I suppose the problem lies in the fact that we don’t know how to properly express the problem in such a way as to suggest a solution. Our words are inadequate, our vocabulary has been diminished. It resembles to some extent the novel 1984 whereby the State began to ban certain words and without the words the people lost the concepts, like freedom and oppression. Phrases took the place of in depth thoughts, expressions like “double-plus good”. They mean almost nothing but fill the mouths with something to do. I see this today in the book burnings, book bannings and the convoluted twistings the talking heads take to convert words like petri dish into peach tree dish, taking a science term and making it nonsense. Part of the path to true ignorance is in reducing the kinds of thoughts the people can think. The ideas of reason and discourse are eliminated or even stigmatized to the point where bringing up the concept is seen as an attack on the listener and in a blossoming fascist dictatorship and attack on the rightward lurch is a crime punishable by death. It has to be this way simply because a nascent autocracy is like any other gestalt system with self preservation instincts and the ability to lash out violently at its perceived enemies.
What the members of the previous gestalt need to recognize is that the new system will struggle and fight in the most barbaric manner because it is intellectually and emotionally at an inferior position and it will fight to achieve dominance over all other systems. The perceived threats are quite real: democratic systems with majority rule will by their nature oppose despotic and autocratic systems. Although there is no real reason to fear one skin color replacing another the members of the fascist movement will articulate baseless fears in exactly the way a pre-pubescent child will tell ghost stories or spread horrible rumors about local adults or even other children. Immature minds are not equipped to deal with more mature and complex issues such as global climate collapse so they turn their tiny minds to problems like the kinds of mascot candy companies use to advertise their goods. It is far easier for such minds to deal with the fear of a gay candy than to show off their ignorance and even stupidity on such matters as food production, housing for tens of millions of refugees and the matter of water which does not poison the drinker. By stressing those concerns the talking heads on the left, such as it is, trigger fear and anger in the ignorant. When those ignorant men and women also happen to control 80% of all the wealth in a society it can be expected that they will violently oppose any mention of their poor handling of a situation which will eventually kill off all of humanity. Interestingly enough those same ignorant people will cheerfully embrace an imaginary crises in the form of an End Time return of a long dead radical rabbi from the 1st century but will bristle at the thought that the End Time might simply kill off most of the life on the planet and produce no happy after-life Heaven on Earth.
So the quandary facing humanity is how to do anything to mitigate the damage of global climate collapse when the vocabulary is outlawed and the concept is twisted into a mythology whereby the victims will happily accelerate the collapse in an effort to promote the return of the long dead rabbi. Interestingly enough the teachings of that long dead rabbi seem to promote policies which would have prevented the global climate collapse if enough of the followers of the dead rabbi actually followed his suggestions of tolerance, mutual respect, and a low-impact life style. To this point it is much more accurate to describe these people as adherents to the teachings of an anti-christ rather than any form of “Christianity”. You can call an up and coming dictatorship a democracy all day and all night but in the end the goose stepping brown shirted bully boys will be guarding the ballot boxes and attacking the police should their glorious leader not win 100% of the votes at a minimum. Many dictatorships shroud themselves in the trappings of democratic concepts while blocking any and all democratic movements. The myth that the United States was ever a democracy is a get-out-of-jail free card for future dictators and oligarchs in the same way the anti-christians expect that after a life of greed, lust, murder and intolerance they will yet ascend into heavenly bliss by simply saying the proper words at the final seconds of their life: I have accepted the Lord Geezus as my personal savior! POOF all their crimes and sins, all the blood on their hands is washed clean. This is less a religion and more a childrens’ game. Ally-ally all come free!
A Mid-April Rant
A little Mid-April Essay:
Corruption is a disease of the social animal. Like most diseases it can start as an innocent little sniffle, some local cop accepts some bribe for special treatment of some merchant, a DOT engineer moves a highway interchange in order for a powerful politician landowner to sell some worthless land for a premium. School boards decide to insert personal, religious and political agendas into the teaching curriculum. Slowly things go badly. Raise your hands if you: drive the speed limit on the freeways… come to a full stop at stop signs… never drive after drinking… Chances are only one or two managed to get a hand up because we are a nation of law breakers and hypocrites and we relish the lies, the destruction, the greed and the cheating, oh how we love to cheat others. In the process we have cheated ourselves out of the opportunity to establish (for instance) a democracy, a well educated advanced society, a world where income will not determine if you survive a deadly disease. But we won’t because so many of us have bought into the lie that money makes you happy and only losers play by the rules. Look at our popular entertainment, the movies, the television shows and write down the qualities of the protagonists in the stories. Go back a few years: “Dirty Harry” is a cop who cheerfully tortures and murders suspects. “Batman” is a simple vigilante who considers himself above the law. Hell, Superman is an illegal alien! How many movies have as a plot the stealing from or murder of others justified because the criminal is presented as funny, smart and reasonable? In point of fact most criminals are failures who can find no way to live except as parasites on the rest of us, not unlike all professional politicians. We are attracted to the inverse concept: bad guys who have a heart of gold, stupid people who are truly wise, poor folk who manage to be generous and helpful. But in reality we are a pack of dogs fighting over scraps tossed out by the wealthy who own the government while laundering their ill-gotten money by having ever increasingly expensive “elections”, carefully gerrymandered to make sure the Right people always get into office. The idea of a People rising up against their Masters to make a new egalitarian life has never happened. We’ve just traded Masters. Just like there has never been a large scale democracy there has never been a large scale communist society. Instead we advertise the former and deliver some form of autocracy, usually excused as being needed temporarily, maybe 5 years, until the people are ready and then making sure nobody is ever “ready” by sabotaging the educational and information systems to promote political agendas rather than the greater good. For those of you who think the so-called “Democrats” are different I suggest you consider how easy it is to join, leave and rejoin the Party, and how votes are carefully crafted to give the appearance of debate when we all know one man has the power to decide which laws get passed and it ain’t the President. They cooperate while dissing the Bad Guys in interviews, they party together, do drugs together, share underage sex partners together… what makes anybody think professional liars are going to give a rats behind what happens to the People? Corruption is taking down the Russians, but look with open eyes on the Western Powers… The United States is no longer “united” and elections are no longer “free and fair”, so how is it we are a democracy? Did we vote on this? Not according to the numbers. As we leaned on the USSR for decades we grew like two trees intertwined. Now the Soviets are crumbling under their own hubris and ya know what? The “United” States is not long behind in splitting up. Not many empires last more than a couple of hundred years and our is no exception. If the diseases we ignore don’t get us and the Earth doesn’t scrape us all off through climate change chances are we still are in the process of regrouping into a smaller, hopefully saner body of humanity. By smaller I mean a few hundred thousand individuals. That number can be handled by our planet. As far the idea of billionaires colonizing Mars? Gravity. Mars has very little gravity which means none of our biology will work over time. Our bones shrink, our blood doesn’t flow properly and our muscles fade away. In orbit we can see this every time one astronaut stays a year or so in space, they begin to fail because our bodies are designed for 1 G, not 1/3 G. The animals we sent into space and tried to breed have all failed, so why would you think humans can breed in low G? With no children there are no colonies, so… Mars is good for robots and short term exploration but will never be a substitute Earth even if we can grow small crops and print homes from the Martian sand. We can make parts look like earth but we can’t make gravity and without proper gravity our bones will melt away and our muscles will fade away and our sperm will fail. Earth is our home, clean it up, care for it and try not to kill one another because we have no other options.