Everyone understands. We're no longer at the edge of the abyss. We're falling and awaiting impact. The failure of the species to overcome its irrationality and resist the manipulations of violent psychopaths is manifesting, again. Please, please dear people, find your allies and cooperate to best endure.
Dont blame this crock of festering excretement on humanity! A lot of $, applied psychology and military went into misrepresenting the huge resistance movements that tried to stop this at each step of this 'plan' being put into place ... so not 'humanity' but rather a tiny group of amoral, greedy, sadistic people totally devoted to their own ??? and devoid of any inkling of what is for the common good. So no - dont you dare blame this crock of shit on humanity.
I figure about ~33% of Americans, the 'murKKKans, are Nazis in heart [sic] and soul [sic] - albeit they have neither. Hannah Arendt: 6“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
Sorry, but I think each of us has a responsibility to know what is going on in the world we all live in. Yes, we were perpetrated on, but some of us knew what the deal was, though, irony of ironies: shedding. Apparently even the unjabbed carry the spike protein, according to dark electron microscopy...
Good point: it is easy to blame the victim. In fact, humanity is born with trust, altruism, cooperation as traits but through subversive institution (property, inequality, centralize power, and war) is aliented from its own inhereited nature. Only if we understand this can we trust each other to unite to alter or abolish the institutions which divide us and create a new society that reclaimed evolutionary legacy as sharing equals.
A Republic form of government which must use its might to capture the soldier immigrants that were sent here during a pseudo Biden/ CHINA era to make us fall. We are still here due to those psychopaths as you claim doing. The White Hats military alliance. Trust The Plan. Your failing us
soldier immigrants,,,,delusional thinking. A republic, as Jefferson wrote, is majority rule as sacred principle, as we see our nation turn to fascism under a ruler who lost the majority by 3 million in 2020. What the hell are you doing here? You sound drunk.
If everyone understood, we would not be here. No one in my birth family but me acts like they understand AT ALL. They are in denial, as are most people I know. I know, I need some new people...
I get it. I am constantly amazed when I am out in the wild to see the vast majority just doing their thing as though none of this crap is going on...it seems to be considered rude to even bring it up in public....denial helped get us here. This is one of my only outlets where we all acknowledge how completely and dangerously the proverbial shit has hit the fan.
If they believe it, they give no sign of that. None. so no, not hard to tell. They cling to the old paradigm/status quo as though their lives depend on it. Are they pretending things are still the same? Yes. I call this denial.
Yes..it's like needing to hunker down in a psychologically safe space, or spiritual atmosphere with like minded individuals to simply endure this insanity. Those of us that can truly grasp all the levels of this evil malignancy may just suffer the most. Recognizing the abject failures in our system among those elected and charged with protecting us is one of the most painful and angering things I deal with. They knew.
Yes, thank goodness not all of us...but as you said before, those of us who are onto their narrative may be suffering the worst. In my opinion, that is a big part of the denial: everything is fine IN MY WORLD, what is your problem? Ayy...
Thinking about the suffering thing...not like martyrs, just like humans who want, well, to be human, and to be free. And this part of us will not stop wanting this, to be a free human. We see, we cannot unsee, and we cannot pretend otherwise. Lovely chatting with you today!!
And keep them out of government and from having immense wealth. This Larry Black from the Epstein Files is one more demented pervert in a network of extremely wealthy perverts, sociopaths, and psychopaths.
You know what? I'd bet not...there is research that suggests that psychopathic traits appear more frequently in senior corporate roles than in the general population.
Extreme wralth existed in fuedalism - and I dont think all the landowners were sociopaths and psychopaths. However - in our 21st century - when we have the means and knowhow to ensure all creatures on Earth have lives with dignity ... there is no longer any excuse for us to tolerate the likes of the psychophants around Trump et al. However - after WWII - when thete was the impetus to avoid another 'Great War' we had 'social contracts' of sorts. Now however - there are none in the technocratic capitalist societies - and in places like the USA - it is more like a 'capitalist democracy' where it is 1$=1vote than the liberal democracies where after WWII it was 1 adult citizen 1 vote.
yOUR PREMISE IS INCOCORRECT: FEUDAL wealth was limited by being based not on capital but on land and renting and also limited by population grown.
"Feu- dalism's environmental degradation pivoted on the lord-peasant relationship, which limited the possibilities for reinvestment in the land. Consequently, feudalism exhausted the soil and the labor power from which it derived revenues......What feudalism did create
Extreme inequality, not extreme wealth.
Lords, bishops, and kings lived vastly better than peasants, but that gap existed in a low-surplus economy. Inequality was sharp; total wealth was small.
Wealth as land, not capital.
Feudal wealth was tied to control of land and people, not to productivity, innovation, or accumulation. A duke was “rich” because thousands owed him labor and rent—not because society was generating massive surplus.
Stable extraction, capped upside.
Feudal rents were customary and conservative. You couldn’t suddenly 10× output without changing the system itself. That put a hard ceiling on wealth accumulation.
What feudalism did not create
No billionaires (not even close).
Even the richest medieval kings had resources that would look modest next to modern industrial or financial fortunes. There was no compounding, no scalable production, no global markets.
No self-expanding capital.
Wealth didn’t reinvest itself to create more wealth. Surplus went into castles, cathedrals, wars, and display—not into productivity gains.
No explosive growth.
Feudal economies were Malthusian. Any gains in output were eaten by population growth, not accumulated as rising per-capita wealth.
The real comparison that matters
Ancient empires (Rome, Han China) produced more aggregate wealth than medieval feudal Europe.
Capitalism produced orders of magnitude more wealth—and also orders of magnitude more inequality.
Feudalism sits in between: hierarchical, stagnant, extractive, but not wildly productive.
The clean verdict
Feudalism created powerful elites without massive wealth,
Feudalism produced lords who were rich relative to peasants, but poor relative to what later systems made possible."
Capitalism broke the wealth ceiling. a modern upper-middle-class person lives better than most feudal kings—but billionaires live better than anyone in history.
Final Verdict (No Softening)
Feudalism produced lords without vast wealth.
Capitalism produces vast wealth without limits.
If feudal inequality was a knife, capitalist inequality is a nuclear reactor.
And crucially:
Feudalism could not produce billionaires even in principle.
Capitalism produces them as a structural outcome." Only strong democratic restraints by the state, labor unions, do-determination, etc can stop the structural inevitibility of billionaireess.
that is inaccurate: "Ancient empires (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome) already had elites extracting surplus from producers. Feudalism didn’t invent surplus extraction.
The mechanism is different.
Feudalism: surplus via extra-economic coercion (status, law, force).
Capitalism: surplus via economic compulsion (wage labor, markets).
Capitalism’s “basic tenet” isn’t just control of surplus.
It’s private ownership of the means of production + wage labor + reinvestment (capital accumulation). Feudal lords extracted; capitalists accumulate and compound."
The potential for sociopathy or atruism exists in all of us, and it is the institutions that mold us....so it is not psychopaths who produce extreme wealth but a system of propeerty which creates haves and have nots tha produces psychopaths. This view suggests we need to change our institutions, not uselessly condemn its results.
Psychopaths and sociopaths get power because THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT. That's ALL they want. And they want it BAD. The rest of us can't be bothered because we have better things to do. That's the problem in a nutshell. That's why we are ruled by psychopaths.
Thank you, Annie. That is very astute of you. There is, indeed, a story, thereby:
In fact, I was born in Dublin, Ireland, where I was given the name of "Sean" by my parents, and where I received my surname from my father, of course….
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The other part of my name, Bodhivajra, I received from one of my Tibetan Buddhist teachers many years ago. Some years back, when I became a naturalized citizen of the United States, I was asked if I sought to make a legal change of name, and I did.
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In fact, I asked them to insert my Buddhist name into my legal name, by which I became Sean Bodhivarja Scanlan. (My parents, when they heard about this) were a little taken aback at the alteration, but took it in their stride and with good humor.
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Curiously enough, an American friend of mine pointed out to me that, in making this change, I was, as ever, characteristically enough (she said), moving in a contrarian direction to everyone else.
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When pressed for an explanation, my friend pointed out to me that most immigrants to the U.S. undertake a name change in order to sound more like what she called more "mainstream American," whereas I seemed to be doing the opposite.
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What the middle name, "Bodhivajra", actually means, by the way, is "Indestructible Wakefulness." It's a synonym, of sorts, for the Buddha's enlightenment. I simply take it as a reminder not to sleep walk my way through life. 😊
From some past reading I associate “vajra” with “diamond.”
Another way you are moving in a contrarian direction. It struck me because I suspect the Abrahamic religions are a major root of our quandary and yet so many are rushing right back into the fire—”our Western tradition!!”
the rise of psychopaths is a result of the structural aspects of capitalism, compounded capital plus scale; to get rid of it, we must change the laws and institutions which make it a feature of capitalism, inevitable. We will not get rid of billionaire psychopaths until we get rid of the institutions which create them.
Extreme inequality with billionaires is a structural feature of unregulated capitalism, which compounds capital, scalers, and captures government. Top prevent it, we need structural reform, restraints, even political revolutions to alter or abolish the institutions which create inevitible scale of inequality. " Unless we understand the institutions which create this inevitibility, it will only grow.
An academic and ideological approach to the same question, which makes it sound like something can be done about it: The Revolution, which never comes, but when it does, ends up with a different bunch of psychopaths on top.
No, it is a structural insight into what makes the system work and thus provides the insight into what must be changed: the laws and institutions which support a system of exploitation. Revolutions often fail, often work. The idea nothing can be changed is what those who sit atop the totem poll want you to think so you won't even try.. They fear us and so pit us against each other. Look up 1989, Eastern Europe, where massive protests and strikes brought down 7 dictatorships without bloodshed, without putting a new bunch of pscyos on top. You are doing the work of the psychopaths if you claim change never comes.
It is not enough to change rulers; we must change our institutions, "alter or abolish," which is our right. Revolutions come frequently; the question is whether they are completed: replacing one class of oligarchs with another is musical chairs. Effectie revolutions change the structure of institutions to produce different results. In the US, it's time to complete the American Revolution, which only replaced hereditary aristocrats with enslaver oligarchs, then finanicial oligarchs, a feature of the institutions and changable only with a change in institutions, by changing the system.
The problem is not that the greedy are greedy but that we have a system of institutions that rewards greed. To change this, we need to change the system and institutions which promote greed.
The whole system is infested with greed. But I would argue that in the chicken-and-egg debate between values and institutions, values come first. Institutions are downstream of values. Ultimately this sickness springs from materialism, the belief that the most important if not the only “goods” are material goods. I’m not preaching Christianity like so many others, just saying that I think values are the problem and values are viral. The billionaires are competing with each other over whose wad is bigger. They feel small if they have less than the next guy. Another driver of metastasizing greed that is too little talked about. Imagine if people like MLK were admired and emulated instead of assassinated. Money is a cheap and easy shortcut to status compared to courage and principle.
Early homo sapeins, the first 300,000 yrs were egalitarian, sharing, and non-violent and if someone tried to rise up and dominate, they gave them the silent treatment, a powerful weapon to deter aggression. But with civilization, a set of new institutions replaced the old, tho it dwells in our inherited traits, starting with replacing the commons with property, which created a new world of haves and have nots, thus inequality, thus hierarchy and monarchs, religion to justify, wars to protect the haves and expand their property. This is system which rewards greed and agression and the will to power; to change it, we must dismantle the institutions, redefine property and reclaim the commons, and learn to use the silent treatment to isolate the psychopaths who have been pushed to the top in a world of haves and have nots. But first we must unite and change our institutions, to once again align with our inherited traits of trust, altrusim, and cooperation and to reward compassion and reward empathy, conscience, and the honesty to reveal our true selves.
🌿I feel the pain and exhaustion in what you’re saying, and I agree that despair is exactly what this system feeds on. But I’d gently reframe one thing. This crisis didn’t begin with Trump, or Biden, or even billionaires. Those are symptoms, not the root.
The deeper rupture goes back tens of thousands of years, when humans shifted from relating with the living world to dominating it. When animals were first hunted beyond need, then herded, owned, bred, and turned into property. That moment normalized violence, hierarchy, and the idea that some lives exist to be used by others. From there flowed land theft, patriarchy, slavery, empire, and eventually governments captured by wealth.
What we’re watching now is not just a political failure. It’s the logical endpoint of a domination culture that treats animals, Earth, and ultimately people as expendable resources.
That’s why I don’t believe things are hopeless, because systems built on violence are inherently unstable. They must collapse. And they always do when enough people withdraw their consent.
Real power doesn’t start at the ballot box. It starts at the dinner table, in daily choices, in refusing to participate in normalized harm. Ending the mass exploitation of animals would do more to dismantle militarism, climate collapse, disease, and inequality than any election cycle ever could.
So yes, there are more of us than them. But the shift isn’t about becoming better rulers of the same broken system. It’s about outgrowing it. Choosing compassion over domination. Life over profit. Liberation for all beings, or none.
That’s not naïve hope. That’s historical reality catching up with us.🌱
You show the domination of animals as the beginning of the betrayal of our evolution legacy as egalitarian, sharing, non-violent communities sharing the commons as the beginning of a trajectory that ends up treating people as property. Unsaid here but necessary to name is the choice we can make to adopt a plant-based diet and reject the domination model that makes of animals food, of human effort, slavery or commidified labor. Until we reject the violence of our food system, we will always have war and exploitation. Until we rob dehumanization, which accompanies slavery and war, of its power by granting animals the right to life, nothing will change.
I think a lot about what changed things coming out of the Paleolithic. Almost like some kind of collective traumatic event taught humans that they can't rely on the Earth for their needs, so they need to start taking.
A bit of an over simplification of our quite varied socio-economic pre-history and history. A great variety of cultures evolved - and died for a variety of reasons. Some were relatively egalitarian some were not. With the invention of money, capital, and book keeping ... 'wealth' got separated from serving a common good.
Unfortunately, Jews were always predominantly ostracised, not allowed to own land like others and therefore forced to "sit on benches" (from which the name Bank) lending out money with interest. Hence the invention of modern banking!
Then the wholesale slaughter of Jews in WWII led to a very vicious 🇮🇱 in response, as we all know.
The sins of stupid racist people are inherited for all humanity to bear.
In factual terms, it doesn’t seem in accordance with the most up to date anthropological research to suggest that all of humanity was egalitarian or lived in any other particular way.
Eg. David Graeber and david Wengrow’s book “the dawn of everything” which strongly argues that the key trait of prehistoric societies was probably their variety.
(Although it might seem tempting from a leftist perspective to hark back to an idealised happy time, this is self defeating because it concedes to conservative arguments that inequality and cruelty are necessary parts of the modern world. They aren’t. There’s no need for things to be how they are. Infinite other possibilities are possible.)
Unfortunately, I understand that the Homo Sapiens who broke out of Africa were a violent lot, overrunning the much more peaceful Neanderthals in Europe who were not as agile to resist (but whose brains were larger). A genocide ensued. Modern humans do have a small amount of Neanderthal genetics from the encounter, but in the main we retain the genetics for ruthless competition as an option for survival.
The hope is that our brains have evolved sufficiently to not have to rely on our primitive instincts!
Not true. For one thing, some anthropologists argue that Neanderthals didn't survive because they didn't have the communication/cooperation skills of our ancestors, were not killed by the Cro Magnons. To me it seems clear that humans are hardwired for cooperation and competition--which dominates depends on culture. A lot of our problems stem from sociopaths, who in a a mass society are able to grab power and thus wealth. But the bigger problem is that a sociopathic CULTURE, based on domination--of women by men, lower classes by upper classes and everyone else by humans, quite comfortable using violence to achieve its ends and with practices that require endless expansion, has taken over the world. It wins one war with more peaceful defenders after another, because it justifies violence, develops weaponry and war schemes as a high priority--and this has been going on for thousands of years but now we are at a turning point. There are no new lands to conquer, and the population growth and aggressively greedy practices of this culture now have us facing multiple ecological crises. The sociopaths currently directing this craziness are too intently focused on inflating their own wealth and power beyond the bounds of need or desire, beyond the bounds of sanity, to address the crises--thus collapse is imminent, hopefully very imminent as it's the one thing that can stop this destruction.
I would like it to be a requirement that to hold any public office, for a period of six months, all the applicants assets are frozen. They are thrown out into the street and must survive on the services that are available including public transportation and social services. If they receive personal assistance from friends or family they are permanently disqualified. This would put them in touch with the reality of many while deterring those who apply so they can live like royalty.
That won't fix it, we'd done that and still doing it and it doesn't work, obviously otherwise we wouldn't be where we are now. The thing that makes the conditions IMPOSSIBLE for psychopaths to thrive is to live with freedom of speech. That's all! Free speech is our ticket outta here. But what do freedom seekers do? They censor. So when you do something it means you consent to it. Every freedom lover must strenuously condemn anyone who censors. Period. Then the world will have the conditions that allows good people to thrive, not psychopaths. They hate free speech. They are always on the side of censorship. Identify them, they don't like that. That's why they cannot live without censorship.
I keep a database of them and name them. Three off the popular ones are Dr Jayne Ruby, Jeanice Barcelo, Frances Leader (and she does a substack titled (now try not to laugh...) "Uncensored". She censored me because I defended another victim of her censorship and was trying to enlighten all three that free speech is our ONLY way out of this. If someone disputes that, and this goes for everything I say/write, I welcome dispute but you'd better have a good argument, you better have thought it through well because this is so important and can very easily out-coherence everyone so far on the subject. The intent is to incite discussion, incite curiosity, incite faith in our humanity. Just think of it - free speech is our ticket outta here. That's all it takes. Just make sure you champion free speech, speak up, defend it, with all your might because I guarantee you it is the only way to find truth. Everyone has their truth. We don't have the access to most of the light spectrum, so at this point in our evolution, the best we can hope for is to get as close as possible to the truth, and that can only occur by hearing as many perspectives as possible. Intelligence actually consists of that - curiosity and an understanding that everyone is a piece of the puzzle. The puzzle is "who are we and what the fuck are we doing here".
And after that, man became the decider of everything rather than a co-pilot. Men then devolved into lesser than animals. They dismissed nature, and even raped children and took up weapons so it became a cult-ure of who can out-dominate who. It is still like that. What would put everything on the right track immediately, is if we sought a roughly 50/50 balance in decision making and had a system for getting a quality consensus. This is now available called the Egalitarian Proposal System. The bottom line is, the idea of any adult ruling another adult, is preposterous. Once we get ourselves back into balance, our woes will literally evaporate. But will we do it?
For roughly 300,000 yrs of egalitarian, sharing, non-violent homo sapien evolution, those who to dominate were simply given the silent treatment: social isolation is powerful. Shunning those seeking to pervert the social norms of equality and cooperation worked until the Agricultural Revolution, about 10,000 yrs ago introduced the concept of property, which resulted in a new order of haves and have nots, inequality, hierarchy, and a chain of command that rewarded the very urge to dominate that had been deterred for hundreds ofr thousans of years, to rise to the top.
To change this situation, we need to alter or abolish the concept of property in such a way that it does not create a world of haves and have nots and thus creates the powerful force of the equal community to give "the silent treatment (ie to ignore)" those seeking to dominate.
If you really want to do it, be in touch because I have the architecture to get us there and I'd love to do a podcast or talk with you on this subject. We need to be talking about the conditions we need to produce that will favor the good people and not psychopathy. There is one simple easy way that we can initiate RIGHT NOW, and that is uphold and champion free speech. I cannot emphasize enough how robust this foundational belief can be. I believe we went wrong when women agreed to be married. I believe this is what changed our society as it went against nature to force people to marry. It distilled the belief that humans became property. The idea of ownership needs massive amounts of discussion because it is an insidious thing. Let's talk about it dale?
My channel is Serendipity Media on Rumble and youtube. And we have plans to have more podcasts (as soon as we can get out from this snow) and they will focus on getting out of the system, things we can do as individuals and get even more power by teaming up with other individuals.
Prior to that men thought they could possess women. And that's where I would say it all went downhill. Women used to be the counsel of men, and that is how it ought to be. But of course, we don't know why women even exist other than as an incubator.
Psychopaths will always exist. It is the idiotic political system that allows psychopaths and sociopaths to gain and prosper in positions of power. It is the stupid uneducated lazy ignorant populace that worships such psychopaths (Orange idiot and his minions). It is the culture of nation/nations. In that respect I mean particularly the arrogant, fascist, zionist, genocidal western supremacist culture of "manifest destiny". That is the real problem of humanity. Good and bad people live everywhere, but some human political/national systems are pure evil in the core although on the surface they may be looking OK.
I think we can get a handle on it if we analyzed it deeply but we gloss over it. We need to figure out the conditions that make it unfavorable for psychopaths to reign over others. In fact, no adult should reign over another adult. That is so preposterous, surely future generations will roll their eyes over it. That is why we have the situation - because we believe with our entire heart that hierarchy is necessary, when it is hierarchy that enables these types to rise to the top. We need decentralized systems - just about all systems need to be decentralized. This is more in keeping with the way nature does things. More in circles than ladders. But are you prepared to go deeper? Are the readers here? Will anyone ask any questions about how we can do this, will anyone even so much as seek answers? The solution is easy but the will to find solutions is not.
Here in the United States, 100% of the psychopaths get elected to public office, become the biggest reality TV stars, control the entertainment industries, and get all the preachers and pastor spots.
For real democracy to work many conditions must be satisfied. None are met in fascist "west". Democracy is just a BS word so that people feel like their opinion matters. In fact people had more say in many so called "autocratic" systems then in so called "democratic" west.
I used to love reading dystopian fiction because I thought we weren’t living in one. Now, thanks to social media, we can see with our own eyes that the world is not at all what we were lead to believe. I have always been a left leaning Democrat and an antiziønişt Jew. I’ve never been fond of Republican policies and politicians, but I never in my wildest dreams imagined there were people and governments as evil, sadistic and corrupt as what we are seeing today. I always thought civil and human rights would slowly get better and better, but I no longer can have confidence in our future. What a hellscape we are seeing. Izzræl is trapped in a pathological trauma reaction that is destroying Gåzã, the West Bank and now intentions burning Patagonia, and infiltrating governments all over the world. Our current regime led by a narcissistic madman with a horrifying coalition of malevolent factions riding his coattails, is dismantling our democracy and terrorizing the American people. This whole nightmare scenario is something I never could have imagined or anticipated. I don’t know how we are going to survive and I feel terrible for my 4 young adult children who didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy the era of pleasant and hopeful ignorance we were living in before cell phones could show us all that we were living a lie.
Not totally living a lie - well - maybe for Americans who were ignorant of the bedlam their military and economic policies were inflicting on the world for a century ... in the name of freedom and democracy but really for a mercatile form of capitalism. Yet - if anyone said that to most Americans - their first reaction was how 'anti-American' the person is being. No - anti-imperialist. However - I dont think America has ever been as degenerate, corrupt and rotten as is this Trump administration and all the psychophant billionaires profitting from its brutality.
Read Howard Zinn’s “Peoples History of the United States” for a better perspective. Genocide, slavery and ruthless exploitation and environmental destruction were the foundations upon which “America” was built.
The period of approximately 1935 through 1970 was an anomaly.
Daniel Quinn's Ishmael and the Story of B, Rianne Eisler's Chalice and the Blade, Carol Flinders' Rebalancing the World, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and Schmookler's Parable of the Tribes are all good choiuces for the underlying problems that have led to our current crisis.
The tacit support of the US policies and overreach by the West through "ally ships" for their collective benefits is now haunting them. Recall Obama (so did the entire "civilized west") looked the other way for the crimes of Bush & Blair invading Iraq based on lies and then bailed out criminals of the 2008 financial meltdown rather than pushing for accountability.
However, right now, the orange clown felon at the helm is upfront with what US stands for, but when he says what he means, people don't take him seriously.
In a couple of years (if US elections should hold), don't be surprised when the next president, Democrats or Republican, asks you to look forward not accountability. That is the US! I hope I am proven wrong.
My bet is there will never be another election that Democrats can win. If polls shortly before the midterms suggest Trump/the Republicans can't cheat hard enough to retain at least one House, Trump will declare a state of emergency and cancel the election. Dems will sue and win, it will be appealed, and SCOTUS will rule in Trump's favor. Another scenario is the Republicans will do whatever it takes to win, even if it means blatantly obvious cheating. And then go on ruling, ignoring the outcry--what are we going to do about it? But the US economy is so tied up with the AI bubble that's likely to burst soon, I wonder how that affects things.
At present I'm reading Ken Foĺlet's "Fall of Giants" set around WWI. Woodrow Wilson did not want America to join that war, yet when they did he wanted to be topdog. He instigated a secret multinational army sent to stop Russia from becoming a Soviet Republic, Wilson wanted it to remain a monarchy, as did UK, France and others. Seems like America has never stopped interfering in other countries in order to change the regime to their liking, and the fools ruling in Western/European countries allow it to continue. Every US president thinks he rules the whole planet and what a rotten job they've made of it to the detriment of their allies as well as their named enemies. Kennedy could have turned America around so, of course, he had to be assassinated as well as, later, his brother, Robert.
I guess, that taste of interfering, and ruining a country's right to rule the people who voted them into government, stayed with each following American president - until the present sick narcissist had his way in bought for him, and now he happily goes about ruining America along with those others he's destroying and no one has the strength to stop him - or are they all hoping for someone else to step up? Guess what, another couple of weeks, if that long, and we might be saying, 'Goodbye planet Earth.'
Actually it used to be a lot worse for a long time. The Great Depression clobbered the 1% so things got better for a while. But since 1980 all downhill. 45 years of that and here we are.
I would just add that the Dems are just Republican-lite. In their own way, they are just as bad. Worse, in some respects, because they betray peoples' hopes and drive them into the Republican camp.
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And worst of all in that respect are Bernie and AOC who are the greatest "Hope Traitors" of our time. Bernie is an ardent Zionist and AOC is Zionist-complicit.
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And AOC just now has been pounding away on the war drums to invade Iran. So, the two of them – Bernie and AOC – are the worst, because of being faux progressives, and misleading people.
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Oh -- by the way, I've always liked reading dystopian fiction, for the opposite reason that you apparently used to like reading it. I like reading dystopian fiction, because I long ago concluded that we are indeed living in a dystopia and, after being exposed daily to so many lies in mainstream media that purports to be reporting actual facts, I am generally relieved to find myself reading dystopian so-called "fiction" that is the closest thing I know to speaking the truth about our daily lives.
Exactly. I can’t bear it any longer. I used to be an ardent cinema buff, and now I’ve lost my affection for watching movies. Somehow I feel uncomfortable indulging in that form of escapism, though it might be good for my mental health. It’s difficult not to get sucked into doom scrolling when there are so many insane and intense catastrophes happening failing all over the world. I’ve been walking my dogs to reset my nervous system and have resorted to weed gummies in the evening. Thank god for legalizing Cannabis products.
A friend of mine used to say something very similar. He would remark:
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Why do you need to go to the movies? You're already at the movies.
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I think, maybe, though, it's because, in the dystopian fiction, we can imagine the villains of the story being overcome, and justice being served. Whereas, with the "real thing," that is far from what we see on a daily basis.
Interesting take, but makes sense. I was just naive and am in my core an optimist, which has now been seriously damaged. Have you seen the Dune movies? Watching the second one I couldn’t shake the parallel of the evil empire being (US/Izzræl) and the brown skinned indigenous inhabitants being Paleşťińianş. The hero was the white savior (ugh).
Yes, Alyx. I have seen the Dune movies. And I read the original DUNE epic series a long time ago, also.
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I think that the role of the Paul Atreides character is called "Whitewashing," is it not? The White Savior motif?
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The Dune mythology was a curious construct by Frank Herbet, insofar as it combines quite a number of phenomena much beloved and much utilized by the Israel-American Ethnosupremacist Empire:
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Appropriating the desert sands of others for the value of what lies beneath them.
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Subjugating indigenous peoples.
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The use of systemic violence to control populations.
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How Spice [read "Oil" as a drug] is the fulcrum of a society's economy.
Very interesting AlyxPraeger. Your adult children have come face to face with the brutal reality of now, because sadly an earlier generation thought ignorance was bliss.
This is only true if bliss is the point of life, the highest calling. That is not wisdom. The opposite of ignorance is knowledge, not wisdom. The opposite of stupidity is intelligence, not wisdom. The opposite of folly is prudence, not wisdom. So what is the opposite of wisdom? Selfishness, short-sightedness. The wisest is the one who see that all people near and far, similar to him or herself or very different, matter--including the non-human beings. And those in the future.
Absolutely, it hurts like hell. Some days you wish something, anything, would shut them all down so we can catch our breath, but first - America, it needs to have the present government radically stopped. This going from one murderous group to another and another just to keep Drumpf's dementia-filled brain happy? It has to stop. There must be someone there with guts - but it needs more than just him removed, the whole inept yes-men needed cleaning out.
A whole new type of "not out for themselves only" government needs to be elected by the everyday people, not by billionaires choosing the president, that way lies death and destruction as we are seeing right now. Billionaires don't care because they think their money blocks any problems from coming their way. Time to prove that money doesn't buy as much as they want to believe.
I know someone will naysay what I write, that's your choice, but as long as we keep believing that we have no power nothing will change. Never forget; there are more of us than there are of them. They are the ones who should be afraid because of the way they have treated society, as if we are nothing. We are better than them, with all their money they are still miserable.
Attention, Caitlin! Power thrives on division, fear, discouragement, and resignation. Division stems from competition. Fear stems from a sense of powerlessness regarding the future. Discouragement stems from the disappointment that always follows the deception of illusion. Resignation stems from mental and physical exhaustion. Of course it hurts. But it was all predictable. Also because it has happened many times before. Now the situation is worse than before the First World War and is suspended only because of the existence of nuclear weapons. How many times have you written that we are many and they are very few? Now you understand that it doesn't matter, because the system's "memes" have distorted the minds of many. After all, no change has ever arisen spontaneously from the people. It needs a trigger. To do so, you need holistic information, willpower, and courage. And the conviction that you are not alone. I am here. And power, even the power to change reality, is not measured in quantity. It is measured in quality.
Funny, then, how the French Revolution managed to overthrow their monarchy with no phones, or social media, no television, just enough people sick to the teeth of living in such moral poverty as well as physical poverty because a few people lived it up and cared nothing for the suffering they're greed caused.
Humanity, in irrationality, refuses meditation, whose genuine nature is that of seeing the Time/Fear correlation, touched on in the 2nd line of your post.
I used to call them sociopaths because they hide their true agendas of pure evil destruction and the most inhumane actions towards any living beings but you are correct psychopaths. It's gut wrenching when hearing and watching this behavior every minute of the day!
I’m not sure we are more divided than ever. In the USA and in the UK we see people protesting who never did before. No doubt there are still differences, but authoritarianism and fascism seem to be uniting more people in opposition to the Empire. The psychopathic oligarchs are very powerful and it may already be too late (given nuclear weapons and climate change), but I think there is a very small glimmer of hope. Hang in there Caitlin, we need your voice.
Nothing is more precious than honesty, which you have offered.....now get out into the street and join the millions whose outrage has turned to action.
I think the tempo of chaos is exactly the point. It keeps everyone unbalanced. The first rule in battle is to put your opponent off-balance. This is exactly what the Trump administration is doing. I fear there will be no let-up in this strategy. The more threatened they feel, the more chaos they will create. I, like so many others, feel overwhelmed and can offer no solutions that do not increase the level of chaos. I live in despair.
Hello Rai, I hear you loud and clear! A lot of us can relate to the sense of feeling ungrounded and simply reacting to everything around us. One antidote to despair for me is when I connect with history - the history of others who devoted their lives to the struggle for a better world. When I read the words of Che, or Lenin or Rosa Luxembourg I feel an instant connection to the larger struggle and can sense my place within it.
Thanks, Lizzy. Of course, you are right. Humanity has been here before, countless times. Tyranny has repeatedly been overcome to create a better world (for a time). But I do despair that we, as a species, keep repeating this cycle. Perhaps this is the nature of the human condition, and we are destined to do so forever (or until we destroy the planet). I do agree that we must never stop striving for a better world, and learning from those who walked before us is key to achieving this. But I still feel despair. For the endless suffering imposed by those who act in self-interest rather than collective benefit. At the end of the day, my despair is tempered by hope and a belief that love will prevail over self-interest. We all have a role to play in achieving what John Lennon expressed in the song 'Imagine'. This song remains my anthem as we navigate this current struggle.
I'm sorry but chaos is not necessarily a bad thing. Chaos, the falling apart of the global economy and the political institutions that have been in places for centuries look like bad things from up close--but I'm afraid collapse is the one thing that will break the psychopaths' hold on power and allow survivors to create islands of sanity and responsibility--the current trajectory is heading straight off a cliff in terms of climate change, resource depletion, plummeting biodiversity and pollution by plastics, PFAS, nuclear materials. Business as usual for a few more decades leads to human extinction. Those in power--even if we get to Democrats--will not change course, they have to reward their rich benefactors. So collapse is our best hope, and the time to begin preparing for it is now.
I think you are right, Mary. Our current economic/political structures are not sustainable and are indeed heading straight off a cliff. Without change, we are most certainly heading for collapse. The level of human suffering will be enormous, but it is possible that our species will learn from it and establish kinder, more compassionate systems that value all life. It is possible for sure. Likely? I'm not so sure. Something has to drastically change in the human condition for utopia to emerge.
Okay, you want a pretty story? Here's what I base my hope on. Maybe this collapse will not be like other collapses because it will be global and the environmental aspect is much greater--we're destroying the substrate on which we live. So this collapse will be much more profound--it's quite possible humanity won't survive if it, especially if nuclear exchanges are involved. Which is why it needs to happen soon, before that substrate is too severely damaged to recover. (I know, this is supposed to be a hopeful story, but hang in there.)
There is evidence that when humans first arrived in the Americas and Australia,they wiped out the megafauna in fairly short order. Why? Because these animals had not evolved alongside humans and were not ready to cope with our unique hunting skills. So it was too easy to run a whole herd over a cliff, feast on the resulting dead, wasting a lot--and then suddenly there were none left. And then, according to my story, the people said, "How could we have been so stupid? We must never let this happen again!" So they crafted rules, precepts, a religion, that included restraint, respect for the rest of the web of life and so forth--and it WORKED. When Europeans arrived in these places, they found cultures that "weren't using the land"--that still, thousands of years later, held onto these precepts and religious views.
What I'm saying is that previous collapses and revolutions have always been relatively shallow--mostly a change in who rules the roost. And the current situation is as bad as it is because the ruling-class band of psychopaths have been working for forty years to set things up so that their power is unassailable, quite successfully. And maybe, what it takes for the kind of profound change in culture we need, is a cataclysmic break--one that leads the survivors to say, "How could we have been so stupid? We must never let that happen again!" What we need is a change such as hasn't been seen in several thousand years.
So I no longer hope we can get there via sensible policy change--we must pass through the fires. And the next few decades will likely be horrific. But there is hope that on the other side, a better world will emerge, especially if people recognize the need to constrain sociopaths.
I do not discount the possibility of your story. It is, perhaps, even likely if our current trajectory is maintained.
The problem I see is that we humans think we are separate from the world - that we are in 'charge' of the world. That the world exists to satisfy us. To me, this is what needs to change. This illusion of separateness. This is the environment that creates sociopaths.
I do sense a growing recognition of this worldwide, and it tempers my despair. I can imagine a future world where this sense of separation no longer exists and humanity realises we are all 'one'.
I hope that this is where we are ultimately heading. Perhaps we do need to 'go through the fires' to get there, or perhaps there will be a global awakening that changes the human condition, enabling us to live in harmony with each other and with nature. This is the story I prefer to hang on to.
I've enjoyed this conversation. None of us can predict the future. All we can do is work within our sphere of influence to create a better world for all - day by day. I sincerely wish us well.
Oh it seems from here that you’re still riding the crest! You are far, far from alone. Douglas Rushkoff’s latest Substack titled something like “you’re not crazy” says it well: just trying to explain how this world works makes you sound like a crazed conspiracy theorist. Presumably it’s going to get even more bonkers. Luckily there is also a ton of good developing out there as well. But yeah, those in the seat of centralized power are unfathomable right now. Offering a hug, from another part of the internet.
I feel you about the Zeitgeist. For me it was after COVID when I felt that my ability to map and interpret the world, and idealism, were pretty much shot. Lately it's just constant milieu of bad and I don't even want to look on my phone or read about anything. Anyone with power is psychopathic, cynical, nihilist and normal people who think and feel seem to have no say about the world we live in.
Really reinforces my impression that humanity really is headed for a dark night of the soul which includes not just ecological and systems collapse, but full moral and spiritual reckoning.
"They’ve done such a good job dividing us and conquering us."
They really have. I'm still amazed at how clueless some adults are about what is really happening in the world... They refuse to connect the dots. I guess there's some kind of comfort they get from being in the dark all the time? Personally, I'd be more anxious if I didn't know what was going on. But you're absolutely right, Caitlin--our rulers are psychopaths and their job is to make everything awful for us. All the more reason that we make things "awful" for them instead--GENERAL STRIKE!
🌹There is so much cruelty, and it hurts - because violence has been normalized so deeply we are taught to see it as inevitable, even natural.
But history tells a different story. Large-scale violence did not begin with politics or ideology - it began when humans learned to hunt, then herd, then turn living, feeling beings into property that could be owned, dominated, and killed at will. That logic - domination, extraction, expendability - did not stop with animals. It spread outward into land theft, patriarchy, slavery, empire, and war.
What gives me hope is that for the first time in history, people who see this brutality have a daily, tangible way to withdraw consent from it - from our own plates. Ending animal agritorture and domesecration is not a side issue; it is a direct interruption of the oldest training ground for violence.
A vegan world is not naive - it is evolutionary. It is a world where we stop rehearsing domination three times a day and start modeling the values we claim to want - empathy, justice, restraint, and care.
For anyone wanting to explore this deeper, I recommend An Unnatural Order by Jim Mason and Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson - both trace how systemic violence against humans is inseparable from violence against animals.
The rulers may be psychopaths - but the people still have a choice. And that choice starts closer than we are taught to believe.🌻
It truly is divided. Here in US, on META platform, there’s the anti-🧊platform vs. the anti-illegals, pro 🧊platform, vs it’s all staged, false flag, AI platform. I’m on the, It’s All Wrong AND Violent AND TRAUMATIZING IN OUR FACE PLATFORM. Genocide in Palestine is bad enough, and seeing Americans getting unalived in real time on a daily basis is shocking and utterly disturbing. We walk amongst monsters. We’re saddened, to say the least. And it’s been this way for a while , and there’s no relief coming, in fact it may get worse, but we’ll keep pushing back with the truth to the best of our ability, and take a page from the Palestinian perseverance story and courageously continue on till justice and morality prevail.
Everyone understands. We're no longer at the edge of the abyss. We're falling and awaiting impact. The failure of the species to overcome its irrationality and resist the manipulations of violent psychopaths is manifesting, again. Please, please dear people, find your allies and cooperate to best endure.
Dont blame this crock of festering excretement on humanity! A lot of $, applied psychology and military went into misrepresenting the huge resistance movements that tried to stop this at each step of this 'plan' being put into place ... so not 'humanity' but rather a tiny group of amoral, greedy, sadistic people totally devoted to their own ??? and devoid of any inkling of what is for the common good. So no - dont you dare blame this crock of shit on humanity.
I figure about ~33% of Americans, the 'murKKKans, are Nazis in heart [sic] and soul [sic] - albeit they have neither. Hannah Arendt: 6“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
> — The Origins of Totalitarianism
Oh, this is humanity, all right.
Fools, led by sociopaths.
🎯
PAYING CIRCUS CUSTOMERS LED BY THE NOSE BY CLOWNS AND MAGICIANS
It is easy to blame the victims...and it also supports the status quo, by viewing those who could change it as fools.
The usual state of affairs. In Europe anyway.
i agree, it's the ruling class (bourgeoisie) that is entirely responsible.
What Would Zizek Say?
some liberal defeatist stuff maintaining the status quo.
Sorry, but I think each of us has a responsibility to know what is going on in the world we all live in. Yes, we were perpetrated on, but some of us knew what the deal was, though, irony of ironies: shedding. Apparently even the unjabbed carry the spike protein, according to dark electron microscopy...
the ruling class is responsible for preventing the majority of people of knowing what is going on in the world. it's their fault.
Good point: it is easy to blame the victim. In fact, humanity is born with trust, altruism, cooperation as traits but through subversive institution (property, inequality, centralize power, and war) is aliented from its own inhereited nature. Only if we understand this can we trust each other to unite to alter or abolish the institutions which divide us and create a new society that reclaimed evolutionary legacy as sharing equals.
A Republic form of government which must use its might to capture the soldier immigrants that were sent here during a pseudo Biden/ CHINA era to make us fall. We are still here due to those psychopaths as you claim doing. The White Hats military alliance. Trust The Plan. Your failing us
soldier immigrants,,,,delusional thinking. A republic, as Jefferson wrote, is majority rule as sacred principle, as we see our nation turn to fascism under a ruler who lost the majority by 3 million in 2020. What the hell are you doing here? You sound drunk.
Yes, it is an inherent feature of our inability to deal and susceptibility to irrational manipulations.
https://substack.com/@samasiam/note/c-204982445?r=be3ln
and
https://substack.com/@gnug315/note/c-205895368?r=be3ln
And William Rees's recent 3 part post sum it up.
https://substack.com/@standstoreeson/note/c-197576802?r=be3ln
If everyone understood, we would not be here. No one in my birth family but me acts like they understand AT ALL. They are in denial, as are most people I know. I know, I need some new people...
I get it. I am constantly amazed when I am out in the wild to see the vast majority just doing their thing as though none of this crap is going on...it seems to be considered rude to even bring it up in public....denial helped get us here. This is one of my only outlets where we all acknowledge how completely and dangerously the proverbial shit has hit the fan.
Are they in denial or do they really believe it? Hard to tell, yes?
Yes..difficult. My kindest assessment is " denial"...
If they believe it, they give no sign of that. None. so no, not hard to tell. They cling to the old paradigm/status quo as though their lives depend on it. Are they pretending things are still the same? Yes. I call this denial.
Yep. My family is in denial too it seems.
Even 39% of American Jews, in a recent poll, found Israel guilty of genocide. I find those calling the public fools the real fools.
Only 39%? Geesh it should be 100%! Same for Americans!
Yes..it's like needing to hunker down in a psychologically safe space, or spiritual atmosphere with like minded individuals to simply endure this insanity. Those of us that can truly grasp all the levels of this evil malignancy may just suffer the most. Recognizing the abject failures in our system among those elected and charged with protecting us is one of the most painful and angering things I deal with. They knew.
Yes. Mistakes were made??? No, they were not. The only mistake was people believing they had good intentions. We were soooooo gaslit.
Well...some of us were...
Yes, thank goodness not all of us...but as you said before, those of us who are onto their narrative may be suffering the worst. In my opinion, that is a big part of the denial: everything is fine IN MY WORLD, what is your problem? Ayy...
Yes!!!!Thank you!!! You nailed it! 😊
Thinking about the suffering thing...not like martyrs, just like humans who want, well, to be human, and to be free. And this part of us will not stop wanting this, to be a free human. We see, we cannot unsee, and we cannot pretend otherwise. Lovely chatting with you today!!
Crisis is opportunity.
About 10 percent of humans are psychopaths. We need to establish a method to identify them and provide padded cells.
And keep them out of government and from having immense wealth. This Larry Black from the Epstein Files is one more demented pervert in a network of extremely wealthy perverts, sociopaths, and psychopaths.
Would extreme wealth exist if not for sociopaths and psychopaths?
Who said, “Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime?”
Balzac?
Bingo.
It's an old French saying.
Yes. Both you and Annie are right.
In his novel Le Père Goriot, Balzac writes (in French):
“Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait.”
“Behind every great fortune without an apparent source is a crime, forgotten because it was properly done.”
Where there’s brass, there’s muck.
You know what? I'd bet not...there is research that suggests that psychopathic traits appear more frequently in senior corporate roles than in the general population.
Scum floats.
Interesting.
Extreme wralth existed in fuedalism - and I dont think all the landowners were sociopaths and psychopaths. However - in our 21st century - when we have the means and knowhow to ensure all creatures on Earth have lives with dignity ... there is no longer any excuse for us to tolerate the likes of the psychophants around Trump et al. However - after WWII - when thete was the impetus to avoid another 'Great War' we had 'social contracts' of sorts. Now however - there are none in the technocratic capitalist societies - and in places like the USA - it is more like a 'capitalist democracy' where it is 1$=1vote than the liberal democracies where after WWII it was 1 adult citizen 1 vote.
yOUR PREMISE IS INCOCORRECT: FEUDAL wealth was limited by being based not on capital but on land and renting and also limited by population grown.
"Feu- dalism's environmental degradation pivoted on the lord-peasant relationship, which limited the possibilities for reinvestment in the land. Consequently, feudalism exhausted the soil and the labor power from which it derived revenues......What feudalism did create
Extreme inequality, not extreme wealth.
Lords, bishops, and kings lived vastly better than peasants, but that gap existed in a low-surplus economy. Inequality was sharp; total wealth was small.
Wealth as land, not capital.
Feudal wealth was tied to control of land and people, not to productivity, innovation, or accumulation. A duke was “rich” because thousands owed him labor and rent—not because society was generating massive surplus.
Stable extraction, capped upside.
Feudal rents were customary and conservative. You couldn’t suddenly 10× output without changing the system itself. That put a hard ceiling on wealth accumulation.
What feudalism did not create
No billionaires (not even close).
Even the richest medieval kings had resources that would look modest next to modern industrial or financial fortunes. There was no compounding, no scalable production, no global markets.
No self-expanding capital.
Wealth didn’t reinvest itself to create more wealth. Surplus went into castles, cathedrals, wars, and display—not into productivity gains.
No explosive growth.
Feudal economies were Malthusian. Any gains in output were eaten by population growth, not accumulated as rising per-capita wealth.
The real comparison that matters
Ancient empires (Rome, Han China) produced more aggregate wealth than medieval feudal Europe.
Capitalism produced orders of magnitude more wealth—and also orders of magnitude more inequality.
Feudalism sits in between: hierarchical, stagnant, extractive, but not wildly productive.
The clean verdict
Feudalism created powerful elites without massive wealth,
Feudalism produced lords who were rich relative to peasants, but poor relative to what later systems made possible."
Capitalism broke the wealth ceiling. a modern upper-middle-class person lives better than most feudal kings—but billionaires live better than anyone in history.
Final Verdict (No Softening)
Feudalism produced lords without vast wealth.
Capitalism produces vast wealth without limits.
If feudal inequality was a knife, capitalist inequality is a nuclear reactor.
And crucially:
Feudalism could not produce billionaires even in principle.
Capitalism produces them as a structural outcome." Only strong democratic restraints by the state, labor unions, do-determination, etc can stop the structural inevitibility of billionaireess.
Thank you
Feudalism was (the first?) system to allow excess value to be controlled by the Lord...the basic tenant of Capitalism.
that is inaccurate: "Ancient empires (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome) already had elites extracting surplus from producers. Feudalism didn’t invent surplus extraction.
The mechanism is different.
Feudalism: surplus via extra-economic coercion (status, law, force).
Capitalism: surplus via economic compulsion (wage labor, markets).
Capitalism’s “basic tenet” isn’t just control of surplus.
It’s private ownership of the means of production + wage labor + reinvestment (capital accumulation). Feudal lords extracted; capitalists accumulate and compound."
If those feudal landlords were not themselves sociopaths, they quickly were replaced by others more ruthless.
The history of medeival europe can be summarized as someone trying to twke someone else's stuff.
True: "Medieval elites said:
“I rule you because God and my sword say so.”
Capitalist elites say:
“You chose this deal.”
But the structural coercion hasn’t disappeared — it’s just:
hidden behind markets
normalized as “the economy”
individualized as personal failure
Medieval Europe took surplus by force up front; capitalism takes it through markets and calls it consent."
I'll bet the feudalistic landowners were perverted psychopaths, all.
quibble. It was one adult white citizen, one vote.
The potential for sociopathy or atruism exists in all of us, and it is the institutions that mold us....so it is not psychopaths who produce extreme wealth but a system of propeerty which creates haves and have nots tha produces psychopaths. This view suggests we need to change our institutions, not uselessly condemn its results.
Excellent question! Seriously.
no.
Good question. I don't know.
Psychopaths and sociopaths get power because THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT. That's ALL they want. And they want it BAD. The rest of us can't be bothered because we have better things to do. That's the problem in a nutshell. That's why we are ruled by psychopaths.
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Pretty good, Annie Gottlieb. Pretty darn good!
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My “like” is mostly for your name, all parts of it! And the story it implies.
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Thank you, Annie. That is very astute of you. There is, indeed, a story, thereby:
In fact, I was born in Dublin, Ireland, where I was given the name of "Sean" by my parents, and where I received my surname from my father, of course….
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The other part of my name, Bodhivajra, I received from one of my Tibetan Buddhist teachers many years ago. Some years back, when I became a naturalized citizen of the United States, I was asked if I sought to make a legal change of name, and I did.
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In fact, I asked them to insert my Buddhist name into my legal name, by which I became Sean Bodhivarja Scanlan. (My parents, when they heard about this) were a little taken aback at the alteration, but took it in their stride and with good humor.
.
Curiously enough, an American friend of mine pointed out to me that, in making this change, I was, as ever, characteristically enough (she said), moving in a contrarian direction to everyone else.
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When pressed for an explanation, my friend pointed out to me that most immigrants to the U.S. undertake a name change in order to sound more like what she called more "mainstream American," whereas I seemed to be doing the opposite.
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What the middle name, "Bodhivajra", actually means, by the way, is "Indestructible Wakefulness." It's a synonym, of sorts, for the Buddha's enlightenment. I simply take it as a reminder not to sleep walk my way through life. 😊
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You have good parents.
From some past reading I associate “vajra” with “diamond.”
Another way you are moving in a contrarian direction. It struck me because I suspect the Abrahamic religions are a major root of our quandary and yet so many are rushing right back into the fire—”our Western tradition!!”
I think of myself as a “recovering Abrahamic.”
the rise of psychopaths is a result of the structural aspects of capitalism, compounded capital plus scale; to get rid of it, we must change the laws and institutions which make it a feature of capitalism, inevitable. We will not get rid of billionaire psychopaths until we get rid of the institutions which create them.
Extreme inequality with billionaires is a structural feature of unregulated capitalism, which compounds capital, scalers, and captures government. Top prevent it, we need structural reform, restraints, even political revolutions to alter or abolish the institutions which create inevitible scale of inequality. " Unless we understand the institutions which create this inevitibility, it will only grow.
An academic and ideological approach to the same question, which makes it sound like something can be done about it: The Revolution, which never comes, but when it does, ends up with a different bunch of psychopaths on top.
No, it is a structural insight into what makes the system work and thus provides the insight into what must be changed: the laws and institutions which support a system of exploitation. Revolutions often fail, often work. The idea nothing can be changed is what those who sit atop the totem poll want you to think so you won't even try.. They fear us and so pit us against each other. Look up 1989, Eastern Europe, where massive protests and strikes brought down 7 dictatorships without bloodshed, without putting a new bunch of pscyos on top. You are doing the work of the psychopaths if you claim change never comes.
so what is your conclusion?
It is not enough to change rulers; we must change our institutions, "alter or abolish," which is our right. Revolutions come frequently; the question is whether they are completed: replacing one class of oligarchs with another is musical chairs. Effectie revolutions change the structure of institutions to produce different results. In the US, it's time to complete the American Revolution, which only replaced hereditary aristocrats with enslaver oligarchs, then finanicial oligarchs, a feature of the institutions and changable only with a change in institutions, by changing the system.
Name me a revolution that didn't just end up changing oligarchs.
The problem is not that the greedy are greedy but that we have a system of institutions that rewards greed. To change this, we need to change the system and institutions which promote greed.
The whole system is infested with greed. But I would argue that in the chicken-and-egg debate between values and institutions, values come first. Institutions are downstream of values. Ultimately this sickness springs from materialism, the belief that the most important if not the only “goods” are material goods. I’m not preaching Christianity like so many others, just saying that I think values are the problem and values are viral. The billionaires are competing with each other over whose wad is bigger. They feel small if they have less than the next guy. Another driver of metastasizing greed that is too little talked about. Imagine if people like MLK were admired and emulated instead of assassinated. Money is a cheap and easy shortcut to status compared to courage and principle.
Early homo sapeins, the first 300,000 yrs were egalitarian, sharing, and non-violent and if someone tried to rise up and dominate, they gave them the silent treatment, a powerful weapon to deter aggression. But with civilization, a set of new institutions replaced the old, tho it dwells in our inherited traits, starting with replacing the commons with property, which created a new world of haves and have nots, thus inequality, thus hierarchy and monarchs, religion to justify, wars to protect the haves and expand their property. This is system which rewards greed and agression and the will to power; to change it, we must dismantle the institutions, redefine property and reclaim the commons, and learn to use the silent treatment to isolate the psychopaths who have been pushed to the top in a world of haves and have nots. But first we must unite and change our institutions, to once again align with our inherited traits of trust, altrusim, and cooperation and to reward compassion and reward empathy, conscience, and the honesty to reveal our true selves.
🌿I feel the pain and exhaustion in what you’re saying, and I agree that despair is exactly what this system feeds on. But I’d gently reframe one thing. This crisis didn’t begin with Trump, or Biden, or even billionaires. Those are symptoms, not the root.
The deeper rupture goes back tens of thousands of years, when humans shifted from relating with the living world to dominating it. When animals were first hunted beyond need, then herded, owned, bred, and turned into property. That moment normalized violence, hierarchy, and the idea that some lives exist to be used by others. From there flowed land theft, patriarchy, slavery, empire, and eventually governments captured by wealth.
What we’re watching now is not just a political failure. It’s the logical endpoint of a domination culture that treats animals, Earth, and ultimately people as expendable resources.
That’s why I don’t believe things are hopeless, because systems built on violence are inherently unstable. They must collapse. And they always do when enough people withdraw their consent.
Real power doesn’t start at the ballot box. It starts at the dinner table, in daily choices, in refusing to participate in normalized harm. Ending the mass exploitation of animals would do more to dismantle militarism, climate collapse, disease, and inequality than any election cycle ever could.
So yes, there are more of us than them. But the shift isn’t about becoming better rulers of the same broken system. It’s about outgrowing it. Choosing compassion over domination. Life over profit. Liberation for all beings, or none.
That’s not naïve hope. That’s historical reality catching up with us.🌱
You show the domination of animals as the beginning of the betrayal of our evolution legacy as egalitarian, sharing, non-violent communities sharing the commons as the beginning of a trajectory that ends up treating people as property. Unsaid here but necessary to name is the choice we can make to adopt a plant-based diet and reject the domination model that makes of animals food, of human effort, slavery or commidified labor. Until we reject the violence of our food system, we will always have war and exploitation. Until we rob dehumanization, which accompanies slavery and war, of its power by granting animals the right to life, nothing will change.
A great deal of important truth here, but I disagree that veganism is the answer (or maybe you're okay with hunting but not animal husbandry?)
“As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap
I think a lot about what changed things coming out of the Paleolithic. Almost like some kind of collective traumatic event taught humans that they can't rely on the Earth for their needs, so they need to start taking.
How do you give the silent treatment to a psychopath you’re expected to work with?
Refuse to work with and/or for psychopaths.
A little bit easier said than done.
It does require a modicum of courage.
It also requires the wherewithal to lose income, losing the sunk investments in the affected job, and having other job prospects.
Too late.
Yep
A bit of an over simplification of our quite varied socio-economic pre-history and history. A great variety of cultures evolved - and died for a variety of reasons. Some were relatively egalitarian some were not. With the invention of money, capital, and book keeping ... 'wealth' got separated from serving a common good.
Have you read Graeber and Wengrow’s the dawn of everything? This is the argument presented in there.
Unfortunately, Jews were always predominantly ostracised, not allowed to own land like others and therefore forced to "sit on benches" (from which the name Bank) lending out money with interest. Hence the invention of modern banking!
Then the wholesale slaughter of Jews in WWII led to a very vicious 🇮🇱 in response, as we all know.
The sins of stupid racist people are inherited for all humanity to bear.
May I suggest that you read "The Myth of the Six Million."
and I had thought it was 4 M 🤣
In factual terms, it doesn’t seem in accordance with the most up to date anthropological research to suggest that all of humanity was egalitarian or lived in any other particular way.
Eg. David Graeber and david Wengrow’s book “the dawn of everything” which strongly argues that the key trait of prehistoric societies was probably their variety.
(Although it might seem tempting from a leftist perspective to hark back to an idealised happy time, this is self defeating because it concedes to conservative arguments that inequality and cruelty are necessary parts of the modern world. They aren’t. There’s no need for things to be how they are. Infinite other possibilities are possible.)
According to anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, "if someone tried to rise up and dominate," they killed him.
Unfortunately, I understand that the Homo Sapiens who broke out of Africa were a violent lot, overrunning the much more peaceful Neanderthals in Europe who were not as agile to resist (but whose brains were larger). A genocide ensued. Modern humans do have a small amount of Neanderthal genetics from the encounter, but in the main we retain the genetics for ruthless competition as an option for survival.
The hope is that our brains have evolved sufficiently to not have to rely on our primitive instincts!
Not true. For one thing, some anthropologists argue that Neanderthals didn't survive because they didn't have the communication/cooperation skills of our ancestors, were not killed by the Cro Magnons. To me it seems clear that humans are hardwired for cooperation and competition--which dominates depends on culture. A lot of our problems stem from sociopaths, who in a a mass society are able to grab power and thus wealth. But the bigger problem is that a sociopathic CULTURE, based on domination--of women by men, lower classes by upper classes and everyone else by humans, quite comfortable using violence to achieve its ends and with practices that require endless expansion, has taken over the world. It wins one war with more peaceful defenders after another, because it justifies violence, develops weaponry and war schemes as a high priority--and this has been going on for thousands of years but now we are at a turning point. There are no new lands to conquer, and the population growth and aggressively greedy practices of this culture now have us facing multiple ecological crises. The sociopaths currently directing this craziness are too intently focused on inflating their own wealth and power beyond the bounds of need or desire, beyond the bounds of sanity, to address the crises--thus collapse is imminent, hopefully very imminent as it's the one thing that can stop this destruction.
I would like it to be a requirement that to hold any public office, for a period of six months, all the applicants assets are frozen. They are thrown out into the street and must survive on the services that are available including public transportation and social services. If they receive personal assistance from friends or family they are permanently disqualified. This would put them in touch with the reality of many while deterring those who apply so they can live like royalty.
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Fantastic, Mathew! Brilliant idea! It should be implemented tomorrow. If only we could.
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Here here matthew
That won't fix it, we'd done that and still doing it and it doesn't work, obviously otherwise we wouldn't be where we are now. The thing that makes the conditions IMPOSSIBLE for psychopaths to thrive is to live with freedom of speech. That's all! Free speech is our ticket outta here. But what do freedom seekers do? They censor. So when you do something it means you consent to it. Every freedom lover must strenuously condemn anyone who censors. Period. Then the world will have the conditions that allows good people to thrive, not psychopaths. They hate free speech. They are always on the side of censorship. Identify them, they don't like that. That's why they cannot live without censorship.
Freedom seekers censor? You lost me there.
I keep a database of them and name them. Three off the popular ones are Dr Jayne Ruby, Jeanice Barcelo, Frances Leader (and she does a substack titled (now try not to laugh...) "Uncensored". She censored me because I defended another victim of her censorship and was trying to enlighten all three that free speech is our ONLY way out of this. If someone disputes that, and this goes for everything I say/write, I welcome dispute but you'd better have a good argument, you better have thought it through well because this is so important and can very easily out-coherence everyone so far on the subject. The intent is to incite discussion, incite curiosity, incite faith in our humanity. Just think of it - free speech is our ticket outta here. That's all it takes. Just make sure you champion free speech, speak up, defend it, with all your might because I guarantee you it is the only way to find truth. Everyone has their truth. We don't have the access to most of the light spectrum, so at this point in our evolution, the best we can hope for is to get as close as possible to the truth, and that can only occur by hearing as many perspectives as possible. Intelligence actually consists of that - curiosity and an understanding that everyone is a piece of the puzzle. The puzzle is "who are we and what the fuck are we doing here".
And after that, man became the decider of everything rather than a co-pilot. Men then devolved into lesser than animals. They dismissed nature, and even raped children and took up weapons so it became a cult-ure of who can out-dominate who. It is still like that. What would put everything on the right track immediately, is if we sought a roughly 50/50 balance in decision making and had a system for getting a quality consensus. This is now available called the Egalitarian Proposal System. The bottom line is, the idea of any adult ruling another adult, is preposterous. Once we get ourselves back into balance, our woes will literally evaporate. But will we do it?
For roughly 300,000 yrs of egalitarian, sharing, non-violent homo sapien evolution, those who to dominate were simply given the silent treatment: social isolation is powerful. Shunning those seeking to pervert the social norms of equality and cooperation worked until the Agricultural Revolution, about 10,000 yrs ago introduced the concept of property, which resulted in a new order of haves and have nots, inequality, hierarchy, and a chain of command that rewarded the very urge to dominate that had been deterred for hundreds ofr thousans of years, to rise to the top.
To change this situation, we need to alter or abolish the concept of property in such a way that it does not create a world of haves and have nots and thus creates the powerful force of the equal community to give "the silent treatment (ie to ignore)" those seeking to dominate.
If you really want to do it, be in touch because I have the architecture to get us there and I'd love to do a podcast or talk with you on this subject. We need to be talking about the conditions we need to produce that will favor the good people and not psychopathy. There is one simple easy way that we can initiate RIGHT NOW, and that is uphold and champion free speech. I cannot emphasize enough how robust this foundational belief can be. I believe we went wrong when women agreed to be married. I believe this is what changed our society as it went against nature to force people to marry. It distilled the belief that humans became property. The idea of ownership needs massive amounts of discussion because it is an insidious thing. Let's talk about it dale?
I would love to hear a podcast on that and read or listen to your discussion.
My channel is Serendipity Media on Rumble and youtube. And we have plans to have more podcasts (as soon as we can get out from this snow) and they will focus on getting out of the system, things we can do as individuals and get even more power by teaming up with other individuals.
"The advent of agriculture was the beginning of the decline of man"
Jared Diamond
Prior to that men thought they could possess women. And that's where I would say it all went downhill. Women used to be the counsel of men, and that is how it ought to be. But of course, we don't know why women even exist other than as an incubator.
Psychopaths will always exist. It is the idiotic political system that allows psychopaths and sociopaths to gain and prosper in positions of power. It is the stupid uneducated lazy ignorant populace that worships such psychopaths (Orange idiot and his minions). It is the culture of nation/nations. In that respect I mean particularly the arrogant, fascist, zionist, genocidal western supremacist culture of "manifest destiny". That is the real problem of humanity. Good and bad people live everywhere, but some human political/national systems are pure evil in the core although on the surface they may be looking OK.
Agree
I think we can get a handle on it if we analyzed it deeply but we gloss over it. We need to figure out the conditions that make it unfavorable for psychopaths to reign over others. In fact, no adult should reign over another adult. That is so preposterous, surely future generations will roll their eyes over it. That is why we have the situation - because we believe with our entire heart that hierarchy is necessary, when it is hierarchy that enables these types to rise to the top. We need decentralized systems - just about all systems need to be decentralized. This is more in keeping with the way nature does things. More in circles than ladders. But are you prepared to go deeper? Are the readers here? Will anyone ask any questions about how we can do this, will anyone even so much as seek answers? The solution is easy but the will to find solutions is not.
Here in the United States, 100% of the psychopaths get elected to public office, become the biggest reality TV stars, control the entertainment industries, and get all the preachers and pastor spots.
For real democracy to work many conditions must be satisfied. None are met in fascist "west". Democracy is just a BS word so that people feel like their opinion matters. In fact people had more say in many so called "autocratic" systems then in so called "democratic" west.
I used to love reading dystopian fiction because I thought we weren’t living in one. Now, thanks to social media, we can see with our own eyes that the world is not at all what we were lead to believe. I have always been a left leaning Democrat and an antiziønişt Jew. I’ve never been fond of Republican policies and politicians, but I never in my wildest dreams imagined there were people and governments as evil, sadistic and corrupt as what we are seeing today. I always thought civil and human rights would slowly get better and better, but I no longer can have confidence in our future. What a hellscape we are seeing. Izzræl is trapped in a pathological trauma reaction that is destroying Gåzã, the West Bank and now intentions burning Patagonia, and infiltrating governments all over the world. Our current regime led by a narcissistic madman with a horrifying coalition of malevolent factions riding his coattails, is dismantling our democracy and terrorizing the American people. This whole nightmare scenario is something I never could have imagined or anticipated. I don’t know how we are going to survive and I feel terrible for my 4 young adult children who didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy the era of pleasant and hopeful ignorance we were living in before cell phones could show us all that we were living a lie.
Not totally living a lie - well - maybe for Americans who were ignorant of the bedlam their military and economic policies were inflicting on the world for a century ... in the name of freedom and democracy but really for a mercatile form of capitalism. Yet - if anyone said that to most Americans - their first reaction was how 'anti-American' the person is being. No - anti-imperialist. However - I dont think America has ever been as degenerate, corrupt and rotten as is this Trump administration and all the psychophant billionaires profitting from its brutality.
Read Howard Zinn’s “Peoples History of the United States” for a better perspective. Genocide, slavery and ruthless exploitation and environmental destruction were the foundations upon which “America” was built.
The period of approximately 1935 through 1970 was an anomaly.
Excellent starting point. READ IT!
Daniel Quinn's Ishmael and the Story of B, Rianne Eisler's Chalice and the Blade, Carol Flinders' Rebalancing the World, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and Schmookler's Parable of the Tribes are all good choiuces for the underlying problems that have led to our current crisis.
Selective adherence to, or rejection of, various tenets of the Old Testament of the Judao-Christian Bible are among the underlying problems.
The tacit support of the US policies and overreach by the West through "ally ships" for their collective benefits is now haunting them. Recall Obama (so did the entire "civilized west") looked the other way for the crimes of Bush & Blair invading Iraq based on lies and then bailed out criminals of the 2008 financial meltdown rather than pushing for accountability.
However, right now, the orange clown felon at the helm is upfront with what US stands for, but when he says what he means, people don't take him seriously.
In a couple of years (if US elections should hold), don't be surprised when the next president, Democrats or Republican, asks you to look forward not accountability. That is the US! I hope I am proven wrong.
Got my money on proven right. The faces change but the game remains the same.
My bet is there will never be another election that Democrats can win. If polls shortly before the midterms suggest Trump/the Republicans can't cheat hard enough to retain at least one House, Trump will declare a state of emergency and cancel the election. Dems will sue and win, it will be appealed, and SCOTUS will rule in Trump's favor. Another scenario is the Republicans will do whatever it takes to win, even if it means blatantly obvious cheating. And then go on ruling, ignoring the outcry--what are we going to do about it? But the US economy is so tied up with the AI bubble that's likely to burst soon, I wonder how that affects things.
At present I'm reading Ken Foĺlet's "Fall of Giants" set around WWI. Woodrow Wilson did not want America to join that war, yet when they did he wanted to be topdog. He instigated a secret multinational army sent to stop Russia from becoming a Soviet Republic, Wilson wanted it to remain a monarchy, as did UK, France and others. Seems like America has never stopped interfering in other countries in order to change the regime to their liking, and the fools ruling in Western/European countries allow it to continue. Every US president thinks he rules the whole planet and what a rotten job they've made of it to the detriment of their allies as well as their named enemies. Kennedy could have turned America around so, of course, he had to be assassinated as well as, later, his brother, Robert.
I guess, that taste of interfering, and ruining a country's right to rule the people who voted them into government, stayed with each following American president - until the present sick narcissist had his way in bought for him, and now he happily goes about ruining America along with those others he's destroying and no one has the strength to stop him - or are they all hoping for someone else to step up? Guess what, another couple of weeks, if that long, and we might be saying, 'Goodbye planet Earth.'
The only “good” presidents in my mind were JFK and Jimmy Carter.
I absolutely agree. What we have going on right now is unprecedented. No doubt.
Actually it used to be a lot worse for a long time. The Great Depression clobbered the 1% so things got better for a while. But since 1980 all downhill. 45 years of that and here we are.
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Well said, Alyx Praeger, well said.
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I would just add that the Dems are just Republican-lite. In their own way, they are just as bad. Worse, in some respects, because they betray peoples' hopes and drive them into the Republican camp.
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And worst of all in that respect are Bernie and AOC who are the greatest "Hope Traitors" of our time. Bernie is an ardent Zionist and AOC is Zionist-complicit.
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And AOC just now has been pounding away on the war drums to invade Iran. So, the two of them – Bernie and AOC – are the worst, because of being faux progressives, and misleading people.
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Oh -- by the way, I've always liked reading dystopian fiction, for the opposite reason that you apparently used to like reading it. I like reading dystopian fiction, because I long ago concluded that we are indeed living in a dystopia and, after being exposed daily to so many lies in mainstream media that purports to be reporting actual facts, I am generally relieved to find myself reading dystopian so-called "fiction" that is the closest thing I know to speaking the truth about our daily lives.
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What's the point of paying to read dystopic fiction when you can get the real thing for free?
Exactly. I can’t bear it any longer. I used to be an ardent cinema buff, and now I’ve lost my affection for watching movies. Somehow I feel uncomfortable indulging in that form of escapism, though it might be good for my mental health. It’s difficult not to get sucked into doom scrolling when there are so many insane and intense catastrophes happening failing all over the world. I’ve been walking my dogs to reset my nervous system and have resorted to weed gummies in the evening. Thank god for legalizing Cannabis products.
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A friend of mine used to say something very similar. He would remark:
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Why do you need to go to the movies? You're already at the movies.
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I think, maybe, though, it's because, in the dystopian fiction, we can imagine the villains of the story being overcome, and justice being served. Whereas, with the "real thing," that is far from what we see on a daily basis.
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Interesting take, but makes sense. I was just naive and am in my core an optimist, which has now been seriously damaged. Have you seen the Dune movies? Watching the second one I couldn’t shake the parallel of the evil empire being (US/Izzræl) and the brown skinned indigenous inhabitants being Paleşťińianş. The hero was the white savior (ugh).
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Yes, Alyx. I have seen the Dune movies. And I read the original DUNE epic series a long time ago, also.
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I think that the role of the Paul Atreides character is called "Whitewashing," is it not? The White Savior motif?
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The Dune mythology was a curious construct by Frank Herbet, insofar as it combines quite a number of phenomena much beloved and much utilized by the Israel-American Ethnosupremacist Empire:
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Appropriating the desert sands of others for the value of what lies beneath them.
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Subjugating indigenous peoples.
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The use of systemic violence to control populations.
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How Spice [read "Oil" as a drug] is the fulcrum of a society's economy.
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Drug trafficking.
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etc.
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Nice to have you back, Sean Bodhivajra S.
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Thank you, Indu Abeyesakara. I hope to publish some interesting pieces in the week ahead -- time permitting. Best regards, Sean.
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Very interesting AlyxPraeger. Your adult children have come face to face with the brutal reality of now, because sadly an earlier generation thought ignorance was bliss.
"If ignorance is bliss then 'tis folly to be wise."
This is only true if bliss is the point of life, the highest calling. That is not wisdom. The opposite of ignorance is knowledge, not wisdom. The opposite of stupidity is intelligence, not wisdom. The opposite of folly is prudence, not wisdom. So what is the opposite of wisdom? Selfishness, short-sightedness. The wisest is the one who see that all people near and far, similar to him or herself or very different, matter--including the non-human beings. And those in the future.
Well said.
It hurts like hell; I don't know how you keep going. I'm just glad that you do.
Absolutely, it hurts like hell. Some days you wish something, anything, would shut them all down so we can catch our breath, but first - America, it needs to have the present government radically stopped. This going from one murderous group to another and another just to keep Drumpf's dementia-filled brain happy? It has to stop. There must be someone there with guts - but it needs more than just him removed, the whole inept yes-men needed cleaning out.
A whole new type of "not out for themselves only" government needs to be elected by the everyday people, not by billionaires choosing the president, that way lies death and destruction as we are seeing right now. Billionaires don't care because they think their money blocks any problems from coming their way. Time to prove that money doesn't buy as much as they want to believe.
I know someone will naysay what I write, that's your choice, but as long as we keep believing that we have no power nothing will change. Never forget; there are more of us than there are of them. They are the ones who should be afraid because of the way they have treated society, as if we are nothing. We are better than them, with all their money they are still miserable.
...and ain't that the truth. The pursuit of money for its own sake leaves a human being an empty shell, the soul long gone.
It feels like 1984 on steroids. I am finding it difficult to even read about it any more.
Attention, Caitlin! Power thrives on division, fear, discouragement, and resignation. Division stems from competition. Fear stems from a sense of powerlessness regarding the future. Discouragement stems from the disappointment that always follows the deception of illusion. Resignation stems from mental and physical exhaustion. Of course it hurts. But it was all predictable. Also because it has happened many times before. Now the situation is worse than before the First World War and is suspended only because of the existence of nuclear weapons. How many times have you written that we are many and they are very few? Now you understand that it doesn't matter, because the system's "memes" have distorted the minds of many. After all, no change has ever arisen spontaneously from the people. It needs a trigger. To do so, you need holistic information, willpower, and courage. And the conviction that you are not alone. I am here. And power, even the power to change reality, is not measured in quantity. It is measured in quality.
Funny, then, how the French Revolution managed to overthrow their monarchy with no phones, or social media, no television, just enough people sick to the teeth of living in such moral poverty as well as physical poverty because a few people lived it up and cared nothing for the suffering they're greed caused.
The French Revolution was triggered by a dozen people
Actually rich people started the French Revolution because in interest of justice the King wanted to impose a property tax.
Humanity, in irrationality, refuses meditation, whose genuine nature is that of seeing the Time/Fear correlation, touched on in the 2nd line of your post.
I refer to Rodolpho's post above.
Thank you, for the correction. I couldn't get it to fit with the second line of my post, I can relax now ;-)
This format is confusing, but i guess it's the best possible. A good idea would be to always mention the name of who's being replied to.
I used to call them sociopaths because they hide their true agendas of pure evil destruction and the most inhumane actions towards any living beings but you are correct psychopaths. It's gut wrenching when hearing and watching this behavior every minute of the day!
I’m not sure we are more divided than ever. In the USA and in the UK we see people protesting who never did before. No doubt there are still differences, but authoritarianism and fascism seem to be uniting more people in opposition to the Empire. The psychopathic oligarchs are very powerful and it may already be too late (given nuclear weapons and climate change), but I think there is a very small glimmer of hope. Hang in there Caitlin, we need your voice.
Nothing is more precious than honesty, which you have offered.....now get out into the street and join the millions whose outrage has turned to action.
Solidarity. It really does hurt bad.
I think the tempo of chaos is exactly the point. It keeps everyone unbalanced. The first rule in battle is to put your opponent off-balance. This is exactly what the Trump administration is doing. I fear there will be no let-up in this strategy. The more threatened they feel, the more chaos they will create. I, like so many others, feel overwhelmed and can offer no solutions that do not increase the level of chaos. I live in despair.
Rai. I understand.
I took time off from reading anything political. Everyone needs to do this.
I am now back after thinking.
Chaos cannot last forever there is a silver lining.
Hello Rai, I hear you loud and clear! A lot of us can relate to the sense of feeling ungrounded and simply reacting to everything around us. One antidote to despair for me is when I connect with history - the history of others who devoted their lives to the struggle for a better world. When I read the words of Che, or Lenin or Rosa Luxembourg I feel an instant connection to the larger struggle and can sense my place within it.
Thanks, Lizzy. Of course, you are right. Humanity has been here before, countless times. Tyranny has repeatedly been overcome to create a better world (for a time). But I do despair that we, as a species, keep repeating this cycle. Perhaps this is the nature of the human condition, and we are destined to do so forever (or until we destroy the planet). I do agree that we must never stop striving for a better world, and learning from those who walked before us is key to achieving this. But I still feel despair. For the endless suffering imposed by those who act in self-interest rather than collective benefit. At the end of the day, my despair is tempered by hope and a belief that love will prevail over self-interest. We all have a role to play in achieving what John Lennon expressed in the song 'Imagine'. This song remains my anthem as we navigate this current struggle.
Lizzy Liberty, I am with you in connecting with " the history of others who devoted their lives to the struggle for a better world".
Rosa Luxembourg: Someone famously wrote, " She told the poor the truth, so they did away with her".
I'm sorry but chaos is not necessarily a bad thing. Chaos, the falling apart of the global economy and the political institutions that have been in places for centuries look like bad things from up close--but I'm afraid collapse is the one thing that will break the psychopaths' hold on power and allow survivors to create islands of sanity and responsibility--the current trajectory is heading straight off a cliff in terms of climate change, resource depletion, plummeting biodiversity and pollution by plastics, PFAS, nuclear materials. Business as usual for a few more decades leads to human extinction. Those in power--even if we get to Democrats--will not change course, they have to reward their rich benefactors. So collapse is our best hope, and the time to begin preparing for it is now.
I think you are right, Mary. Our current economic/political structures are not sustainable and are indeed heading straight off a cliff. Without change, we are most certainly heading for collapse. The level of human suffering will be enormous, but it is possible that our species will learn from it and establish kinder, more compassionate systems that value all life. It is possible for sure. Likely? I'm not so sure. Something has to drastically change in the human condition for utopia to emerge.
Okay, you want a pretty story? Here's what I base my hope on. Maybe this collapse will not be like other collapses because it will be global and the environmental aspect is much greater--we're destroying the substrate on which we live. So this collapse will be much more profound--it's quite possible humanity won't survive if it, especially if nuclear exchanges are involved. Which is why it needs to happen soon, before that substrate is too severely damaged to recover. (I know, this is supposed to be a hopeful story, but hang in there.)
There is evidence that when humans first arrived in the Americas and Australia,they wiped out the megafauna in fairly short order. Why? Because these animals had not evolved alongside humans and were not ready to cope with our unique hunting skills. So it was too easy to run a whole herd over a cliff, feast on the resulting dead, wasting a lot--and then suddenly there were none left. And then, according to my story, the people said, "How could we have been so stupid? We must never let this happen again!" So they crafted rules, precepts, a religion, that included restraint, respect for the rest of the web of life and so forth--and it WORKED. When Europeans arrived in these places, they found cultures that "weren't using the land"--that still, thousands of years later, held onto these precepts and religious views.
What I'm saying is that previous collapses and revolutions have always been relatively shallow--mostly a change in who rules the roost. And the current situation is as bad as it is because the ruling-class band of psychopaths have been working for forty years to set things up so that their power is unassailable, quite successfully. And maybe, what it takes for the kind of profound change in culture we need, is a cataclysmic break--one that leads the survivors to say, "How could we have been so stupid? We must never let that happen again!" What we need is a change such as hasn't been seen in several thousand years.
So I no longer hope we can get there via sensible policy change--we must pass through the fires. And the next few decades will likely be horrific. But there is hope that on the other side, a better world will emerge, especially if people recognize the need to constrain sociopaths.
I do not discount the possibility of your story. It is, perhaps, even likely if our current trajectory is maintained.
The problem I see is that we humans think we are separate from the world - that we are in 'charge' of the world. That the world exists to satisfy us. To me, this is what needs to change. This illusion of separateness. This is the environment that creates sociopaths.
I do sense a growing recognition of this worldwide, and it tempers my despair. I can imagine a future world where this sense of separation no longer exists and humanity realises we are all 'one'.
I hope that this is where we are ultimately heading. Perhaps we do need to 'go through the fires' to get there, or perhaps there will be a global awakening that changes the human condition, enabling us to live in harmony with each other and with nature. This is the story I prefer to hang on to.
I've enjoyed this conversation. None of us can predict the future. All we can do is work within our sphere of influence to create a better world for all - day by day. I sincerely wish us well.
Oh it seems from here that you’re still riding the crest! You are far, far from alone. Douglas Rushkoff’s latest Substack titled something like “you’re not crazy” says it well: just trying to explain how this world works makes you sound like a crazed conspiracy theorist. Presumably it’s going to get even more bonkers. Luckily there is also a ton of good developing out there as well. But yeah, those in the seat of centralized power are unfathomable right now. Offering a hug, from another part of the internet.
I feel you about the Zeitgeist. For me it was after COVID when I felt that my ability to map and interpret the world, and idealism, were pretty much shot. Lately it's just constant milieu of bad and I don't even want to look on my phone or read about anything. Anyone with power is psychopathic, cynical, nihilist and normal people who think and feel seem to have no say about the world we live in.
Really reinforces my impression that humanity really is headed for a dark night of the soul which includes not just ecological and systems collapse, but full moral and spiritual reckoning.
"They’ve done such a good job dividing us and conquering us."
They really have. I'm still amazed at how clueless some adults are about what is really happening in the world... They refuse to connect the dots. I guess there's some kind of comfort they get from being in the dark all the time? Personally, I'd be more anxious if I didn't know what was going on. But you're absolutely right, Caitlin--our rulers are psychopaths and their job is to make everything awful for us. All the more reason that we make things "awful" for them instead--GENERAL STRIKE!
🌹There is so much cruelty, and it hurts - because violence has been normalized so deeply we are taught to see it as inevitable, even natural.
But history tells a different story. Large-scale violence did not begin with politics or ideology - it began when humans learned to hunt, then herd, then turn living, feeling beings into property that could be owned, dominated, and killed at will. That logic - domination, extraction, expendability - did not stop with animals. It spread outward into land theft, patriarchy, slavery, empire, and war.
What gives me hope is that for the first time in history, people who see this brutality have a daily, tangible way to withdraw consent from it - from our own plates. Ending animal agritorture and domesecration is not a side issue; it is a direct interruption of the oldest training ground for violence.
A vegan world is not naive - it is evolutionary. It is a world where we stop rehearsing domination three times a day and start modeling the values we claim to want - empathy, justice, restraint, and care.
For anyone wanting to explore this deeper, I recommend An Unnatural Order by Jim Mason and Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson - both trace how systemic violence against humans is inseparable from violence against animals.
The rulers may be psychopaths - but the people still have a choice. And that choice starts closer than we are taught to believe.🌻
It truly is divided. Here in US, on META platform, there’s the anti-🧊platform vs. the anti-illegals, pro 🧊platform, vs it’s all staged, false flag, AI platform. I’m on the, It’s All Wrong AND Violent AND TRAUMATIZING IN OUR FACE PLATFORM. Genocide in Palestine is bad enough, and seeing Americans getting unalived in real time on a daily basis is shocking and utterly disturbing. We walk amongst monsters. We’re saddened, to say the least. And it’s been this way for a while , and there’s no relief coming, in fact it may get worse, but we’ll keep pushing back with the truth to the best of our ability, and take a page from the Palestinian perseverance story and courageously continue on till justice and morality prevail.