In the developed countries, when you have enough monetary wealth to live comfortably, being in the rut is not such an imposition. It might still have problems, but you can afford to suffer through them – or as often happens, you can afford prescription or even non-prescription medications to blunt the problems of modern living. Loneliness, depression, isolation, drug abuse, alcohol, abuse, etc… are typical symptoms of many well-off people who might jet off to wonderful locations to suffer the same problems as they do at home. A story we often hear is how these well-off people feel that their lives are meaningless yet, cling to their illusionary lives with greed and and distrust of others. They continually fear losing their ‘wealth’ and being thrust into the black waters of depravation alone and unloved. Mind you, I’ve also heard many people say they would rather be rich and miserable than poor and miserable! The rut is the rut whichever way you look at it. It is a confined way of thinking in which love, happiness, joy and a fulfilled sense of well-being are fleeting visitors in what is mostly a dark and despondent existence. As I said in the last blog, we seem rooted to this lifestyle and the worldview that creates it. It like everything lese in our lives is an illusion that is perpetuated by a constant stream of messaging that reinforces the illusion that consumerism is the acme of human achievement. We are bamboozled into believing that this is the way it is and we have no other choices. In a nutshell, we are being controlled by a few people in the hierarchy to create a life they like at our expense. And they do it very well by using their monetary wealth to keep us ‘in our place.’ They do it by preying like parasites upon all our fears and promising us all manner of things that we apparently cannot do for ourselves to protect us from those fears.
The U.S. administration has taken to calling anything in the news that is not liked or that contradicts a self-illusion of the leadership, ‘Fake News.’ The information that is given out by the News Media is set to keep our fears focused and set on high. Sometimes it is a deliberate effort to maintain paranoia for elitist control and other times merely as a consequence of how the media works in order to ensure ‘high ratings’ to sell advertising that drives the hyper-consumer mentality. The crazy thing is that we do this to ourselves everyday, all day long while we are awake! We justify everything to ourselves based on some internal logic mostly based on FEAR and projections of what we think about the future – based on recalled experiences that happened in the past. Make no mistake, it is all about fear. Sit down and write a list of everything, big and small, that you are afraid of – be honest with yourself. Then ponder, WHY you are actually afraid. You have become dependent on ‘the system’ to provide everything. We are in a system of MASS HYPNOSIS in which the system keeps us rigidly linked to a set of belief structures that do NOT work for us, BUT in which we see no way out. Day in, day out, all day, the media are giving us the official worldview and belief systems of the world – when you repeat something non-stop, it is hard to see that it is repeating a myth that we take for reality. Before you get to thinking that rugged self-reliance (like Ayn Rand Libertarianism) is what I am heading towards, let me dispel that now. The movies have done, and still do, propagate this myth all the time.
In the U.S. there is this myth of the Rugged Pioneer – The Little House on the Prairie kind of stuff. In the late 1700s to the mid-1800s there may have been independent-minded families that squatted on land on the edge of the frontier (the imaginary boundary between euro-style civilization and Indian Territories), but that is a rarity not a norm. During the western expansion, where the Europeans moved westwards into Indian territory, they came in their thousands to claim marked out plots of land set up by the geological survey office. They also lived in ‘townships’ that were proposed to create a set of communities that fostered mutual support of all the ‘settlers’ within the township community. Thomas Jefferson had his Agrarian Dream in which he believed that the country would thrive if it every man was a self-reliant farmer as part of a community that produced their own goods locally. He disdained the idea of a manufacturing, until this experiences during the War of 1812, when he recognized that there must be some domestic centers for manufacturing goods not feasible to be produced locally. James Madison essentially had this ‘dream’ that eventually became the one we experience today – an economy driven consumer society. I’m not sure he would have liked how I turned out, but that’s the way it has done. The stuff might be fine but how the lifestyle driven by it? Back to how we let it happen – the great disempowerment!
One of the greatest myths we hold dear is that we are the pinnacle of human achievement. Daniel Quinn again has a good metaphor for us to look at. He likens modern human thinking to the ‘Taker Thunderbolt Express.’ It is as though we have decided that our technological genius has repealed the law of gravity. We like to think that our society is flying along free of the constraints of having to live within the natural world – running an infinitely growing economy in a world of limited resources. I have talked with many business people and they seriously believe that human ingenuity can overcome all resource restrictions and maintain this type of economic fantasy. We like to believe we are flying. But is it really free-fall? How does one tell? I had a skydiver friends that told me when he jumped from 20,000 ft he found he can control the directional motion of his body to the extent that he actually felt like he was flying for a short while. Some of the modern wing-suit jumpers have said the same. This is despite the fact that they are hurtling at alarming speeds towards the ground. For the wingsuit jumpers, it is easy, they see the cliffs they launched off rushing by them. For the skydiver, not so obvious. When you are high up, the ground don’t seem to get close for quite a while. My friend one time said he was so engrossed in this one jump over the coast above water that he forgot to keep track of his altitude. The water just didn’t seem to be getting any closer – no visuals. Then he suddenly became aware of ‘ground-rush’ from the beach below him. He immediately pulled his chute and was able to manage a safe landing. Six more seconds and he would have made a great splat on the beach. To end this post, at what point does the whole of humanity realize when we are not flying but free falling and at ground-rush. Some argue we are already there. Some argue we have plenty of time yet. And some still think we are flying. While we debate this, six seconds goes awfully fast! Why do we insist on staying in the rut with beliefs that do not work for us? To Be Continued…..
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