. I am fat and fluffy, warm and affectionate, and I know the wisdom of love. Join me in it. There’s room for all of us.

A plea for sanity and virtue, Part 2

by Stefan Schindler

Is the sun rising or setting on all of us?
Kathie MM

Part Two: Resurrecting the Wisdom and Spirit of Helen Keller, Dorothy Day, Molly Ivins, Martin Luther King, and Howard Zinn

In The United States of Amnesia, governed by Weapons of Mass Dysfunction, we daily witness America’s devolution into barbarism.

Therefore, it is better to swim against the current than to be swept over the cliff.

Collective Awakening is ever more necessary for the restoration of sanity and virtue in a republic apparently intent on self-destruction.

Insofar as the Republican Party is now wholly lost to the forces of sexism, racism, militarism, sophistry, empire, xenophobia, economic apartheid, ecological suicide, fear mongering, war making, science denial, and religious extremism – i.e., a polymorphous perversity of elephantiastical greed, bigotry and delusion, committed to the total overthrow of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal for the American people – and insofar as multi-party pluralism in a two-party system sold to the mega-wealthy is now and in the near future off the table, our best hope for a brighter future is for the Democratic Party to regain its heart and soul; both of which were lost at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, when it betrayed the Civil Rights and Peace Movements it was obliged to embody in the spirit of our assassinated hero, Robert F. Kennedy.

Karl Marx urged egalitarian economics, arguing that each person has a right to the material security which allows for self-realization and creative service, free from oppressive constraints.  Buddha taught the same.

Which is why the Dalai Lama consistently teaches “a common religion of kindness,” committed to nuclear disarmament, global peace, ecological pragmatism, economic security for all, and lifelong free education in a planetary community where the institutions of society serve schools (and not, as at present, the other way around).  What the Dalai Lama urges and teaches is nothing less than a Global Enlightenment Project.

Also, it might be worthwhile to remind people that if they have a Social Security card, they are a card carrying socialist.

There are today strong voices in Congress urging a restoration of sanity and virtue.  They remain too few, and the forces arrayed against them are strong indeed; but those voices are a beacon of hope, and they deserve our support because they recognize the following:

People before profits = The Sermon on The Mount = The Golden Rule at the heart of The Torah = Heart Centered Rationality = Ahimsa = “Right Vocation” in Buddha’s 8-Fold Path = Covenant = universal health care = Ecosocialism.