This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
If we can use our ingenuity as a species and our unprecedented ability to network and share information to find some way to make this shift happen, we will become very difficult to manipulate, and therefore impossible to effectively propagandize, and therefore impossible to manipulate into supporting the rule of oligarchic tyrants. This would usher in a new era where a true collaborative anarchy (a word which literally means nothing other than "without rulers") would become possible for us. An era where political ideologies become meaningless, since we'd be naturally inclined to collaborate toward everyone's benefit.
This would be possible because the aforementioned mental habit of imbuing thoughts with belief is the same tendency which makes it impossible for humans to be content with enough. When we're lugging around a ton of believed thoughts about "me" and "mine" and "others" and "world", believed thoughts which revolve around an ego who needs to be protected and secured against a hostile world, there's an insatiable sense of lack, and an interminable fear of losing safety and security. These egoic mental habits are what lead people to fight, to be greedy, to be manipulated into supporting war and injustice because those people over there are trying to harm you or take what's yours.
Believed mental narrative is the primary obstacle to overthrowing the unelected power establishment which has loosely centralized itself in the United States. It's also the primary obstacle to happiness and contentment.
Everyone has had a glimpse of this possibility in themselves, however faint. Maybe in the wake of some deep personal trauma, maybe in the space between sleeping and waking, maybe that one time you tried psilocybin mushrooms in the eighties, maybe in a moment of deep contemplation, maybe when you got really "in the zone" during sports or art, or maybe in some spontaneous moment of stillness that took you by surprise. Everyone's seen a glimmer of this possibility at some point, but they usually get lost in the ruckus of life or dismiss it as some insignificant anomaly and forget about it. That's what's real, though. That's what's true. That's the part of you that can lead us home.
After watching the repeating patterns of human behavior and the trajectory that those patterns have got us on, I cannot imagine our species having a worthwhile future on this planet unless this shift takes place on a global scale fairly soon. I don't know how it can happen. I do know that seven and a half billion human brains increasingly interconnected by the internet has never, ever happened before. Anything is possible. We can wake up together.
Just putting this idea out there for Team Human. I love every last one of you.
[Hey you, thanks for reading! My work is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, and maybe throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal.]
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).




