Something new is "coming into form" in America and it transcends the political game of the elites.

[wcepler]

Something new is "coming into form" in America and it transcends the political game invented by and for the elites.

Obama is 100% defined by the political game. WITHIN this game, the jury is still out, but he seems to be desperately trying to make the best of a bad situation. That is to say, the FUNDAMENTAL political game rules have been defined by and for the elites and since he is the ultimate symbolic politician (the President) he must move within these lose/lose rules. Conversely, these same game rules absolutely guarantee an endless Greek God like existence for that less than one percent of America's parasitical elites.

It's as if he's stuck in a failed marriage, but since he loves his children, his only course is to make the best of a bad situation -- and Godspeed to his efforts.

Hence, the core challenge of America (and the entire planet!) is to GO BEYOND THE GAME RULES OF POLITICS. Politicians can still be pragmatic and useful, but only to the degree we return them to political "servants" of the will of the people, and not the bought and paid for puppets of the elites (also known as "The Beast").

To say it abstractly, we need a "paradigm shift" comparable to changing from geocentrism (the Earth is the center of everything) to at least heliocentrism (the Sun is the center of the solar system). Even better, we need to "quantum jump" (an equivalent image) like Darwin's Origin of the Species or Einstein's transcendental insights which left the bog of 19 Century physics and contractions to his two magnificent theories of relativity.

Forgive me, if I use an image I have used in earlier pieces, but our challenge is not merely to reshuffle the deck (of politics); rather we need to kick over the card table and leave the room. WE NEED A RADICALLY NEW MECHANISM OF SOCIAL CHANGE.

Politics, even at its best (which is never a threat to the Beast) is forever more part of the problem, than the solution. Indeed, even at is best, it is still simply running in place. Politics IS the status quo, not a medicine "for" the status quo. Remember the essence is fascism is status quo-ism, and the elites love to watch us gnawing on the bones and crusts they throw us. And how they must enjoy our pitiful delusion that politics is actually an expression of the will of the people.

So politics for pragmatics, but not for dealing with the ultimate challenge of civilization, i.e., DESTROYING THE BEAST (of mentally ill religious fanatics and/or the lunatic right wing fringe of every country on the Earth and/or UNIMAGINABLY rich elites, aka the Haves).

Be honest. Do you see any "microscopic" change in the Beast, even over the last several centuries? None, zip, zero, nada. The Beast is rapidly killing human civilization and even the human species, while we play this game of marbles called politics.

It's like we've got cancer or aids and we think we are substantively "treating it" with vitamin C, or drinking more milk, or (worst of all!) pretending its not there.

But the cancer or aides IS THERE and, to leave the image, it's been there for literally thousands of years. Call it "The Have’s", or The Beast, or the Rockefeller's, Rothschild’s, Murdoch's, and Paris Hilton's, or call it the God of the Earth. Yes, most of all call The Beast the God of the Earth because that says it to perfection.

And yet we suck our thumbs and shoot political paper bullets at the Beast. The insanity and futility of this almost "justifies" our peasant/peon/slave existence. Who was it who said a slave is someone who waits for someone else to free them. Or to paraphrase the words of the mystic J. Krishnamurti, politics AT ITS BEST is "decorating our cage".

Alas, the challenge here almost transcends being put into words, because there will always be that "slave conditioning" which keeps trying to hear it as just a new variation of "politics".

But it isn't. It's talking about a NEW DIMENSION, like the 4th dimension when compared to the familiar three of horizontal, vertical, and depth.

So what are we groping for? Is this a paradigm shift of consciousness? Almost certainly yes, but also almost certainly no, because without a corresponding dimensional change in "how we live", and "how we ACT", the inner transcendence will be betrayed.

Conversely, this can't be only some breakthrough of apolitical strategy, even though that too MUST be there.

Hence, it's clearly a both/and of a virtual "mystical transformation" all of a piece with radically new ways to manipulate the "fulcrums" of social transformation. Archimedes’s (probably the ultimate genius of the ancient Greek world) once said, "Give me a long enough lever, and I'll move the Earth".
That's what these radically new strategies would be: discovering the fulcrums for the levers to fundamentally "change human social existence".

This is seeing through a glass darkly, but surly we need to "go international" and use the internet a thousand times more effectively than we currently are.

Certain patterns of mental illness are characterized by variations of what Sigmund Freud called "the repetition compulsion". This is related to words like obsession and compulsion and it more or less means spending your life trying to solve impossible (and usually meaningless) problems.

For us, this means playing the political game endlessly, hoping that "somehow" this game will be Democracy in action. But it never, never is and never, never will be. It's our society-wide "repetition compulsion"; it's like those heartbreaking bears in zoo cages who keep walking and hurrying in circles, mindlessly thinking they will "eventually" find a way out back to the wilderness. What an agony it is to watch them; and what an agony it is to what US "trying to wash off blood with blood" -- in the infinitely wise words of an ancient Chinese Zen Master.

However, if a critical mass of us AT LEAST realize that politics endlessly recycles The Beast (i.e., less than one percent of the human race) while it endlessly stifles the potential and fundamentally enslaves the "working class" (still, probably the best way to say it), anything is possible. After all, seeing all the way through what NOT to do is often is equivalent to seeing "the way out". Plus it’s hard to be creative and affirming when your entire life (AND THE LIFE OF YOUR DESCENDANTS) has been reduced to being a blood bank for the vampire elites.

The Beast has to go. The Beast has to be destroyed. No more reshuffling the deck. No more pseudo compromise or "adjusting". This is all the way or nothing, because we have totally run out of time -- which is the second core realization in all of this. If we don't DESTROY THE BEAST with politics-transcending dynamics in the very near future, we're finished. The waterfall of human species extinction is already booming in the background.

Please, please remember that our time has completely run out! Basically, that means it’s now or never. ALL of this challenge falls on us. Everything (human Civilization, our species, and countless other species) will be past the point of no return in (what?) 4 to 5 years if we don’t transcend politics and create apolitical strategies to destroy the beast. We can do it. We have the intelligence, energy, and passion of literally billions of human beings, plus we have going ballistic electronic methodologies.

But do we have the will . . .

So is all this a voice crying in the wilderness? I hope not, God how I hope not.
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<http://theliberationofrealism.blogspot.com/>

W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

ps: In Joseph Conrad’s’ magnificent novel, “Lord Jim”, the moment of truth was when Jim had to decide whether to “jump ship” or stay and deal with the chaos of an overwhelming storm. That’s us. Is the human species going to “jump ship” (i.e., keep escaping into politics) or radically deal with (i.e., DESTROY) The Beast? This is our species moment of truth. Perhaps the Universe is watching.

[sam sarrha]

1. we will have to restructure capitalism to be compatible with Socialism as tho our hair were on fire ...

a nationalized program of solar and wind.. use the money that saves for paying off what we owe the Chinese, after we recalculate what it is we really owe them. and start rebuilding our manufacturing base, and education base

we will have to restructure capitalism to be compatible with Socialism. we need to start creating a socialist government as tho our hair were on fire. enough of economic domination by a few rich privileged cleptocrats. who skim off 60% of the economy and only enrich themselves with wall street no-value added ponzi schemes

a nationalize ALL THE ENERGY INDUSTRY, nationalized program of solar, algae oil ,hemp oil and wind.. to remove oil/coal as a fuel source in less than 20 years. use the money that saves for paying off what we owe the Chinese, after we recalculate what it is we really owe them. and start rebuilding our manufacturing base,from making our own shoes ON UP..only 3 shoe factories here.. . and education base, free education to PhD, bonus's for education and science ..

we will have to restructure capitalism to be compatible with Socialism. we need to start creating a socialist government as tho our hair were on fire. enough of economic domination by a few rich privileged schemes. who skim off 60%-70% of the economy and only enrich themselves with wall street no-value added ponzi schemes. A NO-VALUE ADDED TAX OF 99% FOR ALL HEDGE FUNDS, SPECULATION 99.9% FOR ALL DERIVATIVES. ELIMINATE ALL CORPORATE POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS

SOCIALISM MEANS GOVERNMENT OF.. FOR.. AND BY THE PEOPLE

[HillbillyBob]

2. I have been saying something like this for years, we have to take the power back

or away from the money party and create a new paradigm.
Not that I am so elequent....just a hillbilly.

[sam sarrha]

3. i'm an Aspy.... raised in Sweet Home Oregon, in the woods, up the river.. welcome to DU Bob

:hi:

[FatDave]

4. The ruling class has pushed the rest of the people pretty much to the breaking point.

Washington, however, does not notice anything until it is too late. But I think once blood starts to spill they'll remember who they serve.

[starroute]

5. Reconceiving the world is the first step

For most of human history, everybody was basically equal. Some might acquire more strength or knowledge or personal charisma, but there was nobody who was defined from birth as innately superior or inferior.

All that changed with the rise of civilization between about 4500 and 3000 BC. For reasons that must have seemed valid at the time, the human race divided itself into aristocrats and peasants, patricians and plebeians -- where the former had all the power and wealth and the latter got to grovel and do the scut work.

That division probably made it possible for the human race to exploit itself in order to produce surpluses, which in turn made possible the rise of a leisure class that could cultivate strange new arts like writing and metallurgy and more complex forms of social organization.

However, in order to create and perpetuate this division, it was necessary to radically distort most people's understanding of their own nature and their relationship to the cosmos. For example, societies in which anyone could seek guidance from the spirits through a vision quest gave way to societies in which the gods would speak only to kings and high priests -- and where temples took the form of vast courtyards where the masses shuffled their feet while their superiors consulted their deities within a tiny and veiled-off inner sanctum.

That extreme degree of division crashed out in many places at the end of the Bronze Age, and the societies which followed -- like that of Classical Greece -- often enjoyed a greater degree of equality, democracy, and (in the form of mystery cults) access to initiatory wisdom. However, the basic division between aristocrats and peasants hadn't vanished -- people just weren't having their noses rubbed in it as strongly.

But even that degree of change was threatening enough to the old aristocratic order that Plato and his successors were led to conceive of a new method of social control, one in which the rulers were to be instructed in the true nature of things while the masses were to be kept in a state of ignorance and superstition.

Fast forward through the next two thousand years and we witness an ongoing tug of war between the Platonic system of control and an emerging egalitarian ideal of universal enlightenment. Christianity, for example, was thoroughly populist until it got co-opted by the Roman empire and ended up in the same old arrangement, where priests got to do the interesting stuff in a specially fenced-off area while the masses stood and watched.

But then that system began to break down. The Protestant Reformation. Guns and printing presses. The rise of science. The decline of the old feudal order based on hereditary ownership of land and the rise of a money-based economy in its place. By the time of the American and French Revolutions, ordinary people no longer believed that kings and nobles were in any way superior -- and they also had the necessary tools to educate themselves and fight off royal armies.

In the wake of those two revolutions, though, there was a profound conservative reaction. If there could no longer be lords and peasants, there could at least be haves and have-nots -- and the invention of the modern, eternal corporation once again made it as easy to pass along inherited wealth as it had been in the days of feudalism.

That old Platonic scheme of keeping the masses ignorant and superstitious also enjoyed a great resurgence. In the early 1800's, upper class folk were boldly speculating among themselves that the old religions might not be literally true, that even the rationalized religion of the Enlightenment might be susceptible to radical challenge -- but at the same time, they were making sure to keep these dangerous notions out of the hoi polloi, even going to far as to arrest and imprison booksellers who attempted to spread unsettling notions about too freely.

The standard lowest-common-denominator religion of the early 1800's was given to sentimentality and conventional piety. By the end of the 1800's, with fresh challenges from Darwin and other areas of science, fundamentalism had to be devised as an even stronger barrier against radical thought. But the basic method is no different -- and even today the dirty secret of the Neocon followers of Leo Strauss is that they still believe there should be a special form of privileged knowledge for themselves (though in their case, it is more a form of cynical nihilism than Plato's original mysticism) and carefully cultivated ignorance for everyone else.

This is what we have to contend with. Americans, in particular, are ignorant by design -- ignorant of their own history, tied to some of the stupidest possible modes of religion, told that their ignorance is a good and natural thing and that anybody who aspires to something better is a dangerous "elitist" to be feared and shunned.

Meanwhile, the genuine elites are laughing and looking down at those they so easily dominate.

More than anything else, the history of the 20th century is the history of a battle by the wealthy and powerful to retain the idea of hereditary privilege. The Nazis supported that idea, which is why they and their racist ideology were acceptable to the American elite. The Communists threatened it, which is why the second half of the last century was one extended paroxysm of fanatical anti-communism, whose final aftershocks have not yet died out.

Before we can do anything else, we have to throw off those mental chains of self-satisfied mediocrity which have been imposed on us over the last 200 years. In particular, we have to reject the perverted, faux-democratic myth of the late 20th century, that we're all ordinary slobs -- you, your neighbor, and the rich guy up the hill, who may have scads more money but is otherwise just like you and me -- and reclaim our birthright of universal aristocracy.

Because that is what we have lost. Fifty thousand years ago, we all enjoyed the same access to whatever power and wealth and knowledge and freedom our society offered. These days, only the richest among us actually enjoy those things. But they have trained the rest of us not to think in those terms, not to aspire to anything better, and above all not to look behind the curtain and find out that the world is run very differently than we have been led to imagine.

[HillbillyBob]

6. Very good , dead on description or at the very least very good reasoning.

As a secondary title , "the lost ages of reason" .
I have only a high school education, but have much curiosity, read a lot and try to think things through.
I have also thought to my self over the last 30 years Are Americans Getting more Stupid?

[wcepler]

8. knowledge IS power

starroute,


Thank you very much for this comprehensive historical sketch. The more we know, the more power we have. Knowledge (even scholarship knowledge) IS power.

solidarity, Bill

[bertman]

7. Regarding your characterization of politics as being the tool of the elites. I agree mostly.

What I have observed in America is that it is the tool of the class who can afford to spend the time and money to be politically involved. That's because the rest of us have to be working our asses off to make a living and raise a family. Granted, there are some of us who participate in politics despite a lack of financial resources, but those individuals are usually retired workers or committed activists. And that is one of the beauties of our system of government; although, it is a pale imitation of the participatory democracy envisioned by the founders.

How many of us, meaning what percentage, of Americans REALLY give a damn about how our government operates? Very few. At least that is the case when things are running smoothly for the majority of us.

The bottom line is that any organized society must have structure. As the size of the society increases the distance between the producers and the rulers grows. This has happened in every society in history. I doubt we can change it. The founders of our republic tried. But we are not up to the task.