“No one before us has ever witnessed what we almost take for granted today. If only we would change our value system to place emphasis on cooperation, sharing, caring, and compassion rather than competition and the winner-takes-all mentality” Blogger Teresa Writer.
I was driving to the store the other day and noticed that while gasoline (petrol) prices here in the U.S. are rising, they are still not astronomically much higher yet. Diesel prices however are rising much more precipitously. And as I look around the world at the effect these two main wars (Ukraine and Iran) are having on oil supplies and transportation, I see an energy problem looming much greater and faster than we could imagine only a few months ago. I’m not meaning to be alarmist, but merely pointing out how the global human systems we rely upon are unravelling. What happens when the shipping of food and goods becomes economically problematic for the masses? A consequence of this is a major push to make everyone dependent on ‘philanthropy’ from national governments and their cabalistic overseers that lack any humanity.
Commodification of everything in our lives means we are no longer connected as communities able (and willing) to help each other. This is true of all developed and developing countries living within the current global economy. Now we can wallow in despair as we hide fearfully from a perceived coming apocalypse or act from a place of understanding. I note how over the last few decades, Hollywood (and media everywhere) has rolled out one movie after another of a dystopian future. Now you can live in fear of this, OR you can start to understand how relying on a hierarchical set of systems with corrupt values, no compassion and zero humanity is the problem. It’s easy to polarize people when they are in fear – that eliminates their attention to alternate and critical thinking, and makes them more susceptible to old tribalistic and irrational behaviors.
To recap much of what I have talked about these past many months. Acclimating people to an apocalypse is a slow conditioning rather than a sudden disaster or collapse. Psychologists have several terms to describe this condition: apocalypse fatigue; compassion collapse; psychic numbing, or; shifting baseline syndrome. While these serve as coping mechanisms for the anxieties and stresses of societal disfunction, it can make us more manipulable by the powers-that-be and even accepting of draconian solutions. Do we meekly accept it all, OR do we make choices that allow us to control our path to a future we really want? In past history, people have risen up with often bloody revolutions, merely to replace one tyrannical system with yet another one. This always seems to have happened at regional (national) levels. Today, however, we are now a global community, dysfunctional at this time, but for the first time, one where we, the people, can take back our sovereignty and make the decision to build a new future without waiting with hope for the corrupt powers-that-be to do it for us (which they won’t).
Our current world view based on 500 years or more of scientific-materialism is increasingly more dysfunctional that ever. “I’m referring to our idiotic tendency to place all our hopes on rapid economic and technological “growth,” while simultaneously cutting back on human education and ignoring human growth and development. Our societies (with the US leading the pack) focus almost exclusively on more and better ways to exploit our environment rather than learning to live with and nurture the natural world that is our only home. Or learning to live within our means… Put bluntly, humanity has been busy rejecting its own human potential, and placing all its trust in machines and technology. But since hi-tech progress alone cannot and will not “save” us, and we have cut off our other primary route to human “salvation,” all we are left with is… nothing. No way out. Our heavy cynicism has left us with a big, fat zero in terms of a positive future. That’s why I ask, with a heavy heart, “Is the human race actively suicidal?”” Blogger Richard Lowenthal
Real freedom has more to do with release from fear and scarcity than being able to do, go, and have what you want, which is how a consumer society values it. Equity is a value, but it comes from us, not hegemonically handed down to us. We have many laws that try to provide equity, which fail over time, but it is ours to promote for each other. In 2009 (updated 2024) two British epidemiologists, Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, wrote The Spirit Level. They argue that societies that are express more equality and which champion cooperation over competition tend to experience lower levels of mental illness than those with higher levels of inequality. And in that I interpret it as a release from fear brought on by modern social stresses. The powers-that-be “would rather have a herd than a population that has woken up” Roberto Suarez.
And as I have stated so many times, a lot of that change in mental health comes from one’s ability to control their future and having confidence in managing the many stresses that we face as people living within dystopian systems. Fear decreases mental capacity to cope and continues negative thinking., but acting on more positive values does the opposite. People living within a mindset of a hedonistic consumer society worry about all their stuff, and their ability to live ‘high on the hog’ in affluence and luxury. Materialistic values dominate thinking and behaviors. And YES, it’s all about values. Do you want to be happy or comfortable as economic conditions deteriorate? A strange comparison I know, but comfort and luxury do not automatically make one happy. Only feeling more secure while conditions allow for such security.
Richard Lowenthal has a good take on this problem; “Staying trapped in our consumer ‘comfort zone’ is suicidal – you don’t need it but you want it… In short, our addiction to ever-increasing comfort and convenience is a burgeoning social, ecological, and psychological disaster, and there’s no end in sight (as with any addictive process). But it gets worse. If being comfortable is one of our highest priorities, we end up with an extreme aversion to being UNcomfortable, which we label ‘bad.’ We then try to avoid anything that will inconvenience us or cause discomfort — especially EMOTIONAL discomfort, which is ‘very bad’… When comfort and convenience are paramount, we never learn to get beyond our fears OR our limitations. Superficially, we may feel comfortable, but on a deeper level we are supremely UNcomfortable — for life is a process of continual change and growth. When we blindly pursue comfort and convenience, we are avoiding/denying life and growth — because we must be WILLING to be uncomfortable, needy, and afraid at times in order to grow into our full human potential.”
And that human potential is what we need to embrace so that change we choose can occur. We persist in trying to tweak a broken system. Until we finally comprehend that this system is only broken for us nothing will happen. The system is NOT broken for the elites that designed it – it’s working the way this planned it to work. We’re just not part of receiving of the benefits. Since 1945 we did well enough for a few years, but that is all changing as the system reverts back to the way the controllers want it to run. Do we want a sustainable future or global feudalism. Sorry to sound so blunt, but trying to tweak this system gives us the latter. Our choices give us the path to the former.
And it all comes down to We the masses choosing which values we express and focus on. In my five items for change (see link for more), items 2 and 3 cover what we measure and the economy that manipulates and controls us. We need a market to measure what we want – not materialism or money, but how we use a new kind of economy to build a society that is equitable. We have ideas of how that should work, but the market we currently have cannot measure what we value (quality of life) and only values and measures the insidious designs of global hierarchies.
What do we want? I know from many conversations that it is NO more Fear, Hate, Anger and destructive competition. What WE want is Cooperation that builds communities. When we do this, we get Communities of small groups of people that will turn into larger groups of communities. When we focus on Peace, Love, Joy and collaboration/Cooperation, coupled with values that express our androgenous natures, we get partnerships and a global vision of working together for the Greater Good. We need to choose a new system that disregards the greed, corruption, and an economic system that enslaves and punishes us. Only then do we find a way to a planetary Steady State as our path forward to sustainability and a better future. It can only happen from the grass roots.
To Be Continued ………………
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