Set 5
2022-2026
What prompted me to create this archive, in this format, was the desire to show how the writings and talks of the last four years, the writings and talks of this fifth set, make up a single train of thought and argument. They were inspired in 2022 by meeting. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn. Rogers-Vaughn is a pastoral counselor and psychotherapist, a healer of souls. He is the David of this war, standing up against the Goliath of 21st century global corporate capitalism gone mad. Rogers-Vaughn is not just a healer of souls. He speaks for what another warrior of the soul, Marjorie Kelly, describes as “the world-shaping force” of “the collective human mind.” What Kelly means by the reference to “mind” is not some isolated individual machine-like intelligence alone, but that “soul-force” that, along with the human heart, has propelled liberatory movements of every kind to their all-but-impossible successes: the abolition movement, votes and rights for women, the global wave of decolonization, and many others. It may be that the ongoing dream of democracy – united with the dreams of preserving the planetary commons and advancing racial equity – together can embody the liberatory force that leads into the next system.”[i] Kelly speaks for the Democratic Collaborative, which Gar Alperovitz co-founded. “Dreams matter,” she says, “visions matter.”
As I completed the essay, “Outdoors,” in the fourth set, I wanted to begin this fifth set by adding that “outdoors” and all that it means is when I feel most in touch with my soul and its powerful interdependent share in the bodily life of the universe, the extreme opposite of the horrifying, cold indifference felt by Mersaualt, in the final scene of Camus’s The Stranger as he gazed out at the stars through his prison bars.
[i] Marjorie Kelly, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises, 2023, p. 154).
Bio of Fifth Set: Begins with Bruce Rogers-Vaughn’s 2018 Book, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age
In 2021 Lucile Eckrich, founder and leader of the monetary reform advocacy organization, Alliance for Just Money (AFJM), recommended a book called Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, by Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, published in 2018. I bought the book immediately on the strength of the title alone. I looked through it eagerly but set it aside, a bit disappointed that it seemed so “academic.” Not long after, Bruce, whom I immediately began referring to as R-V, showed up in a zoom meeting of the Alliance (AFJM). I was immediately excited again, thinking to myself, “So he’s not just sealed off in his Ivory Tower!” [I’m sensitive to such suspicions directed at me!] I picked up the book again, and this time, as I told him in an email soon after, I hop-scotched my way through the book and soon decided that, yes, after all, it was imperative that I read it from cover to cover.
Working my way through the book carefully, taking copious notes as I read, I became convinced that R-V should be invited to speak at the next annual conference of the American Monetary Conference. By now it was 2022. With R-V’s permission, I suggested this to Steve Walsh, lead Steward of AMI. The upshot was that Bruce Rogers-Vaughn was the keynote speaker for the Sunday morning session of the 2022 conference. I was the respondent. My response is the first document in this set.
First Document in this set:
My response to Bruce Rogers-Vaughn’s 2022 AMI Address.
Rather than simply offering a version of the argument of his book, which had been published eight years earlier, R-V developed a fresh presentation, entitled “Money, Suffering, and Hope,” tailoring his updated thinking to the new occasion. Based on the conversations with Steve Walsh and myself (which Steve described in his introduction to the talk) it was focused powerfully on the implications of the book specifically for monetary reform. My response, therefore, was tailored to that talk, It ended up as a multi-part response, entitled, Monetary Reform Requires a New Birth of Democracy. Both talks are available on You Tube, Rogers-Vaughn’s keynote address here, and my response here.
Second Document
Review-Essay of Caring for Souls
After the conference, I felt it necessary to go back and do justice to the full importance of the book itself. As a result, I wrote a review-essay of it. I completed that essay over the next year, completing it in the spring of 2024. It is entitled, “The Primacy of Care: A Review Essay of Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age.” It is the second item in this set I still feel that the book is one of the most important responses to the scourge of the 21st century calling itself “neoliberalism,” a counterfeit form of liberty that is in fact global capitalism run mad, an enemy of democracy, a nightmare that is in the process of killing the soul of the U.S. and threatening the planet itself. I ended my response by displaying Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics symbol.
In asking myself why it feels so significant, I want to say that I am following the clue provided by Bruce R-V himself. He starts his book with a question: “How could it happen that a Baptist minister who grew up in the United States, in the Deep South no less, in a politically and religiously conservative milieu, ever wanted to author a book criticizing capitalism?”
Another way of posing the question is, how could it happen that a pastoral counselor and psychotherapist, meeting with individuals one-on-one in the privacy of a therapist’s office over the course of 30 years, would take on “hegemonic” capitalism, an all-embracing, total system that has colonized even our souls, that which makes us human, not artificial, persons. Put still another way, the question is, what is out-of-control capitalism done to the soul of the U.S.? before 2016 when R-V was writing his book, this may have appeared to most Americans to be an unserious question, perhaps frivolous. Today, eight years later, when the White House is occupied by someone who evokes images of a Faust who has sold his soul in exchange for unlimited power, it appears as anything but frivolous. Add to this the spectre of uncontrolled AI corporate forces pointing a dagger at that which makes human persons human.
Third Document
Psyche, Soul, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis: The semantic domain of the language of the soul[i]
The third item in this archived set was originally the Appendix to my 2022 AMI response to R-V’s keynote presentation. It was intended for an audience that included in that year a small group of psychoanalysts. I have added it as a separate item because of the central role it has come to play in the four intervening years. I have included it as a separate item in this archive because of the growing urgency of the questions we so awkwardly try to confront, the snake’s nest of questions that revolve around the word “soul.” By “we” I mean Americans especially, but also Western Euro-American culture, in the course of its global colonial project. That project, as the law scholar, Mehrsa Baradaran, has shown in her 2024 book, The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, has now come back to haunt us.
This document focuses on certain traditions of psychology and psychiatry to explore further what I want to call the chaotic state of the question of what we in the West mean by the soul. It zooms in on two figures in particular who, like Bruce R-V shed light on the ineradicable, inter-affecting, interdependent, overdetermining reality of persons-in-relationships over against the monster figure of the sovereign self.
[i] The concept of the “semantic domain” of words I have taken from Trust, A History, by Geoffrey Hosking, published in 2014.
Fourth Document
Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0 Conference
The “Wicked Problem” of Democracy, Money, Authority, and Planetary Crisis
Abstract for a Paper, 2023
The fourth item is a very short Abstract proposing a paper for a conference held in 2023 at Harvard and Hamburg on “Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0. The first such conference was held in 2019. Both conferences were convened by Dr. Cristine Desan of Cornell University. My proposal was one of three papers for a panel entitled “The Suicidal Madness of Capitalism’s Anti-Planetary Modern Monetary Regime, and What to Do about It.” Even though our panel was not accepted and the abstract is very condensed, it played a defining role for my talk at the 2024 AMI Conference (see below)
The title of this Abstract, “The Wicked Problem of Democracy, Money, Authority, and Planetary Crisis,” identified three inter-related issues making up a “wicked problem, issues which therefore need to be taken into account together. It explicitly extended the scope of these issues back in time to reckon with five centuries of white supremacist Western imperial colonization. The talk intended to follow the famous Indian writer, Amitav Ghosh, in tracing what he called, in a series of talks at the University of Chicago in 2016, “The Great Derangement,” referring to climate change denial. I pointed out that Ghosh cites Bruno Latour’s searing diagnosis of modernity’s capitalist monetary regime as a pathological expression of the West’s global hubris that has split humanity in two, a civil war in the soul of the European and American conquerors. Finally, I called attention to the source of this self-destructive derangement as described by Indian scholar, Uday Singh Mehta. Mehta found its origin in the “ambivalence” of the assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism regarding human nature: “first, that human beings are by their nature free, rational, and equal; second that they are therefore capable of murder, theft and mayhem, and are hence in mortal danger.”This short disturbing observation has become, for me, and for this autobiographical project, ground zero for how I understand human nature.
Though the panel of three papers was not accepted by the 2023 conference, two months or so went by before the decision was made, and I spent those two months working full-time on the project and continued pursuing it the rest of 2023. In February of 2024, AMI’s Steve Walsh convened the first of what became monthly planning meetings to prepare for the fall annual conference. I informed the group that I was working on a paper for the conference and Steve suggested I describe it to the group for the next meeting in March. The Abstract and the work I did on it the rest of the year is essential to the next document.
Fifth Document
“Master Proposal for AMI 2024”
A Manifesto
What I wrote and sent to the whole zoom planning group before the March meeting is the fifth document in this archive. It was called a “Master Proposal for an AMI2024 Project.” It was intended as a manifesto. I proposed a strategy for political change, put forward to AMI’s leadership in its mission of monetary reform, a “strategy for mobilizing a movement to reinvent ‘democracy.’ It defined democracy in its ideal form as “a world in which neither of two parties can dominate the other,” an eight-word definition I adopted from Danielle Allen. As I have pointed out, the manifesto was based squarely on the earlier MDM2.0 Abstract,” the fourth document described above. Both of these items were working documents, critical to the purpose of this archive. My subsequent talk at the 2024 AMI Conference, the sixth item, cannot be understood without this manifesto and its original seed document, and none of them can be understood apart from Bruce R-V’s Caring for Souls and his 2022 talk, and my engagement with his work.
Sixth Document
AMI 2024
“Privatized Money-Capital to Public Planetary-Capital: Questions of Monetary Reform Strategy.”
The talk I gave at the AMI 2024 Conference in September, was intended as a contribution to the manifesto proposed in February of that year, offering specific ideas regarding AMI’s strategy for reform. The opening statement stated bluntly that “Questions of strategy are the animating source of this talk. A strategy for change is only as effective as its understanding of the problem and the power of its alternative vision.[i] Therefore a robust strategy for monetary reform needs to answer three questions: What is the Problem? What is the Alternative? What is our Change Strategy?
I started by defining the problem in terms of the threat to “planetary-capital” from what I called “the private mindset of money-capital” that puts profit over the planet.” This was followed by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut image of planet earth, entitled “A 21st Century Compass.” (See image below) I pointed out that the arrow in the image and the nine outside labels indicate the nine ways by which the money-capital of the global economy is overshooting the limits of planetary-capital; that is, the planetary resources of air, water, land and life.
The solution to the problem, the challenge, I argued, is to use Kate Raworth’s vision, spelled out in Doughnut Economics’ seven chapters, as a map for how to democratize, that is, how to reimagine a planet that does not belong to anyone, but rather, belongs to a planetary public, a demogenesis, as Bruno Latour has imagined it.
I took as the basis for a strategy for making such an impossible change, a text I quoted cited at the beginning of this set. The text is from a new (2023) book by Marjorie Kelly, of the Democracy Collaborative, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises. I will repeat it in full:
Kelly’s proposition:
“Dreams matter. Visions matter. For better or worse, the collective human mind is a world-shaping force. So too is the human heart, the soul force that has propelled liberatory movements of every kind to their all but impossible successes: the abolition movement, votes and rights for women, the global wave of decolonization, and many others. It may be,” she continues, “that the ongoing dream of democracy – united with the dreams of preserving the planetary commons and advancing racial equity – together can embody the liberatory force that leads into the next system.…Remodeling our system begins with what we revere. Values form the moral heart of a social system.” (p. 154).
My Commentary:
This text is first a ringing assertion of the collective human mind. It is decidedly not the rugged, self-sufficient, sovereign individual mind of American mythology. It is not the disembodied Cartesian abstraction that dominates modern ideas. Kelly is unequivocal that the mind is embodied, a force that encompasses heart, soul, and body.[i] Third, the force of the mind, its cognitive power and capacity for wisdom, can be used in two completely opposite ways – for better or for worse, depending upon its mindset. The mindset is the direction or default use to which we choose to put it. Throughout Wealth Supremacy, Kelly is spelling out two possible mindsets: the world-destroying collective mindset of private money-capital; and the collective mindset of public planetary-capital. In other words, the cognitive power and wisdom of the collective human mind is ambiguous. It can be used for better or worse.[ii]
The rest of my talk elaborated on this insight into the ambiguity of collective human agency, or capacities, or power, by calling attention to what I call fundamentalizing, or the fundamentalizing dynamic. One simple way to describe this dynamic is the observation that “gifts can be become traps,” an expression I learned from Ruth, my wife, who learned it in a workshop on the many different kinds of gifts or capacities that different individuals have. For example, a person who is a gifted caretaker can fall into the trap of becoming too protective, even possessive. A person who is a gifted diplomat or negotiator may fall into the trap of being indecisive, or wishy-washy. In my talk I called attention to examples of “fundamentalism,” a fundamentalist mindset run amok, what Amitav Ghosh called the great derangement.[iii] These examples were drawn from the history of Western imperial colonialism. In The Nutmeg’s Curse Ghosh tells the story of four centuries of wealth supremacist racial violence. It is the story of “the mindset” of white supremacy that “infused the world of Great Britain and America, the world into which capitalism was birthed:”[iv] I also cited more recent examples such as the Iraq War in 2003, an American fundamentalist crusade that led to Abu Ghraib. I cited also the madness of “market fundamentalism” documented by Naomi Klein in Shock Doctrine, her indispensable history with example after example. Her next book, This Changes Everything, is an extended account of the madness of the limitless growth mindset that is overshooting the Earth’s resources.
In the central part of my talk, devoted to the question of strategy. I focused again on “fundamentals,” this time speaking of “fundamentalizing” and “the fundamentalizing dynamic.” I pointed out the fact, obvious from everyday life, that, to learn any skill, game, discipline or profession, we are taught to focus first on mastering the fundamentals. In each case, however, we must eventually advance beyond the fundamentals if we want to master the intricacies of any enterprise.
The crucial point of this strategy is recognizing precisely the point Kelly calls attention to, what I would call her master insight into the ambiguity of human powers and capacities.
[i]The list I suspect is almost endless: envisioning the future, playing with ideas, thought experiments, talking to myself, dreaming, conceiving ideas, reasoning, logical skills, understanding, interpreting, communicating, blessing, cursing, performing marriages, committing, doing things with words, calculating, asking forgiveness, making requests, making demands, ordering, condemning someone to death, naming things, expressing love, contempt, etc.
[ii] It may make it easier to understand the ambiguity of the mind to recognize that the rich set of activities the mind is capable of includes the world-shaping power of the imagination “the power of the mind over the possibility of things.” Jonathan Z. Smith, Dean of the College and University Scholar at the University of Chicago, was explicit about the ambiguity of what he calls our cognitive powers: “The world is not ‘given,’ it is not simply ‘there,’ he says, “We constitute it by acts of interpretation…. It is by an act of human will, through projects of language and history … that we fabricate the world and ourselves. But there is a double sense to the word “fabrication.” It means both to build and to lie.” [ii] Human cognitive power is a Trickster, a two-faced Janus. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought. 1999. See the interview with Lakoff, conducted by John Brockman, Editor and Publisher of The View, here. On “the passions of the mind,” see Uday Singh Mehta, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke’s Political Thought, 1992, page 3 and Chapter 3.
[iii] This is the title of lectures Ghosh gave at the University of Chicago in 2015, published as a book in 2016.
[iv] (Nutmeg’s Curse p. 27, pp. 50, 51).
[i] Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, puts it this way: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”
Seventh Document
AMI 2025
Why Corporations must be democratized
The final documents are from last year, 2025. The the seventh document in this set is a short talk I gave at the 2025 AMI conference in September, entitled “Who is David Ciepley?” My answer to the question is that in a series of publications over more than two decades he has relentlessly challenged the agent at the heart of the neoliberal capitalist ideology of colonization of market economies, what he called “the neoliberal corporation.” What distinguishes Ciepley’s attack on neoliberalism is his use of the term “neoliberal” to characterize the corporation as the agent.
The subject of the talk Ciepley gave later at the conference was based on his most recent article written earlier in the year. Up until 2025, Ciepley’s work was focused on the pathological form of the corporation today. This pathology he shows has been due to Ciepley calls a “great reversal.” In the late 19th century It went from being a public franchise created to further public interests, to its present incarnation as a private agent. The hands of the law turned the corporation over to the hands of private shareholders. The consequence has been to unleash the neoliberal corporation as a succubus feeding on the planet itself.
Ciepley’s conference talk, however, focused on how the virtues of the corporate form as a franchise of governments, can be recovered, virtues which characterized the corporation originally and throughout its long history up until the late 19th century.
Ciepley demonstrates that the problem is not the specific powers of the corporation as such. To the contrary, he demonstrates that the corporate form is, in fact, what I would call a gift. Furthermore, because of its particular powers, its attributes, it is essential. The capabilities of public corporations have been recognized by figures like Marjorie Kelly and Kate Raworth and others. I would go so far as to say that there is no solution to the planetary crisis without reclaiming corporations as public agents, created for public purposes., a reversal of the 19th century reversal. The planetary challenge demands corporate power. It demands a reversal of “the great 19th century reversal. Both of these “reversals” constitute what I would call gestalt flips that can occur in the mindset of an individual or a culture. Something similar can occur in complex systems when a “tipping point” is reached. Something like this, I believe, is absolutely imperative today. To put it another way, corporations must be democratized.
Eighth Document 2025
In April 2025, an article appeared in The Guardian, entitled “The Rise of End-Times Fascism.” The title was accompanied by the image of a rocket from outer space that looked like a fist, smashing into planet Earth. The authors of the article were Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. I had been following Naomi Klein closely and immediately read it through with growing excitement. Soon after, I decided I had to respond. My response was entitled: Fundamentalisms, Religious and Secular, and the Fundamentalizing Dynamic.”[i]
Here is the Abstract:
One element of what threatens to drive us berserk today in 2025 is that the rich, utterly human religio-political-cultural heritage of the peoples of the global West – no more and no less human than that of any other peoples on the planet, no more nor less capable of greatness and evil than that of any other terrestrial peoples – is revealed to us in the halls of power, today in 2025, precisely NOT in all its richness and folly, its capacity for gracing life and for destroying it; in other words, NOT JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER PEOPLES, but ONLY in its fundamentalized, reduced, form, an utterly shrunken-down, pathetic, abortion of a heritage, incarnate in an infantile, shriveled up abortion of a would-be omnipotent deity, who can only chant like a little bully on the playground, “I am the king of the castle! Yanh, yanh, yanh yanh,” But, the religious imagination is a source of grace, as well as nightmare. My purpose in this essay is not to attack the religious heritage of the West. but, on the contrary, to point the way to bring it back down to Earth as one more distinctive expression of the imaginative cognitive power of human societies, alongside those of every other terrestrial cultural formation, with gifts that are essential, but which can be turned into poison if they are fundamentalized.
The article is a kind of summing up of my journey, an earlier version, of the journey I am revisiting in this biobibliographical narrative. The article, as the title makes clear, is a summing up that places the word “fundamentalism,” and its wider “semantic domain,” at the very center of the story. The title of the Klein and Taylor article is clearly intended to evoke Klein’s 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, published seven years after Shock Doctrine, a book that is absolutely indispensable for understanding the nature of crusading, fundamentalisms, “secular” and religious.
[i] I got no response from The Guardian when I submitted it.
A philosophy of war: Thinking about the Nature of War
Musing on Klein and Taylor’s article and the idea of warrior fundamentalism I remembered glancing at Carl von Clausewitz’s treatise “On War,” and discovering after reading a few pages that it seemed to be not only about strategy and tactics, but also how to think more broadly about the whole subject of “war;” for example, asking such questions as, “What is War?”, “On the Theory of War,” to name two chapter headings at random. I decided to take a second look and found the Pelican Classic edition of 1968, edited by Anatol Rapoport.[i] To my delight, the first thing I learned from Rapoport’s Introduction, was that Clausewitz had been described as “The Philosopher of War.” Furthermore, Rapaport begins his introduction by spelling out “three philosophies of war,” which he calls, “the political, the eschatological, and the cataclysmic.” (p. 13)! Clausewitz’s philosophy of war was clearly an example of the political philosophy. My interest here is in his second eschatological philosophy. His use of the theological term “eschatological” is not casual. I will cite Rapaport’s description of the eschatological philosophy of war in full:
The eschatological philosophy of war comprises many variants. The common element in them is the idea that history, or at least some portions of history, will culminate in a ‘final’ war leading to the unfolding of some grand design – divine, natural, or human. Two main variants are to be noted. In one – the messianic – the agency destined to carry out the ‘grand design’ is presumed already to exist, frequently as a functioning military organization. For example, in this view, crusades and holy wars are seen as means of unifying the known world under a single faith or a single ruler. In recent times [Rapoport was writing in 1968] the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the Nazi doctrine of the Master Race were expressions of imposing a just peace on the world and so of eliminating war from future history. For example, most Americans believed that their entry into the First World War (and later the Second World War) would convert the war into a ‘war to end war.’
In another, ‘global’, variant of eschatological philosophy the agency of the ‘design’ is presumed to arise from the chaos of the ‘final war.’ In Christian eschatology this agency is sometimes represented by the forces which will rally around Christ in the Second Coming; in Communist eschatology, the ‘world proletariat’ is expected to convert the imperialist war into a class war and, after the victory over the bourgeoisie, to establish a world order in which wars will no longer occur. In a film made in the 1930s called Things to Come, based on the ideas of H.G. Wells, this role is given to a community of scientists who stop the ‘final’ world war by a tranquillizing gas and establish a temporary benevolent dictatorship which ushers in a rational and peaceful world order (p. 15).
Rapoport sums up all three philosophies of war “metaphorically” by comparing the political philosophy to a game of strategy, like chess; comparing the eschatological philosophy to a mission or the denouement of a drama; and the cataclysmic philosophy, to a fire or an epidemic.
The potential relevance of Rapoport’s reflections on alternative ways to think about war for the present moment in U.S. history in 2026 strikes me as self-evident. My immediate response has been to wake up [yes, become ‘woke’] to the reality that we are in a war to save the planet against the “climate” deniers. I have also suddenly realized that the best way to understand Raworth’s Doughnut Economics is to read the seven chapters that make up the body of the book as the most incisive attempt to plot the terrain of the war to save the planet. In the introductory chapter of her book, Raworth speaks of the “worldwide revolt,” the “rebellion,” the “revolution in economics” that has begun by economics students who, in January 2015 greeted that year’s American Economic Association conference with the question “Is Economic Growth Killing the Planet” blazing in neon light commandeering the street front of the Boston Sheraton where the conference was being held (Doughnut Economics, p.3).
As I was finishing this bio, I decided on an impulse to search the Internet for “War on the Planet.” What came up was a story on Daily Kos dated February 15, 2026 with the banner title, “Donald Trump Declares War on Planet Earth, written by Alan Singer. Singer, I learned from an American Friends of Combatants for Peace website, is a historian in the department of Teaching, Learning and Technology at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.
See the “strategy” menu option on the website’s home page for more.
[i]According to Wikipedia Rapoport was an American mathematical psychologist. He contributed to general systems theory, to mathematical biology and to the mathematical modeling of social interaction and stochastic models of contagion. Of particular interest to me is that “during the Vietnam War, Rapoport moved to Toronto, ‘to live in a country that was not committed to a messianic role.’” In 1984 he was appointed by the University of Toronto as professor of peace studies, a position he held until 1996.