Who Are The Oppressors?

The oppressors are those who want to control and manipulate the coercive powers of State, those who want to game the rules, change the playing board in which the game is played for their financial well-being, often at the expense of the citizen.

The oppressors are those who seek power solely for the sake of power, those who wish to legislate their own twisted version of morality on the rest of us because they believe that they, and they alone, receive absolute truth.

The oppressors are those who believe in an objective view of reality, that this is the way that it is and that there are no alternatives, they have a static view of reality, and wish to enforce that reality. The oppressors are those who are afraid of change, they are afraid of change because they are amassing financial fortunes from the present, whether or not the means that they are amassing them is immoral or harmful irrelevant, because for the oppressors, the ends always justify the means.

The oppressors are those who are hypocrites to the highest extent. They extoll the virtues of the free markets, they claim the supremacy of laissez-faire, they adhere to the religion of the invisible hand, but at the slightest disturbance to their income streams, they will cry to the State for forgiveness.

The oppressors are those who grant forgiveness to those who cry for it, because the oppressors would never want to bite the hand that feeds, they are incentivized to win their next election, their timelines are as short as their insight is shallow.

The oppressors are those who perpetuate the myths that keep the beast alive. They are the story-tellers, the myth-weavers, and the narrative-producers. That Republican and Democrat represent philosophical differences, that an economic system contingent upon finite goods can produce infinite growth, that freedom can be legislated, we are awakening to the lies by awakening to the fact of our own narratives.

The oppressors are those that absolve personal responsibility for problems they have created. It’s always someone else to blame, some other organization, some other individual. They wish to break the causal chain of events.

The oppressors are those that think external salvation is coming, whether that be God, technology, or otherwise. The oppressors will never tell you that it is up to you to change things, because recognizing that, recognizes that you have power, and the oppressors do not want to recognize the power of the individual.

The oppressors believe that humans are resources and that we are here to consume and be consumed. They attempt to turn our biological urges into cash flows through the modern black magic of marketing while making us feel inadequate, insignificant, and empty. Being content with ourselves and saying “enough” with regards to what we have is their greatest enemy.

The oppressors are dividers, they aim to split, to draw us from ourselves, and to pit us against others. They do not want us to realize what we have in common. They draw false dichotomies, they sketch lines in the sand, they will create enemies when there are none.

The oppressors see you as a cell on their Excel spreadsheets, you are nothing but a potential cash flow. How can they monetize your thoughts? How can they place you into a marketable demographic? How can they influence your neuronal impulses so you can buy their poisons?

The oppressors do not care about the environment, they see the natural world as nothing but raw material to be transformed by human ingenuity into something grand. Yet they fail to realize the economy is dependent on the natural world, the natural world cares not whether our economy continues, or whether we do.

The oppressors will make friends with human rights violators, dictators, and terrorists, as long as they remain subjugate to our national goals. They will readily turn a blind eye to injustice, war crimes, and genocide, as long as they recognize their place as a pawn in our games.

The oppressors will use fear as a weapon. They understand that fear makes one suggestible and revert to our primal instincts, they understand that fear makes one unable to think critically, and they will use Pavolvian methods to prompt their desired outcomes. They will propagate crises to jam through agendas which are never to the benefit of the many, they will manipulate, they will use propaganda, and they will deceive.

A Decree

We all share a common fate, and that is death, so while we are here, for this brief cosmic interlude which we perceive as our lives, let us act upon our higher human faculties to make this suffering which we know on the material plane less of a burden amongst fellow man. We can act as medicine for each other.

Our petty differences and boundaries exacerbated by nationalism, ethnocentrism, racism, and other separatist movements enacted so that we may more firmly define our groupings must be relegated to the past, a past where our internal evolution was not glimpsed nor realized, a past where we did not yet know what it truly is to embrace our humanity.

Compassion is the highest form of self-knowing and is a spontaneous and logical outgrowth, let us all know and act from this place towards others, this will lead to peace.

We were hunters

And foragers

The frontier

Was everywhere

We were bounded

Only by

The Earth

And the ocean

And the sky

The open road

Still softly calls …

… How perilous

Our infancy

How humble

Our beginnings

How many rivers

We had to cross

Before we found

Our way

Max-Neef’s principles for economics “which should be”

AMY GOODMAN: And if you’re teaching young economists, the principles you would teach them, what they’d be?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: The principles, you know, of an economics which should be are based in five postulates and one fundamental value principle.

One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy.

Two, development is about people and not about objects.

Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth.

Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services.

Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible.

And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.

Chilean Economist Manfred Max-Neef on Barefoot Economics, Poverty and Why The U.S. is Becoming an “Underdeveloping Nation”

"We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We oohed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah
And when they found our shadows
Groups ‘round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data in their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death"

Roger Waters :: Amused to Death :: 1992

"

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

"

Kurt Vonnegut :: A Man Without a Country :: 2005

"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful—cannot lead to all truths."

Douglas Hofstadter :: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid :: 1979

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Robert Heinlein :: Time Enough for Love :: 1973

"The [people] are the primary units of the actual community, and the community is composed of the units. But each unit has in its nature a reference to every other member of the community, so that each other member of the community, so that each unit is a microcosm representing in itself the entire all-inclusive universe."

Alfred North Whitehead :: Lecture: Body and Spirit :: 1926

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

Charles Darwin :: Origin of Species :: 1872

"Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages."

The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley 1954