In those dark years leading up to our inevitable rendezvous with destiny, there had been no proverbial soccer coach to help guide us and our fragile 'collective psyche'.
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| Before After |
We had 'given up' simply because everyone else seemingly had, and had instead chosen to live empty lives of self-gratification. We chose this path not because we were innately selfish, but because we had no faith in the rest of the collective to do otherwise.
The majority had surrendered their personal power for the illusion of security and unfettered access to 'creature comforts'. This gross error of judgement had the unfortunate consequences of allowing the few to control the many, and all this had happened simply because we had not yet achieved a critical mass of people who were willing to say NO.
The wealthiest among us had already long since 'given up'. Any human moral advancement, they rationalized, was not something they ever truly expected to see in their lifetimes. Instead they chose to take the 'blue pill' of denial and a poisoned elixir of self-indulgence. "You can't fight the man" was the common belief, and if you tried, one would run the risk of becoming isolated, ostracized or even punished.
Soon, stories began to break concerning highly respected individuals, operating freely within mainstream institutions, and who had been involved in horrific crimes against children. There had been so many of these unsavoury characters positioned within high levels of our societies, that the fear of being 'exposed' had become a convenient tool used to manipulate individuals into passing laws and directing policy of nations in a way that would favour the needs of their controllers.
The only people who were in any position to blow the whistle on these nefarious activities were themselves politically or morally compromised, and therefore in too weak of a position to expose any of the wrongdoings.
But the shit was beginning to smell so bad! so bad in fact that those lodged between the terror of being 'outed' was countered by the fear of reprisal from their controller's minions. They had soon realized that they were better off 'coming clean' with a confession, than to go down in disgrace, forever, as many before them had.
The only thing which had prevented the floodgates from pouring wide open, was the mass consensus trance of materialism most of humanity had allowed themselves to be seduced into.
Exposure of systemic evil had been retarded by our belief that these institutions, and those working within them, were beyond reproach. Many ghoulish private figures had glistening public personas, which had been neatly polished and tightly secured by a highly compartmentalized socio-economic hierarchy, one which everyone had been conditioned into believing we depended upon for our survival.
Oh, and let us not forget the many justifications we made concerning our 'lifestyles', and our corporate government's plundering of natural and human resources in the majority of the world's less developed countries, and those self-cogratulatory 'pats on the back' we gave ourselves whenever we would send a pittance of foreign aid to these troubled lands.
Remember, in those days, a wealthy person could make virtual 'free money' by simply investing in something 'safe', while a person without, and living hand to mouth, had to borrow (and always with interest) just to exist at the most basic level. The poor and middle class were being encouraged to go into credit-card and mortgage debt in the belief that stimulating the economy would then have a reciprocal trickle down benefit to them and the world.
In the end though, the poorer you were, the more debt you had to incur, and pay out to wealthy interests who profited from this via their personal investments.
Cultures like Greece's had been perceived as being lazy, yet statistics had shown that Germans had worked only three quarters the amount of hours annually than Greeks actually did.
As the years went by though, the schism between rich and poor had become so great that western industrial countries were beginning to resemble feudalist societies. The 'Have Nots' sank ever further, both culturally and economically, until they had settled uncomfortably into their role of modern day serfdom.
The game was rigged for the wealthy and by the wealthy. It was they who wrote all the laws, and owned all the banks. They had made sure that the few always came out the winners. Wealth begat wealth and opportunity, and poverty had ensured more poverty and ignorance.
Even when the wealthy had lost big (like during the financial crisis 2008) they had in turn directed government policy to bail themselves out, and always at the expense of the hard working 'common man'.
Everything was justified for the sake of this order, which at the time was considered "too big to fail". This belief was based upon a fallacy then known as 'trickle down economics'; a phenomenon which only appeared to work during times of economic prosperity (ie: before 'peak oil') and did not actually work during times of recession or depression.
All would be lost, it was believed, if this order were allowed to fail. Yet ironically, it had been the collective underclass who had attended to, and performed all the menial work and minutia that had made the world go round.
This act of folly by the collective had freed up precious time, and allowed the wealthy to make themselves buckets of cash (both real and digital) to buy up the lands from which we had grown, whilst honing their golf skills at the local country club, over yet another 'business lunch', courtesy of their lavish corporate expense accounts.
Had the collective psyche been a more conscious one in those woeful days, they would have told the few (the über-wealthy) to go fuck themselves, clean their own grimy toilets, wash their own bloody clothes, and build their own swedish-chinese furniture.
Future CT Village 5, Nova Avalon. Year 17 P.T.E.
What an ugly past.
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