Greed is good
I’ve written here on Dorset Eye about some of the features of modern culture which jeopardise human survival:
> A super-consuming, super-polluting 0.1%
> A lackey media controlled either by the 0.1% or nation states
This corporate media broadcasts the socially damaging and eco-catastrophic narrative of state elites and the hyper-acquisitive 0.1% – a narrative I’ve described (not entirely hyperbolically) as a mind plague: malign, viral ideas which are causing us all harm.
Ideas like these:
– We’re primarily competitive by nature, evolution designed us that way, and that’s how we should behave
– The economy self-balances… Don’t interfere!
– Poor? It’s your fault…
– People need the fear of poverty and joblessness to goad them, otherwise they’d be lazy
– People are just another resource (‘Human Resources’) to be exploited or used
– You’re just a small cog in a big machine. Nothing you do can change things
– Greed is good
– Wealth and power are admirable
– Nations are more important than people
All these ideas divide us from one another, encourage atomisation and alienation, and feed the industrial machine which is blindly destroying our biosphere.
Diagnosis
But it’s easy to diagnose the problem – and I’m not alone in doing so. As Leonard Cohen observed, ‘everybody knows’ we’re the civilian casualties in an asymmetric comms war, where nation states or the billionaire owners of the media act as super-spreaders of concepts that serve them well but badly fail the rest of us. As Cohen put it, “The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor”.
So we need more than a diagnosis. We need to be able to defend ourselves. We need a vaccine against the mind plague, and a cure for the infected.
The cure
I’ve spent a long time thinking about diagnosis and cure and I believe I’ve found something.
I’m going to share it with you in a series of articles over the next few weeks.
I’ll talk about a ‘shield of values’ and a ‘wall of truth’. These are two sides of the same coin: a vaccine against malign, viral ideas; a cognitive firewall against our 21st Century pandemic of lies. You could describe them as ‘weapons of resistance’.
And I’m going to talk about the cure – techniques like the Socrates Bomb, Chaplin’s Stiletto and The Alternatives Ambush, which target the socially divisive and eco-destructive concepts with which we’re being overwhelmed. You could call these ‘weapons of attack’.
The concepts embodied in the mind plague need to be rendered harmless. If we can’t achieve this – and if we don’t achieve it soon – then human civilisation and the biosphere that sustains us may well be f***ed.
That’s not alarmism.
Take a look at where we’re heading and you’ll see it’s common sense.
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I hope you’ll find this series useful, and perhaps even essential.
I hope you’ll get the jab and participate in applying the cure.
Luke Andreski
Luke Andreski is co-founder of the @EthicalRenewal and EthicalIntelligence.Org cooperatives. He is author of Short Conversations: During the Plague (2020), Intelligent Ethics (2019), Ethical Intelligence (2019) and How To Be Happy (2017).
You can connect with Luke on LinkedIn, https://uk.linkedin.com/in/luke-andreski-ethics, on WordPress, https://lukeandreski.wordpress.com/, or via the EthicalRenewal co-op on Twitter https://twitter.com/EthicalRenewal.
Bacteria image was originally posted to Flickr by NIAID at https://www.flickr.com/photos/54591706@N02/16843981465. Taken from Wikimedia Commons and cropped for use with this article. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org, with thanks to NIAID.
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