What is wrong with the world today?

Cross posted to Left Take

The simple answer: The Military/Industrial complex + Corporate State = World Domination…

OK, I started this with one thought, and research has thoroughly jumped that track to another train.  Man, I really, really miss having someone to talk these hare brained notions of mine over with.

Back in the day, the Deary Departed and I would sit in the mornings and have coffee, most every morning, weather one of us was heading to bed or we were both headed out or both free for the day,  we’d sit, with something, either cartoons, old WB’s and Harman-Ising’s, or something ‘educational’, on the TV and talk, about what ever was on our minds, it was always interesting.

Oh, for a lazy Saturday with ‘Art of the Western World’ and My Deary….

In those conversations and many, many others, my hare brained notions would be shifted, winnowed, and polished.

Now, they are left to the whims of my mercurial head.

Now, I just trail along behind and try to make sense of the shifting.

I started with the thought of tracing the problems of the present through the Industrial Revolution, to the rise of the Military/Industrial complex and through to the spawn of the Corporatocracy.

And I can still do that.  Very easily.  But reading up on the various elements and having the reading range all over the Web through uncounted links and shifts of focus, has lead to strengthening of another idea.

One that was shifted, winnowed, and polished back in the day.

The greatest tragedy of human existence is that we can conceive perfection, but we can never attain it.

And one of the big problems is that we all have our own vision of what perfection is, some of those conflict violently.

Where is this all going?

I have no idea, but…

With the thoughts rambling back and forth from the advents of recent days to the beginnings of recorded history, I can’t help but observe that the human experience is a series of big, ponderous, monolithic systems of control, growing, spreading and dying, with a couple of stabs at smaller, lighter organizations sprouting and being overgrown and consumed.

Most all of the biggies, Egypt, Rome, The Church, Capitalism etc… Are systems evolved in a very bottom heavy fashion.  A small minority supported by and controlling a much larger portion of the populace.  Egypt, with its focus of supporting the life of a god on earth was, perhaps, the one with the smallest in crowd.  These power out of proportion with support systems, all tend to a messy demise, with famine, privation, and poverty for the vast number of the participants following in the wake.

Here and there you get things like Greece, The Enlightenment, the birth of Republics, and various rises of the Proletariat.  Which are usually sabotaged and cannibalized by the bottom heavy systems.

And in those shifts I see a mind boggling tendency of the human animal to sell itself, extremely cheap, to the group with the best empty promise.

Egypt crumbles to be supplanted by Greece, Greece is swallowed by Rome, Rome disintegrates into the Dark Age and The Church rises, The Church stumbles on The Enlightenment and The Enlightenment dims in Capitalism.

We build em up and tear em down.

And only the surface changes.

All of our higher ideals; equality, honor, tolerance, justice etc, are constantly overshadowed and subsumed by our baser self interest.  If we think we can get a good deal we’ll sell our souls for a promise of a better future.  When that future doesn’t materialize, we just look for the next promise.

And we don’t even consider the validity of the promise.  We are a gullible lot.  We even bought the biggest scam of all; suffer in this life for a better after life.  That’s a good one.  Cuz with that one you got no dissatisfied customers to deal with.

Every time a system with the aim for equality and justice emerges it gets stabbed in the back by manipulation, greed, the drive for dominance, and judgment.

How long will it take us to learn that if you elevate anyone you eventually end up with a small group who have all the food and toys, and a very large group who have nothing?  Why is it that we always have a large number that will sell themselves, and anyone around them, for even a promise of admittance to the privileged group?  Why is it that we can name seven deadly sins, but we can’t recognize them in our own backyards?

What has happened to this country, and the world, is that the poison of human nature is running freely, and everybody's drinking the Kool-Aid.