Essay: Sustenance and Darkness

 

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[I'm just one old man, with no editing help at all]

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, like myself, 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 rush of radioactive launch. 

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 aspect 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 repeated 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, such as 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 culture 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, ready to destroy the collective dreams and hopes built up over the millennia.

The Netflix movie, House of Dynamite, demonstrates that the launch of a single ICBM could plausibly trigger an all-out scramble, the launch-to-detonate of 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

 

“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.  The embrace of 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 past, present and future, ethical progress gets 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 ethical 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 the ultimate victory of Evil. (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 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 not even seen by those who benefit the most is harder to challenge.  One of its goals is to make life easiest for the males of the highest caste.  It coheres with the function of the patriarchate to minimize or eliminate feelings of guilt in the privileged. 

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.  A White male, reaping benefits while oblivious, is a full participant and beneficiary in the most despicable sort of injustice.  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 suburban neighborhood, distant from the poverties and brutalities of oppression, the masquerade of denial, no matter how deeply entrenched, neither absolves nor exculpates. 

It is a pitiable, a 'talk about the weather' mentality, given what is going on.  The cruelty.  The hate.  The choice to stay blind is made over and over, day after day, 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 choose to go with the grease.  We yield in our broken hearts to the mental massage of the social machinery, the financial and power benefits of an egregious system--a system that has staggered at times, and which could be broken through to reach a mountaintop of justice.  If only we joined in with the brave souls leading the charge, rose up our heads and dared, it would make a significant difference.

 

Active Complicity

There are, of course, those who vocally endorse and enforce a dictator’s virulence.  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.  In light of their lack of internal guide rails, the choice to follow an ethical code can be a crucial moor.  This moor is an essential aspect of a professional therapeutic technique called Good Psychiatric Management (GPM).

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 person without a conscience 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 fleeting things and shiny thrills. 

Maybe you end up getting ahead by being unethical--this time.  But the more you ignore 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 fear and hate, 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 himself, 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 rampant growth of this ponderous screed, is the following image:  the Earth as a beautiful Blue Bulb of a Cosmic Flower.  This Great Bulb has already blossomed many ways and yet, as it now stands, we humans are at germinative core.  You and I may feel puny.  But we have some part to play in the evolution of ideas, what is in effect a vast social-mental web, a web which will craft the future of the planet.  

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

Technology is advancing, providing us with tools both physical and psychological, both architectural and ecological.  Humans distill the best and worst from nature, from kindness to cruelty, and in so doing produce social systems that contain 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 in turn will be a manifestation of the state 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 maturity and inner awareness alters Gaia’s fate, whether to blossom or wilt, in sync with 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 called us “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, for instance, terraform other planets to resemble the wildlife on Earth.  Ideas affect our behavior, which in turn shapes 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 a zest 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 space? 

There are millions of years ahead for our evolving civilization, much more than the puny ten thousand years that have passed--if only we find a way travel in the Light.  Not blindly in the Dark of egomaniacal greed and manufactured rage.

 

Two worldviews compete

 

When it comes to how to rule and lead, there are two competing worldviews.  One is the war-based and started around 10,000 BCE with the Agricultural Revolution.  This worldview is grounded in force and ignorance.  Think slaves working on a Pyramid so that godly pharaohs can travel into the afterlife.

The other way to rule, more recent and less practiced, relies on reason and humanism.  This path underscores dignity, fairness, rights, and the sort of freedom that expands each person’s potential to actualize.  

Citizens have space to flourish as unique individuals.  They are taught to Know Thyself. They are not raised to bow down in fearful, conformist homogenization.

Will we shackle ourselves to idolatrous zealotry?  Or progress through reasonable debate, education, and science-based choices?  Or we can shackle ourselves to idolatrous zealotry.

 

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.  Good or Evil.  Truth and Ignorance struggle against each other.   When tech level reaches a certain point--enough to assert overwhelming control over both mind and environment-- then one or the other 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.  When technology advances far enough, such optimal force shall be achieved.

As I’ve discussed in other essays, one dark scenario is the following:  a computer chip in every human head, monitored by highly effective AI and policed by robots.  Within a few hundred years, this level 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, the totalitarian model will lock in place.

The dark genius of fascism is that it combines monarchy, the politics of a king, with the celebrity of a charismatic dictator.  This fusion gives the dictator full-throttle power to control everyone, 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 where 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 alon  the same old godking worldview.  They thereby establish the same warlordism that cursed ancient Sumer:  slavery, patriarchy, bellicosity.  War ensues.  Over and over.  On and on.  Driven to create stronger weapons, society rebuilds.  At some point, nuclear warheads re-emerge.  The nukes launch.  Again, there is a small percentage of survivors.  And so the cycle starts all over, rise and repeat, an infernal, unspeakable, cosmically stupid trap of tragedy as avoidable as it is digusting. 

The way out would be for the people to reject ignorance-based government.  If people accept truth instead, a marriage of science and psychology as a standard, we can build a better world, more and more and eliminate war entirely.

As I have argued in many essays now, we have the ability to get there.  All we have to do is raise the level of our ethics technology.

 

We can slowly approach a heavenly state--or we can doom ourselves

 

As power 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 continue the vector of the barbaric Era of Dumbing? 

As I type away, democracy and darkness are in a contest.  Which will become the planetary norm?  We can embrace equality and flourishing?  Or will we sacrifice the potentials of the many, including their dignity, to the devouring emptiness of dictatorial delusion?  

Make no mistake, delusion is the path not only to degradation but to ruin.  A delusional journey into the future is blind, reckless and impulsive.

 

Welcome to the present

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 demonstrates that ‘human nature’ does not limit us.   We have both the brain- and cultural-plasticity to approach a Good world.  Our potential to adapt in accord with ethics 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 we have all been indoctrinated to perpetuate the reign of Ignorance, and continue to be indoctrinated every day--saturated by cultural messages, most of them subconscious.  

I can this acculturation trap, this trojan horse of false beliefs for the human brain, which is implanted generation after generation, the Ignorance Vortex.  The Ignorance Vortex has ramified over time and place, but retains its core elements of brainwashing.  (5/20/25, etc.)

 

Sustenance

 

Below, I approach the question of ‘how to stay ethical?’ from some other vantages, such as how best to protest against injustice.  My main point, though, was stated above:  sustenance and joy arise from the simple idea that you and I are part of Earth’s Beautiful Blue Bulb.  From that vantage, we can feel an incredible sense of meaning.  It arises from the awareness that Good is a plausible path, and each of us can choose it for ourselves.  We can walk that path. 

 Around us is the vast void of outer space.  Upon that vast empty stage, the Earth stands out, a beacon and origin point. 

 

Perfect is the enemy of the good

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.  Everyone does.  We will sometimes fail to understand ourselves when we look in the mirror.  In that sense we are a bit werewolf.  Or Jekyll and Hyde.  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.  We can learn to identify all our emotions and dance with them.  Every good act is just that.  It counts in itself.  The strength to face our own behavior, both individual and collective, and work with our emotions to seek virtue, while steering a course away from harm, is within our reach.  It is not inevitable that we remain “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.  How do we do tread in  a realm checkered by bullies, where our basic ‘fellow feelings’ for others are menaced and hurting?   In these times of surgent fascism, 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 evil. Before they burst into outright expression, social movements incubate in undercurrents of unrest.

 

To be cautious or not to be?

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.”  Of course, an 'ultimate' definition is no more possible than it is for the word “love.”  This does not undercut the value of such ‘secondary order’ concepts.  Discussion of life and reality go far beyond the limitations of nonlinear math.  They are more akin to nonlinear math and chaos theory.

Using the quote above, we see that effective protest creates tension while targeting injustice.  It challenges the way people listen and feel.  It marshals discomfort to thaw frozen complacency.  “Good trouble,” to use the phrase of John Lewis, aims to disrupt the ‘peace of law and order' in the quest for decency and justice. 

To protest effectively is to have more than a “good will.”  Intention needs to be mobilized.  What is the best way to act in civil disobedience?  Everyone must answer this question for themselves, with the full engagement of conscience and the moral 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 tyranny.  You could ask, Did they choose the wrong form of protest? 

I don’t think this question can be answered by a mere poet, such as myself.  I will say that the victims probably weren’t thinking, “I’m going to die today,” when they set out and then were shot.   Most likely, however, they recognized the immediate danger.

To stand up to tyranny in this way, so boldly accepting such a risk, is resounding.  Such choice sings of ethical beauty, of the bravery of conscience, and it bares a light of hope for all of us, for our future.  It embodies a timeless statement not only to a nation, but to the universe itself,  seeking to overcome the wickness of oppressive rule.

We should embrace this immortal statement and never forget:

 

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 sui generis joy.  To choose Good is to accept yourself, to work with your emotions as allies.  It is to ‘Know Thyself’ and employ that knowledge to for self-respect; it is to address your own unique personality.  You come to see yourself in new ways.  You initiate dialogues with yourself.  You become your own soulmate.

Listening to one's conscience can spark a surge of psychic happiness.  It is a lovely self-validaton.  And then to protest, to cast your own ripple into the sea of human interaction, this brings another quantum leap of meaning and purpose.

To face the world’s misery.  To admit your own failures and yet also your strengths.  To engage with your deepest traumas and wounds.  What courage it takes.  What heroism.   And yet it is not drudging, dreary or hopeless work.  It fosters a new way-of-being, deepfelt throughout layers of consciousness and heart.

I conclude with the ultimate question, What is the meaning of life?  Ignorance-based systems, like fascism, hide from this question in simple directives of fear and hate, supremacy and conquest.  They thrive in violence on false bifurcations.  Anyone who stands in the way of the ‘will to power,’ anyone who makes a convenient scapegoat, is called ‘Evil.’  What is it to be ‘Good’ in such a system?  It is simply to obey.

A future beyond Ignorance awaits us, if we dare to work for it.  Honesty is painful, yes.  At times, it can be agonizing.  But there is also joy.  And a happiness in a vision of the Earth as a Great Beautiful Blossom,.  You and I have the potential to be part of advancing this Blossom, its profound Beauty, hand in hand with the Good.

 

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5/16 ... Lots of ongoing eds...