Subj:	the collapse of dystopia
Date:	2/25/02 7:53:44 PM Pacific Standard Time
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'If you asked individuals whether or not they believed their lives could safely be built on criminal or unethical activity, almost all would scoff and say "Of course not." Yet people have pretended that these same basic principles mysteriously do not
apply to large human institutions and governments. As if humans in groups might magically be exempt from the great moral necessities of life governing all individuals who wish to live sanely.'



Juggernaut Rising - Part One: The Disintegration Of Dystopia
By Diane Harvey
merak@sedona.net
2-23-2

As a category of human communication, disaster prediction is
flourishing, and with excellent reason. Emerging from widely different
perspectives and employing different approaches, many of us unhappily
sense exponentially growing difficulties looming on the murkily complex
horizon. Differences in individual awareness, experience and
psychological bias very naturally preclude agreement about the gory
details. We even argue about the basic meaning and potential for damage
of the events we are observing.

But perhaps all who perceive the likelihood of oncoming catastrophes
might at least agree on this much: the majority of human beings do not
even begin to comprehend the actual significance of what is going on all
around them. We might agree that what appears blithely disguised as
business as usual on the surface of the world is, in reality, a bizarre
and ultimately hopeless global network built entirely on the denial of
the law of cause and effect.

No matter how assiduously the daily industrial-strength tissue of lies
is spun, denying the discernible deterioration of our sick civilization,
and no matter how many have invested their lives in believing and
sustaining these lies: unpleasant realities are lumbering inexorably
toward us. Experts in all fields are dogtrotted out by the truckload,
and dutifully trundled through the mills of mass media, in order
continually to bury and re-bury any signs of incipient awareness in the
populace that all is not well. Official repertoires consisting of
studied stupidities, frank falsehoods, diagrams for dummies, simpering
smirks and posturing pomposities are designed to semaphore to a
somnambulant citizenry that everything is under control. In fact,
mounting evidence points entirely to a contrary conclusion. And in the
face of our stunningly complicated world problems, the toddler's cartoon
version of life, offered by those in power through the mass media's
obedient mouth, is one of the most shocking aspects of our predicament.
Of a multitude of symptoms indicating rampant human lunacy presently
operating on a grand scale, the continual insulting offerings of
Frankenspeak in lieu of meaningful communication is perhaps the most
directly alarming, disgusting and telling.

It is not hard to fathom the hidden political and economic causes of the
oncoming upset of our earthly applecart. At the same time the material
achievements of the 20th century have brought incalculable temporary
benefits to many, conveniently ignoring the hidden costs of such
progress has eroded human consciousness to a degree beyond all our
reckoning. It is not that material comfort need ever have been purchased
at the price of sane and ethical existence- but that is nevertheless the
path that was taken. It is not that a decent standard of living is a
problem per se, or that in and of itself reasonable levels of civilized
materialism represent some sort of inevitable wrongdoing. The criminal
activity was all in how we got here, in the forms our corporate-born
standard of living has taken, and in how we have allowed worldly powers
to sustain themselves. It is everything we have chosen to ignore along
the way, in order to enjoy prosperity at all costs, that has added up to
our coming undoing. Our collective complacent refusal to look behind the
scenes into secret and wholly unregulated corporate, government and
military activities has resulted in a nightmarish world where the actual
state of things is the polar opposite of what is told to and
subsequently believed by the majority of the public.

This civilization of ours, so outwardly attractive to so many, has been
constructed over a hidden foundation of widespread institutional theft,
deadly levels of pollution, illegal secrecy, drugs and armaments
empires, draconian legalisms, and the extraordinarily cynical
manipulation of large segments of the population through highly
sophisticated forms of genuine mind control offered as "news" and
"entertainment". Behind the scenes this is no utopia, as advertised, but
dystopia: a realm where all is, contrary to expectations and common
belief, in the worst possible condition. Furthermore, dystopia is
disintegrating before our eyes, and out from under our feet, even as the
absurd efforts to pretend that all is well redouble. We see the
ever-more-desperate desire of the many to mutually sustain their belief
in a doomed system of interlocking institutions fuelled by ruthless and
unregenerate human greed and the unbridled lust for domination. It is
not that most people are innately incapable of observing the crumbling
foundations of their own unthinking dependencies. Rather, people are
still subconsciously choosing to avoid the pain and fear of confronting
what is already well underway. Most of the so-called grown-ups on our
planet still fearfully turn their minds away from the unwanted spectacle
of oncoming troubles. A large percentage of the human race, facing the
necessity of giving their highest quality attention to our common
dangers, is instead frantically increasing the dosage of self-delusion.

On the whole, people have been avoiding all honest investigation into
the genuine causes of galloping disintegration in human institutions.
Yet this will change, and is clearly changing now, as vast shadowy shell
games are inevitably exposed to glaring broad daylight. No sooner is the
essential trickery-fakery of an institutional lie exposed, than people
reel with shock and outrage. Yet it is precisely a long collective
agreement to invest blindly in institutionalized criminal greed, and the
refusal to know what corporations and governments are actually doing,
that inevitably results in the very disintegration now so indignantly
confronted. Anyone who wanted to could easily have understood this
inevitable scenario long ago. If you asked individuals whether or not
they believed their lives could safely be built on criminal or unethical
activity, almost all would scoff and say "Of course not." Yet people
have pretended that these same basic principles mysteriously do not
apply to large human institutions and governments. As if humans in
groups might magically be exempt from the great moral necessities of
life governing all individuals who wish to live sanely.

By their own decisions and consensual collusion, many intelligent people
have preferred to ride the greed-powered national gravy train, in
self-willed blindness to the visibly immoral and ugly underpinnings of
longstanding government, corporate and military chicanery. Naturally, as
institutions begin to come unglued, we will all pay dearly for the
willful self-deception of those of us who chose to hitch their earthly
welfare to the dark forces of "civilized" corruption. There will be
ever-louder howls of injured innocence from the hordes of victims as our
dystopia comes apart at the seams. Yet one might give most normal human
beings credit for the ability to discern the difference between ethical
and unethical practices on many levels, if and when they care to do so.
The alternative is to believe that the majority of people are far too
stupid to tell the difference between nominally ethical behavior and
rank criminality. On the face of it, while possible, this appears
unlikely. Rather, most people seem to have assumed the ostrich position
for the sake of short-term personal benefits, and then are astounded and
outraged when reality brutally overtakes the forces of denial.

It is not only dysfunctional human institutions that are breaking down,
despite all efforts to pretend otherwise. The earth's natural systems
are in a state of breathtakingly rapid degradation and subsequent
mutation into who-knows-what new versions of themselves. The earth as a
whole is simultaneously undergoing both dramatic climate change and a
systemic breakdown from toxic shock. And yet such a rapid accumulation,
combining, and coalescing of disastrous forces is not causing the
slightest change yet in collective human behavior at levels where it
might make any difference. If ever there is a setting in which
calamities are most likely to befall the human race, it is the current
one. A sinister synergy is underway, composed of corrupt worldly
authorities, a relatively apathetic and self-victimizing populace,
severe spiritual and physical pollution resulting from a world powered
by uncontrolled greed and totalitarian tendencies, and drastic changes
occurring in the earth's natural systems.

Recipes for disasters don't come with more potently volatile ingredients
than these. And for some, no sudden catastrophe or combination of
disasters will come as any surprise. A certain percentage of human
beings throughout history, aware of being caught in cyclic periods of
wholesale degeneration, have always instinctively felt the truth that
life itself will never suffer the proliferation of human insanity beyond
a certain point. The sole remaining question some of us ask ourselves
these days is exactly what that point might be. In all human cultures,
there have always been those who have warned people again and again that
we cannot live on lies or thrive on degeneration. We have always been
free to ignore such warnings, but we certainly have never been free of
the fatal consequences of such ignorant decisions. Whenever human beings
abandon the principles of reality for the foundationless hallucinations
of egotism, willful ignorance, selfishness and greed, disaster must and
will come to raze such illusions to the ground. This is as implacably
true for civilizations as it is for individuals.

Mankind is inherently designed to understand what it means to live an
honorable life. The suffering required before human beings freely accept
this fact might be long and terrible, yet this reality must and will be
made manifest. We may only shorten, or lengthen interminably, the
quality and quantity of misery involved in accepting the fact that we
are meant to become decent, reasonable and just. Humanity's age-old
self-serving habit of offering meaningless lip service to spiritual
truth is having very bad results. Whether we wish to acknowledge it or
not, we are endowed with conscience, intelligence, free will, the
capacity to love, and the commensurate responsibilities for manifesting
these astonishing gifts we have been given. Spiritual stewardship
includes direct responsibility for the right employment of all of our
capacities, in every aspect of our lives here. There is no such thing as
being spiritual, for instance, while blissfully ignoring the
implications of the present cesspool civilization has become. This world
is one House and the inhabitants and systems it depends on are woven
into a single interactive web of life. All efforts to pretend otherwise,
in order to avoid the strenuous difficulties of solving seemingly
intractable problems, are doomed to eventual destruction.

The general attitude of obliviousness and refusal to regulate worldly
authorities has generated a thick psychic fog in which malevolent forces
have been operating with near-perfect immunity. Most people are still
settling for a position of complete passivity in relation to the entire
external world, as if half-watching a rather boring television show.
Extremes of disgraceful behavior, manifesting everywhere in the highest
levels of military, government and corporate power, have been accepted,
or barely registered, or excused as "the price of doing business", or
perceived as a disgusting display about which nothing ever can be done.
Meanwhile, suggestively interconnected natural and human systemic
failures, likely to be of immense consequence to us all, are perceivable
everywhere, and increasing by the day. As it is, those of us considered
"alarmists" are dismissed with a sad shake of the head as
psychologically mal-conditioned doom-mongers. And far worse yet, many
are now summarily categorized as "traitors" for having the temerity to
observe and comment in public on various outrageously wicked, dangerous
and idiotic activities underway in the name of preserving
"civilization". When venal, frightened, hopelessly dishonest and
secretive authorities designate the most thoughtful and concerned
segment of a population as "traitors", we may take it as one more
certain sign that the disintegration of dystopia is proceeding apace.