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By Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD, Progressive Radio Network
“It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion.”
– Leo Tolstoy
For an ever-growing number of Americans, life is becoming ever more difficult and precarious to maneuver for making ends meet. Each subsequent year becomes more challenging. It seems that suffering has become an endemic quality to the nation’s character.
However, not everyone has been suffering equally. This national chronic illness is not uniform. Much of our suffering depends upon the institutionalization and negligence of previous injustices, the loss of social equanimity, economic heedlessness, and our leaders’ unmitigated greed and pursuit of power.
Nor is everyone adversely affected by the shifts underway in the imaginations of the political and ideological universes. The transnational corporate class has little motivation to respect or contribute to national boundaries and interests. They perceive themselves as global actors. For the generals and captains of neoliberal globalization, the puppet masters of financial markets, the Covid-19 pandemic only caused annoying disruptions in the quality of their lives. For the remainder, it has been cataclysmic.
Now that Washington acknowledges its proxy war against Russia, and the hawkish ambitions of the political class are determined to drive the economy into a catastrophe, we must pause and reflect carefully about what we want and don’t want as individuals and as a nation to secure a sustainable future. This demands a deep and collective introspection into shared moral principles. It is no longer what we say or profess that guarantees any truth or significance. Rather what we actualize in our daily lives and as a society is going to determine whether the future will be liveable or not. Only our actions realistically convey the deeper values in the American psyche.
Therefore it is incumbent to ask ourselves harsher questions to realize the deeper spiritual poverty that defines American civilization. Where were the large demonstrations against the trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and foreign banks when barely a penny was spent for the average citizen?
Where were the demonstrations against home foreclosures and the loss of small family farms? What about debt drenched student aid, exploitative payday loans and exorbitant credit card fees? There was no outrage against Obama’s broken promises on universal healthcare that helped bring him to the White House.
The single-minded attention on the pandemic has canceled out 2.5 million homeless American children and 46 million adults and children who go hungry daily.
At this moment where is a collective voice condemning the billions of dollars being given to the corrupt fascist regime in Ukraine to fight the Russian boogeyman as the rest of America further slides into a ghetto crying for energy and food? Why no vocal outrage against the invasions of Libya and Syria, or the U.S.’s ongoing support of rogue dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE for crimes against humanity in Yemen?
There weren’t and aren’t now noteworthy protests against any of these issues. And yet these are unquestionable existential threats to our very democracy. Bertrand Russell wrote, “one should care about the world they do not see.” Should we not be planning ahead for the future of our children, grandchildren and ourselves instead of being incapacitated by fear?
The national popular disinterest in our past and present crises foreshadows something on the future horizon that does not bode well for the nation’s integrity. It is a simple principle to understand; yet so subtle it will likely go unnoticed until everyone is individually and collectively affected.
That is, there is an utter lack of honesty and moral balance throughout the nation’s body politick. Like a bad case of herpes, government disinformation spreads across the media, which thrives on feeding the masses virtual images of a faux theatrical play and airing illusory icons and lies on our minds’ monitor screens.
The media’s Mummers’ parade of jesters, who masquerade as knowledgeable program hosts, intentionally distort their viewers’ perceptions of reality. In our opinion, these are covert acts of psychological violence.
This is how control is exerted over our thoughts, speech and actions. In fact, it is only after people exercise their thoughts independently, with the certain belief that they have actual self-control over their lives, that they can arrive at the realization that their perceptions may be horribly distorted by the government and media.
Aside from the three federal branches of government that provide our rapidly deteriorating system a semblance of checks and balances, there is also what is commonly referred to as the “fourth estate,” the powers of the press and news media that control the framing of the political narrative and partisan issues.
In the past, the media was expected to hold the government accountable by exposing its conflicts of interest, its misdemeanors, and systemic corruption. The media’s moral mission is nearly extinct as it has now been fully captured by corporate interests. It is politically and ideologically aligned with Wasington’s globalist agenda to dismantle the foundations of an authentic democracy and launch a Great Reset to suppress individual rights and liberties under the control of a technologically driven regime.
Even more insidious, the private media, as the fourth branch of government, is subservient to the U.S. intelligence agencies, which operate independently from executive and legislative oversight. Today we are witnessing this loose cabal of seemingly independent entities, working simultaneously in consortium, propelling us towards a future tsunami of greater polarization and immense social disruption and suffering. Individual rights and freedoms are the collateral damage from this covert war of violence against the American public.
Earlier generations were not threatened by the telecommunication and technological giants, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia. Clinton’s Communications Decency Act of 1996, despite its well-meaning intentions to protect free speech, turned out to be destructively naïve. At that time it was sensible; however, that was before the advent of the social media that now dominates our lives and shapes political discourse.
Silicon Valley has become a force far more powerful than the lobbyists on K Street to ensure that corporate Democrats are raised to a position of absolute power. Yet the problem would be equally threatening if it were the corporate and radicalized GOP in power.
The centrist Democratic left, lulled in a passivity that “it can’t happen here,” is every bit as dangerous and delusional as the Republican far-right’s paranoia over conspiracies squatting behind every nook and cranny. “One wanders to the left, another to the right,” wrote Horace, a 1st century BC lyric poet, “Both are equally in error but are seduced by different delusions.”
A moderate centrist right no longer exists as it has now exited reality like a herd of lemmings to follow Trump phenomena over a phantasmagoric cliff. A centrist left no longer exists as Clintonistas continue to move party divisions’ goalposts farther right.
The more important question to contemplate is how this will impact yourself and average citizens. Biden’s and the European Union’s sanctions against Russia already prove that nothing happens in isolation.
Rather than weakening Russia by a fantasy that Russians would rise up to overthrow Putin, we are observing the exact opposite. Putin is at the height of his popularity at around 85 percent. At the moment the Russian ruble is the world’s strongest currency. The sanctions have been a dismal failure.
Their blowback is hyperinflation—realistically in double digits, higher energy costs, empty supermarket shelves and crashing asset values. Common sense would dictate that the armchair bureaucrats, wearing Halloween military costumes in the Oval Office, would acknowledge their mistake and readjust accordingly.
But the very real danger people need to realize is that when Washington slams its foot on the gas pedal, there are no breaks or reverse gear. This has repeatedly been the case during the past three decades as the U.S. has been the top dog propelling globalization while waging wars and regime change against nations who buck globalization’s unipolar world.
Globalization is perhaps the most holistic phenomena within the matrix of financial capital movements and post-modern social restructuring. China has the means to socially control most of its population, especially in urban areas.
On the other hand, China would be unable to succeed in this endeavor without the direct assistance, trade and technological development of Silicon Valley and the private innovators of intelligence and surveillance applied science.
China has already launched digitized social credit scoring, a nefarious means to reward and penalize public activity. If a person protests for greater democratic values and free speech, his or her social score decreases. The alternative is long imprisonment. And through digital networks, authorities are able to monitor and identify every Chinese citizen’s movements. All of this technology is ready for launch in the U.S. and other developed nations.
The federal government and individual states have been blindly over-reacting to Covid’s health threats, the climate and environment, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the collapse of social cohesion.
These self-inflicted crises give our elected officials and their handlers reason to solidify more comprehensive and long-term agendas to expand government social control under the pretense of national security and to keep Americans safe. The latest in this effort is Biden’s new Disinformation Governance Board, an Orwellian nightmare that echoes memories of the Third Reich.
New laws are under construction that would redefine hate speech. Censorship of free speech for criticizing official narratives and policies are being enforced. Any criticism towards the failures of the Covid-19 vaccines or the Charlie Chaplin comedian and Winston Churchill wannabe in Ukraine’s presidential seat is redefined as threats to national health and security. People who challenge Washngton’s narratives with hard facts may eventually find their names on domestic terrorist lists. This scenario is not beyond the imagination.
Wikileaks revealed that environmental, animal protection, and human rights groups have been labeled as domestic terrorist organizations. Guilt by association laws buried in Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act, for example, are in place. Expanding a law’s scope is far easier than erasing it from the books.
Consequently, it is not unlikely that these laws may eventually widen to include charges of subversion based solely on the emails you read, the videos you watch or the broadcasts you listen to. This would inevitably lead to the death toll for any residue of integrity in journalism.
Silicon Valley’s collusion with the government has canceled the voices of some of our best investigative journalists, such as Julian Assange, Chris Hedges, Sharyl Attkinsson, Glenn Greenwald and Max Blumenthal. These are only a few of many examples. The new unstated law is that original investigation must support the official narrative, otherwise it will be prohibited from accessible public view.
We may recall that under the second Bush administration, the justice department created “free speech zones,” fenced off or confined areas where demonstrators were only permitted to exercise their Constitutional rights of free protest and expression. Today we are only several small amendments away before the right to assemble being banned altogether.
Faced with growing condemnation by many nations, America’s hegemony in the world’s geopolitical arena has waned considerably. The refusal of a large majority of the world’s nations to abide with the U.S.’s sanctions against Russia is one clear indication that distrust towards America has increased dramatically. The move by more and more nations to bail on the U.S. dollar as the global fiat currency is a sign of an international awakening that the U.S. only prints disposal paper.
This was a rude awakening for Washington and the EU. Nevertheless, Biden’s neocon war posturing against Russia and China, with the White House’s attitude of the domestic economy be damned, will continue to make every effort to retain its throne as the world’s most powerful and exceptional nation.
For the rest of the world, aside from America’s closest allies who sanctioned Russia and are now on the verge of runaway hyperinflation, energy shortages and recession, Washington’s image of itself is only a mirage of the past. What has vanished in the U.S.’ former full spectrum dominance over the geopolitical landscape is now being inverted to strengthen federal hegemonic reign over the American population.
Finally, we need to awaken to modern technologies’ remarkable sophistication and its certain threats to the health of our societies, and even to our definition of being human. Sadly, this is an industry each of us has been complicit in advancing.
Coining a term by one of the planet’s most important and forgotten 20th century prophetic voices, the Trappist monk Father Thomas Merton, we are facing a great Unspeakable, a spiritual crisis contributing to the existential vacuity of modern American culture.
Few are aware that in his 1964 collection of meditations, Seeds of Destruction, Merton predicted that the civil rights movement would confront a catastrophic impasse and may find itself without leadership. Four years later, Martin Luther King Jr, who Merton had a deep correspondence with, was assassinated. Merton would die suddenly later that same year under very mysterious circumstances in Thailand.
Another way to describe the Unspeakable is criminal Sovereignty, with a capital S, to convey its almost numinous god-like qualities. If Merton were alive today, he would look upon both the extreme right and left as mere expressions of the meaninglessness of American life manifesting as a turbulent ocean of afflictive emotions and thoughts.
Instead of technology serving the needs of humanity, Americans have become conditioned to willingly serve as technology’s slaves. The public, Somerset Maugham warned, “are easily disillusioned, then they are angry for it was the illusion they loved.”
The Unspeakable’s unspoken mantra is: technology must progress regardless of how many people fall destitute, jobless, debt ridden and physically ill with only suicide as a recourse to escape. “American democracy today,” Merton observed over 55 years ago, “is just cheap pressed wood fiber, cardboard and spray paint.”
No wonder the elite sitting in the global control tower view the Great Reset’s technological regime as preferable to modern democracy’s kabuki theater. Advanced surveillance, artificial intelligence, robotics, transhumanism, a 5G internet of everything, genetic engineering, and weather modification should be our guiding avatars.
The solutions, Merton would argue, can no longer be found in civil discourse nor the rights of human beings to gather in assembly. For the ruling elite, the masses are blind sheep wandering in search of a shepherd.
This is what author Ronald Wright called the “progress trap” – progress’s unending efforts to feed technology’s hunger to devour natural and human capital, interest free. And the mainstream press and news media, in its malady of cognitive dissonance and spineless amorality, serve as technology’s unreflective cheerleader on its march towards civilizational collapse.
Merton was keenly aware of technology’s dangers to social stability. In a 1967 letter he took aim at the “universal myth that technology infallibly makes everything in every way better for everybody. It does not.” However, Merton was by no means a Luddite. “Technology could indeed make a better world for millions of human beings,” he wrote. Yet there remains the nightmare of technology transforming the world into a “more collectivist, cybernated mass culture.”
Decades before the first desktop, Merton foresaw a complete fragmentation of the nation’s moral and spiritual fabric when people began basing all of their political and ethical decisions on computers. Prophetically he wrote to a friend, “just wait until they start philosophizing with computers!”
That was 1967. He even foresaw technology becoming a means to elevate the slaves of technology’s false self, to satisfy narcissistic appetites for admiration and status. In other words, the woke social media.
“The greatest need of our time,” Merton wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think. The purification must begin with the mass media.”
For this reason we urgently need to penetrate the illusions of propaganda and popular falsehoods, across the entire political spectrum.
The self-appointed Pharisees, such as Yuval Harari and other globalist clones minted through the mills of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, now pontificate about the ghastly wonders of a new socio-economic era where endless technological innovation will have precedence over human lives.
Yet all of this has been clearly predictable for those with eyes-wide-open, such as Fr. Merton and other visionaries like the French Catholic anarchist Jacques Ellul. No doubt, if Orwell were penning his great novel today, the emergence of this new American and unipolar era emerging in our midst would not be fiction.