“This is the plague of our time: madmen leading the blind” (1)
This saying from William Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear (original text: “Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind”) suggests that 400 years ago in Shakespeare’s time, similar conditions to those today shaped the way people lived together.
In the dialogue Timaeus, Plato developed the idea of the “world soul”, which he saw as the cause of all movement in nature. According to this myth, the Demiurge, the creator of the world, created the world soul together with the cosmos. The world soul has dominion over the celestial body in the macrocosm, comparable to the personal soul in the microcosm, which rules over the body of the people. The world soul permeates and surrounds the matter of the cosmos. The world soul is the mediating form of energy between the spiritual world of ideas and the physical celestial body.
Plato examined the hypothetical possibility of whether the world soul could also produce evil, or whether there might be two world souls, one of which produces good and the other bad. He came to the conclusion that the world soul, as the conductor of the entire cosmos, needs to be the best soul, especially since celestial movements are ordered and can therefore be described mathematically, and a bad world soul could only produce chaos, which would mean the collapse of the universe. However, according to Plato, the world soul requires reason. The question of whether the world soul also has reason was not conclusively answered by Plato. In his system of thought, the existence of evil could therefore be traced back to a deficiency in the world soul.
According to ancient Chinese beliefs, the vital essence permeates and accompanies everything that exists and occurs. The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi described this life force as the “creator of transformations” in the cosmos, and thus comes quite close to Plato’s view. According to traditional beliefs, the world arose from the original Qi – Yanqi/Yinqui – in which Yin – dark, soft, moist, cold, passive, calm – and Yang – light, high, hard, hot, active, moving – were still mixed. Heaven and earth only formed through the separation of this unity. What received Yangqi rose bright and clear and became heaven, what received Yinqi became dark and heavy and sank to earth.
The present, like the past – is shaped by the conflict between the dark and the light side of power. The dark side of power seems to dominate the world at the moment. The Corona lie, the wars in Ukraine and Palestine staged by dark forces, the obscene discrepancy between rich and poor, the powerful and those subject to power, and the like at least seem to indicate this. But who is responsible for this misery?
Elites and their political and media henchmen
The answer to the question of responsibility is, in my opinion, relatively simple: We are all accountable! The few oppress, and the many allow themselves to be oppressed! Both sides are to blame. If the many would stop crawling, the few would stop ruling, and that could occur right now!
The question that arises is why respectful coexistence does not work, even though people are endowed with extraordinary abilities and are not only influenced by evil, but also they have Godly good within them. So a tolerable, fair and liberal coexistence should be possible.
What is the core of the evil? In my opinion, the rich and powerful are at the top of the pyramid of “evil”, followed by “functional elites” such as politicians and the like. These groups of people – of course not all rich, powerful and politicians – strive to maintain or expand their power, privileges and possessions. Their actions are “inspired” by this desire, and this is the primary goal of the global politics they lead. They are afraid of the people who could disempower them and take away their privileges and possessions. For this reason, they gave the “ordinary” people the illusion of power by throwing them the plaything “democracy” – the former bogeyman of the power and property elites – and robbing democracy of its original meaning.
The founding fathers of the USA, all rich and powerful and seeing themselves as an elite, used a simple trick: They developed “representative democracy”, which had little in common with the actual concept of Athenian democracy institutionalized by Pericles around 2,500 years ago – a real “rule of the people” (Greek demos = people, kratein = to have power, to rule).
The “elite” declared itself such a democracy because it sees its members as superior to the ordinary people and because it believes that complex societies can only be led by functional elites, i.e. politicians – chosen by them of course. The ordinary people are seen as being unable to cope with this complex task.
In a secret debate on June 26, 1787, one of the United States’ founding fathers, James Madison, said that government should “protect the minority of the wealthy from the majority” and that uncontrolled, democratic communities were “exposed to the turbulence and weakness of unruly passions”
The Young Global Leaders training school, for example, with the program of a committee of the elites – the World Economic Forum – where politicians such as Jens Spahn, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Annalena Baerbock and many more were trained, develops people through appropriate brainwashing to become useful instruments of the elites. They are hoisted into government positions by the money of the elites and the power of the media they buy. Ultimately, citizens only have the choice between the candidates pre-selected by the elites.
This is called “representative democracy”, which on election day only allows citizens to choose what they consider to be the lesser evil, often the choice between the plague and cholera. That is the end of democracy for the next four or five years, since the elected politicians are in the vast majority of cases representatives of the elite and not representatives of the people. Most of the time it doesn’t matter which party they belong to.
Before the election, these ladies and gentlemen sharpen our democratic awareness and tell us that in “our democracy” we have the power to decide. They tell us in pseudo-democratic fashion: If you don’t like something, then vote differently, vote for us, vote for our party! After the election: same procedure as the last four years. Then the politicians have four to five years to not keep their promises, only to make more promises just before the election and lie like crazy. Something like “No arms to crisis areas” for example.
Slogans like “Shaping the future” are on the one hand stupid because, as far as I know, no one has ever lived in the future, and on the other hand true because politicians have no control over the present. But we only live in the present – shaping the present is what we need to do! When the future has become the present, our “people’s representatives” will come up with the same stupid slogan about the future again.
The elites and their politicians make it clear to us that we should be happy with what we have and that we should keep calm. Before the election, they act as if they had transformed their consciousness in a good way and had everything under control. We should be grateful that they are responsible for us. But are they? Statements such as “Germany has never been so good”, backed up with figures, are intended to suggest increasing prosperity to the more than 16 percent of Germans living below the poverty line and to employees who have at least 30 percent less purchasing power than in 1990.
In 2023, the average gross annual income of a German full-time employee was 59,094 euros, according to the Federal Statistical Office. These figures are usually mathematically correct. But statements by such politicians are based, for example, on the fraud of average values. How are average values calculated? They are calculated from the sum of the numerical values considered divided by their number. So, for example, if you divide the income of all Germans by the number of all earners, you get the average income of a German. Yes, that is relatively high compared to many other nations and has increased over the last 30 years. But if you consider that the real wealth of millionaires and billionaires has at least tripled since 1990 and the purchasing power of white-collar and industrial workers has fallen by around 30 percent in the same period, the picture looks very different. With this lousy trick of using average values, politicians are deliberately concealing the true state of the nation. In Germany, our gross domestic product has more than tripled since 1990 – from 1.306 in 1990 to 4.121 trillion in 2023. But who pocketed this surplus, which is significant even after deducting inflation? You or I? No? But it must have gone somewhere, right? The surplus ended up with the elite.
Many politicians try to mislead us with the naive calculations described above.
From 1960 to 1980, the social market economy worked quite well in Germany. But Ludwig Erhard, one of the founding fathers of the social market economy, emphasized that the market economy should not degenerate into an ideology, but only be a means to an end in order to solve social problems. Well, the social problems do not interest the powerful elite. The market economy has degenerated into an end in itself, or rather its purpose is to increase the capital of the rich. However, capitalism and democracy in the original sense of the word are mutually exclusive, since although there is freedom for capital – according to the motto: everyone can make their own fortune – there is not freedom for citizens. In particular, the equality postulated in a democracy is not given due to different starting conditions of existing wealth and existing poverty, which inevitably leads to considerable inequality.
“Only economic growth will solve our problems,” say neoliberal politicians. What has this supposed growth brought us in the last 30 years? More poverty than ever – including in Germany and the USA, social problems that are almost impossible to solve, a split in society, endless refugees and much more. These are the results of neoliberal policies that only serve to increase the power and wealth of the elite, aren’t they, Mr Lindner, Mr Macron and whatever your names are?
Why don’t politicians do anything about the inhumane conditions? Because the so-called democracy, the social and economic system, produce precisely the kind of system-compliant politicians who are not supposed to do anything about it. The elite would not allow anything else. Politicians are not fighting against the inhumane system established by the elite, but rather its supporters. Income status, social prestige, status symbols such as cars, villas, expensive dresses and jewellery for themselves and their partners are more important to the henchmen of business and politics than solving urgent social problems. The thought and behaviour patterns of these pathetic economic and political pioneers on behalf of their puppeteers are absolutely inhumane! Managers run the overcrowded shop for the elite – no matter how – and politicians pave the way for even more power and wealth.
Society needs creative shining lights at the top of business and politics, people who want to identify and solve real problems and, ideally, are able to do so. But these are precisely the qualities that the current “rulers” in politics usually do not have. Just look at the puppets at the top of most corporations or “top politicians” in the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Italy or France: Do these people solve the problems of the population?
Politicians usually do not feel the consequences of their decisions because they are too far removed from the effects on those affected. They have a relatively high income, so they will be able to afford their rent or keep their property if they make the necessary adjustments. They probably do not live on the motorway that will soon pass 100 metres from the town of Dingenskirchen; they do not really feel the consequences of their labour market and wage policies, and they have probably never been to the slums of the Third World to be able to assess the situation of the poor and make balanced decisions. When decisions are made about a possible war, they do not send their own children to it in an emergency, but rather cannon fodder, who are currently being recruited again through the possible introduction of conscription. Perhaps politicians should be required to do a year of social work before they take office, so that they know roughly what they are talking about and what they will decide in the future.
The lives of politicians mainly take place in conference rooms, good hotels and restaurants, and occasionally bars. How, I ask you, are politicians supposed to have any idea of real life and people’s concerns? Their ideas of what goes on in reality are pretty far removed from it, I would say. In addition, most politicians regularly give in to the business lobby, which ultimately makes the laws and represents the interests of the elite, as former Interior Minister Horst Seehofer aptly noted.
Politicians rarely make revolutionary decisions, but at best evolutionary ones. Don’t transform anything major, otherwise your job could be in danger! That’s why relatively little transformation in terms of the real circumstances of the citizens, because personal fear also plays a role in the political decisions that are made. Long story short: the rich and/or powerful and their political and media puppets, as well as those who emulate them, are in my opinion to a large extent to blame for the misery and evil in this world.
It is not my intention to defame and stigmatize the elites in a one-sided way. The real problem in this world is human greed and the fact that many people think it is desirable to become rich and powerful. In this respect, it is not surprising that many once poor people who in earlier times cursed the rich for their behaviour when they themselves became rich now display the same behaviour they previously denounced. When the farmhand becomes a farmer or the maid becomes a farmer’s wife, he/she also gives his former comrades a good whip in order not to lose his status and to maintain the murderous system.
But those who are subject to power, who do not fight back and put up with everything, are also responsible for the misery in the world. “Oh well, I can’t transform anything anyway,” said seven billion people who are controlled by only a few others.
Read the second part of the article
Author: Uwe Froschauer
yogaesoteric
September 7, 2024