Rule by Criminals: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State

by Grow Up Conference | Apr 3, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

Rule by Criminals:

When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State

By John & Nisha Whitehead

https://cultivateelevate.com/antioxidant-trio-6mix-dragons-blood-pearl-powder/?ref=2bfG3v4vqhqnIp

Ego Eclipse

by Grow Up Conference | Apr 2, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

Ego Eclipse

and the healing of the Self

By Lindastrologer

Another astrological ‘Christian’ festival is in the rear-view mirror; Mercury turns retrograde today (April 1 or 2 depending on where you are) and the eclipse-everyone-is-talking-about is looming. A lot is happening. The Kosmic medicine suggestion for now, or one of them, is: slow down and reflect, go over and be prepared to re-do stuff. Take your time in other words. When Mercury goes backward communication is likely to be confused and mistakes can be made through misunderstandings.  Mercury is in Aries, always impulsive in speech. Note to self – this is a good time to think before speaking.  We have a bunch of planets in Pisces and another bunch in Aries. Endings and beginnings. Confusion and action. Transcendence and practicality.  The universal one and the individual self…….all are vying for a claim on our souls.

We will have to decide where to put our focus.  The New Moon and Sun eclipse next week (8^th or 9^th) is in Aries and finds the Sun and Moon joined by wounded healer Chiron – suggesting an activation of our wounds around the Self.  The ego self that is. Aries is the primal sign of the Self. Chiron in Aries denotes issues around lack or loss of self-worth; feeling undeserving, unwanted, not needed. This leads to feelings of insignificance; there is a void or confusion around our identity and our purpose. We can find ourselves vulnerable to sacrificing or sabotaging the self.  Ultimately and ideally the healing path of Chiron in Aries leads to a deeper awareness and appreciation of our uniqueness and a clear sense of purpose in bringing our unique gifts to the world – and in this way validating ourselves. The path is about to open to us with the eclipse. With this configuration in the heavens, as distinct from a natal chart configuration we are all vulnerable to this particular form of wounding and this time is bringing it up to our attention.  When we observe the happenings in our world, the staggering level of propaganda and censorship we are subjected to every day, the dismantling of our fundamental support systems (food, money, belief systems to name a few) and the ongoing de-sensitization to human suffering coming through the airwaves…..it is no wonder we don’t know which way is up anymore. It’s no wonder we have lost our Selves. It is time to find them.

Meanwhile, Saturn and Mars are together in Pisces.  This is a bit like driving with the hand-brake on.  Or taking one step forward then having to take one back.  Progress is difficult. And so patience is nevermore a virtue than in April.   On top of that Pisces is confused at the best of times, so when Saturn, lord of the physical domain is cruising through the sign of the fishes we have a feeling of structures dissolving, of old ways crumbling. This is very destabilizing and now Mars has joined Saturn in Pisces actions we take in the world are subject to this confused, unstable energy as well. If you feel like chucking it all in and going off to live as a hermit in the hills, or joining a religious order – who could blame you. It would be a good time to do that.

…… Pisces is the sign of spiritual retreat. Mars is what we do.  If we can resist the urge to run away from home, we might use the energy by turning inward, ‘doing’ our own private spiritual retreat.  We need to realize that the intent of Chiron is to bring our issues to our awareness in order to heal them.  To me, Chiron in Aries is suggesting we all need to get over ourselves. That is, to realize that it is not all about us, our egos, our lives.  We are part of a collective here. It seems the reason we have got into this mess could be because ego has dominated our awareness for too long.  I know it is far more complex than that but on a basic level it is not hard to see the obsession people have these days with themselves.  Note, most social media posts. As King Soloman said, All is vanity.  This obsession commands a high price and the price is the slow deletion of our compassion for others. The number one characteristic of the psychopath is deletion of empathy and compassion. It is all about me-first and the fight to get to the top of the heap. Social media was designed to do precisely what it is doing – one, create addiction to the ‘smart’ world (which is a vital step to techno-totalitarianism) and two, create a world of self-obsessed people who pay no mind to the suffering of others. And even, to the incremental deletion of their own freedoms.

“First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”  

                                                                                                        (Pastor Martin Niemoller)

This period is paradoxical in that the ‘wound around the self’ is juxtaposed with a powerful energy of self-less-ness.  Pisces is compassion because it sees no barriers. It sees rather the Oneness of life behind form. Our self-worth is collectively wounded because we have been conditioned through generations to feel fearful and insecure. Competition replaced co-operation a long time ago.  Life in the physical domain has been, for eons, a fight to survive. Aries is about this survival instinct. And Chiron in Aries now is reminding us of this existential wound we all carry; of the price we have paid for our devotion to our own interests. The impulse is, through awareness, to heal this imbalance.  And lo, the cosmos, along with highlighting the wound (by way of its exact conjunction to the eclipse), has delivered a powerful energy to help. There is a feeling of something profound ending and a new way of life beginning.  Mars in Pisces – along with Saturn and Neptune – is urging us to join in the fight for the collective; to wake up from a long obsession with self and connect – materially, emotionally, spiritually, with each other.   The North Node (the way forward, for us all) is also in Aries at this eclipse – pointing to the fact we are all in the newborn stage now. We are all on a new trajectory of survival on planet Earth and we are all in it together.

And so the question then is, can we heal a wounded self-worth through focusing, not on ourselves, but on others? It seems counter-intuitive perhaps – but we cannot bypass the vibrations coming in at this time, so let’s use them.  My sense is there is a profound healing under way; it is a new way of being and it revolves around validation of our selves through (a paradoxical) letting go of our selves.  Our self-worth was wounded by design. The controllers knew keeping us in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity – not least through the economic system but of course also through on-going wars, famines, genocides – would sever our connection to our spiritual power. They hijacked the education system, re-wrote history, took control of religious institutions. Result: we don’t know who we are and we don’t know our own power.  THIS time is about healing all of that. The eclipse sets in motion a new course – one that will be in effect for a year or two.  We are in a process of healing our survival fears through co-operation and compassion.  This is the paradoxical nature of this Aries/Pisces bloom of energy.  It is less contradictory than it may first appear. Every ending contains a new beginning and New Moons are new beginnings, eclipses more so, in Aries more so again.  Saturn in Pisces is also suggesting the establishment of structures that will support the spiritual life and the care and compassion of others. Mars is saying go to it!   And so we can learn to validate ourselves. We don’t need X number of ‘likes’ on our posts. Life is not a popularity contest after all.  We validate ourselves by finding our true north star. That is, the reason or reasons we took incarnation.  And that reason was not to live for ourselves alone.  Never under-estimate the power of your time and your attentive sympathy towards your fellow planet dwellers.

“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.  When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”     (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Tools and insights to heal and empower in this pivotal transition.

https://cultivateelevate.com/antioxidant-trio-6mix-dragons-blood-pearl-powder/?ref=2bfG3v4vqhqnIp

Why Democracy Leads to Tyranny

by Grow Up Conference | Apr 2, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

Why Democracy Leads to Tyranny

The following is a transcript of this video.

“Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and [destroys] itself. . .It is in vain to Say that Democracy is … less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty.”

Letter from John Adams to John Taylor, December 1814

In every age there is a set of beliefs that are elevated to a sacred status and questioning them is deemed heretical. For centuries it was the dogmas of Christianity that possessed this status, today it is the dogma of the democratic state. Democracy, as currently practiced, is the greatest form of government and anyone who denies this commits blasphemy – or so we are taught. But just as much of the Christian dogma was a veil to protect the power of the Church, the same can be said about democracy. Democracy, with its political campaigns, elections, and the illusion of rule by the people, is a veil behind which politicians and bureaucrats parasitically enrich themselves while imposing their corrupt vision of society on the rest of us. In this video we explore some of the fatal flaws of modern democracy and explain how instead of promoting social flourishing, it has given rise to a form of soft totalitarianism.

“Conceived as the foundation of liberty, modern democracy paves the way for tyranny. Born for the purpose of standing as a bulwark against Power, it ends by providing Power with the finest soil it has ever had in which to spread itself over the social field.”

Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power

There are many institutions that are necessary for a free and prosperous society; these include free markets, the division of labour, a rule of law that promotes order and trust, strong families, sound money, a school system that educates instead of indoctrinates, and a robust media that pursues the truth instead of spreading propaganda. If a democracy preserves these institutions, then one can claim that it is a form of political organization conducive to social harmony. But if a democracy continually produces governments that destroy these institutions, then the value of democracy must be questioned. Across the globe, the governments of most democracies are doing the latter – from the family unit, to schooling, the media, free markets, sound money, or the rule of law, politicians and bureaucrats are actively destroying, or at least severely corrupting, these institutions. Why is this? What are the flaws of modern-day democracies that are leading it to manifest such corrupt governments?

To answer this question, we must distinguish between two types of democracy: direct democracy and indirect democracy. A direct democracy involves citizens casting votes on specific issues, usually by means of a referendum. In a direct democracy majority rules. Whether one views this form of political organization in a positive or negative light will usually depend on if one belongs to the majority or minority. Those in the majority tend to believe that direct democracy is a good system as it leads to the satisfaction of their wants, while those in the minority often feel that direct democracy is nothing more than a tyranny of the masses. “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch,” Benjamin Franklin famously remarked. While the 19^th century British politician Auberon Herbert had this to say concerning the morality of a direct democracy:

“Five men are in a room. Because three men take one view and two another, have the three men any moral right to enforce their view on the other two men? What magical power comes over the three men that because they are one more in number than the two men, therefore they suddenly become possessors of the minds and bodies of these others? As long as they were two to two, so long we supposed each man remained master of his own mind and body; but from the moment that another man, acting Heaven only knows from what motives, has joined himself to one party or the other, that party has become straightaway possessed of the souls and bodies of the other party. Was there ever such a degrading and indefensible superstition?”

Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State

A tyranny of the masses, however, is not the most serious threat facing the West as we live in indirect democracies which render most people politically impotent and the power of the masses relatively negligible. In an indirect, or representational democracy, we vote for politicians who are then, in theory, supposed to represent our interests. But how representational democracy should work in theory, is not how it works in practice. In almost all democratic countries a small number of political candidates are preselected by a handful of political parties that monopolize each country’s political system and from these candidates we vote for the ones we prefer, or at least dislike the least. Once elected, far from being forced to represent the interests of the majority, politicians can, and frequently do, serve their own interests. Or as Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman note in their book Beyond Democracy:

“It is not ‘the will of the people’, but the will of politicians – prompted by groups of professional lobbyists, interest groups and activists – that reigns in a democracy.”

Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman, Beyond Democracy

Many will counter that a benefit of an indirect democracy is that we can vote out the corrupt politicians who fail to serve us. The problem, however, is that modern democracies rarely produce honest and ethical political candidates. Each time one corrupt politician is voted out of office, he or she is replaced by another corrupt politician who merely serves different special interest groups. Furthermore, nation states have grown so large that most of the state actors who rule over us and implement the policies that affect us on a day-to-day basis are bureaucrats who are not subject to popular elections.

And herein lies perhaps the most serious flaw of modern democracies – the democratic process seems incapable of preventing the worst from rising to the top in government. There are several factors that can account for this: Firstly, there is the corrupting nature of power.

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Or as Mikhail Bakunin wrote:

“However democratic may be their feelings and their intentions, once [politicians] achieve the elevation of office they can only view society in the same ways a schoolmaster views his pupils, and between pupils and masters equality cannot exist. On one side there is the feeling of a superiority that is inevitably provoked by a position of superiority; on the other side, there is a sense of inferiority which follows from the superiority of the teacher. . . Who-ever talks of political power talks of domination; but where domination exists there is inevitably a somewhat large section of society that is dominated. . .This is the eternal history of political power. . .”

Mikhail Bakunin, The Illusion of Universal Suffrage

Another factor that can account for the moral corruption of politicians is that like a moth to flame, the most ruthless and power-hungry among us are attracted to state power. Those who enter the game of politics are often the very individuals who we least want to rule over us, or as Frank Herbert wrote:

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”

Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

Another explanation for why the worst rise to the top in modern politics is because Machiavellian, narcissistic, and sociopathic character traits improve one’s chance of winning a political election or getting promoted to the position of a high-level bureaucrat. Or as the philosopher Hans Hermann Hoppe explains:

“. . . the selection of state rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for harmless or decent persons to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position not owing to their status as natural aristocrats, as feudal kings once did . . .but as a result of their capacity as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of state government.”

Hans Hermann Hoppe, From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy

Once in power these demagogues are effectively shielded from the wrath of the citizenry due to a mirage that is created by the dogma of democracy. Most people believe that in a democracy it is we the people that rule, and that as rulers we are collectively to blame for the corruption, ineptitude, and immorality of our government. This belief overlooks the fact that most of us have no impact on the actions of politicians and it diverts responsibility away from the politicians and bureaucrats who are responsible for the policies that are destroying society. Furthermore, when it is believed that we the people rule, our resistance toward the dangerous growth of state power is weakened, or as Hoppe explains:

“Under democracy the distinction between the rulers and the ruled becomes blurred. The illusion even arises that the distinction no longer exists: that with democratic government no one is ruled by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened.”

Hans Hermann Hoppe, From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy

This weakened resistance to the growth of state power has created a fertile ground for the emergence of totalitarian rule across the West. Many will counter that the democratic West is not at all like the totalitarian countries of the past, be it Soviet Russia, Communist China, Nazi Germany, Cuba, or North Korea. These countries centralized power and controlled the lives of their citizens to a degree never seen in history and to a level which far exceeds the experience of the modern West. But the centralization of government power in Western democracies, differs only in degree to that seen in the totalitarian countries of the 20^th century. Western democracies are what can be called soft totalitarian states in contrast to the more brutal manifestations of totalitarianism past. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the rise of soft totalitarianism in Western democracies and described it in his great work Democracy in America:

“After having…taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting…it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America

Prior to the rise of this soft totalitarianism, social relations were dominated by a multiplicity of different institutions and associations which were independent of government – such as markets, guilds, churches, private hospitals, universities, fraternities, charities, monasteries, and most importantly the “primal community of the family”. These independent associations and institutions, while providing great societal benefits, also acted as barriers to the expansion of government power. The destruction and replacement of these more diverse forms of community with relationships between the individual and the state, which began in the West in the 20^th century and continues to this day, was a crucial step in the rise of governments who hide their totalitarian nature behind the veil of the democratic ideal. Or as Robert Nisbet wrote in The Quest for Community:

“It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers. . . What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community. The prime object of totalitarian government thus becomes the incessant destruction of all evidence of spontaneous, autonomous association…To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered to individuals. . . is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms.”

Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community

In places like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia the destruction of institutions independent of the state was done quite rapidly and with the use of violence. The same process has been occurring in Western democracies, but at a slower pace and instead of violence, these alternative institutions are crippled with the use of propaganda, educational indoctrination, laws, regulations, and bureaucratic red tape. But no matter how totalitarianism emerges the result is always the same. Citizens becomes subjects, the state becomes the master, and even if we are still granted the right to vote, we are enslaved nonetheless, or as Lysander Spooner wrote:

“A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.”

Lysander Spooner, The Constitution of No Authority

If our democracies cannot prevent the worst from rising to the top and if they cannot protect us from the rise of a soft totalitarianism, then democracy, as currently practiced, is a failed institutions and alternative forms of political organization must be explored and openly debated. Some may continue to hold out hope that a political saviour will emerge, overcome all the corrupting influences of the state, and return society to a path of peace and prosperity. This, however, is to gamble with the future of society. For as we wait for our saviour, who may never emerge, the state will continue to grow more and more burdensome, and then slowly at first, but ever more rapidly, our societies will deteriorate into the hellish conditions that characterize all totalitarian nations, for as James Kalb noted:

“If all social order becomes dependent on the administrative state, when that becomes terminally corrupt and non-functional everything goes.”

James Kalb, The Tyranny of Liberalism

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