Čitajte na srpskom
This essay is perhaps best introduced as describing where you WILL NOT find leadership (in a state of corporate sociopathy.) It is in an American historical context with superimposed Native American derived story-telling format; where interrelated metadata is strung together in such a way as to challenge the American expression of the Western cultural assumptions. It will be best understood by (and deliberately presents a challenge to) those fairly competent in the American historical & social context. However this essay might also be of interest to those international readers wishing to explore any of several aspects of the American character development (and state of decline), especially this essay should be of particular interest to Serbia, considering the out-sized role the USA is presently playing in Serbian history –
On the politics of ‘hope’
“Hope springs eternal” is a cynicism in folk proverb form. Interestingly, in this reporter’s experience, this cynicism has been employed by persons ‘working fingers to the bone’ to right the USA ship of state against very long odds. In such regard, the expression can be seen as a self-lampoon, based on principled action; where one’s devotion to pursue what is correct and honorable for the fact of any and all refusal to compromise ethics is at the core structure of one’s personal state. This person, although certainly not alone in such principled endeavor, is the exception, not the rule.
Insofar as another personality type, one that cynically exploits the ‘hope’ of simple, common people, that is the sociopath in what amounts to an intra-social predator-prey relationship, it is the ‘prey’ most needs examining (and to examine) where ‘leadership’ intersects in relation to “Hope.” This thought is predicated on the fact we have arrived at a place of mass manipulation of humanity on a never before seen scale of propaganda, where leaders are manufactured, whether for selling ‘hope’ or for purpose of color revolution (exploiting hope) inter alia.
“The tremendous expansion of communications in the United States has given this Nation the world’s most penetrating and effective apparatus for the transmission of ideas. Every resident is constantly exposed to the impact of our vast network of communications which reach every corner of the country, no matter how remote or isolated. Words hammer continually at the eyes and ears of America. The United States has become a small room in which a single whisper is magnified thousands of times” -Edward Bernays, ‘The Engineering of Consent’
From Johannes Guttenberg to Marconi to Microsoft Explorer, in just under 600 years, referencing ability to manipulate via a human trait the atheist Richard Dawkins has attempted to explain away as ‘memes’ (a phenomenal order of information sharing that cannot be separated from the human spirit), the sociopaths’ tools to manipulate have increased in power exponentially.
The most common ‘hope’ (of common people) is a misnomer; it should be better expressed as ‘desire’ that is neither particularly pecuniary nor malignant. It is the desire to have a simple, uncomplicated and meaningful life where one works and is rewarded with a sense of security; within which there should be many small satisfactions that is antithesis of personal empire or the many complications that come with reaching beyond the walls of one’s home and borders of one’s community. This hypothetical person had been (in the modern Western mythology) described as the ‘salt of the earth’ or it could be said the farmer, the miller, the baker, the shopkeeper… all respected in small neighborhood with few to none aspiring to affairs of state or sitting in any senate.
Then, the ‘dark side’ of literacy manifest; like a cosmos of demonic control where ‘freedom’ insists a libertine (not libertarian) corporate neo-feudalism push the little peoples’ face into consumerism until spirit suffocates and all that is sensible becomes beyond reach.
It begins with allure and infatuation; the idea “progress” is the inevitable state of humanity, and thus common people are sucked into the machine of mass media where they become consequent debt slaves in actuality, having taken the bait of self-improvement to one’s lot.
Perhaps the most cynical example in history is the USA’s freed Blacks persuaded to give up 40 acres and a mule to migrate North and work in a factory where, in a short, subsequent generation or two, capital abandoned those very factories and abandoned these people, with no marketable skill, and self-sufficiency (personal sovereignty) was reduced to a mere memory.
It was only a short time preceding this event the market crash of 1857 had upended the lives of countless American Whites who’d bought ‘the dream’ and their ‘hope’ seen reduced to ashes of failure other than to accelerate the economically displaced into involuntary props of “Manifest Destiny.” This underlying foundation of “American Exceptionalism” (American empire’s “American Exceptionalism” is a global clone of “Manifest Destiny” or the overrunning of indigenous nations) is where a meme of ‘hope’ inspired by despair, mis-nomered ‘The Great Awakening’ in a societal self-deceit, was last seen in the Christian ‘revivals’ sweeping soon to be defeated Confederate armies in the throes of civil war; a harbinger of what could easily come on a global scale.
Averaging something like seventy & some years, from the American Revolutionary War & crash, to crash reprise & the American Civil War, to the 1929 crash & World War Two (American history cannot ‘own’ WWI), to impending crash and expanding wars to save 21st Century empire, there is yet to be seen a true generation of ‘little people’ allowed fulfillment of any promise surrounding a ‘pursuit of happiness.’ In the end, all wealth, practically everything, is conscripted to the benefit (profit) of corporate warmongers, repeatedly.
The opportunities for poisoning the populace via inventions of Guttenberg, Marconi and Microsoft cannot be counted but they can be quantified in a sense of social; simple people desiring only honest opportunity at uncomplicated pursuit of happiness are morphed, via imposed artificial expectations that are in turn exploited for fact of inevitable false result (predicated upon lies) into debt slaves with all of the associated implications, in circumstance where simple, gullible citizens become instinctively fearful for their future and many of these become numb or worse: the violently angry cynic. Behold the ‘revival’ embodied in the political persona of Trump and whatever will become of the liberal progressive movement repeatedly poisoned by the likes of Barack Obama’s ‘hope’, ‘the burn’ of Sanders and the coming politically correct demands (self-deceits) of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the two main camps (and several sub-camps) having been manipulated to point of a second American civil war.
The American red states’ conservatives are being driven to a deep (superstitious) conservatism of a distant past due to a real fear of a ‘liberal’ cultural revolution being imposed upon them, the blue states’ liberals are becoming radicalized (into intolerant ‘woke’) because they perceive a revanchist conservatism threat imposing what they consider are archaic social values on themselves in turn. No matter which side prevails, the police state wins (until it all finally and overwhelmingly tears itself apart.)
“The tyrant, to hold onto his power, suppresses every superior thinker, does away with good men, forbids knowledge & enlightenment, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them in perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in meetings, spreads dissension & slanders among the citizens and thereby morally impoverishes them, and is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied & impose on them permanent need of a supreme leader” -Aristotle
The ‘discovery’ of Dawkins’ (memes) had long been known already in human observation; and shortly (repeatedly) poisoned by Guttenberg’s invention, example given, the American Generals Lee & Jackson cynical manipulation of the religious tract for morale purpose (spurring on a false spirit or ‘great awakening’) in doomed armies that served little more than to ‘convert’ the Southern soldiers of the USA into a ‘Bible believing’ embittered and bigoted post-bellum social atmosphere that became the Klu Klux Klan’s southern states.
If Western Christianity has been historically used to manipulate, there is small contrast when ‘The Enlightenment’ had served little more than to ensnare the common man in a self-deluded trap of personal freedom underwritten by fraud from its’ inception; no different to the farmer cannot be freed from rain, the miller cannot free himself from the farmer, the baker cannot be freed from the miller nor can the cottage industries’ shopkeepers be freed from the baker. Every living person in the Western culture imagining oneself independent (having failed consideration of these preceding) is exercising nothing more than what had been described in another 2,500 years past observation:
“Their judgment was based more upon blind wishing than upon any sound pre-vision; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they prefer not to examine” -Thucydides
Leadership in time of crisis should not underestimate the evil ‘advancing’ humanity has subjected itself to. To be ‘disillusioned’ should be synonymous to disabused of false notions of ‘hope’ when looking forward to what is possible. The structure humankind has erected, particularly those adopting the Western model, is far removed from realistic understanding of what it means to depend on the rain. When the burden of this structure has reached point of crushing the shopkeeper, and one looks only to discover the shopkeepers support structure (farmer-miller-baker) is gone missing, in circumstance where the communities farmers, millers and bakers are fast becoming relics of memory, intelligent dismantlement of what amounts to a tangible lie should be a radical focus (prior to collapse.) Without the spine of the community kept intact, and one cannot count on Bayer AG, Syngenta & DowDuPont to safeguard any one community’s economic sovereignty, let alone any nation-state’s national food security, there is no spine because multinational corporations are not a backbone, rather these resemble an exoskeleton.
Real leaders cannot be liars, they do not manipulate the common citizenry away from a healthy community interest and they do not conceal the reality. Religion does these things, whether the religions of science and the Enlightenment or, the Emperor of Rome’s religion of politics shaping Christianity into an instrument of state where the wisdom of the Christian culture’s historical Jesus is buried by the inventions of Paul drawn from Greek paganism, or more properly, the blood sacrifice ‘mystery religions’ of that era. Jesus cannot save you but given attention, his authentic teachings (e.g. The Sermon on the Mount) can point people to saving themselves.
Lastly, leadership in time of crisis is not to be drawn from the model that produced the crisis, that is a model of corporate sociopathy. If there is a true spirit will manifest in the so-called ‘age of liberty’ that had become the sociopaths’ media playground, it must be organic spirit fostering organic intelligence along the lines of a Native American proverb:
“Spirit puts it into the mind of a man, to know what to do”
Disabusing the people of ‘hope’, real leadership will send Microsoft Explorer to hell when pointing community to intelligent dismantlement of corporate structures in process of return to self-sufficiency; where endeavors beyond a community backbone of rain-farmer-miller-baker-shopkeeper are ultimately unsustainable, particularly those foolhardy ‘pie-in-the-sky’ endeavors of corporate consumerism that suffocate the spirit of a people in process of dismantling the spine of a community.
Ronald Thomas West 