Empathy, Truth and Power - Nature, Church and State

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.

http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/22/debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/

"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

Co-opting the 'movements' : 2012 and all that!

A friend asked why people in a certain worldwide community are discussing the 2012 revelations in great detail, and NOT discussing all the other similar revelations emerging from the torah, bible, koran etc etc…

Why indeed? Here for what it is worth is my take at present.....

What we do know is the any system of Empire Logic will make every attempt to co-opt any grass roots emergent ideas that challenge the status quo in order to distract, deflect, undermine and otherwise disrupt any critical analysis inherent in those challenges.

The story of the early Christians is a pointer...

The Romans were persecuting followers of this poor man's religion in large numbers, yet were faced with the fact of an ever increasing growth of the membership of that 'faith' : the more the killed, the more people joined the new revolutionary ideal!

So they decided to stop the persecution, and allowed the Christians to have their faith, and even gave them buildings to house their churches.... and then they started to allow funding to flow in, from within their own ranks, eventually giving the Christians NGO status.

They also infiltrated the 'movement' and slowly, but surely manouevered their own people into the 'leadership', until such time as they could take over, and at that point the Church of Rome was born as an official entity....

The rest, as the say, is history ..... and given the roles the Churches played ever since as 'missionaries' what we know is that the first contact missionaries would live amongst the 'natives' and note every aspect of their lives in great detail, and those reports were shipped back to the central office, read and analysed, and used as 'intelligence' for the subsequent operations of subjugation by co-option....

I know for a fact that the bulk of the Jesuit writings of their first contacts from the 1400s onwards revealed that most (not all) of the hunter gatherer societies they met as first contact were fundamentally peaceful, non-hierarchical; they trusted their children and treated them as such from birth, in the expectation that their children would naturally explore their world and learn what they needed with little adult intervention; these cultures had no words for 'please' and no concept of coercion or punishment, would talk for days on any subject that concerned them before taking action (interminable meetings....) and even then would take action with the awareness that if new info came to light, further deliberation would ensue...

These communities were happy, balanced and their sex lives open. These communities had very little by way of religiosity, and were quite unwarlike.... 

In essence living the Christian ideal....

Which of course ran counter to the practices of the Church of Rome, and it's Inquisitors....

And as a part of the campaign to take control of the lands of these peoples, the Church of Rome also portrayed the inhabitants as 'savages; picking out the few who showed some signs of organised violent resistance as the norm..... and promoted the idea of saving them for Christ (by annihillating - extirpate was a frequently used word - them and converting the traumatised survivors.... who showed all the signs of PTSD and could be used in that degraded state to 'prove' the base nature of these 'savages'.....)

The recent revelations of rampant endemic systematic abuse in Irish Residential Schools, and the long history of the POLICIES enacted by Law against the children of the native peoples of Canada and North America and carried out by the Churches, a history that is still active, reveals that this is indeed the policy of both Church and State... an ancient Policy..

OK so THAT rant over, a critical look at the Mainstream Climate Debate, the ineffectual quality of Charities and large NGOs., Live Aid, Live8, the events after the Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Haitii Earthquake, the Chilean Earthquake, the refusal of Amnesty International to identify the economic drivers of the abuses they recorded in South America and Africa, the way the Feminist, Hippy and Peace movements have been undermined, , and so on reveals a deep and well orchestrated campaign of co-option...

So too with 2012, and all apocalyptic stories that have more active readerships that the truth about say, Iraq.....

Co-option is only possible in such vast campaigns when critical analysis and thinking is undermined, when people who have been for generations in a near constant state of PTSD are looking for solace and will attach to any and all variations of Utopian ideals.... we, the vast majority of ordinary folk, are not individually to blame for the PTSD, (as it's the result of policies enforced by the System) yet it does permeate all those children of war veterans, all those children of war victims, all those who were beaten or saw lots of violence in their school years or at home, who claim 'that the beatings made me stronger' or who subscribe to the 'spare the rod, spoil the child' attitude of life, and those whose psyche was so damaged that they display outward symptoms of distress, a distress that as is most often 'labelled' by the establishment as this or that syndrome to mask the reality and keep those who managed somehow to 'adjust' to the sick society off the scent....

In psychological distress symptomology the TABOO is 'don't mention Society' ..... 'don't mention Civilisation' as a root cause of distress.... blame the victims.... (made all that much easier as the victims, in their confusions, shame and guilt will often blame themselves.....)

And so it is with all externally driven 2012/alien/rapture apocalyptic stories that they are ultimate disempowering, in that power is handed to some external agency, and all ya have to do is 'keep the faith' and the time of 'revelation' and 'change' will come and do the work...

Well, it ain't gonna happen, i never has, and never will.

I am sure I will piss a lot of people off with this analysis. On all sides...

I am 'Climate Change Denier', after all.... I am one of the FEW people in the community discussing CC and 2012 who consistently point out that Global WarRing, be it by direct extreme physical violence or by dint of Economics, is the single greatest threat to nature and to people today - and that threat is all too human, is absolutely an agency of human action and can only be countered by well informed, aware and active human beings...

Here's a riveting scientific article on aspects of what I have been discussing : Body Pleasure and the origins of Violence...

http://www.violence.de/prescott/bulletin/article.html

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

Irish Priests, Abuse and Society

Another report from the slow snail of Justice and Governance in Ireland regarding the vast swathe of crimes against children perpetrated by the people within the Institutions set up by State and Church for the 'care' of children has just been published. The BBC reported this here

I left a comment which formed the basis for this piece. I do not know if it will be published.

I spent my childhood in Irish Catholic Boarding Schools, from age five and a half to seventeen, and as a ward of court, was in custody of my relatives. Who were less than empathetic. Let it be know that abuse occurred in peoples homes too, and that much of that activity has been covered up. Thus as a child there was no-one for me to turn to talk to about my experiences.

I grew up believing those experiences, and my shame, were normal. I believed my low self-esteem was my own fault, that I was evil, a sinner and at heart a disgusting, filthy and ugly person, even though I could pass myself off as reasonably affable.

My life has been pretty much ruled  and dominated by those experiences and how I 'adapted' to them, how I internalised the values of those who abused me, and took on the image they protected on to me as my own identity.

Years and years of unhappiness, dysfunction, insecurity and a nameless rage (for which, for a long I time no target - and that meant I turned the rage upon myself and those close to me) have dogged my life.

I have struggled as best I can to heal, this for myself, and to understand, to fully comprehend  the dynamics of abuse operating at such a huge scale, such that it might be classed a societal problem, because the problem is tractable, because the cycles can be broken, and because this should never happen to any child,  and because the resolution of which is essential to the future of all human beings.

There is no higher calling on Earth today.

It is the FACT of  the intentional and systematic  climate pollution of our children’s psyches through conditioning processes that is a taboo subject for mainstream society and the ‘greens’ and other movements for change must now address this issue, openly. Vigorously.

Failure to do so will be catastrophic for all of us.

Because abuse is always about POWER. Abuse is always about control. Abusers 'condition' those they abuse to accept the abuse as 'normal'. To maintain that control.

There is a long historical record in writing, of the processes of conditioning, under the guise of education, or child-rearing, or training, that go back millennia, writings that informed the philosophies of dominance that are the basis of this society. The cycles of abuse go deep.

I am encouraged that the issue is being looked at, today, and in my own lifetime, and not least by the victims and their families, and empathetic researchers. Much research in these areas has been undertaken, and much is known, far more than is in practice through state sponsored projects, such as education, health , culture and ‘spreading democracy’.

I am less encouraged by Government action on these issues. Slow, unwilling to respond to victims with the speed with which they responded to the abusers, in this case, The Christian Churches. That they defend the likes of leaders who start wars should come as no surprise.  That our Government opposes fiercely any attempts by ordinary folk to arraign war criminals is typical.

There are more incidents beyond the abuse of children, that litter our society, that are tied up in how a society treats children.

The philosophy a society has in this regard must be examined for any false or corrosive assumptions. Conditioning must be acknowledged as a corrosive force.  And ceased.

And that is the only path which I as a survivor deem plausible if we as a society are to honour all children, for all time. It is time, well past time actually, to clean up our collective and centralised acts.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

Expectations of every child

Let the will of the State act, then, instead of the will of the indiviual (or community)

Here's a nice quote to illustrate the way in which childrens minds were targetted through compulsory state education, on behalf of the Industrialists who were hell-bent on turning States into representatives of business, and to do that they felt it neccessary to exercise mind-control, to deflect dissent, especially reasoned dissent.

You will recognise the elements, and for sure, each of us has fallen foul of these. I know I have.

Charles Pierce, the eminence grise behind William James and John Dewey, architects of Compulsory State Education in the USA wrote :

“Let the will of the state act, then, instead of the will of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young, having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated or expressed.

Let all possible cause of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehension. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard … unusual opinions with hatred and horror. Then, let all men who reject the established belief be terrified into silence….

Let a list of opinions be drawn up to which no man of the least independence of thought can assent, and let the faithful be required to accept all these propositions in order to segregate them as radically as possible from the influence of the rest of the world.”

We can see this in operation in the media, and in school text-books. And we can see this in operation in our own minds as we sometimes struggle to grasp the truth of our current situation. Unexamined assumptions are a good guide to those areas of our thinking that have been 'adjusted' to fit into this 'sick society', an adjustment that Martin Luther King made clear was unacceptable.

Here's a few more quotes to flesh this process out a bit.

Woodrow Wilson speaking to an audience of businessmen in New York City in 1909 :

“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

This is the technology of modern management ……this is the doctrine which drove William James in “Principles of Psychology” (1890), to assign habit-training, not intellectual development, the place of honour in schooling :

“Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, it’s most precious conservative agent. It alone is what … saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor … it alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive (jobs) from being deserted. It holds the miner in his darkness. It keeps different strata of society from mixing.”

All of us who attended state schooling have been exposed to and conditioned to accept the imposed and limited ideas that are taught through that education, reinforced through the media and that underpin the success of marketing.

This is the core technology of psychological state control upon which the likes of Tony Blair, David Cameron and the leaders of Indusrty et al depend upon.

Of course they retain that other oh-so familiar stick, that of poverty, physical violence or imprisonment to curtail those few who escape this conditioning. That’s what the War Against Terror and the consistent attack on civil liberties is all about.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

War, Nation States and People

With regard to Nation States, America et al, I like to make the distinction between the Institution known as a state, its apparatus and its servants and those people who just happen to be living in the areas claimed by any given state.

As in, America, the State, sent people known as American Soldiers (Servants of the State) to depose Saddam Hussein and the State Aparatus he represented to the area known as Iraq, uninvited by the people if that area.

Thus the American State, an Institution, toppled the Iraqi State, an Institution. Those who suffered the most (1.6 million dead, 4 million 'displaced' 27 Million traumatised) were not part of either Institution other than being born in either area and/or paying taxes to either Institution. An accident of birth, more or less, becomes the rod with which to beat them to a senseless pulp....

If one travels the world, one finds that PEOPLE, are pretty much the same at the grass roots levels, and that the Institutions of Power Over People are also very similar.

They are two separate entities, one controls and abuses the other.

Thus generalisations about nations (national identity, characteristics) are all about crafting and illusion of us/them, serve the rulers and divide the people...

Do not ever fall into the trap of thinking that YOUR Government is BETTER or WORSE than any other.... all are utterly corrupt. Every Government has hired, and directed KILLERS, be they assasins, mercenaries or serving military, to KILL others to protect their Interests.

Every Government TAKES wealth from people that properly belongs to people, and concentrates that wealth in the hands of a few.

Every Government forces all the children of the people into Education, which is merely indoctrination dressed up as learning. The Children of the Elites get their own schools. And a different learning experience.

Time to get real, folks and to drop all that does not truely serve us, even if it exposes us to an unknowable future - the known of our future at present is the sum of the depredation, degradation and insanity of our consumer war mongering culture, and well worth losing. Indeed it is an appallingly gross insult to the great gift that life truely is.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe