One would think that the most important thing on Earth these days would be to always strive to speak the truth … even if we’d tried and failed, for whatever the reasons — we’re only human, after all. But that’s just not the case any longer. Most of us plain don’t like the truth. We don’t argue: we simply ignore that which discomforts us. It’s become a lifestyle; a highly destructive one. We’re scared, angry, very lost, and for good reason: America is collapsing right in front of our eyes — and it’s not coming back. The only question to deliberate is what a new U.S. will look like.
by Donald Croft Brickner
If the world’s media — all of it, everywhere — is disinclined to discuss where the immediate and near future is taking us, based on in-our-faces symptoms (and most journalists don’t appear particularly observant), you and I can do it instead: We can talk about all of the prospective changes facing us, right here, right now.
Enough of our bell-clanging cultural neuroses, already. In actuality, the media’s as terrified as the rest of us about what appears to be economic Armageddon and climatic disasters insistently hovering just over the horizon.
Never mind that almost everything else going to hell in an iPod.
Being afraid isn’t at issue — not when the issues are so genuinely terrifying. But denial has taken such hold in virtually every arena of human activity at this point, we’ve become like deer frozen in the headlights. Worse, we’re merely in the early beginnings of the first of three culturally transformational stages, where just about everybody will end up on the same figurative playing surface, economically and emotionally.
We’re not sure about what we can do about it, either, and so we take the action we most often take when facing whatever-will-become-of-us circumstances such as these: little (of merit), or nothing.
Some of us even opt to sneer. Tough guys.
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These essays have always been designed to spark discussion on some seriously serious topics. The theories, proposals and instincts offered here are pretty good ones, but they’ve never been intended as some kind of final word — even if they largely turn out to be correct. No one wants to be the final source about anything.
We need to talk and to listen to one another again — and to do so with the mutual intention of getting all the “its” right. That requires a willingness to admit we’re wrong, too, when we are, which these days very few of us are willing to concede. That absolutely has to change. Consider such an admission one of pre-humility.
Egocentric pride must go away. If the train of obsolescence leaves without it, we will likely find ourselves facing chaos, even anarchy — and these times will better us under such a scenario … and by a heart-wrenching, pitiful, even soul-crushing margin.
Let’s not go there. Dump the bleeping hubris.
What’s yet to come cannot be headed off at the pass — it’s already stormed past the pass — but it’s coming at us with a significant pliability. We can soften up to, say, 50 percent of its impact. Just keep in mind the remaining 50 percent is killer.
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The “comfortable” are standing on the threshold of having their heads handed back to them on platters — and, as stated previously (all related essays may be perused online at The Radical Academy, http://radicalacademy.com/studentrefphil24dcb.htm), the time to hold such give-and-take is now.
NOW.
Showtime’s come and gone. The curtain opened more than a year ago.
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Among a litany of predictions I’ve made this year that remain right on target as of this writing (late September, 2008), I stated that 2008 would prove to be the year when the truth would begin to be spoken here in America — and so it has, sort of.
Just not anywhere near the gasps-inducing length and breadth of Truth’s entirety. The operative word there was “begin.” The undertaking of truth telling — which needn’t always involve words — requires an elephantine effort, incorporating both psychological health and valid worldview(s), and it simply can’t kick in over the course of a single year.
Usually, major historic shifts in belief systems — like embracing the truth, which is predominantly (if ironically) silent in orientation — take several centuries, in fact, if not millenniums to unfold.
Silent? The single most significant contributor toward our embracing ignorance, insulation and falsehoods — the three greatest enablers of truth dodging, which is the black hole mirror opposite of truth embracing — is silence by intention. More on those three enablers, to follow — particularly the notion of safety-by-insulation. It alone is killing us as deftly and blind-sidedly as carbon monoxide poisoning.
Regardless, this time around — again, as proposed in previous essays — it will all take a mere four to six years to begin and end. And that remarkable brief period of time is going to be so filled with bewildering and overtly biting distractions, that no course in truth telling need bother be conceived, much less implemented.
Globally, the majority of us will begin to speak the truth if for no other reason than because our ongoing survival as a humanity is flat-out going to depend on it.
Harsh much? You bet. But none of this is an accident and most of us will survive.
One might back such a prediction with the words, “you can take that to the bank.” Yet even now, those words seem comical, as if they’re referring to a distant past.
America has already changed that much in less than one year.
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On Myspace this day, an ad is running asking people to buy a product (it’s electronic, apparently, although that doesn’t matter) which claims will help them tap into their “higher consciousness(es).”
Countless people believe there’s never been a better time than now to tap into one’s higher consciousness (granting the latter’s existence, as conceived and delineated, whether down the road it proves to be accurate or not). Their argument certainly sounds apt, but it’s not the truth — not at this moment in time.
There is a time and a place for everything (unto Heaven). If one first seeks higher consciousness with foam-mouthed barbarians at the doorstep, all they’re doing is seeking escape. It doesn’t matter if higher consciousness has merit conceptually.
Only direct action is appropriate while people’s homes are being taken away, they’re struggling to afford to pay for housing, food, gas or the rest of their bills — or, say, a family member flips out and goes misanthrope. There’ll be a lot of that.
The last thing anyone wants to do in these times is to go Nero, and fiddle away while Rome burns.
And that segues directly into the topic of insulation.
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There are always ruinous consequences headed one’s way when embracing ignorance, insulation and falsehoods. Some consequences take longer to arrive than others, but arrive they will.
Now, the ignorance and falsehoods parts, mentioned here, have been discussed at some length in all kinds of venues these days — not that it’s done very much to stem hate, rage and denial — and so neither will be focused upon here very much (everyone kind of gets the idea). Suffice to say, though, they’re both foundational symptoms of two contemporary ills, finger pointing and prejudice. And so on.
Insulation, which we’ll turn to next, is mostly about delusion and escape.
These are all psychological issues, in any event — manifesting as symptoms and the umbrellas under which related symptoms flourish. Greed, as we’ll soon see, is both a symptom and an umbrella under which other symptoms, what — preen.
Shocking though it is, healthy psychology is rarely sought in these times, much less practiced. After all, who needs healthy psychology when there are drugs and weapons to be had, both of them far more casually, and immediately?
And on this convoluted topic alone, truth has been missing in action for way, way too long. You know why? It’s seldom discussed — it’s been determinedly ignored.
Healthy psychology, which has almost nothing to do with misfiring synapses and everything to do with our wayward emotions, has been consciously ignored by the American culture since the mid-1980s, when personal responsibility gave way to a popularized victimhood via our random universe, genetics, and easier (though far less useful) alternate psychological escape routes (pick an addiction).
Put more simply: America isn’t just psychologically unhealthy during these times. It has no play book or mutually agreed upon guidelines upon which to correct its ills.
There are some terrific psychological tests that will tell you what’s wrong with you, right down to all of the correct predictive outcomes. What doesn’t exist is any meaningful therapy that will either prevent or correct these ugly behaviors.
Our nation has become a figurative psychological swamp, full of plague-bearing mosquitoes with us having no realistic means of achieving ecological restitution.
The only cure possible now is forced humility. And that’s what these next four to six years are going to bring us.
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It’s important to understand what part insulation-as-syndrome plays in all of this — because as a symptom, it’s sailed by the brunt of us almost entirely undiagnosed.
If we cease seeking “safety havens” (we won’t), the yet-manageable 50 percent of the hard times that are coming still will not be diminished, even if insulation is recognized and understood. We aren’t a very courageous people any longer. All we really know how to do (after we stop barking) is to run away — except when we adopt the behavior of an international bully. Bullies aren’t strong, even though they believe they are (falsehood) — it’s a lesson almost everyone learns back in grade school, including a lot of the bullies themselves. But we’ve failed to carry that learning over into our adulthoods, and in that respect, we’re now paying for it.
Examples of insulation may include: every university and seminary campus, everywhere; every house of religion; every TV network and newspaper; every federal, state and municipal institution; every corporation; every small town off the beaten path … — or, in other words, any location that, at first glance, seems to be “safer,” and therefore more perceptively practical and accurate (falsehood), than someplace else.
This next point is critical: almost every single decision, along with the criteria for that decision, is made within a contemporary framework of insulation — and that’s why so many endless mistakes in real world perception and diagnoses are made.
Greed is generally seen as the psychological aberrance behind what’s happened to our economy — and we’ve said as much previously, citing a failure to embrace healthy psychology and a tenable world view as primary causalities.
But why (in broad strokes terms) didn’t Wall Street, which has had to deal with every variation on the theme of greed for a couple of centuries now, begin to foresee the calamity now threatening to destroy it well in advance of its arrival?
Yes, yes — its proponents were in denial. But greed and denial both “live” and energize someplace — and it’s been from within the insulated walls of Wall Street that greed has always festered. Denial “merely” saw to it that it remained hidden.
Had its honchos lived and worked outside on Wall Street, AIG might have seen the “credit crunch” coming. Who knows, maybe a homeless person might have sauntered by and clued them all in.
Credit crunch. Oh, how we like to tone down our jargon in the face of disaster.
Unlike weather broadcasters or enlisted men on the bridge of a destroyer, Wall Streeters, university professors and network news heads don’t have any access to figurative radar readings within their enclaves. So while they pretend (even among themselves) that they don’t guess about what’s going on in the real world — in retrospect, all of that will one day be reinterpreted as preposterous bravado — guessing, and guessing badly, is mostly, in fact, what they do.
Insulated settings rarely reflect the doing-its-own-thing world outside their doors.
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While inclination, a specialized insight and education are very big foundations backing what I strive to do whenever I script an essay, I’m mostly only able to make the accurate predictions I do because I don’t live in an insulated setting (try though I might still to acquire one). I can’t emphasize enough that the freedoms of thought and observation I’ve come to enjoy and appreciate exist in large part because I don’t draw a paycheck for my work.
Hooray. I think.
This, as an aside: Whatever the source of energy that prompts my determination to keep voicing social critiques, trust me — I don’t channel this stuff (probably).
After some 20 years of living (and far too often unnecessarily struggling) out here in the field, it’s my opinion that grasping meaningful Truth requires — demands — first-hand experience. If you really wish to understand the truth of Galveston’s losses, you need to go there, and take it all in.
Empathy for our neighbors is going to help carry the day for all of us in the years ahead. So it couldn’t hurt to begin practicing.
If you want to know what’s going on, just open the door; step outside. Be there.
It’s a little too late now to correct decades of insulative blindness — but it’s never, never too late to begin anew.
Best to do that as a preventative measure, anyway, rather than being forced to continuously react to shudders of cascading catastrophe.
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