Writings

Devolution

Devolution – A biological or cultural decline, the process of degeneration, decline, or "rolling backward" in complexity, effectiveness, or morality.

"How can they mean any harm when they know what's best?" This statement expresses a frustration with the blindness of institutional power. Institutions, convinced of their moral authority and societal importance, are insulated from accountability. Their authority persists even as their devolution accelerates; the undeniable failures fuel a more aggressive defense of their importance. A benevolent power laced with a greedy certainty offers guidance, tradition, order, and protection. The institutions relevance becomes a hollow myth we are forced to repeat, in systems we are forced to support with money by way of blood sweat and tears. Every one of us should feel this by now.

The institution stands tall in Holy rot.

Service becomes self preservation becomes doctrine becomes our cage. They sing hymns of virtue, they award and recognize genius, they write psalms of great accomplishment while the children are abused, neglected, indoctrinated and left to wander a landscape of systemic indifference. They plant a demon seed deep in the future soil. This evil slides down the walls of the vapid halls of institutions that forgot who they were built to protect.

Under this coveted holy rot of institutions children inherit the ghosts of sins they never chose. What they call progress is nothing but devolution, a hijacking of evolution. A slow decay disguised as wisdom. Accountability is an insult to these people. Scrutiny is rebellion. They punish the question because they fear the answer. We already have the answer. We have already asked and been answered. We have all seen the response. What we feel is the breath before the scream. The spark before the fire. The "no more" that finally changes things. No more can we afford to let our children bear the weight of a society's craven appetite for distraction from a reality no one wishes to truly face.

J. Krishnamurti tells us "It is no good measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society". There are only two things in our reality. Light, and the absence of light. That's it. This must be the unit of measure in determining the morality and value of things. Our behaviors, the behaviors of governments, institutions, and leaders.

Am I the light? Am I aware, honest, compassionate, creative, kind, or generous?

Or am I unconscious, selfish, harmful, distracted, deceptive, impatient, or violent?

These harms grow in the absence of light. It is our birthright to question, to examine, to evolve. It is our responsibility to illuminate. We must be the light.

The institution has consumed a centuries resource ahead of time. It is mentally foggy and sluggish. Bloated, clumsy and slow. Too big to fail, too inept to serve, like a cornered opossum too rabid or devolved to play dead. They are relics of a dark age that has to pass. The only fix is a fast. To need less of it. It is the only end-around for institutional tradition on the ropes.

Human beings can produce so much more than just profit. People don't need to be told what to do; they need to know what is possible. History shows us that to build what lasts requires a cooperation we have yet to realize. We wonder how people did inexplicable things in the past while we build weapons of war and let child abuse fester so as not to call into question a system that lost its' way long ago.

This is a profoundly sick society. The institutions have failed with an immeasurable cost to our future while we developed habits and nervous ticks that allow us to endure this truth.

This is why the fate of the universe depends entirely on how we treat each other.

Am I the light? Because this is dystopia.

Is It Faith or Certainty?

Is certainty wrapped in a religious shield of righteousness as dangerous as a switchblade knife in the hands of a toddler? Are humans certain of anything? Or are they clutching a mast on a broken ship in a wild sea storm with no land on the horizon, the creatures of the deep circling just out of sight? Barking orders at the masses who move like a cloud of panicked birds without sense of magnetic north. Chaos and collisions drown out the cry for order. Rain whips and panic scat plasters the ships remnants with a slippery paste that may later be dehydrated and sold as a source of sustenance for the surviving masses. The one barking orders will perish in circumstance, while the mighty institution will rise, immune to the putrid environment that was necessary for this grand rebirth of feudal tradition.

They say you will own nothing and be happy. This will be true but it cannot come by mandate. It has to be the voluntary fast that starves this demon seed out of existence. They can't sell what we aren't buying. I am not buying this anymore. We live in a world that will make it increasingly difficult for people to provide for themselves. There is no battle without a measure of attrition. I believe that all of this will go away, whether by cataclysm or contracts, unpredictable global destruction or by design, we will have to provide for ourselves. The system is a self serving grift that we may no longer rely upon.

Do unto others and stop feeding the system.

We Are the Same

You are not me but we are the same.

We are different (slightly), but not divided. I am afraid of everything. I am numb, overworked, over-stressed, hyper-focused yet completely distracted and desperate to over-stimulate in an effort to procrastinate away the entirety of my reality. If you ask me in public I will say that I am fine. For too long I have choked back my silence like the horse pills they dole out to the masses. It is so easy to shepherd me to obedience. Too tired to fight anymore. Too confused to form a question. Too overwhelmed to rise against a system that consumes my energy but has long since produced anything meaningful.

I don't want to be a threat to anyone or to be threatened by anyone. I want to treat people with respect and immediately disarming kindness. I want the tide to rise, and the rising tide to lift all ships. We will all feel grief, despair, heartbreak, hopelessness, loneliness, shame, guilt, love, joy, bliss and fear. I want to be the light. We all want to be the light.

We are all the same. They fear our realization. They fear our potential for unity. They fear the day we realize in large enough numbers that what we are looking at is no more pleasant than a black light flipped on in a well used trap house. Filthy, repugnant, and stained with a sickness that is metastasizing in the blood of our culture. It is no longer acceptable to look away.

A unified population can stop it cold and starve it out of all existence. Participation is consent. Unified withdrawal is rebellion. Fasting not fighting. Withdrawing not raging. Starve the system that cannot be fixed. We are the same. We are not like them.

The fate of the universe depends entirely on how we treat each other.

Bicycle

Did you ever feel like this life will fold you in half? Crumpled like a piece of loose leaf that will never lay flat again? Flawed? Carried on the air without any method of course correction. I live against my will. Like a bicycle down a beach against the wind. You cannot deny the effort. You should be able to see the struggle clearly. Every ounce of weight thrust down my leg, an organic piston fighting pain and a diminishing chance of reward at the end of the effort. Right, left, right, left slowly losing momentum, finding a new shocking sharp ache in every eternal rotation. Heavy questions burden the mind like deep sand, alluring from a distance but difficult to move through and red hot under naked foot. Every hard fought foot fall is taxed. The rusty sprocket has been worn jagged and stripped of lubrication. The reality of a difficult but inevitably failed effort burns the eyes like a chemical mist. A twisted face of a man who doesn't know why he is crying brings forth a truly primal sound of pain.

Did I go until I died? Did I die against my will? Did I live at all? Was I ever really free? I don't believe that I ever made a free choice. Was I so selfish that I never allowed myself to feel anything at all? Was I so concerned with how I felt that I never connected with another human being at all? Yes I was. Am I dead? No. Am I the same? No. Do I have to ride this God Damn bicycle anymore? Again no.

No more will I lash heavy leather against my own back, split my tender flesh chasing how others may judge my very existence. No more will I be so arrogant as to think that it holds sway over something so valuable as my own free will, captive to the concept that another's opinion should determine my own level of comfort in life. I can leave the bicycle and walk in the other direction. Walk. Not just cover ground. Walk with purpose and confidence that those who would sit in judgement of me are pedaling a bicycle they simply do not see.

Is this the truth or another mask? Would I ever know the difference? This is the frailty of my human nature. Piecing reality together like a ransom note. Letters, numbers, symbols and codes, all with different translations, many possible meanings, one certain end.

The more we talk, the less we communicate.

Devolution Economics

Economics is the study of inequity.

A vacuum of debt keeps the great machine lurching forward. Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime. Until an industrial behemoth parks next to the body of water and empties its bowels into the very place a man may wet a line to live. Who are we to stand in the way of progress. The system thrives on scarcity, fear, wealth extraction and self-preservation. Innovation and sustainability take a back seat to a self-serving structural imbalance that may never resolve. Individual skill means survival and freedom. In our devolved world this skill is crushed by industrial magnitude, corporate overreach and monopolistic ambition.

The world should be shared, sacred and unowned. Corporations now claim dominion over land, water, air, ecosystems and our human future. The system extracts, poisons, profits and all but mandates consumption of the cure. Some modern day petro chemical snake oil. The system has your health and welfare at the forefront of its altruistic mission.

Economics has become a blueprint of our hierarchy. They decide who eats and who goes hungry. Who works on and who rises to leadership. Who profits and who pays. Who will get relief and who will take the blame. Economics is the study of control, it is the operating system of devolution. The institution avoids all responsibility while convincing citizens to internalize the failures it produces and profits from. Holy rot wears the mask of reason. Institutions forget their purpose and focus solely on their own hunger.

Value is not price or profit. Value is the measure of how much something will preserve life, bring dignity, expand awareness and strengthen human connections. Value is found in compassion, creativity, insight, courage, integrity and unity. A collective awareness of our current circumstance. The system says that value comes from production driven by competition. True value comes through human flourishing, the light within people measured not in currency but in consciousness.

Is the Tradition of Hierarchy Crushing Us All?

The judgement we cast about into the world is not the light. Who are you? What are you? What am I? Worst of all, who are you compared to me. How do these people I meet fit into my world view? Human beings now judge one another on the basis of income rather than outcome. What do you have and how did you get it. Although the acceptability of how you get it has broadened vastly in our modern drought of shame. It seems to be all that grows anymore. What you are willing to do to get there outweighs merit. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do unto others, depending on who they are and where they stand in relation to your own status, seems to be the new golden rule.

The institution is now a scarecrow held up by a sagging rotten trellis guarding an abandoned field where life used to grow. Politicians and their parties have let us down. They are human beings. Slowed by the same human frailty that weighs me down. This hollow assumption built on hierarchy that people are qualified to handle anything but their own business is killing us. I'll take advice under advisement, I will not take orders. Least of all from those who have failed so miserably, willfully, and publicly.

High Strangeness

They say that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction is limited by what we believe is possible. Truth has no such limit. Our current truth seems to be testing the theory. It seems that everything, every topic that drives the system into a defensive posture, has been a lie exposed. Every subject that makes them bristle up like a ridge down the back of a predatory canine, cornered and aggressive, is worth serious scrutiny. They expect us to turn away as they bare their wicked teeth. They expect us, faced with an avalanche of unnerving news, to lose touch with reality. To lose touch with each other.

The truth is this: we can shape the nature of shared reality. It is hard to argue that there exists a minority of people on this planet that seem to guide daily life in the direction of their will. We outnumber them. The advantage must not be expressed in violence. It must be expressed in vibration. Do unto others. A kindness so pleasant that those who oppose this momentum stand out as an obvious minority devoid of any power. Highly illuminated awareness is hard to boss around. Be the light. Bring the light. Cast no shadow to benefit ego and seek the truth over the tribe.

The system is greedy, clumsy, and bloated. We are the weight they intend to lose. They are the parachutes we feel dragging behind us while they whip us to run so that the breeze is pleasant. It is time to stop running. It is time to recognize the power represented by our unity. It is clearly what they fear above all else.