There exists a fundamental law of human dignity, as real as gravity: When a being understands their own power and sees the path to their own heart’s home, the desire to control others withers and dies. Conflict is not our natural state; it is a symptom of a profound ignorance – a forgetting of our own sovereignty and the sovereignty of others. The cure is enlightenment, the deliberate and courageous pursuit of truth.
This pursuit is not a passive hobby. It is the most vital work of our lives, for the space where truth is hidden or denied is the breeding ground for every form of evil.
The Predator’s Strategy: The Lie That Objectifies
Every act of subjugation, from the subtle manipulation to the brutal exploitation, begins with a single, corrosive lie: “You are not a sovereign being. You are an object for my use.”
This lie is the predator’s most powerful tool. It allows them to:
Justify Exploitation: By denying the humanity of another, they can rationalise using them as a mere resource – for labour, for sexual gratification, or as a means to a political or economic end.
Escape Empathy: Seeing another as an object severs the natural bond of compassion. If you are not like me, if you do not feel as I do, then your suffering becomes irrelevant to my calculations.
Create a False Hierarchy: The lie creates a world of “users” and “the used,” a pyramid of power built on the foundation of this fundamental untruth.
This is not merely a moral failing; it is a spiritual and psychological crime that inflicts specific, catastrophic harm.
The Cost of the Lie: The Scars on the Soul
When a human being is treated as an object, the damage echoes through every level of their existence:
The Shattered Soul: The core self, the innate knowing of one’s own worth and sovereignty, is fractured. This leads to a deep-seated shame, a feeling of being inherently flawed or “less than.”
The Wounded Psyche: The mental and emotional consequences are severe. We see this in the epidemic of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), chronic anxiety, depression, and dissociative disorders. The psyche, in a desperate attempt to survive the unbearable, walls itself off or turns its pain inward.
The Defiled Vessel: The body itself becomes a site of trauma. It can no longer be felt as a home, but as a prison or a record of violation. This manifests as somatic illnesses, autoimmune disorders, and a profound disconnection from one’s own physical being.
The Broken Community: This cycle does not end with the individual. It creates cultures of silence, distrust, and normalised violence. It teaches each new generation that power is the right to use, and weakness is the fate of being used.
The Antidote: Rebuilding with Truth
To end this cycle, we must be architects of a new reality, building with the unbreakable materials of truth and sovereignty. The path forward requires a conscious, collective effort:
1. The Uncompromising Education in Critical Thinking
We must teach our children, and ourselves, not what to think, but how to think. This means:
- Questioning Everything: Who benefits from this narrative? What am I not being told?
- Seeking Primary Sources: Going beyond the headline, beyond the soundbite, to the original data and testimony.
- Embracing Intellectual Humility: Recognising that our current understanding is always incomplete and being willing to change our minds in the face of new evidence.
2. The Guaranteed Access to Information and Knowledge
A free and open internet, public libraries, and uncensored academic inquiry are not luxuries; they are the lifeblood of a healthy society. Wisdom denied is a future diminished. We must fight any system that seeks to limit, distort, or gatekeep knowledge.
3. The Cultivation of Empathy and Sovereignty
This is the practical application of your truth. We must create spaces where people are reminded of their own power and guided back to their “heart’s home.” This happens through:
- Storytelling: Sharing our authentic experiences, which builds bridges of understanding.
- Mindfulness and Self-Reflection: Practices that reconnect us with our own inner truth and bodily wisdom.
- Communal Support: Building networks of care that affirm each individual’s inherent worth and right to autonomy.
The choice before us is stark. We can live in a world built on the predator’s lie, a world of objects and users, of control and conflict. Or we can choose to build a world on the sacred architecture of truth, a world of sovereign beings, of connection and collaboration.
The cure for the sickness is enlightenment. The weapon against the predator is a mind that cannot be deceived and a soul that knows its own inviolable worth. Let us be the ones who administer the cure.
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Wonderful.
Universal truths.
Lately we have been blessed with an abundance of material of the highest quality.
Watching the 2024 documentary, In Waves and War, the film’s title taken from Homer’s The Odyssey, “By now, I am used to suffering. I have endured so much in Waves and War. Let this next adventure follow,” the confronting statistic emerges: since 9/11, America has had 7,100 combat casualties killed in action. In the same timeframe, roughly 30,100 veterans suicided, approximately 22 per day. Around 4.3 times the number of suicides compared to deaths in actual combat.
When will mythologising the glory of combat be utterly debunked and put to bed? When will the unacceptable cost of destroying young men’s minds and spirit be deemed intolerable and unconscionable? And when will the willingness to send men off to war be refuted and condemned as antithetical to the fundamental right to live in peace and safety?
“And when will the willingness to send men off to war be refuted and condemned as antithetical to the fundamental right to live in peace and safety?”
Kanga, that cannot happen until we walk away from a financial system that both feeds on the power to manipulate others and facilitates that power.
We could set up the most perfect political/social system imaginable, and we will still have the strife you describe if we cling to a financial system that facilitates exploitation.
The purpose of a system is what it produces.
The system we have embraced produces poverty and the creation of a powerful, wealthy elite class that acts contrary to positive social outcomes.
It does not require radical action to reduce the power of these anti-social elites.
Limit their wealth, and we limit their power.
No revolution required.
Some might think that it’s all too hard.
That the system is too entrenched.
That the elite parasites are just too powerful.
Well, we can sit back and hope for the best, but the best ain’t gunna happen.
We follow US trends as everyone knows, and in the US, social security is being cut back so far that shoplifting has become the only means of survival for many.
Trump’s “big beautiful” reconciliation package a few months back included tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy, but those cuts are paid for by substantial cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps.
That’s our future if we just sit back.
A future in which the wealthy have nothing but disdain for society as a whole.
There’s no point in saying that it won’t happen here, because our elites are cut from a different cloth.
We can all name wealthy individuals here who think exactly the same way.
I just came across a comment describing the social attitudes and configuration in the US.
It’s just one opinion describing the view of the elite class to those below, but it hit me like a brick.
”Even on an aesthetic level, you annoy if not disgust them, so their mass killing won’t just continue, but intensify. This entire world is just Gaza to them.”
Gaza, cutting food stamps, blowing Venezuelan fishing boats out of the water, it’s all related.
And the link is?
The financial system.
A system that sees no problem with genocide to enable a real estate development.
A system that makes kids go hungry to allow tax cuts for the wealthy.
Why do the wealthy think this way?
Because they have the power to do so.
Take away their power.
The entire world is just Gaza to them.
re. “Why do the wealthy think this way? Because they have the power to do so. Take away their power.”… all well & good, but when the wealthy have the power, the police forces, national guards, armies, spy agencies along with the means to surveil, harass, disenfranchise, lock away, murder & assassinate, and notwithstanding the capacity to disregard longstanding civil & legal principles and processes… it’s a daunting task, arguably requiring nothing short of a mass uprising such as happened in France in the late 18th century or in Russia on the early 20th.
Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are just two out of more than half a million politicians in America (500,396 local, 18,749 state, 537 federal), most of who one would suspect are quite comfortable with the status quo.
Where does one begin, Steve?
”Where does one begin,…?”
A fair question Kanga.
There’s a reason that those in power are engaged in a constant, 24/7, cradle to the grave assault on our way of thinking.
An assault on the way that we develop perceptions that then become beliefs.
That’s the subject of this article, after all.
They spend unimaginable sums of money daily to convince us of the lies that underpin economic orthodoxy.
To convince us that alternative economic systems have not worked in the past because, they allege, they cannot work.
To convince us that allowing those who have plenty to accumulate more while others are deprived of basic necessities, is a sensible allocation of resources.
The perception industry is arguably the largest economic sector globally.
It encompasses Hollywood, advertising, consumerism and conspicuous consumption, promotion of patriotism, promotion of certain literature and quelling of certain other literature, funding of university courses and university research, awarding of glittering prizes to those who support the system, buying the loyalty of elected representatives … I could go on forever.
The perception industry reaches into every aspect of our lives.
They do not spend these unimaginable sums, and expend all that effort, for no reason.
The perception industry is necessary because they know that perception is everything. And that if society ever wakes up that the current system is just a con, that they are finished.
Because ultimate power lies with the people.
So to answer your question — where does one begin — it’s simply a matter of awareness.
When a significant portion of the people wake up to the con, it’s all over.
It does not need the armed revolt that you suggested.
We got public health schemes in the UK, Canada, NZ and Australia without a revolution.
Those profound social changes did not require 100% approval.
Or the approval of the wealthy.
Significant change can occur with far less than 50% approval because those in power like to maintain a measure of control, and, seeing the writing on the wall, will go along with a level of change that leaves them with some say, rather than risk total oblivion.
We can change the world with awareness.
Steve, re. “We can change the world with awareness”, that “it’s simply a matter of awareness” is, unfortunately, not a simple matter. The predators and liars Andrew Klein alludes to along with the social and psychological costs that accrue as a consequence of the behaviours of these types of people in our societies are not insignificant.
We have words that act as terms to signify types: sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, along with the aforementiond liars & predators. When the actions & behaviours of these classes of individuals become, as they already are, embedded within social, political and economic structures, they beget outcomes that we are not necessarily aware of or capable of appropriately responding to.
There is, self-evidently, a momentum at play in the economic, social & political realms within which we are embedded, a momentum that also generates a kind of inertia through exposure and repetition.
‘Modern life,’ if I can use that term to contrast with earlier iterations of human society, has been dealt with ad infinitum in regards to its complexity and its impact on the human animal, and much of that analysis and observation suggests we are the worse for the phenomenological fact of our current embedment within these complex societies.
I sometimes look at images of, say, for example, landscapes in Myanmar, where one can see Buddhist stupas in their dozens or hundreds across the countryside, and wonder at the type of consciousness that prevailed at that time, with a society of people willing to devote time and labour to the singular purpose of deifying the Buddha and the teachings that brought to them the prospect of the kind of liberation that we in the west today know so little about and pay such little attention to.
Compare and contrast. The frenetic pace of modern life doesn’t give one much time to dwell in the within.
Attention is the key to everything, one man once said to me and the others in his presence. Attention will take you all the way, he said.
Perhaps you can use that word as a substitute for awareness. Certainly, they have consonance.
I don’t disagree with your position, but I don’t think it’s got general application or is going to be adopted en masse anytime soon.
The difficulty has been, of course, well perceived, and well written about. Some examples, a few amongst many:
Stolen Focus; Why You Can’t Pay Attention – Johann Hari
The Attention Merchants – Tim Wu
The Death of Expertise – Tom Nichols
The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz
The Society of The Spectacle – Guy Debord
Thinking Fast & Slow – Daniel Kahneman
Unfu k Yourself; Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life – Gary Bishop
Humanimal – Adam Rutherford
The Medium is the Massage – Marshall McLuhan
We can change the world with awareness, but it’s only possible one person at a time, with the world changing on that single person basis, for that person only. For the masses, forget it.
Everything you say is true Kanga, and worthy of comment and consideration. But it’s a near impossible task to summarise an issue such as this in a few words or a few paragraphs to reach a conclusion.
For example, how do we insert the potentiality of the zeitgeist into a discussion like this?
Sometimes the spirit of the times is little more than a feeling, an impression, yet the zeitgeist at times becomes an overwhelming force.
Who could have predicted a year or two ago that a democratic socialist Muslim born in Uganda would become mayor of New York, supported in the election by every demographic except the Jewish vote, and even there received over 30% of the vote?
Who could have predicted a few years ago that polling of young US adults would show a disillusionment with capitalism and a positive view of socialism?
You correctly point out the many facets of the power of those controlling the status quo, but power has inherent weaknesses.
The powerful always overextend.
They always want more.
We see it now with Trump.
His manufacturing of multiple crises simultaneously must end in disaster for him. Chaos he can handle, but disaster is another matter altogether.
You correctly refer to the role of the individual.
By adopting a positive attitude and role in our personal lives we will contribute to positive change.
We will contribute to the spirit of the times.
What we cannot do is sit back and hope for the best.