The Mystifications of the Past
"History always constitutes the relation between a Present, and its Past.
Consequently Fear of the Present, leads to Mystification of the Past."
~ John Berger
Our Societies have been subject to the influence of indoctrination and propaganda for many centuries, ever since organised Religion took hold in our Civilizations.
If it appears I am stating the obvious here, I apologise as it was written for other eyes... :~
In order to achieve a Revolution World wide, or even just to create a better future for our children, we need to re-think Everything...
But first, we first need to construct a surgical instrument with which to dissect and remove all the old Mystifications of the Past.
We have evolved to a new paradigm.
Our Technology is rapidly transforming us, but unless we systematically re-examine and eliminate all of our previous false assumptions about society, the citizen and the State, we will not necessarily change for the better.
Change begins at the personal level, with our own self-awareness.
For it is through the thorough, rigorous investigation of our own thoughts and feelings that we can arrive at a new state of empowerment, a state of being fully self-actualised and in control of our own destinies.
It is through the arrangement of our thoughts that we shape belief.
Belief shapes behaviour, and behaviour is particularly susceptible to the conformist, peer pressure persuasion of the Group or Crowd...places which have traditionally never been ideal for rational thinking, and instead quite often produce Fear, mass hysteria and collective hallucinations.
Our behaviour as we go about our daily lives in society can therefore be no more sensible, rational or intelligent than the thinking which precluded it and therefore brought it into being.
So the clearer our thinking, the more empowered we will become.
The sharper the lens of your critical faculties, the better your decisions will be, and the more equipped you will be, to deal with a world which is filled with propaganda and deception on a massive scale, ultimately shaping your behaviour for the better by aligning that much closer with the 'real' world.
If we all did this, obviously we would already be living in a better world as so many of our contemporary problems could so easily be solved by the correct application of scientific principles.
By studying the history of science, and examining our past understanding of reality we can see that we stand on shifting sand, that nothing is as it seems, and that our best scientific understanding Today will undergo radical shifts in awareness Tomorrow i.e our reality is 'Emergent' at best.
If our reality is constantly under revision, it makes little sense to place too much Faith or Belief in our apprehensions.
Faith and our belief systems are a suspension of critical faculties.
This has become a serious problem for us collectively as a species due to our gregarious, conformist nature and require urgent critical scrutiny and revision.
Rather than verify our views by evaluating the evidence individually, and with reference to source material via our technology, thereby obtaining 'knowledge' and education, we tend to go with 'the crowd' and generally accept whatever the majority are thinking or doing.
This may have been a valid strategy for our ancestors, but our technology has liberated us so that this choice i.e to go with the crowd may no longer necessarily be the wisest choice, and this conformist thinking of ours, over many millenia of reinforcement has become a dangerous, deeply embedded, instinctual behavioural choice, with potentially critical ramifications for us collectively as a Species.
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| Salem Witch Hunts |
When the majority of people think that the Earth is flat for example, or that a particular Western Government is waging a war and invading a sovereign Muslim country merely because they care about its people, or because they are morally outraged over an act of barbarism and they really care about the democratic process for it's people, it reminds us of the extreme importance of questioning everything!
Get your information first-hand, be familiar with the inherent biases of your sources, always question the motives behind dissemination of information i.e "Cui Bono?" 'to whose profit?' and never assume that because the majority think a certain way, or because you heard it on a certain news station or whatever, that it must be correct.
Questioning all our old assumptions and preconceptions... :
Lets forget about our doomed rat-race for a moment, and ask ourselves what is truly valuable in our lives?
Q.Is following the majority always in our best interests?
Q.What if there were no Gods at all?
Q.What is our relationship with the State?
Q.The Proletarian Work-Ethic which by design consumes 8 hours of each and every working day for most of us in our average adult lifetime, is this still valid as an activity?
What nobility lies in repeating abstract tasks which merely consume resources and do nothing to help shape a better World?
Q. Are we fiddling as Rome burns?
Q.Are we truly free agents?
Q.Or are there certain obligations involving repetitive virtually meaningless tasks which need to be carried out, and which bear no relationship to our real needs or requirements in order to secure our survival?
Q.Will we always need political leaders to tell us what to think and how to live our lives?
Q.Or is it conceivable that we can grow up as a species, and learn to co-operate amongst each other in a new era of sharing, caring and mutual help?
Q.Why are there endless Wars raging across the Planet?
Q.Is this the natural state for Man, to be forever in conflict and competition with his fellow man?
Q.Or are we conditioned to behave in certain ways i.e are we compelled to travel down certain grooves and channels by the nature and structure of our archaic, fossilised System?
In our quest for understanding and self-awareness we need to be deliberate, vigilant and above all consciously aware of our inbuilt propensity to be recidivists, repeating over and over again the same mistakes as before.
We cling insecurely like children, to ancient, familiar modalities of thought and patterns of social behaviour.
False beliefs based on the need to conform.
Ancient baseless assumptions regarding man's inherent nature e.g competitiveness is our natural state or that Man is essentially selfish and ego-driven.
Nietzsche, certainly one of our first existential philosophers once said : "It is not about having the courage of your convictions...but rather it is about having the courage for an attack on one's convictions"
A difficult task granted, but one which is essential if we are to evolve and embrace the new epoch of scientific rationalism.
We have come a long way in the last 50 years or so.
It is now time for us to move collectively into the 21st century.
However we must first learn to identify and acknowledge the inherent problems with our past Institutions and accompanying assumptions such as Religion, the necessity for a 'fearless leader' and other belief systems such as Nationalism, which is merely an extension of Tribalism and the State control of our lives per se.
These left-overs, are simply echoes of our distant past which contain no raison d'etre in the 21C, no logical requirement as it were, and are in their effect counter-productive to their stated aims, in other words they are irrational, uneconomic and illogical, and ultimately work against the common good as we emerge into our global identity in the 21st Century.
Our global identity is being inevitably shaped right now, whether right or wrong, and it is an inevitable reality which we need to fundamentally consider, and factor in to our efforts in shaping a better World.
In our new epoch science has given us a new perspective on man and his seemingly limitless capabilities;
"What a piece of work is a man, How noble in Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god"
~ William Shakespeare
It is often said about our old Institutions that they are tried and true.
That is, that they have stood the test of time and that we have always done things in a certain manner.
This viewpoint totally ignores all evidence regarding such phenomena as peak oil, water and air, the inevitable result of living in a finite World...
How could we have ever foreseen a different outcome?
Just as we have built-in obsolescence, there is similarly a built-in flaw within our system of cyclical consumption, driving us ever closer to the edge of no-return.
Surely at this juncture it is logical to examine the volition, direction and the 'Will' in historic terms, of our collective activities and the tracks on which we are hurtling like a midnight ghost train downhill into a fog of war and extinction.
You only need to examine just for a moment where our tried and true Institutions, our Establishment and it's established ideas have brought us i.e literally to the brink, 4 minutes to midnight, via our vast stockpiles secreted all over the world of nuclear bombs and other heinous weapons of mass destruction.
If this insane, incredibly dangerous situation wasn't bad enough, thanks to our crazy abstract hologram of a Money market Casino otherwise known as Wall Street and our global economic system (truly a contradiction in terms) we are now, through the endless rapacious need for greed i.e profit literally threatening life on this planet.
We cannot continue in our present direction with our values based on Money that much is clear.
We are destroying ourselves and the planet at a catastrophic rate.
The machinery of our present system grinds inevitably towards it's own demise, taking us with it, in a giddying spiral pattern of increasingly smaller orbits.
Circular arguments which contain no credible basis for their own sustainability except for a grossly flawed concept of continuous Economic growth.
As a wise man once said : "The only thing which grows in an organism after a certain age is Cancer".
Capitalism as evidenced by the American model is clearly at the head of our global plunge into the abyss...
'America my tragic lost love, you have been hoist by your own Capitalist petard.
That rapacious unquenchable lust for Profit and more profit and ever greater profit was always the viper nestled in your bosom... inexorably the poison begins to spread, billowing out like an indigo cloud of ink.
Finally the organism begins to undergo violent paroxysms as it consumes itself from the inside out, clawing and eating its way through the organs and the soft underbelly of it's own lower classes'.
~ From a prose/poem of mine.
I humbly submit that it is time to put an end to our ancient preconceptions, in other words the 'old established ways' which no longer serve mankind but rather control and enslave us, robbing us in small increments on a daily basis, stripping our liberties statute by statute, killing us with plutocratic precision, with the modern state equivalent of Death by a Thousand Cuts and destroying our unique and singular 'Home' in the process.
I further submit that we need to replace these dinosaurs, these primitive modalities of thought and action with a new, deeper understanding of our reality, ourselves and our established Institutions using the tools of Science :
an intellectual Revolution of sorts, which places scientific discovery and the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as the ultimate pursuits, ahead of sporting results, celebrities and the vulgar brain numbing assaults of the corporate Media.
A new paradigm of mutual collaboration and sharing of information which recognises that our global survival must surely come first.
Ahead of a world governed, and driven pathological, by the conditioned need for incessantly greater amounts of a paper abstraction called Money.
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