Empathy and Power are two mutually exclusive realities. The exercise of power over others destroys innate empathy, transforming it at best to sympathy (charidee) and at worst it becomes a form of 'intelligence' gathering, the kind sociopaths engage in order to exert greater control over those they seek to control. They call it knowing your adversaries 'weaknesses'.
The recent elections in the UK are an example of that lack of empathy, in that the Illegal war in Iraq and Afghanistan is not an election issue, nor is the bail-out of the irresponsibly greedy investment bankers.
The 'deficit is however a very important issue because all parties are agreed on one thing: the debt or deficit MUST be paid, and it will be paid by the ordinary citizen!
Another example is the Roman Catholic Church's response to the witnessing of so many traumatised people, survivors of a world wide Institutional system of Residential Schools, a system that was and remains Policy; as was the landing of three Black Hawk helicopters of the US 7th Calvary on the sacred burial grounds of Wounded Knee last week. The same 7th Calvary that slaughtered 350 unarmed men, women and children and had the temerity to call that bloody event a 'battle' worthy of a battle pennant. The landing was touted as a 'peace offering'.
Think on the reaction were some Germans to do something similar, and drive a few tanks into Treblinka by way of an apology!
If anything defines this 'civilisation' it is the almost complete lack of empathy more than any other single factor.
Canadian Oil Company, Talisman Energy, is currently attempting to invade the lands of the Achuar people, to exploit the 'resources' that lie under their land, land they have lived on, and eaten of, for tens of thousands of years. They are wedded to the land in ways few 'civilised' people understand. Talisman will utterly destroy that relationship, and is supported by the Columbian State, a state that is also 'advised' by Tony Blair, who also 'advises' JP Morgan, UBS and Israel and the Palestinian People. Tony Blair is a Roman Catholic convert, a man who placed his hand on his heart at the Chilcott Iraq Inquiry earlier this year, and told the world that he sincerely 'believed' that the Invasion of Iraq, which was proven to be illegal, was the 'right thing to do.'
His lack of empathy for the 1.3 million Iraqis who have died violently, the millions of Iraqi orphans, the hundreds of thousands of seriously maimed children apparently makes him a good candidate to advise states and huge multinational banking corporations.
As regards the sociopathic gathering of intelligence, marketing targeting infants and young children is but one example.
Another is the vast dataset of first contact writings that described the indigenous peoples who lived in and on the lands taken for the Church and various States over the past 600 years or so. The data shows that the vast majority were egalitarian, peaceful, stable societies. Those who recorded their observations, for the most part honestly, were not fully aware of the use to which those works would be put.
The history reveals the intent. That intent is proven by the ways in which the Australian, Canadian, Thai, North American, Columbian and many other Governments are treating the first peoples of those lands those States lay claim to, even today,even as I write people are being killed for 'progress' and 'souls are being saved'. Indeed.
The rationalisation that converts 'virgin' territories into 'leases' for exploration, mining and development is one of many rationalisations of absolutely irrational behaviour - the destruction of life for profit.
Residential Schools, Magdalene Launderies, Uranium Mining, People Trafficking, Cocaine, Heroin, Tea, Coffee, Sugar, Ritalin, Lockheed, Mossad are all part of the same pattern of destroying life for profit.
Here's a very fine article on the History of Debt.
"Debt: The first five thousand years by David Graeber
Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.
What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call “the economy”. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence – maintained by the contemporary state.
Let me start with the institution of slavery, whose role, I think, is key. In most times and places..........."
Read it, it's easy enough to understand. Debt and Violence are lovers, entwined and inextricably linked. He ends with a positive note. I agree. It's not all bad, though it is pretty ugly in most places...
The truth is out - when people who have been isolated can come together, and share their stories, they begin to form a dataset that cannot be denied. This is what the Catholic Church Residential School revelations are showing. Witness reports are reliable, when they can be verified, as they are. Mainstream Society cannot ignore these data, without becoming complicit.
The isolation of the individual is Societies condom, protecting Society from it's most feared STD : solid truth disclosure.
I have a song about this : here
Tell the truth, YOUR truth; that's how you start to bring the system of power down.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Do what you love, it's your gift to universe
