New World Disorder: you can't go swimming in a tailings pond

essay

"War is the continuation of politics by other means.”
~ Carl von Clausewitz

A friend responded “new world order” after i shared a comments section report about the government’s deliberate lacks of helping people, rescuing the stranded, or showing respect for the dead in North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, with perhaps the motive being huge amounts of lithium to be had.

So that prompted the title because to my view, while an accurate label, the New World Order (NWO) is more aptly called New World Disorder (NWD).

What’s orderly is societal programming and necessities: the line you stand in to buy roughly 30% more expensive groceries in the past few years, the slower and more crowded lane to stay in while driving somewhere, and the efficiency with which a car registration arrives in the mail after sending the DMV money, and am sure there are more examples.

Society and the institutions keeping things in check are portrayed as doing their best to keep things on the rails in this crazy world, while the people go to work, vacation, celebrate holidays, receive social security checks, etc. But then ‘the weather’ comes along as if to say: Same old routine? Now deal with this! . . . and suddenly you’re helping your neighbor you never talk with shovel out his driveway or flying a helicopter trying to rescue someone stranded on a roof top in North Carolina because the government efforts are scant. (see: The Jimmy Dore Show "Helicopter Pilot THREATENED WITH ARREST For Rescuing Hurricane Victims!")

The overall semblance of order is a grand illusion so as to keep the so-called status quo progress rolling like a child’s ball… down a hill that ends in a tailings pond; a tailings pond stores waste from mining, and birds have been known to die instantly when landing in them. Sadly for some, parts of North Carolina, Tennessee, and perhaps other states were turned into virtual tailings ponds, with an estimated 230 human lives lost and probably more.

In his book, translated from the French, Empire Of Disorder (2002), Alain Joxe writes:

“The neoliberal ideology of the global aristocracy is much more “peaceful” than the ideologies of Stalin or Hitler, since it contains no official call for concentration camps or massacres; it does, however, sugarcoat a cruel reality. For a number of years or decades, one could already witness with the naked eye a return to a form of free-market slavery in certain Third World countries by fixing salaries at the subsistence level—under the threat of death, with hordes of new labor descending on cities and through the elimination of subsistence farming.”

Wikipedia defines NWO as a “conspiracy theory” about “… a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda conspiring to eventually achieve world domination and rule the world through an authoritarian one-world government.”

Rather than bandy that about with facts, theories, and other argumentative-prone tacts, i’ll approach the topic from some other angles.

New World Disorder is not new. As example, Walt Whitman, regarded as the father of American free verse poetry, touted the “New World.” Much of his poetry is admirable yet it lost its shine for me when i realized the manifest destiny behind the verbiage.

In his later years, in a A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads he wrote:

“As America fully and fairly construed is the legitimate result and evolutionary outcome of the past, so I would dare to claim for my verse. Without stopping to qualify the averment, the Old World has had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional characters and affairs, which have been great; but the New World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality, which shall be greater. In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, towards whose heroic and spiritual evolution poems and everything directly or indirectly tend, Old World or New.”

Flat-out anthropocentric. And “democratic average and basic equality” read as political doublespeak.

Whitman's poetry at least mentions one of the Native names of so-called Long Island (where he was born), Paumanok (various spellings there of), yet otherwise his anthropocentrism reads as oblivious of respect for All The Relations, yet one of his oft-quoted poems in “Song of Myself” begins, “I think I could turn and live with animals,” and further into the poem, “not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”

Worth mentioning is that i only learned the word “anthropocentric” maybe fifteen years ago from a Native friend, so Whitman’s view is understandable, nonetheless his outworn and actually destructive settler-colonist worldview needs called out.

For a while, as a younger poet, i was so endeared with him that i wrote a poem, “Breathing Uncle Whitman,” which is in my 2005 chapbook, Aromas Finer Than Prayer; the title comes from a line in Whitman’s most well-known long poem, “Song Of Myself”:

“Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from; The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer. This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.”

I appreciate the idea that any bodily part is considered divine, and Whitman was ahead of the times with his poems about sexual love between men. Full disclosure: while some human beings opt for deodorant, i love the smell of my arm-pits and sometimes the scent of other’s, as well.

However, what the above quote shows is lack of respect for the “holy” that was already here for thousands and thousands of years and not needing Whitman’s grandiosity to “make holy”—the trees already “holy,” the rivers already “holy,” the soil already “holy” and all cared for by the Native Peoples of Turtle Island. That was the true Order before the New World Disorder arrived.

The key thing that swayed my opinion about Whitman was his statements of racism and superiority; as quoted in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz:

“The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history…. A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out.”
&
“We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient Mexico…to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?”

Whitman’s horrid bias and lack of consciousness completely contradict the third line in “Song of Myself”: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Historically, Whitman was following in the footsteps, or more like the ship-wakes, of those before him:

“The term "New World" is used to describe the majority of lands of Earth's Western Hemisphere, particularly the Americas. The term gained prominence in the early 16th century during Europe's Age of Discovery…”

The advertising mind-game of new-and-improved dies hard. From New York, New Jersey, New England, New Mexico, and many more, to recently a photo of Kamala supporters holding signs stating “A New Way Forward”.

In many ways Whitman is a poster boy for many of the hot topics of America today: caring about the environment, open-minded about LGBTQ, “America’s Got Talent” TV show, trying to make America great again. And here’s the catch: I’ll venture to say that Whitman, like those before him, didn’t face what Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow phase. And the big problem is that America hasn’t either.

out of chaos comes order

“In The Empire of Disorder Alain Joxe offers the first truly comprehensive analysis of the new world disorder of the twenty-first century. The contemporary world, claims Joxe, is dominated by the American empire but not ordered by it. This “leadership through chaos” … is at the root of the present organization of violence and [barbarity] on a global scale. At the same time, national governments—including that of the United States—are declining in influence as the imperial system fosters transnational mafias, corporations, and markets.”

That last statement can be summed as Global Corporate Empire, and “transnational mafias” ought to raise many an eyebrow.

One way to fight the above described nefariousness is via alchemy. In the alchemical tradition, the task at hand is to identify the energy pattern so as to then know the parameter within which transformation needs to occur. In this case the words “disorder” and “chaos” provide the clue.

I’ll preface my analysis and suggestions by saying that my personal experiences with what can be called spiritual/mystical alchemy (so as not to be confused with trying to turn actual lead into gold) has significantly helped change me and my life for the better.

The basic principle of alchemy is working with negative/divisive/destructive energies and transforming or transmuting them into positive/healing/constructive energies. The first phase of the process, in Jungian terms, is working with and facing one’s shadow self, otherwise known as the dark night of the soul, and alchemically, massa confusa—a mass of confusion, disorder, chaos. In my opinion, the New World Disorder deliberately perpetuates this state by promoting what historian Charles A. Beard called “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” Victory is not the goal; disorder and chaos is, and, of course, material gold aka money.

On a societal level, one tact is to constantly make people think there is someone or something to fear and that they are being protected by the government, the science, the media—hence Osama bin Laden, Global War On Terror, lone gunman, pandemic, etc. Projecting the fear outward is a decoy that encourages people to seek protection and safety (now a mega-money industry) rather than questioning and discussing the actual legitimacy and nuances of the said danger. What this projection does is to keep people from spiritually evolving by never facing their own personal shadows, rather avoiding the supposed shadows out there. Following that track, the masses of at least a certain income bracket are left to find distractive satisfaction with small comforts: flavored lattes, umpteen choices of TV shows, weekend road trips, while the masses of lower income struggle to get any comforts at all. And some find the NWD enjoyably orderly, especially those who benefit from it—the billionaire class, the comfortably wealthy, and those infatuated with individual success stories because one day it may be them.

Yet what about deeper and more fulfilling lifestyles without authority figures, without top-down totalitarian control. It is hard and sometimes scary work to face one’s shadowy dark side, to have to admit, and then find ways to transmute one’s fears, jealousies, hatreds, competitiveness, egotistical selfishness, ill-will, etc.

After the shadow has been faced or wrestled with, fears diminish and one gains inner strength because, to make up an example, instead of a skinny guy being scared of a body builder, he begins to lift weights.

The next phase is purifactio or purifying; filtering impurities is another way to look at it. What was once a mass of disorder and chaos begins to settle, revealing more clearly where the trouble spots are and enabling a clear approach to specific purifications.

What came to mind while writing this is a line from a book i published in 2011, Children of the Sun: prosetry unplugged by Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota) — ”Mother Earth is in her purification dance.”

My interpretation of all this in context is that America is stuck in its unresolved shadow phase while the Earth is purifying Herself due to centuries of abuse, disrespect and disorder. Mother Earth is a step ahead, thus ‘things’ are way out of sync and humans need to catch up.

While not a conclusive list, what follows are what i consider seven key shadows:
- faith and belief in the “New World”
- slavery > ghettos
- genocide > reservations aka prisoner of war camps
- the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, Domination and Dehumanization
- greed, as the name in Latin suggests: Ame Rica “Love of Riches”
(that and the one above with thanks to Steven Newcomb)
- the cult of rugged individualism (Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is an amazing and in many ways wonderful poem, yet consider the title)
- the natural world as a commodity.

If these shadowy issues are not addressed and then brought to the light of purification both individually and collectively, my sense is that America will remain stuck in its cycle of infighting at home and wars abroad, stuck in its histrionic cycle of same talking head personas with different faces—and Mother Nature will continue to provide wake-up calls.

While purification has its pleasantries and truly forward, light-filled motions, the process is, like the discharge of pus, not always pretty. Yet knowing that such discharges are part of the healing process makes one handle the cleanup with gusto because when one is not in a state of perpetual chaos, there are some good times to be had.

Any way you look at all this, there’s a lot of bringing stuff to the surface needed and a lot of cleanup to do.

(pics: istockphoto.com & wallpapercave.com)