Pope Francis claims global economy is close to collapse and describes youth unemployment rateshidden world of governmental surveillance, from drone bases to "black sites"Lethal Virus Sample Vanishes From U.S. Biodefense LabNuclear plant spills tritium into lakePentagon studying protesters to prep for 'mass civil breakdown
In a plot to destroy humanity, the elite has fashioned many
opportunities for failure to exist. The financial system is setup for
the bankers to control everything and the public to become more poor.
The environment is consistently polluted in every category but the
biggest polluters are in bed with the government, and so they're allowed
to continue.
The entire system is criminal and it's ready to take you down once you stand up.
THE COLLAPSE OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION – Is this the End of the Human Specie?
The
corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts and
critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and
ignored, frantic Cassandras who are viewed as slightly unhinged and
depressingly apocalyptic. We are consumed by a mania for hope, which our
corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth.
Friedrich
Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil” holds that only a few people have
the fortitude to look in times of distress into what he calls the molten
pit of human reality. Most studiously ignore the pit. Artists and
philosophers, for Nietzsche, are consumed, however, by an insatiable
curiosity, a quest for truth and desire for meaning. They venture down
into the bowels of the molten pit. They get as close as they can before
the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral
honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of
reality become “burnt children,” he wrote, eternal orphans in empires
of illusion.
Decayed civilizations always make war on independent
intellectual inquiry, art and culture for this reason. They do not want
the masses to look into the pit. They condemn and vilify the “burnt
people”—Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Cornel West. They feed the human
addiction for illusion, happiness and hope. They peddle the fantasy of
eternal material progress. They urge us to build images of ourselves to
worship. They insist and this is the argument of globalization that our
voyage is, after all, decreed by natural law, which is a Lie. We have
surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems
of death. We ignore and belittle the cries of the burnt people. And, if
we do not swiftly and radically reconfigure our relationship to each
other and the ecosystem, microbes look set to inherit the earth.
Clive
Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About
Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that
“catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of
“false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an
emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it
means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly
doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a
few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending
disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite
will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as
difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential
struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and
emotionally—and rise up to resist the forces that are destroying us. The
global economy and or market, is being held up by toothpicks!
The
human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a
500-600 year-long worldwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting,
exploiting and polluting the earth—as well as killing the indigenous
communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and
scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as
unrivalled military and economic power for a small, global elite—are
the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion
and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our
economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and
intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We
have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds fast-forward.
Radical political and economic reform is overdue; we seem to suffer
imagination-poverty along with spiritual abandonment issues that require
more than tissues.
Complex civilizations have a bad habit of
ultimately destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph
Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in
“Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short
History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to
systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the
whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be
no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new
peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and
the earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a
painful lesson about unrestrained greed, hubris and idolatry.
Collapse
comes throughout human history to complex societies not long after they
reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity.
“One of
the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization
expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal
values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite
existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has
already begun,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote.
That pattern holds good for a
lot of societies, among them the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what
is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including
smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that
cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to
exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to
disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is
what Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” calls the “progress
trap.” We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity
and such dependence on expansion, Wright notes, that we do not know how
to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands
on nature.
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is
any guide, we, like past societies in distress, will retreat into what
anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in
the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further
collective delusions, such as fundamentalist beliefs in a god or gods
who will come back to earth and save us. The Christian right provides a
haven for this escapism. These cults perform absurd rituals to make it
all go away, giving rise to a religiosity that peddles collective
self-delusion and magical thinking. Crisis cults spread rapidly among
Native American societies in the later part of the 19th century as the
buffalo herds and the last remaining tribes were slaughtered. The Ghost
Dance held out the hope that all the horrors of white civilization—the
railroads, the murderous cavalry units, the timber merchants, the mine
speculators, the hated tribal agencies, the barbed wire, the machine
guns, even the white man himself—would disappear. And our psychological
hard wiring is no different.
In our decline, hatred becomes our
primary lust, our highest form of patriotism. We deploy vast resources
to hunt down jihadists and terrorists, real and phantom. We destroy our
civil society in the name of a war on terror. We persecute those, from
Julian Assange to [Chelsea] Manning to Edward Snowden, who expose the
dark machinations of power. We believe, because we have externalized
evil, that we can purify the earth. And we are blind to the evil within
us.
We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us
toward self-annihilation. And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest
to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we
are going too often lack the fortitude to actually rebel. But moral
cowardice turns us into hostages.
We must develop a revolutionary
theory that is not reliant on the industrial or agrarian muscle of
workers. Most manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and, of those that
remain, few are unionized. Our family farms have been destroyed by
agro-businesses. Monsanto and its Faustian counterparts on Wall Street
rule. They are steadily poisoning our lives and rendering us powerless.
The corporate leviathan, which is global, is freed from the constraints
of a single nation-state or government. Corporations are beyond
regulation or control. Politicians are too anemic, or more often too
corrupt, to stand in the way of the accelerating corporate destruction.
This makes our struggle different from revolutionary struggles in
industrial societies in the past. Our revolt will look more like what
erupted in the less industrialized Slavic republics, Russia, Spain and
China and uprisings led by a disenfranchised rural and urban working
class and peasantry in the liberation movements that swept through
Africa and Latin America. The dispossessed working poor, along with
unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed journalists,
artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement.
It is not the
poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not
be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This
consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and
fast-food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college
graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of
debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of
revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases
broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted
courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize
poor people of color, especially African-American men in the USA and the
Aboriginal in Australia as two examples, without just cause and lock
them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban
centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at
least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in
chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us. “The law, in
its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under
bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,” Anatole France commented
acidly.
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan examined 100 years of
violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil
Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed
twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in
civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent
movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure,
especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the
corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon
them. And we only need 1 to 5 percent of the population actively working
for the overthrow of a system, history has shown, to bring down even
the most ruthless totalitarian structures. It always works on two
tracks—building alternative structures such as public banks to free
ourselves from control and finding mechanisms to halt the machine.
The
most important dilemma facing us is not ideological. It is logistical.
The security and surveillance state has made its highest priority the
breaking of any infrastructure that might spark widespread revolt. The
state knows the tinder is there. It knows that the continued unravelling
of the economy and the effects of climate change make popular unrest
inevitable. It knows that as underemployment and unemployment doom at
least a quarter of the U.S. population, perhaps more, to perpetual
poverty, and as unemployment benefits are scaled back, as schools close,
as the middle class withers away, as pension funds are looted by hedge
fund thieves, and as the government continues to let the fossil fuel
industry ravage the planet, the future will increasingly be one of open
conflict; And this applies to all Commonwealth Nations and includes the
OECD group of nations. This battle against the corporate state, right
now, is primarily about infrastructure. We need an infrastructure to
build revolt. The corporate state is determined to deny us one.
The
state, in its internal projections, has a vision of the future that is
as dystopian as mine. But the state, to protect itself, lies.
Politicians, corporations, the public relations industry, the
entertainment industry and our ridiculous television pundits speak as if
we can continue to build a society based on limitless growth,
profligate consumption and fossil fuel. They feed the collective mania
for hope at the expense of truth. Their public vision is
self-delusional, a form of collective psychosis. The corporate state,
meanwhile, is preparing privately for the world it knows is actually
coming. It is cementing into place a police state, one that includes the
complete evisceration of our most basic civil liberties and the
militarization of the internal security apparatus, as well as wholesale
surveillance of the citizenry.
As the planet begins to convulse with
fury, as the senseless greed of limitless capitalist expansion implodes
the global economy, as our civil liberties are eviscerated in the name
of national security, shackling us to an interconnected security and
surveillance state that stretches from Moscow to Istanbul, from Sydney
to New York and or from Paris to Rome, how shall we endure and resist I
ask myself day by day since 1987?
I have been watching this
slow-motion train crash spread from city to city across the world… In
aesthetic terms the corporate state seeks to crush beauty, truth and
imagination. I do not know if we can build a better society as one whole
Human Family on Earth. I do not even know if we will survive as a
species beyond 2020, they say this civilization will have 20-20 vision
in the year 2020. This is a war waged by all totalitarian systems upon
humanity.
It is only those who harness their imagination, and through
their imagination find the courage to peer into the molten pit, who can
minister to the suffering of those around them. It is only they who can
find the physical and psychological strength to resist. Resistance is
carried out not for its success, but because by resisting in every way
possible we affirm life. And those who resist in the years ahead will be
those who are infected with this “sublime madness.” As Hannah Arendt
wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the only morally reliable
people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be
done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant
wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.”
And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is
better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act,
and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of
despair, not by reason, but by faith.
Culture, real culture, is
radical and transformative. It is capable of expressing what lies deep
within us. It gives words to our reality. It makes us feel as well as
see. It allows us to empathize with those who are different or
oppressed. It reveals what is happening around us. It honors mystery.
“The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that
darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” James Baldwin wrote, “so
that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which
is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
The System is an Illusion – Nature is Life & Reality!
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