There has been a lot in the news the past few months about the Epstein files, Pizzagate and other similar tales of sordid human abuse and trafficking along with the apparent connection between these things and so many of the wealthy and politically powerful people in the world. It can make one wonder why people who have so much would engage in such horrible activities. The beginning of this post is addressing one logical connection from a psychological perspective.
Sometimes things are a matter of perspective. For instance, to someone who has been taught to be afraid of the world, afraid of the natural processes in the world, afraid of the other people in the world, it might seem the most natural thing on Earth to strive to accumulate as much wealth and power, to control everything it is possible to control, in order to protect oneself from the threat of…life. From such a perspective empathy, sympathy, pity toward the general population of the world may well seem to be feelings and thoughts to be strictly avoided. Anything that opens you up to “them”; the dangerous masses waiting outside the gate to swarm you, to take what you have worked so hard to acquire, is something to be shunned, a disease to inoculate yourself against.
How does one inoculate themself against warm, human emotions? How can that shell be built? The answer to this question is one that humanity has seen answered time and time again, war after war. The answer is trauma. Experiencing repeated, profound trauma will build that shell. Just ask the warriors coming home from prolonged or extreme combat situations. Such cutoff from one’s emotions is often one aspect of PTSD. If, deep down inside, you have not been taught to be fearful of “the other”, of the general population of the world, if you are someone who has experienced love, genuine transcendent love, you don’t want to lose the ability to feel love and to share love, to care about others and be cared about. So victims of PTSD seek treatment. Seek to learn to feel and love and know calm serenity down deep in their soul…again.
But if you are someone who has never known that transcendent state of being, who is seeking a state of detachment from people in general, then you don’t seek treatment for such a state of being, you seek to establish and maintain it. You seek out trauma. How does one find trauma? Today it isn’t hard to find vicarious trauma. There are movies, books, documentaries which show the horrors that exist through either natural disasters, or more often by human being committing inhuman acts toward other human beings. Video footage from wars, of people who are in the process of experiencing a violent, cruel death. “Snuff” films. The more horror, terror, shock, the better…that is what helps numb you to the world. Watching children experience such horrible abuses can be even better than watching adults because children’s emotions are purer. Also we humans tend to feel an affinity for our children. But if you’re seeking to make yourself into a monster devoid of such affinity for people in general that is just one more avenue of emotional ingress to your mind, your feelings, so that also needs to be cut off.
Vicarious traumatization though isn’t enough after a while. You need the real thing. To a mentally, emotionally healthy person this reassertion of feelings of empathy, caring, is indicative of the beauty of the resilience of the human spirit. But to someone seeking to not feel those aspects of the human spirit, of their spirit, who seek to not care, to be able to abuse others, to take from others what they need to live, to take their bodies for whatever pleasure or benefit you can extract from them, you want to be cold, detached intellect. You want to be able to coolly assess every situation to find the opportunity for self-aggrandizement in it. You have been taught, and believe, that you must always “win”, be the taker, not the giver. So in order to get that next level of trauma induced emotional cutoff you need to be participating in the brutality, to witness, to see, to hear, to feel the terror, the shock, the voluntary and involuntary pleading from “the other” who is experiencing horrors and abuses thought up by people like yourself, sometimes over many generations, who have also been seeking to instill the utmost in horror, in terror, from another person.
Yet we’re all social beings, even the most ego driven, spiritually perverted, among us. So, you need companions, others like yourself who are seeking a state of being divorced from their most innate human spiritual senses in order…to acquire. You and those with similar appetites form groups; cabals, covens, whatever name you have found that most satisfies your ego. Together you engage in rituals, because you all aren’t without talent, a desire for ritual, for elaborate sets and costumes in an attempt to convince yourselves that you are doing something other than the grotesque, inhuman perversions which you are taking part in. Wealth and power have become your gods. Wealth and power have become the narcotic with which you seek to soothe the pain of the emptiness which results from being so divorced from your own true spiritual reality. In truth you have become a type of monster, a cutoff, sickened shell of a human being who feels a need to subjugate others, to take from them what they need to live, to reinforce your own desperate need to believe a delusion, to believe yourself to be superior to “them”.
This is the plight of the so-called civilized world today. A world in which two separate realities have emerged: the reality of the predators and the reality of their prey. Actually the predators are as much parasitic as predatory but repeatedly calling them “predatory parasites” is a bit much. So I’m using simply “predators” in this blog. The wealthy, educated predators know that if the prey truly realizes the schemes and mechanisms via which they prey upon the masses of people then the masses would likely turn on them. Therefore the “successful” (at suicidally destructive predatory/parasitic behavior) have realized the need to maintain public personas that inspire respect, even sometimes admiration. But sooner or later the deprivation experienced by the “prey”, people experiencing themselves and their loved ones perpetually suffering poverty, depression, sickness, all in a world of plenty, begins to dissolve whatever illusions the predators have put in place to try to conceal their true practices. Oppression of the human spirit is a losing proposition.
It’s happened before in history. Just in the past two hundred and fifty years there has been the American revolution, the French revolution, the Communist revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba and many more. It’s not that the revolutionaries in all these cases were themselves above the sickness of mind and spirit which had so pervaded those who they were rebelling against. It’s not that well founded revolutions always result in a new, more equitable, enduring better world. What we can learn from these events is often simply that put in a position to be able to see a way to do grab it, human beings are too often all too quick to be infected with a lust for wealth and power. Too often a culture of “haves” and “have nots” is what emerges…again.
This is something that has happened so often in human history one might believe that it is an inescapable human failing. It isn’t. It is a reality only when the people involved are ignorant enough of their true spiritual reality that they are susceptible to becoming overly enamored of the enticements of material pleasures. It’s not that material pleasures are categorically bad or evil, they aren’t. But just as an individual can overindulge in the pleasures of life and lose sight of taking care of their spiritual and physical health in the process, the same can happen with groups of people, with a culture. The mindset, the spiritual disease, of craving unlimited acquisition can be as contagious as any physical disease that there is. As we can see by conditions in the world today, it can become a pandemic which affects even the people who are perpetually being preyed upon. The very people whose deprivation serves to support the excesses of the predators who are on the receiving end of the mechanisms of economic imbalance at work in the world. It shouldn’t be too surprising though, the predators actively seek to encourage a “prey aspiring to predatorhood”, attitude among the general population. They use the media to portray extravagant wealth as the key to a happy life, the key to heaven on Earth. They want the general population to envy them, idolize them, to try to emulate them. To be perpetually blinded to the reality that there is another way, a better way; a way that nourishes and sustains the life and spirit of an individual without preying upon the lives of others.
It is such a profound truth that it bears repeating: Oppression of the human spirit is a losing proposition. Ultimately that is true for every person on Earth or anywhere else. A human spirit may be crushed, but like what looks like dead, dry grass after a drought, give it some love and care and watch it spring back, vibrant, vital, dynamic. If, by design or default, you work at oppressing others, or if you are oppressed: either way, you lose. If you are successful at oppressing others you are losing because the actions involved in the acquisition of extravagant wealth do not honor nor uphold the true conditions of the human spiritual reality in its fullness. You are not honoring your own spiritual reality. We are all one, interconnected, and ultimately the quality of our future, of anyone’s future, is tied to the quality of everyone’s future.
The illusion that the material world is all that there is can be the jumping off place to engaging in all manner of behaviors offensive to and counterproductive of a healthy spirit. There are people who believe that when it comes to spirituality we are physical beings who are maybe in search of a spiritual aspect to our lives. That is exactly the opposite of our reality! We are spiritual beings who are incarnated in an effort to establish a physical reality for ourselves. Why? If for no other reason because it can be very enjoyable. But tacitly agreeing to accept suffering tomorrow for some pleasure today is an idiot’s bargain. Especially when it is unnecessary. With wisdom and proper regard for one another we can have heaven on Earth without putting the wheels in motion to have to suffer farther “down the road”. All it takes is some wisdom, maturity, humility, occasionally patience, and the willingness to put in the work, mentally and physically, to make it happen. It doesn’t even require slaving away to put the work in, it just requires including putting some work in conscientiously and regularly. As Jesus said: “My yoke is light and my burden is easy.” He wasn’t talking about a yoke we put on to serve him. He is referring to the yoke we put on, as he did, to righteously truly serve our divine spiritual reality; to truly be doing the best for our own happiness and wellbeing. We do have to take the time and attention to get to know ourselves, our spiritual reality as well as our physical reality (which is a creation of our spiritual reality).
It is a task that we have to enter into with the understanding that we must speak and honor truth, always. No more half-truths and manipulative myths. It does include also educating ourselves around what keeps us physically healthy (because our body is our temple). Overindulging as a habit doesn’t work to keep us healthy. Think of it as we aren’t trying to get into heaven, we’re trying to learn how to manage living successfully so that the heaven we occupy doesn’t become hell. At this point in time it is not hard to see that we haven’t been doing the best job of it. Especially if we realize that we are our brother’s, and sister’s, keepers.
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