The Ubiquitous Nature of Power

Why would previously elected governments cut services that would ultimately harm the economy when they build their campaigns on the economy?

Why are essential services, that intervene in crises before they reach their ultimate social cost, being underfunded or shut down?

Why does the corporate media in its news and entertainment programs promote an image of our world as greed-driven, macho, and violent while all the serious discussions around how to effectively deal with the problems are slotted in the back pages or late night shows?

Why has so much hatred been directed towards those who love or pray differently and why has so much contempt for the poor and marginalized been inflamed and so little done to alleviate the misery?

Why have our governments failed to care for the environment upon which our future health and wealth depend?

At first these may seem like separate issues but to me, they are all connected in one very important way – they lead towards social breakdown and ultimately destroy civil society.

So it appears that some in government and media, actively support and work towards the destruction of the entity they are supposed to be governing. It also appears as though people in Western democracies are voting for the parties that are destroying their futures.

Is this intentional? Are there powerful interests conspiring to bring about a slow and painful end to the human project, or has something gone terribly wrong in the way we identify with the collective future?

David Suzuki points out that we have “developed a way to estimate economic activity by measuring the value of all transactions for goods and services” called the Gross Domestic Product. However it doesn’t seem to include the services that come from government – that is disdainfully called taxes.

Corporations measure their success not by the quality of their products or how it helps people, but by how much their stock sells for. Politicians measure their success, not by what they have done for their constituents, but by how many votes they get.

In essence, what this means is that the health and well-being of humanity and the environment, is “overburden” to use a mining term. What this means for us and our children is less health care, lower education in terms of learning rather than superficial tests, less public transportation, more pollution environmentally and culturally, the silencing of real debate, the end of science, a global distancing from the reality we live, and a greater focus on invasive corporate measures.

Prisons will be filled with environmentalists and activists for social justice. People will be afraid to talk to their neighbours. City centres will become territorial battle grounds for drug lords. The sensitive and educated will die quietly from drug overdose. Families will break up under stress. Suicide will overtake obesity as the major epidemic. Bigotry, prejudice and balkanized wars will make the commons uninhabitable.

If we want to know what this looks like, think of all the failed nation states constantly in turmoil while transnational companies extract huge profits. Think of pipelines covering the earth, the sky filled with industrial chimneys and dark satanic mills powered by slave labour getting crushed or burned in hazardous warehouses. To use a quote attributed to George Orwell “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

The enemy is not one particular country, the enemy is that dissociated power universally accepted as force, rather than something that flows from our relationship to the environment in which we live. When we cease to look inside ourselves for the capacity to care and organize a humane world, we become victims or sociopathic egos punishing all that we can’t control.

We have come to this stage not because of progress but because of a ubiquitous disorder which we must examine to begin the work of healing. Our power lies in many things but mostly in accepting we are vulnerable, fallible and mortal.

This post was first published in The Flying Shingle then online at Episyllogism.

Remembrance Day 2019

The celebrity who accused nameless immigrants for not wearing a poppy is not just a  bigoted curmudgeon. He is a trope puppet to keep men in line through a generalized accusation.

I am an immigrant who came to Canada from England in the sixties, made it my home, got married, had children, became a Canadian citizen, and do not wear a poppy.  I make a donation to  the poppy box but do not take a poppy.

The reason is a practical one — if I put a poppy on my jacket it falls off and I would rather leave it in the tray.

When I think of Remembrance Day I think of my grandfather, John Jackson, my grandmother, Rachel, her first and only son who was killed in his pram while he slept, my mother's first husband, and my half sister who never met her father. I think of all the families I know who lost loved ones in WW1 and WW2.

I think of the courage of young military personnel who join the forces, who mount the discipline and carry through their duty.

Then I think of the rulers who plan the strategies and the rulers who plan the social systems that lead to conflict.

As much as I would like to think with clarity about the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys' I come away feeling uncertain and unsure.  War demands that we all become loyal to our tribe regardless of whether our 'leaders' have the common good at heart or not.

I am remembering without wearing a poppy. A poppy does not make you loyal. It is a symbol of remembering which is an emotional state of our species. 

I am also remembering the history that celebrates killing and being killed. And most of all I am remembering the propaganda that keeps us all divided. I am remembering my life in England where we were well trained by our culture to judge others. For their gender, their class, their good manners, the colour of their skin, their nationality and their language. I was part of that spitfire 'we' spouting beliefs as though they were laws, and also part of that group who wanted desperately to be accepted by others. I tried hard to do, say and think 'the right thing'.

So I would suggest that you don't have to wear a poppy or make a public display of remembering. You have to decide how you will remember war, those who were sent to war and those who create war. There are no rewards or outward signs that you are doing this, but it would help to save your world from unthinking violence caused by unreasonable manipulation.

The War

The war is not about conflict between different beliefs, different religions, or races. Neither is it about the roles of gender.

The war is about maintaining a narrative of supremacy over the diversity of life. The war is about making the masses miserable, anxious and mute. The war is about maintaining the grip of exploitation and oppression on the world by sowing and nurturing hate and fear as endless systems.

When opinionated people believe the "real world" is this one of greed, hate and violence, it is because the tools of oppression have convinced them there can be no other way. Our choices and creative imagination have been sucked out of the sphere of neoliberal capitalism.

Education, nature, curiosity, justice and reason are continually battered by a superimposed doctrine often called "common sense" or "normal" that strangles our own thoughts before they mark the blank page, leaving the system of fear and oppression to govern society.

This is why people like Greta Thunberg still have the ability to follow their own instincts. But it comes with extraordinary courage and we see their brilliance clearly.

There was a time when entering the adult world we had to choose between our own understanding of how the world works in order to fit. Our precious freshness and innocence is given up to avoid the label "naive".

Now we are in a time when the world is trapped in sophistry, the game of thrones. As a civilization we have lost our way. Our institutions are broken or silenced.

But the war will not be won until we re-learn the value of our own imagination, our own contributions to the mysteries and sciences of relationship.

Rebecca Solnit - Says so much in one article

"We are a country at war, but who that “we” is – in a nation where so many have been so disenfranchised – should be central to the conversation. There are more guns in the US than people, and the rhetoric of gun rights has been used to defend the rights of these killing machines to spread everywhere – classrooms, Walmarts, public places, homes where children have access to them." Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian.

Chris Hedges on the useful propaganda of war

"Military studies have determined that after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of those who survive will have become psychiatric casualties. The common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities." 

Chris Hedges, Peter Jackson's Cartoon War, Truthdig. 


An excellent piece, as always from Hedges. Worth reading and re-reading.

This is how capitalism managed to turn humanity away from its sensitive intelligence, toward the shallow workforce for profit - the man-made god.

Misogyny

After reading The Preludes to Assaults by Jane Eaton Hamilton I was compelled to post this poem on here.

Forget history, culture and knowledge. Break free

of your hoarding of facts, dates. Forget right and wrong.

Nothing means what it intends. The opposite is true

until we recognize it and then it becomes a lie.

The ideologue is the great virus, scourge of this planet.

He climbed down from his tree and turned it

into toilet paper. He tore open his mother’s flesh

to mine for gold.

Hated his kind, moulded it into a sword

made of his mother’s blood and slew his brother.

Sold his children into slavery and called himself

Ruler. Warrior. God.

Gaia is a whore and man is her pimp.

Our laws, our art, our songs, can’t rid her

of this storm, this swarm, this pandemic

this era of man who descended

from the awe and beauty bestowed upon him

by a power he could never deconstruct

this creation larger than his knowing

the stars he couldn’t reach, so instead

he sought revenge and created the order

raping every vessel of hope, each womb

of enlightenment, churned our mother’s milk

into grease, a war to be won.

So when we talk of misogyny as though

it’s simply the fear and hatred of woman

remember – it is the seed of homelessness

entrenched so deeply we blame nature

say it is natural law, say boys will be boys

corner them by two converging walls

of a doctrine so bricked no light can enter

no doubt allowed to breathe

trapped in the construct even she defends

his privilege by love’s failure to disarm

the earth he has littered with weapons

against the distant bird singing at dawn.

published in Eyewear Blink September 2015

Sacred Masculine

Even though gender is a construct beyond 

the reproductive organs - I need to respect 

the hero, the sacred masculine

as it has been witnessed here.

The real man who goes out to the garden

to build a wooden box for tomato stakes

come summer.

The man who takes an afternoon nap

before he prepares supper

who knows when I am sick before I do

who keeps the TV volume down

when I take a nap.

Who held, fed and changed our first born 

while I went to the theatre,

who survived the highway-to-office battles

for fifty years, the endless sales calls, 

unmentionable skirmish in the belly, 

who had the insight to admit he couldn’t stay 

in the manager’s chair without slipping 

into that alcoholic night. Who realized

he never wanted to be a stranger to his children.

The sacred masculine holds the ability

to fix the gate or vacuum cleaner

look for the best hotel, weed the garden

coach kids how to kick a soccer ball into the net

listen to the troubles and achievements of friends,

buy birthday cards, potatoes or eggs

and allow the ‘other’ a seat on the subway

without spreading.

The sacred masculine adapts to the world 

as it is, his level gaze informing

the warrior of the weapons required

who will never win fame because

he didn't take a gun and kill something.

.

The Real Crisis

"No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred — unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done. And anyone making excuses for that hatred — who tries, for example, to turn it into a “both sides” story — is, in effect, an apologist for crimes against humanity." (Paul Krugman, Return of the Blood Libel, New York Times.         https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/opinion/blood-libel-trump-immigrants.html)

Paul Krugman writes about how Hitler's hatred of Jews became a "cause" for his campaign to find glory in killing as many people as possible.

The fact that hate drives wars is a sordid economic boon, while the lives of decent people are disrupted and destroyed. This is true for any system of government.

In the early part of the last century there was a theory, probably created by Russian secret police, that Jews were planning to take over the world, writes Krugman. As Russia was about to begin the communist revolution through fascist means they embarked on spreading fear through the charge and imprisonment of writers and artists who expressed "anti-Soviet ideas". Krugman writes the steps and causes of the rise of hate across Europe in a clear way. His article is worth reading.

In my less detailed way of finding patterns I propose that a system rules people until the people see the errors of it, then as movements to resist grow, up pops another scapegoat and theories are manufactured to point the blame to a small powerless group. 

This is achieved by billionaires and the ruling elite who fear being sacked by the masses. Media helps to spread this hate as people begin to feel more trapped by a system that punishes them for being poor and powerless.

Many wise people have warned that the rising gap between haves and have-nots will lead to fascism and violence.  It has been documented in the past.  But those most impressed by the anti-immigrant movements have been duped, manipulated by the emotions that men dare not speak of.

How can any self-respecting macho man admit that he is vulnerable to forces he cannot control no matter how strong he tries to be? Whatever the system is and whatever promises are made by well meaning leaders the pattern always ends up with the psychopath on top. Men love the apes that pound their chest and roar and feel contempt towards the poorest most bullied and abused.

This is called projection - projecting our fantasies onto others, in stories, songs and politics.

If you go to the article written by Krugman there is a picture of a white man with his distorted mouth open as though he is screaming some hateful epithet. This is the face of the human who has lost hope for the future while centralized power organizes humanity's expulsion from the commons. This is the face of the man who has been purchased, who is trapped and cannot find a way out.

The Depth and Breadth of White Supremacy

Because the media keeps reporting on the events, utterances and activities of broken men, I think concerned citizens must jump in to offer a different view.

We are vulnerable to fashions and movements that cause tremendous suffering, such as the Thirties in Europe.

Using Hitler's playbook we know that human nature can be misrepresented and conditioned into robotic bodies to serve a political fantasy such as racial superiority. Using different words I might say the men of Europe were asked to give up their reality, their health, their livelihood, their intelligence, for an imagined glory, which meant death.

Nations of people starved so that money could be invested in global killing machines. The mental health of these "Aryan" people was battered by trauma. We lost limbs and lives, husbands and sons, fathers and mothers, wives and daughters, for the glory of war.

It meant that arguments, doubts, conversations and worry about the future were temporarily wiped out for the beat of the goose step. It meant that people no longer had to solve human problems because they could hollow out their minds and replace them with propaganda. There were only two choices to make - obey the rules and die, or be tortured to death.

Does that look like highest attainment for humanity? Does that feel like a celebration of life?

This either/or scenario didn't begin with Hitler or the Nazi's and the social conditions that were causing men to give up hope and turn to hate, began through other men who had power over the people.  Those who dictated the rules of austerity were not the ones who would go hungry.

You don't have to be a scholar to know that glory is about sacrificing life for power. Life is presented as a burden, and the only true achievement is the ability to control the lives of others.

This is not new and has been said more profoundly by Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, and millions of poets whose work is mostly ignored.

The culture of Europe was destroyed in politics, wealth, life and health while a few got rich. Now this hate has been ignited by North American opportunists to defend capitalism against the human conscience.

What did Hitler achieve for the world? A brutal example of how low humanity could sink and the proof of our capacity for cruelty. But also a warning to us all about what it is we need to fight against. Not the stranger but the shadow in ourselves.

White supremacy is about turning human souls into vacuous puppets in order to destabilize and destroy civil society and ultimately create a smooth path for megalomaniacs to do as they please without criticism or obstruction. Is this what we want?

Remembrance Day

Is it a lie to think young boys

sent to the front lines

were willing to sacrifice

their un-lived lives to win

something they didn’t plan?

Was it assumed for them?

Barked out by the pecking order

with the rules. No options

once you joined the army.

You were a prop for the gun

and you couldn’t even choose

where or when to shit.

You who just learned how to shave

started out honourable

and found comradery among the others

who feared the white feather

from the village wives.

If being a man means living up

to others’ expectations

with your young scrubbed face

your limbs looking for love

your mind questioning

the fraction of a unit

you have become

for some other purpose

never revealed to you

- does it mean you proved it?

I want you to know

even though it’s too late

that I love you, and

your virgin heart.

The Great Flood

How can we clean up a flood or restore our community after a fire? These questions are great metaphors for the survival of civilizations. 

We are flooded with all the reminders of our mortality in these crises, even if we are not directly affected by them. 

When fires burn our homes, farms, flow charts and plans, how will democracy or capitalism rebuild our world? 

The future requires more than a lego set or blueprint. It requires  a Restoration story we can all relate to, says George Monbiot.

Chris Hedges notes in his article "The Great Flood"  that civilizations in fits of despair and anger  "have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris." 

The ruins of great empires litter the earth, says Hedges, as corrupt leaders  "driven by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds ... and hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery and poverty."

Channeling anger into wars, the people are without knowledge because the wisdom they learned from a civil society don't apply. The worse things get, Hedges reminds, the more we retreat into magical thinking.  

We tell ourselves through social narrative that we have no agency. Everything is tied to the system which controls and punishes us if we don't believe their ideology. And  those who offer new stories are often burned at the stake or nailed to a cross, then worshipped as martyrs and messiahs after they die.

George Monbiot in his blog - tells us, what we need is not just facts, science and knowledge, but a cohesive narrative, where our agency is required. Where we are needed.


"The narrative we build has to be simple and intelligible. If it is to transform our politics, it should appeal to as many people as possible, crossing traditional political lines. It should resonate with deep needs and desires. It should explain the mess we are in and means by which we might escape it. And, because there is nothing to be gained from spreading falsehoods, it must be firmly grounded in reality."

For clarity I have itemized the instructions embedded in this paragraph:

1. transform our politics to include humanity and not just economics
2. appeal to as many people as possible, crossing traditional political lines
3. create the story to resonate with deep needs and desires
4. explain the mess we are in and means by which we might escape it
5. ground it firmly in reality.

Yes it is a tall order, but without long term intentions we are soon pushed off the road. 

Why Hate is Not a Way Out

Antony Gormley was quoted in an article (by Hannah Ellis-Petersen, printed in the Guardian July 6 ) with a warning - we live in dangerous times. “Yet we are all sleepwalking through it...aware the centre cannot hold, that 250 years of industrial activity has undermined and fundamentally disturbed our world – yet we feel somehow not responsible.” 

Worse is the seeming efficiency with which movements are able to destroy civil society all across the globe with very little analysis among comrades or from the mainstream media.

So while hatred has been whipped up towards immigrants, or more likely people who are not white, and while hatred has done so much damage to struggling countries everywhere - we seem to have learned nothing.

But there are recurring elements we must remember before we slip into civil wars, terrorism or xenophobic attacks.

1. The white race has for centuries invaded all continents and brutally destroyed the social systems of aboriginal people they encountered.

2. Outrage at the "problems" caused by immigrants usually comes from the white race who felt entitled to invade, rape and pillage wherever they landed without question. The harm done by colonialism has yet to be fully examined by Europeans who now feel threatened by mass migrations. 

3. The military-industrial complex has been very effective in flaming hatred where they stand to profit from the wars that result from it. However we don't remember the interests who help to fund campaigns such as the Nazis in WWII, military coups in Central America, or the Middle East.

4. We don't pay attention to the really powerful lobbies and their ideologies. It's as though we accept their reptilian appetites as business-as-usual without blame.

5. We forget that the front line hooligans, thugs and suicide bombers are often the poorest most desperate groups who have very little choice, and who are hungry for a future that includes dignity and meaning.  We readily turn away from their condition and their despair when it is obvious they are in need, and then are shocked when they become radicalized.

6. We forget that the masses are dismissed until they are exploited and manipulated to cause the conditions for a profitable invasion from a foreign elite so powerful, their presence is rarely reported in the mainstream.

7. We forget that every generation experiences the disregard for humanity, until their suffering becomes a useful means for profit for the very few. 

In spite of all this, we quickly blame without reflection, those who have the least power to change things. There seems to be an inability to see our part in this recurring drama which ultimately harms us all. 

But also we need to realize that it is the system that breeds contempt for life with its surgical strategies that further divide us and make life miserable.

If we don't wake up soon, our beloved will suffer the torture and violence that spreads like a deadly virus as though it is the only solution, when in reality, it simply breeds the trauma that keep us fearful and afraid of one another. And therefore powerless cannon fodder for the strategists planning their next windfall.

Humanity at Hazard: The Etiology of War

This paper by John Alexie Crane, published in 2008,  (and posted on Episyllogism) asks "Human beings are extremely creative at making weapons and war, but persistently inept at achieving lasting peace. Why is this?"

Crane explains this well and there are two main points that I took from it. One is that we are animals with animal instincts but our culture denies it. And the second point is that groups are led by males who have a strong drive for power and control. These alpha males arouse a fighting spirit among other males such as "Make America Great Again!"

Alpha males, when they are aware and responsible create better groups but if they are immature and unaware, they can destroy and devastate their group.

"Together," writes Crane, "we must develop a social order rooted in the reality of human nature rather than in denial and delusion, a social order that will make survival possible. Otherwise, this promising human experiment that has come so far in its development will end."

That is our task. That is the problem we must tackle.

The Last Conspiracy Theory

While many hotly debated arguments raise the blood pressure of oppressed citizens, much attention is directed toward the need to get the facts straight. Who is causing what, who is to blame, and how to exterminate them.

All of the previously named culprits – capitalists, communists, patriarchs, narcissists, psychopaths or fascists, are not the cause. They are the carriers of something much more destructive and dangerous.

The Anthro-Hyena!

No you haven’t read about this before. You have never seen it, or heard it, and you won’t. The Anthro-Hyena blends into any group it seeks to dominate and control. It appears like any charismatic professional or business person. It professes an interest in the greater good, single-mindedly through stealth and charm.  The outcome however, to the shock of cohorts and witnesses, is destruction and chaos which occurs long after the Anthro-Hyena has left.

The MO of the Anthro-Hyena, revealed through centuries of revolution, war,  regime and ideology change, is to manipulate humanity by playing on our fears and basic desires. It works like a virus, entering the reptilian brain which then becomes inflamed and puts pressure on the limbic system. Human functions such as reason and language suffocate, unable to work.

Civilizations where people have lived and prospered for centuries endure intermittent episodes of madness and dysfunction where the focus moves away from stewardship to destruction.  This is known as war.

All resources are switched from food, health, community and beauty, to the basic binary of win or lose, kill or be killed, live or die. Civilization itself dissolves into competition, an obsession so ridiculous, mothers enter their babies into beauty contests. Education is rendered down to a series of tests. Infrastructure is neglected for the arms industry. Ruling nations are not progressive, effective or kind,  but simply the ones with the biggest weapons.

While the Anthro-Hyena itself is not limited to the reptilian brain it convinces humanity to discard all other sensibilities learned over centuries, for the bottom line, the lowest common denominator. In spite of the activism and intellect of a few, the Anthro-Hyena has won.

The over-arching narrative has fallen for the sensational siren and shut down public discourse for the masses. Politicians have given up on leadership to appeal to the lowest common denominator, for good reason – the system will sabotage the campaign that is life-affirming, justice-oriented and reasonable. 

Media is hostage to the noise, broadcasting propaganda without analysis. Movies, television shows, rarely play out the cause and evolution of the plot, simply going straight to the effects – explosions, crashing vehicles and pools of blood. Pornography  has trashed love and amputated the limbs of the human body from its final orgasm.

The Anthro-Hyena has corrupted art, beauty, wisdom, love, complexity, democracy and the future.  We are presented with corporate sponsored contempt for life in all its shades and colours. We are the everlasting dementia, looking for the next human sacrifice to be slaughtered for our brief exultation of having won. Replaying our delusional triumph like the circus it is.

Meanwhile the world of human capacities, civil society, literature, compassion and creativity is shrinking. Living communities are replaced with ruins and the continual rain of  bombs for which there is no solution.

No matter how smart, determined, courageous and powerful we may be, no matter how many hearts and minds are destroyed, life is made redundant. No theology, technology or philosophy can stop the fire, the floods and bullets.  The intention is that there be no witness, no argument and no narrative. To put an end to birth. Without birth there is no life, there is no light. Without light all that remains is the singular winner.  The one who destroys any chance of its own death by being the last to survive, by having the last word.

Who benefits from this nihilism? Nothing that breathes or thinks or hopes. There is no benefit other than the ego detached from everything except winning. This is the Anthro-Hyena. The thing that eats into our tender brains as we struggle so hard to conquer the universe, never seeing we have no time to live in it.   

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

Write a list of the tasks you started or finished today. Write a list of the people you helped or who helped you. Write the name of those whose smile uplift your spirits when you see them.  Make a list of the people you worry about or would like to help but don't know how.

Now write a list of world problems you read or hear about in the media.

Which is the longest list?

If the list in the first paragraph is the longest then you are engaged in the process of being human.  If the list in the second paragraph is longer then you need to go back and check the first paragraph. It could be you have not observed all the things you have done, all the people you have helped or who have brightened your life.

All the small things that others don't notice, and the things that are not recognized for prizes or as "achievements", list those. If you washed dishes - list all the times you washed them - breakfast, lunch, supper.

Even the list of those you worry about or don't know how to help is a human endeavour.

Make a list of mistakes you have made and people you have offended. Make a list of the goals you thought you would achieve but haven't. Make a list of all the feelings you have experienced.

Are the world problems still greater than your list?

Now make a list of all the beliefs you started with when you were young. If you still believe them now put a ✓ next to them. Those you discovered were wrong put an x by them.

Right or wrong, all of this is what it means to be human. You are not good or evil, hero or victim, winner or loser. You are not a simple descriptor.

What we read about in the media or books are constructs that help us compare ourselves and our lives with others.  If we forget to engage in our own lives we are digesting other people's thoughts and experiences, some of which will be very well developed.  And some of which are designed to influence the way we see ourselves.

The problem with the world is that it's dominated by propaganda that presents the masses as disposable, as nothing.  The message in media is that we must strive to be somebody, otherwise we are nobody. To be somebody is to be a thing. A carpenter, anthropologist, bank manager, teacher. A thing that strives to remove the human from the discipline. That we must prove to be superior even though we may become more destructive, hurtful and miserable.

Once we give up our humanity and see ourselves as numbers on a spreadsheet, we dissociate from the connections between our thoughts, feelings, and practices developed over centuries of evolution. We judge our worth based on the things we own, we begin to see others as things, as problems.

We are not problems.  We are the ones who can, with reflection and insight, fix problems. Not all of them. Not immediately. But by the way we live and the choices we make, we can explore more deeply, what it means to be human.

Consolidating Power through Ritual Contempt For Life

"Well over 250 million people died in the 20th Century as a result of political violence. This includes an estimated 200 million deaths that were the result of people killed intentionally by governments, and perhaps fifty million deaths as the result of warfare. Among governments that were the most prolific in murdering people were the communist USSR, China and the Mao Guerillas, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and of course Nazi Germany." Hitler, War - and the Holocaust. Richard Koenigsberg.

The complete essay needs to be read as Koenigsberg reveals how violence breeds violence.  It appears to arrive from the idea that young men are born to experience the glory of running out on the battlefield to be gunned down.

Dying on the battlefield has mostly been portrayed as sudden death but that's not how it happens all the time or most of the time.  Sometimes they lie on the field in excruciating pain - intestines falling from a gaping wound, arms and legs blown off, eyes ripped out, faces blown away, cold icy rain on frozen mud.  Or prisoners transported in cattle cars without food or water, the stench of urine, pus, for days, weeks or more, knowing that wherever they arrive it will not be good.

Megaphones spouting the glory of giving your life to war, worshiping the men who designed the battles - Kemal, Ludendorff, Hindenburg, Hitler, who told the people in various words - we do not ask you to fight but to die for your nation.

Now I am thinking of ideologies preached by a few candidates of the Republican Party that are clearly destructive to those who have had the privilege of living in a peaceful, almost democratic nation.  Their policies are not about running a nation but about preparing people for war through hatred and division. Fascist parties in Europe and America are not interested in governing a nation  - they are looking to centralize power.

Why do they focus on hate? Is it because they/we are seeking revenge? Is it because we cannot imagine a world that is just and so we think it useless to work towards a better world? Has the system created the means to destroy us as soon as we enter school through ritual humiliation and competition, so we grow up valuing things more than ourselves? 

Would it be that education, compassion, social justice, cooperation, wisdom and social responsibility would take back the power from those who preach that our worth, our only worth, is when we become the means of aggrandizing the emperor?

Would you like to die on a bloody field or coffee shop with your limbs blown out of reach, or in a cattle car with the stench of pus and urine, or a slow and painful death as a refugee carrying your infant to nowhere? 

Who benefits from this global contempt for life?

Reflections on the future and elections

One election won't fix the looming crisis. What we need to do is see how the worship of power has got us to this point where people are actually willing to vote for governments that erode our hard earned human rights and democratic sensibilities.

We are organized by centralized power (herein referred to as CP) who have the means to buy media and government and then spin or omit the facts as they please, to their advantage. The strategy used is divide and conquer - set up false enemies or sensationalize distant threats.  Because we feel powerless we love to look for those who have less power - minorities, women, Asians, Africans, gay, lesbian, transgender, those with obvious disabilities and the poor.  These are the pool of punishables, so that whenever the government or big business is pulled up on bad choices and destructive outcomes - they can pull out, quick as a gun, an issue that blames one or two women who want to wear a niqab at a citizenship ceremony.

The CP keep giving us scape goats but not for our own good - to deflect their abuse of power. We do not need scape goats. We have evolved beyond that time when our sins were laid upon the rear of a sheep and sent off into the wilderness carrying all our fears.

According to scholars and scientists we have the capacity to turn our economy on renewable clean energy, the knowledge to create a just society, to house the homeless, to feed the hungry - but the reason we haven't is not because we can't.

Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness…. Charles Bowden 1945-2014.

Imagine that the majority of voters know better than to vote for the handmaidens of unregulated industry and they know their future depends on a minority who vote for a manipulative system, because they are afraid to look too close to the way it works.

Imagine that the resistance to CP causes that majority to re-create their own communities based on action, justice and peace, and that they are imprisoned, tortured and murdered, yet the guilty are not brought to trial.

Imagine that business goes on as usual and the masses become more afraid and more desperate to avoid seeing the world as it is, and that more of the innocent are harmed, starved and murdered, and that we lose our capacity to discuss ideas, to challenge injustice. Imagine that we forget what equality, freedom and democracy was, and we forget our culture.

Imagine that the world is so unsafe we lock ourselves up in our living rooms and watch the world from a 27 inch screen for that is the only way we dare participate in our society.

Imagine that this is not just a future possibility but what is happening and has happened all over the world. That the CP has manufactured false societies with false issues and false threats.  Then you get a picture of what is to blame for the conditions of war, poverty, domestic violence, climate change.

Imagine that you have learned there is no point to beheading the aristocracy, the ruling elite - as in the French Revolution - because you know that whoever takes over from them will institute the same system. Imagine that you and I finally get it!  The work and struggle of creating social justice is not just a matter of fairness it is a matter of mental health which is basic to the survival of our species.

Then we'll understand what the price of freedom really means, and what it is for us to do.

The World in One Paragraph by Chris Hedges

"Extraction industries, like wars, empower a predominantly male, predatory population that is engaged in horrific destruction and violence. Wars and extraction industries are designed to extinguish all systems that give life—familial, social, cultural, economic, political and environmental. And they require the obliteration of community and the common good. How else could you get drag line operators in southern West Virginia to rip the tops off Appalachian mountains to get at coal seams as they turn the land they grew up in, and often their ancestors grew up in, into a fetid, toxic wasteland where the air, soil and water will be poisoned for generations? These vast predatory enterprises hold up the possibility of personal wealth, personal advancement and personal power at the expense of everyone and everything else. They create a huge, permanent divide between the exploiters and the exploited, one that is rarely crossed. And the more vulnerable you are, the more the jackals appear around you to prey on your afflictions. Those who suffer most are children, women and the elderly—the children and the elderly because they are vulnerable, the women because they are left to care for them." Chris Hedges

This just about says it all of our age and our society. I have long suspected that all our species' problems have arisen out of misogyny. Seems there are others also leading to that conclusion.

Four Lessons on how to Change the World

Ilona Szabó de Carvalho left her career in banking to lead the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janeiro, which focuses on security and development policy. In her TED talk she gives us four lessons she learned while tackling the violence around issues of drugs and guns in Brazil.  Carvalho's experience contains an important message for us all – we can challenge big issues and achieve change.

The four lessons she learned in the process are: 1. change the narrative, 2. never underestimate your opponents, 3. use data to drive your arguments, 4. bring together odd bedfellows

What would this look like for those of us who want to change the current political narrative? Below are the thoughts I have wrestled with.

1. change the narrative

We are not nations or religions competing for the most of what each of us want. We are sentient beings trying to survive the cumulative effects of a global hierarchy that enables mass starvation and violence to sustain the power of a few.

The conflict is not between right-wing and left-wing, capitalism and socialism, Christianity and Islam, the conflict is between power and life.

The Operating System has moved beyond tribal competition for territory and is now in the stage where power is valued only as a wholly separate construct from human nature. This requires a structure that upholds, defends and worships the non-human measures of  our culture such as money, technology, numbers, formulas, ideologies, celebrity (not the person but the image), and ideas.  Which also requires a consistent doctrine.

The doctrine tells us that life is not valued because the world is over-populated. Life is a threat to order and must be managed, categorized, brainwashed, dehumanized and reduced through organized war, disease, starvation and addiction. Authorities create fear, insecurity and misery, and make it appear that we ourselves have chosen the conditions we live under.

Hierarchical power requires a rationality that is free of sentiment,  compassion or reverence for life. Any progress that has been made in the last two hundred years is that sophistication and application of purified power and its increasing contempt for anything that breathes. Entertainments must be pornographic to uphold this regime. Food must be genetically modified to its meanest elements. Civil society, art, community must be destroyed for these are the elements of power from within and are difficult to manage. Community is reduced to a shopping mall restricting human interaction to the impersonal , where all other human emotions such as compassion and empathy become a  means to the end of a business transaction. Here we become willing consumers of our own self-hate.

Corporations are the controllers, government are the police and media are the instructors who must continually promote the notion that life in itself has no value, and the more things we possess the more contempt we feel for earth's unpredictable and uncontrollable forces. Social intercourse celebrates and promotes consumerism through the adoration of new gadgets, rare and expensive foods, new trends and sophisticated technology. The household that possesses the most up to date fashionable stuff can congratulate itself as the winner.

Our darkest nights understand that once a weapon of mass destruction is invented that will kill most of the people without destroying the elite playgrounds on earth, it will be used. But it won't solve the problems humanity faces because all, including the elite, are oppressed by the doctrine that power must eat life.

This is the narrative of post-modern literature - Wells' Time Machine, Orwell's 1984, Monty Python, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and other classics that have warned us.

This is a narrative that makes sense of all that has happened socially and politically. It's not the only narrative but it is one that puts us in the centre of the problem.

2. never underestimate your opponents

First we need to identify who our opponents are. Are they the one-percent, the corporations, the governments, the media, the ideologies? Are they the sum of our apathy, greed and ignorance? Is it our reluctance to examine life?

Many empires have come and gone throughout history so we can’t pin the blame on a singular tribe or a political system. It has been an endless return of revolution and corruption.  That's the force of power-over.

Is the opponent our own ego which separates us from the cause and effects of our habits? Is it the way we try to hide from our inherent malevolence, or inability to see ourselves as the earth sees us? Is it the ruling elite who manipulate us? Is it always the other who is incapable of self governance?

What if we were able to reclaim our human family, to embrace and acknowledge our power from within, through dialogue and reflection. What if we listed all the tricks we use to deny our involvement and responsibility in the evolution and care of this planet? What if we nurtured our world and loved nature? What if the imagination could bridge the small things we can do with the large movements for change?

Our opponent is really our own ignorance on how power is used against us, and how easily we slip into the narrative provided by our oppressors. As we have learned to write, read, decipher symbols, understand metaphors, we can also learn how to recognize power in all its forms.

3. use data to drive your arguments

You can find data in many places. Mainstream media sometimes includes it but other news sources and websites developed by concerned citizens are available.

The Gun Violence Archive; Amnesty International; Humanist and Liberal Religion that celebrates the human experience through diversity; news sites that defend social justice; those who acknowledge the complexity of society and its problems at the cost of making their message less slogan-ready; thought leaders who seek wisdom and do not rely on power-over to influence others; poetry; statistics.  And our own level gaze.

4. bring together odd bedfellows

What and where are the odd bedfellows of this issue? Members of the Gun Club, members of Tax Payers Federation, workers within community services, managers of the CBC, the homeless, the working poor, MP's within all political parties, police chiefs, scientists, environmentalists, artists, writers, philosophers and deans of the academy – all who are willing to talk and listen.

Bring together different narratives of how the world works, different personalities from different faith groups (including atheists and nihilists). Make it clear that their views are important and that everyone has a voice, but the point of the voice is not to be right, but to open doors. 

The future, if there is to be one, must embrace and hold up the reverence and dignity of all.