Forced Displacement Quotes

Everything suddenly seems displaced, subtle gradations erase borders, but it’s more forceful than that.

Rape is integral to the cultures of war, colonization, and forced displacement that have turned gender oppression and sexual violence into a global currency of desperation

It seemed to me that fate was inherited, like eye color. I wondered if she had felt the same disorientation that now ruled my days. Had it been all she could think about—the incomprehensibility of forced, permanent displacement?

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.

What greater sorrow than being forced to leave behind my native earth?

It amazed me to see how quickly they got comfortable in the new apartment and settled into a routine, as if their lives had simply been excised and replaced elsewhere, intact, with just a dusting of grief they shook off before returning to the business of living. Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.

The voices that speak to us at particular moments in our lives, especially during transitions or crises, imprint themselves with a force that later voices never quite displace.

It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.

The central question is not: what is force and what is freedom? That is a good question, but in the realm of human cruelty - the realm of history - it is utterly abstract. The central question is: why is force never acknowledged as such when used against the racially or sexually despised? Nazi terror used against the Jews is not in dispute. Still, there is an almost universal - and intrinsically anti-Semitic - conviction that the Jews went voluntarily to the ovens. Rational discourse on how the Jews were terrorized does not displace or transform this irrational conviction. And similarly, no matter what force is used against women as a class or as individuals, the universal conviction is that women want (either seek out or assent to) whatever happens to them, however awful, dangerous, destructive, painful, or humiliating. A statement is made about the nature of the Jew, the nature of the woman. The nature of each and both is to be a victim. A metaphysical victim is never forced, only actualized.

Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiatet the conditions of your selfhood under pereptually changing existential circumstances.

Nevertheless, the doctrine that one can impose one’s visions and desires on the world by the force of thought alone retains a powerful appeal to many people. Its acceptance displaces critical thinking and good strategy.

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people—the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic.

For the decline of capitalism to continue, that is to say, no revolutionary alternative is required, and certainly no masterplan of a better society displacing capitalism. Contemporary capitalism is vanishing on its own, collapsing from internal contradictions, and not least as a result of having vanquished its enemies - who, as noted, have often rescued capitalism from itself by forcing it to assume a new form. What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, now underway, is, I suggest, not socialism or some other defined social order, but a lasting interregnum - no new world system equilibrium a la Wallerstein, but a prolonged period of social entropy or disorder (and precisely for this reason a period of uncertainy and indeterminacy). It is an interesting problem for sociological theory whether and how a society can turn for a significant length of time into less than a society, a post-social society as it were, or a society lite, until it may or may not recover and again to become a society in the full meaning of the term.

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. …[T]his was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.

I keep finding the ashes of the man I unequivocally loved, everywhere. Everytime, I go to bed, they are displaced about my covers when memories flood back in my mind. When I glance at my skin, the ashes are smeared on my skin like hand prints from a tragic crime scene. When you cross my mind, the ashes of moments of intimacy fall to my heart, my body forcefully expell them through my lungs and tear ducts. The ashes spew out in an eruption of utter chaos. The ashes block out my perception of love and self value. My sight is distorted to truth and trust. The particles of ashe prevent me from forgetting. ANONYMOUS

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease.

A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we’ve seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less of a stress response. Likewise with baboons—if you are low ranking, a reliable way to reduce glucocorticoid secretion is to displace aggression onto those even lower in the pecking order. It’s something similar here—despite the conservative nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor. This point is made with a great metaphor for the consequences of societal inequality.41 The frequency of “air rage”—a passenger majorly, disruptively, dangerously losing it over something on a flight—has been increasing. Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or to the flight attendant.*

The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area but leave him intact... He is an isolated, definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another. Self-poised in elemental space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the parallelogram of forces bears down on him, whereupon he follows he line of the resultant

To make the country ours, before and after the American Revolution, we had to displace or annihilate the indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years. We had expanded by using deception and force, by military forays into Florida to persuade Spain to “sell” that to us (no money changed hands), by invading Mexico and taking almost half its land.

And, unlikely as it seemed at lunchtime on 2 April, Ascension Auxiliary Air Force Base was about to displace Chicago O’Hare as the busiest airfield in the world.

Those five characteristics are:    1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.    2. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.    3. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.    4. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather than fundamental change.    5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four. To reorient oneself away from a focus on technology toward a focus on emotional process requires that, like Columbus, we think in ways that not only are different from traditional routes but that also sometimes go in the opposite direction. This chapter will thus also serve as prelude to the three that follow, which describe the “equators” we have to cross in our time: the “learned” fallacies or emotional barriers that keep an Old World orientation in place and cause both family and institutional leaders to regress rather than venture in new directions.

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane -- as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout -- there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans. Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it ill be with us long after his demise. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on the matters of the spirit. The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end -- wealth, fame, eternal salvation -- but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic's worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture. Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God...

Which countries contain the most peaceful, the most moral, and the happiest people? Those people are found in the countries where the law least interferes with private affairs; where government is least felt; where the individual has the greatest scope, and free opinion the greatest influence; where administrative powers are fewest and simplest; where taxes are lightest and most nearly equal, and popular discontent the least excited and the least justifiable; where individuals and groups most actively assume their responsibilities, and, consequently, where the morals of admittedly imperfect human beings are constantly improving; where trade, assemblies, and associations are the least restricted; where labor, capital, and populations suffer the fewest forced displacements; where mankind most nearly follows its own natural inclinations; where the inventions of men are most nearly in harmony with the laws of God; in short, the happiest, most moral, and most peaceful people are those who most nearly follow this principle: Although mankind is not perfect, still, all hope rests upon the free and voluntary actions of persons within the limits of right; law or force is to be used for nothing except the administration of universal justice.

So much of what seems to lie about in discourses about race concerns legitimacy, authenticity, community, belonging – is, in fact, about home. An intellectual home; a spiritual home; family and community as home; forced and displaced labor in the destruction of home; the dislocation of and alienation within the ancestral home; the creative responses to exile, the devastations, pleasures, and imperatives of homelessness as it is manifested in discussions on globalism, diaspora, migrations, hybridity, contingency, interventions, assimilations, exclusions. The estranged body, the legislated body, the body as home. In virtually all of these formations, whatever the terrain, race magnifies the matter that matters.

Right Relationship With Life Itself Gerald May, a dear and now deceased friend of mine, said in his very wise book Addiction and Grace that addiction uses up our spiritual desire. It drains away our deepest and true desire, that inner flow and life force which makes us “long and pant for running streams” (Psalm 42). Spiritual desire is the drive that God put in us from the beginning, for total satisfaction, for home, for heaven, for divine union, and it just got displaced onto the wrong object. It has been a frequent experience of mine to find that many people in recovery often have a unique and very acute spiritual sense; more than most people, I would say. It just got frustrated early and aimed in a wrong direction. Wild need and desire took off before boundaries, strong identity, impulse control, and deep God experience were in place.2

Straw" I still keep the last straw I picked from the harvested wheat field near my home before the war forced me out… I have the straw framed and take it with me everywhere I go… And when asked about it, I tell people: It is the straw that broke my back… [Published on April 7, 2023 on CounterPunch.org]

But you failed to realize that America has only ever deemed certain heritages worth preserving. If the Lenape were forced from their ancestral home on the island of Mannahatta, the eviction of Little Syria's impoverished immigrants is no surprise, and it's hard for me to imagine that things will ever be any different.

All of us—every one of us—will be endless newbies in the future simply trying to keep up. Here’s why: First, most of the important technologies that will dominate life 30 years from now have not yet been invented, so naturally you’ll be a newbie to them. Second, because the new technology requires endless upgrades, you will remain in the newbie state. Third, because the cycle of obsolescence is accelerating (the average lifespan of a phone app is a mere 30 days!), you won’t have time to master anything before it is displaced, so you will remain in the newbie mode forever. Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or

Archimedes’ Principle states that any body completely or partially submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force, the magnitude of which is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body. Or to put it another way, you can hold a beach ball under water but the second you stop it’s going to shoot straight back up.

A little study of history was instructive. To make the country ours, before and after the American Revolution, we had to displace or annihilate the indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years. We had expanded by using deception and force, by military forays into Florida to persuade Spain to “sell” that to us (no money changed hands), by invading Mexico and taking almost half its land.

The absolute authority of market forces would be enshrined as the ultimate source of imperative control, displacing democratic contest and deliberation with an ideology of atomized individuals sentenced to perpetual competition for scarce resources. The disciplines of competitive markets promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects too preoccupied with survival to complain.

Time would heal the wound that was Frank; the world would continue to spin, to wobble, its axis only slightly skewed, momentarily displaced, by the brief, shuddering existence of one man -one THING - a post-human mutant, a blurred Xerox copy of a human being, the offspring of the waste of technology, the bent shadow of a fallen angel; Frank was all of these things. . . he was the sum of everything dark and sticky, the congealment of all things wrong and dark and foul in this world and every other seedy rathole world in every back-alley universe throughout the vast garbage dump of creation; God rolled the dice and Frank lost. . . he was a spiritual flunkie, a universal pain-in-the-ass, a joy-riding, soul-sucking cosmic punk rolling through time and space and piling up a karmic debt of such immense magnitude so as to invariably glue the particular vehicle of the immediate moment to the basement of possibility - planet earth - and force Frank to RE-ENLIST, endlessly, to return, over and over, to a flawed world somewhere to spend the Warhol-film-loop nights of eternity serving concurrent life sentences roaming the dimly lit hallways of always, stuck in the dense overshoes of physicality, forever, until finally - one would hope there is always a FINALLY - eventually, anyway - God would step in and say ENOUGH ALREADY and grab Frank by the collar of one of his thrift-shop polyester flower-print shirts and hurl him out the back door of the cosmos, expelling the rotten orb into the great wide nothingness and out of our lives - sure, that would be nice - but so would a new Cadillac - quit dreaming - it just doesn't work that way. . .

The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological agents: the emotion of disgust.111 Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions, animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamination. 112 And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle—a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach. The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was ethnic cleansing.

WHEN YOU BECOME INVOLVED IN AN ARGUMENT or some conflict situation, perhaps with a partner or someone close to you, start by observing how defensive you become as your own position is attacked, or feel the force of your own aggression as you attack the other person's position. Observe the attachment to your views and opinions. Feel the mental-emotional energy behind your need to be right and make the other person wrong. That's the energy of the egoic mind. You make it conscious by acknowledging it, by feeling it as fully as possible. Then one day, in the middle of an argument, you will suddenly realize that you have a choice, and you may decide to drop your own reaction — just to see what happens. You surrender. I don't mean dropping the reaction just verbally by saying “Okay, you are right,” with a look on your face that says, “I am above all this childish unconsciousness.” That's just displacing the resistance to another level, with the egoic mind still in charge, claiming superiority. I am speaking of letting go of the entire mental-emotional energy field inside you that was fighting for power. The ego is cunning, so you have to be very alert, very present, and totally honest with yourself to see whether you have truly relinquished your identification with a mental position and so freed yourself from your mind.

When the pressure of suppressed and repressed feelings exceeds the individual’s tolerance level, the mind will create an event “out there” upon which to vent and displace itself. Thus, the person with a lot of repressed grief will unconsciously create sad events in life. The fearful person precipitates frightening experiences; the angry person becomes surrounded by infuriating circumstances; and the prideful person is constantly being insulted.

Quammen compares the human population explosion to an outbreak of tent caterpillars. As we cut down deep forests and convert wild places to feed lots and drained swamp to cropland we encounter other species—birds, mammals, reptiles, bacteria and viruses—alien viruses whose hosts and habitats we have severely disrupted and displaced, so that viruses such as SARS, Ebola, MERS, the cluster of “swine flus” and Covid-19 are forced to find other places, other hosts including humans.

if you don’t much care for regulation now, you might be in for a hard time. As climate change causes sea levels to rise, more and more people are going to get displaced. More and more people are going to want to come live where you are living—or worse, you will be among those forced to do the moving. Cities are going to need storm walls; farmers will need compensation to relocate their fields. If you think action on behalf of climate change is expensive, just wait until you see the price of inaction. Regulations will be required sooner or later, but if we wait until things reach crisis level they will be a lot more onerous. There may be requirements to restrict your use of gasoline. Requirements that restrict your access to proteins, such as steak and fish. Regulators watching what you put in the trash. There may be limits on shipping and air travel. And by then, your neighbors will probably be voting for these regulations. The environmental and just plain cash-money costs will be staggering the longer we go without getting going.

The generalized theory of relativity has furnished still more remarkable results. This considers not only uniform but also accelerated motion. In particular, it is based on the impossibility of distinguishing an acceleration from the gravitation or other force which produces it. Three consequences of the theory may be mentioned of which two have been confirmed while the third is still on trial: (1) It gives a correct explanation of the residual motion of forty-three seconds of arc per century of the perihelion of Mercury. (2) It predicts the deviation which a ray of light from a star should experience on passing near a large gravitating body, the sun, namely, 1".7. On Newton's corpuscular theory this should be only half as great. As a result of the measurements of the photographs of the eclipse of 1921 the number found was much nearer to the prediction of Einstein, and was inversely proportional to the distance from the center of the sun, in further confirmation of the theory. (3) The theory predicts a displacement of the solar spectral lines, and it seems that this prediction is also verified.

Work is simply, “force x distance” or the product of a force applied to an object and the displacement of the object in the direction of the applied force…holding an object in the air does not involve any work, no matter how painful your hand will be after a few minutes… reflect on your daily activities and the results from them. Are you really working or just increasing your potential without progress or desired results? Your work must produce some movement, progress and change, by effectively using all your energies whether intellectual or physical.

When people encounter the true God, they experience a selfquake. That’s one way you can tell if you’ve met Israel’s God or simply a figment of your imagination. A made-up God will leave your world undisturbed, conveniently aligning with your priorities without displacing anything, because ultimately you are more glorious than it is. The real God, however, will land in the middle of your life like an elephant crashing through the ceiling, displacing your sin, changing all your priorities, and forcing you to reorient yourself around the weight of glory.

For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of Police departments, fearing that they would become forces of oppression...Only in the mid -nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots- after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed the dread of the state- did police departments emerge in the United States.... By the time of Anna's death, the informal system of policing had been displaced,,but vestiges of it remained, especially in places that seemed to exist on the periphery of geography and history.

Life is desire which essentially aims at expressing itself and consequently runs on entropic energy: it reaches its aim and then dissolves, like salmon swimming upstream to procreate and then die. The wish to die can consequently be seen as the counterpart and as another expression of the desire to live intensely. The corollary is more cheerful: not only is there no dialectical tension between Eros and Thanatos, but these two entities are really just one life-force that aims to reach its own fulfilment. Posthuman vital materialism displaces the boundaries between living and dying.

Symptoms which once stood for a restriction of the ego come later on to represent satisfactions as well, thanks to the ego's inclination to synthesis, and it is quite clear that this second meaning gradually becomes the more important of the two. The result of this process, which approximates more and more to a complete failure of the original purpose of defence, is an extremely restricted ego which is reduced to seeking satisfaction in the symptoms. The displacement of the distribution of forces in favour of satisfaction may have the dreaded final outcome of paralysing the will of the ego, which in every decision it has to make is almost as strongly impelled from the one side as from the other.

The awe of a naked female body is different, I thought, completely different. Naked girls exist almost exclusively, and for the longest time, in pictures. Movies, ads, porn. Moving or still images revealing what can only be guessed, grazed, or mentally drawn. Sleeping with a girl is bringing the uncommon, the extraordinary, into the very common: your bed, your body, your hands. Sex with a man, I realized, is initially the opposite. The very common nakedness of guys, glanced at, studiously ignored, forced upon you in locker rooms, sleepovers and showers, is thrown at you in the most uncommon, the most extraordinary setting: a forbidden and overpowering sexual disorientation. When you first sleep with a girl, you get the affirming feeling you’ve arrived. When you first sleep with a guy, you are drunk with displacement.

Over the years, I have grown to love airports, despite all the travel inconveniences which are getting worse every year. I don’t know why I have this strong desire to depart; to always be somewhere else. Maybe getting displaced and being forced out of my home as a result of war has turned me into a permanent nomad? Since I left Iraq for the first time in 2005, I almost always have a plane, bus, or train ticket to go somewhere. Sometimes I think of the mothers who abandon their unwanted babies at the doors of churches and mosques. I imagine that my mother, too, had left me at the door of an airport with a plane ticket instead of a pacifier in my mouth! And since then, I have been moving everywhere and arriving nowhere. Could it be that disillusion takes place precisely at the moment we arrive at a certain destination?

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

In one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, Amadeus, Salieri looks with wide-eyed astonishment at a manuscript of Mozart's and says, "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall." In this, Salieri captured the essence of perfection. His two sentences define precisely what we mean by perfection in many contexts, including theoretical physics. You might say it's a perfect definition. A theory begins to be perfect if any change makes it worse. That's Salieri's first sentence, translated from music to physics. And it's right on point. But the real genius comes with Salieri's second sentence. A theory becomes perfectly perfect if it's impossible to change it significantly without ruining it entirely-that is, if changing the theory significantly reduces it to nonsense.

The arrival of cotton growers in most cases displaced the indigenous inhabitants. In the antebellum decades, native peoples who had inhabited the cotton-growing territories of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi had been pushed farther west. Now pressure resumed. In October 1865, the Kiowa and Comanche were forced to give up land in central Texas, west Kansas, and eastern New Mexico—land that was turned, among other things, into cotton plantations. Shortly thereafter, many of the Texas plains Indians were pushed into reservations in Oklahoma, and so were the last southwestern Indians during the Red River War of 1874 and 1875, thereby freeing up further land for cotton growing.28 Yet Oklahoma ultimately provided little protection for these Native Americans. By the 1880s, the old Oklahoma and Indian territories came under pressure from white settlers who hoped to displace the native population from the most fertile lands.

It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repair person, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

The racial categorization of Blackness shares its natality with mining the New World, as does the material impetus for colonialism in the first instance. This means that the idea of Blackness and the displacement and eradication of indigenous peoples get caught and defined in the ontological wake of geology. The human and its subcategory, the inhuman, are historically relational to a discourse of settler-colonial rights and the material practices of extraction, which is to say that the categorization of matter is a spatial execution, of place, land, and person cut from relation through geographic displacement (and relocation through forced settlement and transatlantic slavery). That is, racialization belongs to a material categorization of the division of matter (corporeal and mineralogical) into active and inert. Extractable matter must be both passive (awaiting extraction and possessing of properties) and able to be activated through the mastery of white men.

If we are serious about moving toward a saner housing future, the options in terms of federal policy are relatively clear: we can prevent land from being subject to market forces, either through government ownership of land (housing projects) or through heavy regulation (rent or land-price control), or we can prevent the ever-increasing value of land from displacing people (programs such as Section 8 vouchers would fall in this category of solution). Instead, we do almost nothing and hope the market works it out. Without major new regulations, we can expect what's happening in San Francisco to continue in virtually all major US cities. In the same way that the suburbs were once inaccessible to the poor, in the near future American cities will become gilded jewel boxes, and the exodus of the poor to the suburbs will continue unchecked - that is, until the rent gaps in cities become too small to make gentrification profitable, and a new form of spatial filtering begins.

Imagine that seven out of ten working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do? It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repair person, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined. It

You promised I could start any charity I wanted. I'm going to find or build low-cost housing for the displaced Charterhouse Lane residents." Tom regarded his wife for a long moment. The flash of newfound assertiveness interested him. Excited him. He approached her slowly. "I suppose you'll want to take advantage of some of the undeveloped lots I own in Clerkenwell or Smithfield," he said. She lifted her chin slightly. "I might." "You'll probably rook some of my own people into working for you... architects, engineers, contractors... all at cut-rate fees." Her eyes widened. "Could I?" "I wouldn't even be surprised if you forced Barnaby, who has access to all my connections and resources, to act as your part-time assistant." As Tom stared into his wife's beautiful face, he heard Barnaby exclaim in a heartfelt voice behind them, "Oh, must I?" "Do you think I could succeed?" Cassandra whispered. "Lady Cassandra Severin," Tom said quietly, "that you'll succeed is not even a question." He gave her a wry glance. "The question is, are you going to spend the rest of our marriage trying to make me live up to your standards?

We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history. At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school: The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction. The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term. The imperial-era French engaged in mercantilism as a matter of course, but so too did any up-and-coming industrial power. The British famously product-dumped on the Germans in the early 1800s, while the Germans did the same to anyone they could reach in the late 1800s. One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less). In essence, both possible models would be implemented with an eye toward sucking other peoples dry, and transferring the pain of general economic dislocation from the invaders to the invaded. Getting a larger slice of a smaller pie, as it were. Both models might theoretically work in a poorer, more violent, more fractured world—particularly if they are married. But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem: Too many guns, not enough boots.

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

I will begin by describing the nature of an emotional regression and showing how in any society, no matter how advanced its state of technology, chronic anxiety can induce an approach to life that is counter-evolutionary. One does not need dictators in order to create a totalitarian (that, is totalistic) society. Then, employing five characteristics of chronically anxious personal families, I will illustrate how those same characteristics are manifest throughout the greater American family today, demonstrating their regressive effects on the thinking and functioning, the formation and the expression, of leadership among parents and presidents. Those five characteristics are:    1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.    2. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.    3. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.    4. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather than fundamental change.    5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four. To

Let me return from history and draw my conclusion. What all this means to us at the present time is this: Our system has already passed its flowering. Some time ago it reached that summit of blessedness which the mysterious game of world history sometimes allows to things beautiful and desirable in themselves. We are on the downward slope. Our course may possible stretch out for a very long time, but in any case nothing finer, ore beautiful, and more desirable than what we have already had can henceforth be expected. The road leads downhill. Historically we are, I believe, ripe for dismantling. And there is no doubt that such will be our fate, not today or tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow. I do not draw this conclusion from any excessively moralistic estimate of our accomplishments and our abilities: I draw it far more from the movements which I see already on the way in the outside world. Critical times are approaching; the omens can be sensed everywhere; the world is once again about to shift its center of gravity. Displacements of power are in the offing. They will not take place without war and violence. From the Far East comes a threat not only to peace, but to life and liberty. Even if our country remains politically neutral, even if our whole nation unanimously abides by tradition (which is not the case) and attempts to remain faithful to Castalian ideals, that will be in vain. Some of our representatives in Parliament are already saying that Castalia is a rather expensive luxury for our country. The country may very soon be forced into a serious rearmament - armaments for defensive purposes only, of course - and great economies will be necessary. In spite of the government's benevolent disposition towards us, much of the economizing will strike us directly. We are proud that our Order and the cultural continuity it provides have cost the country as little as they have. In comparison with other ages, especially the early period of the Feuilletonistic Age with its lavishly endowed universities, its innumerable consultants and opulent institutes, this toll is really not large. It is infinitesimal compared with the sums consumed for war and armaments during the Century of Wars. But before too long this kind of armament may once again be the supreme necessity; the generals will again dominate Parliament; and if the people are confronted with the choice of sacrificing Castalia or exposing themselves to the danger of war and destruction, we know how they will choose. Undoubtedly a bellicose ideology will burgeon. The rash of propaganda will affect youth in particular. Then scholars and scholarship, Latin and mathematics, education and culture, will be considered worth their salt only to the extent that they can serve the ends of war.

As the result of its systems and of its efforts, it would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all its self-compaceny, can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association. And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask it for justice, it alleges that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization. It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thingbeing done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the State--then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion--then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, beacuse we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.

My kingdom isn’t the sort that grows in this world,’ replied Jesus. ‘If my kingdom were from this world, my supporters would have fought, to stop me being handed over to the Judaeans. So then, my kingdom is not the sort that comes from here.’ (John 18:36) This translation captures something that many commentators gloss over. Yes, Jesus’ kingdom is not like the kingdoms of this world. It doesn’t originate the same way or behave like the kingdoms of this world. But Jesus’ kingdom is still for this world, for the benefit and blessing of this world, for the redemption and rescue of this world. If Jesus were an earthly king of this age, then there would be soldiers killing to bring about his kingdom, just as they do for every other earthly kingdom: victory through violence. Yet that’s not how Jesus’ kingdom will come. The kingdom will come rather through the imperial violence done to him on the cross and through the anti-imperial, death-reversing, justice-loving power of resurrection. Then the kingdom spreads, not through conquest, but through the spirit’s life-giving and liberating power being experienced by more and more people and through their life-giving contributions to the world. At the heart of John’s kingdom-theology is God’s love revealed in the death of his Son, the Lamb, the Messiah. This is conquest, but by love. This is power, but in weakness. This is kingship, but in self-giving suffering for others. This kingdom is not one that arises from within the world. But as it advances, as it spreads, it dispels and displaces the dark forces in the world.24

ISIS was forced out of all its occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, though thousands of ISIS fighters are still present in both countries. Last April, Assad again used sarin gas, this time in Idlib Province, and Russia again used its veto to protect its client from condemnation and sanction by the U.N. Security Council. President Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Syrian airfield where the planes that delivered the sarin were based. It was a minimal attack, but better than nothing. A week before, I had condemned statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had explicitly declined to maintain what had been the official U.S. position that a settlement of the Syrian civil war had to include Assad’s removal from power. “Once again, U.S. policy in Syria is being presented piecemeal in press statements,” I complained, “without any definition of success, let alone a realistic plan to achieve it.” As this book goes to the publisher, there are reports of a clash between U.S. forces in eastern Syria and Russian “volunteers,” in which hundreds of Russians were said to have been killed. If true, it’s a dangerous turn of events, but one caused entirely by Putin’s reckless conduct in the world, allowed if not encouraged by the repeated failures of the U.S. and the West to act with resolve to prevent his assaults against our interests and values. In President Obama’s last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions. Much of that conversation concerned Syria. No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions. Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created. And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor. There are senior officials in government who are trying to mitigate those effects. But I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last ten years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door on the era of the American-led world order. I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded. I have nothing but hope left to invest in the work of others to make the future better than the past. As of today, as the Syrian war continues, more than 400,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. More than five million have fled the country and more than six million have been displaced internally. A hundred years from now, Syria will likely be remembered as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, and an example of human savagery at its most extreme. But it will be remembered, too, for the invincibility of human decency and the longing for freedom and justice evident in the courage and selflessness of the White Helmets and the soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom from tyranny and terrorists. In that noblest of human conditions is the eternal promise of the Arab Spring, which was engulfed in flames and drowned in blood, but will, like all springs, come again.

A fighting force cannot be reduced to its order of battle any more than a ship’s value can be reduced to the number of guns she carries or the shaft horsepower her turbines can generate. A vessel draws life from the spirit of her crew, which derives in large part from the leadership qualities of her chiefs and officers. Morale defies quantification--and yet it weighs significantly on the ultimate lethality of the tools of war. A ship’s effectiveness is the product of thousands of bonds that develop between individual officers and crew. The bonds form and break in a chain reaction, the power of which is determined by drill, by relationships, by fortitude, faith, and values. Task force commanders can be only abstractly aware of these uncountable qualities as they exist on the particular ships under their command. The officers of the ships themselves see these qualities more clearly but still can only guess how the chemical reactions will coalesce when the real shooting starts and men begin to die. And so orders of battle are drawn up to focus on the tangibles: speed, displacement, armament, and sensors. On that score Taffy 3 scarcely even registered on the scale of force that Takeo Kurita brought against them.

Logical objectivity derives from carnal intersubjectivity on the condition that it has been forgotten as carnal intersubjectivity, and it is carnal intersubjectivity itself which produces this forgetfuIness by wending its way toward logical objectivity. Thus the forces of the constitutive field do not move in one direction only; they turn back upon themselves. Intercorporeality goes beyond itself and ends up unconscious of itself as intercorporeality; it displaces and changes the situation it set out from, and the spring of constitution can no more be found in its beginning than in its terminus. These relationships are found again at each stage of constitution. The perceived thing rests upon the body proper...We can just as well say that the entire functioning of the body proper hangs upon the perceived thing the circuit of behavior closes upon. The body is nothing less but nothing more than the things' condition of possibility. When we go from body to thing, we go neither from principle to consequence nor from means to end. We are present at a kind of propagation, encroachment, or enjambment which prefigures the passage from the solus ipse to the other person, from the "solipsist" thing to the intersubjective thing.

Socialization itself is in question. The present crisis, of which the disintegration of the banlieues is only the spectacular form, is the crisis of general disintegration in the face of the ideal demands of sociality. The disturbances in the margins conceal the fact that society as a whole is resisting the systematic colonization of socialization. The bar of total investment in life through society and economics has been set too high. When did we discover that the deepest demands were social and economic, that the only horizon was the horizon of integration and calculation? Capital's coup de force is to make everything dependant on the economic order, to subject all minds to a single mental dimension. Every other issue becomes unintelligible. The displacement of all problems into economic and performance terms is a trap: the belief that everything is granted us virtually, or will be, by the grace of continual growth and acceleration - including, by extension, a universal lifting of prohibitions, the availability of all information and, of course, the obligation to experience jouissance.

Do you think what’s happening in this solar system hasn’t happened a million times before? Your own history is a guide to what’s happening here. Countless times, your own species has invaded new lands. You’ve displaced other species. Caused mass extinctions. And it’s not limited to the plants and animals of your world. You have murdered and hunted your own people. Forced mass migrations from lands you desired—relocating those deemed less worthy of natural resources you coveted. When a more advanced group of people needed the resources, they took them. We are simply doing what you’ve done to your own people, playing by the same rules.

Once upon a time, displaced people had a time and a place. They had a place in which they made plans about what to do with their future and their lives. Their time and place were prematurely destroyed and stolen from them. These people were then forced to exist in times and places that are not theirs. They were forced to learn the art of living and flourishing in the same empire that stole and destroyed their time and place back home.

A refugee is someone who was forcefully taken out of their time and place. They were then placed in another time and another place that insist on dehumanizing them. It is a tragedy. The ultimate paradox and irony of this tragedy is that, in many cases, those who caused their displacement and those who hate them in their newfound ‘homes’ in exile are the same people! In this way, they leave no place for a refugee to feel at home or even alive.

If Tivo marks the beginning of the shift from the Brand Age to the Product Age, the summer of 2020 saw the Brand Age’s end. The killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests briefly displaced the pandemic in the front and center of our national consciousness, making obvious the passing of the Brand Age into history. Seemingly every brand company did what they always do when America’s sins are pulled out from the back of the closet where we try to keep them hidden: they called up their agencies and posted inspiring words, arresting images, and black rectangles. Message: We care. Only this time, it didn’t resonate. Their brand magic fizzled. First on social media, then tumbling from there onto newspapers and evening news, activists and customers started using the tools of the new age to compare these companies’ carefully crafted brand messages with the reality of their operations. “This you?” became the Twitter meme that exposed the brand wizards. Companies who posted about their “support” for black empowerment were called out when their own websites revealed the music did not match the words. The NFL claimed it celebrates protest, and the internet tweeted back, “This you?” under a picture of Colin Kaepernick kneeling. L’Oréal posted that “speaking out is worth it” and got clapped back with stories about dropping a model just three years earlier for speaking out against racism. The performative wokeness across brands felt forced and hollow. Systemic racism is a serious issue, and a 30-second spot during The Masked Singer doesn’t prove you are serious about systemic racism. That’s always been true, about ads on any issue, but social media and the ease of access to data on the internet has made it much harder for companies to pretend.

We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable,” declared, in 2011, the commission charged with investigating the 2007–2008 financial cataclysm. That event caused more people to take their own lives in the United States than the 9/11 terrorist attacks caused casualties. It triggered what would be considered a humanitarian crisis in any African or Middle Eastern country, as millions of Americans, forced out of their homes, became internally displaced people.

In 1429, a seventeen-year-old girl who would soon come to be renowned as Jehanne la Pucelle (“Jeanne, the maiden”) left a small town in northeast France to offer her services as a military strategist to Charles VII, the Dauphin—or heir to the throne—whose forces were losing a protracted war against English partisans threatening to displace him. At first, no one took her seriously, but Jehanne’s determination overcame initial resistance: her skill and insight helped the French develop new battle plans and her courage inspired the demoralized troops. Under Jehanne’s leadership, the French forces successfully thwarted a siege on the city of Orleans. Later she led a campaign to retake the city and cathedral of Reims, where the kings of France had been crowned ever since the Frankish tribes were united under one ruler, allowing the Dauphin to be crowned king in the ancient tradition. Jehanne’s remarkable successes seemed divinely ordained, which necessarily implied Charles’s divine right to rule France. In 1430 Jehanne was captured in battle and imprisoned. An ecclesiastical tribunal stacked with English partisans tried her for heresy. But Jehanne’s faith was beyond reproach. She showed an astonishing familiarity with the intricacies of scholastic theology, evading every effort to lure her into making a heretical statement. Unable to discredit her faith through her verbal testimony, the tribunal seized on the implicit statements made by Jehanne’s attire. In battle, she wore armor, which required linen leggings and a form-fitting tunic fastened together with straps—both traditionally masculine attire—and, like the men she fought alongside, she adopted this martial attire when off the battlefield as well. Citing the biblical proscription in Deuteronomy 22:5 (KJV) which warns, “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a women’s garment, for all who do are an abomination to the Lord your God,” the tribunal charged Jehanne with heresy. They burned her at the stake in 1431.

The rationalizing mind prefers to keep the true causes of emotion out of awareness and utilizes the mechanism of projection to do this. It blames events or other people for “causing” a feeling and views itself as the helpless innocent victim of external causes. “They made me angry.” “He got me upset.” “It scared me.” “World events are the cause of my anxiety.” Actually, it’s the exact opposite. The suppressed and repressed feelings seek an outlet and utilize the events as triggers and excuses to vent themselves. We are like pressure-cookers ready to release steam when the opportunity arises. Our triggers are set and ready to go off. In psychiatry, this mechanism is called displacement. It is because we are angry that events “make” us angry. If, through constant surrendering, we have let go of the pent-up store of anger, it is very difficult and, in fact, even impossible for anyone or any situation to “make” us angry.

To explain how we got to this seemingly intractable place, a little history is required—never a simple proposition in a part of the world where rivaling versions of the past are a dense thicket. The 1930s saw a series of Arab revolts against the influx of Jewish migrants to Palestine, which was then under British control. This wave of Jewish immigration was regarded by many Palestinians as a colonial imposition, a perception that was further cemented when British troops and local police put down the Arab uprising with tremendous force, fueling further resentment. When Palestine was partitioned in 1947, a move with overwhelming Arab opposition, and Israel declared statehood the next year, the first Arab-Israeli war was locked in. These were the years that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe: roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, and thousands were killed, with many of the horrifying truths about these atrocities finally escaping Israel’s own Shadow Lands in recent years. Of course Palestinians would resist such ethnic cleaning with violence of their own. Yet rather than seeing Arab resistance for what it was—a nationalist, anti-colonial battle over land and self-determination (with some anti-Semitic elements, to be sure)—many influential Zionist leaders portrayed the entire Palestinian cause as nothing but more irrational Jew-hatred, a seamless continuation of the very same anti-Semitism that had resulted in the Holocaust, and that therefore needed to be crushed with the kind of militarized force that Jews had not been able to marshal in Nazi-controlled Europe. Within this imaginary, the Palestinian, as the Jew’s new eternal enemy, was treated as so illegitimate, so irrational, so other, that Israelis believed themselves to be justified in reenacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanizing propaganda, and forced displacement that had targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centuries, a process that continues to this day with ongoing home demolitions, Israeli settlement expansions, targeted assassinations, settler rampages through Palestinian communities, openly discriminatory laws, and walled ghettos into which Palestinians are corralled.

Peel was forced to develop a lower-cost and more legitimate form of policing: a “Peace Preservation Force,” made up of professional police who attempted to manage crowds by embedding themselves more fully in rebellious localities, then identifying and neutralizing troublemakers and ringleaders through threats and arrests. This led eventually to the creation of the Royal Irish Constabulary, which for about a century was the main rural police force in Ireland. It played a central role in maintaining British rule and an oppressive agricultural system dominated by British loyalists, a system that produced widespread poverty, famine, and displacement.

The Nazi genocide is conventionally thought to exceed all “normal” conceptions of justice and to estrange familiar categories such as “guilt”, “punishment”, and even “the human.” Yet, invocations of the genocide in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict tend to reference the Holocaust as the bearer of shared norms of human rights and clear-cut moral distinctions. In scenarios of equation, not only is the past anachronistically rewritten from the vantage point of a very different present (a rewriting that characterizes many acts of memory), but as a result, the present loses its potential as a locus of novelty [.…] Regardless of the complexities of the Nazi genocide as a historical phenomenon, the images of the genocide that circulate in the present reduce it – as well as the contemporary cases to which it is analogized – to a stereotypical scenario of good and evil, innocence and absolute power. A discourse based on clear-cut visions of victims and perpetrators or of innocence and guilt, evacuates the political sphere of complexity and reduces it to a morality tale. Even in the case of Genocide, a seemingly exceptional situation of polarized innocence and guilt, the most thoughtful responses have been forced to reflect on uncomfortable questions of complicity and ambivalence in “the gray zone” first described by Primo Levy. P139 [….] Ultimately, the goal of a radical democratic politics of multidirectional memory today is not only to move beyond discourses of equation or hierarchy, but also to displace the reductive, absolutist understanding of the Holocaust as a code for “good and evil” from the center of global memory politics. This task is time- and place specific and demands a vision of reflective justice.

The African as immigrant was not an inevitable by-product of the traffic in human commodities but rather a creation of his or her own arduous making. It is this that distinguishes African displacement in the Atlantic slave trade from all other emigration. Slaves’ full personhood was the crux of the contest between Africans and those who commodified them. Traders and masters alike confronted the universal contradiction inherent in the idea of human beings as property; conceding that the slave had a will, in order to better devise means to control it, was not an acknowledgement of the slave’s personhood. The African slave, a victim of forced migration, cannot, then, be taken for granted as immigrant subject. This displaced being had to restore through her unassisted agency the pulse of social integration that saltwater slavery threatened to extinguish. That the Africans enslaved in America were immigrants was thus not an axiomatic truth, but rather one Africans had to fight for. Those who lived to walk away from the slave ship had to address the problem of their unique displacement and alienation. They did so in three ways that gave distinctive shape to their effort to build meaningful life in a new world. First, they engaged with the cognitive problem of orientation: Where are we now that we have escaped the slave ship? Second, they created kinship and community out of the disaggregated units remaining after the market’s dispersal of its human wares. Third, they came to terms with the saltwater journey’s haunting imprint on their communities, regularly reinforced by the slave ships’ return to deposit still more saltwater slaves on these unfamiliar shores.

In reality, the various movements and removals of Indigenous peoples from the Southeast due to white invasion meant that the first western settlers were often Native Americans who migrated to spaces other than their homelands, where they encountered other tribes—longtime enemies, other displaced peoples, and groups who had long called this land home. Native peoples adjusted their oral histories and survivance strategies to incorporate their new surroundings as they had done for millennia, crafting stories that told of successful migrations and learning about the food and herbs of their new homes. As they were forced westward, the Five Tribes’ experience in Indian Territory was different from the other Indigenous migrations occurring around them. The Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations sought to use the settler colonial process to cast themselves as civilizers of their new home: they used the labor system that Euro-Americans insisted represented sophistication—chattel slavery—to build homes, commercial enterprises, and wealth, and they portrayed themselves as settlers in need of protection from the federal government against the depredations of western Indians, which, the Five Tribes claimed, hindered their own civilizing progress. Moreover, they followed their physical appropriation of Plains Indians’ land with an erasure of their predecessor’s history. They perpetuated the idea that they had found an undeveloped ‘wilderness” when they arrived in Indian Territory and that they had proceeded to tame it. They claimed that they had built institutions and culture in a space where previously neither existed. The Five Tribes’ involvement in the settler colonial process was self-serving: they had already been forced to move once by white Americans, and appealing to their values could only help them—at least, at first. Involvement in the system of Black enslavement was a key component of displaying adherence to Americans’ ideas of social, political, and economic advancement—indeed, owning enslaved people was the primary path to wealth in the nineteenth century. The laws policing Black people’s behavior that appeared in all of the tribes’ legislative codes showed that they were willing to make this system a part of their societies. But with the end of the Civil War, the political party in power—the Republicans—changed the rules: slavery was no longer deemed civilized and must be eliminated by force. For the Five Tribes, the rise and fall of their involvement in the settler colonial process is inextricably connected to the enslavement of people of African descent: it helped to prove their supposed civilization and it helped them construct their new home, but it would eventually be the downfall of their Indian Territory land claims. Recognizing the Five Tribes’ coerced migration to Indian Territory as the first wave among many allows us to see how settler colonialism shaped the culture of Indian Territory even before settlers from the United States arrived. Though the Cherokee ‘Trail of Tears’ has come to symbolize Indian Removal, the Five Tribes were just a handful of dozens of Indigenous tribes who had been forced to move from their eastern homelands due to white displacement. This displacement did not begin or end in the 1830s Since the 1700s, Indian nations such as the Wyandot, Kickapoo, and Shawnee began migrating to other regions to escape white settlement and the violence and resource scarcity that often followed. Though brought on by conditions outside of their control, these migrations were ‘voluntary’ in that they were most often an attempt to flee other Native groups moving into their territory as a result of white invasion or to preempt white coercion, rather than a response to direct Euro-American political or legal pressure to give up their homelands….

If it was unclear that Biden could change the country’s direction, it was because Trump was more a symptom of what was happening to America than the cause. It was easy to attribute “America First” and the country’s seeming lack of faith in science, its political dysfunction and gridlock, to one man. And the Europeans did that plenty. But deep down, they knew that Trump had been a product of many forces, from American anger about trade, about jobs displaced by technology, about the increasingly glaring evidence of economic disparity—and also by legacies of isolationism and racism and distrust of government agencies and most media. Joe Biden’s election didn’t change any of that.

Yes. He worked for the British consulate in Bern. He offered to marry me and support the children, have me evacuated to England. The practicalities of life were solved, which was a relief. Once you have children, the practicalities are all that really count. Especially in wartime. But I still didn’t know what had happened to Jurgis. He’d simply vanished. When the war ended, I thought he’d turn up. Like magic. He was like that. I imagined he would simply walk through the door one afternoon and set down his pack and call my name and carry me to bed. I asked Nathaniel to help me—he was in Germany, you remember, with the occupation force in Berlin. He was wonderful. Combed all the prisoner of war lists and put out the word at the displaced person camps, everything he could think of. Dear boy. But we never heard a word. Not a clue. Disappeared. Like so many. Into thin air. Or the mud of some battlefield, more likely.

If Jefferson's leadership is to be set apart from others similarly situated later on, it should not be because he was inclined to finesse a frontal assault on the old [Federalist] governmental establishment, but because he transformed national politics so thoroughly without being forced into any make-or-break confrontation with it. Jefferson pursued the reconstruction of American government and politics relentlessly, and the regime he created in the end was profoundly different from the one he displaced. Yet, the most remarkable aspect of his transformation is how little resistance he encountered in the process from the institutions and interests previously attached to the old order. Jefferson's authority to reconstruct proved singularly disarming and all-encompassing.

Children displaced from their families, unconnected to their teachers, and not yet mature enough to relate to one another as separate beings, automatically regroup to satisfy their instinctive drive for attachment. The culture of the group is either invented or borrowed from the peer culture at large. It does not take children very long to know what tribe they belong to, what the rules are, whom they can talk to, and whom they must keep at a distance. Despite our attempts to teach our children respect for individual differences and to instill in them a sense of belonging to a cohesive civilization, we are fragmenting at an alarming rate into tribal chaos. Our very own children are leading the way. The time we as parents and educators spend trying to teach our children social tolerance, acceptance, and etiquette would be much better invested in cultivating a connection with them. Children nurtured in traditional hierarchies of attachment are not nearly as susceptible to the spontaneous forces of tribalization. The social values we wish to inculcate can be transmitted only across existing lines of attachment. The culture created by peer orientation does not mix well with other cultures. Because peer orientation exists unto itself, so does the culture it creates. It operates much more like a cult than a culture. Immature beings who embrace the culture generated by peer orientation become cut off from people of other cultures. Peer-oriented youth actually glory in excluding traditional values and historical connections. People from differing cultures that have been transmitted vertically retain the capacity to relate to one another respectfully, even if in practice that capacity is often overwhelmed by the historical or political conflicts in which human beings become caught up. Beneath the particular cultural expressions they can mutually recognize the universality of human values and cherish the richness of diversity. Peer-oriented kids are, however, inclined to hang out with one another exclusively. They set themselves apart from those not like them. As our peer-oriented children reach adolescence, many parents find themselves feeling as if their very own children are barely recognizable with their tribal music, clothing, language, rituals, and body decorations. “Tattooing and piercing, once shocking, are now merely generational signposts in a culture that constantly redraws the line between acceptable and disallowed behavior,” a Canadian journalist pointed out in 2003. Many of our children are growing up bereft of the universal culture that produced the timeless creations of humankind: The Bhagavad Gita; the writings of Rumi and Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes and Faulkner, or of the best and most innovative of living authors; the music of Beethoven and Mahler; or even the great translations of the Bible. They know only what is current and popular, appreciate only what they can share with their peers. True universality in the positive sense of mutual respect, curiosity, and shared human values does not require a globalized culture created by peer-orientation. It requires psychological maturity — a maturity that cannot result from didactic education, only from healthy development. Only adults can help children grow up in this way. And only in healthy relationships with adult mentors — parents, teachers, elders, artistic, musical and intellectual creators — can children receive their birthright, the universal and age-honored cultural legacy of humankind. Only in such relationships can they fully develop their own capacities for free and individual and fresh cultural expression.

But the murky role he played in the notorious July 20 plot on Adolf Hitler’s life in 1944, the closest an assassination attempt got to killing the Nazi Fuhrer, would bring about the Desert Fox’s untimely demise in October 1944, even as the Soviets and Western Allies were tightening the vise on Germany. Compelled to take cyanide by authorities, the Desert Fox insisted he was innocent until his dying day, and his popularity forced the Nazi government to claim his death was brought about by a heart attack or a cerebral embolism. In fact, Rommel was given an official state funeral, and Winston Churchill would go on to praise him, “He also deserves our respect because, although a loyal German soldier, he came to hate Hitler and all his works, and took part in the conspiracy to rescue Germany by displacing the maniac and tyrant. For this, he paid the forfeit of his life. In the sombre wars of modern democracy, chivalry finds no place … Still, I do not regret or retract the tribute I paid to Rommel, unfashionable though it was judged.

In 2015, an exhaustive study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that rising CO2 pollution had made the 2007–2010 drought in Syria twice as likely to occur, and that the four-year drought had a “catalytic effect” on political unrest in the area. Herders were forced off their land, seeking food and water elsewhere. More than 1.5 million rural people were displaced, causing a massive migration into urban areas, where they bumped up against an influx of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees. When researchers asked one displaced Syrian farmer whether she thought the drought had caused the civil war, she replied, “Of course. The drought and unemployment were important in pushing people toward revolution. When the drought happened, we could handle it for two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.

The carbon cycle has grabbed the headlines, but we’ve also seized hold of many other major geochemical cycles. Through production of fertilizers, we’ve radically altered Earth’s nitrogen cycle. The sulfur cycle has become dominated by industrial emissions. We’ve dammed rivers so thoroughly that there is now more than five times as much fresh water captured in reservoirs as there is remaining in all the wild rivers and streams of Earth! That is not a minor change. It’s fair to say that we’ve domesticated a major part of the water cycle of this planet. Earth’s vibrant hydrosphere, arguably our planet’s most distinctive feature, has to some degree become an artifact of human civilization. Every year now, humans constructing roads, buildings, and farms displace ten times more dirt than the combined erosive forces of wind, rain, earthquakes, and tides. Simply measured by the amount of stuff we move around, we have become the undisputed world heavyweight champions

In Milwaukee, a city of fewer than 105,000 renter households, landlords evict roughly 16,000 adults and children each year. That's sixteen families evicted through the court system daily. But there are other ways, cheaper and quicker ways, for landlords to remove a family than through court order. Some landlords pay tenants a couple hundred dollars to leave by the end of the week. Some take off the front door. Nearly half of all forced moves experienced by renting families in Milwaukee are 'informal evictions' that take place in the shadow of the law. If you count all forms of involuntary displacement - formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations - you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move. There is nothing special about Milwaukee when it comes to eviction. The numbers are similar in Kansas City, Cleveland, Chicago, and other cities. In 2013, 1 in 8 poor renting families nationwide were unable to pay all of their rent, and a similar number thought it was likely they would be evicted soon. This book is set in Milwaukee, but it tells an American story.

On June 20, 2016, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which tracks forced displacement worldwide based on data from governments, partner agencies, and UNHCR’s own reporting, issued a report stating that a total of 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, compared with 59.5 million just twelve months earlier.

Those five characteristics are:    1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.    2. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.    3. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.    4. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather than fundamental change.    5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four. To reorient oneself away from a focus on technology toward a focus on emotional process requires that, like Columbus, we think in ways that not only are different from traditional routes but that also sometimes go in the opposite direction. This chapter will thus also serve as prelude to the three that follow, which describe the “equators” we have to cross in our time: the “learned” fallacies or emotional barriers that keep an Old World orientation in place and cause both family and institutional leaders to regress rather than venture in new directions. By the term regression I

Jesus dwell at the fountain of my life; if the currents of His life have displaced and superseded all self-currents; if implicit obedience to Him be the inspiration and force of every movement of my life, then He can safely commit the praying to my will, and pledge Himself, by an obligation as profound as His own nature, that whatsoever is asked shall be granted.

For our story, the most important proposed expansion of the equations of physics is supersymmetry, often fondly called SUSY. Supersymmetry, as the name suggests, proposes that we should use equations with larger symmetry. SUSY's new symmetry is related to the boost symmetry of special relativity. As you may recall, boost symmetry says that the basic equations don't change when you impart a common, constant velocity to all the components of the system you're describing. (Dirac had to modify Schrodinger's equation to give it that property.) Supersymmetry likewise says that the equations don't change when you impart a common motion to all the components of the system you're describing. But it's a very different kind of motion from what's involved in boost symmetry. Instead of motion through ordinary space with a constant velocity, supersymmetry involves motion into new dimensions! Before you get carried away with visions of spirit worlds and wormholes through hyperspace, let me hasten to add that the new dimensions have a very different character from the familiar dimensions of space and time. They're quantum dimensions. What happens to a body when it moves in the quantum dimensions isn't that it gets displace-there's no notion of distance out there-instead, its spin changes. The "superboosts" turn particles with a given amount of intrinsic spin into particles with a different amount of spin. Because the equations are supposed to stay the same, supersymmetry relates properties of particles with different spin. SUSY allows us to see them as the same particle, moving in different ways through the quantum dimensions of superspace. You can visualize the quantum dimensions as new layers of the Grid. When a particle hops into these layers its spin changes, and so does its mass. Its charges-electric, color, and weak-stay the same. SUSY might allow us to complete the work of unifying the Core. Unification of the different charges, using the symmetry SO(10), united all the gauge bosons into a common cluster, and all the quarks and leptons into a common cluster. But no ordinary symmetry is capable of joining those two clusters, for they describe particles with different spins. Sypersymmetry is the best idea we have for connecting them.

all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights—all

Sometimes you may feel like your life is submerged in life's relentless challenges, but you can develop the kind of internal substance in you that displaces every negativity, fear and self-doubt. Even if the challenges were bigger and heavy on your soul and life, the new attitude and belief within will displace every challenge before you - then the law of buoyancy will begin to force your challenges to be ejected out of your pathway to success.

At times the challenges will displace us or some of the things that are important to us. If we strengthen our belief system from within – those challenges must inevitably begin to float away and not take root or force us to sink.

Yuda and myself exchanged very detailed, open letters about our lives and our plans for the future. He had volunteered to the Haganah (the forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces), worked sporadically as a construction worker, in order to support himself as an engineering student at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. He had no immediate family, just uncles and cousins and his newly-arrived from Europe, beloved octogenarian grandmother. As Yuda had come to Israel on an illegal refugee boat, with just the clothes on his back, he could offer me nothing except love and devotion. I, myself was looking for a life of fulfillment, of shared responsibilities and surrounded by people, like ourselves, survivors. I thought that I would be happier living among people who had gone through similar life experiences to my own. I felt that I really needed to have a home of my own, built by myself and Yuda. I was not afraid of life in a new country, struggling and poor. I supposed that I could feel at home there, find a place in that society, not a displaced person any longer.

If you count all forms of involuntary displacement—formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations—you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.

Yet, the present dangers in the Middle East are a substantial result of the failures of recent American foreign policy. The Obama administration failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement (SOFA)5 with Iraq when U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011.6 Obama also refrained from engaging in significant military action in Iraq and Syria when such action had the chance of success. These omissions led to the removal of U.S. forces, leaving a power vacuum in the region.7 Iran, Russia, and ISIS have seized the opportunity, and all have grown stronger due to America’s withdrawal from the Middle East. The civil wars raging in Iraq and Syria—in which Iran, Russia, and ISIS are currently embroiled—illustrate the resulting power struggle. The instability in the Middle East has also led to a rise in refugees displaced from their homes, especially in Syria.

Perhaps it was foolhardy to suppose that in real life we could undo what had been done, cancel our knowledge of evil, uninvent our weapons, stow away what remained in some safe hiding place. With the devastation of World War II still grimly visible, its stench hardly gone from the air, the community of nations started to fragment, its members splitting into factions, resorting to threats and, finally, to violence and to war. The certainty of peace had proved little more than a fragile dream. “And so the great democracies triumphed,” Sir Winston Churchill wrote later. “And so were able to resume the follies that had nearly cost them their life.” Prophetic as he was, Churchill did not foresee the awesome extremes to which these follies would extend: diplomacy negotiated within a balance of nuclear terror; resistance tactics translated into guidelines for fanatics and terrorists; intelligence agencies evolving technologically to a level where they could threaten the very principles of the nations they were created to defend. One way or another, such dragon’s teeth were sown in the secret activities of World War II. Questions of utmost gravity emerged: Were crucial events being maneuvered by elite secret power groups? Were self-aggrandizing careerists cynically displacing principle among those entrusted with the stewardship of intelligence? What had happened over three decades to an altruistic force that had played so pivotal a role in saving a free world from annihilation or slavery? In the name of sanity, the past now had to be seen clearly. The time had come to open the books.

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people — the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of trouble. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easy manipulated and dominated that scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test for loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots.

Much of the negation poisoning the democratic process has stemmed from a confusion of the personal and the statistical. I may hold down an excellent job, but the failure of the stimulus to meet its targets infuriates me. I may live in peaceful Vienna, Virginia, safe from harm—but a report that several Americans have died violently in Kabul appears like a fatal failure of authority. By dwelling on the plane of gross statistics, I become vulnerable to grandiose personal illusions: that if I compel the government to move in this direction or that, I can save the Constitution, say, or the earth, or stop the war, or end poverty now. Though my personal sphere overflows with potentiality, I join the mutinous public and demand the abolition of the established order. This type of moral and political displacement is nothing new. The best character in the best novel by Dickens, to my taste, is Mrs. Jellyby of Bleak House, who spent long days working to improve “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger,” while, in her London home, her small children ran wild and neglected. Dickens termed this “telescopic philanthropy”—the trampling of the personal sphere for the sake of a heroic illusion. Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She also held a discussion with Mr. Quale, the subject of which seemed to be—if I understood it—the brotherhood of humanity, and gave utterance to some beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an auditor as I might have wished to be, however, for Peepy and the other children came flocking about Ada and me in a corner of the drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down among them and told them in whispers “Puss in Boots” and I don’t know what else until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed.3 The revolt of the public has had a telescopic and Jellybyan aspect to it. Though they never descended to details, insurgents assumed that, by symbolic gestures and sheer force of desire, they could refashion the complex systems of democracy and capitalism into a personalized utopia. Instead, unknowingly, they crossed into N. N. Taleb’s wild “Extremistan,” where “we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.” In that unstable country, “you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data.”4 I can’t command a complex social system like the United States, but I can control my political expectations of it: I can choose to align them with reality. To seize this alternative, I must redirect the demands I make on the world from the telescopic to the personal, because actionable reality resides in the personal sphere. I can do something about losing my job, for example, but I have no clue what could or should be done about the unemployment rate. I know directly whether a law affects my business for better or worse, but I have no idea of its effect on the gross domestic product. I can assist a friend in need, but I have little influence over the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger. Control, however tenuous, and satisfaction, however fleeting, can only be found in the personal sphere, not in telescopic numbers reported by government. A

WE PAUSE to be with grief, joining the rebellion against a hedonistic culture of happiness-at-all-costs and reclaiming our rightful feelings. We learn to just be without needing to tame, alter, or displace our emotions. This is radically countercultural, even revolutionary, when all other social forces merge to quell, overcome,

As two forces so diametrically opposed, those forces cannot occupy the same space at the same time; the stronger force will win out. The conclusion is always violent as one displaces the other; and the greater the forces, the more violent the conclusion. You were just the instrument of good displacing evil. It is done and forgotten.

Still more striking, the people who built Stonehenge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3300 BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people – with its own Woodhenge – in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer. The builders of Stonehenge seem to have been neither foragers nor herders, but something in between.41 All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way.

Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment; or "What is Communism?" by Yggdrasil The sine-qua-non of inner party power is a multi-cultural elite alienated from its tribal and racial kinsmen. It is the native elites - the indigenous leaders who might resist the inner party's drive for power that are always the target. ... For the reform version of communism developed by the Frankfurt School that now dominates the ‘liberal democracies" and the NWO, the masses of the nations are important as consumers ... What remains relevant to the inner party are the inner party's potential competitors, the native national elites with community ties to their brethren. In the Soviet Union, the inner party elites (using Lenin and Stalin as their cover) resorted to murder and forced resettlement to remove the native national elites, a fast, direct and brutal form of decapitation. In the "liberal democracies" the inner party uses a slower and less visibly brutal method of decapitation. Thus, in the liberal democracies of today we have "affirmative action" - a set of laws that places tremendous pressure on private businesses to displace native elites at the top with minorities who will be less plausible targets of discrimination lawsuits. These laws exist everywhere in the European world, and with the exception of the U.S. were enacted long before any significant minority constituencies (other than the inner party itself) existed to lobby for their passage. The entire program of displacement and decapitation within the liberal democracies was carefully drawn up and explained in "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor Adorno, et. al.(1947). It is a prescription for identifying any person who displays any bond of obligation to his own kind and the will to resist those who threaten the interests of his kind. Such "authoritarian personalities" are to be denied university admission and consigned to low status occupations, which is precisely what the laws of affirmative action and social rules of political correctness accomplish. Indeed, as I read the tables from the 1939 Soviet census published in Sanning's work [The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter N. Sanning] I recalled my own research showing that the inner party, representing 2.4% of the U.S. population comprises 28% of the student body at Harvard, while the descendants of European Christendom comprising 70% of the population supply only 18% of the students. The American Majority has been effectively displaced at Harvard. Relative to their share of the Population, they have 2.4 times fewer students than do the inner party's Afro-American coalition partners. ... The United States Department of Labor has maintained a tracking study of 12,000 young people who were between the ages of 14 and 22 in 1979 known as the National Longitudinal study of Youth ("NLSY"). The CD Roms with all the data can be purchased from Ohio State University. These data show that at each given level of IQ (all participants were tested) the income and educational attainment of the descendants of European Christendom is much lower than for Blacks, Hispanics and Inner party members of the same IQ. In what will surely be a surprise to most middle and upper middle-income Euro-Americans, the effects are most pronounced at the highest IQ levels. In other words, it is the majority elite that suffers the widest disparity in income and education when compared with Blacks, Hispanics and Inner Party members within the same IQ range. When the effects are broken down by sex, we find that among males the disparity is most pronounced in the highest IQ ranges and disappears entirely by the time you descend to the 50% mark. The widest disparity exists among the top 2% of the population (those with IQs above 130).