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Meditations on the coming collapse
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by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Nov. 1, 2006
Ultimately the coming collapse of industrial civilization and its
financial underpinnings is a spiritual problem.
To the extent that the world's population continues to worship Mammon,
that is to practice Greed as a sacrament, then cycles of destruction
and despair are sure to continue.
History has continually accelerated due to the tremendous motivation
derived from Greed. You covet someone else's wealth, their very
bodies if nothing else, and succeed in becoming a target for someone
else's Greed in an endless succession of violence and expropriation.
This has been the story for the last many thousand years that the
human species has been experimenting with centralized control.
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Centralized control always, inevitably, leads to collapse because it
is fundamentally not an internally balanced organic system. At this
point the entire globe has been ruined in this process of sacrifice
on the alter of Greed. The climate is becoming uninhabitable. The
soils and fresh water resources have been destroyed. The vastness of
the ocean itself has been fundamentally altered.
No matter what scenario of triumphant Greed you care to indulge -- a
thousand year U.S. reich, a feudalism of international bankers
enforced by mercenary armies, any scenario of centralized control you
can think of -- it will end up in the same final pathway of destruction
from within. We will be left with a wrecked Earth, but there will be
no resources left to concentrate sufficiently to support centralized
control. Indeed the last will be first, what few of the last remain
that is.
There is a story from WWII about the Burma road. At one point the
Americans took over from the British and decided to increase
productivity by paying the local tribal workers twice as much as the
British had been paying for a day's work. The result was that the
workers showed up only half the time. Sensible people, they were not
worshipers of Mammon.
In the ensuing half century the Mammon
worshipers have systematically destroyed the last vestiges of
sustainable tribal cultures. But rebooting tribal culture will only
require the removal of coercive threat, the bankruptcy of large scale
warfare.
Liberation is at hand. The invisible hand turns out to be a suicidal
one. The worshipers of Mammon will destroy themselves. May that
future generations, if in fact there are any, remember in song and
myth the great error of the false god of Greed.
If I was a leader of a small, technologically backward country with a
few nuclear weapons, I might think that this was a good time to send my weapons
into fractional orbits around the world and create an enormous
electromagnetic pulse that would serve to even the score with the
technologically advanced nations. In the logic of survival, if it
hurts my enemy more than it hurts me then it is a good thing. The
collapse of the industrial infrastructure of the world, the collapse
of the world "economy," the starving of armies of mass destruction
would quickly ensue.
Maybe, if I was the leader of a small country with no nukes but a
sophisticated enough biological research establishment, I might order
the engineering of a virus with the potential for creating a pandemic
so severe as to reduce the population of the world by 95% or so, with
a small number of my own people to be protected by prior
immunization. With a long enough latency period designed into the
virus, worldwide dissemination would be easy. Total war is total,
no holds barred, anything goes, and the small may smite the great in
unexpected ways.
But we need not posit any dramatic denouement. Time alone will see
an end to this story of insane Greed, expansionism and enslavement.
Out of the compost heap left by industrial civilization may grow a
new, vigorous crop of humans that remembers the errors of the past,
or does not.
© by the author.
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At this point the entire globe has been ruined in this process of sacrifice on the alter of Greed.
The climate is becoming uninhabitable.
The soils and fresh water resources have been destroyed.
The vastness of the ocean itself has been fundamentally altered.
No matter what scenario of triumphant Greed you care to indulge -- a thousand year U.S. reich, a feudalism of international bankers enforced by mercenary armies, any scenario of centralized control you can think of -- it will end up in the same final pathway of destruction from within.
We will be left with a wrecked Earth.
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Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
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Previous articles by Dr Ruhs:
This is how civil wars begin
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The Secret Police may be
watching you so don't think,
act or believe like a free person
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The end is at hand
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When spinach becomes a matter of life and death
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And now for something completely different
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We are all prisoners on home supervision
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There is no war but class war
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Meanwhile, back on Lifeboat Earth
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Is anyone willing to think about America’s dismal health statistics?
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A plague of criminals
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On facing adversity with courage and good humor
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Bush's death toll will vastly exceed Hitler's
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An unemployed physician
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Truth and Reconciliation Commission
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Who "Them" are:
You can't tell
the players without a scorecard
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Global warming passes the point of no return
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In case you wondered why your doctor would sell you down the river
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Time to pull the rip cord
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Can the President legally
crush a child's testicles?
His lawyer says, "It depends ..."
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
The great American misunderstanding
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When death is the proper penalty
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The revolution this time
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The good tidings and the bad
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Health care in America: An ongoing, massive con game
by Paul Krugman, The New York Times
with comments by Herb Ruhs, MD
Competition: Destroyer of character
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America without the myths
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To dream the impossible dream
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Refusing to see the obvious
by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
with comments by Herb Ruhs, MD
What can we do? Rhetorically speaking, that is.
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Banned in Cloverdale, by Herb Ruhs, MD
All of us are being fatally poisoned
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Enough already
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War is sometimes justified, often not, but always insane
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The bad news is the same as the good news
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The gangsters' mentality
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Nietzsche, New Orleans, and 'Nam
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The masquerade of "civilization"
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Habits of successful modern cannibals
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Face these horrors with acceptance, equanimity, humor
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Yet another, higher dose of pain
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The war of one against all:
The roots of our enslavement
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Doctors, medicine, hospitals, and the rest of the story
by Herb Ruhs, MD
System of privilege expands in scope and overall power
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Highway robbery turns out to be legal after all
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Class warfare, anyone?
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Why the little-known news is the most important
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Why "Free Speech" does not matter
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Big pharma
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The genius fish and other comments
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When all else fails, try the truth
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Childhood abuse and the role it plays in maintaining coercive power
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Murder by medical device
by Herb Ruhs, MD
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