TUESDAY, JAN 25, 2022: NOTE TO FILE
Declaration of the Dependence of Mind
21st century update
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: OVERSHOOT NOW, FROM THE WIRES, DEGROWTH COMETH
Abstract: In 1919, Romain Rolland wrote a four paragraph declaration signed by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Hermann Hesse, Upton Sinclair, Rabindranath Tagore among other luminaries. It was a post-conflagration (post-WWI) statement. If there is another conflagration coming, a declaration now would have a pre-conflagration theme. That in 1919 the world had convulsed was obvious. That the near future may be bad news for ten-year-olds, is not, so no signators expected (other than those prone to carry signs and wear tinfoil hats) are likely. It may turn out that those who deny, deny, deny are the crazy ones—or not.
COOS BAY (A-P) — DECLARATION OF THE DEPENDENCE OF MIND (with apologies to Romain Rolland)
HUMANS who would or would have descendants (genetic or memetic) who may pass through the coming bottleneck with information packages intact (knowledge and a functional complex society to embody and perpetuate mind), know that few to none will be selected (by the system, aka Nature) to persist. Those who listen to Nature (who has all the answers) must endeavor to recover, over the next 8 to 12 generations, functional behaviors and a sanity of mind dependent on hearing the small still voice of Gaia and of the stars in their courses.
The coming dissolution will disorder our minds and complex societies even more on the downslope than they have been on the upslope. Those who would rather know than believe must place their science, their art, their reason, their intuition, at the service of posterity. We have all known belief and the wages of belief. We can but endeavor to iterate towards recovery of our original naturcentrc lves. We must again know humilitas. Let us learn from the dissolutions of the past to not repeat the pattern of empire-building pathology.
First of all, let us understand our domination by the dynamics of of technology enabled energy flows that has selected for short-term self interests, for Self over system, for hubris, hierarchy, and overcomplex society that has turned us into true believers who mistake our pathological ways for progress. We who sing to those whose bread we eat must understand the better view. Know that it is Nature's sunshine we eat and not the monetary crumbs of short-termers who shall pass away along with all who serve the monetary culture of modern techno-industrial society. We have become agro-empowered (then modernized as the fossil fuel empowered) overcomplex (hence unsustainable) adaptive non-evolvable empire-building dissipative structures. We will become evolvable systems or perish from the face of Gaia. We who know this must endeavor to become non-pathological, evolvable, complex enough societies that select for what works long term, even as our ancestors going back nearly four billion year did to thereby become ancestors. We can again fight to see who inherits the rubble, but the victors, and such vanquished who survive to serve the winners, will fade away as no viable memes will they have known.
Awake hu-mans! Know then thyselves as subsystem, as the not-two, the not separate from system. Nor are we permanent as a species or in any form, therefore endeavor to viably persist. Nature is not only more complex than we know, but more than we can know. We live within limits or we pass away. We can endeavor to know something of the nature of things, but we cannot know Nature whose merest operational perameters we are unable to compute anymore than a dog can understand calculus. We can iterate towards understanding the planet and learning to live properly with it as agents of the Earth, or we can pass away. What to do? Seek out the condition now that will come anyway. Mind is free only to be obedient to the nature of things, to system, and then only when mindfully still so the prattle of self and other narratives, of the believing mind, settles like clay in muddy water to clarify the abelieving mind wonderfully. To think is to listen. Listen.
E. L.
Coos Bay, Winter, 2022
[This manifesto was added as a subnote to file, January 25, 2022.]
By the end of 2022, the following signatures had been received to the above declaration.
- Lee, Eric (where rolls the Oregon).
DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MIND by Romain Rolland, 1919
BRAIN workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for five years by the armies, the censorship and the mutual hatred of the warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union, but to make of it a new union more firmly founded and more strongly built than that which previously existed.
The war has disordered our ranks. Most of the intellectuals placed their science, their art, their reason, at the service of the governments. We do not wish to formulate any accusations, to launch any reproaches. We know the weakness of the individual mind and the elemental strength of great collective currents. The latter, in a moment, swept the former away, for nothing had been prepared to help in the work of resistance. Let this experience, at least, be a lesson to us for the future!
First of all, let us point out the disasters that have resulted from the almost complete abdication of intelligence throughout the world, and from its voluntary enslavement to the unchained forces. Thinkers, artists, have added an incalculable quantity of envenomed hate to the plague which devours the flesh and the spirit of Europe. In the arsenal of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, they have sought reasons for hatred, reasons old and new, reasons historical, scientific, logical, and poetical. They have worked to destroy mutual understanding and mutual love among men. So doing, they have disfigured, defiled, debased, degraded Thought, of which they were the representatives. They have made it an instrument of the passions; and (unwittingly, perchance) they have made it a tool of the selfish interests of a political or social clique, of a state, a country, or a class. Now, when, from the fierce conflict in which the nations have been at grips, the victors and the vanquished emerge equally stricken, impoverished, and at the bottom of their hearts (though they will not admit it) utterly ashamed of their access of mania—now, Thought, which has been entangled in their struggles, emerges, like them, fallen from her high estate.
Arise! Let us free the mind from these compromises, from these unworthy alliances, from these veiled slaveries! Mind is no one's servitor. It is we who are the servitors of mind. We have no other master. We exist to bear its light, to defend its light, to rally round it all the strayed sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to be a centre of stability, to point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of passions in the night. Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice; we reject them all. Truth only do we honour; truth that is free, frontierless, limitless; truth that knows nought of the prejudices of race or caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we work, but for humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know the People, unique and universal; the People which suffers, which struggles, which falls and rises to its feet once more, and which continues to advance along the rough road drenched with its sweat and its blood; the People, all men, all alike our brothers. In order that they may, like ourselves, realise this brotherhood, we raise above their blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant—Mind which is free, one and manifold, eternal.
R. R.
Villeneuve, Spring, 1919.
[This manifesto was published in "L'Humanité," June 26, 1919.]
By the end of 1919, the following signatures had been received to the above declaration.
- Addams, Jane (U.S.A.).
- Alain [Chartier] (France).
- Alexandre, Raoul (on the staff of "L'Humanité," France).
- Arco, G. von (Germany).
- Arcos, René (France).
- Barbusse, Henri (France).
- Baudouin, Charles (editor of "Le Carmel," France).
- Bazalgette, Léon (France).
- Bernaert, Edouard (France).
- Besnard, Lucien (France).
- Bignami, Enrico (editor of "Coenobium," Italy).
- Biriukov, Paul (Russia).
- Bloch, Ernest (Switzerland).
- Bloch, Jean-Richard (France).
- Bodin, Louise (editor of "La Voix des Femmes," France).
- Bracco, Roberto (Italy).
- Brooks, Van Wyck (U.S.A.).
- Brouwer, L. J. (Holland).
- Buchet, Samuel (France).
- Burnet, E. (of the Pasteur Institute, France).
- Carpenter, Edward (England).
- Chateaubriant, A. de (France).
- Chenevière, Georges (France).
- Colin, Paul (editor of "L'Art Libre," Belgium).
- Coomaraswamy, Ananda (Hindustan).
- Costa, Benedicto (Brazil).
- Croce, Benedetto (Italy).
- Crucy, François (on the staff of "L'Humanité," France).
- Desanges, Paul (on the staff of "La Forge," France).
- Desprès, Fernand (France).
- Dickinson, G. Lowes (England).
- Donvalis, Georges (Greece).
- Doyen, Albert (France).
- Duhamel, Georges (France).
- Dujardin, Edouard (editor of "Cahiers Idéalistes," France).
- Dunois, Amédée (on the staff of "L'Humanité, France).
- Dupin, Gustave (France).
- Dy, Melot du (Belgium).
- Eder, Robert (Switzerland).
- Eeckhoud, Georges (Belgium).
- Eeden, Frederick van (Holland).
- Einstein, Albert (Germany).
- Eslander, J. F. (Belgium).
- Fiévez, Joseph (France).
- Foerster, W. (Germany).
- Forel, Auguste (Switzerland).
- Frank, Leonhard (Germany).
- Frank, Waldo (U.S.A.).
- Fried, A. H. (German-Austria).
- Fry, R. (England).
- George, Waldemar (on the staff of "La Forge," France).
- Georges-Bazille, G. (editor of "Cahiers Britanniques et
- Américains," France).
- Gerlach, H. von (Germany).
- Goll, Ivan (Germany).
- Hamon, Augustin (France).
- Heidenstam, Verner von (Sweden).
- Hellens, Franz (Belgium).
- Herzog, Wilhelm (Germany).
- Hesse, Hermann (Germany).
- Hier, Frederick P. (U.S.A.).
- Hilbert, David (Germany).
- Hofer, Charles (Switzerland).
- Holmes, John Haynes (U.S.A.).
- Huebsch, B. W. (U.S.A.).
- Jouve, P. J. (France).
- Kapteyn, J. C. (Holland).
- Key, Ellen (Sweden).
- Khnopff, Georges (Belgium).
- Kollwitz, Käte (Germany).
- Labouré, A. M. (France).
- Lagerlöf, Selma (Sweden).
- Laisant, C. A. (France).
- Latzko, Andreas (Hungary).
- Lefebvre, Raymond (France).
- Lehmann, Max (Germany).
- Lindhagen, Carl (Sweden).
- Liveright, Horace B. (U.S.A.).
- Lopez-Pico, M. (Spain).
- Lucci, Arnaldo (Italy).
- Mann, Heinrich (Germany).
- Martinet, Marcel (France).
- Maseras, Alfons (Spain).
- Masereel, Frans (Belgium).
- Masson, Émile (France).
- Masters, Edgar Lee (U.S.A.).
- Matisse, Georges (France).
- Matisse, Madeline (France).
- Mercereau, Alexandre (France).
- Mériga, Lue (editor of "La Forge," France).
- Mesnil, Jacques (Belgium).
- Michaelis, Sophus (Denmark).
- Moissi, A. (Germany).
- Morhardt, Mathias (France).
- Natorp, Paul (Germany).
- Nearing, Scott (U.S.A.).
- Nicolai, Georg Friedrich (Germany).
- Nithack-Stahn (Germany).
- Ors, Eugenio d' (Spain).
- Paasche, H. (Germany).
- Picard, Edmond (Belgium).
- Pierre, A. (on the staff of "L'Humanité," France).
- Prenant, A. (France).
- Ragaz (Switzerland).
- Reuillard, Gabriel (France).
- Rolland, Romain (France).
- Romains, Jules (France).
- Roorda van Eysinga, H. (Switzerland).
- Roussel, Nelly (France).
- Rubakin, Nicholas (Russia).
- Rusiecka, M. de (Poland).
- Russell, Bertrand (England).
- Ryner, Han (France).
- Schirardin, (professor in Metz, France).
- Schneider, Edouard (France).
- Schoen, Edouard (professor in Metz, France).
- Schultz, P. (professor in Metz, France).
- Sévérine (France).
- Signac, Paul (France).
- Sinclair, Upton (U.S.A.).
- Sorel, Robert (France).
- Stieglitz, Alfred (U.S.A.).
- Stocker, Helene (Germany).
- Suchenno, Jean (France).
- Tagore, Rabindranath (Hindustan).
- Thiessou, Gaston (France).
- Uhry, Jules (on the staff of "L'Humanité," France).
- Unruh, Fritz von (Germany).
- Vaillant-Couturier, Paul (France).
- Velde, Henry van de (Belgium).
- Vildrac, Charles (France).
- Villard, Oswald Garrison (U.S.A.).
- Viskovatov, L. de (Russia).
- Wacker (professor at Metz, France).
- Wehberg, H. (Germany).
- Werfel, Franz (Germany).
- Werth, Léon (France).
- Yannios (Greece).
- Zangwill, Israel (England).
- Zweig, Stefan (German-Austria).
Emilio H. del Villar, editor of "Archive Geografico de la Peninsula Iberica," of Madrid, has sent me a manifesto Por la causa de la civilizacion, published in the Madrid newspapers in June, 1919, and inspired with sentiments analogous to those of the above declaration. This manifesto is signed by about one hundred Spanish writers and men of science, university professors, etc. Emilio H. del Villar sends his own adhesion, together with that of all the signatories of the Spanish manifesto, to the Declaration of the Independence of the Mind.
It is a matter for regret that we have not been able to add to the list the signatures of our Russian friends from whom we are still cut off by the governmental blockade. We keep their places open. Russian thought is in the vanguard of the thought of the world.
R. R.
August, 1919.
