After struggling against our own self-destructive tendencies throughout the entirety of recorded history, humanity is now at a point where that struggle is probably going to be resolved, one way or another, within the lifetime of most people reading this.
The movie about this struggle has been written with one of two possible endings. In the first, we are unable to overcome our self-destructive tendencies, and the last of our species dies by radiation poisoning or choking on the dust of an uninhabitable planet. In the second, we evolve beyond our self-destructive tendencies and move into a healthy relationship with our minds, our ecosystem, and each other.
Neither of these two endings would work in a Hollywood blockbuster. In the first, humanity dies off not with a bang but with a whimper as a result of nuclear fallout or climate collapse. In the second, conflict and drama as we know it will cease to exist as we pull up and away from the self-destructive patterns which brought us to this point. We’ll either keep along this same destructive trajectory and meet its inevitable end very soon, or we’ll deviate from that trajectory into something wildly different. In either case, there is no kissing the girl while the credits roll, no coolly striding away from the explosion, and no spin-kicking the bad guy off a cliff into lava after uttering a short, memorable line.
I say this because it seems like a lot of people are kind of hoping for a Hollywood ending in some way. People are hoping that Donald Trump gets arrested for conspiring with Russia and dragged off in chains and everything goes back to normal. People are hoping that President Trump drains the swamp, locks up Hillary Clinton, arrests most of Capitol Hill for child molestation, and destroys the Deep State. People are hoping there’s a violent revolution which restores individual sovereignty to the citizenry. People are hoping there’s a peaceful people’s revolution which ousts the ruling class and replaces the status quo with whatever their personal favored strain of leftism is. Everyone’s subconsciously looking for some big, momentous climax where the Good Guys are vindicated and the Bad Guys are brought to justice.
And it just isn’t going to go down like that.
If you’ve paid much attention to human behavior throughout your life, you know that we reliably repeat the same patterns until there’s inner healing and personal growth. If you’ve experienced inner healing and personal growth, you know that the actual experience of it is generally anti-climactic. True healing is always a game of subtraction, and it moves in the exact opposite direction of the egoically satisfying mental narratives which Hollywood has grown so skilled at providing us. When true inner healing takes place, it doesn’t usually make for a good story, and its effects often go unnoticed for some time, because they are evidenced not in the addition of something new but in the subtraction of something old. You look at your memories of your old unwholesome behavior patterns and think “Hmm, how strange that I used to do that sort of thing!”
If humanity transcends its unwholesome patterns at the end of this movie, it’s going to happen in much the same way. Not in an egoically gratifying way where we see our most hated political figures punished and our own ideological preferences uplifted, but in the simple falling away of old patterns. If human consciousness evolves to the point where we can avert our own destruction, then it will necessarily have dropped the egoic patterns of fear, greed and negativity which kept us bound to our old destructive behaviors. Were that to happen, we’d probably struggle to even remember what we used to stress and rage about when looking at the state of our world.
Nothing else will do the trick. If we do come to some dramatic, egoically satisfying climax, like where all the oligarchs and warmongers are guillotined and their wealth distributed among the needy or whatever, then it isn’t the end of the movie. We have not arrived at a point where we’ve transcended our old patterns, we’ve just seen those old patterns manifest in a way which happens to be egoically pleasing to us in this particular instance. And we will soon see them manifest in ways which we find far from pleasing again.
We will not arrive at our happy ending unless we collectively heal away those old egoic addictions to drama and conflict. Even if we did somehow manage to create a utopia without healing away those old egoic addictions, it would be quickly destroyed and the countdown to doomsday restarted by the gnashing, looping patterns which brought us to the brink of extinction in the first place.
Because guess what? From the perspective of our current state of drama-addicted and conflict-addicted collective consciousness, a world without drama and conflict is dull and worthless. Those addictions will keep leading us toward our destruction until we shed them, if for no other reason than our psychological inability to live in a peaceful, harmonious world.
Are you able to live in a peaceful, harmonious world? A world that is boring to the ego and unsuitable for Hollywood scripts? When I look at the behavior of a lot of activists on social media, it seems like a lot of them fear an end to drama and conflict more than they fear the end of the world. It sounds funny to say, but I think this is legitimately the case for many people. Our addiction to drama and conflict is so strong and our ability to just be at peace in the here and now so weak that keeping things from becoming harmonious can feel like an existential life-and-death need. And we all know people who are strongly predisposed toward stirring up drama to feed that illusory need.
To be able to live in a peaceful world where we collaborate harmoniously with our ecosystem and our fellow humans, we’ll have to transcend our inability to simply be. To have a world where all human ingenuity is pointed at making the world a better place instead of inventing new ways to create landfill for mass consumption and new ways to kill and exploit each other, we’re going to have to have minds that are able to survive in an environment with a lot less conflict, and, once our ingenuity really gets going, a lot less work as well. Minds that can rest comfortably without frenetic busyness or drama. Such minds are currently rare among our species.
The reason there are so many Hollywood movies about dystopian futures and hardly any about utopian futures is because there is no drama and conflict in utopia. Hollywood movies bring in the big bucks by being egoically pleasing to watch; it’s ego candy to watch heroes kicking villains off cliffs, because we can place ourselves in the role of the protagonist and imagine ourselves emerging triumphantly from the drama and conflicts displayed on the screen.
This is why I refer to myself as a “utopia prepper”. In order to have a peaceful, harmonious world, we’re going to have to have minds that are receptive to such a thing. I consider cultivating such a mind to be the most important thing I do in paving the way for paradise on earth, abandoning all attachments to our old ways of operating and opening a path within myself for something new. This will necessarily happen among us all if we’re to see the happy ending of this movie, and if we do it won’t be spectacular. It won’t be egoically gratifying. We’ll simply cease engaging in unwholesome patterns in a very anti-climactic way, begin channeling our ingenuity into making the world a better place, and perhaps once in a while look back on history and think, “Hmm, how strange that we used to do that sort of thing!”
_________________________
Thanks for reading! My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
43 responses to “The Revolution Has No Hollywood Ending”
This article is excellent. Caitlin is talking about a possible Enlightened humanity. A collective enlightenment that will only occur after many more individuals enlighten, and that only occurs through intense, deep and brutal introspection. It ain’t easy, but when the time is right for you, you’ll do it. Because you’ll have no choice.
Therefore, literally everything in modern society encourages maximum extroversion, even if only virtual (movies, stories, social media, politics, etc). Rarely if ever is personal reflection/introversion encouraged or celebrated. Alan Watts called it, “The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.”
The Extrovert-encouraging bottom line is: Whatever it takes to get you to jam your thumb down on the big, red Maximum Pleasure button. Again and again.
And yes, while the state of enlightenment as imagined by not-yet-enlightened folks may seem “dull and boring,” the opposite is the actual case. Perceived reality as experienced without your gross ego filters is stunning beyond compare. The inherent organic beauty of Nature is forever spellbinding; your intuitive sense of Rightness of the Universe is stable, abiding and constantly unfolding in its depths; your human senses attune to subtle sources of information and stimuli that give tantalizing evidence of your growing neurological expansion into telepathy, clairvoyance and clairaudience capabilities that organically evolve inside you, once those gross ego filters have been removed permanently.
This planet could be an incredibly amazing place as clear-seeing and clear-living people evolve to work co-operatively with Divine.
I wish I could say “HMMM how strange I used to do those things!” More often I have to ask “What the Hell was I thinking to do those things?’ Now I must apologize to pretty much all of the women on the planet! for they were the victims of my arrogance.
Very different, interesting and insightful piece here. Agree with many of the points. There’s a reason why I haven’t stepped inside a cinema for more than twenty years. 😉
Not entirely sure if we can’t have works of art that eschew drama and simply present an appealing vision of a harmonious world. Many works of classical, new age and traditional ethnic music simply invite you to wander in a world of beauty without going anywhere and without any drama. Try Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune, the ‘Dawn by the Moskva River’ from Moussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending and 3rd Symphony, Kitaro’s Silk Road suite, Indian sitar music, or traditional Chinese guzheng solos. Well, I guess it’s true that these aren’t exactly the most popular sorts of music around…
There have been civilizations that upheld the peaceful and harmonious vision of things as an ideal, by the way. Premodern China with its Confucian/Daoist/Buddhist heritage comes to mind. It wasn’t a utopia (heck, name me one) but it did reasonably well for millennia — read Kent Deng’s A critical survey of recent research in Chinese economic history (available online in PDF format) — and at least since the 10th century AD never victimized anyone else. (Interestingly, although there are war epics in premodern Chinese literature, in premodern times they were never accorded high literary status and were never required reading by educated Chinese AFAIK.) It was only after being converted by the West to the unholy gospel of the modern industrial narrative that China became the ugly and bellicose creature it now is.
I would have added on word. ‘modern’
Thus making an early sentence in the piece “Neither of these two endings would work in a modern Hollywood blockbuster.
The second ending, where we evolve beyond our self-destructive tendencies, is a key feature of the plot and setting of a very popular American TV show and a series of Hollywood movies that I believe would qualify as Blockbuster movies due to ticket sales and revenue.
This was a core idea behind the original Star Trek TV show, which aired during the late 1960’s. It continued into the original movies featuring many of the original cast, and it carried over into the later TV show of ST: Next Generation.
Of course, in terms of ‘modern’ Hollywood, what Ms Johnstone says is perfectly correct. In the modern remakes of the movies, and the modern TV show that I derisively call Star Trek: The Comic Book (not a compliment), the whole notion of the show being set in a future where mankind has evolved beyond these crisis has been whitewashed out of the scripts, in favor or war, more war, terrorism plots, and the great favorite of fascist TV, traitors.
The idea of a bright future where human being evolved into a great society used to be popular. But these days it doesn’t make it past the pro-war financiers and the Pentagon script approvers.
Well, Ms. Caitlin, you certainly have people ‘thinking’, this is the best ‘comments’ section I have seen so far…All you commentators, well said! There is a lot I can say about the ‘Simple’ life. The most expensive thing I have bought in the last 20 years is this laptop, and I only got it because I went deaf, and deaf can be lonely, Music 4 1 is a big loss. I miss listening to Leonard Cohen, bless his memory….Here, I am meeting people, who I would never have a chance to meet in everyday life. By getting rid of all the unneeded crap, I have free time to do all kinds of neat things, like learn how to use this machine at age 73. I fix things, work on art stuff, learn how to write, none of which I could do if I was still a wage/debt slave….Not owing anyone, I have change at the end of the month to keep my local food bank and other good charities open. Today I drove to town and visited my local bookstore (Town of 6,000) and ordered Ms. Caitlin’s book Woke, a field guide, but not from the Big, evil A…..The reason this bookstore is still in business is because they treat their customers well and are not greedy. The owner is a master at reassembling skeletons and teaches those skills to high school students, the last thing they did was a 40 foot whale which is hung in the High Schools Atrium. See what you can do when you have good neighbors and a simple life? We are an ocean side community with glaciers and beautiful views….It is never Boring. But it is peaceful…..Greed and the Lust for Power is the deadly disease we must find a cure for, until that happens nothing will change. Now reading list: Fun, great read meant to be read aloud and shared: The River Why, by David James Duncan, Sierra books. (I have read probably 5 or 6,000 books) and this was my favorite read of all, I have bought and given away at least 40 copies. Serious read I mentioned here before: The Experience, A Celebration of Being…By Sirio Esteve, Random House 1974, available from many used book stores because again I purchased many copies to give away, thus raising it up the list at stores…Anything by J. Krishnamurti, Theosophical Society….Any collection of Essays by Louis H. Lapham i.e.:Money and Class in America,The Wish for Kings, Imperial Masquerade,etc…OR books in partnership with Counterpoint Press. On that note I beg your leave, friends….Please keep writing!
That’s why I cannot watch the most of Hollywood movies. Even most thrilling pieces have elicited or laugh or boredom. When I tell about my favorite films almost nobody understand me becouse of ‘there is nothing happens there’.
In regard the latest BOEING AIRCRASH, how is it that the FAA can give a safety clearance to this airliner, when NO investigation has yet to begin? Nor has the prior BOEING AIRCRASH couple of months ago, been finalised, this can take many months, even years to find the fault or reason behing the crash! The FAA is deceiving us all, so I would suggest CAUTION against flying on one of these “billy-carts”, strong caution. Please read the article below for more evidence of the situation!
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-11/boeing-shares-fall-9-hundreds-737s-grounded-following-2nd-deadly-crash
In the modern US government, I would believe that the process by which the FAA grants such a safety clearance is that Boeing contacts the official with the authority to grant such a clearance and offers them a very nice, well-paying job and other rewards to be delivered in the future. The official then grants the safety clearance, and after an almost but not nearly decent interval of time has passed, moves along through the revolving door into her bright future as a Boeing executive.
—————–
At this point, the only US government agency I believe is the Weather Service, and that’s only because I can look out my window and check their work. Beyond that and perhaps a few other verifiable instances, I regard anything said by any US government official to be a complete lie unless someone is threatening to throw them into prison and destroy their life for saying it.
This is the kind of wishful thinking that paves the way for totalitarian regimes. Read about Robespierre’s Reign of Terror or Maoist China to see how it turns out. Utopia is always just so many murders away.
Caitlin, Thank you!
Utopia prepper might be the wrong vocabulary as you have already fully experienced a futuristic, “boring and dull world without drama” and conflict but filled with oneness, love, wisdom and incorporated forgiveness for a change of choice. The seemingly violent and deadly block buster – history of mankind – that was/is created as surrealism of a nightmare dreamt in a wave of egoistic longing to stick out from “the crowd” or oneness and being used as such is nothing but a choice that can be reversed at any moment in time and because of a incorporated free will, that can be used to select ones own choice. Free will – a weapon of mass distraction or harmony and love.
What will it be? FREE to anyone most of all.
Another brilliant article ,however as Kafka reflected “there is hope, though not for us” the New right has achieved to wrap old ideas as new and using them to transfer the levers of power from elected governments to unelected corporations sold to us as “tax-cutting and deregulation” by rights courtiers in the media leaving ruin and social wreckage. The revolt against redistribution is killing ghetto to rainforest. Taxes have also been diverted from aid and social programs towards military and corporate ones Oliver Wendell Holmes American judge once said “I dont mind paying taxes; they buy me civilization” The removal of that confidence has set off a free for all that is stripping the earth The idea that the world must be run be the stock market is as mad as any other fundamentalist delusion Market extremism crossbred with evangelical Zionist an offshoot, is actively hostile to the public good. if we don’t occupy the streets our fate will twist out of our hands.
Beautiful Caitlin. Your insights are really deep and true. I find your thoughts very nourishing for my own inner/outer journey. Wouldn’t meditation be the ideal training for backing off from the drama addiction, and learning to enjoy the simple pleasure of being?
Yes I do have subpersonalities in my makeup who would like to see the evil doers of our world get what is coming to them, and a little more! Bad on me. I have to watch that inner revenge loving voice in me. When I catch that inner voice starting to run one of it’s gruesome fantasies, I have to tell it to go back to it’s little room in the basement of my consciousness, and let me be more at peace.
Mike, the biggest step in ones own evolution is to first recognize the “inner revenge loving voice”. To turn it into a inner loving voice is part of ones journey that can be hard, long and thorny – if one chooses so. Though having ones cheek slapped constantly in a feverish dream will only go away when the nightmare itself is discarded or recognized by the one who dreams it.
Consider the process of natural selection. The human beings who have a strong relationship with nature are most likely to survive if and when the system breaks down. Inertia itself will answer the question of our sustainability. If we, as a culture, have failed the test if being a sustainable system then it is likely to to continue under it’s current conditions, if not it will be exploited by the nature of entropy.
If we consider our economic system, we can see the grave fractures between sustainability in the global debt alone. The denaturing of currency is very reminiscent of Rome’s collapse and this time there are no slave owning estates to rebuild the next generation. It will simply be left to the capable to rebuild with the lessons of the movie to base their choices on. I give a lot of credit to a living planet that operates unseen to most, but is not beyond it’s own evolution and the empowering of the next generation.
Trump has already damaged the deep state. Their only reaction is to push for a global war which will allow them to control the collapse and chose the next generation by attrition. In their current state they appear to have lost control and whether or not we repair this current modality of capitalism or not, the burden from the past 100 years has been done. So whether it’s an environmental collapse like an ice age or a physical collapse of the monetary system, something is moving behind the scenes and shaping the outcome.
As my friend Jedi says. “It’s all happening”. Peace
What a deep insight! I’ll have to think about this – I spent yesterday writing an op-ed about Ilhan Omar that was very dramatic, and I thought it was good. But maybe it’s not.
Another Hollywood scenario that is quite possible if we continue down the roads of destruction is ‘Mad Max and the Thunderdome’.
Given the subject matter here, you all might be interested in the work of Dmitry Orlov, who has thought and written extensively on a comparison between the Soviet collapse and the US or Western collapse which he anticipates. The idea that a sustainable life would be bland and boring in Hollywood terms relates to one of his ideas, ‘communities that abide’ and what their characteristics might be in the future. Obviously, if they were highly combative, they might not last very long, since the combative tend to find competent partners for their combativeness. Presumably surviving communities would work out some way of life which suited them, and afterwards be rather conservative about preserving it.
Orlov generally believes that the US will destroy itself through its imperialism. It is true that every modern state that has attempted empire has bankrupted itself financially, and usually morally and socially as well, with a few partial exceptions like Great Britain, which was bailed out and subordinated by the US. However, there is a kind of broader imperialism in which humans attack and destroy the natural world, which will have even more deleterious consequences than the competitions between states. Climate change and pollution are the most noticed at present, but there are also such developments as the wars on microorganisms and other ‘lower’ life forms, which will result in newer, hardier, more hostile and more dangerous versions of these targets. I would not expect humans to be wiped out, but it does look like some very hard times are ahead, and it would make sense to try to get ready for them individually and collectively.
It could. Take a look at Zelda Rotstein’s medium.com postings (need Chrome to translate from Deutsch) of her book Protokoll Red. We are shooting the scenes now and it definitely has a Hollywood ending, and it definitely is a better outcome / plan than either of the two you propose, even the good one.
See: https://medium.com/@zeldarot and read from the bottom up, i.e. Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc.
You get the gist of it by Chapter 5 or 6
I appreciate you bringing the discussion to the table, and we’re in a dangerous moment in history.
As the established order built on capitalism, and based in class warfare ladle the bottom of the well dry, the recognition of what the’ve left the rest of us rest of us to work with becomes indisputable.
If history is our best teacher; we’ve seen social constructions come and go, if history human nature is a reliable constant to predict the future, defeat and panic for personal survival is most likely to result in fight or flight, its a rocky uphill road we’re on, and Its not likely to look like a virtuous hollywood ending.
The financialized global economy and people with access to capital are playing roulette with the upper, hand, they still have everything to gain, because they buy what everybody else loses.
The rest of us can sing “Kumbaya”,, throw rocks at state fascists and their proxy class traitors, walk away in a fit of anger over the injustice like screaming infants…
The burn it debbie downers are seizing the Mic, their not gonna like what they get but the’ll have the smug satisfaction that they brought their Goliath to its knees.
Unfortunately The nihilism of trolls gas-lighting FB with suggestions that voting in and of itself is an abdication of “resistance” to political duplicity, and tearing down support for progressive candidates is hypocrisy, it’s an indication of how deeply the establishment press Corps and their sycophant patsy propagandists have demoralized every last shred of hope “left”.
Its not strategic but people adapt and will make the best of whats left, they’ll reconstitute social systems based on variations of their experience with exactly as much cooperation as necessarry to achieve their most pressing immediate objectives in a fragile balance between self interest and mutual interest.
…or we can galvanize enough crossectional unanimity to be strategic and systematically undermine their authority over us. Strategy requires leadership. Its a long game!
I can assure you this, sheeple will vote, our absence is an abdication of choice leaving the the decisions to people whou would live to make the choice for us. and if 2016 is a valid indicator we’ll get the lowest common denominator, an orange buffon or purple rube!
The ego mind loves drama and making things complicated. They see themselves as human becomings instead of human beings. Always chasing some phantom in the future. When i work hard now i will obtain the fruits in the future. What about now? The ego doesn`t like the simple life Thoreau was talking about. Dear Caitlin your article reminded me of Walden and the simple life which fulfills and heals the soul like nothing else does. That is utopia to me, and i am prepping. http://simplicitycollective.com/the-simple-life-of-henry-david-thoreau
I see the future as one in which our species will continue to evolve, not voluntarily, but simply to survive, as it always has. Our need for drama and conflict, coincidental with our insatiable lust for power and possessions, only got out of hand when we were comfortable enough to take survival for granted. Since we show neither the ability nor inclination to recognize, much less curb our self-destructive behaviors, we will be forced to deal with their consequences, i.e., to adapt to a degraded, inhospitable environment that is only survivable in small groups that cooperate both internally and with the larger biotic community. How perverse our species, and how ironic our situation, that we must be dragged kicking and screaming down the path to Utopia before we are able to recognize it.
I’ve been around long enough to know that people are essentially “good”–especially if they are given the chance to: Advance–to find meaningful work–and to raise their children in a relatively safe and healthy environment. We [the people] are currently under siege: Environmentally, economically, socially, psychologically, technologically, and spiritually. This assault really gained momentum when JFK was murdered and reached a crescendo upon the wanton false-flag murders and destruction–known as 9/11.
Something is going on which has perverted the will and the intent of all of those good people. What could it be–and who might benefit from this chaos and destruction? Perhaps the people who allegedly compiled this very detailed plan for world domination. Some allege that it is a forgery–and yet you would be murdered on the spot if it was found in your position–in Bolshevik Russia [I guess some people really have an issue with forgeries?]. Well, forgery or not, it describes exactly what is happening in the world today–so whoever wrote it [published 1905] had a very prescient view of the future [as did Orwell in 1948].
Why not review its contents and decide for yourself–while we are still able to access the document: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/Kidd/thesis/pdf/protocols.pdf
As they say, “The world parts for a man with a plan”. And for those of us who don’t have a plan [“the Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper”]–well, it’s like being up a creek without a paddle.
Meditation by everyone would be a great way to begin a transformation and awakening of mankind.
Fully agree!
You have addressed exactly the issues I have been pondering and offered a most reasonable solution. Now I am wondering how you came up with that assessment.
I really enjoy your writing, Caitlin. Your ability to insightfully observe human behavior and history and contextualize it into modern-day relevance is more than refreshing; it’s at times revolutionary. I hope you keep up with it, but I wouldn’t blame you at all if one day you said you were done and found some place somewhere to just spend your days on earth enjoying yourself in peace outside the narrative with which everyone else is so consumed.
The u.s. Empire is failing. Hollywood will be beat by China. After Obama and Trump (the U.S. Hollywood MIC Candidates and winners) Aipac and others are failing with there State Propoganda. Free Assange and Manninng for Truths. Did Harvey Weinstein support BDS and put propoganda in his films to support Palestinians? Hillary’s first dinner after her loss was with him. Have a nice day.
“we evolve beyond our self-destructive tendencies and move into a healthy relationship with our minds, our ecosystem, and each other.” Lol I laffed my scrawny little arse off reading this! Methinks we’ve had enough time in our sorry history to realize this ain’t gonna happen. Homo sapiens are an evil cancer on the planet, and cancer don’t suddenly change its spots and become productive bacteria! Nope, cancer proliferates until it devours it’s host, and then consumes itself. Delusional thinking to the contrary is just the cancer rationalizing it’s wholly malignant existence. Repeat after me: “We are cancer!” Bon appetit!
We do seem to be waking up tho, don’t you think? …maybe not fast enough.
I would agree that humanity is awakening, although, as you state, perhaps not quickly enough. On the other hand, there are major forces, the bordellos of presstitution that dominate public discourse working to keep people asleep. President Trump, no matter what you believe about him, has done something no other president has done which is to identify clearly that the main stream media is not his enemy, it is the mortal enemy of the American people, and, in fact, the enemy of humanity. It is nothing more than the evil propaganda arm of a very corrupt, criminal, international deep state. I tend to believe that Trump is dismantling the deep state, but I’ll reserve judgement about him long enough to prosecute the criminals deeply embedded in U.S. government from the Bush, Clinton, and Obama Crime Families that have controlled it since at least 1980. That will take time.
Of history one can learn nothing but habits and human perversion beyond civilizations. Nature teaches wisdom, life and cures without intellect or universities – even for/against cancer, though it will not be quite profitable for the directors of this shabby construct “world of humanity”. To kill what has become estranged, problematic and deadly for its organism is a human remedy and tradition as treating a terminal cancer with a deadly chemo or radiation therapy. To look for the origin of the disease and learn from its cause to revert cancer completely will be censored and distracted because we submit and therefore become cancer consuming itself. Maybe it is us who prefer cancer more then life itself because we are lacking to grasp the meaning of life.
Another excellent post, Caitlin! I really enjoy ‘where you’re coming from’ and, in this piece, I particularly resonate with the ‘less is more’ truth. It seems almost to come with our consumerist culture that we’ll survive by adding solutions to our problems rather than by changing mindsets and letting current habits wither.
You’re in dream world. People are flawed. So many are greedy and want power. This will never change. And it’s proof that there is no god. Who would never have created such a flawed being if god were so good? Maybe there’s a devil? 🙂
Well stated. Yes, there is a devil, and that devil is Man.
Cora, are you a devil?
Using absolutes like “never” or “always” in a probabilistic world is most often a hallmark of foolish naivete, or intense cynicism, and being somewhat a cynic myself about humanity, I am sympathetic to your sentiments. On the other hand, knowing that media, and our human neurology to which media plays is quite hardwired to fixate on the negative, I also have great optimism about humanity because there are large numbers of people doing great work to change society that don’t receive much attention for their work by the bordellos of presstitution that dominate the public discourse. If you have some rigorous proof for god’s nonexistence, please provide it but it’s often impossible to prove a negative, particularly when it comes to a possible god, if one exists, outside of space, and time, and which might respect the free will of its sentient creations. I tend to be agnostic on god, with a slight lean toward belief. Dean Hamer, a brilliant geneticist, and his research on human’s belief in god tends to indicate an evolutionary advantage conferred by belief, and his hypothesis is fairly well supported by his research. Many of the greatest, most innovative minds in science, and in many in literature, like the late Saul Bellow, also had a deep appreciation for mysticism, and the mysteriousness of life. Erwin Shroedinger’s statement that the number of minds in the universe is one is a profoundly mystical statement, and profound insight into consciousness.
This is a good, insightful piece except for two things: the first is a bit too much naive melodrama in the form of humanity will within most of the lifetimes of those reading this piece either self-destruct or heal in that binary, simplistic outcomes are the exception in a complex world, not the rule, except in digital computing, and the second is an oversimplification that healing is “always” about subtraction, which ignores addition which strikes me as a naive, slight mischaracterization of healing complex minds, particularly large numbers of them where something called resonance may occur as critical numbers of those minds heal. Forecasting the future of humanity is complex, and fraught with so many unknowns that it’s best to take anyone who attempts it with a very, very large grain of salt, particularly when language of absolutes, like “always,” is used in areas where great complexity, and uncertainty are prevalent. It is well demonstrated, and rigorously proven statistically in numerous cases, including using equity prices, equity indices, and a variety of other long, large, and often very complex time series data sets, that the best predictor of the future is the past for time series, and the complex systems that generate them. In extremely complex systems, such as human social systems, or the earth’s climate, forecasting the future has not been done with any model that has appreciable statistical significance, or can do so very far out into the uncertain future, and every single climatology model that has used Keeling curve CO2 data, or other CO2 data, and temperature data has been invalidated rigorously because the data sets were not transformed–as they must be to use the statistics the researchers used valid–to account for what is called nonstationarity, i.e. systems that produce data with time varying means, as our climate does. The climatology journals, controlled by dogmatists, not scientists, have all refused to publish research showing the models these journals have published to be not only invalid statistically, but when nonstationarity is accounted for, statistically insignificant in that human caused CO2 is not correlated appreciably to temperature. Some of the best hypotheses about what may be causing slight increases over time in the earth’s atmospheric temperatures are that it may be due to the precession of the earth, and solar activity. These hypotheses, and the models developed to test them are largely ignored by the climatology Bibles, which are less like scientific journals, and far more like canons of religious dogma. I believe it is more likely that humanity will bungle along selfishly for many generations continuing to destroy precious ecosystems with toxic pesticides, plastics, clear cutting old growth forests, polluting water, and waging wars on each other, and likely slowly extinct ourselves. It’s also quite possible that the pyscho, and socio paths who wield great power in this world by using nearly all government officials, and governmental administrative operations as their fronts will implement full scale, hard core fascism to wipe out large numbers of people. This trend has been historical, and growing since WWII, which the Nazis in reality won when the fascists like Allen Dulles, and his cabal brought them in large numbers to the U.S. to continue their work, which the U.S. business community fully supported, both before, and after WWII. Healing minds is not merely about subtraction, it’s also importantly about addition in that the minds of many, many people are very dis-eased, and removing dis-ease which has crowded out the normally healthy mind, very often requires fostering healthy qualities that have not yet arisen while removing unhealthy qualities which have arisen. Caitlin has sometimes used Buddhist teachings, but ignoring its teachings about removing unhealthy states of mind that have arisen, preventing unhealthy state of mind that have not yet arisen from arising, while protecting, and developing healthy states of mind that have arisen, and encouraging healthy states of mind not yet arisen to arise, strikes me as a bit incomplete.
I appreciate your taking this discussion further in such a thoughtful way. The “system” we’re in is so complex I’m baffled, but if it weren’t I may loose interest, as Caitlin suggests. Warm regards.
Thanks, Robert, and what might be even more fascinating is that as complex as are human social systems, and the climate of the earth, human consciousness is vastly more complex. Consciousness is a non-local, universal phenomena, and in the human realm tends to reincarnate, often again into the human realm, depending upon kamma, and sometimes children, typically before the age of 5 have distinct, often very precise memories of their prior incarnation. The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies now has a database of approx. 6,000 well-documented cases from around the world collected since the 1960’s of this phenomena, and those cases are scored on a large number of variables, many of which measure, and classify how well each case is documented. The late Ian Stevenson, M.D.,, who started the UV Division and his colleagues are meticulous, rigorous scientists, and their work is fascinating, as is the work of the scientists who started what used to be the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab. What is truly frightening is that illegal black ops using trillions of dollars—money illegally diverted from federal program, narcotics dealing which the CIA has done for decades, stolen money such as gold looted during brutal wars of the U.S.,etc.–have set up a highly compartmented system of collusion/collaboration between academia (Stanford, MIT, and many, many other universities), corporations (Lockheed Skunkworks, etc.), and various U.S. government military, and intelligence, and other unknown services to do research into consciousness, artificial intelligence, weapons systems, transport, communications, and other areas that are so much more advanced than what is generally available in society. It’s fascism at its worst. Steven Greer, M.D. of the Sirius Disclosure Project has it very, very well documented.
Holy Frijoles!…
Are you trying to become a Jehovah Witness?…
Your last paragraph (almost all) advocates the kind of future promoted
by the Jehovah Witnesses…
And you know what? I find it Boring!!!… Where is the learning curve?.
Where is the Salt that makes “the food taste ” better?.
In that future that you propose with the pass of the time we will became:
Insensible Peace loving Borgs, with no knowledge of how the darkness operates.
Guess what? the darkness are necessary so that we can learn our lessons in this existence.
Without that it will be very boring!!!.
“utopia prepper” What a concept! I’d love to live in a peaceful, harmonious world. Nature is never boring.
Permaculture will restore our earth and us at the same time. The mind games hoping for celluloid endings disappear with a shovel in your hand.
Nice, Paul.
PS Are you in Ashland OR?