POSITIVE MONEY
THE POWER OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Revolution as the inevitable outcome of discovering the truth.
by Rafael Zambrana November 1, 2013
by Rafael Zambrana November 1, 2013
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People of all stripes, even those who think of themselves with no political stripes at all, are getting upset and have begun to ask why the laws we are all supposed to be ruled by, are being broken by some highly paid Bankers, politicians and Corporate executives. There's an invisible force that holds together the social fabric in any society, including in the animal kingdom, which is expressed in humans as a shared belief system that it's being challenged today.
Chris Hedges has written the article shown below where he tells us of our Invisible Revolution taking place. A revolution in the mind as people are going through the same process as the Capuchin Monkeys are shown in the video below, and as Ms Lilly Ledbetter went through when her consciousness regarding her unequal pay brought her to sue her employer and a law was eventually passed in the US that bears her name today.
But the most remarkable thing in both Ms Lilly Ledbetter and the Capuchin Monkeys' experiment, as you will see in the video, is that they were perfectly happy with their "wages" until they realized they were being shortchanged.
In the case of Ms Ledbetter she worked for over 20 years doing her job well and had no issues with her pay (employers' policy didn't allow employees to discuss their pay) until the facts came out. Then she was upset and demanded equal treatment.
WHAT CHANGED?
The mind is invisible but it sure is powerful. What changed was her perception of reality. Suddenly she's confronted with the fact she has been paid much less than other male co-workers doing the same job for 20 long years and merely this piece of information exploded in her mind demanding to be redressed, hence her long legal struggle that took her all the way to the US Supreme Court where she was told to take a hike, and shut up by its male members.
(continued below video)
Chris Hedges has written the article shown below where he tells us of our Invisible Revolution taking place. A revolution in the mind as people are going through the same process as the Capuchin Monkeys are shown in the video below, and as Ms Lilly Ledbetter went through when her consciousness regarding her unequal pay brought her to sue her employer and a law was eventually passed in the US that bears her name today.
But the most remarkable thing in both Ms Lilly Ledbetter and the Capuchin Monkeys' experiment, as you will see in the video, is that they were perfectly happy with their "wages" until they realized they were being shortchanged.
In the case of Ms Ledbetter she worked for over 20 years doing her job well and had no issues with her pay (employers' policy didn't allow employees to discuss their pay) until the facts came out. Then she was upset and demanded equal treatment.
WHAT CHANGED?
The mind is invisible but it sure is powerful. What changed was her perception of reality. Suddenly she's confronted with the fact she has been paid much less than other male co-workers doing the same job for 20 long years and merely this piece of information exploded in her mind demanding to be redressed, hence her long legal struggle that took her all the way to the US Supreme Court where she was told to take a hike, and shut up by its male members.
(continued below video)
CAPUCHIN MONKEYS DEMAND EQUAL PAY
Congress then controlled by the Democrats, passed a law that lets a grieving party to go beyond the 180 days allowed before to seek a solution.
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009
The significance of the Capuchin Monkeys experiment goes beyond the amusing behavior by the monkeys and touches on the universal urge for equality intrinsic in our genes. Those who declare that poverty has always been in society and therefore always will be, ignore the facts.
IT IS BIOLOGICAL TO BE EGALITARIAN
What this means is that those who disseminate the illusion humans are naturally selfish and greedy, need to rethink their assumptions and realize that view is a product of indoctrination. We have erroneously thought of our society's level of consciousness as "mature" when in fact we as a civilization are barely acting as selfish adolescents, behaving recklessly as if there was no tomorrow, but we take it as if this is all we're going to evolve to, as if our spiritual, intellectual and emotional potential has been fulfilled.. Wrong! In fact, our skewed idea of reality is learned through our cultural upbringing, the first form of brain-washing which can ultimately be trumped up by the original biological hardware in our beings. What triggers the reaction to the feeling of being treated unfairly is CONSCIOUSNESS. In all cases the subjects are happy until their perception shows them they're being shortchanged, and once that idea has entered the mind, it won't stop until it finds a balanced outcome.
NO WONDER THOSE BENEFITING FROM THE STATUS-QUO RELENTLESSLY WANT TO CONTROL THE FLOW OF INFORMATION.
Edward Snowden has touched a raw nerve (finally) in the masses that has sparked a demand for the right to privacy and independence from being monitored.. Just being aware someone is watching all we do and say in itself has an inhibiting effect on free thinking. It is becoming more and more apparent to the masses the Corporate Media is a factory manufacturing consent from them.
Too many good people who are confronted with the fact they're being defrauded, feel broken and depressed because they don't understand the power of consciousness. They don't understand it is in the simple action of being conscious of unfairness, that in itself brings with it the eventual redress. The mind automatically starts working to change the situation whether it takes one day or a life time, sooner or later the mere fact of being aware of it, pushes the mind to do the right thing. Even the most coward eventually sides up with those more courageous to right the wrongs. That's how revolutions happen, and that's what the great Chris Hedges is telling us in his superb piece below.
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009
The significance of the Capuchin Monkeys experiment goes beyond the amusing behavior by the monkeys and touches on the universal urge for equality intrinsic in our genes. Those who declare that poverty has always been in society and therefore always will be, ignore the facts.
IT IS BIOLOGICAL TO BE EGALITARIAN
What this means is that those who disseminate the illusion humans are naturally selfish and greedy, need to rethink their assumptions and realize that view is a product of indoctrination. We have erroneously thought of our society's level of consciousness as "mature" when in fact we as a civilization are barely acting as selfish adolescents, behaving recklessly as if there was no tomorrow, but we take it as if this is all we're going to evolve to, as if our spiritual, intellectual and emotional potential has been fulfilled.. Wrong! In fact, our skewed idea of reality is learned through our cultural upbringing, the first form of brain-washing which can ultimately be trumped up by the original biological hardware in our beings. What triggers the reaction to the feeling of being treated unfairly is CONSCIOUSNESS. In all cases the subjects are happy until their perception shows them they're being shortchanged, and once that idea has entered the mind, it won't stop until it finds a balanced outcome.
NO WONDER THOSE BENEFITING FROM THE STATUS-QUO RELENTLESSLY WANT TO CONTROL THE FLOW OF INFORMATION.
Edward Snowden has touched a raw nerve (finally) in the masses that has sparked a demand for the right to privacy and independence from being monitored.. Just being aware someone is watching all we do and say in itself has an inhibiting effect on free thinking. It is becoming more and more apparent to the masses the Corporate Media is a factory manufacturing consent from them.
Too many good people who are confronted with the fact they're being defrauded, feel broken and depressed because they don't understand the power of consciousness. They don't understand it is in the simple action of being conscious of unfairness, that in itself brings with it the eventual redress. The mind automatically starts working to change the situation whether it takes one day or a life time, sooner or later the mere fact of being aware of it, pushes the mind to do the right thing. Even the most coward eventually sides up with those more courageous to right the wrongs. That's how revolutions happen, and that's what the great Chris Hedges is telling us in his superb piece below.
OUR INVISIBLE REVOLUTION
By Chris Hedges
“Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”
Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.
It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.
Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.
“Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.”
Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian revolutionary myth. The articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny—as attempted by the book “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA” and the website Popular Resistance—is, for me, paramount. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, the old regime is finished.
An uprising that is devoid of ideas and vision is never a threat to ruling elites. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, descends into nihilism, random violence and chaos. It consumes itself. This, at its core, is why I disagree with some elements of the Black Bloc anarchists. I believe in strategy. And so did many anarchists, including Berkman, Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”
This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their adversaries. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
It continues....
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By Chris Hedges
“Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”
Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.
It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.
Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.
“Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.”
Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian revolutionary myth. The articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny—as attempted by the book “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA” and the website Popular Resistance—is, for me, paramount. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, the old regime is finished.
An uprising that is devoid of ideas and vision is never a threat to ruling elites. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, descends into nihilism, random violence and chaos. It consumes itself. This, at its core, is why I disagree with some elements of the Black Bloc anarchists. I believe in strategy. And so did many anarchists, including Berkman, Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”
This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their adversaries. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
It continues....
READ MORE.....
WEALTH INEQUALITY IN THE USA
