Essay: Sustenance and Darkness

 

Essay:  Sustenance and Darkness

 

Birthed in a fretful, restless haze, this essay became a peripatetic meander down a path of pain and truth, a reflection on the rise of tyranny.  It isn’t quite an omnium-gatherum; there is some organization, split into a few sections.  In the first, I reflect on the swirly chaos of global politics, centered in the corruption and darkening of the United States.  Here I seek companionship with the many people across the world who support human rights, while struggling to carve out stability and purpose.  It’s as if the bullies have taken over not only the schoolyard but also the classrooms, with the complicity of a most vile and malicious principal.  The analogy falls short, however, for the threat transcends the scholastic. We are on a mortal level, confronting the potential end of all things, delivered in a planet-busting punch of radioactive detonations. 

In the second part, I grapple with the abhorrence of bowing down to unspeakable, disgusting kings.  Following in the footsteps of far superior thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt and Erich Fromm, I find myself both revulsed and fascinated by the ways in which people morph to scuttle, belly down in obeisance.  I look at the evils of conformity from various angles, wandering in a blurry, Venn-diagram-ish place.  My labels include at least the following:   numbness, cluelessness, ‘neutrality,’ and the outright soul-sell of the lickspittle, who vocally lubricates the dissemination of a tyrant’s Big Lies. 

There are, I propose, various strains of lemming.  They have their various dispositions, but share in common the sorry trait of pushing humanity toward a cliff with nary an objection.  It could be said that those who bow down, the facilitators and collaborators, epitomize the subject matter in Bonhoeffer’s social theory of the stupid.

I reluctantly leave aside the question of how much blame should be assigned to specific persons.  This is a ‘deep in the weeds’ topic, ready for multiple disquisitions.  I seethe at the people around me who refuse to challenge what’s going on, even as our country sinks from democracy into an exigent darkness.  It is easier, though, to accuse in the abstract rather than the specific.   Are children to blame for supporting a dictator?  Teens?  Young adults? 

I will say this:  the Niemöller’s of the world--educated persons in positions of power--invite heaps of culpability.

Although I continue to blame and feel hatred for certain people, I hope it is part of a larger process of catharsis and sublimation.  The goal is to steer my rage away from people and toward the phenomenon of oppression itself.  This includes racism, sexism, anti-gay, anti-LGBTQ and other sorts of bigotry.

I strive to hate the behavioral sink, not the people down in it.   For more on this, see my essay, “On Hate.”

In the final section, I consider some virtues of resilience.  How do we align with the Good, despite the brutish, deteriorating sadness of these times?  How do we sustain ourselves? 

In this regard, I begin with an imagery of beauty and purpose, and finish with a discussion of the nature of protest itself.  When we listen to and validate our own inner angel, that critical agent of the self, nestled within bridges of conscious and subconscious, we form a lovely relationship with our intrapsychic being.  We become situated in a place of companionable joy, in alliance with honesty and Good.  In a sense, we become our own soulmate.

 

Side Note on Global Warming

 

I would have liked to discuss global warming in relation to tyranny.  But that’s yet another Brobdingnagian topic.  Suffice it to say that the leader of the USA, Donald Trump, has called global warming “a giant scam.”  This proclamation is a prime example of the Big Lies that such dictators put forward as loyalty tests for their cult base.  Meanwhile, environmental conditions deteriorate beyond red-line estimates:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/23/earth-being-pushed-beyond-its-limits-as-energy-imbalance-reaches-record-high

As I’ve repeatedly said on this blog, the so-called ‘strongmen’ like Trump are better referred to as enervators.  (strongman = enervator).  Such leaders are political parasites.  They suck the vibrancy of a nation into their glutinous, gluttonous, depthless narcissism.  Why call them strong?  They are psychologically and ethically the weakest sort.  Mental health and ethics go together.  In conjunction, these two should be society’s highest priority.  Not profit.  Not power.  Not servitude to Mammon, Satan, or Mars (taken here as symbols for Greed, Deceit and Violence).

Civilization has advanced sharply in the last few centuries.  Women’s right to vote was the greatest invention in the entire history of civilization.   We can now begin to embrace ethics as a technology, like we have embraced medicine as a technology  (see my essay “Lightcraft: ethics as technology,” 5/20/25) 

 

I.  A Swirl Of Reflections

 

Mere months ago, Trump initiated war on Iran.  Before that, he joined with Israel to continue the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza.  This full-scale atrocity now seems to be expanding into the West Bank and Lebanon.  He ordered the US military to raid Venezuela and abduct its leader Maduro, which led to tribulation in Cuba as well.  So much wickedness has been dumped on the Earth since the President attained office in 2025 that it boggles attempt at recitation.   In addition to the considerable military violence, he has wielded a whip of economics, studded with mercurial tariffs, to stagger the stock markets and fray the global financial system. 

Trump doesn’t have the foresight to consider the risk of collapse.  He needs to be in the immediate center of things, right now, all the time.  Dozens of psychologists and psychiatrists have pinned him as a malignant narcissist (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump).   His own niece, Mary Trump, with a PhD in clinical psychology, labelled him the same (Too Much and Never Enough;  How my family created the world’s most dangerous man). 

 

Stupidity and narcissism

 

Still, a sizeable tranche of American voters, wallowing as they are in stupidity, to use Bonhoeffer’s concept, continue to follow their monster deeper into an abyss of ruin and depravity.  The Trumpers lap up their godking’s speeches.  An overarching factor is America's hideous history of Black slavery and Native genocide.  Con-man Trump taps into a cesspool of bigotries and frauds.  He barks and barks and barks, such a talented barker, at his primary mark:  the rural White heartland.  He has enthralled about 30% of the population, similar to the historical slice in Nazi Germany.

 

The original Big Lie

I want to mention a social weapon often ignored, and yet always used by dictators:  the original Big Lie, which started thousands of years ago.  The original Big Lie is as simple and obvious as it is unacknowledged; namely, that women are inferior to men and should obey them.  Brave women and their male allies have chipped away at this enormous deceit, making some astounding progress.  And yet the bulk of the original Big Lie stands to this day.  

 

Lies are what give Trump power

 

It’s tempting to hope that Trump’s latest evil, his choice to go to war with Iran, will sink his popularity.  After all, he ran on the promise of “no more wars.”  He also ran on “lower prices” and now gasoline prices are through the roof.  And yet sadly this latest bout of stunning contradictions is likely to bind Trump’s fawning base even more.  In their eyes, he is Napoleonic.  The ‘great leader’ will likely proclaim victory in Iran, whatever the actual circumstances, while zealots and jingoes cheer him on. 

The ongoing genocide in Gaza, it is important to emphasize, hasn’t slowed Trump down at all.  So much for the Holocaust Memorial’s motto of Never Again.  

Genocide is the greatest evil possible.  Trump’s followers deny it is even happening with the zeal of drooling dogs.  It is similar to how they are in denial about  Global Warming, despite the environmental evidence right before their very eyes.

 

Grave

 

Egomania runs a headlong race.  When it propels the belligerence of the most powerful man in the world, we court grave peril.  Trump’s rancor blows up the room over and over.  It keeps him in the spotlight, battening his delusions of godhood.  His skill at gaming bleachers of toadeaters means that all of us here in the USA, and in fact everyone in the world,  is stuck on an accelerating, hell-bound train ride. 

In the sense of a Nero who gets to fiddle while Rome burns, Trump is a genius.  If escaping the verdict of decency and truth is the measuring stick, Trump is a dark god.

 

Give 'em the old three-ring circus, stun and stagger 'em
When you're in trouble, go into your dance
Though you are stiffer than a girder
They'll let you get away with murder
Razzle dazzle 'em and you've got a romance

--from the musical Chicago

 

 

Apology

 

I apologize if this essay is a scattered.  As I type these words, the deadline that Trump set to “wipe out a whole civilization,” is approaching.  Said deadline is (… drum roll…) 8pm tonight.  Such is the insanity of the times in which you and I live.

[editorial update:  no nuclear bombs have dropped ... yet …]

 

Significant probability of armageddon

A significant probability of nuclear launch can be extracted from the compulsive hustle of Trump’s disordered brinksmanship.  He has menaced Greenland and Canada.  And, again, let us never forget that the USA and Israel are engaged in a genocide in Gaza right now.   This has been affirmed by many experts, several of whom I have quoted previously on this blog. 

Israeli rights groups, such as B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have called what is happening in Gaza genocide.  Navi Pillay, Chair of a UN Commission, called it genocide.  The International Association of Genocide Scholars called it genocide.  Omar Bartov, a genocide scholar at Brown University, called it genocide. He writes in an op-ed:

 

This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

 

And so on. 

Add to this the hell of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine under Vladimir Putin, and you get a resemblance to pre-WW2 upheavals.  Today’s crisis is worse, however, because phalanxes of nuclear missiles enshadow the globe.  Tens of thousands of ICBMs poised and armed, set to destroy the collective dreams and hopes built up over the millennia.

The Netflix movie, House of Dynamite, demonstrates that the inbound trajectory of a single ICBM could plausibly trigger an all-out scramble, the rush to detonate every warhead available.

 

“O proud death, what feast is toward in thine eternal cell”  --Hamlet

 

To fight hopeless, face painful truths

 

Here we are, those of us who embrace truth over lies, compassion over division, virtue over violence, pulled into a psychotic vortex of horror and war.  We are forced toward the cliff, despite our protests.  Our votes and voices feel impotent; and yet it is not my purpose to argue for resignation.  By acknowledging the awful realities, my goal is to counter hopelessness.  Are we menaced by bellicose, authoritarian powers?  Yes.  Is there a significant risk that the hostility will increase, past the point of no return, to the destruction of humanity?  Yes.   However, even under the gun of worst case scenarios, there are things we can and should do.

As I discuss below, there is a special sort of joy which stems from the recognition that we dared to act.  We who take the tough, courageous path of the Good in defiance of Evil.  

In addition to its inherently noble aspect, such action might well save humanity, if enough people dare to believe that 'we shall overcome.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7akuOFp-ET8&list=RD7akuOFp-ET8&start_radio=1
('We Shall Overcome' sung at the March on Washington, 1963, for Civil Rights)

 

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” -- Elie Wiesel

 

II. The problem of numbness

 

For many of us, it is tempting to tune out.  To go numb on the sidelines.  Before getting into this, I want to make clear that is healthy to take time to recuperate, to temporarily step back from the assault of miseries and travails.  A template for my own daily routine is one or two intense writing sessions, maybe a deep conversation with a friend, maybe grading papers or otherwise plying my trade as a part-time instructor; and yet then the rest of the day is a medley of life’s simple gifts:  walking, gaming, cooking, and other casual things, sometimes at random, what a friend of mine refers to as puttering.  All these ‘little things’ are miracles.  Just to look out a window and see a tree, the sky, a bird.  I try to be mindful, outside the call of my protest.  I remind myself, too, that I am lucky in comparison to the many, many people, local and abroad, who struggle through no fault of their own to merely subsist.

If you have the energy of a leader--someone who sleeps four hours a night, who constantly feels ready and active--by all means go for it.  The rest of us still have our place; and we can take comfort in the maxim that no one should judge themselves in comparison to others.  

Look in the mirror.  Strive to advance, accept and be good to yourself.  

 

Privilege and numbness

Numbness is an ‘easy’ option for those who are privileged, that is, not in a group calumniated by fascists.  The nature of numbness is as straightforward as it is poisonous:  just let bad things happen to those targeted for persecution and reap benefits on the sly.  A pension fund can rise on a dictator’s influence, such as Trump’s embrace of oil over renewable sources of energy.  “Let’s invest in oil stocks!”

Note that this wicked mindset need hardly be recognized, if at all, by the perpetrator.  A well-practiced pawn can bask in a seamless continuity of blithe appearances. I discuss this more under “Cluelessness.”

 

‘Neutrality’

The choice to sit it out is sometimes described as ‘staying neutral.’  But as Hannah Arendt points out, neutral is simply another face of evil.  I’ve belabored this point in other essays.  Suffice it to say that neutrality is cowardice.  It is the acquiescence of quiet facilitation.  It is refusal, blatant in one’s inaction, to defend human rights as a nonnegotiable aspect of a nonmalevolent society.  If you are willing to scuttle human rights, via negligence or deed, especially in times of deep social crisis, then you are propping a depravity akin to Apartheid, Nazism or Jim Crow.

 

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil" - Hannah Arendt

 

An ‘easy’ option? 

It’s not really an easy option to sit things out.  People with a conscience, which is most of us, who suppress and deny our empathic sentiments --what classic philosophers call our “fellow feelings”-- pay a psychic price.  The internalized machinery of the Big Lie consumes a great deal of energy.  Bending a knee to Evil entrenches cognitive baggage. 

Such is the heaviness of the Faustian bent.  Doing nothing while racists lay a blanket of abominable cruelty exacts its pound of cerebral flesh.  It is a pusillanimous stain not only on the nature of one’s soul but on the very ability to function.  To sell a Big Lie is on par with an attempt at sincerity when saying something like, “the sky is red,” or “the Earth is flat.”  Hiding the falsity within the guise of sincerity requires the mind to erect smoke-and-mirror partitions and tricks.  Such is the sheer gall, the absurd norm of the blinkered Babbitry.  To flee from one's own clear-sighted analysis and replace it with murk and hedges.

 

The Era of Dumbing (3500 BCE -  present)

Society often forgives the complicity of the numb mind.  It is relatively easy to hide from the gavel of justice by huddling amid the bulk of the herd.  To the detriment of our past, present and future, ethical progress has been massively hampered.  

At the risk of oversimplification, the reason that our civilization is probably about to go down is what I call the Era of Dumbing:  the reign of ignorance-based government.  It has been going on for thousands of years.  In this primitive, immature time, this Era of Dumbing, ignorance is treated as a kind of capital, wielded by dictators, those who would be godkings, to turn the masses into political cultists.

We have the brain- and cultural-plasticity to initiate the transition to a better world.  We can escape the intergenerational propaganda of Ignorance.  To fully take this on, we need a concerted effort by a multidisciplinary team of intrepid thinkers.  This effort would be what I have called a Project of Light, something far greater and more ambitious than the Manhattan Project, that dark enterprise which lay a path for Evil's ultimate triumph. (see Lightcraft, 5/20/25)

 

Cluelessness & White males

What is happening now in the USA--the nationwide bullying, the sense of being trapped and destined to sink--is most unfamiliar and shocking to White males such as myself.  Other sorts of people have lived under oppression for a very long time. Women have been pressed down since the beginning of civilization.  The origin of racism, the oppression of Black folks, goes back to at least to the 16^th century.   We White males have only experienced the privilege side of things.  This makes us the numbest and most clueless, especially now that we are getting a taste for what it is like to be heavily targeted.

Why is cluelessness so common?  Cluelessness in the dominant group fortifies the overarching control mechanism.  A system that is invisible to those who benefit the most is harder to challenge.  One of the patriarchate's goals is to make life easiest for the males of the highest caste, which aligns with the minimization or elimination of feelings of guilt. 

Hear evil, see evil, and speak evil--but without even knowing it.  Coasting along in White-male wonderland--except for all the crippling cognitive baggage--the privileged segment reaps benefits while oblivious.  Not only the failure to speak up, but the facade of ‘all is fine,’ the suavity of the gaslighter, is damnable.  Worn in a manicured neighborhood, distant from the poverties and brutalities of the oppressed, the masquerade of denial, no matter how deeply entrenched, neither absolves nor exculpates. 

This 'talk about the weather' mentality is beyond cruel.  Total denial in the face of hate.  The choice to stay blind is made over and over, day after day, in a continuous, deadening stream of failed ethical choices, greased by the complicity of social institutions at every level.  Without that grease, how quickly would the masquerade become untenable and fall?  

I bring this up not to mitigate what we White males generally do, 'talk about the weather,' but to emphasize that we damn ourselves by basking in the grease.  We yield in our broken hearts to the mental massage of the social machinery, the financial and power benefits offered to us by the institutions of injustice.  These institutions have staggered at times, and could be broken through--if only we joined the brave souls leading the charge.  If we dared to raise our heads out of wonderland,  we could be part of the solution, not components of the problem. 

 

Active Complicity

There are, of course, those who vocally endorse and enforce a dictator’s virulence and truculence.  To take this route is to shirk even a trace of disagreement and become something vile, a quisling inside a shill, a mouthpiece for monstrosity.  There is income and power to be had for those willing to sell out, those who worm their way into the hierarchy.

It is a temptation, not only for the privileged, but for members of targeted groups as well.  The minions who served the British Raj.  The Schafly-ites who fought against equal rights for women.  Vichy France.  Quisling Norway.   

“Every minority and every people has its share of opportunists, traitors, freeloaders and escapists.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

 

A side note on sociopathy

A small percentage of human beings do not have a conscience.  This does not make such folks bad by nature.  They can lead noble lives.  Many jobs are easier for them, such as social work that involves trauma assessment.  Sociopaths frame life differently, outside the presence of guilt or that special joy which comes from doing what’s right.  Given their lack of internal guide rails, the choice to follow an ethical code can be a crucial moor.  Good Psychiatric Management (GPM), a professional therapeutic technique, centers on establishing such a moor.

All of us are tempted at times.  But for the sociopath, it can be constant and compelling.  Can I get ahead by stealing and cheating?  Yes, I can.  Does it bother me?  Not at all.  Is it adrenal?  Absolutely.  Are the people around me trusting and vulnerable?  Yes, they are. 

The sociopath is put in a very tough situation.  Our primitive society gravitates toward profit, power, status and trophies.  Our institutions ‘talk the talk,’ claiming to be honorable; and yet in deed, it is greed and ignorance which hold the reins.  The sociopath, lacking the experiential rewards associated with conscience, easily gets caught in a sand trap, sliding down a slippery-slope on a no-holds-barred ride in pursuit of shiny things and fleeting thrills. 

Maybe you end up getting ahead by being unethical--this time.  But the more you ignore the stability of moral principles, the more your behavior corrupts.  Chaos is ready to pounce, just one bad dice roll away.  The need for more and more gets riskier, tilted by the short-term benefits of nihilism.

An example of someone with no conscience who has completely fallen is Donald Trump.  He is all in on the grand deceit of an endless, immediate power trip.  Compulsive insecurity goads him on as he plies his trade of outrage, seizing at adulation and godhood.  From outside the bubble of his cultish sphere, he seems an empty shell, incapable of real relationship, not only with others, but with self, art, beauty, environs, animals, the universe, or any aspect of the Good.   There is no awe, reverence, love or spirituality in the man.  His bottomless craving seeks to break everyone and everything--people, ideas, structures and situations--and reconstruct them as puppets in the black hole theater of an empty heart. 

 

III. How to Stay Ethical

 

An Inspiring Image

 

The original impetus for my essay, buried now in the unruly growth of this ponderous screed, is the following image:  the Earth as the beautiful Blue Bulb of a Cosmic Flower.  This Great Bulb has already blossomed many ways; and yet, as it now stands, we humans are its germinative core.  You and I may feel puny.  But we have a part to play in the evolution of ideas, what is in effect a vast social-mental web, which will craft the future of the planet.  

Human choice, one way or the other, will shape everything.  Why?  

The advance of technology provides tools both physical and psychological, both architectural and ecological.  Humans distill the best and worst from nature, from kindness to cruelty.  In so doing, we  produce social systems with elements of Good and Evil.  Due to our power to both rarify and magnify, the future will suffer the lens of our choices.  It will bear either the liberation or the destruction of our self-fulfilling prophecy, which is a manifestation of the status of our collective consciousness. 

We will soon have the power to create a veritable heaven or hell.  The content of the driving prophecy will derive from the wisdom, or lack thereof, that we possess.  Our level of inner awareness alters Gaia’s fate, whether to blossom or wilt, led by the transformative effect of our own psyches.

There are many sorts of knowledge, all of which relate to power.  And yet physical power alone, without the emotional competence to wield it, is what Omar Bradley warned us about, when he spoke of “ethical infants”:

 

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

 

Not only is physical strength, manifested in technology, not enough;  it is, by itself, a route to total destruction.  We need psychological prowess.  We need to deal with our passions and emotions in conjunction with advances in ethics tech.

It would behoove us to embrace that ancient axiom of the Greek Oracle:   

tement nosce -- Know Thyself

 

The Blue Flower

How will the beautiful blue bulb of the Earth bloom?  One possibility is that it spreads petals to other planets, or even galaxies, invigorating the whorls of nebulas.  Although the expansion of civilization into outer space feels distant to us, we are part of an ongoing evolvement of ideas.  It is a laborious process, a struggle whose outcome will follow us into outer space (should we survive, that is, our own stupidity to reach such a marker). 

We could, in grand egocentricity, exploit other planets to resemble the polluted environs of Earth, and pepper them with idolatrous statues of males like Donald Trump. 

Ideas affect our behaviors, which in turn shape the relevant environment:

I ==>  B ==> E

As technology increases, we gain more power, whether wielded consciously or unconsciously, to alter things:

I ==> T x B ==> E

 

(see my discussion of the "Mind-World Lemma" for more on this, 1/1/26)

 

An analogy

Consider the analogy of an alcoholic.  All things being equal, the (non-sober) alcoholic alters their household in ways that encourage chaos, whether they intend it or not.  This is also true of someone who is virtuous, though the effect is opposite, toward health and harmony.  Who we are, not only physically but psychically, manifests in the places we touch.

I ask again, with soupçon of rhetoric, How will we, as bearers of Earth’s Blue Bulb, curate that Blossom?  How will we nurture the Great Flower and trellis its vibrance into outer space? 

Millions of years await our evolving civilization, much more than the puny ten thousand years that have passed already--if only we find a way travel in the Light.  Not the dooming Darkness of myopic greed and manufactured rage.

Two worldviews compete

 

When it comes to how to rule and lead, there are two competing worldviews.  One started around 10,000 BCE with the Agricultural Revolution.  It is a way of living grounded in force and ignorance.  In the Republic, Plato assigned this view to Thrasymachus:  "Justice is the interest of the stronger.' 

To exemplify this worldview:  think hordes of slaves who haul and chisel stone to build a Pyramid so that godly pharaohs can travel with style into the afterlife. 

The other way to rule, more recent and less practiced, embeds in reason and humanism.  This path underscores dignity, fairness, rights, and enough time for each and every person to expand their potential, that is, the freedom to self-actualize.    

Under the auspices of such freedom, citizens would be taught to Know Thyself. They would not be raised to bow down in fearful, conformist collectivization.

We can progress on a course of reason by raising our level of ethics tech:  embrace psychology, humanities and science to better achieve and define harmony, happiness, and health as aspects of the Good.  Or we can shackle ourselves to idolatrous zealotry and the might-makes-right of petty godkings.  

 

The Purgatory Principle

As I discuss in the essay, “The Purgatory Principle,” when technology reaches to a certain point, humanity will embrace one or the other of two idea-systems.   Ignorance-based government.  Or truth-based government.  Truth and Ignorance struggle against each other.   When technology reaches a certain point--enough to assert overwhelming control over mind and environment--then one or the other, Good or Evil, will win out.  

Light seeks to eliminate Darkness.  Darkness seeks to eliminate Light.  Ignorance and truth cannot co-exist in a government that has the power to optimally embrace one or the other as the driver of its function and purpose.  

Technological prowess will determine when such optimal force is achieved.  As I’ve discussed in other essays, one dark scenario is the following:  a computer chip in every human head, monitored by AI and policed by robots.  

Within a few hundred years, this kind of totalitarian dungeon will be feasible.  

Whether it happens or not depends on the type of government in play.  If insecure men with bottomless egos enthrall the world at the crucial moment, the meta-control model will lock in place.

The dark genius of fascism is that it combines monarchy, the authority of a king, with the celebrity of a charismatic dictator.  This dangerous fusion gives the dictator full-throttle access to intimate force, even to the point of ordering people to implant a brain chip in themselves and their families.

 

The armageddon cycle

The ultimate victory for Evil is a scenario in which humans doom themselves to nuclear war, over and over again.  It happens when a small percentage of humanity survives a nuclear holocaust, then proceeds to rebuild society along  the same old worldview.  They re-establish the same warlord system that cursed ancient Sumer:  slavery, patriarchy, bellicosity.  War ensues.  On and on.  Mimicking our own historical pattern.  Society rebuilds on a theme of might-makes-right, centered on fighing and weapons.  At some point, nuclear warheads re-emerge.  Predictably enough, they launch.  Another nuclear holocaust ensues.  Once more, a small sliver of the population survives.  And so the cycle starts all over, rinse and repeat, through the infernal, unspeakable, cosmically stupid trap of doom-by-war, an Earth-daming tragedy that is as avoidable as it is disgusting. 

The way out would be for the people to reject ignorance-based government.  If people accept truth, a marriage of science, psychology, humanism and ethos, we can walk together toward a better world.  Given our brain- and cultural-plasticity, it is certainly possible that we someday eliminate war entirely.

 

Welcome to the present

As tech progresses, the worldview we adapt will affect who we are, what we are, and how we live.  Will it be a noble flowering? Or will we reinforce the vector of our barbaric Era of Dumbing? 

These are the times in which you and I live in.  Times of rapid change and yet also great possibility.  As I said above, the greatest invention in human history was universal suffrage:  the attainment of equal voting rights by women.  This overturned ten thousand years of the original Big Lie.   It was a monumental step.  It demonstrated that ‘human nature’ does not limit us.   We have both the brain- and cultural-plasticity to approach a Good world.  Our potential to adapt has been demonstrated. 

 

The Ignorance Vortex

What stands in our way now, as it has for so long, is the Era of Dumbing.  The brain of every infant is fed the same pattern of lies, things like women are inferior, macho is best, and war is inevitable.  Not a single person ever born to human civilization has known what it is like to be raised in a Good world.  Not you.  Not me.  Not anyone.  We don’t know what it would be like, because all of us have been indoctrinated to perpetuate the reign of Ignorance.  We continue to be indoctrinated every day--saturated by cultural messages, many of them 'innocuous' and subconscious, such as micro-expressions on a scolding or mocking face.  At other times they are blatant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GVm-wYBXs
(sexist commercials from the 20^th centurty and some ... commentary)

 

I call this acculturation trap, this trojan horse of false beliefs for the human brain, which has been implanted generation after generation, the Ignorance Vortex.  The Ignorance Vortex has restyled to adapt to disaporas and the resultant ethnicities, but in so doing, it has retained the core elements of the  acculturative curse.  (5/20/25, etc.)

 

Sustenance

Below, I approach the question of ‘how to stay ethical?’ from some other vantages, such as how best to engage in protest.  My main point, though, is that sustenance and joy arise from the simple idea that you and I are part of Earth’s Beautiful Blue Flowering.  From that vantage, we can feel a wealthy sense of place and purpose.  Around us hovers the vast inky void of outer space.  Within that backdrop, its millions of lightyears of emptiness, the Earth stands out, a beacon and origin point, one that holds great promise of unfolding Good.

 

Perfect is the enemy of progression

We are, of course, frail, faltering creatures. We humans will never be perfect.  Our very nature has vampiric elements, because we must devour other life to survive, even if it is a vegetarian’s choice to eat only plants.  We will do bad things.  We will sometimes fail to understand ourselves when we look in the mirror.  In that sense we are a bit werewolf.  It is part of life. 

And yet, to stretch the metaphor a little more, even a vampire or werewolf can choose the path of the Good (as in the Twilight movies).  We can learn not only to acknowledge our dark emotions but to dance with them.  The strength to face our own behavior, both individual and collective, and to work with our own emotions, to nurture virtue, while steering a course away from harm, this is how we grow beyond the status of “ethical infants.”  

 

When I Choose To See The Good Side Of Things, I'm Not Being Naive. It Is Strategic And Necessary. It's How I Learned To Survive Through Everything  

--Waymond, ‘How I Fight,’ Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

 

Variety within circumstance

 

We may be powerless to stop the procession of Evil.  But it doesn’t mean we should give up.  This begs a question:  how should we do tread in a realm checkered by bullies, where our basic ‘fellow feelings’ for others are menaced and hurting?   In these fraught times, even a peace sign or a rainbow motif elicits rage.

History offers countless paths to an effective social statement, many of which are nuanced.  Due to the brutal cruelty of police states, a protestor sometimes must stand up without actually standing up.   A Black porter uses body language to signal resistance in the fight to end segregation.  A women works as a maid to pay for her daughter’s college.  The queer community opens a door to expression in 1980s pop music culture.  None of these are failures to protest, even though they don’t directly call out inequality. Before bursting into outright expression, social movements incubate in undercurrents of unrest.

 

Cautious or not?

That said, caution can be feckless.  We should never forget the message in “A Letter from the Birmingham Jail”:

I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the … Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

 

A definition of protest

Drawing on Martin Luther King Jr’s words, we can approach a definition of “protest.”  A final definition, of course, is no more possible than it is for the word “love.”  This does not undercut the value of such ‘secondary order’ concepts.  Discussions of life and reality go far beyond the limitations of linear precision or Euclidian math.  They are far more elaborate and exquisite than the nonlinear version of math, though they share some basic elements with it, such as limitations on knowing precise individual outcomes.

Using the quote above, we see that effective protest creates tension in order to call out injustice.  It challenges the way people listen and feel.  It marshals discomfort to thaw the freeze of complacency.  “Good trouble,” to use the words of John Lewis, aims to disrupt flawed law and order in the quest for decency and justice. 

"No justice, no peace."  (there is no peace in oppression)

 

A good will is not enough

To protest effectively is to have more than a “good will.”  Intent needs to be mobilized.  What is the best route for civil disobedience?  Everyone must answer this question for themselves, with the full engagement of their conscience and the passions of an open heart.

A few months before the war with the USA, the Iranian government killed six thousand protestors, opening fire on the crowds.  People paid with their lives for challenging the tyranny.  You could ask, Did they choose the wrong form of protest? 

This question can't be answered by an armchair philosopher, such as myself.  I will say this, the victims probably weren’t thinking, “I’m going to die today."  Most likely, almost surely, however, they recognized the immediate danger.  They made an informed choice.

To stand up to tyranny in this way, so boldly accepting such fatal risk, is resounding.  It is a choice that sings of moral beauty, of the bravery of conscience, while shining a light of hope for all of us and for the future of Earth.  It is a choice that embodies a timeless statement, not only to a nation, or even the globe, but to the universe itself.

 We should embrace this immortal statement and never forget it:

 

Life doesn’t have to be this way.

 

Goodness provides its own sort of sustenance

As I said above, choosing Good over Evil brings a kind of joy that is sui generis .  To choose Good is to accept yourself, to work with your emotions as allies.  It is to ‘Know Thyself’ and employ that knowledge for self-respect.  It is to grapple richly with your own unique personality.   You initiate dialogues with yourself.  You become your own soulmate.

This inward relationship-building also goes outward too.  When you introspect on your own exquisite being, you come to see, as well, the uniqueness and potentials of others.  Your inward empathic relationship nurtures beneficial relationships in general:  with other people, animals, the environment, with Earth and Cosmos. 

The many sorts of relationship invent each other and have a mirror effect. Maybe the only sentence worth pondering in this while essay is this:  the individual self is defined through the quality of its relationships at all levels.    

 

Psychic happiness, not material

Listening to one's conscience can spark a surge of psychic happiness.  A lovely self-validation.  And then to engage in protest against darkness, to cast your own ripples into the sea of social interaction, it is yet another quantum leap.

I don't mean to belittle the difficulty behind such joy.  To boldly listen to yourself is to admit your failures and confront weaknesses--and then to learn from them.   What courage this takes.  What heroism.   To face your deepest traumas and wounds.  

It can feel hopeless, trudging through the valleys.  But when you do so--for the world and self are so interconnected and inter-defined--you confront not only who you are, but also the world's miseries and identities.   To dare to look inward is to dare to look outward.  From this recognition stems a mode of awareness, an alert, empathic honesty, deepfelt throughout layers of consciousness and heart.

“We are a totality made of many interlocking parts. This is why we must remember that our individual healing is directly connected to our collective healing” -- Lorena Saavedra Smith

 

“The personal is political” -- Women’s Movement rallying cry

 

Meaning

What is the meaning of life?  Ignorance-based systems, like fascism, answer this question with pathetic, simple bifurcations.  What is ‘Evil’ to the facist?  Anyone or anything that is a useful scapegoat for the 'will to power.'  What is it to be ‘Good’ in a fascist system?  Simply this:  obedience over everything, loyalty at all costs, even--especially--at the cost of your soul. 

A different future awaits us, beyond such murderous bullying and titantic dumbing.  The path of honesty is painful, yes.  It can be agonizing.  But there is also joy.  There is happiness in a vision of the Earth as a Great Bulb ready to Blossom.  You and I can be part of unfurling that Blossom, hand in hand, nestled in the profound Beauty of a vision of the Good.

 

========

5/18... I'm just .. 

5/17/ ,,, more edits, ... I say too much and know too little

5/16 ... Lots of ongoing eds... 

Poem: Unhypnotize

 

 

Unhypnotize

 

in the screen of your eyes

carousels went round,

menageries of style

flashy and cute while

your facial commercials hypnotized.

 

one real caress

would’ve been enough

to cut through the drama,

dispel my worship like breeze.

icons could’ve tumbled,

the glitz to drip off your

photogenic chin onto a new sort of  

stage without promotion.

 

it wouldn’t even have been sexual.

just no televisuals.  no cloned chicks or

masculine rocks.  just a glimpse of concern,

alien to your fluorescence,

the sort that honors a journey

of connected touch.

 

=========================

5/11/26... eds all day

Poem: Fire Kiss

 

 

Fire Kiss

 

the fault line of your kiss has

fractured me down through the tectonic  

plates of my chest and

ruptured the magma there

to pant fire and burst out of

my sternum, fabled violets and

roses melting my bones, my blood

a mad vapor, musculature

to pump and boil, thigh and

piston of bicep, and that torch

of the crucible of abdominis,

seat of ache and flesh and

my ribs split and list, sides of

a galleon cleaved aft to fore

clutching at each other in

the solar churn of this heart,

such complict rhythms of

blaze and ecstasy.

to feast

on the merge of our breaths and moans,

pursue the resonance across

the volcanoes of your breasts, your

lunge and that surge in your eyes, so clear

with delicious fever, secret places

forever shared between us, yours, mine,

mysterious cores of naked, brutal being

which cast the first flame.

 

 

 

 

========================

Poem: Knox Hobo

 

Knox Hobo

 

breeze laps the side of a pond

lazy and wet while

lotuses float and i sway

as if a old hound

was leashed to my saunter.

 

down i go to the railroad tracks,

that crucifixion of steel

long and unbroken--

should i wait, arms out,

while i gaze at the pawpaws,

their greasy fruit ready

for my feast, their

pleasure on my tongue,

 

ooooooooooooooooooh

and a little beer?

 

i’ve gone down many times

for the pawpaw fruit guarded by

devil’s stick and nettle’s breath.

 

be sure not to tickle the thorns. 

 

the sun is a woman’s smile

thin above her green skirt

when you lie back and gaze

at that soft river.

 

 

===================

5/7 .... took out a word

5/6/26 eds

"Aralia spinosa, commonly known as devil's walking stick, is a woody species of plant in the genus Aralia of the family Araliaceae. It is native to eastern North America. The various names refer to the viciously sharp, spiny stems, petioles and even leaf midribs. It has also been known as Angelica-tree.[2]"

Poem: Displaced

 

Displaced

 

maples gesture

like a zealous choir,

not in praise of gulls

who salt a vast indigo,

but that pearl of eternal shining:

honey-giver over deciduous temples,

hallelujah, the golden teat!

 

squirrels tussle

to rile cone-rich duff,

riding the chthonic roots

of the two-faced maples near

a single scalloped doubloon,

long stolen from its underwater cove.

 

calcified, the lonely trinket,

gooey with marl,

tilts as if hunkered down,

a sad mollusk’s tomb,

fleeing alien oxygen.

no advocate with gills

in this upside down world

to offer comfort, let alone

peace.

=============

5/1/26 ... changed a word... fixed typo ... rephrased.. again

 

Regarding the Poems

 The poems are all I have.  They are my children.  They will keep growing, full of error and play, at least until I die.  And yet eternal in their wonder. 

Poem: Cloud

 

Cloud

 

flaunty in its fluff, the cloud

failed to find release,

just hung there,

dense with unseen yet obvious emotion.

 

its seamless shell of flesh,

deliberate and obstinate as

tectonic plates, inched and

inched and inched until

 

it became what happens to a body of water

which holds onto a lie so tightly

it rises up, phantom grey,

to inform a tragic statue.

 

yes,

 

belly full of electric lust,

frustrated in a wallow of

merciless gravity, the cloud 

moaned without a sound, ignored

 

by lawn after manicured lawn,

patio squared with patio,

and all the grills of searing flesh

in barbecued lines.

 

 

 

====================

4/26/26 .. removed a word 

4/23/26... mods all day .. 

Quote, "Isn't that what evil is? ... "

 ===

… Isn’t this what evil is? A projection onto the world not of overbearing and large intent, but smallness and fear? The consequences of violence are secondary to the validation that comes from inflicting it. Trump’s constant self-aggrandisement, his grudges against political adversaries, the fury at being challenged by the press, the revenge he promises to wreak on the Iranian regime. All are ways to erase and avoid what is a permanent terror of humiliation and obsolescence. (Goya’s Saturn, wild-eyed, devours his son.)

It is in that very puniness that insatiable evil lies. In 1931 … [ Hitler ] was interviewed by the US reporter Dorothy Thompson for Cosmopolitan. “When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof hotel,” Thompson recalled, “I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something like 50 seconds, I was quite sure he was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.”

… We tend to imbue history and all its grave events with a seriousness and coherence that we struggle to apply in the present. And I think that’s because it’s hard for the human brain to encounter evil in ludicrous form, and still recognise it as such. That’s how it creeps up on you.

 

Nesrine Malik, Columnist

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/20/trump-presidency-evil-absurd-frightening-ideology

===

Poem: New Death

 

New Death

 

in a struggle of a second

i called out, more than loud,

less than a penitent scream.

i listened to the echoes of myself fade,

embers of some thinker hollowed,

a sculptor who became a replica,

etched on an ironic tomb.

 

it was a plot of dizzy asters,

white and purple needle sprays,

and i had just remembered

our ‘walks’ in places where

dust had suckled our bare toes,

sashes of ravens in sierra blue,

cliffs whiskery with sagebrush.

 

i’d come to the realization

your presence was not assured.

a new sort of death which

didn’t hurt as much as the first,

my limitation, not yours,

how i argued into the wind,

as if it knew how to find you.

 

such lovely sorcery

had been our sustenance

ever since it all began,

how we found each other with no explanation

from anyone else who had tried,

only the echo chamber of the fearful

who chipped away at marvel and delight.

 

sheep in the valley, wings in the sky,

only the meander of the foothills

bared pleasures fretless and attainable.

and so it was, you and i,

we fell together, over and over,

far above the jaws of generic cruelty,

faltering in our height.

============================

Poem: Cursor

 

Cursor

 

in the chasm between stanzas

a heartbeat of a paring-knife.

it lugs words even as it cuts them

across barrens of pure white hopelessness.

 

its insectoid blink

tells me what i can/can’t do,

frustrates, makes me want to run

faster than its snippet pulse.

 

but that goad is like the throb

of some invincible fiend,

always there, somewhere,

askance, above, below the stage,

tugging and jerking

in the wires.

 

==================

4/14/26  .. took out a "which"