CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS & AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

A deeper dive into complexity with simplicity

Catherine Austin Fitts’s highly skeptical stance has been a mainstay of a uniquely American intelligence and thought for a few years. She is an insider who has worked to understand the complexities by revealing the simple truths at the heart of them. It is an interesting area to explore.

For that is where we find ourselves as Americans today. Inside the belly of the beast, we work to understand the shape of the rabbit hole we exist within. The much abused - and even at times self-sabotaging American - should not be so reflexively discarded before further examination.

We do not need to be so quick to react if we perhaps don’t necessarily agree with everything a fellow comrade in arms believes. This is simply an ever present political reality. The saying politics makes for strange bedfellows is true. Since we are all politicians from the moment we are born every person has political skills. Political skills, like swords, can be sharpened.

A useful for instance of this is that we are born, helpless and forlorn, into a very strange reality. But this is what evolution has prepared us for. The human infant is born equipped with a high-tech package of skills which stun us. Minutes after a natural birth the human infant recognizes and responds to human faces, touch, and emotional context, and negotiates powerfully for their rights to be met. “Helpless and forlorn”, we emerge as powerful and skilled political negotiators.

Since this post isn’t meant to fully explore the amazing world of fundamental human intelligence present in newborns I won’t go into further detail on this here. Any readers needing more information in the skill set packaged in the human newborn may find a wealth of information available. An understanding of this intelligence and the nurturing of it depends on our social environment - our culture. An intelligent culture, certainly not necessarily dependent on “academic” learning to justify or comprehend, provides for and supports these understandings.

That our culture has failed in this arena doesn’t need much elaboration. When I was a young mother myself I designed and taught the art and science of community-based childbirth and parenting preparation. My classes differed sharply from the norm, being twelve weeks long and involving much reading and discussion. Because of this my students tended to be young professionals. Among them were many physicians, attorneys, computer programmers, music industry tycoons - and balancing this some local rural hippies. One of the couples I taught had argued cases in front of the Supreme Court. They were not easy students. The discovery and learning which resulted was fascinating and revealing for myself and for them.

What I discovered is that we can come together in communities and overcome a wealth of problematic issues even in an area so complex and culturally loaded as child bearing. I watched as over-indoctrinated professionals slowly dropped the force of their indoctrination and got real about birthing and parenting their kids. Through the exploration of our humanity in this area I observed the power of education in having measurable effects on the health of childbearing families. 

I wrote and published a paper in a medical journal which helped document these findings that community-based childbirth education changed birth outcomes, newborn health and underscored the importance of early bonding in family systems. It was an ancient idea regarded as “revolutionary” by many at the time. This view however that the quality of childbirth education can be scientifically documented and held accountable for birth outcomes has become more standard today.

Alright, so how does this all apply to Catherine Austin Fitts and her philosophy? Quite a bit. Just because things initially may appear to be unrelated doesn’t mean they are. I believe Catherine Austin Fitts exemplifies this nontraditional linking of disparate facts and distills them with the simple elegance of America and Americans. I believe this ties into the intelligence we are born with. It is critically important today in the midst of the crisis of human evolution we face at this point.

That we are in a crisis of human evolution is undeniable. Without going into immense detail of what Catherine Austin Fitts explains for herself, and although there are many important discussion points and things to be questioned which are raised here, there appears an overwhelmingly critical point to understand from this.

This is that in a world today in which the extreme swing of the pendulum has led us to consider forces such as American simplicity to be a liability, that it is actually a tremendous strength which demands celebration. Yes, other nations and peoples excel at nanotechnology, chip and computer manufacture and AI development.  The prevalence of the Asian continent and peoples has certainly been proved in these arenas. The obvious skills of the ancient civilizations of China, Russia, and India figure into this and must be respected as part of our collective human intelligence.

But America, as tragic as she has become today, also has an ancient peoples and heritage which figures in here. And in ancient terms this is tied ultimately to Asia and in historical terms to Europe and Africa.  Native Americans entered America most likely over a Bering Sea land bridge once existing from Asia into Alaska during an earlier climate. There is much information from anthropology on this. 

America is obviously tied to Europe by way of early colonization. That this colonization failed to diplomatically engage the Native American population positively is a fact. That America would have been a stronger, richer culture if this tragedy of effectively exterminating the native population had not occurred is a fact. That America would have been a stronger, richer nation if people of African descent had not been enslaved is also true.

Like all human beings, nations and civilizations we are flawed as individuals and must learn to accept our failures and shortcomings. But we fail utterly if we do not accept these flaws and move on, forgiving ourselves and others, and forging a better humanity from the very ruins of our former failures. This comes back to our evolutionary skills as epic negotiators and politicians. We do not make the world we are born into. Our task is to suffer it and learn to be the changes we wish to see.

For many of us we don’t come to see eye to eye with our parents. They are flawed and we must suffer their imperfections as we suffer our own. But we learn from birth or before how to come into the world all ready and packaged to take our stand, to be strong in the face of adversity, and to learn to love and respect those we depend on, as we shape our own reality as political forces in a world we never intended or made. Bemoaning our fate doesn’t work, we must forgive ourselves and others and move on.

So American intelligence - of both native peoples and immigrants - has been fed from the beginning by evolutionary ties to the entire planet. There is no American exceptionalism because there is no human exceptionalism. We are social animals with big brains requiring an extraordinarily long childhood and an intelligent culture to function in. The crossroads we are at require that we institute our innate political and negotiation skills to form a world in which the requirements of being human are met. To fail to do this guarantees we will fail and perhaps ensure the opposite - the end of human evolution - human extinction.

What Catherine Austin Fitts demonstrates to us as Americans is that we exist at a unique intersection of history where our ability to simplify complexity and get real is what is important.

Bemoaning our fate and lambasting ourselves for ending up here is counter-evolutionary. Like all other nations we are essentially tied to all the others despite our claims to the contrary. What Catherine Austin Fitts does then is demonstrate precisely why the tendency to simplify complexities is our greatest asset.

In the final analysis it is this American tendency to plain speech which defines us, elegantly expressed in our Constitution, by our tragic revolutionary ancestors and their forbears, as the great hope of mankind. It is not an accident that the great ongoing American experiment in forging a nation, extraordinary in its capacity to embrace diversity, capable of tolerating many political extremes in its dedication to free speech and the balance of powers, is emerging today as a world leader in the very midst of its failures. Let us get on with the real work to be done.

Women discover in the midst of childbirth - if given the chance - that they possess enormous strengths not previously understood. Likewise, it is the birth pangs we experience as a nation today, giving birth once again to our freedoms endowed by the creator, which point the way. It is here and precisely here that we will continue to overcome our deficiencies - not as expressed by American exceptionalism, but as we take our place as citizens of the world.

“Deep in my heart, I do believe, we will overcome.” Martin Luther King

I Have A Dream Speech

Martin Luther King Speech