Of course, all this bullshit can't go on very much longer. Societies must have common Narratives and mythological frameworks in order to have common currency with ones fellows. The smiley face that signifies America is looking worn. We are deeply divided along various tribal lines and sub-tribal lines--just like high school really. And like in high school, we have not the slightest clue about the notion of critical thinking or, for that matter, anything beyond the superficialities. The mainstream media that has been proven wrong about what is going on time after time after time after time after time is still believed by most people. Their commentators that have been proven wrong time after time after time get to stay and are promoted while those who are right are fired or demoted. Only lies are accepted. If events like the obviously phony "gas attacks" which are so audaciously false on the face of it kind of fade from the news when they are debunked though the debunking stories are never published. The mainstream media presstitutes don't even bother to say, as the great Emily Littella used to say "never mind" when shown by Chevy Chase that her elaborate story could not possibly be true.
One of the truest political statements was by Walt Kelly of Pogo fame--one of the best comic series ever created--that statement was "We have met the enemy and the enemy is us." To me this means, in today's cultural/economic/political milieu that while most of our major public and private institutions are increasingly authoritarian, corrupt, and deeply malevolent the fact is that we actually want it that way. We want to be lied to by the mainstream media--we don't want to know that we are the, by far, major cause of war, violence, corruption, anti-democratic regimes around the world--we don't want to know that we claim to be "spreading democracy" but are spreading, for the most part, the opposite of not just democracy but governments that care for their people.
Like all groups of marks, chumps and suckers the American people are so embarrassed at spending trillions on wars that are fought mainly to use up armaments that to even admit that would cause great emotional pain and we wouldn't have the energy to lick the ass of our bosses every day to keep our families unlimited cell-phone plans. Every study about everything you can imagine, health-care, education, transportation, the military, mental-health, drug policies, prisons, the courts and justice system, police, energy and power sector, the FIRE sector (our most powerful sector second only to the Military Industrial Complex ill of these and more are run in wasteful and impractical and unscientific ways. All of those areas all have solutions to lower costs, improve services and outcomes that would greatly outstrip where we are now. For example, our health-care system that features rationing by income that does not cover everyone costs twice the OECD average. Most of the money goes to a combination stupid and outdated procedures and paradigms (using drugs to treat everything) and blatant corruption.
As I said, we don't want to hear about it. People with new pragmatic solutions are demoted and those with the ability to lie creatively are promoted and celebrated at least at higher levels. Generally speaking, for example, the maximum rank of an honorable military officer is Colonel. Higher than that rank and anyone honest won't survive. Usually what people do is they are "good" in their family life and "bad" in their job justifying themselves by saying the are doing it for the children. Thus if any SS officer would have felt at home in our covert services.
M. Scott Peck wrote a book that shocked the people that read his famous book The Road Less Travelled that book was called People of the Lie and faced squarely the problem of evil. Americans don't like to think about evil in their lives. Evil is a term reserved for "them" whether its Russia, or Muslims, or some public figure like Trump. Peck saw this evil alive in some people he encountered in his practice and the stories in his book are chilling and though I believe "Evil" as such is a spiritual energy I don't believe people are ever Evil--they are organisms wherein Evil makes a nest--most of the time there is always a shred of light within these evil people that offers the possibility of escaping from a career of spreading misery but this can only be accomplished by spiritual means. I don't mean here the usual "possession" of spinning heads and fierce voices--that whole idea is waaaay overrated. Most possession is more subtle because people engage in it willingly. Evil, as an energy, meets personal needs for power because it eliminates the needs of others--some call this state a "personality disorder" like sociopathy but for me the situation allows Evil to manifest--Evil, as a spiritual force requires a human host to spread and endure so people who are naturally shut down of off are easy marks. I've written one half of an essay on the problem of Evil on this blog so I don't want to go further at this time. Rather, I want to note that Evil is a force that is, very much as the Star Wars series describes it as "the Dark Side of the Force" and at present it seem to be manifesting in more obvious ways than it ever has. Yes, mass killing occurred in the 30s and 40s and, in some Asian locales, in the 50s, 60s and 70s (China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia) but never in the history of the planet has the world been so endangered just by the way human beings live in terms of chemical pollution, climate change, and massive species die-offs. These problems all have major consequences that are utterly unprecedented--at the same time the threat of nuclear war still exists more than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
All of the problems we face from global poverty, nuclear war danger, environmental crises, depression, anxiety, and all the ills of a society obsessed with radical materialism all have pragmatic potential courses that would largely eliminate the worsening of these problems and solve most of them. There is no reason whatsoever except the fact that radical materialism that tells us that the only final arbiter of human morality is money--and money that goes only to me, to the part of us that is selfish, isolated and, yes, carries Evil with it. It is not human beings, again, who are evil, but our beliefs and values that are evil. If you believe that human beings only learn through punishment and rewards then you believe, contrary to social science, that human beings are too deeply flawed to ever solve their problems when, in reality, it is only the most radically materialistic among us who keep that idea alive by deliberately repressing all possible solutions for the better to any of our major problems. Instead, you have the weird idea that slaughtering mass numbers of people will somehow bring some kind of "security" as if that was the ultimate goal of life.
I believe, and social science backs me up, that human beings are compassionate and spiritual people (by my definition of "spirituality") who are happiest when their lives have meaning, purpose to help others--this has clearly been shown in studies of happiness and studies of anxiety and depression. The quickest way out of depression = helping other people. Yet, our society de-emphasizes those qualities by valorizing competition over compassion, fear over love in almost every department of life. Again, sentimental appeals to positive emotions is always given by cultural "leaders" but the "bottom line" mentality ALWAYS trumps.
This cannot last for long. Social cohesion built on what we call moral capital eventually runs out and, while it never entirely goes away since people are naturally social and compassionate, when it is to the advantage of the political master, they will pump out fear and hate as they have, particularly after the 2016 election--while much of this was aimed at particular people that is less important than the cultural polarization that the oligarch class has created, deliberately in my view. It's not that we fell into this state--we were manipulated into it by the forces that dominate the media.
As such, as a society, we lie and demand our institutions lie to us to avoid cognitive dissonance that could be alleviated through the process of acquiring knowledge by digging deeper than the superficiality we live with every day. We accept superficiality, lies, fantasies, delusions, national chauvinism, fear-mongering, deliberate manipulation of opinion because we have, it appears, a constitutional inability to do anything else. We are not even remotely "the land of the free and home of the brave" any longer. I think the description could have held up a half century ago but not today. We are, instead so obsessed with safety and security that we can only go along to get along, for the most part. Courage is no longer a virtue but is considered a vice today except in fantasies where we increasingly live. We are rapidly becoming the Eloi and our overlords, the oligarchs are becoming the Morlocks.
All of the problems we face from global poverty, nuclear war danger, environmental crises, depression, anxiety, and all the ills of a society obsessed with radical materialism all have pragmatic potential courses that would largely eliminate the worsening of these problems and solve most of them. There is no reason whatsoever except the fact that radical materialism that tells us that the only final arbiter of human morality is money--and money that goes only to me, to the part of us that is selfish, isolated and, yes, carries Evil with it. It is not human beings, again, who are evil, but our beliefs and values that are evil. If you believe that human beings only learn through punishment and rewards then you believe, contrary to social science, that human beings are too deeply flawed to ever solve their problems when, in reality, it is only the most radically materialistic among us who keep that idea alive by deliberately repressing all possible solutions for the better to any of our major problems. Instead, you have the weird idea that slaughtering mass numbers of people will somehow bring some kind of "security" as if that was the ultimate goal of life.
I believe, and social science backs me up, that human beings are compassionate and spiritual people (by my definition of "spirituality") who are happiest when their lives have meaning, purpose to help others--this has clearly been shown in studies of happiness and studies of anxiety and depression. The quickest way out of depression = helping other people. Yet, our society de-emphasizes those qualities by valorizing competition over compassion, fear over love in almost every department of life. Again, sentimental appeals to positive emotions is always given by cultural "leaders" but the "bottom line" mentality ALWAYS trumps.
This cannot last for long. Social cohesion built on what we call moral capital eventually runs out and, while it never entirely goes away since people are naturally social and compassionate, when it is to the advantage of the political master, they will pump out fear and hate as they have, particularly after the 2016 election--while much of this was aimed at particular people that is less important than the cultural polarization that the oligarch class has created, deliberately in my view. It's not that we fell into this state--we were manipulated into it by the forces that dominate the media.
As such, as a society, we lie and demand our institutions lie to us to avoid cognitive dissonance that could be alleviated through the process of acquiring knowledge by digging deeper than the superficiality we live with every day. We accept superficiality, lies, fantasies, delusions, national chauvinism, fear-mongering, deliberate manipulation of opinion because we have, it appears, a constitutional inability to do anything else. We are not even remotely "the land of the free and home of the brave" any longer. I think the description could have held up a half century ago but not today. We are, instead so obsessed with safety and security that we can only go along to get along, for the most part. Courage is no longer a virtue but is considered a vice today except in fantasies where we increasingly live. We are rapidly becoming the Eloi and our overlords, the oligarchs are becoming the Morlocks.
But we don't want to look at our direction. We don't want to look at the logical end to current trends either social, political, or environmental. We want to hid in the fantasy worlds created by Hollywood and Silicon Valley. We are rapidly becoming the people of the lie.
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