Our Rulers Have All The Power And None Of The Responsibility
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As the world burns, as ecosystems die off, as the insects vanish, as the forests disappear, as soil becomes rapidly less fertile, as extinction takes over, as the oceans gasp for air and become lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters, it is interesting how often you hear the sentiment that this is the result of some flaw in humanity for which we all share equal guilt.
To hear people talk about it, you'd think we all had some say in the way our society is organized, the way food, goods and energy are distributed, the kinds of vehicles which dominate our civilization, the way our planet is being stripped bare to turn millionaires into billionaires and billionaires into trillionaires.
And of course, we don't. We've never gotten to vote on how corporations behave in our world. We never got a vote on which technologies would be suppressed and which would be subsidized and backed by wars and military scams. We never got a vote on the US war machine becoming the worst polluter of any institution on earth. We never got a vote on whether a tree should be cut down for profit or left standing for the benefit it provides to our ecosystem.
And the things we do get to vote on don't count because our dominant political systems are owned by corporate elites. And even if they weren't it wouldn't matter because those elites use media propaganda to brainwash us at mass scale and manufacture our consent for the ecocidal paradigm that has turned them into modern-day kings.
The kings of today do not live as the kings of old. They don't sit on thrones publicly issuing decrees to their subjects; they hang out in the background behind the theatrical performance of the officially elected government, quietly funding think tanks and corporate lobbyists, buying up media, bribing politicians with campaign donations, rigging the system, amassing more and more wealth and power, and shaping the fate of our world.
Yet if you ask the wealthy who is to blame for the death of our planet, they'll tell you it's the fault of the riff raff for having too many babies. If you ask the billionaire-owned media who is to blame, they'll tell you it's your fault because you didn't go vegan and ride your bike to work.
In our extinction existence of invisible kings and wall-to-wall lies, those with all the wealth and power are completely free of responsibility, while their rank-and-file victims are made to justify their very existence to the system every day and pay through the nose for every misstep. None of the world's worst people are in prison, and if you tell the police your employer stole your wages you'll get a very different response than if your employer tells them you stole from the company.
You can get a hefty fine for throwing a paper cup out a window, but corporations can fill the oceans with plastic without ever being told "This is your fault. Fix it." You can go to jail for smoking a leaf, but corporations can blacken the air at immense profit without ever facing any consequences.
They are living as kings on wealth they made by raping the planet we all live on, whose health we all depend on for survival, and because their mass media propaganda is so successful it hardly ever even occurs to anyone that they should have to pay for it. They take what they want and do as they please, at our expense, for free. They are spoiled little boys with flamethrowers.
The people who are leading us to armageddon are hailed as charitable and industrious job creators. Rob a man for money and they'll call you a thief. Rob a planet for money and they'll call you a philanthropist.
This cannot stand. The one area in which we do have power is the fact that there are a lot more of us than there are of them, a fact that secretly terrifies them which they spend vast amounts of energy making sure we never notice ourselves. As folk singer Utah Phillips famously said, "The Earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses.”
But this insight does us no good if only a few of us realize it. Until a critical mass of the human collective rises up against these sociopathic ecocidal tyrants, we won't be able to stop them. But stop them we must, which is why it's so important to spread awareness of what's going on and where the blame really lies. All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an increase in awareness, whether it be individually or collectively.
And from there, perhaps we can create a healthy world directed not for the greed of the few but for the good of everybody. Where scientific endeavor is poured not into creating billionaires and finding new ways for the war machine to kill people but into ways we can harmoniously collaborate with our natural environment.
If we can't find some way to pull this off, humanity's epitaph will read, "In the end it was easier to let them kill the ecosystem than to take away rich people's rocket money."
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I recall many liberal preachers in history that would equate having all the freedoms but none of the responsibilities as that of LICENSE and then tie it to pro-slavery conservatives. "They believe God/Government has entitled to them the license to own slaves," they would thunder from their pulpits before hocking them right alongside their values. Here it's 2021, and the global oligarchy has all freedoms they want, all the wage slaves they could ever need, and none of the responsibilities. They don't need to bother with the pretense anymore and just admit it right out of the gate, "License?!? Vee don't need no steenking license ... "
We point out these powerful few to create awareness and thus change. If we use ‘common human flaw’ to belittle others we may sow confusion. Many will conflate this with your fundamental theme about the human ego.
“So we all have the same condition but if you mention it I will call you out.”
When people speak about the egoic condition it encompasses all of our species. This means humans not yet free of this (most of us) are suffering a form of mental illness, including those powerful few who are at the top of the human hierarchy— and the egoic condition makes all of us favor primitive hierarchies to varying degrees because this compulsive, dysfunction -inducing condition allows the survival brain to dominate our sharing/caring tendencies.
*Perhaps we express less obvious traits of the hierarchy: submission, approval seeking, conformity etc. and use ‘softer’ forms of deception, of maintaining our status/ place in the hierarchy , of manipulation, of concealing and coercion with family, coworkers and friends but the subliminal message is received: “ yes, I am playing the same consensus reality game of survival brain social hierarchies as you are”, and the virus of unconsciousness persists and spreads. And in the next person it can manifest as something very big and ugly.
Our own egoic condition enables others to stay asleep; if we are asleep/unaware then no one is there to awaken the other person from their destructive programming.
Unfortunately those others may rapidly rise to power in our human social structure: a survival brain-induced hierarchy that favors and rewards domination, hoarding, aggression, deception and more.
Yes, a powerful few are more responsible for the *way* our species manifests suffering and destruction but they suffer from the same dysfunction and are unconscious of this.
So we point out these powerful people again and again—these destructive forces—and try to change what is happening.
They may know how to manipulate and dominate but they too are asleep to the egoic condition which makes them operate largely on primitive brain autopilot, makes them feel that domination, submission, deception, aggression, competition, and othering are completely natural and proper in all situations.
The egoic condition robs us and ‘them’ of choice to a significant degree. Choice implies consciousness. We are pointing out that ‘they’ are not conscious, so we are actually pointing out that they have little choice but to play out their social conditioning derived from their egoic conditioning. The more consciousness the more choice.
Are we afraid that acknowledging this shared madness might induce a little compassion? Might stop our hatred and disgust? Stop our momentum in bringing down the oppressors?
If we fear this then we must be transparent. Do we need to feel sufficient hate and disgust to wake people out of complacency? How much? Are we afraid that the compassion that inevitably emerges with greater awareness of our collective oneness will allow the oppressors to continue?
Talk it out. Transparency is strength. We must be honest to ourselves and others about our urge to manipulate and not reveal that our oppressors suffer from the same condition.
The path of awareness is the path of root causes ( root cause of suffering and root cause of existence) and the root cause of oligarchs and sadists is the same unconsciousness we all suffer from. Our compassion for the entire species including the oppressors doesn’t have to make us weak, it in fact can make us stronger and more resolute about what can and cannot be permitted.