By Paul Edwards
March 22, 2023:
Information Clearing House
-- Is this, our
lifetime, the critical moment when the survival
of life on earth will be determined; or just
another of the ongoing crises that have always
defined human existence? For a great majority
of people it’s the latter: a time like any
other. To most people, beset as they are with
daily struggles, the question doesn’t even
occur. One of the mixed mercies of human
limitation is their blindness to what threatens
them and the capacity to ignore it.
But assume that it is. Assume that in our time
the future of life will be decided. This idea,
as Dr. Johnson said of the prospect of being
hanged, concentrates the mind wonderfully. If
we imagine this is where we are—that whether
human life continues truly does depend on us
now—then all would agree that it’s imperative to
abandon the hypocritical bullshit that prevents
us from acting to preserve it. Humanity has
never had to face the certainty its actions will
determine whether life continues, and has never
had to make ultimate choices irrevocably.
Suppose that now it does.
Beneath and behind the cowardly sophistry that
has prevented humanity from acting for its own
survival, there are two powerful conceptual
anchors that support our refusal to accept the
iron fact of finity and prevent our acting
rationally. They provide both cover and tacit
permission for our self-elected suicide.
The first—longest enduring, and deepest—is the
absolutism of organized religion; not of one
religion, but all religions, religion itself.
We understand why they exist. Awareness of
finity, that fear we feel of our inevitable
mortality, in addition to the random miseries
living entails, create a desperate yearning for
protection, hope, and safety every human
experiences. Since life provides no such
dispensation, a magic answer had to be devised.
All religion originates in this need and is an
attempt to address it.
Humanity in the mass found relief in religion;
it assuaged the eviscerating hopelessness and
mollified the inescapable dread mortality
imposes. It’s psycho-spiritual gift has come at
great cost, however. In insisting upon godly
direction of Man’s destiny, religion allowed him
to obliquely offload responsibility for his
actions onto deity. The notion that “Man
proposes and God disposes” has been used not
just to provide a fantasy heaven, but as an
excuse for the horrors Man inflicts on his own
kind.
The appalling tragedies Man has perpetrated on
himself and the living world through the ages,
have found ultimate excuse and explanation in
the Will of God. Religions have provided
historic justification for Man’s long saga of
cruelty and murder of his own. This is not
because gods are portrayed as malevolent, but
rather as omnipotent and incomprehensible. Man
is not ultimately in charge of himself and his
actions. God is. Religion requires Man to
conform to a destiny he is unable to
understand. Deus lo vult!
Although science has so long and so thoroughly
exposed all religions for the specious,
infantile fantasies they are, weak Man continues
to use God myths to justify his brutality, and
to elude, in his own mind, responsibility for
the disasters he has planned and executed that
are leading him and the living world to an end.
The second categorical imperative of human
policy is Capitalism. It has been said that
it’s easier for men to envision the end of the
world than the end of Capitalism. Because it
has proven the best means to amass the wealth
that insures power and privilege, it is the
ruling economic system of the world, and all
business of significance is conducted through
Capitalism. It is absolute.
Economics—a “social science”—has no more
relation to ethics than chemistry has to
politics. It is simply the study of the way
people contrive to exchange goods and services.
Its “laws” or, more accurately, practices, are
not subject to ethical strictures or regulated
by social effects. Economic systems simply
enable servicing of the needs and wants of
Mankind, and Capitalism is one of them. There is
nothing inevitable and numinous about its
so-called “laws”. They are a human created
collection of rules that serve the interests of
money power; in other words, stories.
In spite of that fact, Capitalism, the most
powerful engine of wealth generation in history,
has assumed a mythic character of permanence, an
aura of inevitability, that has raised
humanity’s belief in it to the level of a
sanctified religion. The fact is, that
human-created economic systems work as money
power wishes them to work, but are riddled with
cruelties and failures, and are subject to
change if and when humanity demands it.
For the same reason religions continue their
hold on the vast majority of humanity,
Capitalism is virtually invulnerable to honest
criticism. It has been portrayed as somehow
holy, and ultimately necessary for the survival
of humanity. Nothing could be more false and
ridiculous. Ages of lying indoctrination and
relentless force-feeding of dishonest propaganda
by the money power has rendered it
unchallengeable as Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam.
The combined power and dominating influence of
these forces—religion and Capitalism—which
virtually all mankind upholds and fiercely
defends—is rapidly destroying the physical bases
of human life and the prospect of any possible
future for Mankind.
To return to our premise, if this is the age in
which survival of our
species will be determined, which seems certain,
then unless the tyranny of these deeply evil
belief systems is broken there is no hope for
Mankind. Perhaps, the sense that any possible
future is ours to determine, if widely
disseminated, will provide the moral strength
to break free and live? The choice is ours to
make.
Paul Edwards is a writer
and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached
at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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