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The Golden Road to Unlimited Totalitarianism - Part 6
Planet of the Golden Calf
By Diane Harvey <merak@sedona.net>
7-23-00
 
 
What we desire, we become. There is no disguising the outcome of our inward life. We can pretend all we like, but Life is never fooled. Each of us unerringly manifests the results, to one degree or another, of what it is we are seeking. What we want, both to give and to get, powerfully shapes our destinies. There is no escape from desire, and no way to hide these motivating secrets of our innermost nature. Existence itself knows what we are really like, whether or not our own conceptions of ourselves are accurate. In the same way, nations, like individuals, follow the desires which determine their fates. A nation is not a thing apart from human beings, after all. It is simply what a large number of people are up to together through time.
 
What we are up to together lately is the dissolution of the soul of our nation. As a people, we have turned our proud, shallow, contemporary backs on everything which relates us to any spiritual impulses. And we have gone much further than that: we are now speedily devolving downward and backward, past basic human common sense. We the People are nearing wholesale soul-suicide. This is the inescapable fruit of all that we have been ardently desiring. Sixty years ago we desired to save the world from totalitarianism, and its regimented unholy materialism. That sacrificial desire resulted in the momentary triumph of the soul of humanity over the powers of darkness let loose on this planet. And all who are alive and still thinking today try to fathom what happened next. How on earth did we get here from there to here in the blink of an eye?
 
We have had a great deal of help. There are always two opposing forces, two paths, two plans, two directions to choose from, individually and therefore also collectively. There was already a dark plan in place, just as the forces of light are ever-present. Even before that great war for human freedom was over, the forces of totalitarianism were busy behind the scenes, redeploying their assets and developing a new strategy for enslavement. This strategy is obvious in retrospect. The war for ownership of human souls was transferred from crude physical warfare to the arena of a new and more enticing breed of materialism. It isn't necessary to go to all the trouble to enslave the physical bodies of human beings. If you can entrain their desires downward far enough into dense matter, humans will exchange their souls gladly for the sake of playing with toys and passively devouring clownish spectacles. Once the individual soul's creative spiritual purpose is traded for a "lifestyle", the forces of darkness have won. People are then eager to ignore the voice of conscience in order to spend their lives buying what you want to sell them. This is a perfectly balanced ecological system from the point of view of the dark forces. Through advances in techniques of the manipulation of human desire, we were carefully conditioned, bit by bit, right out of our souls. However, this could not have happened without our enthusiastic cooperation. In the end, humanity is always the deciding factor in the endless battle between material and spiritual forces. We choose our heights and depths, and the entities that accompany us along the way. Angels or devils: the nature of our desire decides. Many people choose not to know the difference, and thus never acknowledge that their guiding angels are actually horned.
 
Our country has become a busy, hard-working and thriving desolation. We are slaves to The Empire of Empty Words and Meaningless Gestures. We have come to the end of this particular form of our body politic, our larger destiny. Surface movement and shine is now enough to please the undiscerning eye of most Americans. Life lived inside a thin layer of veneer is deep enough for most, so long as the picture changes fast enough. The sixteenth-of-an-inch deep offerings of the entertainment industry, Hypnosis Unlimited, are avidly welcomed. The newer-better-bigger-louder-faster Department of Unquestioned Materialism is always hiring. Not many citizens of this spiritually gutted, hollowed-out nation protest. They have mostly all bought stock in America, refusing to notice that it is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Planetary Totalitarianism, Inc. To admit what is happening might endanger one's comfortable "lifestyle", and this cannot be. To see through the surface might mean to feel obliged to do something about it in some small way, and that would interfere with the job in the corporation, the plans for buying new stuff, the retirement plan, and television-trance-time. Better to not know, better to surrender to the hypnotic messages and the everyday passive states, because they feel so comfortable. Better when experiencing the chilly touch of the meaninglessness of all this to quickly go shopping again, or eat another ice cream, or submit what is left of one's mind to screaming soul-obliterating sounds and the charm of hideous images. Better to work harder, to make more money, to buy more matter, to be more entertained, to sink ever deeper, in order to work harder, to make more money, to buy more matter, to be more entertained, to sink ever deeper. And the great sought-after prize in all this: to be able to do nothing at all. The freedom to be absolutely useless is now considered to be the highest form of human life. We now actually believe the underlying message of the dark forces, which is that Receiving Everything + Giving Nothing = Success. The message is that perfect freedom to consume equates to perfect enjoyment of existence. This is the life demonstration of absolute greed. It is all the desire for the little self to have have have. And afterwards: death.
 
Greed was once an obvious and, on the whole, socially unacceptable disease. There was little difficulty distinguishing between normal human desires for civilized comfort, and the pathological out-of-control desire nature of the relatively few. In the last few decades however, the infection of greed has managed to stealthily mutate into a virulent and deadly new form. Greed has developed a protective coating which reflects a sheen of normal respectability, and is no longer even recognizable. A lifestyle based on Getting-and-Having is now enthusiastically embraced as a particularly All-American virtue. Greediness is not merely psychologically fashionable now: it is well established in the American psyche as the summum bonum of our special rights. The original spiritual promise inherent in the phrase "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" has been dragged down into the uttermost basement of meaning. The new version of our basic "rights" consists of the dictionary definition of pure greed: "Excessive desire for acquiring or having". We don't believe in any such thing as "excess" now. And the result of this is a nation suffering from a fatal illness, but which does not, on the whole, even comprehend it is sick. The occasional lip-service given to deploring our raging materialism is a useless noise drowned out by the yowl of advertising. Seen from space, Earth's once lovely face is stamped with the corporate logo of the Ferengi.
 
As the current version of the Roman Empire, just short of the inevitable disastrous collapse, we export the florid excrescences of our decaying culture to an eagerly awaiting world. At the present rate, consumerism will shortly be a global plague in the human species. The consequences of this rampant disease on a planetary scale are evident. Too numerous to be supported by rapidly diminishing resources, greedy humanity becomes a kind of flesh-eating bacteria on the surface of the planet. One can only wonder if subconsciously our civilization registers its coming inevitable disintegration, and chooses to dine on as many hummingbird tongues as possible before the end. Destined sooner or later to meet the results of its actions, the United States of America perhaps tries to escape its logical conclusion through fevered immersion in ever-more idiotic and demeaning distractions.
 
Such a level of alarm is no exaggeration. A wholesale metamorphosis from homo sapiens into homo consumerus will be fatal. The reasons for this are numerous and readily understood by all those as yet uninfected. First of all, greed is not a sort of evolutionarily harmless childhood disease, merely appearing on a larger scale. If it spreads to the extent of taking over the entire psyche of a nation, it will kill the host. We see from the historical evidence that a small percentage of greedy people cannot harm a country whose numerous healthy cells, average sane citizens, function as a powerful immunological protection. But if an entire people succumb to irrational levels of desire for getting-and-having, then the cancer will spread until the body dies.
 
Desire, after all, when allowed to focus overmuch on the material world, does have a tendency to get out of hand and to imperceptibly sink downward into thoughtless and endless Wanting. Whoever has no self-existence, no inner desire to become creative and useful, must fill this vacuum with a passive other-directed life. Unless our normal desire-capacities flow first into their natural circulatory channels of intelligent love, the energy of desire itself becomes problematic. Most of us have had the experience of our desires leading us, temporarily at least, along paths which lead nowhere, ending in the unpleasant swamps and deserts of hard lessons. The energy of desire leads us all onward, one way or the other. Choked off into the single narrow dead-end road of Stuff, desire itself becomes a toxic substance. It's not just that materialism doesn't buy happiness: it will actually destroy us. We are not, as a nation, even considering what the nature of our collective desire is, what it is for, and where it will take us.
 
It is quite telling that we don't all indignantly and vigorously object to being constantly referred to as "consumers" rather than human beings. Perhaps the actual meaning of the word will serve as a reminder of the new image we have accepted of ourselves. The definition of consume is "to eat, use up, destroy; to spend wastefully, squander (time, energy, money, etc.); syn. swallow up, exhaust, expend, lavish, dissipate, burn." A consumer is "1. one who consumes, spends, wastes, or destroys; that which consumes. 2. in economics, a person who uses goods or services to satisfiy his needs rather than to produce other goods with them." In short, to passively allow oneself to be thought of as a consumer is to accept oneself rather literally as a gobbling cancer cell in the body of humanity. It means to deny the fundamental spiritual truth behind all religion and spiritual life: "It is better to give than to receive". To be a consumer is to forgo expressing one's gifts and talents, except insofar as the corporate world wishes to approprate them to its purposes. To consume is to forget that the whole point of being human is to create something useful and beautiful which serves others as well as oneself. To be merely a corporate paradigm slave, a consumer, is to be a useless two-ended tube, and a willing carrier and transmitter of a disease which has the potential to destroy us all.
 
Of course, once the greed-virus takes over there is little consciousness left to discriminate between rational desires and endless greed. And one marker of this virus is a complete disinterest in the sources and actual human costs of what we want. Our nation consumes 30% of the entire planet's resources? Then we must surely deserve it, right? Refusal to see the chain of materialism for what it is is a sure sign of subconscious greed. If we still buy, say, redwood and don't want to know where it came from, then there we are. We can no longer see the forest for the furniture. There are unfortunately endless similar examples, of course, of refusal to know the cost to the planet of what one wants for oneself. History records that quite a few civilizations disappeared with astonishing suddenness through consuming their surroundings. Here today, gone tomorrow: no more nature left to support life. This is going on today on a global scale for the first time. It's inconceivable to us that one day we will wake up and there will be no more forests, no unpolluted water, no clean air, no natural food. Yet as the Chinese saying goes "Unless we change direction we are likely to end up where we are going." We don't care at all, we just Want. The logical conclusion of our greed will be a planet covered with a skin of asphalt, with human habitations, factories, and shopping malls in a nightmarish unbroken globe-girdling city. Inside their houses, humans will be riveted to the giant wall-tv, watching other humans hunt each other for food. So much for the human race. Once it gave rise to divinely inspired cultures: art, music, architecture, gardens, beautiful objects for everyday use, and all the other blessings of civilized comfort. Now we only create money, stupidity and ugliness.
 
One of the oldest prophecies on earth refers to our moment in time, here and now. It comes from the Vishnu Purana, written no-one-knows how many thousands and thousands of years ago. In it the writer is describing what he forsees at the end of the age known as Kali Yuga: the Age of Iron. Ancient eastern wisdom describes unimaginably (to us) vast cycles of time, called "ages", which succeeed one another in descending into materialism and loss of spirituality. The cycle begins with a Golden Age, when human beings are bright with spiritual awareness and promise. It ends, several million years later, in the depths of decay. The following prophecy certainly sounds familiar:
 
"There will be be contemporary monarchs, reigning over the earth: kings of churlish spirit, violent temper, and ever addicted to falsehood and wickedness. They will inflict death on women and children, they will seize upon the property of their subjects, and be intent upon the wives of others; they will be of unlimited power, their lives will be short, their desires insatiable....People of various countries intermingling with them will follow their example. Piety will decrease until the whole world will be wholly depraved. Property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation; and women will be objects merely of sensual gratification....External types will be the only distinction of the several orders of life;...a man if rich will be reputed to be pure; dishonesty will be the universal means of subsistence, weakness the cause of dependence, menace and presumption will be substituted for learning; liberality will be devotion; mutual assent, marrriage; fine clothes, dignity. He who is strongest will reign; the people, unable to bear the heavy burden of taxes, will take refuge among the valleys...Thus, in the Kali Age will decay constantly proceed, until the human race approaches its annihilation." At which point, according to these ancient scriptures, a great descent of divine power takes place again, and the seeds of the new cycle, the beginning of the next Golden Age, are sown.
 
Since all forms of life are cyclic, perhaps this ancient prophecy merely describes a kind of inevitable end to our civilization. Yet always the choice remains: free will exists, and no human being is obliged (yet) to cooperate in spiritual self-destruction. Furthermore, even when a civilization flowers and then falls to the ground and decomposes, one may choose to become a seed of the future culture. This is strictly a matter of individual desire. We can go with the flow, down the drain, or fight the uphill battle to claim our souls and the life of the heart and mind. There is a great war unfolding within us and all around us, and we are all participants, whether we have the courage to admit it or not. This simple choice is the hardest we will ever make: to recognize the virus of selfish materialistic consumption for what it is, and to reject it. Despite the pressing dark force of increasing greediness, we still have the power to insist on expressing our individual gifts and talents. The price of this is high: it often means a life of struggle. But at this point only darkness and the status quo offer the certainty of cheap mindless comfort. Light, love and creative intelligence only offer themselves, and the eternal promise of being unfolded into an ever-greater livingness. Every moment of our lives we are desiring, we are choosing to attach ourselves to the downgoing darkness of materialism or to the upwelling light of the soul. And when death comes, the sum of all our desires and subsequent choices will determine our next destination. There is no religion or spiritual path which does not teach this, for reasons which ought to be quite clear to us all. It is the truth.
 
 
 
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