Every time I think Caitlin has outdone herself, she posts something like this. There is no better description of current humanity. The backdrop of our lives reflects the ancient struggle of good against evil.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Also one of my favorite quotes “sure I brought peace and prosperity , to United fruit company” -Smedley Butler
"We’re going to figure things out eventually. Consciousness keeps expanding. The light keeps getting brighter. "
Too linear? How about the yin/yang perspective that the brightest light contains within it the seed of subsequent darkness, in exactly the same way that the darkest night contains the seed of a new dawn? And in any case, the universe unfolds as it must.
Agreed. There is absolutely nothing inevitable about progress. Inevitability of progress is actually one of the dangerous myths of Capitalism. We have erected a fragile system dependent on cheap accessible fossil fuels, an nothing is stopping us from disaster once the system stops working. Technological progress or more general human intellectual or spiritual enlightenment is absolutely not guaranteed.
"Because the people who are most adept at obtaining massive amounts of wealth/power are those who are sufficiently lacking in empathy to do whatever it takes to obtain it, we naturally find ourselves ruled by sociopaths. "
Begins with the brainwashing of religion. Having stumbled on "The Keepers", on Netflix, I was reminded that the rebellious attitude toward sanctimonious priests of myself and other NYC street urchin friends was hardly the broader societal norm during my teen years. The acquiescence to psychological manipulation and rape by high school girls portrayed in the series laser-focused on the pure sociopathy of the Catholic hierarchy and how mindbogglingly thorough was its inculcation of sociopathic priests, so as to engender the level of submissive mind control depicted. Brainwashing? Neither the advertising industry nor political prevaricators could come close to the nearly complete control of the adolescents' fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality, society, good and evil. Make all the arguments you like about religion's positive value. For me, they fail miserably when weighed against the ability to twist very young minds away from what are necessary aspects of human cognition: observation, critical assessment, open discussion, articulation of objections to the degradation of other lives — all accomplished while maintaining an air of moral righteousness and superiority. Catholicism may be particularly bad, but many religions attack individual autonomy at such a fundamental level that they prepare perfectly functional minds to become soldiers in the armies by which those sociopaths rip us from the rest of Nature and from genuine loving embrace of one another. Looking for crimes against humanity. Suggest you look no further.
I think you may have missed her message which I read as hopeful for a greater power and purpose rather than nihilistic. Religion and those using it to manipulate others is also not the man behind the curtain. There is no man behind the curtain if you consider it’s always been ‘us’
I didn't miss it at all. By eschewing the extreme mind control of Catholicism, I've been able to worship the real deity of natural systems, such as conversing with the wisdom of ancient desert trees in my own fashion. How can there be an integrated "US, I, we, all there is," if the fundamentals of human-ness, of "us", including our oneness with all other living beings -- bacteria to bears -- in a vast extended reciprocally communicating system are torn away early and regularly during childhood. I'm pointing out the contradictions. Complementary views. Sorry if you think I'm being too negative.
I’ve been following a lot of podcasts on cults/high control groups recently. Steven Hassan on The Influence Continuum podcast talks about the importance of freedom of mind. He was in the Moonies in the 1980s and has since spent his life helping people deprogramme and develop freedom of mind.
I’m also a ‘recovering Catholic’ and agree that this particular religion is a great example of how mass manipulation can work, however, be careful to note that these old fashioned tools are being replaced by new ones and in the end, it’s the same purpose. Every idea can and will be corrupted due to our natural tendencies to compete. But, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. It’s good to believe in something especially if it’s your own belief
Competition isn’t “natural”. It’s just patriarchal. Which we are drowning in. Symbiosis and cooperation are much more normal in nature, regardless of the Victorian excuse for exploitation that nature is red of tooth and claw.
"We’re going to figure things out eventually" stated Caitlin
Come on. Someone put a time on it.
Since 1945 we have gone from Korea to humiliating Vietnam, through to humiliating Afghanistan (with so many in between) and on and on, creating 20 + million deaths, sanctions applied, cruel and inhumane. We have created failed states, almost all to assist Israel become King of the Middle East with US supported actions in Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Jordan, Kuwait, Yemen, Libya), over a total of 78 years. We have tolerated getting the big finger from Tel Aviv (and lived with that embarrassment since 1967) over the USS Liberty humiliation; we have allowed a good President to be murdered by those who needed him out of the way to expand their nuclear capability and as is our nature, initiated war after war, all for US power. Now we have engineered a proxy Ukrainian game, (no Americans deaths, just Ukrainians). We call them "collateral damage" of course. Not our doing. We are not in this war. Well, we may supply weapons and billions of dollars; we may supply depleted uranium weapons and bomblets, killing for years hence; we may have our little slave boys in NATO jump up and down to receive favours from Biden’s bunch of Neocons, but we are safe from harm. Well planned.
We deserve your thanks.
We are good people really, working away for Israel and its embedded fifth-columnists under every American rock, together with BlackRock and Vanguard, militarists, banks and at the same time telling the whores in the media to jump through our hoops. And, just so as you can properly understand, we only have two political parties, all politicians dancing to the Tel Aviv tango, all tarred with the same brush and we will return to power next year to do 'more of the same'. Yes, people, returning in 2024, being one or the other. No difference at all really.
In 1963, a good President was killed. That was 60 years ago. So when is "eventually". Anyone?
"Because the people who are most adept at obtaining massive amounts of wealth/power are those who are sufficiently lacking in empathy to do whatever it takes to obtain it, we naturally find ourselves ruled by sociopaths. "
It's so sad, and kinda amazing, that so many self-styled progressives believe the U.S. lies about the background to the war on Ukraine, given that the U.S. lied about the wars in Vietnam, Indonesia Latin America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia (yes!), Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. Of course the U.S. is lying about the war in Ukraine!
Good article until halfway through, went sideways with this:
"You discover in your own experience that there is no such thing as a separate self; that what we refer to linguistically as “I” and “me” are psychological delusions which underpin most of the suffering and dysfunctionality of the human species"
This is demonstrably false. I get you are attempting some form of a hermetic concept, ( hopefully not world brainish) and to a degree it is true for the physical body, but your premise that this is a delusion and THAT is what underpins most human suffering is simply off base.
We are individuals with individual proclivities, imaginations and souls. The body is a vessel, I, like yourself, am a passenger in this body. Our physical bodies have their own intelligence, which is what can give your statement some validity, as we are indeed connected in a way that mere mortals may never understand. Metaphysics aside, you negate individual agency, the important evolutionary mechanism of free will which creates anti-fragility for our species. One does not have to believe in a soul to understand how free will has affected human evolutionary biology. We would have already gone extinct if it were not possible for us to think abstractly and outside of the collective. We have lasted because of this, and embracing it is our only way out of our current predicament. Humans have been biohacked. We have been reduced to communal bees in a glass hive, no mind just action. We have been deceived into our current social and economic reality and nothing from the modern world and its hyperreality is a testament to our current status as a species.. because it is all artificial. We can thank the trash science of sociology for synthesizing this world for us on behalf of power.
Also, there are people behind the curtain, they just cannot be easily identified due to the fact that this international power structure you correctly point out is hidden from public view because it is a "national security state". Call it what you want. Inverted Totalitarianism. Technocratic surveillance state capitalism. Cryptocracy. Doesn't matter,, your opening section was completely correct. The common man, even to a degree major public players, do not really control anything. Just because you cannot Google OZ and find their Wikipedia page ( so much irony.. like not knowing facebook was LifeLog) does not mean they aren't there. Thinking what we are witnessing in the world including the designs of the self protecting and self perpetuating power structure is just a random occurrence is, using your own words, first adulthood thinking. With that being said, It is very difficult , and dangerous, to identify them publicly. ( this is one place the conspiritainment industry really tires hard to obfuscate) I no longer concern myself with that, but I do advocate for transparency which would be a necessity for any real progress for human civilization.
We live in a manufactured reality. Mass society is a complex hyperreality full of reality tunnels that do not threaten the status quo. Everything is either highly managed or straight orchestrated by the power structure. Governments, are indexing firms for that power. There are, as there have always been, people behind the curtain..
It may appear that we are on a runaway train with nobody at the helm from the perspective of a normal person. However, the engineers just have different motivations, ethics and morality than what most people consider when they look at the mechanics of events. As long as it is useful, they will run a train right over an unfinished bridge into a deep canyon. It has happened before and it is happening again.
This sounds very Catholic to me. And I think it’s day is done. You create your own reality, and your own body, and your own experiences, based on what you think and feel constantly and intensely. There’s no them running the show. Life is your mirror. Look in it.
Good afternoon. Nothing I said is taken from Catholic ideology nor does Catholicism have any affect on any of my belief structures, unless you consider my avoidance of it. I see other people in this thread mentioned Catholic things, not I. With that being said, your second half:
"You create your own reality, and your own body, and your own experiences, based on what you think and feel constantly and intensely. There’s no them running the show. Life is your mirror. Look in it."
You seem to be conflating personal psychology with absolute reality. There are indeed people running the show. We do have the capacity to shape our own reality and experiences ( most people do not actually do so as they are captured by the hyperreality of mass society) and to a small degree our own body with environmental , dietary and physical conditioning. On a personal level, our lives are a mirror to a degree, as it relates to your own person, your environment and your belief structures. ( If you have indeed created your own thoughts and not merely appropriated others) However, there are also the same variables for the "Other" as well as the absolute reality that you , I , and everyone else (other) exists in. We may all have our own realities, or avenues of perception, but there is indeed an absolute reality that is not subjective on this physical plane. I assure you, I have "looked into it".
The systems that are ‘behind the curtain’ are also a result of nature, not just human nature, but all natural tendencies of life on Earth to compete for survival and procreation. That said, we are evolving and can accelerate this evolution if we become more self aware of our oneness as organisms (not just as humans) and our ability to thrive without a fight to the death but rather collaboration and nurturing of others. It can be done but it is difficult to overcome natural tendencies. You see it in families and communities every day. We compete in sports that give us that natural bump we crave, but in the end we can find it in ourselves to love and nurture our competition after the big game is done. We can evolve.
I don’t have a cult. My opinions are from my own observations. Living organisms compete to survive but also collaborate, both unwittingly and purposefully. Look around yourself
Your observations are conditioned by 3000 years of Greek culture by way of Christianity and empire. These animals have no more sense of contest than any herd in an abattoir. David Graeber from his creative refusal paper:
>However this may be, the heroic complex, if one might call it that, had an enduring impact. The city-states and empires of the classical Mediterranean, to take one vivid example, could well be seen as a kind of fusion of heroic principles into a standard of urban life drawn from the far older civilizations to its East – hardly surprising, perhaps, in a place where all literary education began with Homer. The most obvious aspect is the religious emphasis on sacrifice. On a deeper level, we find what Alvin Gouldner (1965: 45–55) called ‘the Greek contest system’, the tendency to turn absolutely everything, from art to politics to athletic achievement to tragic drama, into a game where there must be winners and losers. The same spirit appears in a different way in the ‘games’ and spirit of aristocratic competition in Rome. In fact, I would hazard to suggest that our own political culture, with its politicians and elections, traces back to heroic sensibilities. We tend to forget that for most of European history, election was considered the aristocratic mode of selecting officials, not the democratic one (the democratic mode was sortation: see Manin 1997, Dowlen 2009).
That Greek contest system? That's you right now, projecting drama onto life.
I see this natural tendencies argument as just patriarchal nonsense and hope we can get to the love and nurture before tearing each other apart. But it takes what it takes. That natural bump is just an adrenaline rush that we crave because we have left our souls so far behind in our drug fueled quest for more and better. How about less and good?
I guess this is an adequate description of "reality" if one accepts the passive notion that there is no human agency, "reality" is totally subjective, and there is no possibility of changing reality.
"If that's all there is then let's keep dancing" (Peggy Lee, 1969)
But I would say that if reality is all subjective then changing it is merely a matter of dealing with your subjective self, and changing that. As some king said in some movie, surely madam, where the heart goes, the body has a right to follow. He of course meant nooky, but how about if he or I or you meant peace? Perhaps our bodies would be more peaceful if our hearts were.
I guess you missed my point, which was the opposite of changing individual hearts. For example, you want clean water? Then you need to understand and get involved in work like this (which I do every day):
No, I agree with that. It’s just been my experience that external change comes more easily and quickly when it follows internal change—in other words, I don’t get in my own way so much. But I agree with you. Action is absolutely necessary to change things.
Great acting, great stories and a window into what our governments have been up to in the last 60 years that has led us directly up to where we are now!
If there's no separate self then it seems to me it only makes sense to just pull the wool over one's 'own eyes so to speak and relax in the safety of one's own delusions while letting everyone else do the same. This way the delusion will simply just unravel of its own accord (the universe itself will do the unraveling). Trying to pit your delusion against that of an 'other' only causes the illusion of separateness to become more persistent (there is no 'other' to convince of your position, but acting as though there is makes it seem more 'real' that there's another person out there who's opinions are so dumb that "I" can't continue to live in the world another day until I correct his or her ignorant ass on twitter [or Xitter or whatever it's called now]).
If there are separations that are in some sense real then I guess this description would need some revising.
Our history is but the blink of an eye and although an eloquent viewpoint, I’m not sure it’s anything beyond evil vs good and evil has found new tools to dominate those willing to submit and kill those who refuse.
well, i'm pretty sure there will be a few who at least think they're behind the wheel and the curtain (while holding the unplugged controller). it would be nice if they tried to turn this thing around now, so they realise that it won't work and it's not going to work when we're only just 10 feet from the abyss, and then join the freaks leaning to one side trying to tilt this thing off it's wheels to get it to stop.
Every time I think Caitlin has outdone herself, she posts something like this. There is no better description of current humanity. The backdrop of our lives reflects the ancient struggle of good against evil.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Also one of my favorite quotes “sure I brought peace and prosperity , to United fruit company” -Smedley Butler
Love it! Except for this last bit:
"We’re going to figure things out eventually. Consciousness keeps expanding. The light keeps getting brighter. "
Too linear? How about the yin/yang perspective that the brightest light contains within it the seed of subsequent darkness, in exactly the same way that the darkest night contains the seed of a new dawn? And in any case, the universe unfolds as it must.
Agreed. There is absolutely nothing inevitable about progress. Inevitability of progress is actually one of the dangerous myths of Capitalism. We have erected a fragile system dependent on cheap accessible fossil fuels, an nothing is stopping us from disaster once the system stops working. Technological progress or more general human intellectual or spiritual enlightenment is absolutely not guaranteed.
Love this.
Linearity within yin/yang. Yin/yang rules all.
"Because the people who are most adept at obtaining massive amounts of wealth/power are those who are sufficiently lacking in empathy to do whatever it takes to obtain it, we naturally find ourselves ruled by sociopaths. "
Begins with the brainwashing of religion. Having stumbled on "The Keepers", on Netflix, I was reminded that the rebellious attitude toward sanctimonious priests of myself and other NYC street urchin friends was hardly the broader societal norm during my teen years. The acquiescence to psychological manipulation and rape by high school girls portrayed in the series laser-focused on the pure sociopathy of the Catholic hierarchy and how mindbogglingly thorough was its inculcation of sociopathic priests, so as to engender the level of submissive mind control depicted. Brainwashing? Neither the advertising industry nor political prevaricators could come close to the nearly complete control of the adolescents' fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality, society, good and evil. Make all the arguments you like about religion's positive value. For me, they fail miserably when weighed against the ability to twist very young minds away from what are necessary aspects of human cognition: observation, critical assessment, open discussion, articulation of objections to the degradation of other lives — all accomplished while maintaining an air of moral righteousness and superiority. Catholicism may be particularly bad, but many religions attack individual autonomy at such a fundamental level that they prepare perfectly functional minds to become soldiers in the armies by which those sociopaths rip us from the rest of Nature and from genuine loving embrace of one another. Looking for crimes against humanity. Suggest you look no further.
I think you may have missed her message which I read as hopeful for a greater power and purpose rather than nihilistic. Religion and those using it to manipulate others is also not the man behind the curtain. There is no man behind the curtain if you consider it’s always been ‘us’
I didn't miss it at all. By eschewing the extreme mind control of Catholicism, I've been able to worship the real deity of natural systems, such as conversing with the wisdom of ancient desert trees in my own fashion. How can there be an integrated "US, I, we, all there is," if the fundamentals of human-ness, of "us", including our oneness with all other living beings -- bacteria to bears -- in a vast extended reciprocally communicating system are torn away early and regularly during childhood. I'm pointing out the contradictions. Complementary views. Sorry if you think I'm being too negative.
Drop acid not missiles.
Absolutely, but I prefer natural products; cultured Psilocybe mexicana as a "side project" in grad school. Thanks for the suggestion.
Daannng. That sounds great. I was going to say “eat ‘shrooms and stop the boom” but it didn’t seem as funny as acid. Thanks for correcting me. 🍄🤩🥳
Psilocybe Azurensis is the Key to Terence's Mind.
Beer, not bombs.
I think religion had fallen by the wayside decades ago and yet I don't see any improvement. It may be part of the cause but there is so much more.
I’ve been following a lot of podcasts on cults/high control groups recently. Steven Hassan on The Influence Continuum podcast talks about the importance of freedom of mind. He was in the Moonies in the 1980s and has since spent his life helping people deprogramme and develop freedom of mind.
I’m also a ‘recovering Catholic’ and agree that this particular religion is a great example of how mass manipulation can work, however, be careful to note that these old fashioned tools are being replaced by new ones and in the end, it’s the same purpose. Every idea can and will be corrupted due to our natural tendencies to compete. But, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. It’s good to believe in something especially if it’s your own belief
I'm heartened by the fact that we both survived well enough to end up as members of this community of Caitlin readers.
Competition isn’t “natural”. It’s just patriarchal. Which we are drowning in. Symbiosis and cooperation are much more normal in nature, regardless of the Victorian excuse for exploitation that nature is red of tooth and claw.
“We have met the enemy and it is us.” Especially the propaganda eaters!
"We’re going to figure things out eventually" stated Caitlin
Come on. Someone put a time on it.
Since 1945 we have gone from Korea to humiliating Vietnam, through to humiliating Afghanistan (with so many in between) and on and on, creating 20 + million deaths, sanctions applied, cruel and inhumane. We have created failed states, almost all to assist Israel become King of the Middle East with US supported actions in Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Jordan, Kuwait, Yemen, Libya), over a total of 78 years. We have tolerated getting the big finger from Tel Aviv (and lived with that embarrassment since 1967) over the USS Liberty humiliation; we have allowed a good President to be murdered by those who needed him out of the way to expand their nuclear capability and as is our nature, initiated war after war, all for US power. Now we have engineered a proxy Ukrainian game, (no Americans deaths, just Ukrainians). We call them "collateral damage" of course. Not our doing. We are not in this war. Well, we may supply weapons and billions of dollars; we may supply depleted uranium weapons and bomblets, killing for years hence; we may have our little slave boys in NATO jump up and down to receive favours from Biden’s bunch of Neocons, but we are safe from harm. Well planned.
We deserve your thanks.
We are good people really, working away for Israel and its embedded fifth-columnists under every American rock, together with BlackRock and Vanguard, militarists, banks and at the same time telling the whores in the media to jump through our hoops. And, just so as you can properly understand, we only have two political parties, all politicians dancing to the Tel Aviv tango, all tarred with the same brush and we will return to power next year to do 'more of the same'. Yes, people, returning in 2024, being one or the other. No difference at all really.
In 1963, a good President was killed. That was 60 years ago. So when is "eventually". Anyone?
"Because the people who are most adept at obtaining massive amounts of wealth/power are those who are sufficiently lacking in empathy to do whatever it takes to obtain it, we naturally find ourselves ruled by sociopaths. "
This is the kernel of The Iron Law Of Oligarchy.
Bill Ghates is the person behind the curtain.
It's so sad, and kinda amazing, that so many self-styled progressives believe the U.S. lies about the background to the war on Ukraine, given that the U.S. lied about the wars in Vietnam, Indonesia Latin America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia (yes!), Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. Of course the U.S. is lying about the war in Ukraine!
Good article until halfway through, went sideways with this:
"You discover in your own experience that there is no such thing as a separate self; that what we refer to linguistically as “I” and “me” are psychological delusions which underpin most of the suffering and dysfunctionality of the human species"
This is demonstrably false. I get you are attempting some form of a hermetic concept, ( hopefully not world brainish) and to a degree it is true for the physical body, but your premise that this is a delusion and THAT is what underpins most human suffering is simply off base.
We are individuals with individual proclivities, imaginations and souls. The body is a vessel, I, like yourself, am a passenger in this body. Our physical bodies have their own intelligence, which is what can give your statement some validity, as we are indeed connected in a way that mere mortals may never understand. Metaphysics aside, you negate individual agency, the important evolutionary mechanism of free will which creates anti-fragility for our species. One does not have to believe in a soul to understand how free will has affected human evolutionary biology. We would have already gone extinct if it were not possible for us to think abstractly and outside of the collective. We have lasted because of this, and embracing it is our only way out of our current predicament. Humans have been biohacked. We have been reduced to communal bees in a glass hive, no mind just action. We have been deceived into our current social and economic reality and nothing from the modern world and its hyperreality is a testament to our current status as a species.. because it is all artificial. We can thank the trash science of sociology for synthesizing this world for us on behalf of power.
Also, there are people behind the curtain, they just cannot be easily identified due to the fact that this international power structure you correctly point out is hidden from public view because it is a "national security state". Call it what you want. Inverted Totalitarianism. Technocratic surveillance state capitalism. Cryptocracy. Doesn't matter,, your opening section was completely correct. The common man, even to a degree major public players, do not really control anything. Just because you cannot Google OZ and find their Wikipedia page ( so much irony.. like not knowing facebook was LifeLog) does not mean they aren't there. Thinking what we are witnessing in the world including the designs of the self protecting and self perpetuating power structure is just a random occurrence is, using your own words, first adulthood thinking. With that being said, It is very difficult , and dangerous, to identify them publicly. ( this is one place the conspiritainment industry really tires hard to obfuscate) I no longer concern myself with that, but I do advocate for transparency which would be a necessity for any real progress for human civilization.
We live in a manufactured reality. Mass society is a complex hyperreality full of reality tunnels that do not threaten the status quo. Everything is either highly managed or straight orchestrated by the power structure. Governments, are indexing firms for that power. There are, as there have always been, people behind the curtain..
It may appear that we are on a runaway train with nobody at the helm from the perspective of a normal person. However, the engineers just have different motivations, ethics and morality than what most people consider when they look at the mechanics of events. As long as it is useful, they will run a train right over an unfinished bridge into a deep canyon. It has happened before and it is happening again.
This sounds very Catholic to me. And I think it’s day is done. You create your own reality, and your own body, and your own experiences, based on what you think and feel constantly and intensely. There’s no them running the show. Life is your mirror. Look in it.
Good afternoon. Nothing I said is taken from Catholic ideology nor does Catholicism have any affect on any of my belief structures, unless you consider my avoidance of it. I see other people in this thread mentioned Catholic things, not I. With that being said, your second half:
"You create your own reality, and your own body, and your own experiences, based on what you think and feel constantly and intensely. There’s no them running the show. Life is your mirror. Look in it."
You seem to be conflating personal psychology with absolute reality. There are indeed people running the show. We do have the capacity to shape our own reality and experiences ( most people do not actually do so as they are captured by the hyperreality of mass society) and to a small degree our own body with environmental , dietary and physical conditioning. On a personal level, our lives are a mirror to a degree, as it relates to your own person, your environment and your belief structures. ( If you have indeed created your own thoughts and not merely appropriated others) However, there are also the same variables for the "Other" as well as the absolute reality that you , I , and everyone else (other) exists in. We may all have our own realities, or avenues of perception, but there is indeed an absolute reality that is not subjective on this physical plane. I assure you, I have "looked into it".
If you agree that the world works the way Caitlin describes here, then ask yourself just one question:
Why do you think corporations spend billions of dollars on lobbyists, lawyers, scientists, and PR firms?
The systems that are ‘behind the curtain’ are also a result of nature, not just human nature, but all natural tendencies of life on Earth to compete for survival and procreation. That said, we are evolving and can accelerate this evolution if we become more self aware of our oneness as organisms (not just as humans) and our ability to thrive without a fight to the death but rather collaboration and nurturing of others. It can be done but it is difficult to overcome natural tendencies. You see it in families and communities every day. We compete in sports that give us that natural bump we crave, but in the end we can find it in ourselves to love and nurture our competition after the big game is done. We can evolve.
No, that competitive reproduction drama is nothing more than the metanarrative of your particular fertility cult.
I don’t have a cult. My opinions are from my own observations. Living organisms compete to survive but also collaborate, both unwittingly and purposefully. Look around yourself
Your observations are conditioned by 3000 years of Greek culture by way of Christianity and empire. These animals have no more sense of contest than any herd in an abattoir. David Graeber from his creative refusal paper:
>However this may be, the heroic complex, if one might call it that, had an enduring impact. The city-states and empires of the classical Mediterranean, to take one vivid example, could well be seen as a kind of fusion of heroic principles into a standard of urban life drawn from the far older civilizations to its East – hardly surprising, perhaps, in a place where all literary education began with Homer. The most obvious aspect is the religious emphasis on sacrifice. On a deeper level, we find what Alvin Gouldner (1965: 45–55) called ‘the Greek contest system’, the tendency to turn absolutely everything, from art to politics to athletic achievement to tragic drama, into a game where there must be winners and losers. The same spirit appears in a different way in the ‘games’ and spirit of aristocratic competition in Rome. In fact, I would hazard to suggest that our own political culture, with its politicians and elections, traces back to heroic sensibilities. We tend to forget that for most of European history, election was considered the aristocratic mode of selecting officials, not the democratic one (the democratic mode was sortation: see Manin 1997, Dowlen 2009).
That Greek contest system? That's you right now, projecting drama onto life.
I see this natural tendencies argument as just patriarchal nonsense and hope we can get to the love and nurture before tearing each other apart. But it takes what it takes. That natural bump is just an adrenaline rush that we crave because we have left our souls so far behind in our drug fueled quest for more and better. How about less and good?
Well put.
Christ I hope you're right Caitlin! It's getting more and more challenging trying to keep sane while uncovering such vile and evil.
As we all heal, maybe empathy will develop where it needs to. This gives me hope sometimes.
I guess this is an adequate description of "reality" if one accepts the passive notion that there is no human agency, "reality" is totally subjective, and there is no possibility of changing reality.
"If that's all there is then let's keep dancing" (Peggy Lee, 1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M
But I would say that if reality is all subjective then changing it is merely a matter of dealing with your subjective self, and changing that. As some king said in some movie, surely madam, where the heart goes, the body has a right to follow. He of course meant nooky, but how about if he or I or you meant peace? Perhaps our bodies would be more peaceful if our hearts were.
I guess you missed my point, which was the opposite of changing individual hearts. For example, you want clean water? Then you need to understand and get involved in work like this (which I do every day):
https://bwolfe.substack.com/p/drbc-abandonment-of-adopting-water
No, I agree with that. It’s just been my experience that external change comes more easily and quickly when it follows internal change—in other words, I don’t get in my own way so much. But I agree with you. Action is absolutely necessary to change things.
It's called Nihilism
Sounds like someone just finished the last episode of 'The Prisoner'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQb37kSe8sE
Or maybe JRN...? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o66FUc61MvU
Before watching The Prisoner, try Danger Man in order to get the whole picture!
Great acting, great stories and a window into what our governments have been up to in the last 60 years that has led us directly up to where we are now!
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFR78Uf6Xh3h6p0yarqddRcupV7zFfUSo&feature=shared
(No wonder he resigned!)
Huuly shit, that's a new one on me! Does look amazing like Prisoner, lol. I'll give the first few eps a try. :) Ty.
"We have met No.1, and he is us!" lol.
Somehow, Colony Three got left off of that playlist.
Essential Danger Man episode as precursor to The Prisoner. Enjoy:
https://youtu.be/hrtiQNfw8TE?feature=shared
If there's no separate self then it seems to me it only makes sense to just pull the wool over one's 'own eyes so to speak and relax in the safety of one's own delusions while letting everyone else do the same. This way the delusion will simply just unravel of its own accord (the universe itself will do the unraveling). Trying to pit your delusion against that of an 'other' only causes the illusion of separateness to become more persistent (there is no 'other' to convince of your position, but acting as though there is makes it seem more 'real' that there's another person out there who's opinions are so dumb that "I" can't continue to live in the world another day until I correct his or her ignorant ass on twitter [or Xitter or whatever it's called now]).
If there are separations that are in some sense real then I guess this description would need some revising.
Our history is but the blink of an eye and although an eloquent viewpoint, I’m not sure it’s anything beyond evil vs good and evil has found new tools to dominate those willing to submit and kill those who refuse.
well, i'm pretty sure there will be a few who at least think they're behind the wheel and the curtain (while holding the unplugged controller). it would be nice if they tried to turn this thing around now, so they realise that it won't work and it's not going to work when we're only just 10 feet from the abyss, and then join the freaks leaning to one side trying to tilt this thing off it's wheels to get it to stop.