y first instinct is to tell you this has nothing to do
with current events, politics or religion, but in fact it
has everything to do with all three.
My second instinct is to say the most important principle
in human politics is separation of church and state — not to
prevent the timeless and proven principles of all religions
from benefiting humanity, but simply to preclude the
bickering and misunderstanding over terminology that diverts
all arguments about what will enable the human race to
survive its own nasty habits into frivolous sectarian
hairsplitting.
As a species, we are on the brink of a passage toward a
new way of living, of existing, of organizing human society
on our planet. The old way has failed, demonstrably. Power
accrued to the hands of a greedy few does not result in
trickle-down benificence, as the inbred rich continue to
insist. And we have no knowledge that a genuine democracy
could achieve a greater degree of justice because no actual
democracy has ever been in place. But we do know that the
old system produces endless wars and toxic graveyards, so
wouldn't it be worth at least a try to attempt genuine
democracy just once.
Humans are unable to resist material corruption; everyone
has a price beyond which their morality fails. We have, by
and large, abandoned the exhortations of Jesus to love our
neighbors in favor of the bogus belief that money can
immunize us from mortality.
Can we devise new mechanisms to mentally vaccinate our
minds against the temptation of corruption on a social
level? As the human species races toward a future of
uncertain outcome, these mechanisms must doubtless center on
the nature of money. Rather than continue on our present
course toward a more definitive master/slave society in
which military force is the defining commodity, we need to
find a way to amplify the psychological priority of morality
and correspondingly lessen the attraction of first-person
greed.
I know it sounds like some kind of hare-brained rationale
of Mao Tse Tung (or I guess today that's spelled Mao
Zedong), but can't we rechannel our goals for happiness
toward our relationships with others rather than toys for
ourselves?
It could well be that a merger of banks and churches will
one day evolve into a universal currency based dually on
morality and the welfare of the system in addition to
material worth related solely to survival/comfort of the
individual.
Capitalism has failed because it relies on slums in which
to dump its failed products, as well as an unregulated
fluidity at the top with which to constantly bail us out of
our busted budgets. A socialist system has never failed to
overcome the temptations of privilege and authority, and
tyrannical corruption has always evolved out of noble
intentions for the masses in the administrative processes of
collectivized wealth disbursal.
No system of government ever devised on this planet has
ever truly placed control of its resources in the hands of
its community. Corruption has always prevailed, and quicker
minds have always managed to make off with the loot and let
the masses starve. Real wealth always remains in the hands
of the privileged few. There is no clearer example of how
our religions have failed us. They have all been bought off
by secular authorities in exchange for the state-protected
right to fleece their flocks.
We cannot authentically aspire to real freedom as long as
the money supply remains in the hands of a few rich men. As
long as it does, we have zero power over the events and
processes that control our lives.
Of course, currency is a neutral commodity. It has no
intrinsic value unto itself. It's obvious worth is what it
represents, or the material wealth that it can be traded
for, or converted into.
It may be impossible to attach a moral quotient to money,
because the very act that would link its use to the
consensus precepts of a society trying to be moral would
necessarily place limits on freedom of choice that probably
most of us could not abide.
So in improving the nature of money as a possible way to
creating a more humane and less cutthroat society, we would
probably have to limit our goals to examining the practice
of usury, and then more assisduously identify those who
actually control the money, which will probably be two of
the most difficult and elusive tasks humanity has ever
undertaken.
That glittering technological marvel called Western
Civilization has been built entirely upon usury. Without
capital speculation, no skyscraper would ever have been
constructed. When will the day come, I wonder, when we ask
ourselves this question: Are skyscrapers what we want to
express excellence in our civilization? What good are
skyscrapers? They are dazzling monuments to greed, that
serve no purpose other than impress and inspire those who
are on the path to exploitation and deception at the expense
of others who are merely trying to live their lives.
Could it be that one day we will willingly trade our
skyscrapers and our usury for a system that produces happy,
self-reliant communities of modest means and virtues, rather
than dazzling megalopolises that impress from a distance
because you can't see the bodies of the homeless moldering
and dying in its windswept alleyways?
Then there comes the question of who actually controls
the money supply, and why is it the same people generation
after generation? Why have 34 of America's 43 presidents
descended from Charlemagne, and why is it every election the
masters of finance get to name both alternative candidates?
If you think you live in a free country and possess the
right of free speech, you are sadly mistaken.
Money rules the world. As long it does, we can never
truly rule ourselves.
But money is only a small part of the human transition to
a more humane and functional future. Its kind of like the
quality of motor oil for the collective engine of humanity.
What if riches were really accrued based on the kind of
people we could be, rather than they are now, on the kind of
material and procedural hegemony individuals can exercise on
a given commodity or process? For one thing, this kind of
monetary system would solve all our environmental problems
almost immediately.
And the principal mode of profit during the five thousand
years of organized human society — making war — would
certainly decline.
If I may continue with the engine metaphor .... if money
is the motor oil, then religion is the fuel. The performance
of the engine — humans doing what they need to survive,
prosper and be happy — can be judged by the quality of the
fumes cascading out of humanity's collective tailpipe. In
most cases, it's very toxic.
Not only is it toxic, it's quite likely that it's so
harmful because we are using the wrong fuel to produce it.
I'm not so much talking about food here (although surely the
future will allow us to radically restructure our diets into
something a lot more sensible) as much as I am referring to
the ideas that religion imbues in our minds.
Perhaps the image of the American cowboy is the perfect
contemporary metaphor for human beings (or maybe that's
because I spent much of my early childhood with a plastic
gun and holster strapped to my waist terrorizing
neighborhood grocery stores, all the time clinging to the
little finger of my mother).
With that gun in our hands (a symbol of human potency
merged with technological prowess), we can conquer the
wilderness, subdue scary wild animals, and eliminate those
beings we consider inimical to our own interests,
specifically those indigenous savages whose cultural
upbringing we have deemed to be inferior to our own.
We get these ideas directly from religion, specifically
the Old Testament, in which a wrathful God time and again
urges his faithful followers to wipe out the heinous
infidels simply because they worship other gods, or in many
cases simply did not speak the same language as the person
with the more powerful "gun" (though back in the olden days,
that could have been a lance, or a sword).
But now, in world crowded to the attics with superfluous
souls, the gun-toting cowboy motif just doesn't cut it. The
cowboy must necessarily be replaced. But with what?
Individual rights will never disappear, no matter how
they may be tailored by the perceived requirements of the
state. The principal cornerstone of social life is
individual liberty, the conscious choice of one's own fate.
No matter how crowded this planet gets, that will never
be bred out of us, because it's instinctual. We each possess
our own individual dreamscapes.
No matter now hard the state tries to erase this desire
in individuals, it will not succeed. The recognition that
each human being is a part of a much larger animal
consciousness — call it the Ummah, if you like — must be
voluntary. Otherwise, it is tyranny, and by definition, not
individual freedom.
Yet, this realization will come one day to everyone. It
is written in all the holy books, though by a myriad of
different names. And yet, in one certain, very important
context, religions have steered us in the wrong direction.
Else, otherwise, why all these wars?
Let me explain. I've noticed when I speak with a person
who insists she is religious, the sense of what I am
actually saying can never get through to that other person's
brain, because that other person always interprets my words,
not empirically and taken at face value, but in the context
of her own belief system. Thus, communication is generally
impeded when the receiver of a thought from someone else
translates it into the terminology of her own religious
outlook. As evidenced by the amount of strife in the world,
this usually means mistranslation, misunderstanding and
conflict.
In addition, the tendency of most religions to dangle
some kind of comfortable afterlife concept as a carrot in
front of its potential adherents makes it easier to mobilize
these same lemmings as cannon-fodder in wars of a church's
choice. Heck, if you die, you just go to heaven, or come
back as somebody else. These concepts increase the
propensity for killing, not the other way around, as all the
holy men insist.
To me, these two reasons are stark evidence of the
necessity to separate church and state.
Central to this unfortunate tendency toward confusion and
hard feelings in any society is the role of the dominant
medium of information, which today would be the news media
but in the past would have been the church or the monarch
that had defined the type of society in which the people
lived.
As the needs of the people at large and the aristocracy
that rules would necessarily differ (the latter being the
exploiter who collects and the former being the victims who
pay), so to would the information they impart, and the
perception of their existence, tend to differ.
Example: the peasantry would refer to their masters as
thieves who unjustly steal, and the masters would regard
their serfs as mere zits on the complexion of their
otherwise rosy-cheeked society.) As a result, the measures
taken by those in power unfailingly offend those without
power, and the response of the poor and victimized
undoubtedly produce the same feelings in those who imagine
themselves aristocracy.
I rolled out of bed this morning with the word
"bifurcation" on the tip of my tongue, as I was thinking
about these two divergent trains of thought — the
perspectives of the rich and the poor, the haves and have
nots — within the current context of creeping tyranny that
seems to be about to engulf the entire world. Maybe it was
because I watched too much of the superficial political
celebrations following the results of the Iowa Caucuses on
TV yesterday, too many scenes of forced gaiety by partisans
of many candidates all claiming portentous victory in this
quirky little political ritual.
What has galled me to no end this political season is the
utter and shameful failure of the political opposition to
correctly and courageously define the colossal criminality
of the present administration in Washington, particularly
the failures to notify all Americans that the U.S. is waging
wars and squandering the lives of its own children in
unjustifiable attacks on innocent people in faraway lands.
Worse, and what seems even farther away from happening, is
recognition by the American public that its own leaders
engineered the tragedy known as 9/11 in order to profit from
the frenzied fear these deceitful attacks produced.
"Bifurcation" is the act of splitting something into two
branches. Collective human thought has always been split
into two branches: dominator vs. powerless. What I see now,
and why this word has relevance to me, is that the truth is
not getting through to the people. The picture of the world
that is presented by the news media all over the world is
simply not factually correct. The bifurcation is growing in
the United States, where everything presented over mass
media is predicated not only on an enemy that doesn't even
exist as a separate entity from the government that is
supposedly fighting it. Yet this rationale is presented
daily as the justification for permanent violence and
continuing robbery.
In 21st century America, we are making war on the ghosts
of our own lies, and killing ourselves because of it.
Believe it or not, this clumsy attempt to wrap money,
media, and religion into the same thought has a purpose. The
purpose is to tell you that the bifurcation — this
difference of published perception between ordinary people
and the money masters who manipulate our lives — is about to
destroy the world as we know it.
Think about the major political events of the last 15
years, just for comprehension's sake. In 1990 we staged the
Gulf War after first luring Saddam Hussein, our former ally
and CIA lackey, into invading Kuwait. Washington honchos
actually hired a public relations firm to concoct shocking
stories about the viciousness of Iraq's intentions as a way
to justify our immoral aggression.
The mass media stormed on about how the U.S. was
defending democracy in the Persian Gulf but people with
actual brains realized we were only defending the right of
rich elitists to control more oil.
A couple of years later we had an explosion at the World
Trade Center. It was later revealed, but never widely
publicized — and certainly never widely known among the
American public — that
an FBI informant attempted to stop the actual 1993
explosion, but that his "handlers" allowed the operation to
continue, for the public relations purpose of casting
aspersions on the Arab dupes recruited by the CIA for this
lame plot.
Shortly after that came
Waco,
where almost a hundred people were burned to death in a
Texas farmhouse by the armed forces of our country. Later
stories, read by too few, revealed that a number of those
people had been shot to death. The reasons for such rash
behavior have never been revealed, but people began to think
twice about splinter religious groups.
And then right after that, the
Oklahoma City Federal Building came tumbling down, with
the onus placed on a truck bomb that didn't even knock down
a tree right next to the truck. Yet this obliterated
building and 168 dead was used as a pretext to curtail our
civil liberties and make those hardy individuals who
advocate self-reliance appear as criminals for talking about
personal freedom.
And Oklahoma City, of course, was the test run for
World Trade
Center 2, 3,000 Americans murdered in the heart of our
biggest city, with the dirty deed blamed once again on
dark-skinned foreigners, and the event triggering a massive
war against the whole world as well as the most serious
crackdown on the individual liberties of U.S. citizens in
American history.
Can you see the bifurcation? Can you perceive the
difference between what is actually happening, and the
tailored facts that are presented to us by the predatory
dominators who control our money and our thought processes?
To me, this is the great opportunity of examining the
9/11 question. In realizing that this astonishing tragedy
was engineered by our own leaders, it opens up a window to
see how American foreign policy has always been predatory.
Lies have been crafted as justification for conquest and
plunder, and the American people have smugly bought into
them, all the while preaching freedom and manifest destiny.
It is the same reason we used to slaughter all those
Indians.
Now, I said all that to say this. We are racing toward a
turning point. Events such as the degradation of the
biosphere, the centralization of food production and
prescription drug use, the decay of capitalism, and the
increasingly sophisticated evolution of weapons are all
leading us toward a point of no return, where something
really bad is going to happen that we will not be able to
undo. And it is happening because of this bifurcation in
public perception, where the journalists who profess to be
objective are either unable or unwilling to confess they
have covered up the true facts about so many things that it
is no longer possible to recover any consensually authentic
vision of what is actually happening to us.
We stand now at a momentous fork in the path of human
history. One road, the one we are on, is paved with gold. To
proceed down it means more of the murder, tyranny and
exploitation that have become the hallmarks of the history
of our species. The other path is pure dirt, and, believe it
or not, leads to ourselves, and a renewed understanding and
appreciation of the relationship between ourselves and the
planet that sustains us. The choice is clear: it is either
tyranny or enlightenment. Pick the gold or pick the dirt.
It's the classic devil's bargain.
Norse mythology tells the tale of Ragnarok, in which Loki
the Trickster God, representing ordinary people of ancient
lineage, meets Heimdall the Priest, representing all the
pious and corrupt religions in the world, in a final battle
on the Rainbow Bridge, after which the entire world is
destroyed. Typically, redactions of this myth manhandled
down to us by religious transcribers through the ages have
depicted Loki as the evildoer and Heimdall as the pious
upholder of tradition. Even from the mists of prehistory we
see this deceptive bifurcation of thought, and
misrepresentation of intent in pursuit of profit and power
stifling the innate human quest for self-knowledge.
If we are to avoid our own Ragnarok, whose specter is
imminent in a world besieged by depleted uranium ammunition,
genetically engineered food, and psychosis-producing
medicines, we must perceive the bifurcation — we must see
that what our masters are telling us is meant to kill us,
not enrich us.
We stand on the brink of Armageddon. It's no
exaggeration. Curing the disease of money and recognizing
that the master's information is nothing but sweet poison
are the two main obstacles to what could be a fortunate and
fruitful future for all of us, if we could but recognize and
detoxify those obstacles blocking our path.
Otherwise, one day soon, the two ancient protagonists
will meet, certain in their duty, on that fateful Rainbow
Bridge. Right now the best guess is that the Rainbow Bridge
is located between Jerusalem and Ramallah. And as at
Ragnarok, the spark that will ignite will consume the world
in flame.
John
Kaminski (skylax@comcast.net)
is the author of America's Autopsy Report,
a collection of his Internet essays. The
author derives no income from these web
essays except from the sale of his book.
For information on how to order a copy, or
to make a contribution in support of his
work, go to
http://www.johnkaminski.com/.
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