Corporate Boat Versus Life Boat
In the muddle of these times, progressives ’embrace’ the democratic party because they have no alternative. We in the US live in a duopoly, where our votes are limited by the two party system.Democrats feign policies efforts that would improve our lives, but damn, they’re stymied again, and again, and again. The Republicans are now well adrift from reality, with many aligned with traitor Donald Trump, and nearly all of them given to ideology that does not befit us, and a lust for power that makes corporate interests ever the priority. It’s all too damn ugly.
We may begin to see another option if ranked voting, such as Maine and Alaska have recently initiated, takes hold. But for this election and the near future, the dems are all we have. Sad.
The Republicans began their trajectory in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, the democratic party took a turn toward neoliberlism with the Clinton presidency in the early 1990s, and it has only gotten far worse with more recent ‘leaders’.
With this context, it’s clear we must make our voices heard more loudly than they have been, as the data shows are elected leaders pay almost no attention to our needs and interests, and all the attention they want to Corporate Overlords. Super Elites. Ideological Controllers. See, they’ve been so successful in keeping us duped that we don’t even have an accepted term for these bastards.
I needn’t remind that these bastards are destroying our planet’s biological life at a horrific pace, we humans included. That precious resources are used for yachts and rockets and endless bullshit because these bastards have almost all the money. The yacht is a nice metaphor for the corporate boat, which has controlled our culture for hundreds of years.
Warned again and again, even by our founding fathers, that corporations inevitably corrupt other institutions, we see now how far we are under their thumb. The recent decisions by the utterly bogus Supreme Court to overturn a woman’s right to her body, the regulation of guns and the EPA’s power to regulate can all be easily linked to these bastards.
There is a way out of this morass for each of us. We transform ourselves, away from mindless noise on the screens and toward our true selves. We each have on. Even these bastards. Yet they are so far from knowing themselves that that fat guy can way more easily fit through a needle. A few things for starting…
Turn off the screen. So much useless, time sinking, distracting horseshit that whatever of value exists in that ream it’s not worth chasing. Far wiser to learn to sit with yourself, breathe, notice your body and what’s happening within the place you are in, knowing we are all here in Life together. So we not only move the goalposts, we change our entire life’s game.
Ending our fear is the requirement behind finding our authentic selves. Because our authentic self is Love, which is antithetical to fear. Love is the Energy side of our eternal Tao. Yang. Just as Eternal Awareness is our Yin. We have much to release and let go.
And we must start with ourselves so that we bring authenticity, and its attendant integrity, into our lives. We change the framing of our lives and how we spend this preciousness of Life we share. So this is the Life Boat. So THIS experience of living we are sharing Now, is, quite literally, the Life Boat. Or the First Truth as I call it.
We give our attention to personal healing, which is what I describe above, because healing our lives together and our planet requires that we are healing ourselves already. Then we can begin our efforts to transform this corrupt and broken culture. Indeed, we must rise up.
And as we become more and more authentic we understand and appreciate the messaging we give ourselves on how we best participate, best let our voices be heard, within this transformation process we are undertaking. Our nearly fearless selves understand our place in All This.
And this is what World 5.0 is about. It’s yet another name for our Life Boat. Embracing ourselves, embracing each other, embracing our Earth, and above all, embracing This Life We Share Forever.
Our Civilization Sucks
Well, we don’t have to look very far, indeed, we don’t have to look at all. We feel it in our bones. We sense it on a regular. Our civilization sucks.
This mess in the Ukraine with Russian and US narratives going back and forth, and people dying, but ices our argument. Our civilization sucks. Want a deeper dive?
Want to look at our dying oceans, devastated ecosystems or environmental destruction?
Want to look at our shitty food systems, our fossil fuels use or our tepid response to the potential end of our species?
Want to back up that Ukraine thing with the permanent war paradigm? Haiti, Palestine, and a hundred other situations where human rights are abused and lives are ruined or ended?
Want to look at our media? Raving lunatics on left and right? All that matters to them is the corporate agenda.
How about civil rights or income inequality? Two very related topics where we’re failing miserably.
Or government, where one of the two main parties is officially the Party of Sedition? And the other a spineless tool of elites?
I could go on and on…
How is it that we find ourselves in such a bad place as a species, as a civilization? That’s not really a tough question if we’re paying attention.
It’s because all of the above and so much more stem from the corporate-owned, more money and power at all costs mentality that the elites – super wealthy families going back hundreds of years – have manipulated us and our culture so they always ‘win’. A sharp case in point is how the Rothschilds funded both sides of the war and lied and cheated ‘manipulated’ both sides, vastly improving their fortunes. Despicable, and a long standing tradition.
No wonder the founding fathers were very wary of ‘The Corporation’. And indeed, The Corporation is the ‘great’ financial entity that allows our corporate overlords to remain our corporate overlords. And it remains despicable.
The Rockefellers, Morgans and Vanderbilts were pulling similarly despicable behaviors in the U.S. a century later. Some of the richest men that ever lived, they offered platitudes to the common citizen, but saw wealth and poverty as both necessitated by capitalism. Their philanthropy was supposed to erase, or at least more tolerable, those great inequalities.
Democrat Grover Cleveland was not the first to complain that “corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.” (1888 State of the Union address). The only major shift since then is the addition of globalization to the corporate tool set. Indeed, our founding fathers had similar concerns, but time favors corporate power as we see today.
These days the rampant abuses of The Corporation are ruining our lives and communities and if that’s not enough, destroying our only home. The people behind the mega-corporations of today are so ingrained in elitist ideology that they’re incapable of recognizing the truth of what they are, at the least, contributing to.
We don’t need extravagant yachts and trips into outer space to see where these crazy folks are leading us. To our doom. We don’t need all the plethora of lawsuits trying to eek out some minor victory against these monsters to know corporations and healthy cultures cannot co-exist. While the recognitions of Occupy back in 2011, that financial systems are corrupt and ruining our lives, might not have seemed obvious then, by now it’s clear to anyone whose head is not buried in some ideological sand.
There is, in truth, only one remedy. Transforming our culture to one where The Corporation has no place. Transform our culture so big lie talking points like Trump really won in 2020 are unimaginable. Transform our culture so that we take the threats to our dear planet Earth with total regard. Where the permanent war paradigm is in the dustbin of history, like so much tremendous malfeasance wreaked on us by our elitist corporate controllers.
Our lives cry out for meaning. For something greater than a sports victory. For something more true than gated communities. For seeing each other in our essence, and not in our clothes, hair, skin or other useless gage of our humanness.
The two Biggies: Community and Commerce
Presuming access to decent air and water, food and energy are the great requirements for a civilization to survive and thrive. And how they do so is through community and commerce. Community because we share this Life Now, and being and doing with each other is a fundamental aspect of our existence. But let’s start with commerce.
Commerce in some form has been with us for tens of thousands of years. Especially with the Agrarian Age and the beginning of specialization in work, people bartered, bought and sold, and developed the system of capitalism. Two folks selling shoes. Who makes the best shoes? Who has the better deal? Whose further away? Such considerations are at the heart of true capitalism.
We don’t have that today. You may find a bit of it in your town or online somewhere, but in all our manifest global systems, we have corporatism. Mindless legal entities, designed and effectively enabling the ruination of our lives and the rape of our dear Earth. First enabled by England around 1600, they have been the scourge we have faced and died for all these long generations.
In any area of our lives, what was once a panoply of business entities is now dominated by one or a few companies. Amazon, Apple, Google, Intel, Walmart, Kroger, AT&T, Tyson, AMD – they covers most everything we buy, how we communicate, what shows up in our searches. And that’s just nine mega-corporations. It doesn’t include the massive financial ‘institutions’ or foreign-owned megaliths like Alibaba, China Petroleum and Chemical or Royal Dutch Shell. Mindless, driven by greed, they destroy lives and Earth with impunity to meet ‘quarterly targets’. There is no hope for a healthy planet where corporations rule.
Community comes in a million forms, but the content is similar everywhere. People working together, playing together and just being together. I like the old barn building phenom, where materials were lined up, a day was picked, and friends and neighbors put up a barn. Or built a school. Or a bridge. Coming together is the central aspect of community.
This innate predilection within us has been totally subverted by ‘The Corporation’. Just as simple truths like the totality of Now, the only place where Life happens, and hence where we happen, has been subverted with BS like ‘He who dies with the most toys wins.’ Nonsense, and our civilization is full of it, because that’s what our corporate overlords want filling our heads. Ideally fearful nonsense, because the terrified do not act to change things.
Oh, and Nation States
Hand in hand with a long history of corporate malfeasance is the nation state. Small communities became cities, cities fought other cities to become city-states, and city-states the fought each other to become nation-states. Do you note a common theme? Fought. And the winners designated the borders and rights and everything else. [See British Empire.]
It’s not a pleasant history to come to grips with. The most aggressive families became the elites, and then monarchies and then those crazy people came up with all sorts of delusions of grandeur. They’re just like you and me but with aggressive ancestors. This pattern still plays out today with politicians.
The Corporation is like the Hydra. It’s many heads can be severed to no end, but it will not die until we stab its heart.
The Answer
Clearly we need transformation. We need a new ground to stand on, and it is Life, already here with us. Already us. Life, and we, only exist in the vast ‘Nowness’ that encompasses everything that is, and is going on. Almost unimaginable in our current civilization, it, this, is none the less everything that exists, and everything that is true.
In temporal affairs, the truth often changes. What happens in our lives or on the world stage is always in transition. Yet in our hearts and souls we remain here in Life, here where everything happens.
World 5.0 offers the clear way forward. We are all together here in Life. It cannot be helped. The second truth is the power of our intent. We choose between fear and Love. The third truth? Only Love makes us happy. This simple formula takes us far.
When applied to our systems, we need the same integrity in government and finance that we have with buildings and bridges, or the Internet. Without integrity they don’t function. Such is not currently the case in our politics.
It’s striking that we of good will are so ignored and the vile imbeciles run rampant in Washington DC. The Democrats are terrible tools dedicated to their corporate overlords and the Republicans are worse with their big lie and utter lack of respect for we, the people. We will never achieve health or happiness until the corporate scourge is ended. World 5.0 offers a clear alternative.