And our egos buy into the collective ego of empire. It's so hard for people to get unstuck from the good guy/bad guy stories empire creates. Our collective belief in the goodness of our empire can create so much misery.
We get that collective belief starting in kindergarten when we are told that we need to learn things so that we can grow up to get a good job and make lots of money. We aren't born with those egos. We are taught them.
100 percent agreed. And we can liberate ourselves from that belief-system. Suffering from oppression, as many people realise today, can be an inital moment for that process.
"They waited. Suddenly another voice spoke,low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice spoke to them, and when it spoke to another they smiled, as men do who see through a juggler’s trick while others gape at it. For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those whom it conquered the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them. But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it" Tolkein Lord of the Rings
"The whole fabric of our religions are based on superstitious beliefs in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us.
To whose personal profit and aggrandizement it is to have us continue to believe as they wish us to believe."
Edward Bernays- "The conscious and intelligent Manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen element constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
We're made to believe the world can't work that way, and we must all just scratch out a living desperately, while allowing one individual to become a trillionaire.
Then there has been a more recent intellectual assault on faith and spirituality. It is often looked down upon as anti-science and irrational. We are now to believe life came about randomly and the Universe is basically a mechanical process where we just happened to have found ourselves in (for a very brief time). Love is just a biological evolved mechanism based on survival and nothing more.
So people alive today have two things to deal with: your life is just a grunt for the machine (for the majority of people), and reality itself is just a machine. And how do you like those cookies?
I appreciate your metaphysical bent, jamenta. When I was a small child walking alone on our country lane, I was boggled by the mere fact of my existence and how it all came about. And was there ever Nothing? Being and Nothingness is quite a juxtaposition! But anyway, I’m pretty firmly in the camp that matter presupposes mind as opposed to the other way around.
I wouldn't be so sure. Have you ever looked seriously at the last 30+ years of scientific research in near death studies? Unfortunately, many academics dismiss it due to ingrained assumptions. But there is actually good science that has been published regarding NDEs.
I have not only seen a cotton field in full bloom, I've had dreams at night that turned out to be true. Something Carl Jung witnessed often with his clients, and Freud would later write about. Which means, assumptions regarding the locality of consciousness, or the nature of consciousness may just be assumptions. And assumptions are often what stop science and human knowledge from advancing.
What I mean is that mind is the ultimate reality—idealism, so to speak, as opposed to materialism. That is to say—we are of like mind “metaphysically.”
Ah, Roger. When you wrote: "matter presupposes mind" I got confused with the subject and object. "Presuppose" is a fairly unusual word, don't see it to often. Which also means you probably have read quite a bit.
I hope you are right "metaphysically". I find myself in the odd position in not accepting any of the official religions available, but at the same time keeping a tenuous faith that there is hope in the primacy of consciousness. Cheers.
I understand. I had to double check the dictionary before hand. It’s been a long time since I did a college paper on Berkeley, but I had that expression in my head. Love Jung as well. There is hope. Cheers.
We've been controlled by psycopaths for a long time in varying degrees. Now, as more and more of us wake up and see it, the same creatures are building the ultimate cages for us once and for all.
Yes!! That's what this furious data center buildout is all about. The Trump administration is intervening in a lawsuit against a Musk data center that built gas generators without permits, saying that the data center is needed for national security and that it, the administration, should have the power to toss lawsuits it doesn't like. What "national security" means is the ability of the psychopaths ruling things to feel secure against the masses, by hiding things or in this case by illegally building a structure to be used for surveillance, so when the endgame becomes clear and we finally rise up, they'll know who the potential leaders are, and can likely also use AI to direct the drones against us. They already use AI to direct drones against supposed enemies abroad--this would cross a threshhold but that day is not far away. The warehouses they're turning into concentration camps for immigrants will also be used for dissidents before long. Imagining that if the Democrats sweep one or both Houses in November, all this will go away, is naive. They are already signaling that they will step back only a little.
Thanks for this Mary. Yes, drones are the new weapon ... to be used against anyone/everyone. And for those pesky house-to-house scenarios, the robots now have legs ... which go anywhere. Beam me up Scotty, I've seen enough!
Those who are lost seek themselves in the world. The United States, like every empire, is certainly preoccupied with control. But it is also an age old power system devised by those who forever seek greater material gains, because the present moment is obviated by mental noise, and so unsatisfying. Oligarchs seem to have a deep sense of personal impoverishment because direct experience is reduced to abstractions - which includes other people. The trauma produced by such a society results in the sort of damaged, shattered individuals that dangerously wield power.
There are alternatives but most people reject them because their programming is set against change.
Anarchism is not a romantic fable, but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we can not trust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”- Edward Abbey
Panarchism is the moral realization that entrusting the management of your life to kings, priests, politicians,generals,and county commissioners should be at your risk and cost, and only at your risk and cost, not those of unwilling others forced into your territorial government.
Remember: “ Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it”. Kurt Hoffman
But, empires are collective. They arise out of constellated unempathic egos, formations of individuals who come together to define others as less than they are, therefore deserving to be subjugated and used.
If a person has enough ego to believe he/she can rule a people, they need to know, or learn, that it takes hard work, understanding of the humans they plan to rule and needs their heart and soul to be in the job. Without these they are in it for themselves -- just like Drumpf and his cabinet and the party that supports him. And it will fail because they may take the people for fools, but they certainly are not - at least not all of them.
It's rather amazing how easily humans are led by some of the vilest types of people and ideologies. A retreat to group think - herd behavior - go with the flow - this is where it goes. All of these render individual choice as something to surrender. I feel that pull too but have always maintained my own ideals - this has cost me mightily over the years - so be it. As a youngster, I was abandoned at a time when I was most vulnerable - no one stepped up to protect me and I will never forget how horrible that felt, therefore, I have always felt a natural compassion born of that experience.
Once you start down that road, you have to start making choices. If the society and system that we live under does so much evil, how much will I compromise with it?
These choices can have very real personal and professional consequences. Try not paying taxes and see what happens. "Bartelby the Scrivener" it ain't.
Even if you do compromise, you are left with a guilty conscience.
By contrast, if you go along with the crowd, you can avoid those tough choices and face no consequences, and your conscience stays relatively untroubled, for the time being at least. Even in the worst case, you can say to yourself that you did what every other Good German did under the circumstances.
It's called coercion. Together with threats of violence, and examples of that violence being used work very well to keep the sheep in line.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H.L. Mencken
There is a lot truth to indeed, I just can't see it as a sufficient explanation.
In the historic materialism we learn that there is a dialectic exchange between how people function and prosper in historical material circumstances.
We're not born into a vacuum, our parents are already exposed to a system of circumstances that allows them very little room to maneuver to keep us alive, since for that they have a living to make.
Empires, vertical hierarchic systems and exploitation are rather young systems among humans.
We humans lived for million of years without those systems before so around 10-12 thousand years ago, after the younger dryas (last ice age) we started to create what we now call civilization.
Those systems are the opposite of civilized, if we look at it by the amount of death, destruction and misery they produced.
Mankind is not born as slaves, not born as serfs and not born as 'human capital'. That's not natural.
In the here and now it is the system of capitalism/imperialism that convicts the born child into a life of exploitation, a life where we people have to sell our muscle-and brain capacity on the labour market to be allowed to survive.
The very few that own the meaning of production plus their armies of media, culture and academic pundits came up with the lie that if you do your very best, you can make it into their club.
And so people struggle, hurt each other in an unnatural competition to get up in the hierarchy of society, that they do not have created themself. (As George Carlin put it very wisely: 'it's a big club and you're aint in it.')
The ruling class has hammered a picture of human kind that tells us about greed and winning, about hate and worthy versus unworthy. That picture is wrong!
No one is born greedy or mean. It's the perverse system that shapes us into wanting to break out of the degrading cycle of wage labour and become one of the people that 'earn' money by doing nothing but exploit us.
In my view: Change the system and the people will change as well. If we're free of the struggle to climb the hierarchy ladder and can have a life where kindness, solidarity, cooperation and DO NO HARM(!) is the rule of life, then we can a life as true humans.
"But we’re waking up. Strangely, awkwardly, stumbling forward like a toddler, we are moving to become a conscious species".
I hope so.
Sometimes we sleep through the alarm. And the repeat alarm. Sometimes we need a rude shove in order to wake.
For those in the west, we could remember the ten plagues of Egypt.
After the initial shock of each plague, Pharoah became complacent and went back to his old ways.
We had Covid. Now we have had the failed war against Iran.
The first two plagues.
I am not thinking of the great crimes committed by the West, such as the Gaza genocide. I am thinking only of those events which have at least temporarily disrupted the course of our culture of violence, our gross exploitation of our fellow human beings, and our cavalier disregard for the earth and the oceans which sustain all life.
Do we need eight more such plagues before our rulers see sense, or our peoples topple them from their thrones of iniquity?
Arrogance, delusion, tyranny, exaggeration, injustice, betrayal, lack of sincerity in work, not forbidding evil, transgression of human law, espionage, lying, show off, hypocrisy, bribery, insults, calling names, corruption, extremism, intolerance, genocide, and discrimination (racism, nationalism, tribalism, sectarianism, and politics) and disbelief and tyranny are an immoral stances
There's a more universal view about this ego thing, having it, losing it, transcending it, etc.
"It is of course a common misapprehension that the change of personal consciousness effected in the Eastern ways of liberation is "depersonalization" in the sense of regression to a primitive or infantile type of awareness. Indeed, Freud designated the longing for return to the oceanic consciousness of the womb as the nirvanva-principle, and his followers have persistently confused all ideas of transcending the ego with mere loss of "ego strength." This attitude flows, perhaps, from the imperialism of Western Europe in the Nineteenth Century, when it became convenient to regard Indians and Chinese as backward and benighted heathens desperately in need of improvement by colonization.
"It cannot be stressed too strongly that liberation does not involve the loss or destruction of such conventional concepts as the ego; it means seeing through them -- in the same way that we can use the idea of the equator without confusing it with a physical mark upon the surface of the earth. Instead of falling below the ego, liberation surpasses it."
The biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity and fear is the root of all violence. Eliminate scarcity, and we eliminate the root of violence.
I would also state that much of the scarcity in the modern world is “false scarcity” which is generated purposely in order to maintain the class system of inequality.
Thank you Caitlin, your words resonate with me and all the comments below also. There is so much damage and fear found in regular folks. How to undo and remove the injuries ?
The manipulation via fear of folks is like fire out of control in all areas. From the moment a baby enters this war zone the manipulation starts.
There is no compassion or communication in any formulation of contemporary culture, from finance, so-called law, religion, so-called defence is really a manifestation of group greed, gross fear.
RUSSIA MUST WIN RESPECT BECAUSE THE WEST WILL NEVER GIVE IT.
Russia needs to come to the realization that it has no choice but to remove the proxy that the EU and US have created to constantly and consistently batter Russia. Never-mind American politics. Russia has no friends in the US. They want to destroy Russia and control it’s resources. Russia should have already learned that lessen in the 1990’s and what they tried to do when the Soviet Union collapsed. It should be obvious that there could never be a government in Russia that the US will respect as it’s equal. Just because the Russians understand that it is foolish to disregard the potential for a nuclear catastrophe does not mean that the capitalist desire for global hegemony has diminished in the slightest.
Forget EU empty threats. The fatuous so-called leaders of the EU are not competent or capable enough to pose a real threat to Russia. The US will turn them from vassals to proxies at any time it’s in the interest of American hegemony.
Russia is wrong to think that it has the luxury and time to procrastinate about what to do in Ukraine. That it can make diplomatic or reasonable agreements with the hegemonic neocons or neo-liberal Democrats. It better realize that when it comes to capturing Russian resources both parties see eye to eye. American politics does not serve Russian security or sovereignty and it never will. Quite the opposite.
The only way for Russia to end the escalating drone and missile bombardments the west pretends comes from Ukraine is to finish off the neo-Nazi proxy and take away the murderous pretense. Russia will have to completely control all Ukrainian territory so that it becomes clear who the real enemy to Russian security actually is. The US and EU will not be able to disguise it’s treacherous ambitions as a weak and vulnerable country fighting for it’s existence anymore.
Let Iran be a lesson to Russia. The US must be forced to do the right thing. it never does it on it's own.
And our egos buy into the collective ego of empire. It's so hard for people to get unstuck from the good guy/bad guy stories empire creates. Our collective belief in the goodness of our empire can create so much misery.
We get that collective belief starting in kindergarten when we are told that we need to learn things so that we can grow up to get a good job and make lots of money. We aren't born with those egos. We are taught them.
100 percent agreed. And we can liberate ourselves from that belief-system. Suffering from oppression, as many people realise today, can be an inital moment for that process.
"They waited. Suddenly another voice spoke,low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice spoke to them, and when it spoke to another they smiled, as men do who see through a juggler’s trick while others gape at it. For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those whom it conquered the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them. But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it" Tolkein Lord of the Rings
A proven strategy it seems!
Edgar Rice Burroughs,The Gods of Mars.
"The whole fabric of our religions are based on superstitious beliefs in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us.
To whose personal profit and aggrandizement it is to have us continue to believe as they wish us to believe."
Edward Bernays- "The conscious and intelligent Manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen element constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
Thank you for sharing with us. stay safe, stay blessed. 💜
If only we could all just learn to relax and love and care for each other... What a wonderful world it would be.
We're made to believe the world can't work that way, and we must all just scratch out a living desperately, while allowing one individual to become a trillionaire.
Then there has been a more recent intellectual assault on faith and spirituality. It is often looked down upon as anti-science and irrational. We are now to believe life came about randomly and the Universe is basically a mechanical process where we just happened to have found ourselves in (for a very brief time). Love is just a biological evolved mechanism based on survival and nothing more.
So people alive today have two things to deal with: your life is just a grunt for the machine (for the majority of people), and reality itself is just a machine. And how do you like those cookies?
I appreciate your metaphysical bent, jamenta. When I was a small child walking alone on our country lane, I was boggled by the mere fact of my existence and how it all came about. And was there ever Nothing? Being and Nothingness is quite a juxtaposition! But anyway, I’m pretty firmly in the camp that matter presupposes mind as opposed to the other way around.
Ever see a cotton field in full bloom?
I wouldn't be so sure. Have you ever looked seriously at the last 30+ years of scientific research in near death studies? Unfortunately, many academics dismiss it due to ingrained assumptions. But there is actually good science that has been published regarding NDEs.
I have not only seen a cotton field in full bloom, I've had dreams at night that turned out to be true. Something Carl Jung witnessed often with his clients, and Freud would later write about. Which means, assumptions regarding the locality of consciousness, or the nature of consciousness may just be assumptions. And assumptions are often what stop science and human knowledge from advancing.
What I mean is that mind is the ultimate reality—idealism, so to speak, as opposed to materialism. That is to say—we are of like mind “metaphysically.”
Ah, Roger. When you wrote: "matter presupposes mind" I got confused with the subject and object. "Presuppose" is a fairly unusual word, don't see it to often. Which also means you probably have read quite a bit.
I hope you are right "metaphysically". I find myself in the odd position in not accepting any of the official religions available, but at the same time keeping a tenuous faith that there is hope in the primacy of consciousness. Cheers.
I understand. I had to double check the dictionary before hand. It’s been a long time since I did a college paper on Berkeley, but I had that expression in my head. Love Jung as well. There is hope. Cheers.
We've been controlled by psycopaths for a long time in varying degrees. Now, as more and more of us wake up and see it, the same creatures are building the ultimate cages for us once and for all.
Great write-up Caitlin!
Yes!! That's what this furious data center buildout is all about. The Trump administration is intervening in a lawsuit against a Musk data center that built gas generators without permits, saying that the data center is needed for national security and that it, the administration, should have the power to toss lawsuits it doesn't like. What "national security" means is the ability of the psychopaths ruling things to feel secure against the masses, by hiding things or in this case by illegally building a structure to be used for surveillance, so when the endgame becomes clear and we finally rise up, they'll know who the potential leaders are, and can likely also use AI to direct the drones against us. They already use AI to direct drones against supposed enemies abroad--this would cross a threshhold but that day is not far away. The warehouses they're turning into concentration camps for immigrants will also be used for dissidents before long. Imagining that if the Democrats sweep one or both Houses in November, all this will go away, is naive. They are already signaling that they will step back only a little.
Thanks for this Mary. Yes, drones are the new weapon ... to be used against anyone/everyone. And for those pesky house-to-house scenarios, the robots now have legs ... which go anywhere. Beam me up Scotty, I've seen enough!
Only YOU! can prevent data centers ~~ Smoky Bear
Those who are lost seek themselves in the world. The United States, like every empire, is certainly preoccupied with control. But it is also an age old power system devised by those who forever seek greater material gains, because the present moment is obviated by mental noise, and so unsatisfying. Oligarchs seem to have a deep sense of personal impoverishment because direct experience is reduced to abstractions - which includes other people. The trauma produced by such a society results in the sort of damaged, shattered individuals that dangerously wield power.
There are alternatives but most people reject them because their programming is set against change.
Anarchism is not a romantic fable, but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we can not trust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”- Edward Abbey
Panarchism is the moral realization that entrusting the management of your life to kings, priests, politicians,generals,and county commissioners should be at your risk and cost, and only at your risk and cost, not those of unwilling others forced into your territorial government.
Remember: “ Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it”. Kurt Hoffman
But, empires are collective. They arise out of constellated unempathic egos, formations of individuals who come together to define others as less than they are, therefore deserving to be subjugated and used.
They are the nature and result of tribes.
Actual strong individuals might go other ways.
Collaboration and cooperation is empathy based. Narcissism and selfishness is fear based.
The Empire freaks are always screaming about "Security" and "Defense" in the name of control. It's all fear based.
Actual strong individuals realize there is real Strength in Unity.
Agreed.
If a person has enough ego to believe he/she can rule a people, they need to know, or learn, that it takes hard work, understanding of the humans they plan to rule and needs their heart and soul to be in the job. Without these they are in it for themselves -- just like Drumpf and his cabinet and the party that supports him. And it will fail because they may take the people for fools, but they certainly are not - at least not all of them.
Humans are herd animals as easily led as sheep or dogs.
It's rather amazing how easily humans are led by some of the vilest types of people and ideologies. A retreat to group think - herd behavior - go with the flow - this is where it goes. All of these render individual choice as something to surrender. I feel that pull too but have always maintained my own ideals - this has cost me mightily over the years - so be it. As a youngster, I was abandoned at a time when I was most vulnerable - no one stepped up to protect me and I will never forget how horrible that felt, therefore, I have always felt a natural compassion born of that experience.
Once you start down that road, you have to start making choices. If the society and system that we live under does so much evil, how much will I compromise with it?
These choices can have very real personal and professional consequences. Try not paying taxes and see what happens. "Bartelby the Scrivener" it ain't.
Even if you do compromise, you are left with a guilty conscience.
By contrast, if you go along with the crowd, you can avoid those tough choices and face no consequences, and your conscience stays relatively untroubled, for the time being at least. Even in the worst case, you can say to yourself that you did what every other Good German did under the circumstances.
Perhaps you are a cat?
It's called coercion. Together with threats of violence, and examples of that violence being used work very well to keep the sheep in line.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H.L. Mencken
Coercion is rarely needed. Humans are natural herd animals, unlike cats.
MOST humans.
There is a lot truth to indeed, I just can't see it as a sufficient explanation.
In the historic materialism we learn that there is a dialectic exchange between how people function and prosper in historical material circumstances.
We're not born into a vacuum, our parents are already exposed to a system of circumstances that allows them very little room to maneuver to keep us alive, since for that they have a living to make.
Empires, vertical hierarchic systems and exploitation are rather young systems among humans.
We humans lived for million of years without those systems before so around 10-12 thousand years ago, after the younger dryas (last ice age) we started to create what we now call civilization.
Those systems are the opposite of civilized, if we look at it by the amount of death, destruction and misery they produced.
Mankind is not born as slaves, not born as serfs and not born as 'human capital'. That's not natural.
In the here and now it is the system of capitalism/imperialism that convicts the born child into a life of exploitation, a life where we people have to sell our muscle-and brain capacity on the labour market to be allowed to survive.
The very few that own the meaning of production plus their armies of media, culture and academic pundits came up with the lie that if you do your very best, you can make it into their club.
And so people struggle, hurt each other in an unnatural competition to get up in the hierarchy of society, that they do not have created themself. (As George Carlin put it very wisely: 'it's a big club and you're aint in it.')
The ruling class has hammered a picture of human kind that tells us about greed and winning, about hate and worthy versus unworthy. That picture is wrong!
No one is born greedy or mean. It's the perverse system that shapes us into wanting to break out of the degrading cycle of wage labour and become one of the people that 'earn' money by doing nothing but exploit us.
In my view: Change the system and the people will change as well. If we're free of the struggle to climb the hierarchy ladder and can have a life where kindness, solidarity, cooperation and DO NO HARM(!) is the rule of life, then we can a life as true humans.
Love your comment Frank Sailor! Really resonates with me!
"But we’re waking up. Strangely, awkwardly, stumbling forward like a toddler, we are moving to become a conscious species".
I hope so.
Sometimes we sleep through the alarm. And the repeat alarm. Sometimes we need a rude shove in order to wake.
For those in the west, we could remember the ten plagues of Egypt.
After the initial shock of each plague, Pharoah became complacent and went back to his old ways.
We had Covid. Now we have had the failed war against Iran.
The first two plagues.
I am not thinking of the great crimes committed by the West, such as the Gaza genocide. I am thinking only of those events which have at least temporarily disrupted the course of our culture of violence, our gross exploitation of our fellow human beings, and our cavalier disregard for the earth and the oceans which sustain all life.
Do we need eight more such plagues before our rulers see sense, or our peoples topple them from their thrones of iniquity?
Arrogance, delusion, tyranny, exaggeration, injustice, betrayal, lack of sincerity in work, not forbidding evil, transgression of human law, espionage, lying, show off, hypocrisy, bribery, insults, calling names, corruption, extremism, intolerance, genocide, and discrimination (racism, nationalism, tribalism, sectarianism, and politics) and disbelief and tyranny are an immoral stances
Most humans are not sociopaths. However, power selects strongly for sociopathy.
That healthy society will not be without individual ego, but it will have checks and balances that prevent collective ego from growing malignant.
There's a more universal view about this ego thing, having it, losing it, transcending it, etc.
"It is of course a common misapprehension that the change of personal consciousness effected in the Eastern ways of liberation is "depersonalization" in the sense of regression to a primitive or infantile type of awareness. Indeed, Freud designated the longing for return to the oceanic consciousness of the womb as the nirvanva-principle, and his followers have persistently confused all ideas of transcending the ego with mere loss of "ego strength." This attitude flows, perhaps, from the imperialism of Western Europe in the Nineteenth Century, when it became convenient to regard Indians and Chinese as backward and benighted heathens desperately in need of improvement by colonization.
"It cannot be stressed too strongly that liberation does not involve the loss or destruction of such conventional concepts as the ego; it means seeing through them -- in the same way that we can use the idea of the equator without confusing it with a physical mark upon the surface of the earth. Instead of falling below the ego, liberation surpasses it."
—Alan Watts
The biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity and fear is the root of all violence. Eliminate scarcity, and we eliminate the root of violence.
I would also state that much of the scarcity in the modern world is “false scarcity” which is generated purposely in order to maintain the class system of inequality.
Thank you Caitlin, your words resonate with me and all the comments below also. There is so much damage and fear found in regular folks. How to undo and remove the injuries ?
The manipulation via fear of folks is like fire out of control in all areas. From the moment a baby enters this war zone the manipulation starts.
There is no compassion or communication in any formulation of contemporary culture, from finance, so-called law, religion, so-called defence is really a manifestation of group greed, gross fear.
https://indi.ca/hezbollahs-greatest-hits/
FIRST KNOW THY SELF
From ego to geopolitics...across the universe
but anyway...
The psychology of politics
RUSSIA MUST WIN RESPECT BECAUSE THE WEST WILL NEVER GIVE IT.
Russia needs to come to the realization that it has no choice but to remove the proxy that the EU and US have created to constantly and consistently batter Russia. Never-mind American politics. Russia has no friends in the US. They want to destroy Russia and control it’s resources. Russia should have already learned that lessen in the 1990’s and what they tried to do when the Soviet Union collapsed. It should be obvious that there could never be a government in Russia that the US will respect as it’s equal. Just because the Russians understand that it is foolish to disregard the potential for a nuclear catastrophe does not mean that the capitalist desire for global hegemony has diminished in the slightest.
Forget EU empty threats. The fatuous so-called leaders of the EU are not competent or capable enough to pose a real threat to Russia. The US will turn them from vassals to proxies at any time it’s in the interest of American hegemony.
Russia is wrong to think that it has the luxury and time to procrastinate about what to do in Ukraine. That it can make diplomatic or reasonable agreements with the hegemonic neocons or neo-liberal Democrats. It better realize that when it comes to capturing Russian resources both parties see eye to eye. American politics does not serve Russian security or sovereignty and it never will. Quite the opposite.
The only way for Russia to end the escalating drone and missile bombardments the west pretends comes from Ukraine is to finish off the neo-Nazi proxy and take away the murderous pretense. Russia will have to completely control all Ukrainian territory so that it becomes clear who the real enemy to Russian security actually is. The US and EU will not be able to disguise it’s treacherous ambitions as a weak and vulnerable country fighting for it’s existence anymore.
Let Iran be a lesson to Russia. The US must be forced to do the right thing. it never does it on it's own.
https://substack.com/@wilrodx108853