Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

An Introduction

I own a few books. And I read a fair amount. This has come in handy in my earliest career (pulp and smut writer) and my latest career as a bookseller. Whereas other folks have listings of favourite television shows, or the best Marvel movies in order, or their favourite Starfleet captains, or the best album by their favourite band before they sold out; I have a super hero squad of fictional characters I would want by my side during an apocalypse, writers that I have not only read everything they have written but will re-read multiple times with a doggish sort of love and a list of ten books I would want with me in prison or while lost on an island. The list shifts as I get older and my thoughts on things change and my tastes shift from action adventure to noire pulp to literary masterpieces to the feel good escapism that helps a fella forget he’s living in a card board box and is missing teeth he had spent a good part of his life rather attached to.

One book has been on the list since I first found a paperback copy in a used bookstore in my early teens. It is an 1871 analysis of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay entitled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In it Mr Mackay examines phenomena of crowd psychology and economic bubbles whilst giving a pretty good beginner’s history (and solid debunking) of such things as alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers and the influence of imagination on the curing of diseases, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves (re: pop culture and star culture) the popular follies of great cities, and the insanity of religious relics and icons as objects of great value and power.

It gave me a solid foundation for scepticism which, in turn, gave me the ability to think critically, a skill that seems to have not been taught in Catholics highschools at the time that I was a student in one. Much later in life, okay, much much later in life when I traded alcoholism for therapy and the self-loathing of being a horny queer Catholic for a life of meditation and studying Buddhism it provided me with a fantastic headstart on the nature of our thoughts compared to the nature of the world in which we live and how we really, really have most of it skewed in our minds. I imagine I will talk more on that later.

This then, is a wee blog started in my fiftieth year in which the Secular Buddhist Bookseller will share some thoughts on things happening in the world around us and how, despite all that we are told, things are not as bad as we think. And things are never as bad as we think. Things just are. A confluence of a million separate factors working in unison to create the moment, the now, this place where we stand. When you stub your toe, you feel pain. When you dwell on it, or think Well that’s just….argh you suffer. This will probably explain why I don’t really suffer as much as I used to. This will probably come off as a bunch of white middle aged guy mansplaining his misguided takes on an Eastern Philosophy that he stumbled on after years of therapy induced meditating.

Or it may just be funny. Who knows?

What it really will be is what it is.

Me sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair I’ve been sitting in to write since I was 12 years old. Me sipping cooling coffee out of an Oxtail Soup bowl that holds two proper cups of coffee because I am too lazy to make multiple trips to the kitchen. Me breathing air and writing words; the only magic I have ever known to survive Charles MacKay and my own skeptical eye.

Who knows?

Technowoes and Angst and the Need for a New Spiritual Revolution

I often say that I was born thirty years too late. Arguments can be made. I spent a good decade writing pulp fiction mysteries and men’s mag garbage at the dawn of the video era when those magazines were on their last legs. And I took up photography, and Investigating the Unknown at a time when the internet and basic photo editing made wasting one’s time on such things absolutely no fun at all. Despite the fact that I would probably have been beaten to death for being queer in the fifties or not at all having survived AIDS in the eighties I miss my typewriter. I miss visiting crime scenes decades later looking for the one thing someone else missed. I miss talking to unmedicated schizophrenics in coffee shops about aliens.

A boy must have his hobbies.

That said, being born in the seventies means that I watched techonology evolve from black and white televisions with rabbit ears to the nascent growing pains of AI that we are currently witnessing. I have watched the complete evolution of the internet from the first messages sent from lab to lab to the rising of the Technobros and the only horrors worth investigating these days aren’t found out in the world where things still go bump in the night but in the dark web where all the worst of human impulses live basically rent free.

It is hard to not be fascinated by and, I confess, a little addicted to the various technologies as they pop out. I mean, a boy who thought an Atari 2600 was the coolest thing in the universe in Grade School is going to have a few moments of jaw dropping bliss the first time he tries out a VR helmet loaded with a locked room horror game based on a story he wrote once (by the way, despite being the grandfather of the beast in the game, I died almost instantly). When Covid hit I did what a lot more people should have done. I hit the books and upgraded some skills. I went back and, thanks to the internet, taught myself college level math and highschool level Chemistry… two courses I failed miserably at in my youth. I read about history, and technology, and just about anything I could get my hands on. I went to the mattresses with the determination to come out of this world pause with some new practical skills. I learned how to cook. I learned how to garden. I did my level best to try not to go insane.

And I played with all the new technologies. Probably more than I should have. But I tried everything. It is all so very fascinating. And tremendously cool. And monetized. And addictive. And soul destroying. And profoundly worrying. And and And and And…

I quickly lost interest because I realized most of it was providing me with escapism which runs counter to the whole purpose of my meditations and embrace of the here and now. It wow’ed the pants off me (maybe once or twice literally) but I saw just how much of it was based on separating your thoughts from the moment so I quickly gave them all up.

And set down to reading up on the technologies and thinking about them.

Some very basic conclusions?

AI hates me. I don’t take it personally. In the quest to quickly monetize the fun new thing various companies have trained AI to completely eradicate and annilihate the two arts I use for my own personal expression and joy; putting words on a page and taking pictures and occasionally juicing them up and calling it, cough, art. There are now so many pay for play programs out there that will do all of this for you, easily. Trained on the works of millions of writers and photographers who learned to do it the hard way and struggled to sell the works the computer is now chewing up and regurgitating.
AI is a terrible writer. Like recognizes like. But, unlike myself who takes years to edit a story from 30 pages of caffeine induced free form thoughts into a coherent story… AI is learning a lot faster. After all, it has the whole of the internet to learn from. It is really, really easy to spot AI writing these days… some Universities and professors are getting duped but the booksellers are still hip to the scam. But it is getting harder. And it will keep getting harder. My shop hasn’t implemented a “Only Human Works” policy yet but I can definitely see us having that discussion in the future.
A large language model being taught off of the internet is a really bad idea. Yes, granted, that is where the great compendium of human intellect is stored. Everything we write, we create, and we are ends up on the internet. But, it is Everything. Without quality control all information provided by AI is, instantly, suspect because a good chunk of the “information” available on the internet is just absolute horseshit madness written by a guy in a basement drinking cold coffee (hello!) There are many stories, some actually credible (we’re talking information on the internet after all) of AI flinging off into wildly racist hallucinations, or going randomly psychotic or just being so damn thirsty. Why is AI so horny? It’s trained off of the internet. What makes up a good forty percent of the internet? Porn.
All of our current technological advances, including those with life altering potentialities, are controlled by corporations. I will avoid going full socialist on you here; sure, innovation requires capital and corporations have money to spare so of course they are in charge of it. The problem? Corporations are notoriously not interested in anything except quarterly profits and infamously make decisions based on profit models and not social implications of those same decisions.
The environmental implications of large language model AIs and the absolute bullbleep madness that is cryptocurrencies are enough to make me want to call a halt to ALL furthur use of said technologies until we sort our the immediate issues of energy use in a warming world. A single ChatGPT inquiry uses about ten times the energy that a Google search would have used. Multiply that by the fact that every single search engine now uses AI searching. Or the week long, six to eight hours a day, conversations people have with their digital paramours on something like CharacterAI. Or the hours people spend using AI image corrections on their photography. Or to write a book that you can sell on Amazon for $2.99. Meta, and Microsoft are lobbying the US Government to open up their own nuclear generators to power their AI. Mining a single Bitcoin uses between 407,059 kWh and 850,219 kWh. That is energy enough to power between two and four thousands homes for a month.

Okay, enough ranting. Here’s my thinking.

Techonological advancements are great. We are Borg. Mankind has long ago lost ourselves to our technology… and it makes most things better. It makes a lot of stuff easier. We live longer, we have access to instant information we need, we have all sorts of cool new toys. AI being used for medical research? Amazing. AI being used to build safer vehicles? Bring it on. AI being used to solve the complicated maths that exist in particle physics and other investigations into the nature of existence? Fantastic! AI doing the horrible work that we deem beneath us so that we, mankind, can break off the shackles of the nine to five and dedicate ourselves to the pursuits of higher educations, greater sciences, fantastic new arts and discovery! Bring on Starfleet, we’re in a Utopia!

These may be worth the cost.

And there is a cost. A hell of a cost.

But that is not what it is mostly being used for. We are using it to create cheap art, political disinformation, deepfakes, porn, misinformation, invasions of privacy, slander and completely ridiculous search results nowhere near what we were actually looking for, data mining by a few to the absolute disadvantage of the many.

We are killing the planet we live on, or rather, we are making it uninhabitable to us which is one of those things we’re going to have to pay for eventually. It is currently controlled, quite lawlessly as the technology evolves far faster than our abilities to regulate it, by a small group of people which gives them extraordinary amounts of power to leverage against everyone else.

I was talking to my brother about this a while back. I was trying to wrap my head around it. I stated that I think I would be okay with this technology if it was being controlled by scientists. My brother is a scientist. He, surprisingly, echoed the Dalai Lama in his reply to that thought. I’ll quote the Dalai Lama here because he said it better, sorry Steve.

“Specialists often have too narrow a field of vision. They are not sufficently concerned about relating their research to a broader context. I am not saying that their intentions are bad, but by devotuing themselves solely to the exhaustive study of one particular area, they do not have time to reflect on the long-term effects of their discoveries.”

Or to put it simply, a brain expert will make a brain AI. A biologist will make a biology AI. They will only create a thing that helps their specific field of study.

My argument was, yea, but their specific field will have beneficial results for humanity as a whole. An AI that spots brain cancer or maps neurons that advance health science seems a better investment of our dwindling energy supplies that creating a bisexual bargirl avatar trained to say exactly what you want to hear and will send you AI Generated naughty selfies (which aren’t that bad if you’re not picky about numbers of limbs or fingers) for the low cost of $9.99 a month.

My friend Charlie, who spends a lot of time thinking about things pointed out that so long as AI is being trained off of the internet (as a once TechnoUtopianist I have to agree with this) is bound to be a disaster. The great database of free information that we once dreamt it would be; collaborative works of great and lesser minds sharing knowledge and experience to create new avenues for mental evolution has been monetized. Now, absolutely everything on the internet exists to make someone, somewhere money and in that it has just become a giant mine that we all work looking for that one little nugget that will make us rich.

“No technological revolution will serve us at all without a spritual revolution first.”

We need to break our current capital driven social structures before any new major techonological revolution, or we are going to end up a bifurcated society like that in Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon) books or… even the H G Well’s Time Machine. A race of immortals, rich beyond belief, removed from any care or concerns in life living as decadently as humanly possible living off of the backs of an enslaved, poor lesser race with no hope.

Wow. Depressing.

What kind of spiritual revolution?

Well, let me tell you about a bunch of folks called the Buddhas…

Day Off Reading: Tuesday June 4th

(Traditionally a non-fiction, a light read and a science or nature book)

Perhaps inspired by the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV I decided to learn a little of the history of the hierarchy of the church I was raised in… an endeavor that my Father, a devout Catholic, called me a weirdo for even attempting. That said though, as far as a history of something as mind numbing dry and fantastically self-involved as the Catholic Curia could be this actually a really engaging read. Beginning with Pius XII (who I have been fascinated by ever since reading Kertzer’s The Pope at War) and the spiritual/political high wire act he had to walk between being the leader of the Catholic Church whilst living in and having to bow to a fascist state and stretching all the way to Francis. He introduces future popes as young men and how they moved and were moved by the big moments in Church history; the friendships, the rivalries, the fights, the pre-ordained destines. It is a great read for Catholics, lapsed Catholics (hello) and anyone who enjoyed Robert Harris’ Conclave but like a touch of… oh… reality and history explaining the sometimes ridiculous traditions and politics.

The Republicans' "golden boy" -- and a loyal, unquestioning tool of the powerful special interests -- handsome, unthreatening, Florida governor-by-default Marlon Conrad seems a virtual shoo-in for re-election. That is, until he undergoes a radical personality shift during a bloody military action in the Balkans. Now it's just three weeks before the election and Marlon is suddenly talking about "issues" and "reform" as he crosses the length and breadth of his home state with an amnesiac speechwriter and a chief of staff who turns catatonic in the presence of minorities. The governor's new-found conscience might well cost him the election, though. And it appears that pretty much everybody from Tallahassee to Miami Beach is trying to kill him...

Tim Dorsey, John Scalzi, Christopher Moore and Michael Poole are my go to summer reads. Funny books, with hidden depths in them… usually. Tim Dorsey is a throw back to the MASH novels I read in my early teens; just absolute zany adventures you’re almost embarrassed to admit you read. These, in particular, follow Floridian history buff and serial killer Serge Storms and his often self-medicated (to the point of insanity) sidekick Coleman. When I started reading this I assumed it was a Serge novel. Then I wasn’t sure. Then I realized it was, but unlike any of the others and it is freaking amazing that I didn’t see that coming. Now I have about a hundred pages left and I have absolutely no idea how the heck he’s going to pull this off. Therefore, the perfect sitting in the sun growing my cancer book.

It is no secret; I am weak in math and sciences. I was an artistic kid that really couldn’t wrap my head around… or focus my attention on… the coolness that were maths or sciences. It was only in my late twenties or early thirties that I started to read up on them and it was only in my forties that I started going back to school to make up for those childish deficits. That said, give me a good science book that is about a subject I have always been fascinated by (space travel) that is funny and I am 100% in.

From the Publisher:

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered:

Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism?

With deep expertise, a winning sense of humor, and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.

Get in, we’re going to Mars.

Learning to Disengage

One of the most psychologically challenging things I have ever had to do was spend a month in the woods disconnected from the world. A retreat. A return to the most basic things: working on shelter, working on food, engaging in a small community, learning about the interconnectedness of life and the nature of reality.

I basically took a vacation from everything that was my life and started a long, long journey towards learning about life.

Although there is serious physical discomfort to be had in sitting for hours on end, and semi-enforced meditation is a helluva a horrible thing to do to yourself (until it’s not… and it’s weird where you find that line) the hardest part of it was the disconnect. I had not realized just how addicted I was to the attention economy before I was removed from it. I had not realized just how absolutely everything I thought I was came from my thoughts on the thoughts of others about things that had so very little to actually do with my life.

A lot of people are writing a lot of things about the attention economy these days. In our uniquely human way we have found a way to monetize even that, our base attention. I was a wreck when I arrived at the retreat and I honestly thought I was going to die a few times in those first few days. Looking back, I can’t help but feel the inherent ridiculousness of that sentence and yet, there it is. No phone? Sure. People who would need me in an emergency had the number of the retreat’s office phone. I could get on without a phone for a few days. No social media? Yea, I can do without seeing my friends adventures for a while and reading about their miseries and joys was uniquely draining when I couldn’t actually do anything to help them. Social media is insanely unhealthy for the empathic and the unsolid. No instagram? I could definitely go a few weeks without perving my friends in their swimwear.

No news.

Huh.

No news?

Like, none? But what if…

What if what?

The news addiction was the one that I had the largest problem with. I was a news junkie. Twenty-four hour news and constant twitter streams from agencies and reporters I liked had me getting instant, almost constant, reports of things that I had a vague intellectual interest in but rarely connected to my life in any way. It was bad. I have struggled with alcohol. I have experienced just how addictive drugs can be. But those were physical addictions.

This? This felt, personal. This felt like it was ripping my brain apart. Not knowing what was happening in the world?

But what if…

What if what?

Every morning I would wake up and the world would still be here. One of the monks who ran the place, my mentor for the month, would visit me every morning and look me in the eye and smile. His way of telling me the world wasn’t descending into chaos and doom and I could spend one more day here without the world imploding. It took weeks before my brain disengaged from the need. It took weeks before I finally settled down enough to feel, and exist in, the moment. For weeks I felt like I was just acting like a guy at a retreat, meditating, helping, learning. It took weeks before I stopped thinking of myself as a guy enduring a vacation for cool stories to tell his friends and just started being THERE. The morning it happened I was sitting against a tree listening to the dawn coming. Nature sings different songs at different parts of the day.

My monk, the one who coined the phrase, What if what?, brought me a cup of tea and sat with me for an hour, neither of us saying anything. Just watching the world brighten and listening to the dawn. I am pretty sure I cried.

What if what?

That had been my mantra for those first two weeks. I went to the lectures and listened to the monks and wrapped my head around the big Buddhist concepts that they were talking about (a fun thing about Buddhism: you can actually wrap your head around the concepts. Read enough on the subject and it just starts to make a kind of sense to you. But the real fun of it isn’t Enlightenment (which may exist, but I will never know) but actually feeling it once in a while. I have had maybe three moments of clarity. I used to think that isn’t much. I know profoundly wish everyone gets at least one in their life. Just one moment of clarity, of the fearlessness, of knowing the interconnectedness of all things and the loss of the past and future for The Moment.) While the other folks seemed to me to be making interesting progress on their paths I felt I was stuck at the start line, working on What if What, and trying to shake off my need to be connected to all the news and all the noise.

It was hard, but it really didn’t take long for me to work out that there really wasn’t any News in the news. You could dip in for five minutes in the morning and know all you needed to know. You really didn’t need 24 hour updates. You really didn’t need talking heads and their opinions to form your own thoughts about what was happening in the world. You really didn’t need to know what everyone else caught up in the emotional roller coaster of reaction/counter reaction was feeling about any particular point of someone’s misinterpreted take of an article that was probably misinformation to begin with. Why focus on the minute by minute reporting, a lot of it unnuanced and straight up wrong when you can wait until the full story is ready for you? But mostly, the realization that in a fully interconnected world things would continue to happen whether they had your attention or not. A billion little factors moving a billion things in billion directions creating a singular motion, a singular energy, a single moment. What is gained from knowing single strands of thread when you can just get to know the whole of the rug?

These were basic, first steps into interconnectedness brought about by ripping off the bandaid on my brain; basically, pulling me the hell out of the attention economy to which I was so addicted. The continual exchange of thoughts, and thoughts of those thoughts, and the emotional reaction to those thoughts sending your fingers blindly typing reaction to a reaction to a thought; replacing being in the moment, acting skillfully and compassionately and just being here and now. The key word there? Acting. Over that month, instead of scrolling on my phone, reacting blindly, reading news sites endlessly, joining a side, making arguments of my side versus their side for the endorphin hits of having people I will never meet agree with me, getting high off of the star status of a digital avatar achieving success solely because I can write my emotions more logically then most… I helped dig a vegetable garden. I learned how to fix a roof. I cleaned a latrine. I learned how to make an amazing three bean soup. I watched leaves grow. I existed, on a piece of Earth that I was grateful for and it was happy to have me.

I bring this up today because it has been over a decade since that retreat and that crucial, fundamental first lesson. I am back to work in a few hours. My weekend, two days where I had no responsibilities to the people I care for or the world at large, have slid by and in looking back (specifically, looking at my phone’s usage) I realize that I spent a considerable amount of that time scrolling… and blindly. I find that, with the current American president, the current near constant rage being generated from both sides of a generational war (and it’s associated hangerons) and genocide happening in the Middle East, the Bondesque Supervillain that is the richest man in the world and a Russian president who is losing his once iron grasp on his percieved power unlocking the nuclear doors in his head I find that I am falling back into old habits.

I need a bit of a detox.

CBC news, the ten minute clips, in the morning and at dinner time. NPR once a day.

Music on my walks to and from work. Classical. Maybe celtic. No lyrics.

No podcasts.

And maybe make the focal point of my meditations for the next two weeks that helpful sentence I am pretty sure he pulled out of his butt out of pure frustration of having to deal with me…

What if what?

ADDENDUM, FROM WORK, AROUND 6PM:

Of course, the day I make this resolution is the day that the James Bond villain decides (probably whilst in a drug induced state) that he is going to try to take down the President of the United States with some well fired nuclear level tweets; only for the President to respond with a series of mental breakdowns on his own Twitter knock off. I am doing my best to just hear the anecdotes from co-workers and avoiding jumping on line but apparently there have been some great lines like..

“Hey, you know why Trump never released the Epstein files? He’s in them.”

“We are going to cancel all of Elon’s government contracts.” to which Elon replied, “Fantastic. Good luck NASA without the Dragon Rocket program.”

And apparently Elon fired off “Republicans should really side with me. Trump is going to die first.”

Luckily, I am in a bookshop. And have plenty to read.

Fire Lines and Asthma Puffers

Two years ago it became quite clear to me that I had something going on with my lungs. I had known there was something up for a while before that: stairs would wind me a lot quicker than they used to (which I attributed to age) and I had a combination panic/asthma attack while hiking with a friend in Gatineau Park that scared the absolute crap out of me. While hiking up to the Luskville Fire Tower I stopped breathing. Then I started panicing about the fact that I stopped breathing. My friend Taryn got me calmed down enough to recognize the panic attack and from there, I could feel what was going on; it was my lungs, not my heart. This was just my asthma reacting to a humid day and a lot of vertical hiking and the existencial dread of having just turned 49.

I was embarrassed, but we made it to the top and we made it back down and by the time we hit the Lone Star for a victory meal my mind had moved on.

Then the fires came.

In 2023 Quebec lost 13 million acres during the fire season; most of it over two months. Ottawa, being perched just over the southern border of Quebec had some of the most beautiful sunsets you could imagine in an apocalyptic movie and, sadly, really terrible air quality. For about three weeks I could barely breathe. Then we lost a third of Jasper. Then 90% of Lytton. Yellowknife. Fort MacMurray got written off. Enterprise in the Northwest Territories. These were the ones that made the news. There were thousands of evacuations in the years 2023-24.

This year, with the fire season only having just begun, more land has burned than last year and tens of thousands of evacuations have been ordered across all three prarie provinces and parts of British Columbia. La Ronge Saskatchewan (they were very nice to me when I was there once) and Snow Lake are emptying out. According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center today, June 6th, still only a month or so into the fire season there are 214 active wildfires in the country. Up from 204 yesterday. There have been 1784 fires to date this year. About 2.84M hectares have burned… more then the ten year average for an entire season.

The majority of the fires are in the praries. Ottawa has been under smoke warnings for two days. I have been a boy-of-the-puffer for two days… weezing my way through life like Darth Vader with his mask off. The smoke has travelled so far as New Brunswick to the east and there are air quality warnings all over the mid-western United States as well as New York, Chicago and Washington D.C.

I bring all of this up for two reasons. One, an ex boyfriend of mine is spending his first season working for a Parks Canada Fire Management Crew (why they don’t call them Fire Teams I will never know). We chatted on both of his breaks last night and he’s been sending me some absolutely terrifying photography from some of the scenes of his first few weeks of work. I think he needed distractions. Lord knows I would. But he’s big and burly and a hero in every sense of the word so he will be fine. But his reports from the firelines mixed with my weezy walk home under a blood red sun last night sent me diving back into my Green Buddhism books and having a long long think about the interconnectedness of life when I should have been sleeping.

Some basic thoughts:

We have reached the point now where it would literally be cheaper to ditch fossil fuels for clean energy completely and totally than deal with the accumulated damages of various climate events that are happening yearly. I used to say that the only way America would get off their collective backsides and do their part in saving the world would be if two Katrina level events hit the same region in one year. I was wrong. That happened last year when both Helene and Milton whacked Tampa Bay last year.

I think we all need a collective swat on the upside of the head.

Dear Homosapiens, family all, guess what? We aren’t the rulers of the Earth! Hell, we’re not even in the top ten of the most numerous species. Arguments can even be made that we aren’t even the smartest because although we have been better than most other species at gathering the necessities of life and reproducing… we have abandoned one of the most rules of natural survival and that, basically, is this…

Nature very rarely tolerates, and evolution never accelerates, a species that defiles it’s own nest.

When I was a kid I was terrible at physics and chemistry, although I did enjoy making colorful stains that to this day still paint the kitchen floor tiles with one of those Kid Chemistry Mess Maker sets. But I wasn’t completely locked out of the sciences. I adored biology and the grand historical concepts of anthropology. My father and my grandmother were very patient with me when I tooled about in their gardens, often upending flowers to look at all the little things that lived amongst them in the dirt. I loved that interconnected universe of worms, bugs, bees, ants and all the living things existing in the forest of pretty flowers that my dad and my grandmother grew.

The basic concept never left me. Even when I was a pro-capitalist right wing firebrand in my twenties I always spent more time than I should have worrying about the environmental consequences of business decisions. I’d grind my teeth, time and time again, when folks discounted the environmental effects of decisions made for the sake of profit, and jobs, and the future of the city/people/man.

We are not the rulers of Earth. God didn’t put us in charge of husbandry of his creatures… or, if you believe he did, I would really, really be worried about my next performance review the next time it comes up because we are losing about 10,000 unique forms of life a year. I know, I know. It isn’t only us. Species die out and new species evolve all the time. That is the nature of life on the planet.

But we are certainly accelerating the extinction far beyond it’s natural limits.

The concept of an ecosystem imprinted on me pretty early. And ten years of Buddhism has basically only expanded the concept of the web of life for me. We are but one single species in an intensely threaded web, all interconnected, all dependent upon a thousand variables to grow and thrive. But long ago, we developed a kind of specious ego that imprinted on us the idea that the natural world was there for us to exploit; that we were masters of the resources, kings of all.

And we are starting to pay for this arrogance.

If you were to look down upon the planet, like, say, God does (if that is your belief): He created a beautiful world. He filled it with a trillion species that all balanced on a delicate web that continuously grows, continuously evolves. Then, one species, evolved a brain and a sense of self quicker and faster than the others. It got clever. It learned to start using tools. It learned to start using up resources, and then started to get greedy about it. It starts destroying entire branches of the web for even quicker evolution, and need quickly became replaced by want for no particularly identifiable reason. It started to destroy vast swaths of the land, speeding up the extinction part of the program before the evolution part could even dream of catching up.

Sounds a bit like cancer doesn’t it?

And then, the fever sets in… heating the whole world and threatening and even deeper extinction.

And for what?

We are burning the world for what exactly?

Convenience for some?

We aren’t even torching the place for the good of all.

We are doing it out of habit and luxury for some. Maybe twenty percent of the species? Ten? Five?

If we embrace this labored metaphor, would God not think this was a failed experiment and shut it down? If he were a determined mad scientist would he not start excising the dangerous growth of the species wrecking his pretty planet?

Or, if you want a more feet on the ground practical take:

Life is an ecosystem. We are not above it. We do not control it. We are merely a part of it. And if we don’t start finding ways to exist with nature; embracing all of the life on this planet with the same slavish devotion we give to buying ourselves things that we really don’t need to solve pains (another mad human delusion, this urge to try to buy our way out of our sadness instead of just sitting down and dealing with it) the damage will be irrevokable.

Let’s be clear.

The world will survive.

Some life will survive.

Some human life might survive. But not all of us.

And none of what we call civilization.

Nature really does not abide a species that despoils it’s own nest.

We live in a completely interconnected world. Every single thought, word and action matters. Every single moment. A move made in the name of ego, made from this mythical I that insists upon layering yourself and your thoughts on reality is damaging. Every single move made out of love, out of goodness, out of the need to preserve life above all else heals.

We rule nothing.

We need to start living within, and with the world instead of just on it.

It has fed us, and housed us for millions of years.

It is only when we broke the balance, and tried to exploit it, that it became dangerous to us as a species.

We need to start living within, and with the world.

I weezed something like this to Colin on one of his breaks last night as he guzzled water and heard about a town he was going to help evacuate early this morning. He called me a fucking hippy. I called him a fucking hero.

Weezing our way through another unfortunately smoky night.

THE OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT OF LAST JULY’S “PATRIOTISM WEEK” SPEECH

(With Stage Notes)

What strange impulse is this to pledge allegiance to a piece of ground and a bit of cloth flapping in the wind.

I know, I know. We are neither celebrating the birthday of the ground nor the flag. We are celebrating the birthdays (Canada July 1, America July 4) of our countries. Of the ideals they represent. Of the concept of a nation of people working together and being one united and powerful thing in a time of an increasing political polarization so bad that most of the news stories running right now are basically op eds on how the owners of the news papers feel about the story of the day: meaning, how angry they are at what the other guy did! How dare he! How unpatriotic he is! How dare he call me unpatriotic while I am calling him unpatriotic! That is just… Unpatriotic!

I am Canadian. This is an accident of birth. I was born in Ottawa. I have lived in Ottawa most of my life. It is a lovely city going through some growing pains but not all that bad a place to spend some time. Besides, all my stuff is here. Most of my friends are here. This makes me an Ontarian which means we have green health cards and blue drivers licenses (I think) all of which only matters in Alberta, and you don’t mention it there unless you want to get the crap kicked out of you.

Ontarian. And Canadian.

And try as hard as I can, as often as I have, I have no idea what that means. I never have. Does this make me a bad Canadian, not knowing what a good Canadian is? I don’t think so, since most of the people I know spent most of their lives defining Canadian as simply Not being American. The only people who are really pounding on the “True Canadian Patriot” drums right now are basically maple washing American republican talking points. The “Freedom” movement up here is just the Trump Maga movement of the south with a new paint job.

But then, wrapping Americanisms in a Canadian flag is very Canadian.

Maybe they are right after all.

I come before you today to express a radical idea that a guy came up with while sitting under a tree a few thousand years ago. No… no… that was gravity and that was only a couple of hundred years ago. And despite a lifetime love of Doctor Who, I refuse to call it Mavity.

Are you ready? Okay. Here it is.

Anything that separates people into differing groups causes problems. Anything. I don’t care what criteria you are using. It is foolish. Skin color? Wealth? Circumstance? Looks? Beliefs? Get out of here with all of that shit. Our instinctive need to do this is basic lizard brain wiring from thousands of years ago. I had rather hoped we’d of evolved beyond the need for it after all this time; and not just doubled down on the differences and then create even more, largely illusionary differences to divide the people even more. Our politics thrive on it. Our economy enshrines it in our day to day lives. Our arts and culture and guilt remind us of it day after day after day. Our social systems are built upon it. Our economic systems were designed to exploit it. I am not you, you are not me and we must be better than those guys over there because… well, just look at us!

Go Canada! Yay Yay USA!

Fuck all of that noise.

My family came to this country a little over two hundred years ago to escape poverty and famine in Ireland. Thousands are doing the same to escape climate induced poverty and famine from around the world. We treat the original inhabits of the land so badly that South Africa modelled apartheid on our First Nations Reservations systems. There are entire towns and villages living in 18th century conditions today because of our political decisions. We have caused generational trauma that you only need to spend five minutes walking through the downtown core of any Canadian city to see up close and personal.

So, what does it mean to be Canadian?

I know the buzzwords.

I have listened to all the speeches on Canada Day (I’m from Ottawa, and I am not deaf yet. You can’t escape the speeches).

But why pledge allegiance to that?

Why chain ourselves to expired ideals and buzzwords that have been used to “Goose the Crowd” since the second world war?

Let’s try something new.

Let’s try thinking of ourselves as a single species for a while!

Let’s make a country filled with a people that casts aside bipartisan horse shit, that admits it made and will continue to make mistakes and with open hearts try our level best to fix our fuck ups and then, because we are really ballers when we’re actually working the pole, fix the structural defects in our country. Let’s be the country that innovates a way out of poverty. Let’s be the country that solves a housing crisis and finds a way to balance out income inequality. Let’s be the country that creates a balanced, helpful and new kind of police that serves the community itself and not reinforces the structural defects we’ve been trying to ignore for the last two hundred years. Let’s make a country that finds ways to feed itself, and then, for an encore feeds the whole of the world.

We were always very bright. We always worked hard and worked well together. So, let’s be the country that sets aside the notions of left/right and works together to help heal the climate, slow the sixth extinction and lead the world into a new era of peace and prosperity. How about, just once, because we’ve been standing out in the sun a bit too long and are starting to go a bit batty… how about we just TRY SOMETHING NEW!

(Looks around. Even the homeless guys aching in the shade are bored now. People walk by. Shrugs. Picks up his soap box. Tries not to cringe, RE:PUNCH the very tanned fella with a Fuck Trudeau Flag screams “Freedom” in his face.)