The Trashing of the World

The other day, talking about how the ultra-wealthy have the rest of us ever more and more in their absolute control, I quoted the Yiddish proverb, “If rich people could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.”

My friend Glenda replied, “They already do. This is their recruitment of rural kids from the poor regions of the United States, who cannot afford to attend universities, who cannot find jobs, so they are going to war in place of the rich kids who are attending universities or are put by their rich daddies into the family business. However, the poor don’t make a wonderful living, they actually make less than minimum wage if you add it all up with the hours they put in.”

Glenda is right. I am more and more convinced that there is a cabal of ultra-wealthy individuals. Their names are not particularly well-known. They work from the shadows, through their proxies and puppets and puppydogs. They are reinstituting a worldwide slave society, in which all but they have to work constantly for pitiful wages to cover the ever-rising cost of living. Onto these slaves, chained by bills and taxes to their workbenches, the ultra-wealthy have put so much burden that people are crushed thereunder. More than that, wars are engineered as ways to make money (munitions industries, prison industries, construction industries, and so on), as well as to kill off excess populations, and keep people living in fear.

North Americans and Western Europeans are kept in a miasma of fear and anxiety by the overwhelming flood of information coming at them. They are made to feel guilty unless they watch the news and catch up on Facebook. But there is too much information to digest, and it leaves us confused and disorganized, and yet always craving more, and feeling guilty if we fail to review all of the information. Moreover, the information is largely propaganda, and carefully calibrated so people think and behave exactly as this cabal of ultra-rich want.

As I write this essay, there is a peaceful occupation of Wall Street, the financial center of the United States and, effectively, the world. While there was plenty of coverage of similar events in North Africa, this is getting hardly even a brief mention on the mainstream news media - which are owned by the ultra-wealthy who stand to lose a bit of their fortunes if this occupation reaches any meaningful outcome. I have just learned that journalists with the only news outlet providing video feeds - a small alternative outfit that broadcasts through the internet - have just been arrested. Hm. I wonder why.

Shortly before I wrote this essay, I watched in horror the video of a crowd cheering a Republican candidate for the United States presidency when he bragged about executing more than two hundred (mostly minority) people in his state of Texas. And the video of a crowd calling for the death of a man in hospital who had no health insurance. And the video of another crowd screaming imprecations at a man in the United States military, serving in the front line of one of these nonsensical wars, who happens to be gay.

Most people in North America and Western Europe don’t know that nearly one million people have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since the United States invasions, according to the lowest credible estimates. Americans are trained to be chronically incapable of thinking about anybody but themselves. They rarely realize that the Afghanistan/Iraq wars have no credible raison-d’être – there is no relationship between these countries and the September 11 attacks. They have no clue that, on the pretext of those attacks, the United States government has caused the death of thousands of people for every one individual who died in those attacks. These wars are entirely about oil and power, and ego on the part of the Bush/Cheney/Rove collective.

Most Americans are chronically unable to see how the arrogation and bigotry of their government, and its insistence that it has the unilateral might-makes-right to invade other countries and dictate to them how to run their own affairs made such an attack almost inevitable. The September 11 attacks were utterly abhorrent to any pacifist like me. But far more abhorrent, to me, are all the many, and worse, ways in which the ultra-wealthy, through the United States government-military-corporate establishment, have profiteered on their egregious exploiting of bloodshed in the world. Millions of innocent people have died in wars engineered by the United States. Millions more suffer thanks to United States corporatocracy (e.g., Bhopal, the Gulf of Mexico, the Exxon Valdez).

Americans are chronically blind to how their country, which was once upon a time loved and respected, is now broadly hated in the world. The United States has squandered and trashed the good will of the world by betraying its vaunted dedication to good. It now is clearly out to exploit the entire world, through commerce and war. And what is bound soon to happen as a result the United States can only blame itself for.

Descartes famously said, Cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I exist.” It is one of the greatest misfortunes of this age that very few people are capable of truly thinking any more, and one wonders if, then, they truly exist. Oh, yes, they think they think, but it is what they have been trained and programmed to think by the mills the public schools have been turned into, by the propaganda news media, by the politicians and the clergy. “Education”, in schools and the media (both news and entertainment) and houses of worship, is no longer about opening minds to the ability to think creatively and critically and to make decisions thoughtfully and to communicate eloquently, but to prepare them for their lifelong enslavement to the system of producing more riches for the rich.

Indeed, speaking as a retired clergyperson, I blame religion (all religions) as a social institution. Just like countries, just like the medical or insurance or legal or what-have-you social institutions, the short-sighted dimwits who “run” the religious social institutions, wear the sheep's clothing of vaunted spirituality to hide their lupine nature (the analogy is borrowed from Jesus of Nazareth) as they rape the people.

But religion is, as an institution, simply another pool of power, on the part of the ultra-wealthy, to control and harvest the people of the world. It is the Roman Empire, which never died; it simply became the Roman Catholic Church and its similar organizational hierarchies.

Spirituality is not religion. Spirituality, the sui generis yearning of the soul for the infinite, is decidedly not a social institution. Jesus, Mohammed, Lao-tse, Gautama Buddha, Black Elk, etc., on whom all be peace, were not religious leaders, not presidents of some social institution. They were spiritual people. As such, they were antinomian. As such, they condemned the social institutions – they condemned the “pharisees”, the establishment, as hypocrites (as, said Jesus, “whited sepulchres all white without and full of corruption within”).

We need more people like them. We need more John Lennons, Sojourner Truths, Martin Luther Kings, Mahatma Mohandas Gandhis, Dalai Lamas. We need more prophets, provocateurs, revolutionaries, poets, visionaries – people who have a vision of humanity as it should be, and have the courage like those I’ve named to stand in front of the military tanks in Tiananmen Square, to stand up to the well-entrenched powers, to outrage the people, to challenge common assumptions, to inspire and lead the way to a new world.

It is indeed always a battle of sorts between the visionaries and those who would convert the Sacred into the merely mundane. For every Jesus, every visionary, there is an organizer, a corporatocracist, a Paul, a Constantine, to set up the bureaucracy and turn the wild sacred power of spirituality into the mundane and malleable religion. Mircea Eliade and Emile Durckheim both pointed out this sad fact. coming from different scholarly directions.

But does that mean we should give up? As a spiritualist and an artist, I vehemently reject that notion. If through my writings I inspire only one person or maybe a few, and they go on to inspire others – then my life has not been an entire waste.