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Are our biggest challenges hierarchy and cowardice?

I watched Agnieszka Holland’s powerful drama, ‘Mr Jones’, last night.

James Norton portrayed the real-life Welsh journalist who uncovered Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine known as the Holodomor. Jones brought the tragic events happening in Ukraine to the world’s attention. Moreover, Jones persisted in his mission despite personal dangers which would ultimately see him meet an untimely death shortly before his 30th birthday in Mongolia, at the hands of Russian security agents.

The film is a specific account of Jones’s courageous journey to publish the truth of the Holodomor tragedy in Ukraine under Stalin before WWII.

But it’s a tragic story that is continuously inflicted on people by powerful elites in the pursuit of extreme ideology and development goals. The inaction of fearful sycophants and politicians desperately clinging to power, which emboldens the brutality of the wealthy Machiavellians, Sado-Narcissists and Psychopaths who invariably profit from our exploitation, misery and end up running our countries.

Furthermore, once the truth does come out post the event, the inertia to act on new insights ensures that lessons not only go unheeded but become a playbook for repeat occurrences elsewhere.

Following Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, Hitler’s Nazi Hunger Plan was developed to systematically starve 30 million Ukrainians, Russians and Slavs so that the food surplus created from starving the communities, could be redirected to Nazi forces.

This plan, led by Nazi Food Minister Herbert Backe, was intended to open the fertile soils of Ukraine to German settlers post the conflict. History appears to be repeating itself. Tyrannical psychopaths and narcissistic vandals are often the frontmen, whilst the Machiavellian monsters orchestrate the atrocities from behind the scenes.

During Brexit, Dominic Cummings was masterful at influencing from the rear and ensured that a ‘divide and conquer’ tactic, used by many colonising villains historically, caused enough confusion to break up the EU.

It wasn’t about making an informed decision. It was about who was motivated enough to break the rules and what little democracy was left, in order to manipulate the results. The already rich and greedy trumped the day.

They’ve become so brazen that they don’t even hide it now because there are little consequences even if uncovered…. As long as you belong to one of the ‘in-crowds’.

Britain itself was fond of concentration camps during its colonial ambitions around the world.

It imprisoned around a sixth of the Boer population comprising of mainly women and children of which nearly 30,000 died along with an untold number of black people. During the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya, members of the Kikuyu tribe were imprisoned and as a result many died from malnutrition and torture.

We could go on to talk about Native Indian resettlement in the USA, the war in Yemen sponsored and supported by Britain’s weapon manufacturers and military, or even the Palestinian situation.

There’s generally a lack of willingness to look at these situations by the mainstream, let alone accept and adapt into the future. Whenever threatened, the elites tend to double down on their tactics, i.e., more capitalism, more propaganda, more divide and conquer.

The establishment is afraid to face the truth about its colonial history because the same strategies are being used in a slightly different way today. Physical slavery is replaced with debt slavery. Nobody is free to do as they want in a capitalist world apart from the 1%. Even fairly smart but wealthy individuals are reluctant to challenge their own modus-operandi.

I’m interested in what people think will happen as we enter this era of existential challenge.

What can ordinary people do, if anything, to prevent themselves, their families and their communities being persecuted by tech-cap titans, wealthy weapons peddlers, aristocratic elites and power addicted politicians?

We’re supposed to be the custodians of the planet, due to our intelligence. Yet the severity of the atrocities inflicted on fellow human beings and the destruction of their own environmental life-support system, by nutcases in the name of warped ideologies, is not something observed in the wild as far as I know?

What happens when the delusions of national boundaries are realised as just another command-and-control mechanism and that the real boundaries are between the rich them and us?

History

Thanks to the work of anthropologists, we’ve learnt that our ancestors lived for 200,000 years, a mostly egalitarian hunter-gatherer lifestyle. If people did live in cities, inequality and exploitation were not a given. It seems we drifted into hierarchy. But anyway, back to what we believe now.

Our contemporary social systems and beliefs are built upon what happened around 10,000 years ago. The big transition is known as the agrarian revolution but really it was the beginning of the Tech-Cap era.

We’ve been stuck in re-branded versions of tech-capitalism ever since and its sole aim is to own everything and replace humans with tech, so as to increase production. This is so wealthy people can exploit more of the earth’s resources for less hassle. As more tech replaces humans, less and less homes and schools will be needed to house factory workers or hospitals to maintain their health.

Humanity has been widgetized and externalised.

Scientists might dream their work will one day benefit humanity and the bio-sphere. But wealthy elites always usurp and secure the use of new tech to gain even more wealth which doesn’t trickle anywhere but into their offshore accounts.

They know their game is up, it’s just a matter of jockeying for the last morsels and working out how to survive the collapse.

This all began with farming. It was then that people started competing for ownership of the land. Nutritional levels decreased and it also became hierarchical and warlike in Europe and elsewhere.

This then morphed into colonialism. National competition for dominance meant that over the last few centuries, power went from the Dutch with their navy to Britain, who replicated and overtook the Dutch navy with cheap labour, but who were eventually usurped by the Americans. But whichever country gained dominance, they all went exploring and exploiting other lands.

The two decades of war in the middle east was a massive pay day for the usual players and they’re not in the least bit bothered about terrorism. Terrorism and 911 were just tech-cap opportunities.

Incidentally, the contemporary San people of south west Africa, have been around for thousands of years and outlasted many dynasties and empires. It appears that cities and hierarchies come and go, whereas egalitarian hunter gatherers and nomads, if not exterminated by colonialism, fare much better longevity wise.

It’s All in Our Heads

According to Dr Iain McGilchrist it’s all down to the way we use our brain and we’re overly reliant on the left-side of our brains.

London cabbies, who having undertook ‘The Knowledge’ training – driving around London to learn all the routes – re-shape certain areas of their brains.

I bet that’s what’s happened to the left side of our brains. The left is concerned with ‘think-do’ to compete and control resources. It is ego-centric, likes predictable problems and can’t see the woods for the trees.

When it’s won the competition for wealth and power either through birth or being in the right place, with the right product, at the right time – lucky in other words – it then wants to control the resources so as to not have to share their wealth.

That’s why they keep developing new TAP’s-Tools to Accumulate Power. ChatGPT and other forms of AI are the next phase. It’s ‘think and do’ quicker. We’ve overly developed left-sided brains it would appear and the tech evolutions are external manifestations of our inner world.

The right side of the brain is more able to understand complex situations and can ‘sense and feel’ it’s way around ambiguous and novel situations. It’s more sociable and empathic. Ecological in other words.

But the rich and infamous don’t like tricky and transient problems. They can’t control ambiguous and novel challenges with capitalism, centralised solutions and hierarchy. So, they ignore them.

These are known in economics as ‘externalities. Whilst they plunder and exploit the earth and other people not in their ‘in-crowd’, they push the cost of all this onto societies.

And we are too afraid to do anything about it because they allow the rest of society just enough resources so that you won’t tell them to “Foxtrot Oscar!”

They pay the police enough to turn on their own people. They manipulate the narrative through the media to generate a divide and conquer situation. They have us running on hamster wheels too exhausted at the end of the day to do much else. They build gated mansions and pay their army of lawyers to stop people walking on the land they’ve snatched and they’re making it illegal to protest against them.

Our response…

So far, our response seems to be that similar to a fish in a fish bowl.

We’re swimming in a bowl which is filling up with trash. The owners are feeding us less and less. So, our response is to swim in the other direction whilst begging the hand that feeds us, to come back and clean up the mess.

And of course, they never come back or clean up, do they?

But that doesn’t stop people making a living trying to tell other people which way to swim. No, they want to appear saintly so make a living telling the exploited they’re being exploited by foreign invaders.

The Solution!

It would be an enormous task to outline a solution and not the work of a simple fella like myself. We collaborated our way to the top of the evolutionary tree. It’s going to take better decision making and powerful collaboration to survive, if’s it’s still possible.

I think there are three virtues that we need to instil in everyone first.

Adaptability- We need to become more experimental and get out of the goddam fish bowl.

Resilience- We’ll need resilience to keep operating in less-than-ideal circumstances over the long term

Courage- It’ll take the courage to act before pain motivates us into rash actions. We’ve got to realise that we are the heroes we’re looking for.

We have to accept that we and the planet are being exploited by the people we vote for. We have to see through their false dichotomies of left and right.

So stop voting!

We need to stop asking for permission and just get on with implementing experimental solutions. Progress will not be big leaps but one small step followed by another, with lots of back-sliding too.

How about not buying the next smart phone which relies on the exploitation of kids in the Congo?

How about learning to grow your own food?

How about building a community?

We need more Gareth Joneses in the world. Humble, curious and courageous.