I get really excited when I hear big words thrown around that would make great examples of non sequiturs. One such phrase that comes in vogue periodically is Structural Adjustment. The phrase is quite popular with the IMF and World Bank. One can be excused and even believed if they associated the phrase with the colors of Black, Yellow & Asian colors primarily. I know the three examples are not one would expect as Asian is not a color, but that is exactly what Non Sequitur means in Latin: does not follow. So I am just staying true to my theme.
My point is actually very simple. There are certain policies by two of the world’s influential financial institutions on a global level. The two institutions which were formed after the second major White War, that changed the history of war in the west by modifying the designation of a war that was known as the Great War into WW1 or what I call White War I. That part of the story makes sense. The war of 1914-1918 was the greatest war that had been fought thus far and it made sense to name it in that accordance. So I can imagine what a shock it must have been for an even greater war erupted amongst the so-called civilized countries that resulted in the death of 65 million people over a short 7 years. Many more were damaged for life and their numbers will never be known. By that time, many countries in the global South were not liberated but were in the throes of vicious colonialism marked by violence that was invisible to the world. Many of those who died under that injustice were never counted and no monuments erected for the sake of remembrance just like their counterparts who died during the two great wars. It should therefore not come as a surprise that two economic institutions were designed with the bias of the times. Besides the Marshall plan that was designed to rebuild Europe, including Germany which had started and driven the costly war, the IMF and World Bank were equally flawed in their goals and design. Their stated goals were to be lenders of the last result to ensure that no major shocks would rock the global economy due to the failure of one or a few countries. The reality did not follow those lofty goals. In fact the two bodies did not prevent the global economy from experiencing shocks as planned. What happened was that instead of ending the possibility of a war that was so big that it was named as a World War, it started an era of a world of war. I am not trying to insinuate that wars are new phenomena but the reality of the matter is that the instruments of war are quite new. Whole economies would become weaponized to the extent that hardly any guns or soldiers are visible in the modern war. Instead, weapons such as seeds, food, used clothes, debt and local markets all become tools of war. Nothing is spared in this new era of subtle violence where the victims of the modern violence can purchase painkillers from their oppressors to help withstand the extraction of blood from their own bodies.
In the end, those who are being oppressed slowly adjust to dealing with their oppression the best way they can. There is a deity of war that the oppressed have access to with great hope and investment of both time, money and hope. Yet the only thing that drives that whole industry is not any tangible results but habit. Many oppressed people have strangely adjusted that their lot in life is to be ignored by the deities that determine the fate of those who dwell on this end of the cosmos. That has become culture, and a negative one at that. It is a hard reality for the human species with such an attractive story of having overcome great trials in their history as species and an almost equal tendency for flawed missteps to accept one narrative of being losers and to build a culture around those shameful habits.
Structural Adjustment is one such shameful concept. The term structural adjustment sounds like something that an engineer might be engaged in. A constructor could also have a small role of following or actualizing the design of an engineer or architect. But banks would mostly be useful in financing the project. But that is old thinking, WWII changed all that and a new era replaced the old order. Banking system became a weapon. While many survivors of the war from previously dominated countries were happy designing new flags and national anthems for their countries, another more sinister struggle was taking place that would change the history of war in the world forever. The new era of weaponized debt makes mockery of all the hard-won victory of men’s desire for liberty. That almost universal spirit marks the history of all. It is a diabolical act of treason against those who have toiled so hard in an effort to vanquish the rule of the masses by those with inferior knowledge and motives. The ubiquitous word that has come to symbolize that kind of government has been the word democracy. This word that was practiced by many indigenous cultures but popularized by the Athenians is fast losing its original meaning. When I hear politicians telling lies and the masses falling for those political subterfuge, I am reminded of the most famous funeral oratory speech in the Western world by Pericles in 431 BC, almost 2455 years ago. The speech was given after one year of fighting in the Second Peloponnesian, the Greeks version of WWII, except that theirs took about twenty years longer. Pericles could never have suspected how long the battle he was leading his country in would take. In fact, he had no idea that he would not live to attend another memorial for the soldiers who had died in the war. Pericles and his sons would die the following year from different types of war as we will find out.
Our focus is on the great speech that was given in the town of Kerameikos, a popular leafy neighborhood in Athens that was named after the porters who used to make clay pots from the great clay found there.
That region of Athens was quite appropriate for such a famous speech as Plato too would also open his school, The Academy, not too far away from that location. We know just how influential the works of Plato are in the many disciplines but especially that of political science. Interestingly enough, one of the most famous of Plato's works to come out of the Academy is aptly entitled, the Republic, a work of fiction that based what was called the city of the greatest necessity, whose main theme was the definition of justice. I can’t say for sure whether Plato knew how far reaching his works would go in time, but I can say that the matter at hand today is very similar to the matter that Plato attempted to address in his time for our own countries are indeed modern polis of great necessity. Much has been written about the speech by Pericles but I will reduce my remarks to only three points that relate to our current predicament with the IMF.
The age of Pericles was known as the golden age of Athens. The first point worth mentioning from Pericles was that he started out by clearly stating that he would not make any reference to the heroes of previous battles but rather would focus on the principles of those who had fallen in the previous year but would focus on principles of those who had fallen. The two most interesting points that Pericles made was that mind expansion through the education , arts and theater in Athens made Athenian soldiers better fighters than just having military training. Such highly educated Athnians had the “..highest regards for the bravest spirits who had the clearest sense of pain and pleasure of life and did not on that account shrink from danger” He continued to emphasize that the soldiers had such a love of their city that they could not stand the idea that Athens would fall in the hands of anyone else. Pericles actually thought that the Athenian taste and superior sensibilities made them unusually brave. He felt that those who were left behind should equally toil on behalf of such a well deserving city. So far so good. Athens as depicted by Pericles sounds like a city I would gladly offer my life for.
Pericles then negates most of the great points he made when he offered his advice to the widows. Pericles stated that the highest honor to the widows was not to be mentioned at all by men, whether positively or negatively.That is where Pericles lost me and where the golden age had so clearly articulated started to lose its glitter. That is literally ghosting the widows who would live the rest of their lives without their loved ones on the day when those loved ones were being honored. How does one honor the brave soldiers by ignoring their spouses? The first two points are very progressive and the last one makes for the non sequitur theme.
The first thing that came to mind is that if those soldiers were brave enough to not to run away from danger, those who were left behind should equally celebrate their spouse. I had this image in my head of the Athenian who ran 26.1 miles to report the victory of Athenias and wondered how much longer the journey of the widow would be knowing that she would never reach the love of her life again. She had to settle for living a life of her own with nobody to share any victory with unlike the Athenian soldier who had to run back home to share the news of the victory with the city he loved. That statement by Pericles must have felt like a sharp dagger going through the hearts of the widows. I say that because that is how I too feel about the IMF policies of structural adjustments. What most people might not understand is that the term structural adjustment is not a non sequitur, it is actually a recipe of exactly what the goal of the IMF is. These financial institutions have ghosted mostly Black, Yellow and Asian countries just like the widows during the age of Pericles. Women had a very limited role in the democracy of the Athenians. Yet this is the standard for what democracy is. The modern version of democracy apparently has undergone a structural adjustment from the original Athenian democracy. The modern democracy has seemingly changed but has retained its original state to those who are brave enough to peep behind the thin veneer. Modern democracy includes women in the Western world but other races have taken the role that women in Athens occupied in their political establishment. While it is done below the radar of those not highly educated in political matters, those outside the ruling races are outside the privileges of modern political establishments. But then if you look deeper, you realize that while power is dominated by a certain race, not all those from that race have equal power. Power is actually in the hands of very few people. It is for that reason that I have come to the conclusion that power has truly undergone Structural Adjustment. There are certain architects of power, and engineers of social classes that have designed a global system that placed enormous power at the hands of a few, mostly men, of a particular race.
While Athenians were proud of living in the city that prioritized education and bravery, I too are lucky to be living in the city on the hill with similar attributes. It doesn’t matter that I don’t belong to the ruling class, in fact, it might be a source of greater joy as I am able to evaluate the country I live in from a more realistic position. I would hate to be in a position where I am so drunk with power that I lose a sense of reality to the extent that I can’t see danger coming. That is exactly what happened to Pericles, at least going by his speech, he was overconfident about the power of Athens and its ability to win the war against the Spartans. Yet barely a year later, Pericles and his sons were dead from the plague and that bad fortune would only get worse ultimately culminating with the loss of the war against the Spartans. So the same people whose intellect made them brave were ultimately defeated by the unsophisticated and uneducated Spartans. Democracy suffered a great blow and many actually blamed the same democracy that Pericles was touting as the beacon of hope, along with its most famous opponent Socrates. Dictators took over at the behest of Spatans and the golden age of Athens, or the age of Pericles came to an end. Food is today in the same position that Pericles and Athens were in 431 BC. Food has mostly been adulterated as food, those that could afford whatever type of food that was within their means knew that they were eating just food. But the same education and progress that Pericles lauded Athenians for has come to bite man on a global scale. Yet the struggle to liberate the food from the hands of a few dictators who are hellbent on controlling it is in a similar fate as the Athenian widows who were best not talked about in terms of good or bad reasons. The modern man is largely oblivious of the crime of food that is turning life into a slave of the medical system. Unfortunately, many will only find out that the substances that they have been consuming and which they so much revere for taste and flavor were fiat food that threatened the very existence of life on this planet. Unlike the imaginary city in Plato’s Republic, the globe today is a city of great necessity of just food. If ever there was a cause worth dying for, the struggle of just food. I can only imagine the kind of structural adjustment that has taken place in the world to change the food system from one of Just Food to one of Fiat Food.
The good news is that the end of one golden age is the beginning of the golden age for another ideology. Now that we have a system of structural adjustment that favors oppression and what I call death worship, there has never been a better time to usher in a new era that is truly golden. In the meantime, I have been preparing for exactly that kind of era before it gets here. My preparation has been in establishing alternative ways of being that would complement what I call the golden age of Life Worship. There are many places I could start but I have chosen to start with food. For it is through food that I have chosen to understand the current unjust system and likewise to resurrect a more sensible system. To mark my celebration of the coming era, I made the kind of meal that would make such an era. The meal was life affirming, sophisticated in taste and flavor. But I had to give it a name. I started asking myself the one word that would symbolize the spread of death worship globally. It did not take long for me to conclude that my first pick would be the F word. It is the one word that fits all emotions, both good and bad. Since the global economic system has Fucked the rest of the world, I decided to promote the IMF into a similar status and therefore call my soup IMF’d. That literally means any structural adjustment by any institution that coopts those who will be disadvantaged by the negative policies to gladly engage and support such policies. That also applies to food. Those who are not food literate have been so colonized that they celebrate the consumption of food that any brave soul with sophisticated taste would be ashamed to admit having consumed. Yet that has become the modern day culture that is stemming from the west. It is the ultimate structural adjustment as simply changing from being ashamed of consuming dead food to actually celebrating it. It is a form of funeral oration we can taste.
The modern empire is actually being spread on the plate more effectively than through the barrel of the gun. Maybe that is why Kerameikos had eventually become famous and still more importantly, where the most famous funeral oration of the era and probably ever since was given. It would make sense that food might be a great place to rebuild that new era. My first diet is to first recognize the danger and the source of the death worship in the IMF. The best way to remind myself of that is by making a sumptuous soup and calling it IMF'd soup. Instead of the funeral oration similar to the one Pericles gave just before the start of the end of the Athenian golden age, I am making a marvelous soup that will mark first the death of the death worship. Instead of saying the F word, a word that is culturally impolite in my culture, IMF'd becomes a great replacement and a great symbolic reminder that we are in the age of transition. That age will be followed by one of independent and majestic food, the truly golden imf. That way those who are addicted to IMF can still feel at home as the only thing that will be different is which IMF one will be interested in. We will all have our own IMF, one for Life Worship and another for Life Warship. I guess it would be the biggest non sequitur to have two IMFs that have exactly the opposite meaning. The only thing that would be non sequitur after that would be to chose the IMF of Death worship is to be Fucked and to choose Death Warship or the fight against death is to be alive and present .
To make all this simple, we can also simply replace the F in IMF with Fuck or Food. One promotes just food or life while the other supports sensibilities to screw people over. Our golden age will come through the plate highways and those food highways can’t carry junk. This might be the debate of the decade in the country of birth but also globally.