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I've spent my entire life working hard to overcome fear, now find myself having to give up my freedom because of the irrational fears of people like KO. I got vaccinated and the reaction was intense, including heart palpitations that lasted 6 weeks. I wasn't afraid of the virus, I was attempting to cater to the fears of others like Olbermann (had no idea he was still around!) Astonishing that he's so out of touch he doesn't realize his rant and so much else that's going on is purely about irrational fear.

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Christ, that Olbermann video was disturbing. That man needs to get on meds.

"THEY'RE AFRAID!!!!"

No, you're afraid buddy. I can see it in your wide, desperate eyes, your heaving chest, the spittle flying from your mouth...projection is a powerful psychological phenomenon.

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I think a good step would be a real, genuine appreciation of true diversity, including diversity of thought and action (power), rather than superficial diversity such as race, gender, sexual orientation etc in the service of tyrannical unity. Allowing for diversity of thought and power requires rejection of top-down hierarchies. It allows for a multiplicity of power centers rather than a unipolar world, and ultimately requires voluntary belief and action at an individual level. It places faith in the wisdom of multiple individual decisions rather than the arrogant demand that the collective and all individuals within it accede to one's own solution to a problem. It requires respect for the individual, be he named Dirk, Otto or Mahmoud.

We have no right to throw him under the bus even if it might save five others. We can persuade him to take action through discourse and action, but must never coerce. If we throw our own weight into holding the trolley back and encourage him and others to do the same, perhaps we can stop the trolley and save six lives instead of five, while sacrificing none. If Dirk decides the only way to save them is to throw himself under the wheels, that must be his decision and his action.

This requires a leap of faith that neither Russia nor China nor Iran will decide to commit collective suicide by attacking the US or any other sovereign nation, and that top-down entities such as the WHO, the CDC, the FDA or various corporate employers of individual doctors and nurses must not interfere in the voluntary relationship between a caregiver and patient.

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I really enjoyed the insights of this article, Caitlin, even though my hardwiring still finds joy in placing frothing sphincters like Keith Olbermann firmly in the other category.

Therein lies my dilemma: I find I still want to maintain an us vs. them framework, only shift it from the one the elites are currently pushing to one that focuses on them as a party to be rightfully loathed.

If that small miracle could occur on a national basis, I'd call it untempered progress and would be OK that my Buddhism pretty much sucks.

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Plurality voting not only leads to two-party duopoly which by itself is extremely useful to rulers who want to divide and conquer, it leads to a *highly polarized* duopoly (plurality voting tends to favor extremists). Although this extremism tends to make a circus of relatively unimportant issues, it still helps divide. Other voting methods don't have this problem: rangevoting.org electionscience.org

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Comparing Keith Olbermann to Carlson? Really? Similar to trying to comparing Joseph Goebbels to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

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Yes, we are wired for us vs them. Even after enlightenment we still have a body and are still subject to it’s survival programming which includes in group vs out group reflexes.

After awakening, however, we spend much less time in our unconscious survival programming and we readjust quickly ( most but not all of it becomes conscious programming that need not be acted upon) and know when we are seeing absolutely clearly and when we have been briefly pulled out of conscious awareness.

It is a difficult balancing act to point out the cruelties of ‘the other/ the them’ without “othering” /dehumanizing which activates our most primitive programming.

We wish to shake people out of their complacency and stop their autopilot sleepwalking toward the cliff and so we have to emphasize with great passion what is happening. But in doing so we activate or increase the us vs them programming which deepens our unconsciousness and enables further manipulation by our own cognitive biases and by others who support the current human hierarchy wittingly or unwittingly.

So what can we do? Something I have suggested here previously: greater or meta transparency. The same way we have “trigger warnings “ and “ viewer advisories” for adult content we could let people know that we are trying to induce a sense of urgency to increase awareness. But that in doing so we are triggering their us vs them programming. We literally say this. We literally provide the meta context. So we course correct with a reminder that the “others” are also in unconscious autopilot, that they are part of our human tribe and ultimately they are literally One with us.

In the short term we try to stop their madness with equanimity not because we’re trying to pretend we love them ( even though their essence is just as much Love as ours is) but because our own unawakened state means we get caught up in the hierarchy/ dominator/ subservience brain as much as they do and this makes our actions ineffective.

And we remind our readers that at this moment we are analyzing the world / the issue of the day through distorted lenses due to the overactive tribal/ survival brain which in turn is a result of the egoic condition.

So we go meta more often, we step out of the issue, whether it’s oligarchy or narrative control etc. and describe to readers what is happening right now as we read this....what is being distorted right now in each of us as we read, as we try to inform ourselves.

It appears to me that this also means humanity will require new social media in order to interact in a healthier way. Humans need to see each other more often in order to correctly read the context. Written battles on twitter or lengthy journalistic replies feel quite different when people can discuss face to face their fears and grievances. Common ground is more easily reached and those that are more interested in manipulation and don’t care as much as they pretend are more easily revealed.

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There is no 'they'

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