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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2023-298
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
Palestine:
Ukraine:
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Other issues:
Argentina:
Spies:
China:
Russia:
The Bidens:
Germany:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza) thread …
Only by recognizing & understanding the causes of the most pressing world issues, will we find viable solutions. The practice of endlessly discussing the sad effects of the cancerous tumor (AKA: western world leaders under AIPAC), is surely not the approach that any competent doctor would take. Surely a good doctor would aim to 1) recognize & 2) annihilate the cause of the affliction.
Are the two most powerful & trusted western institutions (church & state), in fact the least trustworthy & most corrupt of all?
It may pay to remember that ~2,000 years ago the majority of humans were illiterate, emotional creatures, much more like unthinking herds of animals than now. Most people were controlled by shepherds/chieftans who worked thru/the church & state. Humanity needed shepherds, but that need has evaporated with time.
A few “ruling elites” have held the reins of power in the west over the chieftans/shepherds for centuries.
With their clever Big Lies, dirty tricks, & extensive use of the old “Divide & Conquer” strategy, they have managed thus far to evade the significant threats to their hold on power. But obviously the situation has changed in 2000 + years.
Any builder knows that structures built on corrupt foundations eventually collapse. We are seeing the primitive political & religious institutions collapse, as they must to make way for a new era.
It is essential that all thinking people should give time and thought to the consideration of the major world problems with which we are now faced… It must be recognized that the cause of all world unrest, of the world wars which have wrecked humanity, and the widespread misery upon our planet, can largely be attributed to a selfish group with materialistic purposes, who have for centuries exploited the masses and used the labour of mankind for their selfish ends… This group of capitalists has cornered and exploited the world’s resources and the staples required for civilised living; they have been able to do this because they have owned and controlled the world’s wealth through their interlocking directorates, and have retained it in their hands. They have made possible the vast differences existing between the very rich and the very poor; they love money and the power which money gives; they have stood behind governments and politicians; they have controlled the electorate; they have made possible the narrow nationalistic aims of selfish politics; they have financed the world businesses and controlled oil, coal, power, light and transportation; they control publicly or sub rosa the world’s banking accounts.
The responsibility for the widespread misery to be found today in every country in the world, lies predominantly at the door of certain major interrelated groups of businessmen, bankers, executives of international cartels, monopolies, trusts and organisations, and directors of huge corporations, who work for corporate or personal gain. p. 70/1
Alice Bailey, The Problems Of Humanity (1944)
The peoples of the world… are divided into four groups… This is of course a wide generalization… First, the ignorant masses… They can be easily… swept into a collective activity by leaders of any school of thought which is clever enough, and emotional enough, to appeal to material desires, to love of country… They can be controlled by fear, and thus aroused to action by emotional appeal… Their conditions must be bettered, but not through bloodshed and exploitation. Secondly, the middle classes… the bulk of the nations, the bourgeoisie – intelligent, diligent, enquiring, narrow-minded… They are…without exception, the most powerful element in any nation… the most fruitful field from which the new leaders and organizers are being drawn… they are the determining factor in world affairs… Because of their intelligence… they provide the most powerful group in the world in each nation… Thirdly, the thinkers…the intelligent and highly educated men and women, who sense ideas and formulate them into ideals. These people speak the words, write the articles and books, and utilise all the known methods to reach and educate the general public… sometimes for good, and sometimes for selfish ends. They play upon the human mind, as a musician plays upon his instrument… Some few, more perhaps than might appear, are working selflessly under the inspiration of the new era… dedicated to the amelioration of human conditions, and the betterment of world affairs along certain lines… They are found in every government, party, society, and organization… p.174-175
Alice Bailey, Esoteric Philosophy Vol II (1942)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Humanity#B
“Apocalypse… is a Greek word meaning “revelation”, “an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling”. [because 2,000 years humanity was simply not ready to know some things]
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Apocalypse
“Every space scientist will agree that, as the earth undergoes its various cycles of rotation, orbit and precession, these cycles simultaneously define the time of the day, of the year, and of the age, respectively. They will further agree that, by virtue of the present position of the earth’s precession with the sun to the distant constellations of the Zodiac, the earth-sun system is now in a transition period, moving from the Age of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius. Within the science of astronomy, as well as within esoteric astrology, there is little attention paid to the process by which the astronomical transition to the New/Aquarian Age is occurring. In light of events now unfolding in the world by virtue of this transition, this subject will undoubtedly become more interesting to scientists and laymen alike in the coming years. -Rick Roark From Pisces to Aquarius: The precession of the equinoxes
“We are now five years into the age of Aquarius, which seen from the astronomical point of view is almost no time at all. Since 1675 the energies of Aquarius have gradually been making an impact on our lives. Now they are bringing more and more young people into incarnation who are essentially Aquarian in their disposition and energetic make-up.
However, we are in a time in which all the structures – political, economic, religious, cultural, educational, etc – are still dominated by Piscean energy, and the world is led by people who hold them dear. The terrible and dangerous gulf between the poor and the rich, for example, threatens the very existence of this world. So there is still much to do but the ordinary people of the world are waking up to their responsibilities, and their power. –Benjamin Creme, Share International magazine (March 2014)
“I want to remind you about the absolute inevitability of the New Era. The fiery energies are in their greatest tension attracted toward Earth, and if not accepted, realized and assimilated they will cause terrific earthquakes and other cosmic perturbations, and also revolutions, wars and new epidemics. We are now at the very entrance of a New Era, a New Race, and therefore our time may be compared with the times of Atlantis, the existence of which becomes more and more evident to our science. –Helena Roerich Letters I, (26 December 1931)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Age_of_Aquarius
Posted by: Toby C | Dec 10 2023 21:53 utc | 31
@Posted by: Scorpion | Dec 11 2023 14:57 utc | 71
I attended a workshop with McGilchrist a few years back on his book “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World” and it was extremely interesting. He is an excellent speaker about highly complex connections between the brain and society.
I think that you will find that Gramsci overcame this material/non-material issue in his prison notebooks. Marx was certainly not a pure materialist, and the criticism of him as being purely “economistic” is either misinformed or consciously misrepresentative (which many critics are). For example, Gramsci discussing Marx:
a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force … material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content had purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces (Gramsci 1971c – Hoare & Govett Prison Notebooks, p. 377).
When you say “We get the elites we deserve and then blame them for manifesting our own collective shortcomings writ large” who is we? Do slaves deserve the masters they get? Do serfs? Do we really live within a “democracy” or are we (i.e. the non-rulers) in many ways slaves? Gramsci understood that in a time of greater physical and occupational freedom (wage-labour vs. serfdom) and general literacy (required for the industrial revolution and a market economy) organs of psychological/cultural control are required by the rulers to imprison the population within an elite-serving ideology backed up by compulsion and state violence. Its not materialism or non-materialism, its both that interplay in complex ways, as Gramsci noted.
There is much research to point to a predominance of sociopathy within elite groups (which include the mafia, organized crime etc.), and the psychological impact of great wealth and power on individuals (less levels of empathy, greater focus on wealth and power). As has been discovered many times by research, less unequal societies tend to have greater social welfare and less social/psychological problems.
Society is also heavily path dependent as Marx so eloquently stated:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new sense in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Third Edition 1885 – available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf )
McGilchrist has many excellent insights, but as with other bourgeois philosophers he tends to ignore political economy and therefore greatly under-represents the power of a ruling class to control society for the love of the left-brain concepts that he identifies as a defining aspect of modern society (i.e. material wealth and conceptual logic). We don’t get to select our elites to a very significant degree, and the phrase you use (that I quoted) is a classic part of bourgeois ideology meant to blame the victim for their own material, social and psychological subjugation and attempt disarm their attempts to overthrow those elites by rendering the processes of social and economic domination invisible.
I also find in many of the authors in this area a fetishizing of indigenous societies, celebrating limited world views, superstition and even ignorance as “better” than modernity. The theories of the “noble savage” are deeply flawed when opened up to less rose-tinted glasses analyses.
Machines are not “good” or “bad”, they are implemented within a given social and economic context – with the vast majority of people having no say in how they are implemented and what they are implemented for. Without modern medicine, including its machines, I would be both blind and crippled in one leg and many people would lead much worse lives. We should not be looking to throw the proverbial baby out the the bath water. Again, the analysis is void of political economic insight, using generalizations (“we”, “society”) that obfuscate the nature and role of power within society. Prior to fossil fuels, societies without machines used to crash and burn on a regular basis, as Morris (Why The West Rules – For Now 2011) and many other historians and archeologists have noted. Many of those societies were more brutal than the current ones we exist within.
Posted by: Roger | Dec 11 2023 15:58 utc | 72
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