Progress, Regress, And The Dark Age Ahead
We are slowly leaving the dark age, which the people of ancient China, India and Greece said we had fallen into, more than 2,500 years ago. But we can also go downward, as easily as we can go upward.
Since the birth of empires, when the dark age was born, and which began a mere few thousand years ago, we have gone from a society based on slavery, to serfdom, to wage slavery. That's progress. But regress is now underway.
Progress is not inevitable, at least in the short term. We can progress, and we can regress. Germany in the early 20th century was the pinnacle of Western civilization, sophisticated, cultured, democratic and free. Then came the Nazis. That was a plunge into darkness, barbarism, and regression. The Renaissance was a flourishing of art, science, philosophy, literature, architecture, and tolerance and freedom. Then came the Inquisition. Again, regress followed progress.
And now we are doing the same thing. We are being herded like cattle down a chute, into a deeply dystopian, deeply technocratic-authoritarian society. This is not progress, nor is it justified, nor inevitable. We can and should fight the descent into darkness. Remember, history, as with life, is by and large what we make of it.
Regress to a much darker age, or renaissance? We stand at a fork in the road, and we can go either way.
What are you going to do about it?
“Never doubt that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world.
In fact, it’s all that ever has.”
- Margaret Meade
Fatalism and cynicism are infantile, as well as cowardly, irresponsible, and morally unconscionable. They are also irrational, unscientific, and self-defeating. The primary obstacle we face, and the greatest danger that we face, is the widespread and pervasive delusion of powerlessness. We are not powerless. Etienne de La Boite, Henry David Thoreau and David Hume all realized the central truth of the matter: the people always have the greater power. The question is, what are we lending our power to? And more centrally and fundamentally, do we embrace our power, or do we allow a power-hungry elite to rule, unencumbered by democracy - or by conscience, morality or ethics?
Embrace your power now. The future is what we make of it.
As Eleanor Roosevelt said,
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
We are the people we have been waiting for.
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By the way, are you really so sure who are the barbarians and who is civilized? Genghis Khan has been portrayed for centuries as the ruthless leader of invading Mongol barbarian hordes. He was ruthless, expansionist and imperialist; but so too was the Roman Empire, and every empire that followed, right up to the present.
Noam Chomsky was right when he said that international relations haven’t changed since the time of Genghis Kahn.
We have had over 5,000 years of the rule of empire, from ancient Sumer and Babylon, up to and including the present. Perhaps humanity is growing weary of it, finally. Or perhaps we need one more lesson, darker and more horrible than any previous, before we understand, and finally smash the clay feet, and reject and transcend the rule of empires completely. We shall see.
A new renaissance is being born, but it looks to me that, other than a few sheltered and more enlightened areas, in most places, especially in the "leading”, “developed” nations of the West, the birth is going to be painful and protracted.
As the Dalai Lama has said, we should keep a long term perspective.
We have had some genuine cultural progress over the past 1,000 years, but not nearly as much as we imagine. In some ways, we have progressed; in other ways, we have regressed; and in some regards, very little has changed. We delude ourselves. Powerful nations still behave the same way, as do the elites who rule them. Nero and Caligula are not so far away as we like to believe.
Roughly 800 years ago, Genghis Khan rode West across Eurasia, conquering all. If a village or city refused to submit, he slaughtered the people and burned everything to the ground. The Allied Forces of the West, likewise, fire-bombed Dresden, a city of half a million souls, burning the people alive - men, women and children alike. And the only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen, to demonstrate US nuclear power and unchallengable hegemony, was because every city of any size in Japan had already been razed to the ground, by aerial fire-bombing.
In Iraq, we destroyed the infrastructure, including water and sewage systems, in another crime against humanity, dropping more bombs on that one small, oil-rich nation in under 30 days, than were dropped in the entire Vietnam War, effectively destroying the country. In Lybia, we destroyed the country so thoroughly, with the help of our terrorist friends in Al-Qaeda offshoots, that there are now open-air slave markets in the streets. This, we call “liberation”. This is bringing "humanitarian intervention”, “democracy” and “freedom” to the world. Orwell would roll in his grave.
Genghis Khan, while being nearly as brutal, murderous and imperialist as our modern Western governments, practiced religious tolerance, accepting Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and Islam as officially recognized, legitimate religions; stating that while the hand is one, it has multiple fingers; and God is one, but has offered many paths. Meanwhile, during the same period of history, Europe was steeped in the blood of religious intolerance, bigotry and persecution, not to mention the “holy wars”, the Crusades, and the Reconquista of Islamic Spain (al-Andalus) - the only place in Europe practicing religious tolerance at the time, and the real birthplace of the Renaissance, which began 500 years before the Italian Renaissance.
Be careful of accepting official narratives uncritically. Such naivete led to hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq, over weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. It also led to the witch trials, the Inquisition, the building of a global surveillance network and police state under the guise of a “war on terrorism”, the rise of corporate censorship under the guise of fighting “misinformation” (which means any science, evidence or voices that question the official narrative); and it such unquestioning naivete and obedience led to the rise of the Soviet Union and the Nazis, along with gas chambers, genocide, gulags and concentration camps.
Question everything.
Read.
Seek knowledge, understanding, and above all, wisdom.
Passionately seek the truth, and follow bravely wherever it leads; or you will live in a prison, a sarcofagus, a dungeon of the mind, in what William Blake called, “the mind-forged manacles”, and in chains, whether they are invisible to you or not.
Think for yourself.
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Addendum:
Another essential note must be made here. I have said it before, but it bears repeating, because it is crucial for us to understand. The true leaders of the ecology movement are anti-authoritarian, anti-globalist, and anti-fascist. So is the real left, the thinking left. We DO have common ground. We MUST unite the people now, or we are doomed to neo-feudal, corporate-fascist technocracy.
J. Todd Ring,
October 29, 2021
For further perspective:
Here is the brilliant political philosopher, Murray Bookchin, talking about the ecology of freedom (the title of his magnum opus, which is a must-read for every thinking person), and he is above all, talking about the difference between a liberatory social ecology, and a corporate-controlled, elite-controlled, mechanistic and dehumanizing eco-fascism; and he was warning in 1978 about the dominant trends, which are toward further alienation, division and atomization of the people, further alienation from nature, and the very real and growing danger of eco-fascism. And we should note two things: first, the corporate oligarchy has taken over most of the environmental movement, as Michael Moore and co. showed in the film, Planet of the Humans; and moreover, Klaus Schwabb and his fellow oligarchs in Davos are, right now, very literally driving the world into a darkly dystopian, deeply Orwellian, genocidal and Malthusian, Social Darwinist,imperialist, corporate-controlled eco-fascism, as we speak. And secondly, Murray Bookchin was not simply far ahead of his time in 1978 - if he gave exactly the same talk today, he would still be vastly ahead of nearly all the pundits, commentators, analysts, academics, environmentalists, politicians, talking heads, and so-called intellectuals today. Listen closely to what he has to say. Then read his major work, The Ecology of Freedom, followed by Erich Fromm’s, Escape From Freedom, Vandana Shiva’s Oneness vs The 1%, and my own works: Enlightened Democracy, The People vs The Elite, and, coming soon, All Hell Breaks Loose: Global Geopolitics 1945-2045.
The leading constitutional lawyer of Canada, Rocco Galati talks about covid, censorship, and the new wave of fascism:
Coming out of the dark ages: The Moorish Renaissance of Spain (711-1492):
https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl257/Don%20Quixote/moorish_influence_on_renaiss