Monthly Archives: October 2023

Circuitous Introspection

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He wrote in the third person when he wanted to make it less obvious about whom he wrote.  Of course, that sometimes made it more, rather than less, obvious.

Anyway, ….

He was a closet introvert who spent a great deal of time on reflective introspection trying to understand himself and to fathom the realities involving good and evil, all too often, apparently, sides of the same coin as interpreted by those impacted, either by their own actions, or by the consequences they experienced as a result of the actions of others.  He very much wanted to be good, as long as it was not too inconvenient, and he hated hypocrisy, at least in others. 

He believed that truth was an absolute but an obfuscated absolute, too often artificially complicated and muddled by those for whom truth was inconvenient, and that, sadly, included him.  He speculated on the nature of mendacity and came to various conclusions.  First, on the one hand, it was a natural human impulse when an imbalance of power existed, resulting in insecurity, or even when such an imbalance was only an inaccurate perception; but on the other, it was a sadistic expression of hubris on the part of those who wanted to be perceived as in the right, knowing that was not the case.  The latter tended to need quite a bit of cake in order to eat it, but without exhausting the supply available to them.  He wondered concerning the long term consequences of mendacity and came to conclude that it prevented solution to real problems, although perhaps masking the problems for a time during which they tended to metastasize, creating a more and more complex web woven of materials apparently based on singularity theory and thus, all but inescapable.  The conclusion?  Well, formulation of any real conclusion would require a lot more than merely two hands.

He also reflected on the consequences of boredom which he came to believe led to overeating and depression (among other things), and to ill thought out actions whose consequences were rarely positive.  Boredom seemed avoidable but cognitive labyrinths inexplicably blocked positive solutions, creating self-perpetuating negative feedback loops which required a great deal of discipline to avoid. 

“Discipline” doing something that needed doing when was not disposed to do it.

As seems obvious from the foregoing, his introspection tended to wander from subject to subject, sometimes involving rational links, sometimes objective, but all too often seemingly without rhyme or reason, or at least apparently without rhyme or reason.  Further reflection sometimes turned up profound insights, or at least what appeared to be profound insights.

He liked writing, perceiving that it provided a means of communication between the diverse aspects of his personality and nature, both concurrently and temporally, and disclosed the unreliability of memory, evidently something heavily impacted by what he referred to as legis murphiatum.  Writing seemed an essential means to maximize the potential of his introversion while minimizing the existential threat of boredom.

And, of course, he wrote in the third person when he wanted to make it less obvious about whom he wrote although sometimes that made it more, rather than less, obvious, about whom he wrote.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/

Reflections on Patrick Lawrence’s Recent Article Dealing with Cognitive Warfare

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On Sunday October 1, 2013, yesterday as I write this, Patrick Lawrence published an article in Consortium news entitled “IMPEACHMENT: ‘Cognitive Warfare’ on Capitol Hill” (Volume 28, Number 269 — Monday, October 2, 2023).  It’s an important article reflecting truths obvious to any objective, cognitively competent person.  At least one would think so, but Patrick sort of makes the point that such might not be the case, and explains some of the reasons why.

I do have one issue with Patrick, his use of the phrase “liberal authoritarian ideology” with respect to this otherwise praiseworthy article.  “Liberal authoritarianism” is an oxymoronic phrase unfortunately used more and more by decent and intelligent people.  The same is true of terms like “progressive” and “leftist” when coupled with the concepts of authoritarianism, totalitarianism and censorship.  The Democratic Party is not liberal, progressive or leftist, and it is to that political party that Patrick’s observations are (or should be) directed.  Unfortunately, language has become so utterly manipulated that its capacity to serve as an efficient communicative tool is now trivialized.

It is worth noting that the term “democracy” too has been perverted.  Now, as used by the corporate media, the term demands facilitation of electoral fraud through relaxation of identity verification and use of unsecured ballots.  It is no wonder, at least to me, that opponents of such measures suspect that they’re meant to be used to improperly impact elections.  In the Republic of Colombia, for example, where I now live, where for almost a decade I chaired a university political science program, and thus, with which I’m familiar, the concept of voting without identity verification through picture ID supplemented by signature verification and ballot access available only at polling stations during actual voting would be considered anathema.  The same is true almost everywhere else in the world.  But not in many states in the United States of America, purportedly the “land of the free and the home of the brave” (at least according to slavery advocate Francis Scott Key).

There is a sort of new term that has become essential in order to understand what is happening socially, politically and economically in the United States, and to understand the gist of Patrick’s article, and that term is “Deep State”.  The Deep State is an unfortunate reality, albeit not as an organized entity but rather, as a loose confederation of like-minded villains who now control the corporate media, most of the federal bureaucracy (especially the Department of Justice, all of the intelligence agencies and the federal judiciary), with analogs at the state, county and municipal levels in a number of jurisdictions.  The two major political parties were long controlled by the Deep State, although a successful rebellion by the so called “Tea Party” has made the GOP unpredictable and thus, well, unreliable.  Because of such lack of reliability as far as the Deep State is concerned, a dictatorship (in the non-pejorative sense of consolidation of legislative, executive and judicial power) by the so called “Democratic” Party has been become essential, with all theoretical “checks and balances” disabled, which brings me to the subject matter of Patrick’s well thought out article, i.e., “cognitive warfare”, both domestically and abroad, something Cassandrically prescient dystopian authors have been warning us about for at least a century, most notably Eric Arthur Blair writing as George Orwell, in his novels, Animal Farm and 1984, but also, ironically, President Dwight David Eisenhower in his farewell address.

Patrick’s article deals with the possible impeachment of current president Joseph Robinette Biden for numerous felonies and is set in the context of the cognitive warfare with which it is being opposed.  Impeachment was once something drastic, but not so since the Clinton presidency, a presidency that accomplished so much long term institutional malevolence, from moving the Democratic Party away from its liberal roots to creating a mockery of verity, crystalized in Bill Clinton’s quote “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”  The two impeachments of then president Trump turned the concept into a partisan political stunt, as a consequence of which, all future impeachment proceedings become suspect, even one where the evidence is likely to be as obvious as it is in the case discussed in the article (remember when the emoluments clause of the Constitution was a big deal?).

We are, of course, as Patrick implies, in the post truth era, a predictable successor to the era when the concept of verity was stripped of meaning through the hypothesis that verity was non-existent, all meaning being relative based on the perceptor’s cognitive functions.  The article is well worth reading, even if, as the Trojan prophetess Cassandra might have keened, were she among us: “things are not likely to improve so we’d best start to appreciate the benefits, if any, of authoritarian chaos, perpetual war and civil strife”: in essence, an updated version of Hobbes’ state of nature.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.