Guest Post by Caitlin Johnstone
After struggling against our own self-destructive tendencies throughout the entirety of recorded history, humanity is now at a point where that struggle is probably going to be resolved, one way or another, within the lifetime of most people reading this.
The movie about this struggle has been written with one of two possible endings. In the first, we are unable to overcome our self-destructive tendencies, and the last of our species dies by radiation poisoning or choking on the dust of an uninhabitable planet. In the second, we evolve beyond our self-destructive tendencies and move into a healthy relationship with our minds, our ecosystem, and each other.
Neither of these two endings would work in a Hollywood blockbuster. In the first, humanity dies off not with a bang but with a whimper as a result of nuclear fallout or climate collapse. In the second, conflict and drama as we know it will cease to exist as we pull up and away from the self-destructive patterns which brought us to this point. We’ll either keep along this same destructive trajectory and meet its inevitable end very soon, or we’ll deviate from that trajectory into something wildly different. In either case, there is no kissing the girl while the credits roll, no coolly striding away from the explosion, and no spin-kicking the bad guy off a cliff into lava after uttering a short, memorable line.
I say this because it seems like a lot of people are kind of hoping for a Hollywood ending in some way. People are hoping that Donald Trump gets arrested for conspiring with Russia and dragged off in chains and everything goes back to normal. People are hoping that President Trump drains the swamp, locks up Hillary Clinton, arrests most of Capitol Hill for child molestation, and destroys the Deep State. People are hoping there’s a violent revolution which restores individual sovereignty to the citizenry. People are hoping there’s a peaceful people’s revolution which ousts the ruling class and replaces the status quo with whatever their personal favored strain of leftism is. Everyone’s subconsciously looking for some big, momentous climax where the Good Guys are vindicated and the Bad Guys are brought to justice.
And it just isn’t going to go down like that.
If you’ve paid much attention to human behavior throughout your life, you know that we reliably repeat the same patterns until there’s inner healing and personal growth. If you’ve experienced inner healing and personal growth, you know that the actual experience of it is generally anti-climactic. True healing is always a game of subtraction, and it moves in the exact opposite direction of the egoically satisfying mental narratives which Hollywood has grown so skilled at providing us. When true inner healing takes place, it doesn’t usually make for a good story, and its effects often go unnoticed for some time, because they are evidenced not in the addition of something new but in the subtraction of something old. You look at your memories of your old unwholesome behavior patterns and think “Hmm, how strange that I used to do that sort of thing!”
If humanity transcends its unwholesome patterns at the end of this movie, it’s going to happen in much the same way. Not in an egoically gratifying way where we see our most hated political figures punished and our own ideological preferences uplifted, but in the simple falling away of old patterns. If human consciousness evolves to the point where we can avert our own destruction, then it will necessarily have dropped the egoic patterns of fear, greed and negativity which kept us bound to our old destructive behaviors. Were that to happen, we’d probably struggle to even remember what we used to stress and rage about when looking at the state of our world.
Nothing else will do the trick. If we do come to some dramatic, egoically satisfying climax, like where all the oligarchs and warmongers are guillotined and their wealth distributed among the needy or whatever, then it isn’t the end of the movie. We have not arrived at a point where we’ve transcended our old patterns, we’ve just seen those old patterns manifest in a way which happens to be egoically pleasing to us in this particular instance. And we will soon see them manifest in ways which we find far from pleasing again.
We will not arrive at our happy ending unless we collectively heal away those old egoic addictions to drama and conflict. Even if we did somehow manage to create a utopia without healing away those old egoic addictions, it would be quickly destroyed and the countdown to doomsday restarted by the gnashing, looping patterns which brought us to the brink of extinction in the first place.
Because guess what? From the perspective of our current state of drama-addicted and conflict-addicted collective consciousness, a world without drama and conflict is dull and worthless. Those addictions will keep leading us toward our destruction until we shed them, if for no other reason than our psychological inability to live in a peaceful, harmonious world.
Are you able to live in a peaceful, harmonious world? A world that is boring to the ego and unsuitable for Hollywood scripts? When I look at the behavior of a lot of activists on social media, it seems like a lot of them fear an end to drama and conflict more than they fear the end of the world. It sounds funny to say, but I think this is legitimately the case for many people. Our addiction to drama and conflict is so strong and our ability to just be at peace in the here and now so weak that keeping things from becoming harmonious can feel like an existential life-and-death need. And we all know people who are strongly predisposed toward stirring up drama to feed that illusory need.
To be able to live in a peaceful world where we collaborate harmoniously with our ecosystem and our fellow humans, we’ll have to transcend our inability to simply be. To have a world where all human ingenuity is pointed at making the world a better place instead of inventing new ways to create landfill for mass consumption and new ways to kill and exploit each other, we’re going to have to have minds that are able to survive in an environment with a lot less conflict, and, once our ingenuity really gets going, a lot less work as well. Minds that can rest comfortably without frenetic busyness or drama. Such minds are currently rare among our species.
The reason there are so many Hollywood movies about dystopian futures and hardly any about utopian futures is because there is no drama and conflict in utopia. Hollywood movies bring in the big bucks by being egoically pleasing to watch; it’s ego candy to watch heroes kicking villains off cliffs, because we can place ourselves in the role of the protagonist and imagine ourselves emerging triumphantly from the drama and conflicts displayed on the screen.
This is why I refer to myself as a “utopia prepper”. In order to have a peaceful, harmonious world, we’re going to have to have minds that are receptive to such a thing. I consider cultivating such a mind to be the most important thing I do in paving the way for paradise on earth, abandoning all attachments to our old ways of operating and opening a path within myself for something new. This will necessarily happen among us all if we’re to see the happy ending of this movie, and if we do it won’t be spectacular. It won’t be egoically gratifying. We’ll simply cease engaging in unwholesome patterns in a very anti-climactic way, begin channeling our ingenuity into making the world a better place, and perhaps once in a while look back on history and think, “Hmm, how strange that we used to do that sort of thing!”
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That was a good one.
It’s been interesting watching her writing style change over the past two years. She’s getting around to the point where she realizes that most of the problems that we have any chance of correcting are almost entirely of our own making. She’s come a really long way in a very short time.
Her utopia is a socialist nightmare, FUCK THAT. Like so many marxists, she has been right on 90% of the problems, but 100% wrong on the solutions, no matter how well or eloquently she explains the problems.
We have to recognize that there is a cabal that has been kicked out of 109 countries in history for their parasitism and destruction of cultures. This cabal pushes (false) civil-rights and other culturally destructive behaviors for everyone but themselves, while they sit in the catbirds seat and watch the destruction that they have wrought.
Its time for them to be expelled from country 110 and to be permanently “bottled up” so that they can stew in their own persecution complex. They need to be treated the same way we would treat a destructive contagion or virus…
Yup, Kikes be kiking, y’know. Givem da boot!!
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Oh, Gawd, gimme a break! Obviously somebody captured the REAL Caitlin Johnstone …. maybe one of those pod-people. While she’s at it, maybe she should go hug a whale, or stick her tit in a tree.
I want to see my enemies dead, and their women wailing with grief. Nothing else will do. Caitlin is starting to sound like a COMMIE!!
+1000
come on stucky, she did mention happy endings, nudge, wink, nod
There won’t be a happy ending, nor will there be a revolution. American is really strong, built for over 200 years. We will/are slowly being whittled away by all this crazy shit talk, and governments that consume ever more of our resources and tax dollars.
We are / have / gone (pick any or all three) to shit. There’s no going back from shit. It’s my guess in 100 years, fucking Martins will land, and sack the planet.
With their Martin sacks? And I’ll pick “have” of the three, as in ” we have to shit.”
Exactly Stucky They are not gonna meet anyone half way. Thus they need to be eradicated.
I thought the same….and to reinforce your point and hers….
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women”
Conan, circa the Hyborean Age.
If the perpetrators of the vast corruption witnessed since the exploded skull of JFK, the drug dealing, the shoot and loot in foreign lands, the wanton theft of property and money, are not brought to justice, there can be no “moving forward”, rebirth, health, as the infection will persist, metastasize.
It is just about time folks, it is broken, what is it going to be?
Caitlin’s analysis fails to acknowledge any of this by doing what basically all journalist have done for 50 years now, hide it and from it.
Sack up bitch, or get a job at the fuckin Atlantic or some other rag.
I’ve read much of your stuff, and you’re typically spot on. I’m as conservative as they come. BUT. She has a point. If not but for the assholes that are determined to ride herd over humanity – we would not need to be here bitching about them.
Give me a break! Either we’re all gonna die or live in utopia. Those are the only two choices we have? Throughout history, recorded or found in skeletal remains, humans have been the same – some good (making little impact) some bad (having a disastrous impact). Whether you subscribe to millions of years of evolution or a 6,000 year span, humans are self-serving creatures.
And she cleverly alluded to fighting for our tradions and culture as certain death vs her leftist Utopia.
The answer is both events occur but their order matters. There is a clique that is taking over everything that can be bought with their printed money. They think they are the smartest humans and god’s chosen but they are screwing up everything in Nature (and with God). Their evil end will be terrible as foretold in The Bible, but then Christ returns and there is a New Beginning greater than ever.
Kind of a paraphrase of how I was going to word it, but, yeah… same thing. What he said. What He said.
There will be no “peace” until all men come together as brothers in Jesus Christ. I’m willing. I am not as sure about several billions of my fellows.
“If you’ve paid much attention to human behavior throughout your life, you know that we reliably repeat the same patterns until there’s inner healing and personal growth.”
Uh … no. That is, it’s perfectly possible to repeat the same patterns and get worse and worse until nobody can stand you anymore (see also, “narcissist”). Sure, change always happens, but personal growth is never required — you can easily continue to be wrong and/or fuck up everything around you as long as you’re alive.
I applaud Ms. Johnstone’s continuing positive outlook on her own life but I have to smile when she says she is working at abandoning all attachments to our old ways of operating and opening a path within herself for something new — by continuing to write the same column over and over again, until everybody else finally gets around to agreeing with the way she looks at things from her new, enlightened outlook and attitude. Sound familiar? 😉
Guess I’ll just cede the floor to Mr Faulkner.
Man won’t merely endure he will prevail.