Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
I am not a politically complicated person. I think genocide is bad. I think peace is good. I don’t think anyone should be struggling to survive in a civilization that is capable of providing for all. I think we should try to preserve the biosphere we all depend on for survival.
To me these are just obvious, common sense positions, no more remarkable or profound than believing I should refrain from slamming my nipple in a car door. I do not think these views should put me on the political fringe. I don’t think they should cause me to be seen as some kind of radical. It’s not outlandish that I hold these views, it’s outlandish that everyone else does not.
But that’s the kind of society we find ourselves in today. The obvious is framed as freakish while the freakish is presented as obvious. Health is framed as sickness while sickness is presented as health. The moderate is framed as extremism while extremism is presented as moderate.
We live in a twisted, backwards dystopia where everything is the opposite of the way it should be, and we’re conditioned to think it’s normal and acceptable. It’s not until some degree of insight dawns in you that you look around and realize you are living in the nightmare of a madman. Until then you spend your time here thinking, speaking, voting and behaving as though the demented status quo we are living under is the moderate and expected reality.
All our lives we are trained to believe this hellscape is the healthy and expected circumstance for our species. Our parents and teachers tell us that it’s normal for things to be this way. Our pundits and politicians assure us that there’s no other way things could be and that we are living under the best possible system.
A big part of it is just growing up in a society that’s been diseased since long before you were born, being raised and taught by people who also grew up in a society that’s been diseased since long before they were born. We show up here, we don’t know anything, and then the big people teach us about war and money and jobs and politics, and assure us that our initial horrified reaction to the things we are learning is just immature naivety to something fine and normal.
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to explain war to a child, then you know how insane this civilization looks when perceived by a pair of fresh eyes. I’ve never had to explain the genocide in Gaza to a young child, but I am sure it would be met with even more shock and grief. Kids have a natural, healthy revulsion toward such things, and it is only by sustained indoctrination that we are able to twist their minds into seeing them as normal.
It takes a lot of education to make us this stupid. Our minds require a whole lot of training to accept this horrific dystopia as the baseline norm. That’s why the empire we live under has the most sophisticated domestic propaganda machine that has ever existed.
In order to have clarity, we need to learn to look with fresh eyes. Uninitiated eyes. Eyes that have not been educated out of their initial healthy impulse to weep at what we are doing and how we are living here. We need to get in touch with that intuition within us which rejects the sickness of our society as though it was meeting it for the very first time.
Learning to meet life afresh in each instant is good practice anyway; it makes living a lot more enjoyable and beautiful, and it helps us move in a much wiser way since we’re not constantly reacting to old patterns and expectations in an ever-changing world. But as an added bonus it also peels away the tolerance we have built up for the backwards lunacy of this empire we are living under.
The less healthy this civilization feels to you, the healthier you are getting. Everything about this nightmare looks appalling through clear eyes.
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