The End of the World or Just the End as We Know It?: Turn, Turn, Turn…

“I would never have imagined that things could turn out so bad!” This is something one might have said, heard said, or said many times during the last few years. Since “9-11” we have gone through economic downturn, banking industry bail-outs, world-wide economic and social chaos, the war against terror, Gulf oil gushers and natural disasters such as plagues, hurricanes, and typhoons which are promised to recur and intensify in the coming years.

One might ask, “Where is this all going?”

One might wonder whether it even matters. It may be that it is just anther turn on the cycle. Perhaps we will face the challenges that loom ahead of us as a steward species and raise ourselves up once again. Perhaps such an ‘old world’ idea as ‘dominance over all other rival nations’ is patently unsustainable nowadays. Perhaps we cannot fix what we have already started.

There are probably many possible scenarios that we might imagine as the way this will all turn out. The scenario that you pick as your personal favorite will probably have a lot to do with what you think or imagine to have at stake and what you think or imagine you stand to lose when/if everything crumbles (which, by some accounts, would be a blessing!).

America rose to the status of world super-power through slavery, industrialism, trade, military force, global surveillance, a policing force of technical capabilities, and social/cultural imperialism. This has been facilitated in the last century by America’s ‘dictator’s rights’ to prominence on the world’s stage through the development, deployment, and flourishing of communication and military technologies under the rubric of ‘Manifest Destiny.’

The world social system (as it is conceived of and acted upon from the ‘American’ perspective) has become not only ‘The Carcerial Society’, but also ‘The Culture of Fear’ as well as the ‘Panoptic Society.’

In Bentham’s panoptic prison (go and Google ‘Panopticon’), as described by Foucault in ‘Discipline and Punish,’ the attendants in charge could easily monitor the inmate’s activities by virtue of a centralized ‘optical’ position. The guards could ‘see’ everything everywhere. With today’s technologies, we are all being monitored from a centralized position in cyberspace/time no less effectively for the purposes of the dominant regime of bankers and promoters of mass consumerism.

The United States probably has incarcerated more people for minor ‘drug’ offenses like ‘Marijuana possession’ than any other industrialized nation, while at the same time allowing murderers and serial rapists to walk. Yet, workers in this society are and have always been held hostage by a system that routinely and consistently extorts labor power in exchange for allowing families to exist and proliferate. Many now feel ‘incarcerated’ in their homes by illness, crime, disenfranchisement, poverty, silence and pessimism.

The way that all of this is foisted upon the common person in the streets is through the very sophisticated multiple systems of propaganda, opinion management, and media exploitation that generally serve to keep the country informed, instructed, imperiled, and primed. All are kept at the ready for reactionary social, economic, political, intellectual and cultural responses to any crisis or perceived threat to the status quo. We are trained to fear all of the things that authority tells us to fear, the most fearful of which is the authority that tells us what to fear most.

The ‘public image’ that ‘America’ (and Western Europe) has to maintain is managed through the various arms and legs of the international ‘culture industry’ that also coincide with a vast array of ‘ideological state apparatuses.’ These institutions create, disseminate, distribute, and control the ‘public images’ that ‘the people’ require in order to ‘get behind’ the programs and projects of the prevailing capitalist commercial regime.

The prevailing commercial regime consists of the transnational merchants and brokers who create and manage the perceptions of the citizens of the world. Citizens of the world are instructed and trained according to the needs of the masters. The citizens are ritually impressed with the necessity of doing things the way the masters of the coincident economies need them to be done, having the things the masters need them to have, and thinking and saying the things the masters need them to think and say.

The entire system is implemented to produce and reproduce unending unlimited profits that can be turned to the task of producing and reproducing unending unlimited profits for the same group of people at the top of the prevailing regime forever. (This is why most municipalities have a ‘Chamber of Commerce’ and a local chapter of ‘The Freemasons, secret brother-hoodz that agree to operate the local economy according to the membership’s profit-making designs and make sure that profits properly flow to the properly ‘predestined’ pockets.)

The ‘world system’ as we know it is developed and managed by those who wish to exploit and extract labor and profit from all the rest of us. The rest of us do not ‘own’ any real property nor do we ‘own’ any part of the means of producing on such large scales such as to be able to compete across the lines of class and privilege.

These very same lines of class and privilege have been in existence and painstakingly maintained, through whatever social, economic, cultural, military, and rhetorical devices, strategies, and tactics as are available since the time of the Ancient Greeks.

The Ancient Greeks are responsible for creating the notions we in the West have of ‘democracy’ ( demos = ‘the people’, -cracy = ‘rule of or by’). Access to ‘democracy’ in ancient Greece was contingent upon one being able to a) own land, b) avoid being enslaved, and c) having a penis. One could not be a ‘citizen’ who did not meet at least these three prerequisites. Sorry, ladies!

American ‘democracy’ has also always been tied to the economic interests of the ruling classes. The masters are those who ‘own’ access to the materials and resources that are given to all by nature but that they have managed to cordon-off for themselves against the rest of us being able to freely utilize her bounties.

The masters ‘own’ privileged access, which comes at the price of violence and crimes against the rest of us. This is where some folks have arrived at the notions that ‘private property is theft’ or ‘…is a crime against humanity.’ It may be that it is even more criminally heinous and disgusting than that, when we stop to consider the environmental impacts of the current economic system.

This brings up the question as to why we, each one of us, ‘individually’ must justify and maintain our personal existence daily, and ONLY according to the designs that have been set forth by our masters. Our masters, through the communication media they ‘own,’ act and want us to act as if ‘the way things are’ is the only way things could have turned out and is the only justifiable world system that we could have or could, in the future, create.

How do they know? Says who? Whoever owns the media, that’s who!!!

I am not required by nature to anything more than my survival and the survival of my family, am I? It is my non-familial and familial fellow species member that requires anything more of me, as I do of him. Humans are a social animal. We depend on each other. Yet the despotic capitalist has found a way to get an unfair portion of nature’s bounty out of the current arrangement than I do. He has created and maintained dominance by way of violence, threat of violence, and ‘good-old-boy’ networks of privilege and control of privilege through a set of discursive crimes against humanity that we know as ‘The Law.’

The current system of ‘law’ (which, in its philosophies as well as its most criminal and heinous outcomes, is an apt representation of our general morality) is primarily motivated and designed by the need to protect the property rights of the privileged and the wealthy.

The system of law works for and according to the private ambitions and private profits of the wealthy.

The ‘law’ is designed and implemented by the agents of the wealthy we know as legislatures, courts, and police. Every other subsequent law that a dominant group/state creates merely deepens and widens the control of the flow of pirated public property into the pre-determined coffers.

The ‘pre-determined flows’ of capital into ‘pre-determined coffers’ are determined by the lines of class and privilege that are no less criminal (though they are maintained by ‘the law’) than those which they emulate from and whose general sexist, racist, classist, age-ist, attitudes they tellingly continue to emulate, those of the Ancient Greeks.

We have not changed all that much in roughly 3000 years.

The time to change has come. The time is NOW!

We have a vast multiplicity and diversity of choices, problems, and policies that we will have to destroy, create, re-create, and modify if we are to survive as a civilization. Yet, the most wealthy and capable of setting such advancement of humanity into motion are the ones who will lose dominance if they do so. They are in a ‘catch 22.’

If we fail to develop a proper set of attitudes, beliefs and practices for the coming Aeon we will disappear as a civilization and a ‘new order’ will take its place. This is probably inevitable as well, but some of us would rather be part of the solution that survives than part of the problem, which will be solved by its own extinction.

The ‘new order’ will be either generally better for more people more of the time or generally worse for more people more of the time.

Those who are included and privileged may be few or may be many, but, in either case, this will be determined by how we agree to talk and how we agree to think and how we agree to act during the coming transformation. We are currently transitioning from our view of ourselves as ‘human’ (which some might have reason to be not so impressed with, thus far) to becoming whatever we are to become when we are done being what we have defined as ‘human.’

In short, we will either change what it means to be ‘human’ or we will become that which is a break from all that history and baggage, i.e., the ‘post-human’ which might be something unrecognizable to us.

Will the post-human be more compassionate, sophisticated, and pragmatically appreciative of those fellow time travelers that he coexists with or even more deeply and widely cruel, greedy, and pathological than ever before?

Will ‘America’ lead, follow, fall behind, or perish in the coming global transformations?

In any case, the world has become smaller due to communication technologies, commerce and to the environmental, social, economic, and political stresses of increasing total population; capitalism is becoming more unsustainable as the preferred economic system; nature is growing more unpredictable and temperamental. People are becoming more or less human as a result.

Becoming more human and more [something else] in that direction is as frightening as becoming less human and more [something else] in the other, whatever that turns out to be.

Destruction of old definitions, re-definitions, and re-visions are inevitable. This is my own attempt to understand my role and responsibility in that which is inevitable and ultimately unavoidable.

It is time to start talking about consciously directed evolution and survival as much as we talk about the inevitability of happenstance and ultimate extinction. Which ever you believe to be the ultimate outcome, even if total annihilation through nuclear war or super nova, Right Here, Right Now is a very interesting and pivotal era in our human being on Earth. We are approaching the New Aeon. We are being reborn, again.

Or we can be content that we can drive to the store in an assault vehicle and over-consume, dining and dancing while Rome burns, while the ship sinks further and further into a future that doesn’t contain us in it, anymore. Most of us are probably in this category of unwitting consumers content with the satisfaction of our own infantile and petty imagined needs and desires as cultivated by the advertisers.

Some of us, myself included, are not content to go down without a fight.

We are awakening. We are beginning to talk. We are beginning to hear. We are beginning to walk. We are beginning to see.

We are re-visioning. We are starting over.

Are we ready?