Things To Remember
Democracy in action is not enabling.
Participation in the democratic process reinforces the illusion that you are making a difference, and that your voice, input, views, are a real contribution, and that they are valued, put into place or enacted upon.
Democracy is just more glitter on the golden cage that surrounds you. Democracy in action is just a bunch of people telling even more people what to do.
Democracy has been sold as a bill of goods that will enable you, when in reality it is just a process that will obscure how controlled you really are. It’s a tool to allow you input into a process that is designed to enslave you.
You’d be better off by simply removing the prison bars.
What would happen, if during a national (s)election, the voting booths were torn down or destroyed? Instead of allowing people to vote themselves into further slavery, no vote at all was permitted?
If this action was widespread enough, the (s)election could be forfeited. The “disenfranchised” voters would claim that they were cheated out of their votes and either a special (s)election would then be held, or not. If not, the disenfranchised would be angry and question the entire process. If held, they’d still question the entire process.
Eventually, the bars themselves might be removed.
Voting does not enable you, it does not empower you, it does nothing more then to eventually help enslave you.
Nobody ever voted their way to freedom. Nobody every voted their jailers out of office either. Voting empowers the democratic process, and creates the illusion that you have ‘participated’. One jailer is always replaced with yet another. One law stricken from the books is replaced with ten more. Better to stop participating all together. Better to get rid of the books altogether. Voting will NEVER do that, because the voting process is a subset of the democratic process.
Get rid of the vote and the implied authorization that you are being ‘ruled over’ (controlled) by someone else by not voting. Withdraw your consent. Your participation isn’t meaningful anyway. Voting enables democracy, which is just mob rule (majority rule), to rule over you. When you vote, you are basically saying, “I agree to go along with whatever the majority decides”.
The majority never decides (or is never allowed to decide, they’re overruled by the courts) on issues that are really important, such a basic freedoms or personal choices.
The majority is often wrong.
Why “go along” with the majority anyway? History shows that they’re very often dead wrong. It’s usually the lone voice, the dissenting views to the majority view that winds up being proven right. Majority rule quenches independent critical thought and creates consensus based acceptance throughout all of society. This is the exact opposite of individual freedom and creativity.
History is replete with examples of individuals who defied the majority (and authority) and changed history. The lesson here is we do not find accuracy, truth and leadership within the majority.
The majority is “protectionists”, and will always move towards what will give them the most benefits. This is why welfare cannot be disbanded and abolished, too many are on welfare now to allow it, and government itself is too vested in its continued existence to disband their own agencies involved (which would mean firing a bunch of useless employees).
Basically, it’s a racket, a criminal enterprise that protects itself by all who are involved. Even those who try very hard to get off of welfare aren’t easily allowed, they’re sucked back into the system (just like the mafia). Once they’ve got their hooks into you, they don’t want to let go.
Humans are just resources.
We’re just economic units in the eyes of government and authority. Our continued existence is all predicated upon their need and not ours. If you don’t believe that, look at how we treat those who cannot pay.
We are useful only as long as we ‘contribute’ through extortion to society. Those that would leave society are considered harmful, which is quite bizarre when you think about what this means. Anybody should be allowed to leave anytime they want — if they are not allowed to leave, then they are property (slaves), which is exactly how society and civilization treats us all.
This is why indigenous tribes are such a threat, they are reminders that we do not need this civilization or society, and that we can indeed live very different lives that have lasted for thousands upon thousands of years.
Anyone who tries to leave this civilization is threatened (coerced) into staying. Your contribution (extortion) is the primary issue here, but so is a taste of real freedom, it might be catching and then others too, would want to join with you.
Freedom is often messy, ugly, unjust and scary.
Many people are literally scared to death of true freedom, because they’d have to become something that they are not — self-responsible. Their very lives would be on the line and they know it. Not knowing how to take care of themselves outside of the gilded cages that they live in now and experience true freedom is their worst nightmare.
In some respects, they are quite right. Freedom is messy, because suddenly the walls that cage you aren’t there. Freedom can be ugly, because you’ll see things that have been hidden from you all along. Freedom can also be unjust because there isn’t someone looking over your shoulder 24/7 to make sure you or someone else hasn’t stepped over a fabricated line. And freedom can indeed be scary, because it would be entirely new to a generation of freed slaves who really would not know how to behave themselves (and probably wouldn’t).
But not to worry. Freedom won’t come all at once, and it will never come under the guise of democracy. Learning to live without walls is a skill and a lifestyle that our ancestors did just fine. So can we, someday. But not before the prison we’ve helped build is first dismantled right down to the foundation it’s built upon.
Civilization is a prison system.
Civilization is many things, including illusion. We’ve become very comfortable in our cages of illusion. Civilization is our comfort blanket, warm and cozy when we need it, but choking and tangling us when we find that we don’t.
Civilization is not enabling, it is controlling. Civilization is based upon several principles, including ownership, economics, control, hierarchy and authority, all of which is quite unnatural to the entire rest of this Earth. From this, we have a ‘built’ society.
Society is a subset of civilization, and creates differing layers of human labor and activity and is useful for those who like to control others. These layers are further divided by race, creed, wealth, status, heritage or even religion. Depending on “your place” within society, your layer (life) can be very different from someone else’s.
Society pretends to tell us that these layers do not matter much, when it is obvious that they do. In fact, society spends quite a bit of time trying to tell us things which we know are not possibly true. This is done to further control us and divide us and to withhold the truth from our eyes. If we knew the truth, we would rebel.
Society teaches us that the parent organization of civilization is “necessary” and useful for the progression of mankind, but this cannot be true either, as mankind has regressed in every way possible since civilization’s inception, taking most of the planet with it (downhill).
It is worth noting that nothing else on this planet creates societies and civilization like humans have. And nothing else on this planet has destroyed and plundered so much either, and yet has gotten along just fine for millions of years. Our civilization is about 10,000 years old, literally just a blip of time, and yet has destroyed so much of the Earth and the life upon it, that it may not last more then another 100 years or so. Everyone wants to tell you that this is a “bad thing”, when it is obvious, it is not.
The prison we constructed will eventually come down, sooner or later. It has to, because civilization is a predatory construct that exploits both human and non-human resources for the alleged benefits on just one destructive species. This cannot possibly last in a finite world.
Authority does not have to be obeyed.
You obey authority oftentimes because you want to (and you were taught to since birth). But just as often, you feel you have to obey because of threats of force of varying degrees being directed at you. This is coercion.
Our compelling to obey is based upon fear itself. We fear punishment, fines, incarceration or the loss of private property. But even deeper down, we obey because we want to. We’re basically saying that we’ll choose to go along to get along as this is our nature. We are social animals after all.
The problem is authority never has enough and enacts more and more onerous burdens upon everyone’s shoulders. What was once easy enough for us to bear becomes burdensome weights with equally harsh (and unjust) punishments for infraction. This breeds resentment and dissent, and even though most of us still obey, we are now doing it out of fear rather then the spirit of cooperation.
Fear is a widely used tactic to compel our obedience. But fear can also be used against those that would compel us. They are in fact very much afraid of those that they rule over. We not only outnumber them by ten thousand to one, we’re not “duty bound” to obey them or their rules or even the conventions of society if we choose not to. This is why we are oft punished for the tiniest infractions, a leash let long reveals a glimmer of the freedom we have lost.
Humans have not lived like this for very long.
This is well worth remembering, because what we see as permanent, isn’t. The way we live our lives today is anything but normal. It is actually an aberration, a freak development of civilization gone wrong.
Former civilizations were very much different then today, but even their societies imploded after time. Ours will too, top heavy from too much bureacracy and incompetence, with the bottom dissolved from too much resource exploitation and destruction.
Life built upon the constant destruction of other beings and things should simply not be allowed to continue to exist. We need to learn to live from the increase of the Earth and not the decrease, otherwise, we do not deserve to be here at all.
We fear the future, but should not.
We fear what this might mean for us, collectively and individually, but should not. No prison can stand forever and neither should this one. What we should fear is that the walls will not come down fast enough, because what we will need to sustain our lives by then may well be long gone.
Change is always scary, especially big change. But our adaption should be exhilarating, because we are in fact going to be moving (finally) towards more freedom instead of away from it. For every brick that falls, we are going to be that much lighter with the burden that we must carry (and so shall the Earth itself).
This is a time of great change.
Many predict a time of giant upheavals, which is indeed true. But what is being done is our own doing, not something else. We alone are responsible for this process and it is up to us to navigate a safe course through it. There is no reason at all to resist it, embrace it as the necessary and timely steps of change that it is.
Many are afraid and conjure up all sort of imaginary things to comfort them and guide them through this process, and many place the blame everywhere else except in the right direction. These people are quite simply lost in the woods, afraid of what is happening and trying to wrap a comforting blanket around their fears. They can only be helped when their illusions dissipate and they finally learn to see clearly. Most won’t, but some will.
Many will be lost.
Millions, even billions will die and there is no rescue awaiting them from any direction or deity. Those that survive will be the survivors at their own hand, and by the help of a few human others. This is how it should be, as the is nature’s inexorable command — adapt or perish.
Those that learn to live within the newly rediscovered boundaries will be humanities future. If there be survivors, it will be them. We can only hope that they will have discarded all the dross that we built up, and all the machinations and manufactured imaginations we endure today.
You mentioned inequities of social layers but only listed the following:
“These layers are further divided by race, creed, wealth, status, heritage or even religion.”
You left out gender. As far as I can tell, it is only in the democracy you rightly revile for its many failings that women have equal rights (and even in our society they often are abused). This makes me fear that any return to a more tribal existence will inevitably mean that women will once again be treated as property with all the attendant beatings and rapes.
Just today in the NYT was this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/opinion/21kristof.html
which seems to indicate that women and female children are the primary victims when social order breaks down.
To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t care much if the Mad Max scenario results from climate and economic meltdown, except…I have three daughters.
Inequalities exist within all social structures. Not all tribal groups treated females as inferior, some ‘reversed’ the roles of leadership, preference and favoritism. But that is not to say that we’d not return to inequality, we probably will. Such is human nature.
The attendant beatings and rapes you mention continue right through today in our “fair and democratic” society. So does outright slavery, there are more human slaves today then at any other time in history, and I’m not talking about my loose application of wage slavery either, I’m talking about real slaves.
Democracy has not made anybody free, it has only held it’s place in human history on a long chain of human suffering, which I do not believe will ever go away.
The link you mentioned (thank you) will happen again. Everybody thinks we can deny the baser human nature in the ‘land of the free’, but it won’t happen. We’ll see massive levels of suffering, including countless murders, deaths, rapes and human slavery before it’s all done (falls apart to the bare bones).
Just take a look at the cases of rapes in Iraq that have been reported by U.S. soldiers and other occupiers. It’s still here in times of war and ‘conquest’. Nobody likes to talk about this or admit it, but we’re still the same humanimals we point fingers at elsewhere.
ugh.
I do think however, that we have made progress regarding slavery and misogyny. Neither has been eliminated but both have been significantly reduced. If you compare contemporary statistics to historical data, there is no question, progress has been made.
The problem to my mind is that with the looming and catastrophic disruptions of climate chaos, we will lost every bit of that progress and regress to basic survival of the fittest. And that will not be a pretty scenario.
It’ll be rape (sex) for food for many, no doubt. I do see a pretty horrible future scenario.
27 million are in slavery today. That’s quite a few more then in history.
‘Civilization’ today is really just a thin veneer of what is really going on (imo).
But isn’t the proportion of the population more relevant? In other words, are there just more people, or more of a percentage of people, that are enslaved.
I guess my point is, I do think we have reached a rather more decent understanding, that slavery is bad, and torture is bad, and so forth, even if it is imperfectly practiced.
27 million is 27 million at any point in history.
Slavery today is the unspeakable horror that almost nobody is willing to talk about.
All we have today is illusions, nothing more. We’re as evil, corrupt, defiled and depraved as ever. Just look around and do a little digging, we’re not any different then civilizations before us.
What we REALLY have today is a highly controlled media that won’t tell us what is going on, but you can find it if you look hard enough. And what you find will scare the living hell out of you.
It is not an illusion that today, in contrast to more or less ever in the past, women can own property, they can vote, they can control their reproduction, they have remedies in the courts to fight back against rape and physical abuse.
There are many many wrong things still going on, all over the world and right here in the US A,
But do you dispute there has been NO progress?
It is a fundamental query.
Is it possible for us greedy and selfish humans to see just a bit past our own profits to sacrifice for future generations of OUR OWN children and grandchildren?
I’m not at all sure what the answer is.
It depends on your definition of ‘progress’. It’s a gilded cage, after all.
Who ‘owns’ who here? The entire concept is fraught with misunderstanding and deception.
Regarding rights, we’ve actually lost rights (collectively speaking, irregardless of gender) more then anything we’ve “gained”. The illusions is that we are more free when we clearly are not.
Freedom today means if you are born of the right class, the right race, the right country and the right economic heritage, you can ‘achieve’ anything, which is just another way of saying you can be the slave you always ‘wanted’ (were taught) to be.
Regarding you last question — no. There is simply no chance at all that we’ll see past our own quest for profits (or we would have already done so). The future will be what we can actually measure and assess today, and what we can learn from that.
Human have not changed one bit. The illusion of society and civilization will fall away like the veneer it is, quickly burned in the fires of collapse.
We’ll NOT sacrifice sufficiently to save even our own children. The proof is always in the doing — and it does not exist.
I know I’m pessimistic, but I’m a realist. Show me the solid evidence that we have changed and I’ll show you the evidence that we have not. Humans are the same group of slavers as they were 5,000 years ago. We’ve got different names, places and dates, and better technological toys to create master / slave races, but that’s it.
That’s just Africa, Asian and European ‘cultures’ have not exactly been anti-slavery. NTM the slavery known as religion.
“It is thought probable that the total number of slaves today is higher than the number who suffered during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.” link
“According to FTS, these slaves represent the largest number of people that has ever been in slavery at any point in world history and the smallest percentage of the total human population that has ever been enslaved at once.”
Of course I do realize you have an expanded notion of what constitutes slavery.
But when you throw in religion and mindlessly absorbing the propaganda from the media, that kind of gets to the unanswerable question of free choice.
I, too, am a woman with a daughter as well as two very young granddaughters. I fear for their lives in this system as much or more than after the crash. At least after the crash, if someone tries to rape any of us, he’ll end up dead. Can’t happen in this system as it stands now… “he” has more protections than any woman has.
I also feel that collapse will give more people a chance to empower themselves. After all, rape is about power and has nothing to do with sex. When you’re no longer answering to any authority other than your own, chances are you will act a lot differently.
I know there are a lot of damaged and just plain warped people who will continue on as though civilisation is still in place. And who will have no self-control for who knows how long afterward. I don’t think they will win out in the end. Competition only takes the human species so far. It is more than evident that cooperation is the adaption we all have to make and live in order for the human species to survive and continue to evolve.
If we wipe ourselves out, just how fucking intelligent are we? I’m truly baffled by our species. Just blows my mind to try to wrap it around the things we do while we’re running around praising ourselves and our actions up the wazoo! Talk about Dissociative Identity Disorder on a mass scale!
Of course there will be mass climate-induced migration where the poor will suffer terribly.
But a person who isn’t used to having electricity 24/7, and knows how to grow food will be far better off than the coddled wealthy of the USA.
Shadowwalker, I see your point in general. However, although I’m not sure what the incidence of violence against women is in the US, if you check that link to the NYT article above, surely that rate dwarfs anything here. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be the case that without the protection of laws women are empowered. More like overpowered.
Certainly humans are quite capable of mass delusions, how else to explain the Nazi death camps, the gulags, and hosts of others?