As We Struggle to Make Sense

Current events of American police shooting innocent black men, terrorists shooting police in return, an automatic weapon at Pulse Orlando, gun manufacturer profits soaring, a juggernaut truck in Nice, a military coup raining gunfire on Turkish citizens, a US air strike raining bombs on Syrian citizens, protesters blocking Atlanta’s streets sprawling out the old south slavery up the Mississippi into the RNC in Cleveland electing a sewerage leak of vitriol and trumpery over facts, research, or policy.  The spew smelled of fascism’s paw rising from the zombie muck in a festival for a sociopath demagogue squawking cognitive dissonance and the marketing prowess of the ego.

So many people are asking why; what is going on in the world?  I am just one person trying to make sense of it too.  I don’t know, but this is what I think it might be.

The planet is underpriced in the global laisse faire capitalist system the Wall Street one party system represents.  Water, forests, oil, aggregable soil, and the time to replenish their unsustainable depletion since the dawn of the industrial revolution are approaching breaking points given global temperature rise due to trapped solar radiation caused by carbon emissions.  The ice caps are providing temporary homeostasis to stem the arc of the degree increase, but with it a time limit of ocean rise and heat before inability of the planet brings massive death.  Water should not be priced at the cost to get the second to last drop out of Lake Mead, but the price to get the one after the last.  Where is water stress highest: Northern China, India, Iran, and the Western United States.

How is this connected?  The modern economic system was founded on imperialism and the exploitation of indigenous populations and people of color to extract natural resources and labor at as cheap a price as possible to hoard pecuniary profit in banks.  The capital of the planet: that the Earth’s water or aggregable soil is finite has never been accounted for in the system.  

Banks control the money supply.  The governments of our planet are puppets based on the fiscal prowess of these firms.  The firms profit from public debt and thus war.  Firms in the last century have put unprecedented money in banks based on selling natural resources that took millions of years to create: the elements in a cell phone, the oil in a gas tank, the water to grow a CAFO lot, the trees to build a subdivision.  The system encourages us to harvest resources future generations will need in order to overproduce to make a stock price go up to meet quarterly market expectations and put money in banks now to meet a bonus calculation.  The people that politicians like Trump and Clinton represent create a false war of social ideology to both distract and control the masses to create this profit which is more difficult to mask in the age of the hive mind internet.

Fundamentalism most often marketed through religion acts like a glue of mutual belief in that which does not require factual or empirical substantiation.  This bond allows group think and cohesion into the five pillars of the Koran or the Ten Commandments of the Bible.  The texts are arbitrary mental devices mandating stamps of fundamentalism to prevent questioning that morality and security can exist in the absence of specified theism.  How could a follower retain what she or he is most genuinely attracted, the order over chaos in the bond and the solidity of core common moral behaviors in reliable predictable group social patterns?

The evidence to inject validity of the bond through stories of Muhammad or Jesus, tribe or Abraham, Jerusalem or Mecca, these are, even if substantially based in teleological historical evidential matter, each unnecessary.  The preponderance of humanity does not follow the ideology of any one religion.  Inside any one religion are multiple iterated variations speculating interpretation and with each consequences for the adherence and lack of adherence to slivers of each fundamentalist slice of spiritual reality.  Wars are fought over the superiority of these slices. 

Humans must face the European imprint of a vanilla Jesus over a chocolate socialist Jesus reality, the social control of the Bible put into the hands of Uncle Tom and the awakening of Malcolm Little using the Koran to unshackle the Bible for recognition of Africans as the original progenitors of humanity.  Cognitive dissonance produces malignant lies to deny our interconnection and evolutionary creation through natural selection.  Until the color of a man’s skin is no more pertinent than the color of his eyes or an idea of faith is no longer permitted to trump human dignity we obstruct our survival. 

The common gap in follower’s fundamentalism is absolving non-followers from perdition for non-adherence to the idiosyncratic staked ground of specific religious doctrine as long as the underlying moral application of kindness, tolerance, love, and recognition of each being as sacred is maintained.  It is in the common fear of the group ostracizing the individual in acts of violence, capriciousness, hatred, and non-recognition of sacred personal stature which is at the base of the human attraction to religion.  The same is true in China or North Korea where the state serves as the religion. 

Thus when we look at the world and see Syria, Turkey, France, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Brazil, Russia, China, India, America, and across the globe we see our species confronting order and chaos by assessing this escalation of commitment to safety to adherence to atavistic fundamentalist ideologies in the age of the internet pulling the curtain back on Oz.  We see our planet given global temperature rise and population growth threatening our extinction.  We are approaching the true test of our spirituality: will we change who the wizard of Oz really is (the economic system we have agreed to use to obtain order) or will we redesign one based on sharing more than we do?  Will we change? 

We are herd animals cognizant of safety in numbers and death in being made pariah.  The human mind as a social animal will sacrifice logic to presuppose a set of mutually agreed upon improvable social behaviors connoting order to reduce the risk of being expunged from the herd and having to fend alone.  This in part is why secularism is the most unfavorable trait in the pantheon of major candidate political identifiers in the United States and other fundamentalist countries. 

A common worship of a derivation of god is preferable to the grand revelation that god does not exist or that god need not exist to obtain morality or social order or that most dangerous of ideas that the theistic god worshiped has been an escalation of commitment earning not credits with a heavenly bank, but merely a social check on one’s fellow humans independent of divine providence. The idea of god can exist and be good without fundamentalism.  

Survival does not require abandonment of the idea of god, but of the pernicious fundamentalism born from religious social control put on top of the idea of god. Religion can continue to exist if adapted.  Survival does not require all or the majority of humans to agree on defining the idea of god, but it does on relinquishing the grip of fundamentalist mandates on global governance systems to acknowledge and cease the fundamentalist subconscious lust for the end of human civilization to entice any mass entrance into heaven for those adhering to ancient texts.  

This lust is evidenced in terrorism inside militant Islam and the anti-choice abortion movement inside Christianity.  The terrorist attempts to annihilate secularism for a Caliphate.  The anti-choicer attempts to act as a scion of god supplying words without tangible action for the fetus up until the point of birth and then nothing post birth.  The anti-choicer’s lustful obsession over birth and death is perverted in a crucible of the unknown intermixing the concepts of heaven and hell.  The anti-choicer and the terrorist participate in a form of prayer as a lobby for the ego’s entrance into paradise.  The ultimate theistic interpretation of order is heaven and of chaos is hell.   

So when we ask ourselves where does systematic racism against black people in America come from, or homophobia, or misogyny, or what is at the root of the violence of ISIS, al-Qa’ida, the Tailiban, or the American iteration in Dylann Roof or the forces hissing from the voting pits of the RNC or the quicker twitch in the trigger finger of a Miami police officer who answers “I don’t know why I shot you” to a black man with his hands up back on the ground attempting to save the life an autistic man, at the root of it is fear about chaos and order and what order means depending on the false mental crutches taught to a human being based on his or her social environment. 

With the police as a representative of government, the herd is taught to understand police produce order and criminals produce chaos.  A police officer shooting Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, or beating Rodney King can only produce order.  The context or in depth analysis of protocol where this is not the case is subject to unparalleled herd scrutiny even in the advent of video evidence.  The same is true of white supremacy in global societal construction imprinted in so many of these acts.  The human thirst for order over chaos abjures justice. 

The economic system has to shift towards a coordinated global tax on capital amongst the nations of the planet used to properly price the Earth’s natural resources with the goal of meeting the base species needs of water, housing, healthcare, clothing, energy, and food while redesigning the market sectors to funnel public ownership or management of the systems meeting those needs in sustainable paradigms maximizing on technological advances betting on Gordon Moore’s law rather than Adam Smith’s. This is an adaptation of capitalism into democratic socialism, not its abandonment.  This is not communism, but the re-engineering of what involves base social survival needs of a mandatory nature and what does not inside the global economic system in private / public coordination that accounts for the planet as capital of our species and not an asset owned by firms.   Included in this shift is a valuation on love, empathy, and understanding that our basic spiritual interconnection precedes any ancient text.  Those imperfect texts must be interpreted for their core of love rather than the fundamentalist striations which are threatening our extinction.

We already know this and the vast majority of us agree.  This is not an us and them; there is no them.  This is how does an individual alter what feels to be a gigantic intransigent machine perpetually pumping smoke to obstruct the survival instinct of those protesting in our hearts and in our streets in the face of this monstrosity we have created to feel order because we do not trust our fellow humans to choose love over fear.  How do we do this to avoid extinction? 

In short that is what I think is happening.  Whether most will chose to process or analyze the details in this way that is up to each of us.  When you hear chants of USA, USA or a prayer to specified Jesus at the head of a convention of a major party in a country with legal separation of church and state and you think of the pairing of Christian theism with nationalism in the 1950’s under Eisenhower compared to how America was actually founded, when you look at Saddam Hussein’s gangster tyrant role keeping fundamentalist forces in check and how complicated the battle between order and chaos, the either-or of it all, really is, the only path out is to obliterate the ignorance that caused its implementation and create modern systems of digital order that do not rely on such false ground. 

Through technology maybe one day verified digital voting will be possible including biometric validation that will allow one person one vote on either an actual or proxy advisory basis to our representatives on all or significant forms of legislation.  The world can change, but not without understanding that we exist to be conscious of our interconnection.  The pains and traumas we feel in our hearts are there to balance with the empathy and love of others in the countless hidden wounds in every human we see.  We are all afraid.  We have all been hurt in our silent sorrows wanting to be seen by and to see other people in the divine beings of our planet.  We are meant to balance in love.

When we breathe a breath, bite of plant, or sip of water we are imbibing the collective universe which we are part.  In the clarity of such fundamental acts, this should be our fundamentalism.  We are to witness each other.  We are to witness interdependence with our planet.  Only in this will we shed the layers of distraction we have compiled and truly address the precipice of our extinction.