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You Cannot Fix a Problem You Do Not Understand

Thu, 06/12/2014 - 08:11 — james

(This is the first of a series of articles. The next part of the series is linked at the foot of this article)

Some Basic Truths That Could Restore Peace To The World

A couple of weeks ago, I followed a link to CounterPunch website to read an article. As I expected, it contained many inaccuracies and was missing important information. However, while I was on the site, I noticed an article by Andre Vltchek entitled “How Should We Write and Fight?”.

It is a very compelling piece of writing. Andre Vltchek began his piece with these words-

“Are we – opposition investigative journalists, philosophers and documentary filmmakers – doing such a terrible job? Are we not providing the North American and European public with enough information, enough proof about the monstrous state of the world? Enough so they – the citizens of the Empire – finally get thoroughly pissed off, detach their backsides from their couches and chairs, and flood the capitals and business centers with their bodies, demanding change, demanding the end to atrocities that are being committed all over the world… the end of this imperialist and neo-con madness?”

“Are we failing, squarely and patently, to give examples and proof of the pain this world is suffering because of the bestiality of market fundamentalism, because of unchecked neocolonialism and shameless Western supremacy? Are we not providing enough stories and images, enough footage, to convince the citizens of the countries that are ruling the world, that something has gone awfully wrong?
The answer is yes, and also, no.”

Andre spent some time elaborating and with some emotion. Andre Vltchek is a powerful writer and he speaks with authority as he has been all over the world and has seen and reported from many of the most horrendous war and terror zones. Then a little further down he wrote this-

“So Yes – we are providing plenty of information, plenty of images, plenty of proof, that the world is in flames, that tens of millions are dying, that true democracy everywhere is being raped and the natural resources of poor countries are being plundered, so that Western capitalism can flourish.
But No – we are not managing to improve the world. All those tremendous efforts are failing to ignite even those few millions of educated and concerned citizens in the West, to organize and rebel, to demand the end of the global imperialist onslaught.
All the information mentioned above, about the horrors of imperialism and market fundamentalism, is easily available on-line, “just one click away”, to use corporate language.
But nothing is happening. The majority of Europeans and North Americans appear to be thoroughly apathetic towards the state of the world.”

Andre proposes two possibilities-

“There are two possibilities why: either, as I wrote in my earlier analyses (including “The Indoctrinated West”), the Western public is totally lost and overrun by corporate propaganda (it appears to be the most ignorant and misinformed public I have encountered anywhere in the world). Or it simply pretends to be like that, because the status quo suits its interests – it can take advantage of the looting and plundering done by its governments and companies, while pretending that it is still morally superior to the rest of the world… with hardly any feeling of guilt.”

Feeling guilty? It is interesting to me that Andre Vltchek presented only two possibilities. I could think of a third without much effort. Vltchek very ably goes on to list a litany of horrors over the decades and the fact that the western public has done nothing to end them. Yet there are no solutions presented by Vltchek except 'rising up'.
Well, where did that get the people who rose up in the French and Russian Revolutions? They were overtaken by second and more violent revolutions. And what about what happened most recently to the protesters in Maidan Square in Kiev? Same same. All they have achieved is to bring down a torrent of shit on all the people of Ukraine. Well done! What replaced the existing governments in every case has been worse. It's not the way. There are too many traps.

Andre Vltchek finishes his heartfelt article with this appeal-

“I want you to talk to me, my readers. I have written so much; you have read what I have written, patiently. Now write to me. I want to listen. How do we go forward? You and I, together… What touches you? What makes you cry? What would make you rise up and struggle for a better world? How do we coordinate our steps and walk forward, together?”

So I wrote to Andre Vltchek, as he had asked, outlining the third reason why I thought nothing had changed in our society. I knew he would be a busy man so I kept it brief and said I'd be more than happy to elaborate further if he wished to know more. So far, I haven't heard back from him. He might have been swamped with replies or I may have sounded grandiose or even mad! But never mind, mad or not, I'll write it out here for you, the reader, anyway.

The third reason that came to mind, and that I wrote to Andre Vltchek about, is that we have not known how to stop it; that we have not known what is it exactly that is causing the death and starvation. This is why people in “The West” have been so ineffective; why they have not caused the revolution or at least stopped the excesses of our governments and the corporations. A problem needs to be understandable in terms of its mechanics before an appropriate solution can be enacted. Otherwise we bounce from one screw-up to the next. And that has been the history and many are accutely aware of this.

We are in many ways victims of 'the system' too. There is little to no point in rebelling and rioting and even taking over the prison if at the end of it we can't find the way out of the prison. And there is no point if all we are going to do is bring down a worse situation on ours and others heads as the Kievans have done.

Mass protest demonstrations are not the way. First of all, they invite state sponsored violence. Secondly, it is to profoundly misread the reality of the situation. In protesting, we buy into the psychopaths' mind control.

'Appealing to Caesar about Caesar' is worse than futile as it psychologically deepens the 'hole' that the protesters are already in. They are protesting because they see themselves as powerless in the situation. If they saw themselves as having power, they would simply use it! But, no, they protest instead. By protesting they are telling 'Caesar' that they see themselves as powerless. The corollary, and this is not lost on 'Caesar', is that they see Caesar as more powerful and you can rely on 'Caesar' to take full advantage of this. Caesar is invariably a psychopath, after all!

There is also a significant opportunity cost in taking the protest route. What is missed is the opportunity to conceive and act on solutions that do not play into the psychopaths-in-charge strength; violence. "Peaceful protests" don't cut it, either. It is too easy for anyone, especially 'the powers that be', to turn it violent for their own ends through the use of agent provocateurs and then the police and in the process jamming the peaceful protestors between these two state sponsored forces. It is a fundamental mistake to battle your opponent using their weapon of choice. Instead, what is needed is to focus on solutions that play into the psychopaths' weaknesses.

“The System” cannot operate without our co-operation. This has been said many times and is clear to most who have thought about it for any length of time. We, normal non-psychopathic people, make up 95% of the population. So withdrawing co-operation is the way to go as it avoids (mostly) violence to ourselves and others.

Another huge vulnerability of the psychopathic society is that it relies heavily on deceit to operate; to induce naive and trusting people to run a system that is antithetical to their needs and aspirations. The deceit is being broken down some by the alternative news media and web blogs. Knowledge of psychopathy, for instance, is spreading. But we need more information about the psychopaths in positions of power and how to recognise them and deal with them.

We need very specific knowledge of how the system imprisons everybody and conducts its periodic culls, otherwise known as wars. We need specific knowledge on where to put the spanner into the works to stop this meat grinder; where to co-operate and where not to and how not to.

We then need to have specific knowledge on how to rebuild our societies so that they are humane and just. And, most importantly, we need to do this with the minimum of harm to innocent people in the process of transition and with the minimum chance of this change being taken over by the very psychopathic thugs we are trying to escape from. To be successful, our 'means' need to be indistinguishable from our 'ends'. We need solutions that are compatible with our view of our future society.

In short, we need a plan. We need to understand the plan. We need to understand the problem that the plan will fix and we need to know why it will work. This will keep motivation high and people on-track and protect everyone from the psychopaths that will inevitably come in to derail the change.

A reader, 'libertatis', left a comment, on another post of mine and it is very apropos to this series of articles. It sums up very well the scale and urgency of what faces us. I'll repeat most of it here-

"Your use of that word ('psychopath' - Ed) is very important; in fact, I think it's the most important lesson humanity can learn in this cycle.

That is, that all of history could simply be rewritten as the story of a battle between us, the empaths, the 98%...and them, the psychopaths, the predator-parasites, the psychic vampires that have preyed upon us for thousands of years.

Recognize it. Face it. Wake up to it. Because it truly is a battle of good versus evil, and we're getting an opportunity to see it so clearly on this cycle. If we get it right, humanity will enter an era of prosperity and peace like the world has never seen.

Get it wrong, and our species may disappear from the earth."

We will not defeat evil with more evil and thereby create a good society. We need to find ways of unleashing the power of good to overcome evil to create a good, just and equitable society and a sustainable one for future generations. Our present 'civilization' is demonstrably not sustainable and, in evolutionary and historical terms, is therefore a failure.

There are lots of "needs" in my lines above and I hope I don't sound too didactic by using so many. But to me, they are a 'shopping list' of the simple but essential requirements for success as I see them based on the mistakes of the past.

I will endeavour to present this information in a series of essays over the next week or two. The information will not be the definitive last word on it, by any means, as I don't know everything, of course. Far from it! But I do know some things and this will be my best shot at the causes and solutions. I will try to keep the information to the essentials and welcome questions and comments as it is always somewhat of a guess on my part to know if I'm writing in a comprehensible way.

The first four essays will focus on how our society, our institutions and our individual psychology has led to the sorry state that the world finds itself in now; how we have all been bamboozled and some suggested solutions. To give you an idea of where I'm headed, I'll list the working titles of these first essays here-

Power and Psychopaths; Hand, meet Glove

Power and The Rest Of Us; Power Corrupts, Period

The Basics of Banking; The Essentials of Evil

All You Wanted to Know About Economics But Were Never Told

They sound pretty dry, don't they? But hopefully it will be an enlightening journey into the heart of darkness and will light a candle in a few dark corners and shine one light on the way out of it all.

The above four essay titles reflect my areas of interest and research. I may launch into the areas of psychopaths in the food industry and in the medical/pharmaceutical industry later because there are some simple solutions to many of the problems these industries are burdening the world with. And then there is the topic of government structures that marginalise psychopaths instead of promoting them. Anyway, we'll see how we go!

A final note and recommendation - there is a blog article by MotherBarbarian which is excellent and I have been wanting to feature at Winter Patriot Community for a week or more. I will include it in my essays on banking and economics when I get to them. If you would like to jump ahead and have a read now, you will find MotherBarbarian's blog here. And the post in question is called, Odious Debt, Or How To Fix a Manufactured Crisis I highly recommend it.

(The next part in this series can be read here - Psychopaths and Power: Hand, meet Glove- pt 1)

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