Home > The Enlightenment of Resistance
Movement Environment USA Manuel Valenzuela
Exorcising Our Demons
Into the infancy of the 21st century has humanity somehow managed to reach, despite our insatiable addiction for violence and suffering that has for millennia been both endemic and devastating, in spite of the continued tribalism, now called the nation state, that fosters competition, ignorance, fear, hatred and war among the peoples of the world, even with the hierarchical need among peoples to perpetually follow corrupt, immoral and warmongering leadership that continues to lay ruin the vast potential within us and notwithstanding the locust-like hunger of six billion primates whose consumptions and needs for resources are raping and pillaging Earth at unsustainable levels, thus accelerating our inevitable implosion.
Into the early years of the 21st century does humanity find itself in, in the present seeing our past, in our future seeing the present, refusing to learn from the sands of time and the chronicles of those who have come before, knocking on the heavy iron doors of progressive modernity yet hearing only the echoing thuds of regressive primitiveness, desperately seeking the keys that will allow us to finally escape the pestilence of times past and malignant cancers of the present.
Yet in turbulent times do we once more find ourselves living in, surrounded by war, destruction and death, gnawed at by suffering and misery, living among the ignorant, fearful and easily led, taken hostage by fundamentalists, zealots and extremists, refusing to eradicate from our condition the plague called violence and the warmongering, greed-infected leaders who birth it.
Inside the scourge of humanity called capitalism and the devastating system of control it has unleashed onto billions of human energies do we find ourselves trapped in, becoming six billion cogs in an engine, oiled by exploiters and oppressors, that runs voraciously on the fumes of conditioned consumerism and programmed parasitic production. It is capitalism, presently inebriated in its most damaging stage, that has best succeeded in tapping the animalistic selfishness and instinctual individualism of the human mind. It is this form of economic governance that has enveloped our animal urges, needs, wants, passions and emotions into an intertwined cocktail of unparalleled self-damage resulting in the virtual enslavement of billions living off the scraps and bones of the Establishment.
Forgotten by the hypnotizing aura of greed and the Almighty Dollar is the inevitable necessity of the common good and the survival of the commons for the benefit of all. Humanism and communalism has been replaced by manipulated materialism and a systemically programmed love of individual self, our animal instincts easily dominated by a system thriving off the human condition and the nature of who and what we are.
For it is easy to manipulate our instincts, creating a system that thrives off our insecurities, fears, emotions, needs and desires, feeding itself from the heavy pressures on us of society, groups and family, draining our energies through the abuse of the inherent human need for survival and manufacturing a fictional world of fantasy and perfection that penetrates our psychology and attacks our behaviors. Capitalism as we know it has been a parasite, using our own weaknesses to exterminate our strengths, becoming the perfect form of economic dependence from which to exploit, enslave and subjugate billions of human beings.
Its primitiveness lies in its strengths, namely its ability to control and manipulate our animalistic behaviors and passions, masquerading as an evolved form of human interaction. Yet evolution is advancement, a progress away from our animal selves and towards the greater manifestations of human understanding. Evolution of economic governance would be a system willing to take humanity away from its animal instincts and towards those mechanisms distinguishing us beyond the confines of what we presently inhabit.
Progress is fighting our urges, our fears, our insecurities and our human nature. Evolution is doing away with our animalistic individuality and selfishness, our mammalian instinct for competition, our lust for hierarchy and territory, our pursuit of power and sexual conquest, our primitive thoughts and beliefs, and of the unyielding control over our lives of both the tribe and archaic theology, both of which prey on our animal instincts for power and survival. In order to be human the animal inside us must be controlled, dominated and understood.
Only by understanding ourselves and the parameters of our existence can a better humanity arise. Only through deep introspections of history past and humanity present can resistance commence and renaissance be born. We must mold who and what we are into a higher being, forming from the clays of Earth a better, more evolved human species, learning from our mistakes, advancing through our triumphs, understanding ourselves and those unknown, joining our strengths and eliminating our weaknesses, in the end working in concert towards the betterment of six billion, not simply 300 million.
The animal inside us must be exorcised from our conscious, its thirst for violence and war finally exterminated, its lust for oppression and addiction to selfishness vanquished, its divisions and fear based on ignorance and reliance on unscrupulous leadership made to disappear. Antiquated notions such as the nation state - nothing more than a tribe on steroids - and reliance on the archaic beliefs of ancient brains living in primitive times must give way to the coming together of the world entire, for the benefit of all, as well as a new understanding of humanity, encompassing progressive pragmatism, educated modernity, communal spirituality, scientific reality and the thought-processes of 21st century man, not those of 8,000 year old primeval primates trying to make sense of an existence both harsh and frightening through now extinct myths and fables that helped explain a once-mysterious world. Only when we put a stop to a condition that has followed us since we left the jungles of the Great Rift Valley will we be allowed to evolve forward, no longer continuing on our slow and painful stagnation towards self-destruction and no longer held back by the control mechanisms of those who have for too long quashed human potential and our inevitable push forward.
To follow in the footsteps of our animal urges and passions is easy to do, it being a simple continuation of all we have ever known and experienced. After all, we have never deviated from this self-defeating understanding of humanity. It is changing direction, however, in such obvious deficit of present-day society and civilization, that truly makes us human. It is when we go against our own instincts, fighting the symptoms of our disease, struggling for the benefit of the many, in an enlightened stage of understanding, that humanity can finally claim victory in escaping its animal self. To continue our ways is easy, for it is what we are; to change course in spite of ourselves is much more difficult, yet what will allow us to claim humanness away from our primate/mammal selves.
When the day finally arrives when we grasp the reality of who we are and discard the fiction of what we portend to be humanity will cease to ride the rollercoaster of our history, so full of violence, exploitation and suffering, instead launching itself to the highest zenith of civilization. It will be when we deviate away from the ceaseless damage we have done onto ourselves and the planet that we can claim resistance and renaissance.
When genocide stops, when ethnic cleansing vanishes, when war becomes nonexistent and the perpetual cycle of violence is washed away from the realm of human existence we can claim Revolution. Resistance will begin when the many begin the healing of civilization and the planet, when a massive movement commences to purge warmongering leadership from our midst, when a tidal wave of humanity floods the concrete jungles and steel canyons we live in, marching to the drumbeats of peace, non-violence and universal harmony. That is Revolution at the dawn of the 21st century; that is the evolution of humankind and our triumph over the primitive conditions of our being that still riddle our existence.
We must put aside ego, forever eliminating the fallacy of our perceived ascendancy and the conditioned greatness of our species, in unity fighting and curing the symptoms of our disease and the conditioned, systemic exploitation of our lives. We must forever banish the exploitation and subjugation advanced by capitalism, where billions are forever condemned to servitude, raped of opportunity, robbed of talent, sucked of energy and perpetually chained to the bondage of a caste system from where few ever escape.
Only when the many, the indigent, the desolate are freed from the meager wages they earn in dehumanizing and torturous working conditions, all for the benefit of the rich nations, corporations and consumers of the north will we be able to claim enlightenment. Only when the lands and peoples of the poor south stop hemorrhaging from the ceaseless rape of their lands and devastation of their environments by the forces of neo-liberalism, market colonialism and globalization will our world become more secure. Only when the peoples of the rich north unite in solidarity and fraternity with their brothers and sisters of the exploited south can we as a species advance towards greatness. Only then will we have resistance. Only then will the many have revolution.
To continue what has transpired and will continue to be is to remain tied to our animals selves, refusing to resist the urges, the fears, the demons and the disease itself, refusing to evolve as a civilization, ensnarled by the clutches of a primitiveness that has yet to let us go. Remaining stagnant, refusing to leave the comfort of the tormented and arduous reality of the only road we have ever known, when we have yet to change or mend our ways, when history’s books are littered with the effects of our disease, when sands and dirt reveal the shattered and ruined remains of the human condition, will inevitably lead to our self-annihilation.
Indeed, for as long as we have existed we have followed a most ominous path, one of constant war, competition, violence, killing, suffering and destruction. From the beginning humanity has marched toward an inevitability, now closer than ever, that we have yet to deviate away from, that unless altered will leave our ruins to the cockroaches and scorpions, free to roam the plains of Earth, the destroyed cities, its deserted streets and once magnificent monuments of a once troubled civilization. Rather, stubbornly we maintain our self-defeating ways, refusing to evolve away from a system that has been broken, even diseased, for millennia. We refuse to fix or alter what has not worked, what continues to devastate the vast proportion of human beings, a poison that lingers without antidote, gaining strength from our indifference, becoming a historical plague subsisting from our weaknesses, forever cementing into our condition the parameters of war and violence, disease and indigence, pervasive exploitation and incessant oppression.
What road six billion people choose to take in the next few years will in the end decide the collective fates of those alive today and those born tomorrow.
Resistance begins with Ourselves
Understanding ourselves in body and mind will lead to the next leap forward for humanity, and with it the liberation of the embedded greatness inside us, released from the dungeons of human weakness, that will spawn a new awakening in the way we see and treat ourselves. Consciously deciding to step forward instead of facing backwards, the enlightenment of resistance must be massive, a giant movement born of synergy, a symbiotic unity of human energy crashing head first into a system for too long eroding the very fabric of humanity, finally awakening billions to a most troubled history. For only in harmony, knitted together from the toughest elements, can a most beautiful orchestra come alive, trumpeting a rebirth of humanity unparalleled in history and unsurpassed in power. The beginning stages will be called Resistance; its finality, Revolution.
The Enlightenment of Resistance commences with the self, in understanding the destructive forces unleashed by our own actions. The Resistance to the system and the corporatists in power begins by fighting the conditioned consumerism, ingrained into us from birth, that envelopes our daily existence. The evils spawned by capitalism, those mechanisms that manipulate our fragile psyches and mammalian needs in order to garner the most profit, must be seen for the exploitation of human minds that they are. Fictions that cannot possibly exist, whether in advertisements, cartoons, television or movies, where perfection is all-encompassing, fantasy is made attainable in the realm of human life and beauty seen as absolute, must be exposed for the psychological fallacy they espouse, existing to manipulate the human mind into returning every working wage we earn to our corporate masters through the purchase of those products that we are made to believe will somehow improve our “miserable” lives.....
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