Reclaiming your mind from a broken system
We live in an truly amazing moment in time. We have experienced many great advancement under our current economic and cultural operating system and it has brought us things that we never could have dreamt of in our wildest imagination. We have developed technology that has multiplied our effort greatly ever since the industrial revolution and we now through the Information revolution have the library of Alexandria in our pockets in the form of smartphones. The communication technologies of today allows us to access almost unlimited information and communicate wirelessly across the world.
Against what most people are led to believe, the world is getting safer and safer. The risk at dying at the hands of another man is the lowest that has ever been. It is hard to make a case against the fact that this is the best time to be alive ever in human history. Things are going great!
However, there's still a lot of problems that we face as humans living together on this planet. Even though we live in this amazing time in history something is fundamentally wrong. Although we have this abundance and relative safety, our collective psyche seems to be taking a big hit as we are currently experiencing a global epidemic of existential distress. Anxiety and depression are being diagnosed at levels we have never before seen. The UN has estimated that 800.000 people a year now are committing suicide across the globe. That is more people dying than in all armed conflicts and natural disaster combined. Something is seriously out of whack!
Right now there is a lot of polarization in the world. People feel disenfranchised and fed up with the current situation. They see that fewer and fewer people are getting richer and richer at the expense of more and more people and this out of the bones of a dying world. People are getting angry which they have a right and should be. The problem is that anger is being directed in all the wrong directions. They direct it at the trivial or at each other. At other people, races, religions or classes. Instead of directing it where the real power lies.
It's not immigrants that are taking your jobs, it’s technology, through automatization and has been doing so for hundreds of years and it is the politicians who draft the policies that benefit those multinational corporations that's really the ones in charge of taking your jobs away from you. Many of these corporations are now more wealthy and have more influence than many nations states and have consolidated power unmatched in human history. Now they are laughing all the way to the banks whilst making record profits, whilst the media (which is owned and governed by the same elit interest) is dividing us more and more against each other. Pushing narratives either blaming the racists or the immigrants, Trump or Russia, sexist or the feminists, the right or the left for all the problems of the world.
Through perpetuating the myth of scarcity in a ever increasing world of abundance, fear is being used as a tool by those in power to control the masses. We are currently failing to learn the lesson from history and thereby falling for the oldest trick in the book which has been used throughout the centuries by those in control. Divide and conquer.
A lot of people who start seeking answers for the world's problems outside conventional knowledge and means get sucked into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and often end up all too focused on certain groups, families or events, failing to see the bigger picture, getting to aggressive and thereby alienating and failing to persuade big parts of the population by doing this. Instead of focusing on the real overarching structural problem that is now collapsing our world at this very moment
The current monetary and banking system.
To learn more:
Here is a great video on our current monetary system
Who Controls All of Our Money?
In my understanding, the fundamental problem with the current economic system is its inherent unsustainability and its tendency to make us evermore unhappy in an ever-increasing technological world of abundance.
The fiat banking system is the motor of this debt based system: it is a system that requires infinite growth on a finite planet to function and not collapse. This also means that profit is the main goal of this system and automatically gets priority over everything else. The system always moves towards ever increasing profits and not into making the world a better place. All the major advancements that have been made for humanity have been a lucky side effect of this system rather than anything else. This system cannot grow forever but it has to. To quote the comedian Lee Camp:
“Our world under this system is like a hot dog eating contest where the rules are: Keep eating. Without any time limit. Eventually, in this competition, you will run out of hot dogs but the rules would still say: Keep eating. So then you would have to turn to your opponent and eventually, eat him.“
In this system, institutions and corporations have turned into a superorganism within which humans are embedded and where the community acts in the interest of the organism, rather than for the world this organism functions in. People within this system aren't bad people but they have become dependent on their host and have to succumb to it to maintain themselves ( to support their families, loans, lifestyles etc)
When you make profit your number one priority, essentially this thing becomes your GOD, the thing you have to put over everything else, to maintain your system. This inevitably has turned the people under this system into the religion of materialistic consumerism. Where people, on a daily basis, through institutions and cooperation, are being indoctrinated to confuse happiness with money and things. This requires the system to create a reality of having people define themselves and seek happiness in external things. Instead of internally and in their connection to others. We have been conditioned to move to a place of what loves us, to go from without to within instead of from within outwards, and move towards what we love. This has turned us into a state and of constant feeling of incompleteness and self hatred. Which is the internalized state that renders us as the best consumers feeding into this insane system in the most effective way.
Basically, this creates an artificial need in people to buy more things they don't need with money they often don't have, to impress people they don't like. To fill this manufactured void in people, this system has forced corporations to create in order to maintain themselves.
This has been done through the use of corporate and institutional propaganda (PR). Mainly by Freudian tactics, by constant marketing and creating a culture which is aimed at people's subconscious mind and appealing to their innermost desires of belonging, safety and love. Tactics that more or less can be seen as psychological warfare.
This leads to an ever increasing collective consciousness of mass (un)consonsissoiness or insanity. Where people in their desperation to combat this manufactured self-hatred are trying to accumulate and seek salvation in more and more material wealth and thereby constantly moving away from the SELF and more and more into the egoic mind.
In a economic system which is at is core based on debt, scarcity, self interest, and not health. Happiness and the well being of the planet is not seen as the measurement of success but by individual countries GDP.
GDP only measure how much a country produces and consumes, it does not measure how polluted our waters get, how the lungs of our planet, the amazon rainforest is doing or how many animal species that got extinct, it only measure how many we ate and sold. When this system is doing well it literally means that our own extinction of this planet and all life on it is going full steam ahead.
To study this insane system and see the behavior of it and the actors involved, one could just look at what happened in 2008, when this economic system broke after the American subprime mortgage market collapsed creating the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
To summarize what happened:
Banks run a business model based on fraud ✓
Gambles and crashes the global economy ✓
Hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their money, jobs, and homes ✓
These banks then repossessed those homes and then got a 16
trillion dollar bailout from the American people ✓
Now they are as big as they ever been, making record profits to a historic low interest rate✓
This system corrupts industries across the world. In which banking needs ever increasing returns on the interest and to create more and more debt. Which is essentially turning those in debt into their slaves. Where there's more profit to be made by Big Pharma of sick people than healthy ones. Where war is more profitable than peace. It used to be that arms were being manufactured to fight wars with. Now wars are being manufactured to sell arms. And where media and news companies goal is rather profit then inform the population. Now that fact is leading to an every more deluded public perception of reality when the system realises that it can make more money by scaring the public rather than informing them.
In this current Win/Lose paradigm, we now live in a post-truth world where our economic and ecological system are falling apart. A system that has trapped our minds and are turning us more and more into its slaves. To quote BBC Director Adam Curtis from his film HyperNormalization:
”Much like in the Soviet Union in the 70s when their system started to crack, and its inhabitants could see that what their leaders were saying to them were not real because they could see with their own eyes the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend it was real because nobody could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it: Hyper normalization. You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it”
“What do u call system that takes richest country In world & renders 1/2 population poor/low income?
A failed system”
-Jimmy Dore
A failed system”
-Jimmy Dore
Our paradigm is defined by the questions that we ask. So in order to tear down this system, it's crucial that people start questioning their embedded beliefs and ask for more and better questions, before the system has ruined their minds and destroys the planet that they are living on. Questions like:
Why does only 8 people own as much wealth as half of the earth's population?
https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world
What are the chances of having a world free from war or any militarized conflict whilst having a for profit military industrial complex under this current debt based system?
Why is everything amazing but nobody is happy?
https://mic.com/articles/73821/why-is-it-that-everything-s-amazing-but-nobody-s-happy#.M2GqMS2sS
What kind of casino are we running where everyone loses ?
If It's not people or the planet that is winning, who is?
It's the corporations and the institutions. It's the superorganism that is winning.
What do we call an ever growing organism that is just growing out of control?
We call it
cancer.
Everything in this reality is ALL ONE system coexisting with everything else and right now one of the driving forces in this system, the monetary system, is literally the cancer that is killing us and the planet we all live on.
Now:
We have ability, the technological power, the engineering skills, the love and the community to; feed the hungry, to cure disease, to end the war and to save our planet the question is; can we reclaim our minds and change them fast enough, not can we reclaim and change them but can we do it fast enough?