• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Thus the person experiencing resentment, betrayal, grief, loss and anger may well blame something other than the two actual causes: their own actions and choices (i.e. embracing the delusion of exponential credit expansion and ephemeral wealth as real) and the marketing/media system which profited from their embrace of delusion.

The process of accepting personal responsibility for one's actions and seeing the system for what it truly is beneath the superficial simulacrum is a painful one for all of us. But placing personal integrity above all else is immensely freeing.

Many who undergo this transformation of understanding describe the feeling as liberating, as if a great burden had been lifted from their shoulders. All that they once thought so important--the private school, the expansive house, the nameplate vehicle, the title, degree or corner office, the seasons tickets to the ball game, and so on--are revealed as unimportant compared to health, family, friends, acting in good faith and with complete individual integrity, true productivity, simple food and simple pleasures.

This transformation eventually extends from accepting responsibility for one's own health, retirement, livelihood and spiritual attainment to a realization that each citizen is also responsible for the larger community tasks of education, governance and security. Once the Savior State collapses into insolvency, this larger responsibility of each citizen will become clear to all.

This transformation is thus not just accepting lower expectations; it also requires consciously chosen positive action. The following quote by Nikola Tesla, submitted by oftwominds.com reader Kenneth R., neatly encapsulates this understanding:

"Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life energy."

We might also add this quote from Eric Hoffer: "We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves."

Hoffer was one of the first thinkers to grasp how mass movements (religious and political alike) acted as a substitute for self-worth; this is the basis of their tremendous appeal to people who feel lost, adrift, without hope, etc. Hoffer clearly identified the Devil's Pact nature of mass movements: even as they gave the "believers" a newfound, heady sense of purpose and empowerment, they enabled destructive fanaticism and took away the individual's ability to think or judge for himself. This Devil's Pact inevitably leads to fascism, authoritarianism, loss of democracy and national self-destruction.

From one perspective, the entire "religion" of credit-dependent, media-driven consumerism which is the "engine of the U.S. economy" is just such a destructive mass movement; individual critical thinking and engagement in the real world are diverted and diminished in order to maximize the Plutocracy/State's profit and power.

Put another way: the distraction and self-destruction of the citizenry serves the financial-banking Plutocracy and the State quite admirably.

The process of internal transformation is essentially one of illusion, artifice and self-serving denial being replaced by truth, acceptance and integrity.

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Structure of Change

Just as there is an ontological risk in any prediction--for the simple reason the future is unknown--there is an equal ontological risk in prescriptive solutions. Though this is a complex and knotty issue, we can summarize it (slightly tongue-in-cheek) thusly:

Humans only change when they have no other choice.

It is remarkably easy to present prescriptive "solutions" of the idealistic sort which promote working together to save the planet, creating programs to ease human suffering, etc. These "solutions" are readily dismissed because they ignore the reality of human self-interest, greed and self-aggrandizement, all of which reach their perfection in the entirely practical and selectively compelling windfall exploitation discussed earlier.

We have also seen how complacency, fatalism, cognitive and structural traps and propaganda all encourage inaction and passivity in