"Don't feel bad, most species of large mammal die off ... it's just our turn."
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Dr Herb Ruhs is The Compassionate Misanthrope "Don't feel bad, most species of large mammal die off ... it's just our turn." |
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The troglodytes of extreme wealth by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News Dec. 8, 2008 I often find myself puzzling about why the general public, including many in journalism and academia who should know better, have such a hard time noticing that the plutocracy is in the process of dismantling the US and the rest of the world's economy and condemning the world to generations of poverty, disease, despair, death and decay. An objective look at the predictable effects of extreme wealth concentration, neglect of basic services, education, agricultural fertility, ecological destruction and induced stupidity by means of mass media manipulation, indicates that we are nearing the bottom of a deep hole with no hope of climbing out any generation soon. Historically, the current phase of world civilization resembles most the period when Europe was headed into the Dark Ages.
Then it came to me this morning while doing the washing: We have a pervasive fundamentalist belief that is so strongly held across the world that no -one is really aware of its blinding effect. It is a religious belief in Progress. People find it impossible to believe that we could be led deliberately into decline. Something like this happened toward the end of the Roman Empire. Pax Romana was such an amazing success, on a scale, in terms of general improvement of standards of living and personal security, comparable to the Industrial Revolution, that even as the institutions of the Roman state were becoming hollow caricatures of themselves, even as banditry, pestilence and war were depopulating large swaths of the Empire, even as barbarian tribes were routinely sacking great Roman cities, the general population continued to believe in the glory of Roman civilization. Then, as now, the vested interests of a very narrow, hyper-wealthy segment of the Roman citizenship, were working actively against the interests of the general population as they savaged the machinery of the empire in the process of concentrating their personal wealth at the expense of everyone else. These days it is nearly impossible to read any progressive screed without encountering advice about what we need to do, as a world-wide society, to ward off climate destruction, bring the population explosion under control, improve the lives of the poor, and bring an end to war. The brilliance of many of these proposals is startling and the conclusion, at least that I come to, is that saving the world is not a technical problem. It is a political problem. It is a problem of concentrated power that, in every instance, is working against positive change and for a regression to a feudalistic form of order, euphemistically referred to in the inner sanctums of power as the New World Order. Great wealth and power seems to have the effect of transforming otherwise well-educated and modern people into stone cold troglodytes, content to see the rest of humanity suffer in the extreme in order to glorify their unopposed dominance. The spiritual decay induced by wealth was hinted at in the Biblical parable of the camel and the eye of the needle. Our fortune lies not in our stars but in our hearts, and in our quest of avarice we abandon hope in the future in favor of the coin of the present. The single most powerful predictor of a society's health and longevity is economic equality. Though pockets of equality still exist (generally secondary, as with Western Europe, to their
A Short History of Progress is a book-length essay by Ronald Wright, published in 2004. In this insightful, and I think little-appreciated study, Wright contemplates just what I am talking about here. I highly recommend it for any thoughtful reader. Wright lays out in a concise and scholarly way the facts of past misadventures of civilization, their paths to eventual collapse and the lost opportunities that could have saved them from destruction. But I guess, not surprisingly for the author of a popular book, he ends up challenging us to not make the same mistakes. He, like all the progressive thinkers, prescribes a choice of intelligent innovations that can save us from falling off the cliff. But of course, the real situation is not that we lack the ability to make intelligent choices, it is who is making the intelligent choices. The troglodytes of extreme wealth may be primitive in their mental stance, but they are far from being unintelligent. For greatly concentrated power the intelligent choice, the best service of self-interest, is the promotion of a general decay that leaves them high and dry, secure in their castles defended by their armored knights and supremely superior to the groveling rabble at the gates. The primitive human animal lusts for the adoration of a court and impunity of action. Once you have nearly everything, the only thing left is to see that no one-else has anything at all. © by the author.
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