Listen to a reading of this article: Whenever I talk about the way our species is sliding toward annihilation via nuclear armageddon or environmental disaster I always get a few people saying something along the lines of, "Good, humans are horrible. The planet will be better off without us."
Everyone carries a burden. Let us be kind with one another. Kindness is love is the highest form of consciousness that connects us with the universal light.
I love how you give lucid, concise expression to such profound truths, again and again and again.
Gosh Caitlin, how I wish I personally knew people like you. I love people, but no one around me seems to get this line of thinking you share which I absolutely agree with.
“It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.”
This is something I personally struggle with: balancing compassion with accountability and responsibility. I have honestly been more conscious than everyone else my whole life, so I cannot even claim to know the steps to becoming a more discerning and decent human being. I can say that humans are in a unique position to destroy ourselves, other beings, and this beautiful blue planet we live on. We are seriously traumatized and mentally ill and we are stomping around the planet like an out of control King Kong crushing everything in our wake. Yes, we are all born innocent, but at some point you have to take personal responsibility for waking up out of your zombified stupor and becoming conscious. Everyone has trauma, but at some point, you must choose to turn it into your greatest medicine and teacher or succumb to it and destroy yourself (and possibly intimate others).
This is one of the first times I've noticed the extension of compassion and understanding to empire managers and their ilk in your work. I applaud it. It's always felt like a logical extension of the rest of your philosophy for me. Of course, extending compassion and understanding is not the same as allowing abusive, destructive behaviors to continue. I also think it's vitally important that we all take some ownership over the current dysfunction.
Not more than your share, as our dominant systems would have us do, just some. The trauma and drives for power, safety, and procreation (all healthy when in balance with each other and our environment, enormously destructive when not) that ultimately underlie the powers that be live in each of us. This is the kind of foundation humanity needs to truly heal. I'm very nervous about setting up us vs. them paradigms that pit a pure, innocent populace against wicked elites, despite resonating very strongly with that narrative at times myself. It sets up a scapegoat that then allows us to cleanse ourselves of, bypassing the trauma in ourselves.
"In this churning, chaotic tidal wave of evolutionary trauma that we were all born into, the only thing we really have any amount of real control over is whether we mindlessly repeat our conditioning patterns or start bringing consciousness to them. "
Our ancestors weren't unconscious zombies. In fact, some of the wisest people humanity has produced lived 3000 years ago, speaking truths that resonate to this day. Though certainly part of our struggle is with historical reality, a large part is our very nature, which is not just a result of "conditioning patterns." So the idea that *we* are the ones to suddenly bring consciousness to humanity and break out of the pattern ignores a lot of history in favor of a gross oversimplification.
But yes, you're correct that we should all try to be a hell of a lot nicer to each other. That's certainly true.
I would never condemn human beings as human beings, because I) it makes no sense, and presupposes a mischievous, unreliable universe at best, and a despicable and perverse universe at worst: 2) it plays like clockwork into objectives of the few truly evil people who want us to throw up our hands and accept, rationalize, their evil on the basis they are just like the rest of us: they aren't. We can be immortal and unethical in small ways, but few of us would ever think of killing a million people because they aren't white, and we want a monopoly for our oil companies and economic elites.
It's a stupid religion-based idea to scare the bejeebers out of us and give the religionists a patent on our conscience.
I would like to see some kindness directed toward the fascist in the White House, who gives speeches with Nazi iconography. I am sure he is mostly senile, and propped up with Adderall. His wife is a doctor, and a mandated reporter, and yet she is allowing this. She could let the public know at any time that we need him removed. But she does not. That's not a compassionate choice on her part. Then we could have a new fascist, Mrs. Harris, who spent years sending minorities to jail. She's not very compassionate, either, but let's peacefully take from office one fascist at a time.
Re, "Good, humans are horrible. The planet will be better off without us." If somebody kicks off nuclear Armageddon, it's no just homo sapiens that will be rendered extinct. Anything species that has no breeding group that finds a warm but not too warm place where they can survive on decaying roots will also go extinct. Nuclear winter will be an event as catastrophic as the K-T event that killed off the dinosaurs.
We can be compassionate. But we cannot afford to indulge it and allow the unawakened to continue to slumber. We are in the throws of totalitarianism ascendant. A governing system that takes the populace that would rather not look at what is happening around them and turns them into the most destructive killing machine the world has ever known. Death wrapped up in a system of "normal" jobs that normal people go home to their normal homes after doing without ever having to contemplate what their normal job results in.
We are the "philistines" the author describes in the passage below. Most of us reading on Substack are not the elite, we're not a passionate mob pushing a radical agenda, we're not the dis-empowered poor. We are the comfortable, with private lives we retreat to for sanctuary and safety. Not obligated to create and protect a better society for others around us, not prepared to help others losing their rights and liberties by challenging and protesting the abusers tormenting them. Keeping our heads down so as not to draw fire. Doing our jobs. Being cogs in the machine. As it's written, right here, in the history described below. Being compassionate is no excuse to allow our friends, neighbors, colleagues and communities to retreat from their moral duties. This book details how Nazism and Stalinism transformed normal people into the most murderous societies the world has ever known.
From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" written in 1951 by Hannah Arent
"Yet totalitarianism in power learned quickly that enterprising spirit was not restricted to the mob strata of the population and that, in any event, such initiative could only be a threat to the total domination of man. Absence of scruple, on the other hand, was not restricted to the mob either and, in any event, could be taught in a relatively short time. For the ruthless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of coordinated philistines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs.
It is not fortuitous, then, that the few protests against the Nazis' mass atrocities against the Jews and Eastern European peoples were voiced not by the military men nor by any other part of the coordinated masses of respectable philistines, but precisely by those early comrades of Hitler who were typical representatives of the mob. Nor was Himmler, the most powerful man in Germany after 1936, one of those "armed bohemians" (Heiden) whose features were distressingly similar to those of the intellectual elite. Himmler was himself "more normal," that is, more of a philistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement.' He was not a bohemian like Goebbels, or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenberg, or a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Goring. He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.
The philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything — belief, honor, dignity— on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives."
Thank you for the uplifting message. We should be tender with each other. Even on social media--especially on social media!
No need to worry about the climate. It’s changing for sure. Man has little or nothing to do with it.
Everyone carries a burden. Let us be kind with one another. Kindness is love is the highest form of consciousness that connects us with the universal light.
I love how you give lucid, concise expression to such profound truths, again and again and again.
You are a star, Caitling. Be safe 🙏
Gosh Caitlin, how I wish I personally knew people like you. I love people, but no one around me seems to get this line of thinking you share which I absolutely agree with.
A very compassionate piece.
Loved that concluding sentence "Everyone is playing with a lousy hand that was dealt to them by the churning tumult of evolution and history..."
That was unbelieveably sentient, and insightful.
Thank you, Caitlin.
“It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.”
—Aldous Huxley
https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=Aldous+Huxley+%22kinder+to+each+other%22
This is something I personally struggle with: balancing compassion with accountability and responsibility. I have honestly been more conscious than everyone else my whole life, so I cannot even claim to know the steps to becoming a more discerning and decent human being. I can say that humans are in a unique position to destroy ourselves, other beings, and this beautiful blue planet we live on. We are seriously traumatized and mentally ill and we are stomping around the planet like an out of control King Kong crushing everything in our wake. Yes, we are all born innocent, but at some point you have to take personal responsibility for waking up out of your zombified stupor and becoming conscious. Everyone has trauma, but at some point, you must choose to turn it into your greatest medicine and teacher or succumb to it and destroy yourself (and possibly intimate others).
A gentle & tender sentiment Caitlin much needed in these tumultuous times.
This is one of the first times I've noticed the extension of compassion and understanding to empire managers and their ilk in your work. I applaud it. It's always felt like a logical extension of the rest of your philosophy for me. Of course, extending compassion and understanding is not the same as allowing abusive, destructive behaviors to continue. I also think it's vitally important that we all take some ownership over the current dysfunction.
Not more than your share, as our dominant systems would have us do, just some. The trauma and drives for power, safety, and procreation (all healthy when in balance with each other and our environment, enormously destructive when not) that ultimately underlie the powers that be live in each of us. This is the kind of foundation humanity needs to truly heal. I'm very nervous about setting up us vs. them paradigms that pit a pure, innocent populace against wicked elites, despite resonating very strongly with that narrative at times myself. It sets up a scapegoat that then allows us to cleanse ourselves of, bypassing the trauma in ourselves.
"In this churning, chaotic tidal wave of evolutionary trauma that we were all born into, the only thing we really have any amount of real control over is whether we mindlessly repeat our conditioning patterns or start bringing consciousness to them. "
Our ancestors weren't unconscious zombies. In fact, some of the wisest people humanity has produced lived 3000 years ago, speaking truths that resonate to this day. Though certainly part of our struggle is with historical reality, a large part is our very nature, which is not just a result of "conditioning patterns." So the idea that *we* are the ones to suddenly bring consciousness to humanity and break out of the pattern ignores a lot of history in favor of a gross oversimplification.
But yes, you're correct that we should all try to be a hell of a lot nicer to each other. That's certainly true.
I would never condemn human beings as human beings, because I) it makes no sense, and presupposes a mischievous, unreliable universe at best, and a despicable and perverse universe at worst: 2) it plays like clockwork into objectives of the few truly evil people who want us to throw up our hands and accept, rationalize, their evil on the basis they are just like the rest of us: they aren't. We can be immortal and unethical in small ways, but few of us would ever think of killing a million people because they aren't white, and we want a monopoly for our oil companies and economic elites.
It's a stupid religion-based idea to scare the bejeebers out of us and give the religionists a patent on our conscience.
This piece was eloquent, and kind.
I would like to see some kindness directed toward the fascist in the White House, who gives speeches with Nazi iconography. I am sure he is mostly senile, and propped up with Adderall. His wife is a doctor, and a mandated reporter, and yet she is allowing this. She could let the public know at any time that we need him removed. But she does not. That's not a compassionate choice on her part. Then we could have a new fascist, Mrs. Harris, who spent years sending minorities to jail. She's not very compassionate, either, but let's peacefully take from office one fascist at a time.
Re, "Good, humans are horrible. The planet will be better off without us." If somebody kicks off nuclear Armageddon, it's no just homo sapiens that will be rendered extinct. Anything species that has no breeding group that finds a warm but not too warm place where they can survive on decaying roots will also go extinct. Nuclear winter will be an event as catastrophic as the K-T event that killed off the dinosaurs.
We can be compassionate. But we cannot afford to indulge it and allow the unawakened to continue to slumber. We are in the throws of totalitarianism ascendant. A governing system that takes the populace that would rather not look at what is happening around them and turns them into the most destructive killing machine the world has ever known. Death wrapped up in a system of "normal" jobs that normal people go home to their normal homes after doing without ever having to contemplate what their normal job results in.
We are the "philistines" the author describes in the passage below. Most of us reading on Substack are not the elite, we're not a passionate mob pushing a radical agenda, we're not the dis-empowered poor. We are the comfortable, with private lives we retreat to for sanctuary and safety. Not obligated to create and protect a better society for others around us, not prepared to help others losing their rights and liberties by challenging and protesting the abusers tormenting them. Keeping our heads down so as not to draw fire. Doing our jobs. Being cogs in the machine. As it's written, right here, in the history described below. Being compassionate is no excuse to allow our friends, neighbors, colleagues and communities to retreat from their moral duties. This book details how Nazism and Stalinism transformed normal people into the most murderous societies the world has ever known.
From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" written in 1951 by Hannah Arent
https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/mode/2up
(From pages 337-338)
"Yet totalitarianism in power learned quickly that enterprising spirit was not restricted to the mob strata of the population and that, in any event, such initiative could only be a threat to the total domination of man. Absence of scruple, on the other hand, was not restricted to the mob either and, in any event, could be taught in a relatively short time. For the ruthless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of coordinated philistines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs.
It is not fortuitous, then, that the few protests against the Nazis' mass atrocities against the Jews and Eastern European peoples were voiced not by the military men nor by any other part of the coordinated masses of respectable philistines, but precisely by those early comrades of Hitler who were typical representatives of the mob. Nor was Himmler, the most powerful man in Germany after 1936, one of those "armed bohemians" (Heiden) whose features were distressingly similar to those of the intellectual elite. Himmler was himself "more normal," that is, more of a philistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement.' He was not a bohemian like Goebbels, or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenberg, or a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Goring. He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.
The philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything — belief, honor, dignity— on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives."