For many years now, my message has been that tweaking around the edges of a systemically corrupt and discredited economic and political system is not good enough. Rather, what we need is a full scale, species-wide paradigm shift in the way human affairs are conducted on this planet. No small task I know, which is why this series of posts will zero in on four key areas, or pillars, we need to focus on if we’re to evolve and leave this earth meaningfully better than when we arrived.
Knowledge
Let’s kick things off with the low-hanging fruit, knowledge. This is the area I’ve focused on the longest, and my desire to acquire knowledge and share it is what inspired the creation of this website and my dedication to it in the first place.
In this case, the knowledge I’ve been accumulating relates to how the world around us actually functions, as opposed to how we’re told it functions. Some people inform us we live in a Democracy where our vote matters, but overwhelming evidence and life experience demonstrates this to be total nonsense. Others tell us we reside in a Republic where the U.S. Constitution is the supreme inviolable law of the land, but that’s also a lie. In real life, the Constitution is completely ignored by politicians, and most certainly by the unaccountable and unelected shadowy intelligence agencies. Finally, there are those who insist we live in a free market system characterized by countless choices and vibrant competition, but this is rapidly becoming a fantasy to anyone who actually engages in the economy.
The glaring truth of the matter is the U.S. is managed by a unified corporate and political oligarchy that agrees and collaborates on all issues of importance to them irrespective of the meaningless and dishonest Republican or Democratic flags they fly in public.
There are several issues this crowd will fight to the death to preserve no matter what the public thinks. Here are a few:
1) Central Banking. An unaccountable and rigged monetary system run by central banks who answer to the oligarchs and bail them out when they run into trouble or desire war is absolutely critical to oligarch power. In the U.S., this is the Federal Reserve.
2) Empire. Oligarchs, irrespective of superficial political party affiliation, are all in favor of an imperial U.S. that works to dominate as much of the planet and its resources as possible. There’s an incredible amount of money available in empire to the oligarchy, and it’s irrelevant to them if such ambitions end up hurting 99.99% of the public back home.
3) Surveillance. Top tier predators are evil, but they aren’t stupid. They know what they’re up to, and they know how completely rigged and unethical the system they created and support is. As such, they demand the ability to spy on the public all will. It’s an insurance policy against the plebs waking up and revolting. This is exactly why Democratic leadership just voted to give the surveillance state under Trump increased spying powers despite hyperventilating about him being a Kremlin agent for a year straight. The oligarchy will do anything to preserve the spy network, and oligarchs own and control Congress.
4) Monopoly/Concentration of Power. The oligarchy strives to attain and maintain as much concentration of power as possible. Business/finance oligarchs manifest this in the achievement of monopolies in as many economic sectors/markets as possible. A perfect example from my life is healthcare. For the year 2018, I had a grand total of one choice from which to buy health insurance for my family. That’s a lot of things, but it’s definitely not a free, competitive market.
Meanwhile, the political/bureaucratic oligarchs aim for unaccountable centralized power in our very own version of Panem, Washington D.C. This is why our government consists of lawless intelligence agencies, an imperial Presidency and it’s also why half of the ten wealthiest counties in the U.S. surround the district of criminals. If that isn’t proof of an unimaginably corrupt and centralized government, I don’t know what is.
The issues listed above are the ones that really matter to oligarchs, which is why they’re never subject to serious public debate. The oligarchy will always rally aggressively to defend these key interests, while allowing the unwashed masses to endlessly debate everything else. As Chomsky noted:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
The above is basically what the corporate media does. It ensures people endlessly bicker about all the stuff oligarchs don’t really care about.
Consciousness
During the first five years of writing on this website, I relentlessly focused on knowledge. I wanted to learn as much as possible about our systemically corrupt system and share this with anyone who would listen. I’d publish multiple articles a day in an attempt to get people educated and outraged about everything rotten around us. In the process, I neglected something exceedingly important, my own consciousness.
The lightbulb moment for me came early last year when I started to read and learn about Spiral Dynamics, and came across the work of Ken Wilber. It made me recognize the importance of consciousness evolution to the manifestation of a sustainably superior paradigm for the human species. It also provided me with a useful framework which helped me stay steady and sane while much of the population descended into tribal madness defined by enormous societal pressure to either join the dishonest “resistance” movement led by sleazy, war-mongering corporate Democrats and neocons, or rally around a shifty, egomaniac with authoritarian tendencies who promised to “Make America Great Again.” These weren’t rational or conscious options for me, and Spiral Dynamics helped me understand why. (Note: I wrote a 5-part series on the topic).
Trump’s election and the societal madness that followed forced me to look inward and admit some very uncomfortable truths. First, it made me realize that knowledge isn’t enough. The public can be fully aware of how corrupt the current system is, but if this merely results in anger and an unconscious response, we’ll just end up in the same place after the revolutionary dust settles. In fact, history shows us that unconscious revolutions are often led by power-hungry despots who are often even worse than what came before.
I realized that getting people outraged was insufficient, and this misguided focus was a manifestation of my own lack of consciousness. Once I understood this at a deep level I could begin to heal myself and look inward. I came to understand that I was spending too much time demonizing others and obsessing about what’s wrong in the world, versus working on myself and my own failings. I realized that while the overwhelming majority of us cannot impact world events, we can impact the world around us each and every day via our thoughts and actions. I came to understand that if enough people understood this and started to manifest decency and love on a micro level, the world would change.
Equally important, I recognized that identifying a problem doesn’t do any good unless you come up with solutions. What benefit will be achieved if we deal with the current crop of corrupt oligarchs just to have another, potentially more sociopathic, group take over afterwards?
This is a real concern the seriousness of which is highlighted by pretty much all human history. This is precisely why consciousness is such a key pillar to sustainable change. It’s only through a conscious mindset that we’ll arrive at creative, sustainable, ethical and liberating solutions to our problems.
Tomorrow’s post will pick up from there and focus on the two solution-focused pillars, innovation and local action.
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Micael Krieger
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https://socialismisnottheanswer.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/illegal-aliens-quietly-being-relocated-throughout-u-s-on-commercial-flights/
Well, of course illegal aliens are being transported to other states. Texas and other border states know that they can’t stop them, so instead thety send them to other states knowing that future illegal aliens will migrate to other states instead of Texas.
However, what the link fails to mention is that Texas is actully shipping ALL minorites to other states. That way, Texas stays red and remains in Republican hands. This is with an agreement between the Democrats and the Republicans, so that is why the Trump administration is cooperating. Part of the agreement is that they can only be shipped to solid blue states, so liberals keep their illegal immigrants and conservatives keep the southern states. However, this information (as well as the likely data source for your link) are old info. I saw this all before in an article dated 4/1/2017.
This is beautifully said there is nothing more powerful than fixing yourself
Good. I had the same experience.
Spiral Dynamics – How to raise our collective consciousness: Possible solutions from Psychohistory.
Increasing the collective consciousness to the yellow layer and above is very important, but the big question is how to actually do it.
I’ve recently read alot of Psychohistory, primarily Lloyd deMause’s work, and I think it provides important insights on how this could be done.
I highly recommend reading “The Origins of War in Child Abuse”, freely available here:
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-origins-of-war-in-child-abuse/ (The emotional life of nations and Reagan’s America are decent follow up reads)
Independently of Spiral dynamics this provides alot of insights into the functioning of society and culture in general and, I think, is important to know for anyone interested in any of the following:
Politics, Culture, Society, Psychology, Parenting, War, what the root of violence is, how to judge how healthy people and cultures are, etc.
Anyway in brief what psychohistory found is that parenting has evolved of the course of history, slowly becoming less and less abusive. They distinguish different parenting modes based on that, which in turn create different “psycho-classes” of people which build different basic cultures.
What I’ve noticed here is that these psycho-classes heavily overlap with the layers of consciousness described in Spiral Dynamics. Both in description and in the historical timelines they occured.
For example [spiral dynamics layer color vs parenting mode]:
purple & infanticidal mode & abandoning mode?: Both result in tribal societies.
blue layer & ambivalent made & abandoning mode?: both share the appearence of the first big societies. Harsh law and order honor societies, on the lower end theocratic societies, at the upper end secular dictatorships.
orange layer & intrusive mode: both are currently dominant modes of society, both share capitalism and the age of enlightenment.
green layer & socializing mode: both are currently dominant modes of society and became so in the last few decades.
yellow layer & helping mode: Both of those are very recent and appeared appeared in the 20th century. Both of those have in common the disappearance of irrational fears.
Now seeing how much these overlap both in historical timelines and by description I highly doubt that’s a coincidence. Most likely Spiral dynamics and Psychohistorians observed the same phenomenon from different angles.
If that is true that means the solution to raising the collective consciousness is to improve parenting to the helping mode (and above). Specifically that would mean no child abuse, no abandonment, no emotional manipulation but parents respecting their children’s individuality and giving them enough attention, hugs etc. and supporting them in developing in the areas they naturally want to instead of trying to push them into a specific outcome. Your choice as a parent is a healthy or an unhealthy version of whatever your child naturally is, not turning it into X. Trying to turn your child into X will always give you a more unhealthy version of your child.
The helping mode is a low stress mode of parenting for the child (all forms of abuse and neglect result in higher cortisol).
This lines up with other studies on what stress does to the brain and psychological health. Basically the higher stress is during critical brain development the stronger the reptile brain gets and the weaker all higher human brain functions become (primarily neocortex brain regions). There’s lots of studies that show this, from direct brain scans that show this activity shift to correlations in humans with more abusive childhoods and less developed brain regions, lower IQ, more drug addiction, crime and viloence, to all kinds of stress animals during pregnancy studies like loud noises, electroshocks, injecting cortisol, preventing the mother animal from licking/petting it’s offspring. All of those have higher cortisol in common and all of those have shown psychotic behaviour in anmials.
The youtube presentation “The bomb in the brain” by stephan molyneux provides a good overview about that, so I recommend looking at that aswell. Regardless of what you think about orange layer Molyneux and his libertarian views he did to a good job in this video and his parenting videos in general, so i recommend that aswell.
What everyone can personally do:
1) Spread this knowledge to all the people especially parents that you know.
2) Identify people’s parenting modes. Especially your own and the ones of all the parents you know. Try to shift it to a less abusive and more helping mode like behaviour if they aren’t at the helping mode
3) Donate to institutions/charities that promote peaceful/helping mode like parenting. Focus on those that actually go out there and educate and assist parents. Unfortunately I don’t have a list of good charities yet, but if you know the correct parenting style you should be able to identify which ones are working towards the right goal.
I intend to add this comment to a few of your articles, so more people will see it. So I apologise in advance for the spam.
R.Z. I think your observation and research is accurate, and as a parent I am along with my beautiful wife experiencing much of what you stated in your comments along with Mike’s continuing ideas of a action based conscious solution to a global awakening. When observing just mine and my wife’s parents and family history I can see the stages of evolution happening.
Now my only caution is that we can see that society has at least here in the west embraced an extreme out of balance reaction to those older more dictatorial parental behaviors, that example being the extreme P.C. liberal mindset that entitle’s, coddles and shelters children and young adults from real world challenges and is in fact stiffling human growth that comes from overcoming adversity, etc.
My personal opinion is that as we approach the great confrontation/global awakening those who need to join or continue to support the team will become more extreme (I believe we are seeing this now), those people who are in the actionable stages of awakening will see this and the absolute need for balance and harmony.
I feel a big part of the solution is through parenting in a balanced way. Love and nurturing one’s child should lead the way but as one can observe through nature there are times when the child needs those short sharp shocks to be spurred into greater self awareness for any number of reasons necessary for the young ones own development and evolution. Sheltering and coddling a child does as great a disservice to a child’s growth as does the heavy handed abuse many of us saw in our own childhood. As I age and grow as an individual and a parent I am reminded every day to balance the facts of my individual self and the fact that in the greater realm we are all of one consciousness and neither should be neglected or extremely fed. For me the windows of wisdom that come from Yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Shamanism, as well as embracing any avenues of knowledge and wisdom that present themselves without the need to label or cling to any single one has been an indispensable help in my growth, that and of course my own life experience and the shit we are all served at some point in our lives.
“I came to understand that if enough people understood this and started to manifest decency and love on a micro level, the world would change.”
At the risk of sounding both trite and repetitive, that happens one person at a time. So if you demonstrate decency and love in your interactions with the people in your day to day life, then you’re making a difference.
But if you are expecting every person to react the way you want them to react, and then feel offended if they don’t react the way you “think” they should react, then you’re missing the point.
The “point” you are missing is if you feel offended, then you need to lose your sense of self-importance. Otherwise you’re doomed to live your entire life feeling offended. When you feel offended it takes away your personal power and it makes you weak.
A perfect example of how that works is now on full display with the “resistance” BS regarding Trump. It’s a 24/7 self-importance, self-indulgent, “I’m offended” contest. Same applies to the “me too” movement.
Krishnamurti said that “Knowledge Impedes Perception.” – aka wisdom. it’s a Sagittarius Jupiter Pisces Neptune dilemma.
Wonderful insight. Makes me think of ideas written by Thomas Jefferson according to a book titled Mr. Jefferson by Alfred J. Nock. A renowned author in libertarian circles. He has some great, maybe slow reads, but worth the time. His time was 1870 to 1945 so I think this book was written 1920 to1930. His best, ? also my Enemy the State. Keep Going, you are doing mankinds work. REM
Mike-
I’ve followed the similar learning/knowledge curve. As I’ve said here before, I have almost every book that Wilber has written. Ironically enough, I think that the following article — which I got through a ZH post near your post today — has the ability transcend the Spiral as we know it: https://eand.co/the-story-eea04d97062b
Let me know what you think… Matt
Hey Matt, I thought the article was ok. He does a pretty good job of identifying the root sickness of this paradigm’s obsession with maximizing income in the short-term, but his solutions are mainly just nice words that at times made me feel like I was reading some ramblings about a Communist utopia. Not much meat on the bones, and when he does offer some structure, it’s not good.
In particular, this was a nauseating line:
“To do it, it’s different in structure: it probably has a Chief Eudaimonia Officer or the like.”
No, that’s exactly the sort of structure we don’t need, as I describe in detail in Part 2 of this series. He should read up on Bitcoin, crypto assets and decentralization. We’ve had enough centuries of topdown societal management.
Mike- I agree with your reaction after reading several more articles. (Is there away to respond to your response?) One thing that is clear from the “clapping” at Medium is that people are not interested in the details. I have reached out to him via LinkedIn. He is a lot further along than most. I do agree that “To do it, it’s different in structure: it probably has a Chief Eudaimonia Officer or the like.” is not the way forward.
Matt
After the great recessions aftermath and the occupy uprising I believed that this country was recognizing the corruption that is inherent in our political and economic systems. It gave me hope for a while. Until it became polluted somehow? I know many saw occupy as only a leftist movement, but I saw people waking up to realizing both parties were corrupt.
Now, several years later I can barely tolerate waking up to see news of the day and wonder WTF happened to our country. It is depressing and I wonder what kind of world we will leave for my children.
I totally agree that what is happened is not just understanding and realizing that knowledge of the corruption will create a better world or any significant change. I too believe that it is a spiritual crisis that may indicate the fall of our empire. It is crumbling from within and most of us working class folks just wake up daily to make sure we keep a roof over our families heads.
I recently have read a couple of articles expressing similar sentiments and I think you are on to something…now what do we do?
Thanks for your writing and insight.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/14/america-is-spiritually-bankrupt-we-must-fight-back-together
OUR GOVERNMENT IS A PART OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER:
http://nworeport.me/2018/01/25/congress-quietly-passes-bill-making-biometric-ids-mandatory-for-all-americans/
Genaro, you are greatly misjudging the “MeToo” movement. You don’t seem stupid, but I can’t understand how you can be so ignorant, especially in the face of what has transpired over the last year. The “#MeToo” movement is about empathy (“you are not alone”), not self-importance something you seem to be sorely lacking. Without evidence, the victim is almost never beleived – unless there are several other victims as well. Of course, most victims have no way of knowing the other victims, so the sexual predators are free to go on. Before this year, most organizations treated sexual hrassment as a publicity problem, as opposed to criminal behavior. I guess you are on Nassar’s side. Here is some of what he had to say:
“What I did in the state cases was medical, not sexual…I tried to avoid a trial to save the stress to this community, my family and the victim. Yet look what is happening. It is wrong…Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. It is just a complete nightmare. The stories that are being fabricated to sensationalize this. ”
Nassar was reported over and over to multiple authorites, but the victim was not believed. 150+ “fabrications” to finally convict 1 doctor. How many did it take for Weinstein?
Try this empathy experiment: imagine if you were raped by a man. How would you feel? Would you report it to the police? Would you report it to anyone?
You and I are on the same page, but most citizens are too distracted etc. zu care, or know, also too busy etc. Those posessed by power, money, dogma, etc, are those “on top”.