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George Orwell’s 1984 Has Become a Blueprint for Our Dystopian Reality

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”— George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.

Orwell understood what many Americans are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

Even our ability to speak and think freely is being regulated.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

In my debut novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the dystopian future that George Orwell predicted for 1984 has finally arrived, 100 years late and ten times as brutal. In this post-apocalyptic world where everyone marches to the beat of the same drummer and words like “freedom” are taboo, Erik Blair—Orwell’s descendant and unwitting heir to his legacy—isn’t volunteering to be anyone’s hero. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go according to plan. To save all that he loves, Orwell will have to travel between his future self and the past.

And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity. 

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter. 

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has been working on an artificial intelligence system designed to anticipate your every move. Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence) has been designed to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS.

What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.

Whether you’re dealing with fact or fiction, as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

The Systemic Risk No One Sees

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The unraveling of social cohesion has consequences. Once social cohesion unravels, the nation unravels.

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

My recent posts have focused on the systemic financial risks created by Federal Reserve policies that have elevated moral hazard (risks can be taken without consequence) and speculation to levels so extreme that they threaten the stability of the entire financial system.

These risks are well known, though largely ignored in the current speculative frenzy.

But there is another systemic risk which few if any see: the collapse of social cohesion.

President Carter was prescient in his understanding that a nation’s greatest strength is its social cohesion, a cohesion that America’s unprecedented wealth / income / power inequalities has undermined. Consider this excerpt from his 1981 Farewell Address:

“Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”

In other words, a nation’s strength flows not just from its material wealth but from its social cohesion–a term for something that is intangible but very real, something that doesn’t lend itself to quantification or tidy definitions.

Here is my definition: Social cohesion is the glue binding the social order; it is the willingness of the citizenry to sacrifice individual gains for the common good.

Social cohesion is the result of the citizenry sharing a common purpose and identity and working toward the common good even at personal cost. Social cohesion arises from a national identity based on shared values and sacrifices.

To maintain social cohesion, opportunities to better their circumstances must be open to all (the social contract of social mobility) and sacrifices must be shared by the entire citizenry. If the privileged elites evade their share of sacrifice, social cohesion is lost and the entire social order unravels.

The glue binding the privileged elites to shared sacrifice is civic virtue, a moral code that demands elites devote a greater share of their own resources to the public good in exchange for their political and financial power.

Though no one dares confess this publicly, America is now a moral cesspool. As a result, the moral legitimacy of the nation’s leadership has been lost. Every nook and cranny of institutionalized America is dominated by self-interest, and much of the economy is controlled by profiteering monopolies and cartels which wield far more political power than the citizenry.

Civic virtue has been lost. What remains is elite self-interest masquerading as civic virtue.

In his Farewell Address, President Carter explained that “The national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”

Social cohesion, civic virtue and moral legitimacy are the foundation of every society, but they are especially important in composite states.

America is a composite state, composed of individuals holding a wide range of regional, ethnic, religious and class-based identities. The national identity is only one ingredient in a bubbling stew of local, state and regional identities, ethnic, cultural and religious identities, educational/alumni, professional and tradecraft identities, and elusive but consequential class-based identities.

Composite states are intrinsically trickier to rule, as there is no ethnic or cultural identity that unifies the populace. Lacking a national identity that supersedes all other identities, composite states must tread carefully to avoid fracturing into competing regional, ethnic or cultural identities.

Composite states must establish a purpose-based identity that is understood to demand shared sacrifice, especially in crisis. In the U.S., the national purpose has been redefined by the needs of the era, but never straying too far from these core unifying goals: defending the civil liberties of the citizenry from state interference, defending the nation from external aggressors, and serving the common good by limiting the power of special interests and privileged elites.

We’ve failed to limit the power of privileged elites, failed to demand greater sacrifices of the wealthy in exchange for power, and so the moral legitimacy of the regime has been lost. And with the ascendance of self-interest and the elite’s abandonment of sacrifice, social cohesion has been lost.

This loss is reflected in the bitter partisanship, the increasingly Orwellian attempts to control the mainstream and social media narratives, the debauchery of “expertise” as dueling “experts” vie for control, the fraying of social discourse, the substitution of virtue-signaling for actual civic virtue, the institutionalization of white-collar crime (collusion, fraud, embezzlement, etc.), the increasing reliance on Bread and Circuses (stimulus, Universal Basic Income) as real opportunity dissipates, and the troubling rise in shootings, crime, random violence and plummeting marriage and birth rates.

The unraveling of social cohesion has consequences. Once social cohesion unravels, the nation unravels.

What’s the solution? At the national level, all that has been lost will have to be restored: civic virtue, moral legitimacy, the social contract of opportunity, shared sacrifice that falls most heavily on the wealthiest and most powerful, and a renewed national purpose centered on serving the common good.

Is such a restoration of moral legitimacy and shared purpose even possible? No one knows. If history is any guide, such a renewal is only possible after the empire of rampant self-interest implodes.

So what do we do in the meantime? Nurture our own social cohesion by living purposefully and sharing sacrifices and bounties with those we trust and admire–those in the lifeboat we chose to join.

Strategically Resisting the New Dark Age: The 7 Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Measured by the Christian calendar, the period of about 500 years from the fall of the Roman Empire until the end of the first millennium was a time characterized by economic, intellectual and cultural decline in the European Christian world. In retrospect, it is now referred to as ‘the Dark Age’, even as other cultures, including that of Islam but those in other parts of the world too, thrived during this period.

Since March 2020, a number of fine analysts have carefully documented the true nature of what is happening to our world under cover of what the World Health Organization has labeled the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’.

And among these fine analysts, who have investigated ‘The Great Reset’ promoted by the World Economic Forum as well as other initiatives such as those related to transhumanism, eugenics and Cyber Polygon, there is a strong consensus that does not coincide with propaganda released by elite agents in international organizations, national governments and the corporate media.

In essence, these critiques document extensive evidence of an elite coup that seeks to comprehensively restructure human society into a technocratic dystopia in which such previously fundamental concepts as human identity, human liberty, human rights (such as freedom of speech, assembly and movement), human privacy and human volition are not just notions of the past but are beyond the comprehension of the typical ‘transhuman’.

To reiterate, for the bulk of the human population left alive, concepts such as ‘free will’ and ‘freedom’ will no longer exist as ideas, let alone as aspirations or realities. You can access a number of these insightful critiques here: Resources.

So whether we label this world envisaged by the elite as a ‘brave new world’, ‘1984’, the second ‘Dark Age’, a ‘technocratic dystopia’ or, more simply, ‘slavery’ matters little because, whatever the label, what lies immediately ahead is a human future not worth living.

And so resistance is imperative. But unless this resistance is strategic it will not achieve the outcome we seek.

Why? Because this elite coup has been decades in the planning and so resistance that is not carefully designed and rigorously implemented will not succeed. The elite is too well organized for haphazard acts of resistance to have any impact. Hence, there is no point simply reiterating the need for resistance. Only a strategically-focused campaign of nonviolent resistance – such as that outlined below – has any serious prospect of succeeding.

So what does it mean to resist strategically?

Resisting strategically means that we understand the power structures and relationships in society and particularly the way in which the global elite has the power to control us. The elite has power to control us through a number of means. For example, it can control what most people fear, think and believe by ensuring that its international organizations, governments, medical establishments, pharmaceutical industry and corporate media (including corporate social media) present a particular ‘package’ of information which, in this case, focuses on the supposed danger of the SARS-Cov-2 ‘virus’ and the importance of going along with a wide range of measures (including lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, mask-wearing, contact tracing and injections) while also censoring media outlets and authors that publish the truth.

Beyond controlling the narrative, however, the global elite has many other means at its disposal to control  us, many of which are being expanded with the progressive rollout of measures associated with implementation of the fourth industrial revolution (which is fundamentally what the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ is about).

These additional means include the deployment of 5G which, apart from the horrific impact this will have on life generally as this electromagnetic radiation further contaminates the biosphere, will enable comprehensive surveillance, digital ID (possibly implanted in your brain: see ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” Is Being Re-Engineered by the Elite’s Coup’) linked to your bank account and health records, a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life, the digitization of money as well as robotization of the workforce and the military.

And if you don’t normally follow technological developments in the military and how warfare is rapidly ‘advancing’ at great detriment to us all, now complicated by elements intrinsic to the ‘Great Reset’, you will get an unpleasant taste in ‘Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2)’, ‘Countering the “China Threat” – At What Price?’ and ‘War from Sea and Space: Hiding Empire in the 21st Century’.

But, of course, there is more. Much more. In the words of Dr Joseph Mercola: ‘The Great Reset’ means the complete transformation of everything from ‘government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing – even how we interact with our fellow human beings. The globalist technocracy is using the COVID-19 pandemic to bypass democratic accountability, override opposition, accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the public against our will.’ See ‘Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?’

For a more detailed summary of the essential elements of this coup, see ‘Corrupt Science and Elite Power: Your Techno-Slavery is Now Imminent’. For a summary of the enormous and increasing costs, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’. And for the evidence of the coup’s adverse impact on human survival prospects, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

So while these measures are being implemented and thus increasing the capacity of the global elite to control us, we do not have to cooperate. Moreover, we can resist it very effectively and encourage those we know who are also concerned about what is happening to resist effectively as well.

And, in the end, our success or failure will be determined by one simple factor: Are we able to mobilize enough people to act strategically as suggested below?

How Can We Resist Effectively?

Well, as mentioned above, effective resistance requires us to nonviolently noncooperate with those measures that give the global elite the power to control us. That is, we need to focus our resistance so that it undermines the power of the elite. Sound difficult? Believe it or not, it isn’t really.

Let me elaborate a little.

As I have explained on a number of occasions, for example, there is little point organizing a massive protest demonstration unless these mass mobilizations give people who attend (and/or those who hear about them) clear guidance on actions to take to effectively resist once they leave the demonstration. This is because demonstrations, no matter how large, have little impact in themselves (beyond building a sense of solidarity). For example, on 15 February 2003, the largest demonstration in human history – involving 30,000,000 people in 600 cities around the world protesting the impending US invasion of Iraq – took place. And what did it achieve? The ‘Global War on Terror’ goes on still with no evidence to suggest that resistance on that day or since has had the impact we might have hoped.

My point then is simple. We either resist The Great Reset in a way that undermines the power of the elite to conduct this coup or we enter a world in which those still living will wonder about the value of being alive.

So what can we do?

Here is a list of the key actions from each day of the ‘7 Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset’.

  1. Refuse Covid-19 tests and experimental injections: Choose Natural Health.
  2. Don’t buy 5G upgrades: Resist the fourth industrial revolution.
  3. Boycott Corporate & Government Media: Choose free and truthful media & social media.
  4. Pay with Cash & Switch to Community Owned Banks.
  5. Don’t Wear Masks or Social Distance.
  6. Keep your small business open in lockdown. Buy from small businesses. Don’t use contact tracing QR codes.
  7. Don’t pay Covid-19 related fines: Risk becoming a prisoner of conscience. Seek support.

You can download the posters/leaflets, each with an explanation and references, at the link above. Each leaflet explains why this particular action is important in undermining elite power so that those who receive it (whether by email, in their letterbox or as they attend or walk past a nonviolent action designed for the purpose) clearly understand the value of undertaking this action (every day, not just one day). If you are interested in organizing activities of this type locally, you can also download the ‘Campaign Overview’ at the link above which offers a simple explanation of how to get more people involved.

If you want more information (including a fuller analysis and other resources) and the complete list of the 29 strategic goals of the campaign, you can access everything at ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’.

And you can join the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group here.

Conclusion

Under cover of a non-existent ‘pandemic’, the global elite is now engaged in an elaborately planned endeavour to take complete control of human life and human society using measures clearly outlined in the literature related to ‘The Great Reset’, the fourth industrial revolution, transhumanism, eugenics and Cyber Polygon.

There is also considerable evidence that increasing numbers of people are weary of the elite-driven response over the past 18 months and that a proportion of these people are now openly sceptical about the official narrative.

But only the rarest person knows how to resist effectively.

And yet if we are to defeat this elite coup, we must mobilize millions of people to noncooperate with fundamental elements of it.

Otherwise the New Dark Age will not be an age from which transhumans will be emotionally and intellectually equipped to emerge, no matter how long they are given. Why? Because the transhumans the elite is intent on creating will not think or feel for themselves; they will have no Self-will to drive their behaviour. They will be programmed to be willing slaves for life.

The time during which human beings can still make choices is rapidly drawing to a close. We must use that time to choose resistance that makes a difference, and invite others to make that choice too.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

COMMUNITY VERSUS COMMODITY: THE HIDDEN BATTLE THAT AFFECTS US ALL

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“We abuse the land because we see it as a commodity belonging to is. When we see the land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” ~Aldo Leopold

If, as Krishnamurti said, “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” then it stands to reason that remaining “well adjusted” has kept us in a perpetual state of ecocide.

Our society poisons the air it breathes, the water it drinks, and the food it eats. And then it has the audacity to poison the minds of its citizens by convincing them that this is somehow “progress”.

The problem is that we don’t have a healthy sense of community. What little sense of community we do have is wrapped up in the unhealthy society that we were born into. It’s caught up in the nine-to-five daily grind and the rat-in-a-cage drudgery of a fear-based lifestyle that’s codependent upon a corrupt state. And this is happening on a global scale. You would be hard-pressed to find a healthy society: that is, a society that does not poison its air, water, food, and minds.

It all comes down to perspective—or the lack thereof. We have been conditioned by a sick society to perceive the world as a commodity that belongs to us. In order to cure ourselves, in order to no longer be sick, we must find a way to flip our perspective into perceiving the world as a community to which we belong.

It will require unlearning what we have learned from the profoundly sick society. It will require unwashing the brainwash and reconditioning the cultural conditioning. It will require living a courage-based lifestyle despite the fear-based lifestyle that surrounds us. It will require becoming interdependent from, rather than codependent on, the profoundly sick society. It will require obtaining an eco-centric perspective while rejecting the egocentric perspective that got us into this mess.

This will be an arduously Herculean task. But no battle is more important for the continued survival of our species.

World as Commodity:

“Do not become one of those who only has the courage of other people’s convictions.” ~A. Bartlett Giamatti

What makes it so difficult to flip our perspective? It’s the fact that the sick society keeps us comfortable, safe, and secure while at the same time that it keeps us unhealthy and codependent. The other reason is that it is so much easier to use the world as a commodity.

And that’s the rub. Nobody wants to take responsibility. Nobody wants to be uncomfortable, unsafe, or insecure. Everybody wants to take the easy road. And so the profoundly sick society just keeps on getting sicker.

It’s all too easy to simply rely upon unsustainable corporations that pollute the air and poison the water. In order to keep up with the rat race and keep food on the table, we are forced to rely on corrupt corporations and bureaucratic governments that are dead set on using the world as a commodity while calling it progress. After all, even unhealthy food is better than no food at all. Right?

And even when we do try to become independent and grow our own food or catch our own rainwater, we have overreaching governments with the monopoly on violence coming down on us and slapping us with fines or threatening us with jail time.

The ‘world as commodity’ is an unhealthy snake eating its own tail. Even worse, it gives birth to citizens that are codependent sheep grazing on the unhealthy snake shit and somehow managing to convince themselves it’s food. “Hell! If it’s cheap and easy and keeps me comfortable and safe from government oppression, I might as well eat it. Ignorance is bliss, right?” Right.

And that’s the real kicker. Any awareness of living in a sick society is easily pushed to the side and repressed through the psychosocial convenience of cognitive dissonance. Which usually sounds a little something like this: “It’s uncomfortable for me to believe that I live in a profoundly sick society, even though the evidence is overwhelming. So, rather than think about it, I’ll simply ignore it. After all, there are bills to pay. My kids need to eat (probably McDonald’s or Roundup-laced vegetables). Who do you think I am? Captain Fantastic?”

Satire aside, comfort and convenience are the front lines in the battle against the world as a commodity. If we have any chance of winning this battle, every single one of us will have to win that war at the front line. Which will mean a lot of discomfort and inconvenience.

World as Community:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” ~Aristotle

The solution to winning the war against perceiving the world as a commodity is flipping our perspective and perceiving it as a community. Unfortunately, this will require discomfort and inconvenience.

This will require peeling away layer upon layer of cultural conditioning. The first layer is fear of the unknown. It’s the fear of trying something new, of making a healthy lifestyle change. It’s the fear of being ostracized or left out. It’s the fear of some arbitrary authority coming in with some arbitrary power and fining us with some arbitrary law.

So, the first thing we’ll need is courage. But not just any kind of courage. We’ll need a particular flavor of courage that is willing to be “the bad guy,” the maverick, the martyr. It will require the kind of courage that can stand up to codependent peer pressure and take independent leaps of courage, despite goodie-two-shoe conformists and weak-kneed milquetoasts.

The kind of courage that will make the sick society hate you for being healthy; when, really, it just hates itself for remaining sick. It’s the kind of courage that eco-centrically crushes out into healthy interdependence with cosmos, despite the sick society that egocentrically flushes everything away in codependent excess and greed.

The second thing we’ll need is the ability to question the sick society to the nth degree. But not just any kind of questioning. No. We need a particular flavor of questioning that is ruthless, penetrating, interrogating—no-holds-barred.

The kind of questioning that puts unsustainable corporations on blast. The kind of questioning that’s civilly disobedient. The kind of questioning that tears apart the outdated, xenophobic reasoning of the sick society; that reveals the chain-of-command as nothing more than an up-jumped human centipede, blind and poisonous to reason. Indeed. The kind of questioning that has shock value; that won’t allow the sick society to fall back into pretending it’s asleep.

Most of all, it will require us all to practice self-interrogation, self-improvement, and self-overcoming—all of which are exceedingly uncomfortable and inconvenient. Oh well.

When it comes down to it, things will probably get worse before they get better. Transitioning from a sick society that treats the world as a commodity to a healthy society that treats the world as a community will not be an easy task. Things may even slip into anarchy (no masters, no rulers). But even uncomfortable anarchy is healthier than comfortable tyranny, or convenient sickness. Especially when the tyranny and the sickness are ecocidal. Without a healthy planet there can be no healthy people. It really is that critical. Indeed. We may need to sow a little strategic disorder to reap a higher order.

The world can be a community to which we belong, full of compassion, respect, love, and tolerance. But only if we let it. And not if we continue to treat the world like a commodity that belongs to us.

Our tolerance of a ‘profoundly sick society’ can only go so far. Lest we inadvertently end up on the side of the executioners, we must draw the line somewhere. It must be drawn at sickness, at excess, at violence, at greed, and at ecocide. And only free, healthy, courageous individuals will have the wherewithal to draw it.

Falsehood Rules

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

Who knew that reality could become such a squishy thing in the USA? But such are the agonies of a collapsing society that it becomes ever harder to know what’s real, especially with factions in power intent on gaslighting, manipulating, obfuscating, and coercing the raw material of public opinion, which is: what has actually happened in the past and what is happening now.

When I wrote The Long Emergency, I expected we would be living through a period of confusion and disorder, but I didn’t know what it would feel like to go through it: a nauseating existential disorientation, like being seasick on dry land… like living in a German expressionist horror movie of the 1920s (and we know what that led to)… like being held prisoner inside Franz Kafka’s castle: an immersion in totalizing falsehood.

The collapse of authority is especially striking and disturbing now because ground zero for it is the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the very place that is charged with determining what is true and what is false, what is real and what is unreal, and especially what is okay, and what is not okay.

The collapse of authority at DOJ got sickening traction after the election of 2016, when FBI Director James Comey and his underlings, along with many high officials at its parent agency, DOJ, undertook a campaign to disable and expel the winner of that election, starting before his inauguration. The Russia Collusion operation was the epitome of falsehood concocted in bad faith, and the actions taken in it were never adjudicated — though an ectoplasm named John Durham is floating somewhere out in the national ether still delegated to make cases. Leaving all that hanging this long has been a grievous injury to the country’s identity as a place on this earth where fair play was supposed to be normal.

The Mueller Investigation was another insult to the public interest, devised to distract and cover up the all the previous seditious bad faith of Comey & Company, and the C-suite at DOJ — and, of course, the Special Counsel came up with absolutely nothing actionable, which was stunning considering the resources behind it, and the time spent. At a Senate hearing about it in 2018, Robert Mueller himself claimed to be unacquainted with key characters in his own investigation and key pieces of evidence. His performance was worse than not reassuring — he appeared to be lying or incompetent, or pretending to be incompetent, and since that moment he has gone-to-ground… untouchable.

Impeachment No. 1 was supposedly about a phone call that the President made to his counterpart in Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky, regarding suspicious activity of one Hunter Biden receiving large sums of money from a gas company there while his father was Vice-president. At the time, the FBI (and the DOJ) did not disclose their possession of a laptop computer owned by Hunter Biden containing hundreds of memoranda and emails detailing the Biden family’s lucrative business dealings in Ukraine and several other foreign countries, involving sums of money far greater than the Burisma Company of Ukraine was paying Joe Biden’s son, and how the income was split between the family members. In other words, evidence that then-Vice-president Joe Biden himself was on the take from foreign countries, including companies linked directly with the communist party of China. Not important, you think? Not germane to the impeachment?

Why was that information not turned over to the president’s lawyers during the initial hearings and then the impeachment trial itself? That has never been adequately addressed, not even a little, and largely because the mainstream media does not want to know, and didn’t ask, while the alt.media does not have access to ask the officials who might know — and Congress, under Mrs. Pelosi and Chuck Schumer certainly didn’t want to ask or know. Do you appreciate how damaging this act of institutional dishonesty was.

Then there was the election of 2020, held under the Covid-19 emergency, with new rules about mail-in voting that lent themselves to fraud — or so declared former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, who ran a commission on election reform in 2005 — and that appears to be exactly what happened. The specious and dishonest claim is made by the putative winners that the matter was completely settled in the courts post-election. That is simply not true. The actual evidence was not entertained, most particularly not by the Supreme Court, which declined on the basis of “standing,” a mere point of procedure.

Now there is one official forensic audit of the 2020 election underway in Maricopa County, Arizona, (the Phoenix metro area), ordered by the State Senate, and some conclusions from phase one, involving the paper ballots, are due to be released this week, with additional phases to come concerning the Dominion voting machines. Many other state legislatures sent delegations to Arizona to learn the ins-and-outs of conducting a forensic audit, and they are making noises about actually doing it.

So, in stepped Attorney General Merrick Garland. At the start of the Arizona audit, he sent a letter to the Arizona State Senate threatening to use the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ to halt the audit on the basis of depriving voters of their civil rights. Arizona responded by promising to jail any federal officials who laid their hands on any ballots. That was the end of that gambit for now — they may try it again in phase two.

In the meantime, a county judge in Georgia (one Brian Amero) has ruled that 147,000-odd ballots alleged to have chain-of-custody problems must be made available for inspection, and also that five members of the Fulton County (Atlanta Metro Area) Board of Elections are now individually parties to the lawsuit brought by nine Georgia voters, and may be subject to deposition (being questioned under oath). That is believed to be the beginning of an effort to conduct a full audit in Georgia.

So, again, in steps Attorney General Merrick Garland with his Civil Rights Division, led by political activist Kristen Clarke, bringing a lawsuit against the Georgia election reform act passed earlier this year — a shot over Georgia’s bow, shall we say. Ms. Clarke happens to be a colleague of Georgia activist Stacey Abrams, a former Democratic candidate for governor. Ms. Abrams is also a part-owner of a company, NOWAccount, that does payroll for a private company called Happy Faces, which furnished dozens of poll workers to tally the 2020 election in Georgia, as well as the 2021 US Senate runoff election that put two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, in office.

Elections are supposed to be conducted by public officials, not by private entities. Supposedly, the Georgia election officials turned to Happy Faces because it was a way to avoid hiring workers for less than 30 hours-a-week, which would have otherwise required providing them with health care under ObamaCare, the ACA Act. Was that legal? It has not been adjudicated.

Nor has the much bigger scandal of a private Chicago-based non-profit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which received $350-million from Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to arrange grants targeted at swing districts in Democratic strongholds such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, for the purpose of hiring ballot harvesters, among other activities. Mr. Zuckerberg met with Kristen Clarke, Stacey Abrams, Al Sharpton, and other Democratic activists at a dinner in 2019, at which he promised to help. Did his help cross any legal boundaries? It has not been investigated, nor has the use of the company he runs, Facebook, in its campaign to influence public opinion by blocking news and deleting accounts of non-Democrats exclusively.

Assistant AG Kristen Clarke’s DOJ lawsuit against Georgia’s election reform act alleges that it “imposes substantial fines on third-party organizations, churches, and advocacy groups that send follow up absentee ballot applications, and requires new and unnecessarily stringent identification requirements to obtain an absentee ballot.”  In other words, the Georgia law seeks to restrict the activities of private, non-official entities — such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life — sprinkling gargantuan sums of money over key election districts to influence the outcome. Or for companies such as Happy Faces to supply activists for counting votes. That is how disingenuous Merrick Garland’s DOJ is, now a strictly political operation.

We haven’t nearly seen the end to any of this, nor the reaction that it is liable to provoke among citizens who have had enough of being played by their own government. Think about all  that while you make plans to celebrate the Fourth of July, a holiday that commemorates an earlier time when the people of this land had enough of being played by their rulers.

The Etymological Animal Must Slip Out of the Cage of Habit to Grasp Truth

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Etymology – from Greek, etymos, true, real, actual (the study of roots)

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Life is full of slips.

Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us.  Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us.  Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us.  And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.

Slips are double-edged.

It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control.  Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.”  Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.

Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.

In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide.  They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations.  This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior.  Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories.  It is not just words that have etymologies.

When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today.  Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown.  It slips in when people are asleep.

John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:

Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.

And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control.  For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life.  This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines.  A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign.  In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:

… the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual.  The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything.  Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.

Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively.  Ellul again:

It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary).  Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.

The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds.  This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.

In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses.  This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness.  To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.

Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.”  First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem.  A slippery slope indeed.

But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare.  It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.

In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum.  I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously.  The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality.  Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it.  And it will.  But don’t say this out loud.

So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:

So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.

A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility.  Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion.  Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.

The other day I was going grocery shopping.  My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.”  Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred.  “I prefer whipping,” she said.

I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”

We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she.  She slipped, and I found humor in that.  Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.

But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things.  Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them.  Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.

Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down.  In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies.  We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.

It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many.  A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”

But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate.  To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society.  Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.

So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?

This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.

I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.

We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells.  Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television.  Close the computer.  Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others.  Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away.  Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe.  Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly.  Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite.  Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow.  It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing.  In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:

It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.

I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us.  But without it we are lost.  Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought.  Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.”  Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset.  If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation.  Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.

There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks.  It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness.  Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”

It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.

THE ART OF SHADOWING YOURSELF

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask yourself this crucial question, does this path have heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn’t, then it is of no use.” ~Carlos Castaneda

The art of shadowing yourself is a ruthless form of self-overcoming made popular by the writings of Carlos Castaneda (he called it stalking the self), who was inspired by the Yacqui Shaman Don Juan.

The shadower needs four essential qualities: ruthlessness, cunning, patience, and humor. The fundamentals of the art of shadowing yourself are three-fold: shadowing the self, shadowing the world, and shadowing the unknown. Let’s break it down…

Shadowing the Self:

“Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.” –Rumi

Shadowers are seekers. They are ruthless explorers. When shadowers shadow themselves, they are shadowing inner knowledge, sacred wisdom, and hidden information. They are in search of the golden shadow, where latent creativity is hidden beneath layer upon layer of cultural conditioning, religious indoctrination, and political brainwashing.

When a shadower shadows him/herself, he is a hunter mercilessly routing out codependence, weakness, and cowardice. He uses self-interrogation like Occam’s Razor, shaving away the superfluous, cutting away years and years of false knowledge, unlearning what was learned, un-washing the brainwash, and reconditioning the conditioning that came before.

A shadower audaciously digs a hole right into the center of his own comfort zone. He digs deep. He keeps digging, hungry for something more, for something he knows not what. He digs until there is nothing more than a snarling abyss, a soul-shattering existential darkness that presses in on him, that smashes his fragile ego into a million little pieces.

It is at the bottom of the abyss, deep in the throes of a Dark night of the soul, with his shattered ego reassembled into an individuated tool for further exploration, that the shadower discovers the diamond hidden in the rough of his soul: shadow’s gold.

Shadow’s gold is our sacred wound glowing like nothing else can glow. It is the accumulation of all the repressed pain, failure, setbacks, and loss experienced in a lifetime pressurized into a powerful force of darkness made conscious. It is our repressed shadow married with our inner light.

Having discovered the inner darkness of his soul’s abyss, the shadower takes his shadow’s gold and uses it to climb out of fearful codependence and into courageous independence. Now it’s time to use this newfound independence—this unity of abyss and summit, of shadow and light—to stretch his tiny comfort zone into the world.

Shadowing the World:

“The shamans say that being a medicine man begins by falling into the power of the demons. The one who pulls out of the dark place becomes the medicine man, and the one who stays in it is the sick person. You can take every psychological illness as an initiation. Even the worst things you fall into are an effort of initiation, for you are in something that belongs to you.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz

Now that the self has been thoroughly interrogated, shadow’s gold discovered, abyss and summit united, it’s time for the shadower to shadow the world. It’s time for the shadower to rise up out of the ashes of his codependence and break down the walls of his tiny comfort zone. It’s time to piece back together his shattered ego into an individuated ego. The shadower uses the knowledge of his individuation to take a leap of courage out of his comfort zone. He finally has the ears to hear the call to adventure. He is ready to take the next step into his hero’s journey.

But the world is dangerous. Living a life well-lived is full of risks. Adventure is at hand, yet when a shadower stretches his comfort zone, he understands that he is stretching into risky adventure. Hence the need for courage.

Shadowing the world is not for the faint of heart. It requires questioning all institutions to the Nth degree. It requires getting in the face of all so-called authorities. It requires ruthless civil disobedience that puts the powers that be in check. It requires David-like courage challenging any and all Goliath-like power structures. Sometimes, it even requires amoral agency to balance out the extremes of the overly moral goodie-two-shoes and immoral psychopaths of the world.

A shadower shadows the world with the same ruthlessness in which he shadowed himself, mercilessly interrogating everything the culture has taken for granted. He holds outdated world views against the hot iron of universal law and tosses out what cannot withstand the heat. He counts coup on power. He deflates egos and animates souls. He cuts the strings that once bound him to a profoundly sick society like a mere puppet and turns those strings into a lasso with which he lassos truth.

The shadower acts as a mirror to the world, revealing the shadows of others. People fear their own shadows and so they tend to fear the ruthless honesty of the shadower. They cringe. They balk. They reel inside the slow simmer of their own cognitive dissonance. Nevertheless, the shadower relentlessly injects wakefulness into an otherwise somnambulant world.

When a shadower shadows the world, he becomes the world. He stretches his tiny comfort zone into a mighty horizon, subsuming the world. And the shadow of the world is a mighty thing indeed. He is now ready for the difficult task of shadowing the unknown.

Shadowing the Unknown:

“The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.” ~Ken Kesey

When a shadower shadows the unknown, he goes Meta. He shadows the infinite. He shadows God. He cunningly interrogates mental paradigms. He lives between worlds, bridging gaps. To a shadower, the unknown is merely procrastinating knowledge just waiting to be known.

If, as Einstein said, “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge,” then the shadower turns the power of his imagination on the universe itself, flexing on Infinity, despite his own finitude.

It is in this sense that a shadower becomes a cosmic hero. Having risen up out of his codependent comfort zone, having leveraged a life well lived through shadow’s gold, having embraced the interconnectedness of all things through the union of summit and abyss, the shadower becomes an interdependent self-actualizer projecting the prism of his shadow’s glow into the Great Mystery. He has left behind the fear-based lifestyle and embraced a courage-based lifestyle that manifests the provident-based lifestyle of cosmic heroism.

Shadowing the unknown almost always leads to high art. Cathartic art. The kind of art that changes the world, full of myth and metaphor and existential leitmotifs. The kind of art that becomes the magic elixir that wakes up entire “tribes,” that animates an otherwise inanimate world. A shadower shadows the unknown in order to give birth to the sacred known.

Shadowing the unknown is the art of living life to the Nth degree. It’s inflicting oneself with a life well-lived through a courage of the most high, with a humor of the most high, with honor of the most high. It’s grabbing God by the throat and forcing him to cough up all his secrets, blasphemy be damned. It’s being ruthlessly determined to live life well, as a shining example to those living life ill.

Ultimately, shadowing the unknown is shadowing death. It’s being on the hunt for a good death that balances out a good life. As Castaneda said, “Death is the only wise advisor we have. Whenever you feel like everything is going wrong and you’re about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you are wrong; that nothing matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, “I haven’t touched you yet.”

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

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By Stephen Parato

Source: Waking Times

“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth–certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” ~Henry David Thoreau

Obedience is the connective tissue of oppression.

In other words, any form of control on a collective level can only be carried out through obedience. A dictator can’t arrest or kill an entire population himself; he needs mindless minions to do the dirty work. This principle applies across all forms and degrees of systematic control, even the most subtle.

The desires of any wannabe controller can only come to fruition through the compliance of others. And that’s been the case throughout recorded history (his-story). The desire for control becomes a virus, driven by fear and infecting more and more people, until there are enough drones to oppress an entire population.

This phenomenon isn’t just the case with large-scale atrocities; it applies to anything which is an impediment to freedom or love; be it a person, group, system or idea.

Everything is held up by belief. Laws are merely words written on paper, only legitimized by collective acquiescence. Laws need people to enforce them. And if laws are unjust (as most are), those who carry them out must unquestioningly submit to authority and go against their own inner knowing.

The only way control or oppression works on any scale is through compliance. Too many people do the work of ‘the man’ for ‘the man.’ That’s the problem. The solution lies in civil disobedience.

Freedom Cannot Be Granted

“Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.” ~Max Stirner

Asking for freedom is oxy-moronic. If you have to ask for freedom, you’re already a slave.

How is freedom taken? The simple decision to be the master of your own body and mind.

It really is as simple as that, though difficult to apply. It’s easy to blame problems on others, it’s easy to neglect our health and think “the doctor can fix me.” We’ve been conditioned to externalize our power since childhood. We’ve been taught to not trust ourselves. We’ve been taught to submit to authority without question.

This is a recipe for a control system to stealthily and slowly permeate society (the totalitarian tiptoe).

When you attain a degree of self-mastery, you do not acquiesce to the will of destructive people or disharmonious institutions. Which leads to the next point…

Fear-Based Programming

“The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service.” ~Albert Einstein

The covert means by which oppression takes over is through fear-based programming.

If you have people in fear, you can easily control them. Fear activates the part of the brain known as the amygdala (the center for emotional behavior/motivation) and inhibits neocortex function (our “thinking brain”). This means that rationality and intellect are thrown out the window, the perfect storm for brainwashing. There’s even a term for this fear response; amygdala hijack.

The media is one big amygdala hijack, perpetually programming the population with which boogeyman to fear next. This is a massive ritual of fear-based programming that insidiously shifts entire populations into thinking and acting irrationally out of fear. Television is called programming for a reason.

Remember the whole weapons of mass destruction fiasco with Iraq in 2003? US military action in Iraq and massive destabilization of the middle east (which continues to this day) was predicated on that lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction. But lingering fear from 9/11 resulted in a string of irrational behavior and many people blindly believing the hype.

The holocaust took place because German soldiers were thoroughly conditioned to carry out orders. They didn’t carry out orders because they liked doing it, but because they feared the wrath of their higher ranking officers, or even because they were conditioned to fear jewish people. These abominations only occur when fear is the driving force.

Fear is hard to pin down. It’s slippery, and ultimately illusory (False Evidence Appearing Real). Yet it’s the undercurrent of all “negative” emotions. Fear is what stops us from saying no to evil. Fear might actually distort our perceptions to support evil. That’s why it’s so dangerous.

When you cultivate self-mastery, you’re able to break the cycle. The spread of fear stops before you and is transmuted by the omnipotent force of unyielding love.

Love Over Fear

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” ~John Lennon

Strive to choose love over fear in every situation. You can never go wrong if you act from a place of compassion. This is the fulcrum of change, and it starts within you.

The change we all yearn to see in the world will only happen in the wake of a fundamental change in consciousness. Everything we see in this world starts in the realms of imagination before coming into manifestation.

The change begins within and ripples outward. Embodying the change is the first step, the prerequisite. Without inner transformation, humanity will be stuck on the same merry-go-round of madness.

When a critical mass of people create positive inner changes, it will open up doors we never could’ve imagined before and will provide possibilities far beyond our current limited perspective. Solutions will spontaneously emerge.

Go within and stop the momentum of fear. Learn to listen to and trust your intuition. Have the courage to follow your heart instead of cowardly bowing to fear.

“Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor – the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant ‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’” ~Brene Brown

Compliance with destruction, hatred, oppression, violence and fear is cowardice, while noncompliance is courageous. In the depths of your being, in your heart of hearts, you know what is right.

Choose love over fear.

Have the courage of heart and freedom of mind to disobey oppressive forces.

Be the change.