Healing The Body Politic

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Written by George Monroe   
Monday, 09 January 2017 23:23

Use your imagination to place yourself out in space at the point where Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell once observed planet earth and marveled at its pristine beauty.  He wrote that he “had time to relax in weightlessness and contemplate that blue jewel-like home planet suspended in the velvety blackness from which we had come.”  From that vantage point he was also able to “see” many things not easily discernable when immersed in an earthbound illusion of limited scope.  Such a view of our planet today would show that the body politic on our beloved home planet has contracted a serious disease.

 

Gautama Buddha taught that all views of the world around us are illusions.  By that he meant that each person’s view of the world is a selected picture of reality.  Of the almost infinite number of things it is possible to be aware of, a person becoming acclimated to the world must select a very limited number to which they will give their attention.  If their limiting mechanisms go haywire and their senses are receptive to everything possible to attend to all at one time, they will probably “blow a fuse.” This presents all   members of the human community with the challenge to make a fundamental choice of what to see and how to conduct their lives accordingly.

 

All of the great religions have posited this challenge in terms of choosing good versus evil.  A native Cherokee proverb also states this challenge succinctly:

 

There is a battle of two wolves inside of us all.  One is evil.  It is anger, jealousy,

greed, resentment, lies, inferiority, and ego.  The other is good.  It is joy, peace,

love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth. The wolf that wins?  The one

you feed.

 

Sad to say, the wolf that is winning more and more around the globe today is the one identified as evil in this insightful proverb.

 

Throughout the tenure of mankind on the earth, many dynasties and empires have been created by egoistic earth dwellers who made the choice to feed the evil wolf.  The choice was to go with a system of orientation and devotion that was fundamentally selfish.  When they were able to convince other choice makers with similar tendencies to join them, aggregates of destructive power were created.  In all of these egocentric schemes the fundamental game was monopolistic acquisition by a few and brutal tactics to exclude   most others.  The aim was to control and exploit masses of people and reap great profits from their enslaved or indentured labors.

 

Evil conditions grew like a festering boil in the body politic until the pain was too great to bear.  And like a boil growing on human flesh, the pain was relieved and healing begun only when the infected core was removed.  The mechanism for this removal has always been to activate a violent revolution for bringing about the desired change.  Such revolutions have brought down many evil dynasties and empires around the world. Many lives and much treasure were destroyed in the process.  However, some of the   agents of evil infecting the body politic always survived.  They were held in check for a time by inspired efforts of the majority to provide a new era based on healthier choices.  At the same time, a few survivors yearned to resurrect for themselves the nefarious benefits of the evil schemes that were vanquished.  They surreptitiously set to work gaining converts and stealing increments of power for an eventual takeover.

 

Such actions are usually confined to acts of war between nations or conglomerate empires.  However, two world wars were necessary to cure terrible infections of evil that threatened to destroy the body politic of the entire planet.  After a very squeaky victory the winners of WWII convened trials of the core perpetrators in Nuremberg, Germany to start the ultimate healing process.  A primary goal was to learn what had been the root cause of such evil and what might be done to prevent any thing like it from happening in the future.  The most important finding gleaned from the trials was that big German corporations were complicit in bringing Hitler to power. Lured by visions of great profits to be made by the confiscation of properties, slave labor, and very little expense for subsistence of workers, already rich corporations like Krupps and Siemens actually aided and supported the Nazi Regime.  Later on, it was discovered that just like their German counterparts, many American corporations had surreptitiously aided and abetted the Nazis in order to gain illicit profits.  For a more complete review of these revelations, see   article relating to lessons of the Nuremberg Trials published by Reader Supported News, June 19, 2016.  http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/37548-a-critical-finding-of-the-nuremberg-trials-presages-worldwide-disaster-looming-over-us-2016-elections

 

The great fear of many thoughtful people today is that powers stolen by collaborating oligarchs around the world will soon be enough to let them once again start forcing their evil illusions on everyone else.  This situation has been made more likely by a serious infection of the worldwide body politic induced by the American economist Milton Friedman, who claimed that his research provided economic validation of the egotistic illusion espoused by author Ayn Rand. Friedman recognized in her exclusive and excluding pronouncements exactly what wealthy and power hungry choice makers   wanted to hear.  He and his “Chicago Boys” were effective in spreading this illusion around the world as scientifically proven gospel. They educated and coached the brutal   dictator Augusto Pinochet as he tried to implement it by “shock and awe” in the stunned South American country of Chile.  Other governments around the world were coerced or forced into economic traps that made them beholden to the exploitive power of U. S. corporations aided by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.  Taking the resources of other peoples by force, even war, was legitimized in the minds of those infected with this illusion.  The disease is still growing around the world today and especially in the United States with the unwitting election of Donald Trump to the powerful position of U. S. President with the authority to take over as Commander-in- Chief of the world’s most powerful armed forces.

 

It should not be difficult to compare the chosen values and aims of Trump and his supporters with the goods described in the Cherokee proverb and find them in strong conflict. The same is true in comparing them with descriptions of the good values and actions stated in treatises of any of the Great Religions, including the Christian Bible.  The blatant differences that are found when making such comparisons should raise confounding questions.  It appears, however, that once the choice is made to accept the precepts of evil, a choice maker is enveloped in an illusion that justifies the choice and makes it impossible to see or accept anything else.  Being a virtual prisoner of that illusion without awareness of other relevant information actually makes it possible to rally in support of evil demagogues and vote against one’s own best interests.  It also induces a kind of blindness that allows those so infected to be surrounded by healthier  ideals and not be able to see them.

 

Donald Trump and his evil-oriented minions must be stopped quickly and decisively.  They must be resisted by the same kind of people power Mahatma Gandhi mobilized to free his beloved India from the destructive exploitations of an empire once thought to be invincible.  With an erratic fascist-leaning demagogue about to take charge of America and nuclear weapons on the table, the time is very short to cut the core from the current infection of evil in the U.S. body politic.  It must be done before the boil bursts and spreads its poisonous contents to create another holocaust and the Armageddon inherent in a third world war.  With that much accomplished and unified commitment to feeding the good wolf, the process of healing the body politic can begin.

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