- As a category of human communication, disaster prediction
is flourishing, and with excellent reason. Emerging from widely different
perspectives and employing different approaches, many of us unhappily sense
exponentially growing difficulties looming on the murkily complex horizon.
Differences in individual awareness, experience and psychological bias
very naturally preclude agreement about the gory details. We even argue
about the basic meaning and potential for damage of the events we are observing.
But perhaps all who perceive the likelihood of oncoming catastrophes might
at least agree on this much: the majority of human beings do not even begin
to comprehend the actual significance of what is going on all around them.
We might agree that what appears blithely disguised as business as usual
on the surface of the world is, in reality, a bizarre and ultimately hopeless
global network built entirely on the denial of the law of cause and effect.
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- No matter how assiduously the daily industrial-strength
tissue of lies is spun, denying the discernible deterioration of our sick
civilization, and no matter how many have invested their lives in believing
and sustaining these lies: unpleasant realities are lumbering inexorably
toward us. Experts in all fields are dogtrotted out by the truckload, and
dutifully trundled through the mills of mass media, in order continually
to bury and re-bury any signs of incipient awareness in the populace that
all is not well. Official repertoires consisting of studied stupidities,
frank falsehoods, diagrams for dummies, simpering smirks and posturing
pomposities are designed to semaphore to a somnambulant citizenry that
everything is under control. In fact, mounting evidence points entirely
to a contrary conclusion. And in the face of our stunningly complicated
world problems, the toddler's cartoon version of life, offered by those
in power through the mass media's obedient mouth, is one of the most shocking
aspects of our predicament. Of a multitude of symptoms indicating rampant
human lunacy presently operating on a grand scale, the continual insulting
offerings of Frankenspeak in lieu of meaningful communication is perhaps
the most directly alarming, disgusting and telling.
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- It is not hard to fathom the hidden political and economic
causes of the oncoming upset of our earthly applecart. At the same time
the material achievements of the 20th century have brought incalculable
temporary benefits to many, conveniently ignoring the hidden costs of such
progress has eroded human consciousness to a degree beyond all our reckoning.
It is not that material comfort need ever have been purchased at the price
of sane and ethical existence- but that is nevertheless the path that was
taken. It is not that a decent standard of living is a problem per se,
or that in and of itself reasonable levels of civilized materialism represent
some sort of inevitable wrongdoing. The criminal activity was all in how
we got here, in the forms our corporate-born standard of living has taken,
and in how we have allowed worldly powers to sustain themselves. It is
everything we have chosen to ignore along the way, in order to enjoy prosperity
at all costs, that has added up to our coming undoing. Our collective complacent
refusal to look behind the scenes into secret and wholly unregulated corporate,
government and military activities has resulted in a nightmarish world
where the actual state of things is the polar opposite of what is told
to and subsequently believed by the majority of the public.
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- This civilization of ours, so outwardly attractive to
so many, has been constructed over a hidden foundation of widespread institutional
theft, deadly levels of pollution, illegal secrecy, drugs and armaments
empires, draconian legalisms, and the extraordinarily cynical manipulation
of large segments of the population through highly sophisticated forms
of genuine mind control offered as "news" and "entertainment".
Behind the scenes this is no utopia, as advertised, but dystopia: a realm
where all is, contrary to expectations and common belief, in the worst
possible condition. Furthermore, dystopia is disintegrating before our
eyes, and out from under our feet, even as the absurd efforts to pretend
that all is well redouble. We see the ever-more-desperate desire of the
many to mutually sustain their belief in a doomed system of interlocking
institutions fuelled by ruthless and unregenerate human greed and the unbridled
lust for domination. It is not that most people are innately incapable
of observing the crumbling foundations of their own unthinking dependencies.
Rather, people are still subconsciously choosing to avoid the pain and
fear of confronting what is already well underway. Most of the so-called
grown-ups on our planet still fearfully turn their minds away from the
unwanted spectacle of oncoming troubles. A large percentage of the human
race, facing the necessity of giving their highest quality attention to
our common dangers, is instead frantically increasing the dosage of self-delusion.
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- On the whole, people have been avoiding all honest investigation
into the genuine causes of galloping disintegration in human institutions.
Yet this will change, and is clearly changing now, as vast shadowy shell
games are inevitably exposed to glaring broad daylight. No sooner is the
essential trickery-fakery of an institutional lie exposed, than people
reel with shock and outrage. Yet it is precisely a long collective agreement
to invest blindly in institutionalized criminal greed, and the refusal
to know what corporations and governments are actually doing, that inevitably
results in the very disintegration now so indignantly confronted. Anyone
who wanted to could easily have understood this inevitable scenario long
ago. If you asked individuals whether or not they believed their lives
could safely be built on criminal or unethical activity, almost all would
scoff and say "Of course not." Yet people have pretended that
these same basic principles mysteriously do not apply to large human institutions
and governments. As if humans in groups might magically be exempt from
the great moral necessities of life governing all individuals who wish
to live sanely.
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- By their own decisions and consensual collusion, many
intelligent people have preferred to ride the greed-powered national gravy
train, in self-willed blindness to the visibly immoral and ugly underpinnings
of longstanding government, corporate and military chicanery. Naturally,
as institutions begin to come unglued, we will all pay dearly for the willful
self-deception of those of us who chose to hitch their earthly welfare
to the dark forces of "civilized" corruption. There will be ever-louder
howls of injured innocence from the hordes of victims as our dystopia comes
apart at the seams. Yet one might give most normal human beings credit
for the ability to discern the difference between ethical and unethical
practices on many levels, if and when they care to do so. The alternative
is to believe that the majority of people are far too stupid to tell the
difference between nominally ethical behavior and rank criminality. On
the face of it, while possible, this appears unlikely. Rather, most people
seem to have assumed the ostrich position for the sake of short-term personal
benefits, and then are astounded and outraged when reality brutally overtakes
the forces of denial.
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- It is not only dysfunctional human institutions that
are breaking down, despite all efforts to pretend otherwise. The earth's
natural systems are in a state of breathtakingly rapid degradation and
subsequent mutation into who-knows-what new versions of themselves. The
earth as a whole is simultaneously undergoing both dramatic climate change
and a systemic breakdown from toxic shock. And yet such a rapid accumulation,
combining, and coalescing of disastrous forces is not causing the slightest
change yet in collective human behavior at levels where it might make any
difference. If ever there is a setting in which calamities are most likely
to befall the human race, it is the current one. A sinister synergy is
underway, composed of corrupt worldly authorities, a relatively apathetic
and self-victimizing populace, severe spiritual and physical pollution
resulting from a world powered by uncontrolled greed and totalitarian tendencies,
and drastic changes occurring in the earth's natural systems.
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- Recipes for disasters don't come with more potently volatile
ingredients than these. And for some, no sudden catastrophe or combination
of disasters will come as any surprise. A certain percentage of human beings
throughout history, aware of being caught in cyclic periods of wholesale
degeneration, have always instinctively felt the truth that life itself
will never suffer the proliferation of human insanity beyond a certain
point. The sole remaining question some of us ask ourselves these days
is exactly what that point might be. In all human cultures, there have
always been those who have warned people again and again that we cannot
live on lies or thrive on degeneration. We have always been free to ignore
such warnings, but we certainly have never been free of the fatal consequences
of such ignorant decisions. Whenever human beings abandon the principles
of reality for the foundationless hallucinations of egotism, willful ignorance,
selfishness and greed, disaster must and will come to raze such illusions
to the ground. This is as implacably true for civilizations as it is for
individuals.
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- Mankind is inherently designed to understand what it
means to live an honorable life. The suffering required before human beings
freely accept this fact might be long and terrible, yet this reality must
and will be made manifest. We may only shorten, or lengthen interminably,
the quality and quantity of misery involved in accepting the fact that
we are meant to become decent, reasonable and just. Humanity's age-old
self-serving habit of offering meaningless lip service to spiritual truth
is having very bad results. Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, we
are endowed with conscience, intelligence, free will, the capacity to love,
and the commensurate responsibilities for manifesting these astonishing
gifts we have been given. Spiritual stewardship includes direct responsibility
for the right employment of all of our capacities, in every aspect of our
lives here. There is no such thing as being spiritual, for instance, while
blissfully ignoring the implications of the present cesspool civilization
has become. This world is one House and the inhabitants and systems it
depends on are woven into a single interactive web of life. All efforts
to pretend otherwise, in order to avoid the strenuous difficulties of solving
seemingly intractable problems, are doomed to eventual destruction.
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- The general attitude of obliviousness and refusal to
regulate worldly authorities has generated a thick psychic fog in which
malevolent forces have been operating with near-perfect immunity. Most
people are still settling for a position of complete passivity in relation
to the entire external world, as if half-watching a rather boring television
show. Extremes of disgraceful behavior, manifesting everywhere in the highest
levels of military, government and corporate power, have been accepted,
or barely registered, or excused as "the price of doing business",
or perceived as a disgusting display about which nothing ever can be done.
Meanwhile, suggestively interconnected natural and human systemic failures,
likely to be of immense consequence to us all, are perceivable everywhere,
and increasing by the day. As it is, those of us considered "alarmists"
are dismissed with a sad shake of the head as psychologically mal-conditioned
doom-mongers. And far worse yet, many are now summarily categorized as
"traitors" for having the temerity to observe and comment in
public on various outrageously wicked, dangerous and idiotic activities
underway in the name of preserving "civilization". When venal,
frightened, hopelessly dishonest and secretive authorities designate the
most thoughtful and concerned segment of a population as "traitors",
we may take it as one more certain sign that the disintegration of dystopia
is proceeding apace.
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