William Irwin Thompson - Thinking Otherwise

William Irwin Thompson is one of the better social philosophers and cultural critics writing in recent years. He is somewhat of an integral thinker (though he seriously dislikes Ken Wilber's work), which makes him all the more interesting.

I highly recommend his 1996 book, Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness.

Thompson has written an article for Wild River Review that I quite liked, "Thinking Otherwise." Hat tip to goethean for linking to the article.

Thinking Otherwise

by William Irwin Thompson

We Irish think otherwise - Bishop Berkely

On Predicting the Obvious

For some time now pundits have been predicting a future of "wars of resources." Duhh? Afghanistan and the central Asian pipeline? Iraq and Iran? Haven't we been in wars of resources for some time? I seem to remember one August way back in the nineties, when Schverednadze and James Baker visited the Rockefeller JR Ranch in Wyoming, and soon after an independent Georgia got recognized and there appeared a pipeline that avoided Russia and went through Georgia instead.

The neocons in their Project for a New American Century proclaimed that the U.S.A. was now the single global superpower and needed to assert pre-emptive military force to insure that no other nation would equal it in military supremacy. George Bush Senior and Baker decided that a Russia integrated with Europe, aligned with its democratic values, and serving as its main supplier of natural gas would not serve their oil industry's needs as much as a Europe fearful of Russia and oriented toward the U.S.A.

A Russia encircled by us with an American militarily protected Central Asian pipeline would help us check Russia and contain China. If only a way could be found to control Iraq and Iran. So Russia was left to sink into a gangster capitalism reminiscent of Al Capone's Chicago, and when overnight the country moved from a backward agricultural land to a global superpower armed with nuclear weapons, soon the aged pensioners and unpaid soldiers were dreaming of the good old days of Stalin's Soviet Union.

Our encirclement guaranteed that a traditionally paranoid Russia would bring forth a new strong man and scare Europe into our embrace. So Bush Sr. and Baker chose to let Russia sink, and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Bush, the younger, sallied forth to take over the holy lands of oil, encircle Russia from the Balkan States to Georgia and Kazakhstan, tighten the noose on Iran by taking over Iraq, invading Afghanistan, and pushing a missile defense radar system into Poland and the Czech Republic - all the while talking of freedom and protecting democracy abroad as they worked to eliminate it at home with the Patriot Act.

The neocon way of containing Russia, checking China's growth, and protecting Israel, was to control the world's access to energy. You may have noticed that while many an average middle class citizen has lost his home and job, the oil companies have been doing rather well. With such a geopolitic as their world view, why on earth would Cheney and Company want to offer tax incentives to new green technologies and alternate sources of energy in the articulation of a new Gaia Politique?

But you may not have noticed - though Senator Joe Biden has - that every neocon policy, global or domestic, has turned out to be wrong, and that rather than being the world's single superpower, we are now an empire in rapid decline. We are now so in hock to China that the deficit-freighted dollar has become the Texas peso. (Bad as this is for the average citizen, the bright side is that Bush's Saudi partners can now buy up U.S. real estate on the cheap.)

London is fast taking over New York as the financial and literary capital of the world. An encircled Russia is breaking through its containment and asserting itself both militarily in Georgia, subtly in the Ukraine, and more openly in Western Europe as its primary source of exports for natural gas. And an extroverted Iran, emboldened by our empowerment of the Shia in Iraq, is preparing to replace Saudi Arabia as the new Alpha Male in the Middle Eastern 'hood.

Meanwhile, back home in the land of the old single superpower, we are living in denial of a recession with inflation; our train system, compared to Western Europe's, is a disgrace, our infrastructure is rotting, and our general populace is so abysmally educated that it is actually proud of it. Sarah Palin is its avatar.

Read the whole article.

Tags: William Irwin Thompson, Thinking Otherwise, Wild River Review, Politics, society, culture, recession, economics, neocons