Lambs to the Slaughter

A different world order is being mooted for us after the coronavirus has been given a good thrashing and sent to bed without any dinner. This one will see us treating the planet in a much kinder, less consuming and materialisitc way. After all, we survived without jumping into our cars to drive 3 blocks for a pizza, so why not carry on with that? And look, the price of gas/petrol has dropped because of the lack of demand; great! Let’s keep that one going.

We have seen how the planet has recovered without the usual human onslaught. Nature soon returns to reclaim the constructed world; wild boar roaming the streets of Venice, dolphins frollicking in the Trevi Fountain, deer strolling along Pall Mall, Godzilla not destroying a Japanese city. After the lockdown is over, will we continue with this? Will we show more restraint to our beleaguered planet, the one that we need for our surviaval? Like hell we will. A few might, but the vast majority will simply do what we were doing before and the poor, old natural world can just go and suck on an exhaust pipe. Come on, admit it; if you have the money, you’ll embark on an orgy of excessive consumption. Spend, spend, SPEND and party like it’s 1999!

So, the cycle will continue and then something else will occur to cull some of the population, because that’s what it comes down to. No matter how many wars we have, or how pandemics or natural disasters thin us out, every second the world has 3 or 4 more mouths to feed and to provide with a car on their 17th birthday. The car might well be electric, but extracting the lithium causes untold damage to the environment and disposing of the big battery after 100,000 miles will sink the planet in an overwhelming morass of yet more toxic waste.

No matter how much we reduce our carbon or lithium footprint, it won’t be enough. It can never be enough as long as the aim of every country in the world is economic growth, becaause economic growth means producing and selling more and more things, the majority of which we simply don’t need.

What can we do? We’re screwed, aren’t we? Yep, unless we do the unthinkable and get rid of money. “What? Are you nutz? How can we possible get rid of money? It’s what makes the world go around, isn’t it? How would we buy things? How…err, what would our jobs be for? What would we get for working? It’s…not, it just cannot happen. It cannot be done!” But could it? Yes, the invention of money a few milennia ago made perfect sense. It alleviated the need to take your 2 cows to market to barter them for 20 sacks of grain. A great idea, yes? Well, up to a point. When it became apparent that everything and everyone now had a monetary value, all it took to assume power was to grab the lion’s share of the money. So, the upper echelons society could now be fabulously privileged and establish themselves as kings and emperors, convincing us of the Great Lie that they were ordained by God to rule over us, which justified them taking control over the land and giving huge tracts of it to the people who would maintain them in their positions of power; the gentry and the clergy, the latter keeping us in our place by propogating the lie that we are not actually equal, that God controls our every action and that He moves in mysterious ways. These ways may be ludicrous and malevolantly violent but we simply must accept them.

Then the small group of French knights came along and invented a system whereby you could get a letter of credit, or a cheque, to cash in when the wealthy pilgrim made it to the Holy Land and get the necessary funds. A banking system. With that, the sky was the limit, or rather that there was simply no limit. Then, the very bankers who ran the system gave themselves the ability to lend out 10 times more money than they actually had in deposits so they could charge interest on absolutely nothing…well, numbers in a ledger. What a wonderful, get-rich-quick system! The filthy rich just got filthier.

So here we are in 2020, with a handful of people having more money than 50% of the world’s population and with enough spending power to make sure that everyone kowtows to their demands. And their principal demand is that we work like machines, doling out just enough money to buy the things that they have brainwashed us into believing that we need. They establish laws to make sure we are kept in line, rewarding the people who directly control us; i.e. the judges, lawyers, top policemen, politicians, etc. with enough baubles to assure their allegiance. They have created nations to give us the idea that we are all in it together, so that we obey en masse as obeying is all for the national good, so that we pay taxes for them so that they can play around with this huge chunk of money, so that when a war is called for, enough of us swallow the nationalistic line and go and die or get horribly maimed or psychologically crippled in the defence of ‘freedom’.

A secondary school Economics student could have seen the 2008 financial crisis coming, so why couldn’t highly-paid economists, financial analysts and bankers see it? They ignored it because they were making too much money from it.  That crisis destroyed many people’s lives but,for the hugely wealthy, it was an opportunity to become even wealthier. It should have taught us that we cannot continue to live under a system that can be so easily manipulated by a few extraordinarily rich people/family dynasties. The coronavirus pandemic, whether it is real or not, whether it was created in a Chinese lab or not, whether it really has killed so many people or not, should ram that basic truth home to us. Do you honestly think that it was necessary to close so many small businesses when Amazon had to hire 10,000 staff in order to meet demand? Now it is for us to decide if we want to continue being dangled like pathetic, little puppets, scrabbling around in the dirt for the scraps from the table, or whether we want to be a true community with the common interest taking precedent over personal greed.

It can be done, not by violent revolution as that only throws up leaders who will be financed and controlled by the same elite. It needs a revolution in our way of thinking; not to be led like lambs to the slaughter. If you really think that it cannot be done, then read about the Venus Project. As the saying goes, man is only limited by the power of his imagination, so imagine a world where people work for what is necessary, for what can give us all a decent standard of living. Crime exists because the dominant factor in the world is money and the need and greed for it. A utopian world could exist if enough people want it and strive to make it happen, but money must go…with it, the cycle of poverty, wars, slavery and crime will just go on and on, until the world simply has enough and wipes a large part of humanity off the face of it. The world needs a revolution of the present system that places the material far above the spiritual…a human revolution as it has been termed.