Even In Election Years Honest Conversation Is Necessary

So you expect me to vote for Biden. I respect your opinion. Respect mine. Because real, honest dialog is necessary. Oh, I know, we don’t have time for that now, we have to get Trump out of office. I suggest to you that it has been our inability to engage in real honest conversation for the last few decades that has led to President Trump in the first place. All this knee-jerk reaction we engage in and which is exploited is the reason our country keeps getting crazier and crazier. I’m not going to be manipulated any more, so your only chance of pleading your case to me and others like me is through real, meaningful communication.

Since I am the one writing this and you are at this moment just an imaginary reader inside my head, I’ll go first.

First of all, I want to remind you that moral compromise is easier for some than it is for others. Some people have a very scrupulous conscience, others, not so much. The fact that I am less willing to act when there is no obvious moral path forward does not make me a better person than you, just someone who’s less likely to act. I see the virtue of inaction while you see the virtue in doing anything rather than doing nothing. I’m not always right in my approach, but I’m not always wrong, either. We live in a society where action is overrated.

I just want to make it clear to you what you are asking of me when you ask me to vote for Joe Biden. You are asking of me something that is very contradictory to who I believe myself to be and have always striven to be. I have always viewed myself as one who rejects herd mentality. When the crowd runs in one direction, I have always been one who rejects the urge to follow and instead observes the situation in search of understanding. I’ve never followed trends, never felt the need to get what everyone else is buying or watch what everyone else is watching. I’ve always felt like a necessary balance to group think. I still don’t own a smart phone.

Believe it or not, the push to vote for Biden has appealed to the herd instinct and not the intellect. Hardly unique to Biden of course, but it's an approach I instinctively rebel against. I do not see any real rational argument to be made for how Biden became the Democratic Party presumptive nominee in any legitimate fashion, nor have I heard any serious attempt to explain why Biden was the candidate with the best chance to beat Trump. The fact that we are where we are now is not a sufficient excuse for why we need to stop asking how we got here in the first place.

And that is the essence of my concern over supporting Joe Biden: it requires me to stop being an independent thinker and fall in line with something I find morally repellent and intellectually vacuous. It’s an approach I’ve spent my entire life opposing.

In asking me to throw my support behind Joe Biden, you are asking me to remain silent to the unreality that is the media construct. You are asking me to join a group think and a mindset that I find ugly and stupid.

You ask me to keep silent to the obvious voter rigging that consistently worked against any candidate I was even slightly interested in.

You ask me to keep silent regarding the obvious symptoms of dementia in Joe Biden.

You ask me to keep silent on a million dead Iraqis as a result of a war that Joe Biden supported.

You ask me to keep silent and support in perpetuity a corrupt system that has never offered us anything more than the occasional feel-good victory which in the end has only made things worse.

In short, you ask me to keep silent.

And not me only. You are asking Tara Reade to keep silent. You are asking for silence on any issue that might harm Joe Biden’s chances, and they are many and significant. You ask me to pretend there is no hypocrisy involved when anyone outside the cult can see it clearly. You ask me to join the cult and cut out of my life anyone who does not adhere to the cult’s rules and partake of the kool-aid.

You are asking me to surrender my individuality for the greater good, which in the end is merely the greater good of the cult, which in the end is merely the greater good of the cult’s high priests.

All I want to do is see things as I see them and not have to pretend reality is not as I witness it but as I am told it is. All I want is to be able to speak the truth as I see it, rather than subvert my opinions to the authority of the party.

I don’t think this is too much to ask for. I’m pretty sure even Trump supporters are not asked for such conformity of thought and speech. I am afraid I must do more than simply ask for the right to speak my truth, I must demand it. And not for myself only, I desire and demand that you too speak from your heart and not from a party's platform. This, to my mind, is the only useful way forward. 

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The Four Fallacies Surrounding Conspiracies Theories

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the aluminum foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists are those who believe without question everything authority tells them. Neither group is to be swayed by facts, logic or argument. They will be especially impervious to persuasion from anyone outside of the group they identify with.

The one believes because it fits their narrative of the world. The other is fearful of questioning official narratives because it might force them to change their comfortable way of life. 

Between the two extremes is a vast area that allows for questioning of authority while giving respect to those who have spent their lives pursuing their chosen areas of expertise. In the middle can be found the position that sometimes people with a desire for power conspire to advance certain narratives for their own benefit at the expense of society at large. Hardly a radical notion.

There are four different errors that people can make regarding conspiracy theories. The first is that all conspiracy theories are false. The second is, once becoming convinced that one conspiracy does exist, easily believing every conspiracy theory one comes across is true. The third is becoming so lost and confused by the myriad details that one abandons the search for truth altogether. The fourth is mistaking a theory for a conviction rather than a working hypothesis.

The media would have you make the first error: believing that there is no such thing as a conspiracy. If you disbelieve in conspiracy theories, that means everything the media tells you is truth and there is no reason to question anything they tell you. They do their best to smear anyone who says anything contrary to the official narrative as an unhinged nutjob incapable of grasping the obvious truth.

Much of the fringe-right media would have you commit the second error: being convinced that every conspiracy they feed you is gospel truth. Although they act as if they are combating the mainstream media by presenting alternative narratives, they are actually supporting the mainstream media by acting as the bad example. The mainstream media merely has to point to an Alex Jones to show how crazy conspiracists are. Thus Alex Jones is able to speak truth from time to time, because whatever truth he might utter will be dismissed as the rantings of a maniac. Which he more or less is. And of course, they use people like Alex Jones as a poster boy for those who intelligently question official narratives. Those who spread unsourced, easily disproven memes on social media are also doing the work of the mainstream media, though they believe in their hearts that they are doing their best to oppose it. In making themselves out to be brave proponents of the truth, they cast a poor light upon those who’ve invested many hours of their lives critically assembling pertinent facts.

The end goal is to have people fall into the third error: becoming so disheartened by the immense amount of information and disinformation available to you that you give up hope of finding out what is true and what is not. It’s impossible to hide the truth forever, but it is relatively easy to gather so many half-truths about it that you know longer recognize the real truth when you see it.

If I may indulge in a conspiracy theory for a moment, I would say there is a healthy disinformation campaign taking place on social media these days that seeks to muddy the waters behinds certain issues so much that people lose interest in ever finding the truth. There are those who seek to sow discord among conservatives and liberals and I'm not talking about Russia. I cannot provide evidence for all that I suggest, nevertheless I can supply you with enough facts of similar disinformation campaigns to show it is not only logical but likely that much worse than what I can prove is occurring though as yet unproven. A read of Trust Us, We’re Experts by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber will provide you with ample evidence of corporate manipulation of facts and the use of astroturfing (groups that seem to be grassroots but are actually well-funded marketing firms) to sway public opinion. A quick read-up on The Church Committee and Cointelpro will show you how our country’s intelligence agencies are every bit as active as corporations in trying to get you to believe the narratives that suit them best. From there it is not difficult to extrapolate that many of the people you may come across on the internet are not real people with real opinions but narrative control agents.

The fourth error is the one area in which we have the most control. We do not have all the resources, the reach, or the time necessary to take on official narratives pushed by the establishment media. We do not have the time to shoot down every crackpot theory advanced by the loony fringe types who will only answer your cogent arguments with vitriol and an unwillingness to be held to facts. We cannot clear the waters that trolls and astroturfers are intent on roiling. We can only fight the attempts at narrative control by continuing to question official narratives in critical ways. We do not have to accept any given conspiracy theory as either definitely real or definitely not. We merely need to question what is questionable and acknowledge what is undeniable. We don't have to change people's opinions, we just have to remind them how the pursuit of truth is best conducted. In short, we don't have to make anybody believe anything, we simply have to make people realize it is okay to think outside of the parameters set for them.

It’s called tolerance for ambiguity. It's called critical thinking. It’s called being a free thinker. It’s called intellectual humility. It’s being unafraid to say, “I’m not sure.”

Authority is important, but it is precisely because it is so crucial to have respected authorities in society that unscrupulous people will attempt to don the guise of authority. It is why people with power and ambition will forever seek to exert pressure on those with authority to change or soften their message. We must never place authority above question. Indeed, it is the very sign of legitimate authority that it would never ask that us to do so. It is has always been my experience that those with a passion for their field large enough for them to make it their life’s work are more than willing to discuss issues with you and help clarify that which seems unclear.

It is those who insist you accept their authority rather than their explanations who will try to shut down conversation on an issue. They will make the options very simple (though wrong), insisting that there are two extremes to choose from with no room for honest discussion. It’s called shutting down conversation and dissent.

It is quite possible to go through life without definitive positions on any given subject. In fact, I would say it is necessary. You must learn to respond to reality while seeing through more than one perspective, even knowing that if one is true, the other will be false. Because certainty can be dangerous, and it always wise to mitigate risk in a world where things are never very certain.

If you outright dismiss narratives that run contrary to the official version, you are helping foster an atmosphere where drawing outside the lines is frowned upon. If you too readily accept narratives outside the official ones, you are making those who intelligently dissent from official narratives look stupid. In either case, you are hindering society's ability to find its way closer to the truth. Do not choose either extreme, not because they are extreme but because they demand simplistic answers and are incapable of nuanced thinking.

The Perfect Candidate

A very good and trustworthy friend of mine, Christopher Steele, has sent to me the transcribed conversation of a meeting of the Democratic National Committee circa 2019. Names have been omitted in order to protect those present, but the conversation below (allegedly) occurred verbatim:

-All right people, we can't screw it up again this time. We need to find the perfect candidate and get the whole machinery of the party behind that candidate. We can't take any chances on losing to Trump a second time. People will start to wonder if we're really serious about winning. Thoughts?

-We’ll want a candidate who’s youthful to contrast with Trump’s old age.

-Yeah, someone who is pleasant to look at, to really contrast against Trump’s orange skin and cotton candy hair.

-Yeah, someone like Tulsi, right?

-Right. Someone LIKE Tulsi.

-A woman would be good.

-Oh yeah, we run a woman and we can instantly lock in the woman’s vote.

-How about a person of color?

-Ooh, that would be good too.

-Yeah. Either a woman OR a person of color.

-Now wait a moment. Listen to this idea I just thought of. What if, what if we were to run a woman…who was…a person of color?

-Oh my God that is a fantastic idea!!!

-All right let’s see who we might have who would fit that description.

-A woman of color who was youthful and attractive would be good, but it might also be good if we could find someone who was articulate. That would really show how silly Trump sounds whenever he talks if we could just get someone who was a good speaker.

-That would be good too. Add that to the list.

-Since we’re throwing around ideas right now, I think it would be good if we could go with someone without a lot of baggage.

-Well that kind of goes along with the youthful thing, but I like it. Baggage was a major problem in 2016.

-Yeah, if we have someone who’s been around for a while he’s bound to have a lot of baggage and a lot of skeletons in the closet the Trump people could dig up.

-Especially if it’s sexual assault.

-Oh God, no. We don’t want even a suspicion that our candidate would be involved in a sexual assault. We really want to show that we are the moral choice to go with here.

-How about the whole Iraq War thing. Should we exclude any candidate who backed that?

-Yeah, I think that’s a given. Trump DESTROYED Jeb Bush over just having a brother who got us into that fiasco. Just think of what he’d do to someone who was directly involved.

-Well, so far we’re looking for a candidate who’s an attractive younger woman of color who’s articulate, has no baggage—especially not sexual assault—and didn’t vote for the Iraq War. Does that sound right?

-That's our list for now.

-And a fine list it is, too. If we have a candidate that checks all those boxes, I don't see how we lose. Any last ideas?

-What about a candidate without noticeable cognitive issues?

-Well obviously we don’t want a candidate with noticeable cognitive issues! What a stupid thing to say, why did you even bring that up?

-I’m sorry, I haven’t contributed anything to the conversation yet and I just wanted to put my two cents in.

-Sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. No obvious cognitive issues. For crying out loud, who would ever think to run a presidential candidate with obvious cognitive issues? All right, let’s get on with this, I have a meeting with a donor in an hour. Anything else?

-How about a veteran?

-Bloody brilliant! I like how you think. Just imagine President Bonespurs trying to act all tough with someone who’s served in the military.

-Just imagine Trump trying to debate with a youthful, attractive, veteran woman of color who has no baggage—

-Especially not sexual assault accusations.

-Especially not that.

-So a youthful attractive, female woman of color with no baggage—especially not sexual assault allegations—who’s articulate and served in the Iraq War but didn’t vote for it. Who can we get to represent our party in 2020 who's like that?

-Joe Biden?

-Sounds good.

-Sure.

-All right.

-Yep.

-Joe it is, then. Ladies and gentlemen, I can confidently say we have 2020 in the bag. Good work.

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What Will Our Future Be?

What will our future look like? Don’t scurry around looking for the opinions of experts. Our experts have failed us. You’re the expert now, what do you think?

More than that, what do you feel? What do you want? What do you want our future to be?

When someone asks you what the future will look like, you might get images of Mad Max or The Matrix, but those images have been implanted into the fear receptors in your brain. Even if you have thought those ideas on your own, you have never desired them to come to be.

What do you want the future to look like? For all of us, for humanity and for all the animals that are trapped on this planet with us? What do you want for your children and their children? What do you want people in the future to think of us?

You know how this works on a personal level. Everyone knows that if you eat right, if you brush and floss regularly, exercise, save money and work hard, your future will be much more pleasant than if you do not take care of yourself or plan.

But you are part of an ecosystem. Just as a healthy plant cannot thrive in an unhealthy environment, neither can you thrive in a poisoned ecosystem no matter how you tend to your own health. You will never truly be happy or healthy so long as you neglect the environment in which you live. How healthy will our future environment be?

You’re writing the script even as you read this. Your smallest decisions are determining the future that is coming. It is impossible to know whether your largest efforts will bear fruit, it is true. But it is also impossible to know that your smallest choices will not bear fruit you never would have believed possible. As with the choices you make for your personal wellbeing, it is the day-in, day-out routines you establish which will block by block build the future you desire.

It's easy to feel helpless. We’ve been trained to feel helpless, trained by those who feel helpless inside and try to feel powerful by making others feel miserable.

You can feel helpless if that is what you want, but feeling helpless feels horrible. It’s better to feel helpful, powerful, meaningful.

That’s a choice. It’s a habit. It’s an attitude. You just decide you’re going to look for ways to make the future like how you want it to be. You just find ways that you’re making the world worse and find alternatives. You find one tiny little thing that you were doing before, and decide you don’t have to do it. Think of one small bit of your own power you were giving to soulless institutions or bullies that insisted you had to do things the way they told you, and take it back.

Do it. Find some tiny scrap of change you can make, and then ask yourself if feeling powerful doesn’t feel better than feeling helpless. Embrace the glorious feeling of being able to do something that is good for the universe, and all of the sudden new ideas will occur to you. And each time you embrace such an idea it will make you feel good in a way you had long stopped believing was possible. Feel your power and you will soon realize that those who took it from you or told you you couldn’t have it weren’t your friends. Feel your power and you realize you will never let them take it from you again. There is nothing they can threaten you with, because they cannot threaten you with anything worse than that feeling of helplessness that had been eating away at your gut.

The future is in your hands. What will it look like?

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The Widening Gap Between Us And Reality

My theory is that the further our societal narrative moves away from reality, the more absurd the lies will have to become and the easier they will be to spot.

To tell you the truth, I never thought it would get to the point we’re at now. I thought long before we got to a presidential race between a clown and a dementia patient, we’d have seen through the false narratives that sustain our nation. Narratives are simply stories we tell ourselves about how the world works. They are operating programs we use because they allow us to function in a universe far beyond our understanding. They are more sophisticated than the instincts and conditioning of other species, but they are still mere tools we use to function in a reality that has little actual similarity to what we see with our eyes and imagine to be the ultimate reality.

The problem, I suppose, is that the narrative we now follow has been the most successful of all the models that we humans have developed to this point. It is far less sustainable than more primitive models, but in the short term it has produced amazing results. Primitive narratives that saw spirits existing in rivers and trees were a lot more sustainable, but they never led to the invention of the internet and the automobile.

So we’ve lived with this narrative for over a hundred years now, and in that time it has literally created a new world around us. And that is part of the problem. It has created a world that reflects its own image and its own values, and in so doing it has by this time almost utterly erased the narratives that came before it. We have become not merely a society with a dominant narrative but an entire species all staring at life from more or less the same perspective, a perspective that has little basis in the natural world for all the science that accompanies it.

Most of us, whether we consciously admit it, are running several different narratives at once. Sure, we may profess one narrative to be the one we follow, but in truth we are motivated by different and sometimes opposing narratives.

Take Easter, for example. It is a Christian holiday, but it was grafted onto a more primitive narrative. We celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but we do so using the pagan symbols of bunnies and eggs. The name “Easter” itself derives from the Saxon mother Goddess Eostre and the Teutonic goddess of fertility, Ostare. Hence the symbol of rebirth, the egg.

Or take Christmas. It, too, had its origins in pagan celebrations before being taken over by Christianity. Yule logs and Christmas Trees are traditions that pre-date Christianity.

But just as the Christian holiday of Christmas absorbed other narratives into its own, so too has our current-and-now-dominant narrative absorbed Christmas into its own understanding of reality. We now live in a not merely capitalist but consumer-capitalist narrative. No longer is Christmas primarily about the birth of Jesus Christ but instead an excuse for an orgy of spending and purchasing. We are pressured to demonstrate to our loved ones our ability to please them by buying them whatever consumer society tells them they need. 

The blending of narratives can be a good thing, even though humans like to keep their understanding of reality simple by insisting the narrative they espouse is actually the one they follow. It is the vanity of the conscious mind to believe that it alone dictates our behavior. But we know better, at least when we observe others. Even with those we respect most, we can see them acting in ways that are contrary to their stated beliefs and values.

Having more than one narrative is like having more than one revenue stream or more than one screwdriver. Because at some time or another, a revenue stream will run dry, or a particular tool might not be the ideal one for the job. Just like a Phillip’s screw driver is not a perfect match for every screw you come across, however sophisticated a narrative we have, it will never match reality perfectly. Having more than one narrative to work with means you have a more nuanced and flexible method of tackling what life throws at you.

In fact, I would say there is nothing more rare than an individual who lives according to a single narrative. Many Christians claim to, but any observation of their actions would reveal how often they fall back upon other narratives and just plain superstition when it suits them. But rare though they are, there are some among us who are able to see life through a single narrative and live consciously by its principles.

We call such a person a “true believer”. There is nothing so rare, or so dangerous. True believers could be found aplenty in Nazi Germany and Jonestown. True believers are inflexible in their narrative, and when reality is in conflict with their narrative, they will choose narrative over reality. Even when it proves fatal. To live by a single narrative and never permit the notion that it is not reality is to belong to a cult doomed to its own destruction.

We’re there now. This is no religious cult of a few hundred people. It is not even a nation swept up in patriotic and dangerous ideology. No, this is humanity caught up in a narrative that has worked incredibly well for us on a short-term basis but ultimately is at odds with reality. And nature. And the human soul. And survival.

If we look back at the dawn of the 20^th Century, we can see how inhospitable to human beings capitalism could be. Children worked in coal mines and in factories for long hours and their usefulness to society and ability to earn a living were basically over by the time of young adulthood. Workers lived in company towns where they had to go in debt to buy the tools they needed to do their job, never managing to free themselves from debt despite giving everything they had in the way of labor to the people who grew rich off of them. Pollution was so bad that rivers were known to start on fire. Farmers lost their land to the banks despite the fact it was their labor that fed the nation. Things became so bad that the people had no choice but to resist the existing capitalist power structure, and after a great and prolonged struggle, ushered in unions for workers and environmental and safety laws.

But as bad as things were back then, we are looking at a far worse situation now. Because as strong as the capitalist narrative was, the Christian narrative still made sure places of work were shut down on Sundays. The Christian ethos was not yet erased from a citizenry that had been immersed in it for many centuries.

Fast forward to today, where Christian values have been undermined by the values of people like Ayn Rand. The Christianity of today, in the main, bears little similarity to what would have been known as Christianity a century ago. Christianity has faltered, and in its place has arisen a narrative that carries capitalism to new and terrifying dimensions. That new narrative is consumerism, the belief that our deepest longings can be satisfied by what we are able to purchase, that our identity can best be expressed and developed through our buying choices, that who we are and what we aspire to be can be summed up by consumer branding.

Make no mistake, consumerism is an ideology, it is virtually a religion, and it is most definitely a narrative. It shapes our worldview, and it is hammered deep into our consciousness through our incessant exposure to the salesmen/ priests that come to us through our electronic devices. Our worldview is shaped by those who want to sell us something, and it is done on a grander scale than any religion or dictatorship has ever dreamed.

Now we face a reality that would have appeared insane to those of other generations who did not swim in the narrative-infested waters that is our environment. And I keep waiting for others to wake up to that fact. And they are, many of us are. But still the true believers cling to the beliefs that they have been fed their entire lives, from the moment they were children watching cartoons selling cereal to the present day when they listen to CIA agents selling them war under the guise of humanitarianism. It’s gone further than I would have thought possible, but I believe my theory remains valid: the further from truth a narrative takes us, the more ridiculous the lies will of necessity be and the harder they will be to swallow. The change will come, but the further a narrative is permitted to direct our society once it has outlived its usefulness, the more damaging it will be to us. I would have liked to see us start to develop new ways of perceiving our place in this vast universe decades ago, but it will happen eventually. The more we cling to our outmoded ways of perceiving the world, the more difficult it will be to eventually let go, but it will be unavoidable. Those who see clearly must choose to begin the process now, the rest in time will—of necessity—follow.

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Ship Of Fools

Using all the good people for your galley slaves
As your little boat struggles through the the warning waves
But you will pay, you will pay tomorrow
Save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools
-World Party

George Pontmercy is a character from the novel Les Miserables. He was a colonel in Napolean’s army and attained the title of Baron. Unfortunately for him, by the time of the events of the book, he is bereft of all the titles and glory once bestowed upon him.

This happens. When a given regime is removed, most of those who attained stature or admiration in that regime lose everything. One day you’re a celebrated thinker, the next your name is slandered in the establishment media by those whose ideals are in line with the existing power.

Nobody wants to give up all the prestige they have acquired through their long efforts. The truth, the sad truth, is that most of those who attain a degree of power and prestige do so not by an arduous search for truth or a desire to serve others, but by being of use to existing power structures. Not all do so consciously, and not all malignantly. Nevertheless, we tend to fall into the easiest paths forwards simply because they are easy. We seldom seek to question if they are the morally purest routes. In making our way in the world we just seem to believe that those who blazed the trail before us blazed the best trail and that we only need follow them to make a better world.

Of course, for most of us, we recognize at some point how greasy the trail is becoming. The further we go in our pursuit of self-interest the more we realize the compromises that need to be made. This is not to say that those who reach the top do not make tremendous personal sacrifices, working long hours and sacrificing their social lives and life's small pleasures. But everybody knows that the way forward on a career path can be accelerated by less than scrupulous means. Many of those at the top are at the top not merely because of hard work and talent alone but because of an egoic compulsion to reach the top by any means necessary.

Which is why those who reach the top will do anything in their power to insure they stay there. They realize how fragile is their grip on power.

To this end, they must ensure that the existing power structure to which they owe their position stays in place. The greasy things they did to get ahead were done to assist a corrupt system that would reward them for their services. Should that system be swept away, their service to it will be called out by whomever is now running the show, and all their faithful service, like Colonel Pontmercy’s, will mean less than nothing. Their sacrifices will be forgotten, their loyalty will be a subject of derision among whatever new elites take power.

What we are witnessing now is a turn of fortune for those in positions of power and those with a wide platform to influence the opinions of the masses. They are witnessing their Waterloo in the form of a pandemic, a reversal of fortune that will give rise to change and submerge all who supported the system that brought us to such a defining defeat.

They will not lightly step down from their positions in a system that gave them so much in the way of ego-enhancement. They will do all they can to persuade people aboard their sinking ship that they need to stay, because to do otherwise would require them to remove their captain’s hats.

Change is coming. Change has been coming, but you’ve most likely been kept in the dark about it because of those people with a voice and power who have no interest in letting you realize that it is coming, who are unable to admit to themselves that their elite status is about to be stripped from them.

We will not be able to convince our so-called leaders of that, though, until the deck is below the waterline. Nor will they be of any assistance whatsoever to the average passenger as this crisis and those that ensue are occurring. Their job has long ceased to be to care for the people aboard ship, but instead has been to keep an un-seaworthy vessel going through their rearranging of deck chairs and upbeat spin. When the change has become so obvious that even they realize its inevitability, they will scramble to find new positions with whatever new vessel will come next. Some of them will prove useful to serve the transition from the old to the new, but the greater part of them will be too discredited to play any part in whatever succeeds the system that has led us to this point.

Here's what we need to be aware of: big change is inevitably coming, those who were part of the old (failed system) will do everything they can to prevent that change from taking place or you from recognizing it, and by the time they admit it you will have already been crushed by the change rather than playing an active part in making that change something better, not worse, than what we now have.

It is the goal of those who see the change on the horizon (it’s become exponentially easier as the result of the corona outbreak) to alert you to the fact that all those in power are completely useless in reacting to it. It is our goal to point out how utterly corrupt they are and how they belong to an old vessel that is no longer able to weather this or any other storm. It is our goal to provide guidance in the times to come. Like the crew on a sinking ship, we must remind people not to panic but to work together in an orderly fashion. The worst possible thing people can do in a crisis is to go their own ways and abandon others in their pursuit of self-preservation.

We will require clearheaded thinkers willing to adapt to new situations rather than those locked into old paradigms that no longer fit the current reality. We will need leaders who are willing to lead by example and remind people of the better aspects of human nature. And we will need a fair amount of heroes, who have a greater love of humanity than they do their own self-interests. And despite what those who sit high in the current system have drilled into our heads, there is a certain amount of rationalism, independence, and heroism in each of us.

Those who were part of the system that led us to the catastrophe must be swept away. They can never be anything other than part of the problem, will never be part of the solution. They will not go lightly, will cling stubbornly to power and prestige the way an old nobleman clings to claims of royalty and legitimacy. The way a drowning man clutches to whatever wreckage is within reach.

The contrast must be made clear for those looking for leadership and truth. There are people out there now who are demonstrating integrity when it does nothing to further their careers. There are those speaking truth when all it gets them is derision from those who hold power. There are those demonstrating leadership skills in an era that no longer knows what that looks like.

Seek them out, if you want to make it off the sinking ship.

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We Live In A System Built For And By Sociopaths

It occurred to me today that if you are to feel comfortable in the world we have created you kind of have to be a sociopath. It is a system designed by and for sociopaths. And anybody trying to change it is going to experience all the friction and tension a brake feels on a runaway train.

Some people use religion to mask their sociopathology. That sense of feeling comfortable in their relationship with the world as it is is evidence to many Christians that they are right with God. Even though they may feel as if the world is a sinful place deserving of God’s judgment and wrath, they feel as if God has sanctioned them to be rewarded by it without the obligation of trying to change it.

You might not be a sociopath, but the system will try to make you one. It will reward all your sociopathic behavior and punish you when you try to do good. Often when you are engaging in sociopathic behavior, they will praise you by calling you patriotic or successful.

The system applauds the sociopath. When someone lays off a workforce or moves a plant overseas, the person who does this is applauded as someone who’s willing to make the hard decisions. But they aren’t hard decisions, not for a sociopath. Only someone with a healthy sense of right and wrong would have problems making such decisions. They want our sympathy for making decisions that no psychologically sound person would ever make.

Same with those who plunge our country into war. Yes, it would be a hard decision to send our young people to kill and die in an unnecessary conflict. It would be a hard decision to allow many innocent people in foreign nations to die. But who do you know among our political class that shows the burden of such decisions, especially those decisions that have proven to have been made on false pretenses? There is not a politician or media figure who has shown an ounce of compunction over their behavior, not one willing to atone for their failures or seek forgiveness. They have moved on.

Sociopaths.

We’ve been desperately clinging to an outmoded paradigm for a while now. Because even though it is irrational and inhuman, it has at least provided us with an illusion of security. If we send troops over there, we believe we can continue to live our lives as normal over here. If we just keep our heads down and not notice anything is wrong, we can get home and watch the new season of our favorite series on Netflix. If I show up and get my sticker to prove I’ve voted, I can pretend that I’ve played my part in our democracy. As for Boomers, they’ve been hoping that the impending crises can be pushed into the future far enough that they won’t have to experience it. Missed it by that much (Boomers will understand this reference).

But even the illusion of security has been stripped away. The mask has been torn off and all your sub-conscious fears are staring you straight in the eye. Every single worry that you've tried to shove down into your subconscious is rearing its ugly head, one after the other.

That’s a good thing.

In one sense, it’s like waking up from a fever dream. Because a lot of those subliminal fears were creations of a fevered mind. A lot of them don’t really make sense in the light of a new day. We've got ourselves to the point where we see every other country as a existential danger to us. We have been conditioned to feel that anyone who does not belong to our tribe is a threat to our tribe. It's painful to go through life that way, impossible to do so for long before breaking down. Unless, of course, you are a sociopath.

True, a lot of the fears we have are very valid. A lot of those problems we’ve never permitted ourselves to contemplate have only grown worse during our years of avoidance. There’s a reason we’ve all been avoiding them, because they will be difficult to deal with and will require real change. But admitting we have a problem is the first step.

We’re at that first step now. We’ve reached rock bottom. We have an economic system that has no answer to a global pandemic. It will destroy the economy as we know it. In fact it already has, though we have not allowed that fact to sink in yet. 

But an economy is not a real thing. The machinery is all still in place, our capacity to provide every man woman and child in our nation all they require and more is rock solid. We simply have to start building a new system that can function in the new reality we now face.

Such a shift to a new environment, a new reality, is a sane approach. A sociopath, however, would choose denial and perseverance in the same patterns that led us to this point, because sociopaths are not much for self-reflection. They blame others (Russians, Chinese, immigrants, Muslims, conservatives, liberals, etc.) instead. 

The situation we now face, the crises demanding our attention, exists because we have allowed our society to be fashioned by sociopaths for their own aims. We can choose to hit the snooze button on this fact for a few more minutes, but we will no longer be able to rest as tranquilly as we once did, and the awakening will only be more painful. It's time to wake up and face the new day as functioning adults. The sociopaths will continue to create our reality for as long as we'll let them, but they're only going to make things worse. If they are permitted to take their vision to its logical conclusion...well, imagine Berlin in 1945 or Jonestown in 1978.

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