I often feel people misunderstand when I don’t join the mob campaigns … demanding prosecute the bankers, prosecute the police, prosecute the politicians, ban faith schools, ban the lords, etc … It’s not that I don’t see the wrongs, or I’m too lazy to engage my one voice with the larger mob, it’s because I feel I’ve moved beyond that to attacking the root of the problem: Redressing the “western” illusion of reality that pervades all organized and institutional human activities, and how that illusion is the natural result of the evolution of mind.
The really worrying sign of how deeply engrained the problem is, is that its realization as the problem is as old as human history, at least 4000 BCE, and yet still we plough on. Each cycle of fashion in philosophy or governance seems to be ratcheting inexorably in the wrong direction. Massive good and progress within each cycle, naturally, but the general trend, the net results … oh dear. Darwin’s dangerous idea is as true and inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow, more so in fact (one day the sun will not rise tomorrow), but it doesn’t “learn” from history, as we imagine (hope) humans might – it’s “inhuman”. It’s going to take more than hope.
Another of David Gurteen’s cycle of quotes is this one from Thoreau.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)
Is that the arrogance of an individual ego “I’m wiser than the mob” ? Guess it could be, there are enough quotations around about lone nuts and prophets in their own lands, the child who sees the emperor or the boy with his finger in the dyke, but at root it’s a genuine plea to the many and their institutional edifices.
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