Imagine that you are the CEO of Goldman Sachs.
Imagine what it would be like - what you would hear, see and experience.
Now imagine that - maybe because your kids told you what you were doing was destroying a prosperous future for their friends - you decide to change the way Goldman is doing things.
So you leak the government's manipulation of the financial markets to the press (you know all about it, since Goldman has been a big partner in that manipulation) , and you turn Goldman into a credit-creation factory for the people of the United States . . . loaning the states the money they need to plug their budget shortfalls - and loaning money to rebuild America's manufacturing - at next to zero interest.
Can't imagine it? Don’t believe that such a selfish monster could turn around and do the right thing?
I understand, of course.
We are fighting against tremendously selfish and powerful elites.
But unless we can imagine a guy like the head of Goldman Sachs changing, we will not even be able to think of a way to reach someone like that.
It is easy for us (I'm including myself here) to think of ourselves as warriors for truth and justice, and to think of the meat heads like the guys who run Goldman as inhuman monsters whose destructive intentions are set in stone.
They are certainly bastards who have looted the country and manipulated the economy for the sake of total domination and control, and obscene levels of wealth. (And - obviously - it might take massive pressure from the people in order to bring them down and throw them in jail.)
But, as I've previously written:
Our failure to face the shadow side of life has allowed unscrupulous characters to muck things up.
That's why we're in this mess: we haven't been willing to face the shadow side of things. We've wanted to keep our hands clean, and so we've let others do the dirty work.
Righteous anger is essential for enlivening our efforts for truth and justice. And thinking of the idiots who are ruining our country as bad-to-the-core helps rally our righteous anger.
But the truth is that even they have a heart and soul buried deep down and encrusted with thick ice by decades of disuse.
Even they could be reached by people with the right approach.
I don't know if its a confrontational approach or a gentle approach . . . use your imagination and see what you think would work.
A basic military principal is that you have to know your enemy in order to beat him.
I strongly believe that an outgrowth of that principal is that if we can imagine a way to reach our enemy, we have a chance of actually reaching him or her.
I would invite you to try visualizing a change in heart of the enemies on other issues, as well. For example, the chief warmonger realizing that peace is in his family's best interest.
This essay is written for an audience of atheists. But if you are spiritual, the importance of imagining victory is even more evident.
It's even worse than you think. You haven't imagined THIS: www.ponerology.com
ReplyDeleteYes, George, we all have hearts :) We are wise to act in our own highest sense of love, harmony, and faith, and offer this to all we encounter. We are also wise to intelligently apply our love to drive a political wedge between the evil well-described in Political Ponerology (and Alex Jones' work) and those who would prefer a "Scrooge Conversion" to live in a world of love. We should split these two groups.
ReplyDeleteIn this case, of course, the scenario George proposes of a "good" Goldman would be subject to hearings to develop our best first-effort at policy, but his point is brilliant.
This is what I'm talking about in offering our endgame to the current criminal "leaders." I see our best future is to offer them a truth and reconciliation process. They give us their surrender and cooperation in revealing all the facts they know. In exchange we give them a peaceful remainder of their life. Got a better proposal? Then now's the time to speak-up. But I'm on a roll: imagine 10,000 at the top of our food-chain. They surrender and we reclaim a trillion dollars of assets from them (that's probably quite conservative). We give them an appreciative golden parachute of $10 million each, tax-free, to live their lives. What we get is $900 billion net return, the end of war and poverty as quickly as we can do so without their domination and minion-media, and mind-blowing disclosure of what's really going on.
That's my proposal.
BTW: my best sites to discern what's really happening is Fred Burk's www.wanttoknow.info and Project Camelot.
Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu
Charles Manson has a heart too. We jail serial killers, but serial robbers like Blankfein are role models for millions of ruthless and ambitious people.
ReplyDeleteHere's some much needed tough love, for the ever so enlightened here.
ReplyDeleteThis endless analysis of the faults of modern society is nauseating in the extreme. It is much like living next to a pig farm.
Similar social analysis throughout history made by legions of puffed-up and academically educated ne'erd'wells, as well as the lunatic ideas of generations of geniuses meant to address the human-nature-based faults of society, are the intellectual catalysts that have given us every one of our problems today.
We aren't just condemned to relive history. We ARE our history.
The pragmatic solutions of science are worthless.
The pragmatic solutions of science are worse than worthless regardess the well-spoken tripe of brigades of academics and the altruist good-intentions of herds of clomping, cud-chewing social scientists.
===>>>Historically -every single pragmatic solution science has provided humanity, has given rise to problems ten times the breadth of the original problem that these pragmatic solutions of science were meant to address.
===>>>We are today watching the colossal house of cards of millions of pragmatic scientific solutions, each leaning one against the other come undone.
And only mindless fools idly ruminate about more pragmatic scientific solutions.
The solution, folks, is coming up momentarily.
And no one has any sort of pragmatic plan that will affect it whatsoever.
Welcome it with open arms.
There are such things as sociopaths (and, psychopaths) and some of them are CEOs because of their focus that is unchecked by empathy. It makes a profit. Materialism running to insanity. Mostly because of the imaginary feeling of buying your way out of mortality. Also, because violent(or, symbolically violent) conquest holds a sexual charge. It is why some idiots are sexually aroused after beating their spouses.
ReplyDeleteThere is another shadow side that we have been avoiding in the verbage about bad guys. As a society, we have become addicted to fear. The constant verbal assault of modern society throws serotonan fight/flight brain chemistry into hyperdrive, overfiring and burning out neurons and making people depressed and worse. It is the constant mind chatter that does it. Constant relentless consciousness/awareness.
Fear makes endorphans that use up the excess serotonan brain chemistry and makes people feel better. I learned this from a rock climber who was jealous of newcomers to the sport who needed less danger to get the endorphan fix. The fix can be imaginary like a scary movie (or, obcessing about being jabbed with a tainted flu shot).
This unproductive loop keeps people from actually doing anything to solve problems. In fact they want things to get worse and worse. They just are looking for bigger roller coasters. Bigger things to be afraid of.
I wonder if that was the real reason they took things like athletics, art and music out of school. Those activities counterbalance the fear producing left brain activity with a right brain disconnect. People who learn to disconnect are then able to discover solutions to problems and act on them. People caught in the fear/endorphan fix loop are addicted, just like with any other drug and are vulnerable to manipulation because they are no longer free. Those who produce the most fear and paranoia are heavily supported and encouraged to do so. They appear to be fighting the establishment, but are in reality furthering the imprisonment. "Fear is the mind killer..." EQ
"Fear is the mind killer." EQ
ReplyDeleteI don't know who EQ might be, or what the acronym might be pointing toward. I have however, spent the latter half of my life studying philosophy and history.
When anyone starts spouting an intimate knowledge of how the brain works, and how this might affect what is an otherwise non-existent collective social consciousness, I cannot help but cringe.
The idea that a collective "we" should keep the faith, and everything will turn out all right, is a religious idea, and nothing less than a belief in some animist deity guiding the blunders of humanity toward some shining light in the distant future.
Humanity has unfortunately been dumbed down incredibly since the Enlightenment, and become ever more prone to such inane beliefs about some benevolent cosmic guiding hand.
These come in a myriad of forms. They are all fabrications of fancy.
As evidence of how dumbed-down humanity is, anyone can read Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, which were written in the Eighteenth Century. Any one of us would find it impossible to reach out to find a single individual with such a wide breadth of intellect. And so few among us has bothered to read this compilation of earnest philosophic truth.
The notion that the mind can conquer these problems is comical.
Logic is nothing more than a correct way of speaking and writing so that we can communicate the drivel we call intelligence to one another cogently.
Here is an example of our clear intellectual paradox.
Aristotle posited, Things that do not exist, cannot move.
Each of you can take the time to analyze this notion, -just long enough to arrive at some feeling of self-evidence about the statement.
Now consider, we do not and cannot know what does not exist. And further consider, everything -we know of- moves, the movement of the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, and even the galaxy moves through the Universe.
Aristotle, like each and every one of us, was full of it. Our minds are worthless in ferreting anything that might be self-evident against the backdrop of an infinitely complex reality.
That is our reality. There are no solutions that last, and so many solutions that cannot last have been adopted, we are but a small way down the cliff that these popularly noted massive failures have dropped us from.
Anyone that tells you they are not afraid, -is a fool and an idiot.
And no solution will come from any authority this time. The solution will come from recognizing the new status quo -when it arrives as it always does, all by itself, on its own timetable, and with its own terms that will be dictated in due order.
These solutions being contemplated by those who seek to harness their mental powers are all laughable in the face of reality.
Read your history. Study your philosophy.
Recognize your mortality and the source of that which fills your head and your inenviable short time.
You just illustrated my point beautifully. There are a bunch of people out there uninterested in finding solutions to problems, only regurgitating footnoted fear mongering. If you don't know where "Fear is the mind killer..." comes from, you haven't read much. lol Shades of Hawk...EQ
ReplyDeleteFrom the 1965 "Dune"?
ReplyDeleteI generally don't waste my time reading science fiction, or conversing with those who find truth in it either.
Mr. Washington, I was hoping to see a post on the fantastic profits made by financial companies once near collapse! It's truly a miracle of capitalism, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteMind is everything.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, GW.