Part II: The heavy side of reality
World history in short
Some 10,000 years ago most humans ceased to be hunter gatherers to become farmers and craftsmen. In other words, “homo sapiens” started to transform nature for its supposed “benefit”. The human impact on nature increased first very gradually over several millennia before taking off spectacularly in the last couple of centuries.
We are going to concentrate on that recent period, the so-called industrial age. Technical progress seems to have followed a curve similar to that of global demographics. World population is thought to have been around 200 million at the start of the Christian era; it reached one billion in 1830, two in 1930, two and half in 1950, and from then on literally exploded to reach 7 billion by 2012. And it continues to grow. Demographics and large scale use of highly impacting technologies developed considerably more in the last 60 years – less than a lifetime – than over millennia of human presence on the planet.
In the early part of the 19th century the demographic take off coincided with the industrial revolution and with the emergence of a purely materialist worldview. Population started to rise much faster in Europe than in other parts of the world, except North America, where the increase was largely due to immigration from Europe. Figures speak for themselves: between 1800 and 1900 the population rose in Europe from around 200 million to over 400 million, in North America from less than 10 to over 80 million[1], in Asia from a little over 600 to about 950 million and in Africa from over 100 to a little above 130 million.
Why did population rise so spectacularly in Europe at that time, while it remained little changed in Africa? It is also puzzling to note the apparent relative stability of population numbers in native tribes with no or limited contact with civilisation. It doesn’t seem that many in depth explanations have been proposed for this. Yet population growth, stability or decline is a key factor in human condition. It is directly related to how society treats women, views sexuality, child birth and breast feeding. Have there been natural methods of contraception that European civilisation has forgotten?
Anyhow, the 19th century saw a big colonial expansion involving the British, the French and others, and increasing population was clearly regarded positively by European rulers. It provided the army with more soldiers, the church with more followers, and the nation with more manpower for the colonies. After the Napoleonic wars, Europe was more or less at peace during large parts of the 19th century, and most military activities were carried out overseas. Europeans, and later North Americans, dominated the world and did their utmost to impose their vision of life on others.
But that vision was itself changing fast. In fact there never was one vision, but several overlapping and partly conflicting ones. In the 19th century old ideas often associated with religion were challenged by the advances of “objective” science. As newly discovered laws of mechanics, thermo-dynamics and chemistry explained more and more phenomena and as technologies appeared ever more impressive, a worldview rooted in pure materialism came to be seen as totally rational. Atheism became a respectable position for educated people. But while materialist atheists thought there were freeing themselves from the crushing weight of irrational religious beliefs, they generally failed to realise that they were falling into a new belief trap. The belief that science is gradually uncovering absolute “truth” and that our ordinary human logic of linear cause and effect sequences is the only logic at work in the universe.
Meanwhile, though challenged, religion was far from dead, and even progressive atheists saw value in keeping it well alive, be it for no other purpose than as a useful instrument to ensure that the poor remained disciplined and obedient. This fitted with the rapid social changes induced by industrialisation and by the expansion of international trade and colonialism.
The last years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th saw a kind of economic globalisation, less systematic and absolute than what we experience today, but nevertheless sufficiently powerful and unprecedented to shake previously held visions of life.
What the new science-based materialism did not change, on the contrary, was the idea that man is the most important creature on earth where it has a special role to play. Animals, plants, oceans, rivers, forests, are just parts of a décor for the human adventure, providing mankind with limitless resources. This was the long-held view of the dominant stream of Christianity: men were to multiply and conquer the earth, freely using its fruits while glorifying the creator. On the central place of man, materialism profoundly agrees with religion. Both sides also converge in their view of life as being fundamentally a struggle. A hard struggle to resist temptations and gain one’s entry pass to heaven, and more immediately for sheer survival and whenever possible achieving a degree of comfort and convenience. In any case a struggle implying competition with the rest of nature and between humans. Such a vision inevitably breeds fear, mistrust, and open antagonism towards anybody appearing as different, foreign, outside your clan, tribe or nation. To survive you have to control your environment and your relations with people around you. You have to fight enemies; you have to be strong and fit into a strong group.
Another central idea shared by materialism and religion, not unrelated to the previous two, is their view of women. Basically considered irrational and unstable creatures, sensual witches supposedly connected to the earth and cosmic forces. Males couldn’t possibly tolerate such nonsense, could they? It will appear later that today’s feminism is equally wary of women’s basic links with natural energies. But let’s stay with our story.
Against the background of rapid change and evolving ideas, European elites, whether inclined towards religion or towards materialism realised that they had a lot of interests in common, such as keeping peasantry and the new urban low classes reasonably under control, and developing a psychological and moral underpinning for the colonialist expansion. Their sense of superiority was almost absolute. When they were cynics they felt quite comfortable with the idea of exploiting weaker people and nature, within their own country or in the colonies. When they had a moral sense, rooted or not in religion, they considered it their duty to bring civilisation – i.e. their own set of beliefs – to the uneducated and “savages”. We may observe that the mix of arrogance, bullying and self righteousness displayed by Europeans in those days is still largely present today, albeit with some nuances. For “Europeans” then, today you could read “the West”. Propaganda in the West about the need to wage “war on terror”, stabilise Afghanistan, support democracy in Syria or Ukraine, etc., etc., shows an uncanny similarity with the tone of language used in colonial time.
However, it would be wrong to assign all harshness only to European Judeo-Christian civilisation. China, India, and Japan, for example, despite their admirable ancient spiritual traditions open to wholeness and subtle energy, have also developed cast systems, unfair treatment of girls and women, and the apology of force. In a way, the near ubiquity of harshness reinforces the conviction of many that there is something inevitable, “natural” in the competitive violence characterising human condition. Not only the human condition, but life generally: look at the animal world, say the “realists”, and you see predators eating weaker creatures, you see dominant males taking all the females…etc. It’s survival of the strongest all round. That is life, always has been, always will be – so they say.
Despite the appalling impact of hard capitalism on many aspects of social life, the period of first globalisation around 1900 is also a time of remarkable refinement and creativity. Commodities and convenience brought by technical progress reach Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, San Francisco, Istanbul, Tokyo and Shanghai. Imagine the luxury of large aristocratic or bourgeois town houses with electricity, Champagne flowing and smart ladies dressed to kill. The visible world at the turn of the 20th century is what the French called “la belle époque” (the nice time).
For reasons hard to figure out rationally, la belle époque ended very badly indeed. Why did European nations throw themselves into the total madness of the first world war? My own father fought in that war. He was severely wounded, taken prisoner in Northern Prussia (now Poland) together with a few French and Belgians, a number of British and thousands of Russians from the Tsar’s army. Yes, a baby boomer with grand children born in the 21st century had a father who spent a terrible winter of captivity with soldiers of the Tsar and veterans from the Boer war. A reminder of how short our span of history can be.
The first World War combined the near medieval technology of the bayonet with heavy artillery, machine guns, shrapnel’s, tanks, planes and submarines. Tens of thousands casualties each day over weeks, often to move the front line less than half a kilometre. A crazy orgy of violence and inconceivable suffering. For what? It seems nobody really knew. But it didn’t matter. They had to go on, be brave for their country. There had been quite a few pacifists before the war but when events precipitated after the assassination in Sarajevo they were swept away by a tidal wave of bellicosity. However, for some reason a myth took on at the time: “the war to end all wars”. A lot of chaps went into the war convinced it was going to be the very last one. Let’s just win this war, and all people would become reasonable and civilised. Peace would be for ever.
Given the relative prominence of pacifist ideas before the war, this was perhaps less naïve than it may sound today. Is it because it was seen as pure duty, but the extreme violence of the 1st World War was by and large confined to the military. Civilians were not too often taken as targets, as they would be in later conflicts where mass incineration of urban areas through bombing would be considered fair tactics.
When the conflict ended in 1918, millions of young men had lost their lives and millions of others bore the marks of their injuries. The war led to revolution in Russia, to the dismemberment of the Austrian and Ottoman empires, and to misery, humiliation and hyperinflation in Germany. But while life was difficult in many parts of Europe, business boomed in the USA. The country was becoming the first economic power in the world. American companies started to produce a whole raft of new things on a very large scale. And a new phenomenon appeared: mass marketing of consumer goods.
Ideas put forward by the new discipline of psychoanalysis led to applications in commerce. If humans were steered chiefly by unconscious emotions rather than by reason, it should be possible to appeal to their unconscious desires, aspirations, as well as fears and dislikes to attract them to certain products. Fashion and social attitudes could be influenced using techniques derived from psychoanalysis. Cigarettes manufacturers for example were able to break the taboo against women smoking through a public relations campaign inspired by the theme that women saw the cigarette as a sign of male power reminiscent of a penis.
The “roaring twenties” were in sharp contrast to the grey tragedy of the war: chain produced cars, radio, cinema, short skirts, swinging music. And a booming stock market where ordinary folks started to gamble enticed by the general excitement and the development of debt money. Individual and collective behaviour was now under the increasing influence of media, advertising and public relations. Some people high in corporations and government were open to experimenting with the latest ideas of psychology and psychoanalysis to improve their grip on the masses.
Meanwhile in Germany methods of propaganda not far from new business communication techniques were used with great effect in the rise to power of the Nazi party. A little insignificant man with his comical moustache and hair style seized control of the minds of millions in one of the most advanced societies on the planet, a nation rich of top intellectuals with a brilliant cultural heritage. The Nazis developed manipulation of the masses to new levels of effectiveness. And by the way, where did they get their money from when Germany was sinking in debt? The fact, so little talked about, must be that the new Nazi government was generously financed by American and British banks, often in Jewish hands. Where else could they have got the money from? Their country was ruined. But in a matter of a few years that same ruined country was able to create the most formidable war machine the world had seen, and a new conflict broke out two decades after the first one. Two (comparatively) medium sized nations, Germany and Japan, took on the British Empire, the USA and the Soviet Union.
A lot has been written in conventional history about WWII. But huge questions are left unanswered. How come that the advancing German army failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of British troops to escape from Dunkirk? Why were the Germans so poorly prepared for the winter in their campaign in Russia? What are the true facts and figures concerning the Holocaust? No doubt this terrible tragedy happened, but the figure of six millions victims has never been seriously corroborated. Does it matter? Yes, even with laudable intentions, propaganda remains a dangerous poison. Another thing, it is strange, isn’t it, that key technical breakthroughs achieved by Germans – like the V2 rocket and jet airplanes – all came too late to change the course of history. Why did the American authorities refuse to negotiate with Japanese authorities who were prepared to surrender, which would have saved two atomic bombs? Anyway, there are so many more recent issues requiring clarification that we can leave this chunk of history in the shade of its mysteries.
In the post war era things really accelerated towards the present state of affairs. Consider the shape of that unprecedented evolution: 1946 – less than two and a half billion people on the planet, 80% of them living off the land from traditional agriculture in semi autarchy; 2014 – over seven billion people, 50% in urban areas, largely cut off from the land and completely dependent on a global integrated economic system.
How did it happen? No sooner had Germany and Japan been defeated that local conflicts, mostly related to decolonisation, erupted everywhere and the cold war began between the “free world” and communist powers. Despite the indescribable horrors of the two major wars that had followed one another within a generation, force was still largely accepted as the inevitable final means of settling differences, and military bravery still admired as the ultimate male virtue. But things were nuanced. Alongside a mentality revolving around force, another mentality inclining towards appeasement was at work in collective consciousness. And the idea that all individuals had a right to a degree of well being began to have traction. Well being was seen firstly in terms of satisfaction of basic material needs, and in terms of access to civilisation and education. What was meant by the latter was access to a glimpse of the worldview, habits and way of thinking of the elite, who, needless to say, felt pretty sure of possessing values most in line with the truth.
This general mood led, among other things, to the establishment of fairly extended social systems in Western Europe, North America and, under different arrangements, in the USSR and other communist countries. Whatever the regime, it was considered normal that a civilised state should see to it that all its citizens would eventually benefit from education, medical services, and old age pensions. At the same time, a more basic objective held precedence over everything else: providing enough food for everybody.
On the face of it these various objectives looked entirely commendable, and many teachers, doctors, agronomists, and others did their best to contribute to their realisation. They did so in the mindset of the time: triumphant materialism; the world is what we see, science is the way to understand and control it, only mankind really matters, life is essentially a struggle but thanks to “progress” we can limit its harshness through technology and social engineering. There were of course different brands of progress: socialist progress, free enterprise progress, social democratic progress. But differences concerned essentially the means, and much less the objectives. In every “civilised” country, educated professionals set out to develop the various facets of progress: large scale industry, road and air transportation, intensive agriculture, modern medicine, baby milk substitutes, ready prepared food, television networks.
Soon the first casualty of the tidal wave of contemporary progress turned out to be the whole of nature: in the countryside, in the wild, in oceans, seas and rivers. Let’s focus first on the countryside. For millennia peasants and farmers had regarded their land, the plants they grew, insects buzzing in the fields, grazing animals, wild trees and all creatures crawling in the soil as living characters in an extraordinary symphony. Its modulations followed the phases of the moon, the seasons and the ever changing weather. But when the professionals of agriculture’s “green revolution” took matters into their hands, deep relations with the natural world dating from time immemorial were simply ignored without second thoughts, and agriculture became an industry, a big industry. With its processes analysed and managed like production processes in manufacturing. Here you have inputs: seeds, chemicals, water. Over there you have a site where production takes place: the field. And you have operating procedures: ploughing, spreading products, etc. And you have an overall objective: highest possible production in return for your costs. Forget about the moon, forget about the myriads of living creatures, and forget about the sacred relation with mother earth. Stick to a cold approach free of sensitivities and old superstitions.
For a while, this approach seemed to work. That is, seemed to bring more production for less human effort. The approach gained acceptance, and as it did, every aspect of the process was looked at with a view to rationalisation: fewer different seeds, less labour, larger plots …. And a new factor entered the equation: the financial interest of powerful suppliers. Suppliers of tractors and machinery, suppliers of chemical fertilisers, weed killers and pesticides, suppliers of animal feed, animal drugs and vaccines. And suppliers of credit, in other words bankers.
The world of peasants pretty much disappeared in a matter of two or three decades, replaced by a new world of industrialists of the agro-business. This drastic transformation started first in North America just before the war, Europe followed from the 50’s onwards and then the rest of the world.
Some consequences of intensive agriculture are well known: water pollution by large quantities of chemicals used in fields, food contamination by traces of pollutants in wheat, corn, vegetables, milk, and meat. But another set of consequences often escapes attention: the tremendous drop in the numbers of creatures normally presentin soils, like worms, insects, micro-organisms. The quasi disappearance of these armies of active tiny creatures fundamentally changed the nature of soils. Instead of being soft, rich with a nice smell of humus, allowing rain water easy passage, soils turned hard like old cement. When that happens, water can’t go through and flooding becomes frequent. When the sun shines again, pools evaporate and what remains is dry and crackling. In fact the land dies. In countries with a moderate climate, agriculture can be maintained with large inputs of fertilisers. But in very hot countries the land eventually turns into desert.
In the summer of 2012 I spent a few days in Normandy, a well known region of France which used to be full of small orchards and lush pastures boarded by trees and hedges. Rich, splendid countryside if ever there was one. But now it seems that many orchards have been replaced by fields, small plots have been merged together, hedges and trees cut out and hollows filled up to create bigger spaces for intensive monocultures. When you walk along, not only has the former charm of many places gone, but it feels different. Another kind of vibrations. A lack of subtle energy. If we think about it, that was to be expected. Not so many years ago, soils were hosts to a rich variety of creatures and plants crawling and growing on different terrains differently exposed to wind and sun. All was in good balance and harmony. Now soils are mere substrates in a production process. Field are like combinations of concrete slabs and machinery bolted on them: inert, lifeless, and indifferent. No wonder subtle vibrations are weak.
While small creatures living in the soils have been largely decimated by a combination of savage ploughing and chemical spreading, the lot of bigger country animals is hardly more enviable. The vast majority of them now spend their lives in places that are effectively concentration camps. How else could we describe a noisy hall with tens of thousands of chickens, each allotted a surface equivalent of an A4 sheet (new norm from the European Commission). And the story is similar for cows, pigs, salmons and others. The cruel conditions we inflict on the animals we eat is not only a disgrace, it also contributes to make us ill. When we eat them, we ingest the memories of fear and suffering encoded in every cell of their poor flesh. But most people don’t think about this when they choose a piece of meat in its cellophane wrapping from the cold section of their supermarket. Their relationship with reality is entirely formatted by the materialist mode of thinking. Crude ideas and references have been implanted in their minds from their earliest childhood. They think and act more or less like everyone around them does. And of course, like the system constantly suggests through its various media of communication. If there is a good promotion on chicken wings this week in your local supermarket, you have to be almost a social outcast to be able to visualise the noisy hall with twenty thousand birds in total stress.
Those who uphold the “life is a hard struggle, always has been, always will be” theory will no doubt point to the fact that cruelty towards animals is not new. Correct. But what is different now is the systematic, industrialised character of what is done to animals. And not only to animals, to humans too, and to oceans, and rivers, and skies, and old cities. Attacks from different angles amounting to a general onslaught against all aspects of nature and of human expressions of beauty.
Why did this general onslaught come about? After the war, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, things seemed to start relatively well, at least with good intentions, undoubtedly sincere for many people. But then “progress” got into a sort of whirlpool of business interests, conflicting beliefs, corporatism of experts, advertising, communication, lobbying… which became so intricate that most individuals find themselves powerless and completely lost facing it all. A key factor is that constant and ever harder economic pressure tends to mute most people’s ability to think and feel.
Economic pressure had been strong since the start of the industrial revolution, but it really changed gear around 1980 with the advent of financially driven globalisation and, a few years later, with the triumph of capitalism over communism. For a few decades the Soviet block had looked like a formidable competitor to capitalism. However, in the 1970’s communist regimes visibly failed to deliver. And while communism was losing its lustre, social democracy partially inspired by socialist ideals was encountering its own difficulties. Intransigent trade unions made life complicated for business managers. The latter faced costly social programmes, new rules to protect consumers, ensure more safety or limit certain environmental impacts, and government meddling in the setting of sales prices. All these factors were seen by theoreticians of free capitalism as impediments to the proper functioning of markets. They pointed to the fact that business leaders were torn between conflicting constraints without having a clear objective to guide their decisions. Businesses lacked focus. Quite a few big companies at the time were conglomerates with all kinds of activities and unclear strategies. In a way they were not so different from state concerns in socialist economies. To cut right through this lack of clarity and focus, capitalist thinkers came up with the concept of “maximisation of shareholder value”. The job of a company leader was to pursue one single overall objective: ensure constant growth of the value obtained by shareholders through dividends and increasing share prices. Any decision facing management was to be analysed with a view to its likely consequences on shareholder value. Any other consideration – employee satisfaction, quality of products…- was important only insofar as it underpinned the overall objective of maximising shareholder value.
There, at last, was clarity. Decisions could be made regarding borrowing, investments, dividend payments. Financial requirements regarding new projects could be set based on a logic accepted by all. Some older managers had a bit of difficulty grappling with the new stuff, but to younger managers, often more familiar with financial concepts learned in business schools, the objective of maximisation of shareholder value appeared illuminating. At the same time – in the mid 1980’s- new tools like PC’s and spreadsheets greatly facilitated a wider implementation of key financial concepts such as free cash flows and internal rate of return. A competent analyst on his own could compute the theoretical market value of a “business unit” within a large company. The portfolio of activities in a corporation could be more easily assessed and more easily managed. An activity in which the company was too small could be sold off and the proceeds used to expand elsewhere.
But for all these new possibilities to become fully effective, business had to be largely free from obstacles raised by unions or government agencies. Legislation had to become “business friendly”. A new mood started to permeate the circles of government, academia, business and finance. Free trade was encouraged world wide and business across national borders became much easier, particularly for large international companies. These were able to extract better terms for themselves through different geographical areas, and workforces began to feel the impact of foreign competition on their bargaining position. At the same time, millions of women joined the labour market, including in sectors and types of jobs hitherto the sole preview of men. This too played directly in the hands of employers[2]. All these factors were compounded by rapid technological progress. So from the mid-1980’s onwards, employers got the upper hand over labour, and new managers operating according to the maximisation of shareholder value dogma became ever more efficient in their efforts to extract maximum productivity from their workers.
When the Soviet block disintegrated in 1990-91, there appeared to be no longer any alternative to capitalism. Western free marketers had won the ideological contest. Only intellectual dinosaurs would call into question the wisdom of managing businesses and the world economy on the basis of maximisation of shareholder value. Globalisation went into overdrive. Multinationals, banks and financial investors had a great time. Whenever the economy showed signs of weakening, or markets were doubtful, in came central banks with easier money and lower interest rates. Wages and salaries of most employees outside the exclusive class of senior executives came under pressure due to globalisation, but cheap and easy credit enabled them to acquire a home, buy a car and other goods despite their stagnating incomes. As for everybody’s primary need: food, intensive agriculture and large scale distribution provided abundant cheap assortments. Most folks found this entirely satisfactory, as they were largely unaware of the dramatic consequences of low quality industrialised food on their own health and on the state of the planet.
As all this was going on, some people began to realise that the global economic system, while producing massive amounts of goods that people were prepared to buy, was also predatory and destructive. Unease about the side effects of economic growth came to the fore and a major conference on the environment was organised in Rio in 1992. This summit produced a lot of words about sustainable development and provided green activists with ammunition to criticise big business. Multinationals responded with the concept of corporate social responsibility, which consists in giving the impression to care about social and environmental issues. The main advantage for a company to do so is that it helps maintaining its “licence to operate” without serious problems with the authorities, activists or public opinion. Ten years after Rio a new Earth Summit was organised in Johannesburg. This time, instead of being on the defensive, big business was present and proactive, to such an extent that the then UN General Secretary declared that business was “part of the solution”.
After Johannesburg multinationals took over most of the conversation on sustainable development. Related issues of transparency and business ethics were added to the pot, and “sustainability” became a sort of catch-all communication and corporate image tool. The woolly concept of “sustainability” contrasted with the neat and sharp objective of “maximising shareholder value”. The latter, needless to say, remained the only true preoccupation of management. While many people took an openly cynical view of the whole sustainability exercise, a number of prominent individuals in business and government played the game. And the game soon turned into organised confusion and hypocrisy, despite the sincerity of a few idealists. Double standards, bias, oxymoron’s, misinformation, diversions are all too obvious in sustainability speech.
Creating and nurturing confusion in the minds of the public isn’t restricted to fields related to sustainability. It concerns every facet of contemporary life. Since the turn of this century, lies and manipulation have been conducted on a grand scale with unprecedented sophistication by governments, companies, banks, and various other institutions. A remarkable feature of manipulation is that the liars often lie to themselves as well as to others, and it’s hard to know who really believes what. General confusion reigns in the minds. It takes a lot of determination to patiently debunk the flow of misinformation emanating from different quarters.
In that respect the tragedy of 9/11 is a particularly significant case. This event was immediately followed by military action and strong turbulences in the world economy and financial markets. All this happened quickly while ordinary Americans and others in the Western world had been emotionally shocked by the attack. Most people’s ability to assess information put forward by official media was initially numbed by the sheer suddenness of developments. But as the US administration supported by the British and other allies displayed a suspicious haste in using the event as convenient excuse for dramatic decisions regarding the “war on terror”, more and more neutral observers began to take a closer look at facts.
Technical experts openly questioned that the towers had fallen only as a result of fire caused by the impact of the planes. They noticed that the falls had happened in a matter of seconds and quite vertically, just like in planned demolitions. They also noted that the same had happened to a small tower (WTC 7) which had not received a direct hit and was only affected by a fire caused by burning debris from the Twin Towers. And they realised that the remains of metal structure from the small tower in question had been almost immediately removed from site and melted. A number of perturbing elements pointed in the direction of a planned demolition involving long preparatory work requiring full access to the buildings. This couldn’t possibly have been carried out without the knowledge if not full cooperation of parts of the US government. Official propaganda tried to dismiss these allegations as fantasies dreamed up by “conspiracy theorists”. But doubts lingered and amplified. Ordinary folks were now faced with two diametrically opposing stories: the official version of America being attacked by Islamic terrorists, or the “inside job”. The latter probably instigated by neo con extremists in cahoots with Zionists.
Any reference to Zionists touches a raw nerve. Relations between the Christian majority in the Western world and Jewish communities have a long painful history which makes it difficult to conduct a serene analysis of current developments involving the state of Israel, its leverage on American politics, and the influence of some Jews (or more specifically Zionists[3]) in global banking and finance. Given that context it has taken a few years for the “inside job” hypothesis to gain real traction. Largely also because most people lack the time and determination to pay sustained attention to such issues seemingly miles away from their day to day lives. Nevertheless doubts about the integrity of authorities in Western democracies are now widespread and deep.
The motives behind various events in the aftermath of 9/11 appear very suspicious. The attack on Iraq was justified by arguments which turned out to be based on blatant lies. Official versions regarding different episodes of the “war on terror”, such as the bombs in Madrid and London, are fraught with inconsistencies. The bizarre raid of US commandos in Pakistan to eliminate the man supposed to have masterminded 9/11 raises very serious questions. Not to mention the intervention in Libya shortly after that country’s regime had been welcomed back in the “international community” and various other developments in and around the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
But there is a lot more at issue here. The fundamental distrust of growing segments of the population in the integrity of the elite ruling them extends to a number of different fields with no apparent connections. At least not immediately apparent, but pretty clear once you start putting the whole jigsaw together. Why do the elite put so much energy in pushing mass vaccination and the use of allopathic drugs while trying to slow the development of alternative therapies? Why do they encourage the spread of genetically modified organisms while creating regulations restricting the free use of natural seeds? Why do they prevent media reporting of important meetings where crucial topics are discussed in secret while they encourage mass reporting of political theatricals, sports and other distractions? Why is so little public information provided about geo-engineering while the climate change issue is regularly dangled in front of the public? And we could go on and on.
The breath of controversial issues in present society is simply staggering. Behind them all rages a fundamental conflict between radically opposed mindsets: the hard competitive materialist mentality disconnected from nature and spirituality, and the holistic mindset open to the subtle realm. Powerful vested interests do their utmost to have competitive “values” relentlessly drip fed into the minds of the masses.
To free ourselves from such mind control is the key to a meaningful life in what might appear to be a totally mad scenario. Before discussing effective strategies to get free, let us complete our review by turning to the most recent developments.
(…see next instalment)
Copyright © Leo Foresta 2014
[1] Population figures related to America are to be viewed with particular caution as they may tend to conceal the extent of extermination of native Americans.
[2]Massive participation in the labour market turned out to create a cruel trap for a lot of women. But commenting further on this phenomenon would require serious elaboration on its wide societal and personal ramifications
[3]It is essential to distinguish between Jewishness and Judaism on the one hand and Zionism on the other. The former have existed for millennia whereas the latter is about 130 year old, but has managed to seize control over many Jewish communities
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If you are on a journey from honest rationalism to freedom and spirituality, I hope this book has provided you with enough material to bolster your confidence in your own intuition.
Leo Foresta 