Sunday Sermon – Taste the Poison!

Behold the Poison!

[Audio Recording – 12:10 – Text Below]

Fascinatingly, I have picked up as a subscriber a wealth coach. Welcome Trevor! (And I say that genuinely, you are truly welcome here! As are all kind humans who share opinions that are extremely divergent from my own. I love opinions!)

Behold the Poison!

Once upon a time I was a massive consumer of “the news.” I used to work hard to avoid narrative programming and preserve my independent thought by exposing myself to as many opposing presentations of “the story” as I could stomach. I kept my eyes open to the grim horrors humanity perpetrates upon itself. And I observed all the nice hats we place jauntily atop our atrocities (“Spreading Democracy!” “Preserving Freedom!” “Fighting Terrorism!”) to distract from the real underlying cause – Greed and Fear driving the (at this point optional) Conflict over Scarce Resources.

It’s a unique experience of agony, one I wish all of us would experience. As human animals, it is right for us to truly see and acknowledge the vile cruelty of our kind. And we must also comprehend and accept how each of us personally benefits from the savage horrors visited upon our brothers and sisters. Our civilization generates massive doses of toxins. We are largely unaware of this, because we efficiently distribute this poison to places we don’t care about and the alien “people” who live there.

The terrible tragedy of this poison is that it is a direct bi-product of a society’s “success.” It comes from a civilization’s capacity to rip natural resources out of the land (ideally someone else’s) and then apply the tiniest pinch of human effort to harness the incomprehensible energy locked within those resources. All the “contributing” members of society work in collaboration to focus this ungodly concentrated energy into making stuff, which we then sell to all the other “contributing” members of society. Thus is born the Consumer Economy.

What Is the Poison?

We must acknowledge this –

• Wealth represents nothing more than The Capacity for Excess Consumption
• Excess consumption requires Excess Scarce Resources
• This requirement for excess scarce resources drives Conflict over Scarce Resources

Then four factors work together in grim harmony –

• The Conflict over Scarce Resources
• The Extraction of Scarce Resources
  • (preferrably from Somewhere Else)
• The Processing of Scarce Resources
  • (which happens, again, Somewhere Else)
• And the Disposal of
  • both
    • The Bi-products of Processing
  • and
    • THE VERY CONSUMER PRODUCTS CREATED BY THIS CYCLE
      • (which are, of course, fashioned for temporary, even momentary use)

IS THE POISON

And thus, it is the most “successful” societies that excrete the vast and most concentrated bulk of this toxin. Which we then of course shunt off upon those societies producing the least of it. The “unsuccessful” ones. And we drown them in it.

[This, by the way, is where “terrorism” comes from].

Behold the Poison!

A Uniquely Human Trait

Of course, it is counter-productive for a consumer society to acknowledge this. Fortunately, the human animal has developed an effective cognitive ability to not observe this simple and painfully obvious reality. The capacity has been honed through hundreds of thousands of years of homonin evolution. This blindness is a survival trait that has kept us alive long after we developed enough consciousness to realize the true horror of existence in the savage battle for survival, waged even against the members of one’s own species. This vicious struggle has represented all life on this planet for billions of years.

The Greatest Tragedy of All Human History

For human animals, the necessity of this battle against our own kind ended sometime in the 20th Century. We finally arrived. The march of our technological advance had miraculously brought us to a place that represented the dream of EVERY HUMAN BEING WHO HAS EVER COME BEFORE US – The place where we no longer had to kill each other just to secure the resources necessary for our survival.

And even better, we had wealth beyond this measure. We could live lives of relative ease and leisure, and explore the pursuits that fascinated our minds and realized our unique individual human potentials. Unfortunately, we were all too busy pushing the wheel at the time, and it wasn’t in the interest of the few riding comfortably on the axle to draw it to our attention. So we have kept right on pushing until we got to where we are today – PEAK EVERYTHING. It’s all downhill from here].

Our Capacity for Blindness

Back to this default misunderstanding of our existence. I believe that our ability to put nice hats on our savagery has been essential to our survival as a species ever since we achieved consciousness. Without it, we would have fallen into existential despair and failed to thrive. Thus, everything that is, is exactly as it must be. It could never have been any other way.

And so, of course, it takes almost no zero effort for our society to chart the farthest horizons of atrocity our kind has ever explored. I think this adventure in self-deception has culminated in the single, most tragicomical, oxymoronic abomination that our species has ever fabricated.

The “War on Terror”

The point is this – Those who celebrate wealth and the consumer economy, in the same breath extoll the virtues of war and terror.

Well, you can either see it or you can’t, and I’m not here to convince anyone of anything, and I have no interest in arguing about it. As Upton Sinclair astutely observed –

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it

Upton Sinclair – “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked” – 1934

Behold the Poison!

The Bitter

There are two portions to this Preachy Variety Act. In the first portion I am just a witness, a documentarian cataloging our species’ final death throes of self-inflicted destruction, and trying to offer an explanation for the mechanisms that drive it. Consider me a poor man’s Gibbon somehow living through the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I do not even imagine that I could do anything to stop it. And of course it could be no other way.

But for those who will see it, we must accept that the poison is ours. And it is ours to drink. There are so few who can see it. Even fewer acknowledge it. And fewer still will try to taste that bitter poison, metaphorically, by steeping their psyche in its reality. But it is right to taste our poison. I wish everyone would.

But the poison is still poison. It is concentrated death and destruction. If every one of us gave it one good solid pull and forced it down, I don’t think we would never be able to live our individual lives the same way. So, taste it you must.

But that’s just the first part of the sermon. The second part is this –

Those Who Drink the Poison

Some steep their psyche’s too long in the poison. Everyday they gulp it down to vomit it back upon the sleepwalkers around them, trying to offer them a taste of their portion. They do it because their hearts command it – it’s the penance they try to pay while enduring a living nightmare. They are fully conscious in a world of contented zombie sleepwalkers feeding on the suffering of otherized children, the otherized poor. It comes at a dire cost, with essentially no reward.

I have the deepest love, admiration, and gratitude for these humans, and I wish more were willing to fight the battle against illusion, that more could face the darkness and awaken. I have a small idea of the suffering the poison drinkers experience. My heart breaks for the horror. I once drank the poison everyday, and tried to retch it back on those Sleepwalkers around me. But I couldn’t sustain it. I don’t believe anyone can, indefinitely.

Taste the Poison! But Please Don’t Drown In It!

Here’s the thing – all we need is to taste the poison. And taste it often enough that it never completely evaporates from our consciousness. We must taste it often enough that we can hear the command – “You Must Change Your Life!”

This is essential to the Realist Perspective.

But that is all. Because, tragically, I don’t believe that gulping and spewing the poison actually accomplishes anything significant. All it does is give us a sense of balancing out the suffering that our awakened consciousness experiences when continually exposed to the cruel side of life.

Poison does what poison does. It kills. If you want a glimpse at what the poison can do to a truly beautiful, brilliant, and awakened mind, try listening to the Shittown podcast sometime.

So I beg of you – Please don’t drown in the poison!

It accomplishes nothing. And there is another side.

Behold the Poison!

The Sweet

The other side is hard to see. We are all trapped in the Matrix and there is a giant digital hallucinatory screen erected between us and our unbelievable good fortune. Wonderfully, the Realist Perspective commands us to see this side of life as well. What’s more, the further we engage ourselves in this side of existence, the less we consume, the less poison we generate, and the less hellfire we summon upon our brothers and sisters.

If you care to explore our unbelievable good fortune more, I discuss it further in Elysium III.

The Daily Stone