Distracted by Grapes
“A ‘shroud of darkness’ has come over the world.”
A man is walking along a mountain path when he notices a tiger stalking him. Seeing a cliff close by, he runs to the edge and, grasping a strong vine growing there, lowers himself down the face of the cliff. The tiger he was escaping from pursues him to the cliff edge, snarling at the man from the top of the cliff. The tiger lays down to wait.
As long as the man stays on the vine, he is protected from the tiger above. As he begins to lower himself further down the vine, he hears a growl from below. Looking down, he sees another tiger on the ground looking up at him. He cannot go down, and he cannot go back up, for two hungry tigers are waiting to eat him. He is stuck.
While hanging on the vine, he sees a mouse emerge from a hole in the rock above him and begin chewing the vine. The man realizes his time is limited, as the mouse will weaken the vine, and he will fall to the tiger below.
Looking about the cliff face from where he is hanging, he spots some beautiful red grapes growing from a ledge. They look good, and he reaches out to grab a few and puts them in his mouth. The grapes taste good.
This is the condition of mankind today. Hanging on a vine below a cliff with one tiger up above and one below, each eager to devour us, while a mouse gnaws at the rope or vine on which we are hanging, we are distracted by grapes or the satisfaction of our immediate animal desires. It is only a matter of time.
My Teacher, AdiDa said,
"Terrible weapons, worldwide diseases, ecological disaster, political conflict, competition, the rule of the day, deforestation, holes in the ozone layer, climate change, global epidemics, stupidity, Godlessness, materialism—this is not the Golden Age! The principal movement of all the nations and groups in the “world” is to dissociate from one another. The population is growing. The practical requirements are being intensified.
“Happy Downtown America” is over! Its likeness in the “world” will not happen. This was always in the cards. You are going to die, anyway. There is no reason to be surprised about death. It will occur in “darkness,” as far as the “world” goes . . . .
You do not notice the signs of the times. You are not noticing the shroud that is coming on the Earth because of the collective human stupidity and Godlessness. The entire “world” is “tuning in” to separateness and devastation. The general history to come is “dark,” and you should take that possibility seriously. Others in the past have lived in “dark” times, too. Just because the “late-time” (or “dark” epoch) is occurring on a bigger scale this time and appearing on TV does not mean that others in the past have not lived and suffered through and died in “dark” times.
Do not expect utopia to happen on Earth. The times are “dark”. It will be so. Perhaps something better can be done —that is to be seen.
In Civilization in Transition, Carl Jung says that our animal-like tendencies most prominently manifest in times when mental illness becomes the norm rather than the exception in a society, a situation Jung termed a ‘psychic epidemic.’ It seems like such a time has come again.
“Jung writes, “It is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
The once oppressed have turned into the oppressor. The Jews who were massacred for centuries, in the recent actions of the Israeli nation, have turned to killers themselves, destroying tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children to wipe out the Palestinian terrorists who hide behind them. America, the country that went through a revolutionary war 350 years ago to rid itself of the oppressive King of England, has elected a bully, a wannabe tyrant-king, and a stupid one at that, who is a criminal that disdains the Constitution of the United States. The worm has turned as it always has and always will.
How else could this have happened? . . . We have elected a selfish, corrupt, evil man to lead us. He has eyes like a lizard and a hairstyle like Elvis without the guitar. He is overweight and claims to have the most beautiful body. He has a criminal past, filled with bankruptcy, fraud, lying, cheating, jealousy, and betrayal of wives, business partners, and banks. He surrounds himself with criminals; he understands them, and they know him. If he is moving his lips, he is lying. He has an uncanny ability to blithely ignore his ignorant blustering and a feral (untamed, unruly, and chronically misbehaved due to a lack of socialization) sense of self-preservation. He is uneducated, even stupid, yet astoundingly unaware of it. He often praises his own intelligence. He says he loves the Bible, values revenge, cannot stand criticism, and is easily pacified and controlled by praise. He surrounds himself with those who ignore his lies and support his transgressions. He surrounds himself with those who praise him, with people purposed like himself, but, with one exception, they must never forget that he is the greatest of them all and let him know it regularly. It is said that anyone can change, but repentance of one’s sins is the first step towards change. Trump has said, ‘I have never done anything that I need to repent of,’ and, true to form, he has never repented of a single thing. Hitler never showed any remorse for what he did to the Jews and gypsies or all the millions whose needless, horrible deaths he caused, and we have chosen to give Hitler another run at it; how could this have happened?
This is a dark time, and this phenomenon is occurring worldwide. Consider Trump’s friend, at least for a while, Vladimir Putin, another man who has recently invaded Ukraine. Putin is famous for corruption, lying, and cheating. He has invaded countries for made-up reasons that he keeps changing, assassinates his political enemies, brings death to millions, blames others for everything, and now threatens to destroy the world using hydrogen bombs if he does not get his way. It seems the whole world is infected with a virus; everywhere one looks, there is evil.
Carl Jung described what is happening as a ‘mass psychosis.’ He wrote about this after World War II, as he considered the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany:
“The sight of evil kindles evil in the soul. Something of the abysmal darkness of the world has broken in on us, poisoning the very air we breathe and befouling the pure water with the stale, nauseating taste of blood. When evil breaks into the order of things at any point, our whole circle of psychic protection is disrupted.
“All these pathological features- complete lack of insight into one's own character, auto-erotic self-admiration and self-extenuation, denigration, and terrorization of one's fellow men..., projection of the shadow, lying, falsification of reality, determination to impress by fair means or foul, bluffing and double-crossing- all these were united in the man (Hitler) who was diagnosed clinically [in 1918 at the psychiatric ward of the Reserve Hospital IV in Pasewalk by a Jewish doctor, Dr. Karl Kroner] as a hysteric (suffering from 'hysterical blindness’), and whom a strange fate chose to be the political, moral, and religious spokesman of Germany for twelve years. Is this pure chance?
“Hitler's theatrical, obviously hysterical gestures struck all foreigners (with an amazing few exceptions) as purely ridiculous. When I saw him with my own eyes, he suggested a psychic scarecrow (with a broomstick for an outstretched arm) rather than a human being. It is also difficult to understand how his ranting speeches, delivered in shrill, grating, womanish tones, could have made such an impression. But the German people would never have been taken in and carried away so completely if this figure had not been a reflected image of the collective German hysteria.
“It is not without serious misgivings that one ventures to pin the label of 'psychopathic inferiority' on to a whole nation, and yet, heaven knows, it is the only explanation which could in any way account for the effect this scarecrow had on the masses.
Another word for ‘psychopathic inferiority’ is a ‘morally corrupt personality.’ According to Jung, this would be a description of the American people. According to the dictionary:
The term "psychopathic inferiority" is used to describe morally corrupt personalities. It was eventually shortened to "psychopath". Psychopathy is a personality construct that includes traits like impaired empathy and remorse, boldness, disinhibition, and egocentrism. Psychopaths may appear normal on the outside because of their superficial charm and ability to handle stress.”
Like Trump, our country has never even begun to apologize for Slavery, the persecution of Black people, the American Indian holocaust, VietNam, the refusal to ban automatic guns and the killing of so many American children by gun violence, the lack of universal healthcare, the fact that the wealthy pay less percentage of their income in taxes than the working poor; and this is but a few of the instances of our moral corruption or psychopathy. Our country has been this way for centuries. We imagine ourselves as ‘a shining city on a hill', a phrase derived from a Biblical verse: “A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” -Matthew 5:14. But what has fallen into forgetfulness is the field of sins on which that city was built. Such things happened not because of ‘bad information’ as Yuval Hariri suggests; these actions were rooted in the nature of man and have expressed themselves mythologically and historically since the beginning of recorded time.
Technology will not save us. Technology is not our problem. Our stupid, selfish, murderous, and ignorant use of technology is the moral virus; it lies in our very nature.
All the wonderful technological improvements, from electric cars to cell phones, nuclear energy to robotics, the Internet to Starlink, and weather satellites, have potentially improved our lives. Still, tragically, they are also being used to threaten our civilization and the world. As Buckminster Fuller said years ago, mankind has arrived at a point in our technological development where we can create a Utopia or drive ourselves into oblivion. We ‘can’ and will do one or the other.
What does Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, propose as a solution? He is developing technology to bring our species to Mars! Does he think it will be any better there? Does he think that because we have settled in a virgin world, we will not destroy it as we have done to this one? Does he not realize that it is human beings, human nature, and human purposes that we are bringing to Mars? Does he think that the nature of man will change on another planet? Does he not realize we are destroying this world? Does he not see we are hanging by a thin thread already on our planet?
Yuval Hariri is wrong. He says that the problems in our world today are not due to human nature but to ‘Bad Information.’ He says that humanity is ‘on the Verge’ of catastrophe due to such ‘Bad Information.’ This ‘Bad information’ is now more dangerous due to the advent of Artificial Intelligence, or AI.
Hariri says that ‘Bad Information’ causes people to harm one another and act against their own good, the common good, and the health of the environment. He says that if people are given good information, they will act properly and righteously. I believe this argument is mythically, historically, and factually wrong, and it is refuted by Hariri’s arguments when he is questioned using actual examples of why what he says is true.
We are drunk and standing at the edge of the roof. Before going to Mars, let's see if we can make our Earth a utopia. Musk runs companies that use technology to improve the world. But our problem is not about developing better battery technology. Technology can help us create a better world, but man’s present use of technology is now hastening our end. It is man’s nature that is at cause, and it is man’s nature that we must fear. We are far more threatened now than when the atomic bomb was first created and used, precisely because of technology. The threat to our world lies in the nature of man. The real challenge is what man will do with technology. Build new and better weapons and ways to deliver them, or feed the world?
The direction of technology is to accomplish more and more, using less and less materials and energy. Buckminster Fuller called this process -‘Ephemeralization.’ This process increasingly concentrates more and more ability and power in fewer and fewer physical presences and processes. This makes the world more vulnerable to destruction, such as destroying a nuclear reactor or using a single hydrogen bomb to destroy New York City. The vine the man hangs on, below and above the tiger, is the psyche of man. We hang by a thin thread, vulnerable to breakage, and we are distracted by grapes.
I will discuss this topic further in following articles . . .