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| Ray on his birthday 2014 |
Today is my birthday, and as might be expected, I am
in a particularly reflective mood. As a gift
to myself – and hopefully to you as well – I am going to attempt to clarify my
current beliefs about “How the world works.”
This is not an easy task because those who are actually in charge of the
planet relentlessly conceal their true motivations and methods. If this subject proves intriguing to you
folks out there, I will revisit it each year on my birthday.
*******
But first, here is a short meditation on birthdays and
age. Because I am zealous about staying
in shape, I am often asked how old I am.
My usual answer is, “I am in my Middle Years.” Although this answer sounds evasive, it
actually stems from a deeper inquiry into this topic. My analysis is that there are four elements
to human aging.
·
CHRONOLOGICAL AGE Unfortunately, this is the
dominant method that our culture uses to measure someone’s age. But I contend that it is probably the least
reliable marker.
·
BIOLOGICAL AGE
This is a far more accurate
denominator of a person’s position along their life path. How strong and pliant is your cardio-pulmonary-vascular
system? Are your joints troublesome and
has your muscle dissolved into fat? Is
your mind still sharp or is your memory a shifting fogbank? These markers will provide a much better
assessment of your true age than any calendar can.
·
EMOTIONAL AGE Do you handle the disappointments and tragedies of life
with composure and grace? Someone with a
short fuse and a long stress horizon will probably be older than their calendar
years might suggest.
·
PHILOSOPHICAL AGE
This is the category in which
a person should strive to be older than their chronological total. If one can achieve the “Wisdom of an Elder”
at an early stage in life, this will bequeath them an inner harmony that will
normally lead to increased longevity and greater happiness.
So my belief is that true age is a tapestry of these
different threads. If a person can
achieve advanced emotional and philosophical maturity early in life, and if
they combine that with healthy eating and exercise, this will lead to such
vibrant biological wellness that they can practically ignore the calendar.
*******
And now back to the main topic of
this meditation – “What I Think I Know.” I truly cannot remember any time when
I was not inquisitive and idealistic.
Life lessons from a great mom instilled in me a passion for trying to
figure things out and for trying to make things better. These same elemental desires still provide
the foundation for all of my efforts to understand and to communicate.
I also received inspiration and guidance from some wise
quotations from three great thinkers - Socrates, Whitman and Thoreau. Socrates bolstered my inquisitiveness with
his counsel that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Walt Whitman further reinforced this with his
injunction to “question much and obey little.”
And Thoreau outlined how a simple and unencumbered material existence
helps foster an abundant philosophical life with this statement: “a man is rich
in direct proportion to the number of things that he can live without.”
And now, as I look back from my Middle Years, at all
of my striving to understand and improve, what have these pursuits bequeathed
me? Unfortunately, the answer is DISILLUSION
and DISCOURAGEMENT. It has not yet
degenerated into DESPAIR, but sometimes I feel like I am standing at the border
about to enter that bleak territory.
I challenge anyone to deeply investigate this world,
and not emerge with their beliefs shattered.
Every institution that we are trained to respect in our formative years,
is at best fraudulent and at worst pathological. The State, the Church, the Military, the
Police, the Intelligence Agencies, the Corporate World, and the Media are all
corrupt to the core and are now just metastasized tumors of greed, hubris and
violence.
·
THE STATE – The
Western Democracies are a total charade.
They might claim to answer to the will of the people, but their actions
prove that they answer almost exclusively to the will of the RICH people. They are a more subtle - and therefore more insidious
- modern version of aristocracy or oligarchy.
Competing with these depraved, lip-service democracies is a truly
frightening retro form of government - Islamic Theocracies. Seeking to reinstate cultural codes that were
repugnant even in the Iron Age, these aberrant social deformities continue
gaining ascendancy as a counter-weight to what they perceive as Western
degeneracy. With these as the two main
governmental options, the term “lose-lose situation” leaps to mind.
·
THE CHURCH – The
earthly mission of Religion Inc. can be summed up in one word – CONTROL. Churches want to dominate people’s
lives. And they do this with hideous
weapons – either fear-mongering or the promise of salvation. Any cult whose foundation rests upon two
concepts that cannot be proven – namely that a god exists and that there is a
heaven and a hell – should immediately be suspect and presumed to be a
con. But instead, the religious powers
have managed to convince most of the planet that such absurdities don’t require
evidence and can be accepted on the basis of faith. And even though the priests and rabbis and
mullahs claim that religious savagery is a thing of the past, just look at
today’s headlines and it is clear that sacred butchery is still a global
scourge.
·
THE MILITARY –
The most powerful element of what I call The Malignant Overlords is the
military/industrial complex. Their
lobbyists roam Washington like bloated locusts campaigning for endless
war. Indeed, in the last few weeks Leon
Panetta has claimed that the conflict with ISIS could stretch out for 30 years.
These people are putrid inside. They create the most obscene weaponry and
just when you think they cannot get any worse, they come up with something even
more despicable. Now they want to
weaponize space and cyberspace. And
because of our “no-future for young people economy” they have a steady stream
of poor kids for whom killing and getting killed is their best economic option.
·
THE POLICE - Only a fool can look at the evolution of the
U.S. police force and still believe that their role is to serve and protect. They look like galactic storm-troopers and
they behave like a playground bully on steroids. Vets returning from the Middle East
repeatedly claim that U.S. cops have better combat gear than they did overseas. They have not been militarized by accident. The Malignant Overlords realize that the
serfs will eventually reach a breaking point; and so they intend to have
enormous tactical advantage.
·
THE INTELLIGENCE
AGENCIES – It is difficult to not bring up the “military intelligence is an
oxymoron” argument here. But even more
important than their rampant incompetence, is the depravity of their
mission. Essentially, their duty is to
undermine any leader or government that refuses to “play ball with
America.” This is code for allowing U.S.
corporations free reign within that sovereign country to avail themselves of
the best resources and the cheapest labor.
In the good old days, the U.S. Marines would pave the way for the United
Fruit Company. But now it is the spook
agencies that “open up markets” for the American multi-nationals.
·
THE CORPORATE
WORLD – Where should I begin when citing the evils of the Multi-nationals? Their only allegiance is to PROFIT. They don’t care about people or countries or
the planet. The scorn they have for
their workers is aptly demonstrated by their policy of “off-shoring.” This is OrwellSpeak for firing millions of
workers and vaporizingh entire industrial areas; leaving behind a wasteland of
poverty, addiction and despair. This off-shoring
also ravages the peasants at the other end of this profit river. Those largely self-sufficient farmers
suddenly find themselves lured or forced into sweatshops where they are
overworked at slave wages. But as bad as
the manufacturing corporations are, they seem enlightened when compared to the
financial institutions which have become a massive part of the global
economy. These soul-less entities,
receive billions in taxpayer bailouts and yet won’t even make loans to Main
Street. Instead they play the
international financial market casino in which vast profits are made through
the trading of absolutely nothing of value to society. It’s all high-frequency gibberish and voodoo.
·
THE MEDIA – I am
tempted to use the phrase “The Pimpery” here, even though I doubt if there is
such a word. But it surely is
appropriate. When almost all of the
major media are owned by six or seven major players, who are all obscenely
rich, whose interests do you think they will promote? I am old enough to remember a time when there
were reporters who sought the truth or the story behind the story. Now they seek only career advancement and
face time on the Tube. I can’t watch the
nightly news without an air sickness bag nearby.
This brief description of the corruption and
perversity of the bedrock institutions of modern civilization is profoundly
troubling. But the future appears even bleaker,
when one assesses the trajectory of events.
It is as if the Malignant Overlords have taken Orwell’s 1984, which was
written as a cautionary novel, and turned it into an operating manual. It genuinely appears that they are trying to
structure a society of rulers, technicians and serfs. Their spying capabilities, their militarized
police, their desire to plant microchip tracking devices in everyone, certainly leads one to
conclude that what the elites truly desire is a HUMAN HERD that can be
controlled and dominated.
*******
As I survey this panorama, from what I hope is the
maturity of my Middle Years, I see little cause for optimism. Electoral politics surely won’t change
things. And revolution is practically
suicidal, given the surveillance powers and the militarized police that the
State can wield.
So what is left?
I believe that the only possible solution is COLLAPSE. The whole putrid, artificial and violent
edifice must fall. Don’t try to reform
it! Don’t try to overthrow it! Abandon it!
Escape! Flee! Go somewhere and find a mode of living that
provides you as much separation as possible from the tentacles of a soul-less,
joy devouring civilization.
And as it slouches towards self-immolation, prepare
yourself to survive the collapse. It
could source from any or all of what I call the Big Bad “E”s – Energy,
Economics or Ecology. It will be massive
and destructive. And if you do “make it
through to the other side” as a singer/poet once said, I hope you help sculpt a
neo-tribal future that is sustainable, just, caring, joyous and authentic.
By the way, that is a future that I live in the
present. You can do so as well! If I help inspire you in that direction, then
that can be my birthday present to you.
Happy birthday - my unknown friends!