Listen to a reading of this article:
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The human species is at an adapt-or-perish juncture in its history on this planet; we will either drastically change the way we operate, or we will wipe ourselves out by nuclear war or environmental cataclysm. Because we’ve been brought to this point by our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative, the adaptation we’re being challenged to make would be a collective movement into a healthy relationship with mental narrative.
We’re where we’re at because powerful people have been able to manipulate us into believing mental stories about reality which aren’t based in fact. History is one long unbroken tale of large groups of humans being manipulated by much smaller groups of humans in ways which benefit the smaller groups, and that tale continues to this day. Propaganda and other forms of narrative control are used to manufacture consent for status quo models of governance, economic and monetary systems, and foreign policy which benefit an elite few at the expense of the general population.
And what’s interesting is that underneath all the babbling propaganda stories about what’s happening in our world, humanity is indeed showing signs that we are collectively slipping out of our old relationship with mental narrative. It’s happening in the usual sloppy, awkward, two-steps-forward-one-step-back shamble which has always marked all of human progress, but it’s happening.
It’s happening in the way people are moving away from religion as we collectively discover that those ancient narratives which so long transfixed our ancestors are not necessary or helpful for finding meaning, morality and fulfillment in our lives, and as we collectively notice that doctrines about eternal reward for obedience and eternal damnation for disobedience sound made-up.
It’s happening with the rise of cryptocurrencies as people figure out that money is made up and we can change the rules whenever we want. Money is nothing more than an agreed-upon story that’s only as true as we all continue to pretend it is, a collective narrative that we can collectively rewrite at any time.
It’s happening as people figure out that a romantic relationship doesn’t need to look the way they’ve looked throughout most of our recorded history; that it’s only narrative which says one man and one woman must love and have sex with only each other throughout their lives, or even throughout their relationship. That those rules have only ever been made of empty narrative fluff and can be replaced with an entirely different set of guidelines.
It’s happening as people figure out how much narrative overlays things like gender and sexuality, that there’s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality which prescribes our longstanding models of men and women and what their roles are and how their sexualities should express. Rearranging societal narratives that deeply entrenched in our culture is causing a lot of chaos and confusion, and the arguments it’s bringing up are very upsetting for a lot of people, but it’s gradually working itself out as people pick through the narratives and sort out fact from story.
Indeed each issue I’m describing here has brought in its own set of quandaries, challenges, bad faith actors and abuses that had previously been avoided under the old models, but it’s not like the old models have been free of those things either. And as we all discuss, argue, push and pull and muddle our way through these obstacles with each other, we are collectively sinking into the real important insight which underlies all those more superficial areas of contention: that our society is made of narrative, and we can change the rules whenever we want.
We’re still in the early days of this growing insight, but if you look at the conceptual rigidity we had as a society even a few decades ago around our how-it-is stories and our how-it-ought-to-be stories, it’s clear that there’s a real unravelling happening. A relaxation in our collective certainty about how the various components of our civilization are meant to look.
This relaxation and unravelling is the first step in transforming into a healthy society. It’s the first step in the adaptation we’re going to have to collectively make to survive as a species.
But it can’t stop at insights into the fluid nature of narratives around faith, money, gender and relationships. We’re going to have to unlearn the how-it-is and how-it-ought-to-be narratives we have learned about everything over the course of our entire lives.
We’re going to have to learn that we’ve been lied to since we were children about how the world works, how our government works, how our political and economic systems work. We’re going to have to learn that the very building blocks of our culture are mostly just made-up stories from people who want to control us and from long-dead people who wanted to control our ancestors. We’re going to have to learn that all the metrics by which we measure our personal success and failure and the frameworks we use to decide what our lives are about are fictions implanted in our minds by the powerful. We’re going to have to learn that even our most absolutely fundamental ideas about who and what we are have been built on faulty assumptions.
You can’t rewrite a rule if you still believe it’s written in stone. You can’t rewrite a story if you don’t know that you are its author. We can’t rewrite the structure of human civilization if we haven’t yet learned that none of the old rules are real. We can’t collectively withdraw our consent for status quo systems until we collectively understand that our consent is actually required. We can’t bend the spoon until we realize that there is no spoon.
And we are collectively moving toward that realization. We are learning as a collective and as individuals that we don’t have to be what we’ve been told we are, that things don’t have to be how we’ve been told they must be, that all the how-it-is narratives and how-it-should-be narratives we’ve been indoctrinated with are just fairy tales for adults made up by highly confused people whose only qualifications were that they got here before us.
So don’t worry when you see the old rigid boundaries start to blur and wobble. Don’t panic when you see the old stories being met with incredulity. It might look awkward and sloppy right now, but that’s just what it looks like when a thinking species begins moving into a conscious relationship with thought.
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53 responses to “Humanity Is Learning That The Rules Are All Made Up And Can Be Re-Written At Any Time”
Like a lot of free thinkers, Johnstone is hearing trans rights in terms of the gay rights campaign. They are not similar issues. The support and protections rightly due the female due to sexual dimorphism are under legal and social attack, and gays and lesbians have already disappeared from the social conversation in America.
Gender is a social construct; there is nothing biological to prevent a male from being very feminine, there is nothing wrong with a female who is very masculine in outlook and personality. On the contrary, being a little off the curve tends to give a person perspective and insight, making them a treasure to any society.
Sexual biology is separate from gender. Sexual biology is determined at conception, is immutable, and is as binary as the set of (0,1). We can mutilate our children and thwart their puberty chemically, but these devices only obscure biological sexuality, they do nothing to change it.
Transgender people are a thing: it happens. It is a serious medical condition that occurs in about 0.03% of the population. They are also being disappeared and legally destroyed by the corporate astroturf “trans movement”.
Maybe Australia isn’t being forced into accepting the counter-factual claims of transvestite exhibitionists pretending to be transgender yet, but Johnstone’s continued avoidance of a serious look at this particular corporate agenda is going to cost her credibility.
Have deliberately steered away from topics like these over the past couple yrs, but shouldn’t the gender identity question be resolved by checking if you were born with a penis(male) or a vagina(female)?
Understand there are some very confused people out there right now, but in this material go around aren’t those the cards you were delt?
We have probably all been rebirthed and/or reincarnated as males and females numerous different times. Denying the cards you were dealt with in this life makes the lesson being taught rather hard to learn from my perspective.
The whole system is controlled and powered by egregores — non-physical entities created by the collective thoughts of distinct groups of people. We are “feeding” them through our thoughts and emotions, particularly the negative ones, and they keep swinging like enormous pendulums, having acquired great momentum.
The masses of people, just by giving them their attention, are sucked into them, and the only way to disentangle is to react in an unpredictable way, e.g. laughing upon hearing/reading something sad, changing your daily routine to include things you’ve never done, clicking “like” on something completely outside your zone of tolerance… and stop paying attention to what is not related to you in an immediate way; instead, focus on your inner immediate experiences.
The next step is to work on yourself in order to become enlightened and completely self-sufficient, to the point of subsisting on prana, and thus developing — but purely as a side-effect! — super-human abilities. This is the only way out of the Matrix. The few who are able to do it will lift up the rest of humanity to a qualitatively new level of existence. Hopefully, before we self-destruct.
The one historic narrative no one wants to accept – right/left, believer/non-believer, conservative/liberal is that all wars are about power. But power is an illusion. Beyond that lies the truth.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
Top pentagon staff referring to north Syria as American territory. They say it is where the oil and richness from Syria is. Lech Wales speaking about “reducing” Russian population just resonates with western elites about taking over Russian territory. Russia is new “gold rush” to the elites at war with Russia. China is in the equation to be conquered as well. It will not happen as they are thinking. People will not enlist in the army to fight this war unless everyone become a hostage with two choices – face the death squad or go to the front which still unrealistic.
A lot of people will die because of a small group in Washington-London.
Your article sounds much like Voltaire during their age of enlightenment. Of course that was followed by the Victorian Age of stark conservatism. Everything seems to cycle in society from fashion to thought.
Rage Against the Machine says ‘Abort the Supreme Court’ in return to stage
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https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/3551714-rage-against-the-machine-says-abort-the-supreme-court-in-return-to-stage/
Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis
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António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has been scathing in his denunciations of the fossil fuel industry and their political backers. Addressing a climate conference organised by the White House, he warned:
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‘We seem trapped in a world where fossil fuel producers and financiers have humanity by the throat. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimise their responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies.’
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He continued:
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‘They exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.’
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https://www.medialens.org/2022/why-there-is-no-public-sense-of-a-climate-crisis/
You must first understand that the world runs on energy. Reliable continuous energy. Not intermittent solar or wind. Solar panels need energy to build, windmills need energy to build. Electric autos which pollute the environment more than gas cars need energy to build. Take away energy and we revert to the early 1800s with billions starving. Climate change is far off, being cold and hungry is now. Watch Germsny change their tune as winter aporoaches. Climate change is a bunch of virtue signaling which evaporates when energy grows scarce.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. An alternative narrative states that all this loosening of social norms is sending humanity to Hell in a handbasket. It’s certainly worth the debate though. And, unfortunately, many think it’s worth going to war over.
I’m afraid this all working together is not possible because people have different interests and different beliefs, like at the moment farmers are raising hell in the Netherlands because the Dutch globalist government wants basically to get rid of them on account of “climate change”. When you look at who makes the globalist policies (a bunch of billionaires and dubious “visionaries”), I tend to lend an ear to the farmers’ explanation that they want to get the land cheap to sell it to realtors to build houses and stuff and also to conspiracy theories saying that they want to own all the farmland so that everybody depends on the state for food, remembering that Kissinger once said “who controls the food controls the people” – this being aggravated by the fact that at a time when we’re supposed to own nothing and be happy in 2030, Bill Gates will be (already is) the main US farmland owner. And he plans to make new “more sustainable” food. Well, when I look at what these geniuses’ (with Monsanto et al) have done to the American physique with their genius food (with GMO, fertilizers, pesticides…) in the past forty years, I’d rather have the Dutch farmers’ food and see if we can find a way to reduce their nitrogen emission (which is apparently the government’s grudge even though it’s never been mentioned before).
In France, the same thing has been going on for years and farmers have been committing suicide at the rate of once a week.
Question: how do you think we’ll “all work together to make the world work” when people are committing suicide because you take their land on account of a climate change that’s not even a clearly defined concept and is disputed among scientists behind the grants blackmail from the establishment?
As we learnt in MASH, suicide is painless and it brings on many changes but still!
PS: Forgot to mention this was a reply to Max Girard down below.
Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low
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Confidence currently ranges from a high of 68% for small business to a low of 7% for Congress. The military is the only institution besides small business for which a majority of Americans express confidence (64%). Confidence in the police, at 45%, has fallen below the majority level for only the second time, with the other instance occurring in 2020 in the weeks after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
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This year’s poll marks new lows in confidence for all three branches of the federal government — the Supreme Court (25%), the presidency (23%) and Congress. Five other institutions are at their lowest points in at least three decades of measurement, including the church or organized religion (31%), newspapers (16%), the criminal justice system (14%), big business (14%) and the police.
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https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
… and television news down from 16% to 11% between 2021 and 2022, making it the second less trusted institution in the US after Congress, which tends to confirm rumours that autism has reached alarming levels.
On the bright side, there is still a margin of progression to 0%.
To think that we will break the masters’ narrative control systems, honed over centuries and especially over the 20th, when 90% of the 99% of us carry around the primary tool of the masters’ narrative conditioning with us as our most prized possession and look into its guidance every step we take is optimistic in the extreme, Caitlin … I salute your optimism!
I’d also say that narrative is not everything … there is reality (nature, earth’s natural limits, inborn human instinct, etc.) … for one thing, e.g., sex is really a thing, though gender be fluid.
I am somewhat sceptical about your optimism.
For one: This is NOT the beginning of a collective awakening!
That started some 300 years ago with the “Age of Enlightenment”, when people started to take a more fact based approach to understanding the world.
Unfortunately things have gone back and forth on this and i don’t see, that this time is any different in that regard. Goethe had Mephisto say things in “Faust”, that were probably basphemy at that time, but he got away with it. These days some US christian fascist would probably shoot him.
The entire boring sex discussion was, in my opinion, over with KANTs categorical imperative from 1785 – adapted version: What consenting adults do among themselves is nobody elses business.
Marx told us that religion is opium for the people and to this very day it is legal to feed that to children.
So why am i being pessimistic? Because so far the philosophical advances in humanity (meaning development of useful mental tools) has never held up with technological advances and also there are always the people (to quote Douglas Adams) “that believed leaving the trees in the first place was already a mistake”.
Majority rules. You may not like generalised predictions, but that is how the world works I’m afraid. The majority of women across the planet and throughout history have lived put their lives primarily as wives and mothers. The fact that most western or ‘modern’ women no longer view motherhood as a worthy and respectable use of their time is indisputable. They have been taught that acting like a man is of greater societal value.
Just because someone wants a better life doesn’t make gambling less like gambling. A person’s reasons to gamble are beside the point.
No no… You’re a sophist but you’re not very good at it. You wrote: “modern women don’t care about children”. Now you walk that back, agreeing tacitly that generalization is by essence wrong, to “most women”, explaining your previous generalization by the dubious argument in the circumstance that “majority rules”. This has nothing to do with it. It’s not a question of ruling but a question of the percentage of “modern women” caring about children. We’ll have to have some statistics at this point to see if your initial (“women”) or second assertion (“most women”) “don’t care about children” sticks or not. Because you must consider the possibility, to be fair, that this “reality” exists exclusively in your brain.
Then about gambling, you displace the problem entirely. You said you weren’t the gambling kind because you’re a worker and I replied that most gamblers are workers hoping for a better life. “A person’s reasons to gamble” is indeed “besides the point” but it’s NEVER BEEN the point. The point was that you said you didn’t gamble because you were a worker and I objected that this is not a cogent explanation because most gamblers are workers. So you’ll have to find another explanation to your distaste of gambling. Capice?
Good one.
We think we are smarter, more enlightened and advanced in our thinking from men of the past. We are not.
It depends which ones. Medieval Joe Sixpax was less enlightened than Eckhart Tolle and less advanced in his thinking than Noam Chomsky. But you’re right that Buddha was more enlightened and Plato more advanced in his thinking than Joe Sixpax in any century. Generalization is doomed to fail.
Again you have the Gender Identity phenomenon dead wrong, Caitlin. You’re right when you say that “We’re where we’re at because powerful people have been able to manipulate us into believing mental stories about reality which aren’t based in fact.” But what you don’t realize is that Gender Identity Ideology is a prime example of precisely the manipulation you mention.
Gender Identity Ideology is a huge campaign funded by Big Pharma/Big Tech oligarchs. It is designed to sever people from material reality, so that they can be manipulated to accept any and all lies. It is a co-optation of our desire to be free from sex-based oppression that reifies that oppression. It masquerades as a civil rights movement while thoroughly derailing progress on multiple civil rights fronts.
Please, Caitlin, talk with people like me who started out believing what you believe about Gender Identity Ideology but looked behind the curtain. This overview is a start: https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-transgender
As soon as you realise that the rules are made up to take your power and give it to the elites, all you have to do is disagree – It is the first step. Then you decide what you want to see in this world more of snd you bring it to life.
I thought I was reading a review about American Gods series on STARZ. A good one to describe in tales what is going on.
https://youtu.be/3awG5wEE7LU
Lol monogamy isn’t going out of fashion, it’s merely taking a break while all the whores ruin their lives and set the tone for the next ideological revolution.
The modern woman has it all her own way right now, but it won’t last much longer. As the liberal order collapses, so to will this horrid experiment in female equality and autonomy.
Look at the rest of the world, modern woman, that is your future.
Families in their own way come with alot of baggage but ultimately provide security for women in a harsh world when society breaks down. Yes, it will make a resurgence again.
Indeed you are correct. Security and purpose.
But for most western women, a (man’s) career gives them more purpose. They no longer qualify as women. They follow their primal urges without any sense or empathy, and view relationships like businesses; never leaving one until they have another lined up.
Gone is the precious femininity of old. Today’s western woman is a heartless, materialistic shell. Simply a new type of man made purely to pay more taxes into a system that hates them.
Lol that you brought up taxes.
Western marriage was legislated in ancient Rome precisely to make it easy to collect taxes.
Some women at that time in history are known for disobeying the new edict and were made to suffer, like their child was killed or smth else really cruel.
Indeed they did. And Rome fell.
Hardly relevant to todays women either. Modern women don’t care about children. They are more likely to protest their inability to have a doctor kill them in the womb these days. Being forced to kill a child is hardly a threat to the modern woman. To them, If it gets in the way of their career (as a man) then it has to go.
The society is being destroyed so the good goes out as well as the bad. Watch out for the Rule-based International Order, sounds devilish.
@ Larry: the offensive bullshit frustrated incels will come up with, I’m asking you… Anyway, since you see into the future, I’d be much obliged if you could give me the winning number of the next lottery. I’ve got a tank to fill.
Lol incel is involuntary celebate. This is totally by design I assure you.
I’m an involuntary shunnee if anything. I make these predictions based upon the pendulum of extremism that has come to define our reality consciousness. Extremist liberals have poisoned western society, the consequences will be extremely Conservative. History shows that this is how humanity evolves; at the extremes.
Don’t buy lottery tickets, buy physical gold snd silver.
Gambling isn’t my cup of tea. I’m a worker.
To see the future simply look into the past. See how man has reacted under different circumstances. They will act the same way again.
@Larry: however, it may sound foolish to some of your readers to say that “modern women don’t care about children” as you do, when so many of them do indeed voluntarily have children, the adoption market is in full bloom and there are long waiting lists because not many people want to give away their children either.
Generalization is doomed.
As for gambling, most gamblers at the lottery are workers hoping for better living conditions, so I don’t see the contradiction there.
Caitlin, the issue is that there is a spoon, after all.
There are people who would like to persuade us, and themselves that all is the issue of belief. Such as believing in the value that can come into existence by printing money or that we can prosper based on the myth of the American dream. They want us to believe that reality can be a dream, shaped by wishful thinking. Bending spoons is a fraud asserted by the mishmash of postmodernism, new-age mysticism and neoliberal propaganda wanting us to behave as the Matrix bateries.
They want us to believe that having sex and talking about sex is the issue of narrative. So, having an idea of sex is not much different from having sex. All is about ideas, they say, and, when we feel the pain we are to be blamed for not dreaming well enough. They assert that dying in the war in Ukraine is not much different from dying in a computer game. Deaths and ideological principles can be weighed together. So they want to value-compare the incomparable and turn our lives into fancy decorations, into the little kitsch platitudes that another lady I respect called prêt-à-penser – little thoughts aiming to destroy our values.
I am afraid that for many the time of awakening is about to come. Not as some alternative supernatural epiphany but the revelation that pain is where reality is, and that all we have had before might have been an escapist dream.
It will be a rude awakening indeed.
Did you know the same part of the brain that responds to being dealt physical pain also responds and reacts the same way to being rejected? Yep. If you intentionally ignore and reject someone you are in every organic and scientific sense committing an act of violence. Lol.
Also, heaven is work. So is hell. This is school. Learn well.
I’ve seen through the hypocrisy of “rules” and “narratives” for many decades by now, at least enough to know they are made up, arbitrary, ad hoc, and never intended to be followed by those privileged elite who create and impose them. “History” itself is a fantasy crafted by those with leverage to exploit further those without influence. That was a major take-home lesson in Orwell’s dystopian novels that every schoolboy and girl has read, was it not?
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In fact, hasn’t such been common knowledge (or at least persistent dissent) since the enlightened city states of ancient Greece warred amongst themselves, collectively weakening their civilisation to the point of giving Persia opportunities to invade and conquer them? Hasn’t every “great power,” from Rome to the Soviet Union had a population which at its peak eventually stopped believing in the myths, legends, moral values and assumed responsibilities that propped it up? Haven’t the educated chroniclers observing in either retrospect or actual real time usually ascribed this degradation, fall and eventual collapse to “decadence?”
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In fact, don’t the most perceptive observers actually predict such eventualities by simple extrapolation of what they see and cannot (like most trapped within its vortex) deny? The sack of Rome, the fall of Constantinople, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of Pol Pot, and dare I say the emergence of Hitler (to the annoyance of his many present-day champions especially inhabiting the Unz Review) to name but a few historical cataclysms, seem baked into the cake in retrospect. Moreover, do we not see similar sudden societal collapses across all continents and geological eras, including the highly advanced antiquarian cultures of Mesopotamia, North-, South- and Meso-America? None are still with us.
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As to my examples from relatively recent Western history, all played out, not with a simple rejection of the prior social order, but the embrace of one that turned out to be much worse for as long as it persisted, reassuring “conservatives,” that, indeed, all change is not for the better. Undoubtedly the new path in each case was just as effectively controlled by a select group of alpha animals (invariably males) as much as was the old order. Humans are mostly pretty much uncreative, shallow thinking herd animals–at least half of the bell curve is. They truly tend to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, whether that is “sane” or not, and whether Einstein or Yogi Berra was the first to make the observation. So, it’s a pretty safe bet that at some point Americans WILL take mass action and, dutifully following a new faction considered enlightened and charismatic, either lead us into a new (but always transitory) golden age or something even worse than we presently know and admittedly hate–assuming we are not all destroyed in a nuclear conflict with Russia and/or China first.
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Some would say that Donald Trump was a false start at such a revolution that was not allowed to happen by entrenched powers. Judge for yourself whether that was good or bad. Personally, I didn’t see any coherence in his erratic proclamations, but then all the recent presidents have been equally inept and disappointing especially the current demented fool.
Go Sri Lanka! Very inspirational. But ppl need to be aware that the powers that be won’t let mob movements stand. Empire will use it’s advanced technology to track every single person out in the streets. Special satellites can track millions of people simultaneously. These folks will be terrorized and tortured in their homes by torture computers sitting in the sky. They are copying our brain onto holograms and making virtual clones of us with all our memories. From there they are programming people into cyber, hot, painful hellscapes after their physical deaths. They are tracking our thoughts and looking for key words. The human body is electric.This is reality while people are pledging allegiance to the flag and watching ball games.
Yep they were training here over our city to recognise people by overflying them for years, before newspaper confirmed it after a political incident. They made an excuse that they were tracking illegal aliens. Of course they track all, always inventing more ways to track people.
This is the best comment, completely down the rabbit hole of kooky!
The movement and migration of man is how we adapt to changing conditions. At one time Rome had a million people and a century later only 15000. London reached a million people then fell rapidly with the black death and took 250 years to recover. The world with technology has massed humanity into the cities. This is going to end eventually with movement back into the countryside. Demographics are going to reduce the population drastically in the next 50 years. War and disease will drop those numbers even more. A revolution is not needed because new generations will adapt to the changing conditions. The process will be difficult, dangerous and deadly as such transitions have been in centuries past.
I’m old so I hope to see the blinding light of realization happen before I die!
The zeitgeist is growing and cannot be so easily contained now. Hence the call for censorship of our major platforms. The previous censorship was thru NYT and WaPo, TV stations etc. At a cellular level, we are waking up and realizing just how confused we are. It’s like a person just waking up, we have to orient ourselves in space and time.
Imagine if we humans, are the very first to reach this level of sophistication in our grasp of science, our ability to manipulate energy, our ability to see down to the atomic level and out to the cosmic, and the best we can do is turn Eden into a trash pile.
Or if we had to explain to another intelligent lifeform why it is we so thoroughly fucked up our planet. “Well, some people convinced us they needed way more than the rest of us and we let them.” Seems like a very poor excuse.
I appreciate your perspective regardless of what anyone else says. Who doesn’t want to see a new species be born, the emergent Homo Conscientia?
It isn’t about narrative, it is about nature. Our narratives and nature diverged at some point and now our narratives have lost all relationship to this planet that sustained life for over a billion years.
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We don’t just exchange one narrative for another narrative, we silently observe nature and try to find our place in it’s fabric once again.
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If we continue to fail to see ourselves as part of nature that is under attack, then we will continue to fail to see that it is us that is attacking nature.
Agree! Generations upon generations have managed to live quite old (in spite of Big Pharma’s propaganda pretending it saved humanity with chemicals because the average lifespan in the past was 40 years, omitting to mention that the scale is tipped by the inclusion in this “average” of the very high infantile mortality then, due to poor hygiene and the fact that the immune system of a child is not in full gear before eighteen months) without ever seeing a doctor and curing their aches and pains according to Hippocrates’ principle: “Let your food be your medicine”. It’s amazing what salt, olive oil, honey, lemon, garlic and herbs will do for a genetically sound body (both internally and externally), not even speaking of the clay that a whole bunch of gods allegedly made us of and has the most amazing healing and regulating properties which will get you banned to the edge of the galaxy for casually mentioning by the $cientific phy$icians’ mafias – which in and of itself constitutes a label of quality in Mammon’s world :o)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_of_life_from_clay
Timothy, thank you for this. Narrative shapes how we live and interact with the world around us, but cannot change the physical realities of life on this planet. Some thought the industrial revolution and the technology that has been created since would allow humans to master nature and bend it to our will. We now see how very wrong we were as we experience the results of this misguided effort.
I fear we will see another instance of this heading our way when evidence mounts up that giving puberty blockers and hormones to children has serious damaging effects on their long time physical health. It’s already here, but being swept under the rug as it doesn’t fit the current preferred narratives.
As the hordes stormed the Presidential Palace in Sri Lanka this morning, or a citizen killed Shinzo Abe with a home-made gun.. A reminder to those at the top that they are not out of reach!
So, you’re telling me the “Rules-based Order” Penny Wong is pushing as the cornerstone of civilisation might actually just be a fiction to keep America uber alles? That Russia invading Ukraine for no reason at all except Putin is mad may not be so? That half a dozen excruciatingly expensive submarines will not stop China in its tracks on its way to world domination?
The world you describe is so different to what is believed, it just won’t be believed!
Your frame in this post doesn’t really hold up for me, because there’s a much simpler way to look at the problem, and unfortunately, a lot of the social churning you describe doesn’t really address the root problem. To me the problem is, at a certain early point in human history, the accumulation of surplus began falling into private hands, and those people banded together into (basically) secret societies for the purpose of protecting their wealth. Religion, patriarchy, warrior culture, slavery and a host of other social technologies developed, and continue to be developed to this day. But it’s not just mental: the cultural power of these elite groups is built upon actual economic, legal and military surpluses that leave the vast majority of people in the world powerless. So, the time has come not to embrace a litany of myth-busting intellectual positions, but to organize the vast number of powerless into a focused fighting force against the privatization of all wealth and power…ie., capitalism.
BTW See Brian Hayden’s “The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity” for the extensive archeological and ethnographic evidence of secret societies working to promote the interests of wealthy and powerful persons in prehistory…
According to Arnold J. Toynbee, this happened in Sumer 5,000 years ago when the hunter gatherers of old were lured into a new agriculture-based modus vivendi where an elite class could manage some free time to think ahead by having other people do the daily chores for them. Thus was born civilization, says Toynbee, with its two original sins: hierarchy and war.
He also interestingly said (and this was over half a century ago): ““Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.”
However, Confucius remarked: “Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall”.
The problem is, OK, so the powerless fight and win, then what? Hasn’t history been about war, pillage and domination? Do we get a dictatorship of the proletariat like Stalin? I think what Caitlin is getting at is not an Oprah think and get rich believing but a freeing of minds to not mindlessly repeat history.
I don’t think fighting is the answer. I hope we are coming to a global realization that we must all work together to make the world work.
The zeitgeist is building. A blinding epiphany could be just what we need.
See up there for reply for space.