From nothingness to boundlessness

 

*

* * *

*

 

To all of us

 

Imagine waking up in the darkness of a huge tunnel,

as in the darkest nightmare,

then the dimmest light,

the slightest glimmer of hope,

would appear to us as salvation and deliverance.

 

Plunged into total darkness,

the slightest light, the slightest glimmer attracts us

like moths, like magnets,

especially if you don’t feel safe in the dark.

 

If we want to save ourselves from the nightmare,

light is what we need to focus our eyes on.

 

Light is our guide.

 

It is towards it that we direct our steps and our eyes.

 

Staying petrified with our eyes in the dark

has never gotten us anywhere and never will.

 

Light is our guide.

 

It is our salvation,

our happiness, our freedom.

 

Light is where we run away to if we want to live.

 

Understanding something, anything,

it’s inevitably connecting two neurons together,

at the very least.

 

To raise awareness

is to create a spark.

 

To see, in all conscience,

is to connect tens, thousands, tens of thousands

millions, if not billions of neurons together…

 

To see is to create fireworks in your head.

 

To see is to be enlightened.

To see is to see the light.

 

Light alone frees us from darkness.

 

Turn your head away from the darkness,

and you’ll see the light.

 

See the light and darkness shall fade away.

 

Lost in the impenetrable pitch of darkness,

I can assure you that

the slightest glimmer of hope that seems to shine in the distance,

however weak, however real it may seem to you,

that’s where you’re going running away to,

especially if you’ve got a horde of zombies on your tail.

 

Light transcends and liberates.

Ignorance enslaves and casts a curse.

 

Follow the sparks.

 

To find the light,

it’s not just to live,

to find the light,

 is to find truth, wisdom, peace, serenity, wonder, justice, freedom.

 

Light is both a guide and a saviour.

 

Let us find the light

and light shall save us.

 

Whatever your spirituality and your religion,

your beliefs and your convictions,

if for you the Divinity is a probability, even a tiny one,

then this prayer is sacred.

 

If for you the Divine exists,

and life is a divine creation,

then this prayer is sacred and divine.

 

Whether God exists or not,

light exists.

 

As much as God is light,

light is divine.

 

Light alone liberates from darkness.

 

Light is the way.

 

Behold…

Follow the light.

Follow the sparks.

 

They are always beauteous.

 

*

Sunrise

 

Like a mirror with infinite facets of the same reality,

humanity is both one and multidimensional, one and multi-interactive,

multiple and universal.

 

It is by revealing itself

that humankind will reveal the divine within.

 

It is by revealing itself

that humanity will reveal all of us,

each and every one of us.

 

The more humanity as a whole will see the light

the more each of us will see the light,

and vice versa.

 

In every sense of the word,

that would be a miracle.

 

*

Who am I?

Who are we?

What are we for?

Where are we going?

 

Let’s imagine

that we see a camera for the first time,

and we don’t know anything about it.

 

We don’t know how it works,

or even how to turn it on,

we do not know how to hold it, how to move it, how to focus it,

we know nothing at all about any of it.

 

Let’s imagine

that this is the very first time we’ve ever seen a camera

and we don’t even know what it’s for.

 

If we know nothing about it,

there’s nothing we can do about it,

we cannot use it at all.

 

Not knowing yourself

is exactly the same

as not knowing anything about that camera.

 

You cannot see anything,

you cannot know anything.

You cannot decide anything,

you cannot do anything.

 

Same thing with an alien technology.

 

We wouldn’t be able to use it,

if we didn’t know anything about it.

 

We would have to study it before knowing how to use it.

 

In the same way,

you have to study yourself

to be of service to yourself

and strive for the best.

 

How to see

all there is to see in this world

when you don’t even know how to press the on button

of our own spiritual camera?

 

Everything goes through us.

 

Not knowing who you are,

how you function,

is equivalent to knowing nothing at all.

 

Unable to find and turn on the consciousness button,

you are unable to see anything at all,

do anything at all,

it’s like walking around in the darkest place.

 

How to build and accomplish anything in the dark,

in an entirely dark place, with no light at all?

 

Imagine building a building in the dark,

by workers totally unable to see.

 

Not only would that be impossible,

but then it would be a hecatomb of poor, innocent people dying on the job.

 

Nothing can be built in total and permanent darkness.

 

Not knowing how we function

is being in the dark.

 

It’s like operating a machine

of the most dangerous, complex and sophisticated kind

with no instruction whatsoever,

in total darkness.

 

That cannot happen.

 

Turn on the light,

and anything becomes possible.

 

Switch on the consciousness button,

and you’ll finally see the world,

you’ll finally come into the world.

 

When we’re in the light,

everything lights up,

we can do anything,

we can go wherever we want.

 

Turn on the light.

 

It’s the only way,

the only possible liberation.

 

It is right there,

as is right there

the light of the sun.

 

*

* * *

*

Mere mortals

 

Whether we wish it or not,

we are all mere mortals.

 

Saving life

is saving yourself.

 

Saving yourself

is saving life and the planet.

 

*

Weakness and frailty of the living

 

Because everything that lives

is sooner or later doomed to death and suffering,

life is frailty, weakness, vulnerability.

 

The truth is,

the questions of whether we’re going to be able to make it,

of whether we’re going to be able to continue to live decently,

whether we’re going to be able to get richer and how we’re going to do it

are just side issues.

 

Nothing and no one can be strong

if he or she doesn’t know his or her weaknesses.

 

So the real question, to which all the others are appended, is this:

 

Do we, as a species, the human species,

want to come to the rescue of frailty, to the rescue of Life,

and save ourselves?

 

Even if we put all the technical means

in an attempt to cope with ecological, economic, political and military cataclysms,

to answer no

would necessarily mean choosing death as a species,

impending and untimely death

on a global, continental, national, regional and personal scale,

at all levels, in all spheres.

 

This vulnerability is at the root of our survival instinct.

 

Better still,

it’s at the root of society.

 

It is what damns us, it is what saves us.

 

In order to contend with the realities of the world and human fallibility,

 capable of the greatest feats as well as the most utter failures,

the awareness of our ultimate fragility

is at the origin of our will to unite in cohesive communities.

 

Since time immemorial,

it has always been so.

 

And even if we wanted to commit the insanity

to dehumanize ourselves more and more and further annihilate ourselves,

it will always be that way.

 

Ever since man has been man,

it has been this way.

 

As long as humans remain humans,

it will remain this way.

 

This is all the more true and irrefutable

as consciousness and sensibility, sentience and sensitivity are human characteristics

feeding on and strengthening each other

which make them even more vulnerable to suffering in body, heart and soul,

and induce them to seek the company, affection and approval of others.

 

Without having a choice, so natural it is to them,

humans live in society.

 

Solidarity is the raison d’être of society, of the bond with others,

of the community, state, nation and confederacy.

 

Until humanity as a whole understands this,

no measure will be effective enough to save humanity.

 

*

From Earth to Earth,

From air to water,

From water to air,

From life to death,

From death to life.

 

It’s very strange to think that in the Western world,

where burial and oration are the funeral rites,

the particles of our bodies are irretrievably doomed to be recycled

from body to earth and from earth to plants,

grass or maybe a tree, flowers or fruit,

maybe lawn or sealed under a concrete slab,

and that at the same time, Western civilization despises, pollutes and destroys

so much of nature and vegetation, the whole plant and animal realms;

 

It’s strange to think

that in areas where cremation by fire is used as a funeral service,

all the particles of our body gone up in smoke and flames mix with the atmosphere

when the world is contaminating air and water to such an infamous degree;

 

It is very strange to think that, born from the Earth,

we are all of us, women and men,

bound to recycle ourselves in a world

that we are literally polluting, contaminating and destroying,

trying so hard to change it not for the better, but for the worse.

 

So strange to think that we’re taking so much trouble to contaminate

what may be our afterlife, for all eternity…

 

It is so strange to think

that the air we breathe is the same air, constantly being recycled,

that all men and women, all trees, all species of plants and animals

breathed before us, and are still breathing with us,

like a giant collective lung

that transcends all beings and all species.

 

It is very strange to think indeed

that the water we drink and wash with

is the same water, recycled over and over again,

that all men and women, all trees, all species of plants and animals

have been drinking before me.

 

We’d be well advised to take care and be very careful

to the phenomena, diseases and life forms that we might generate

playing with life and fire.

 

 The worst will most likely be for our descendants.

Our own children.

 

If the particles that I leave, that I bequeath to this world,

have been a part of me,

so do I survive in this world?

 

Do I remain bound to this world?

Until this world ends?

 

This question is probably perceived as mystical and mysterious,

and it certainly is.

 

It is nonetheless a scientific enigma:

When do the particles I once indwelt pass away?

When do all the particles that once embodied me cease to bind me to them?

 

Would there be something after death,

some kind of link, however tiny and weak, unimaginable and extremely strange,

that would bind us to them and to the earth’s biosphere

until life here on earth is no longer?

 

On the scale of the infinitely small,

particles behave in such an incomprehensible and strange way,

that they still seem largely

beyond the reach of all modern science, of all contemporary scientists.

 

Some quantum physicists even say

that some particles billions and billions of miles apart

are somehow connected and interact.

 

No one can answer this question with definitive certainty.

It is impossible.

 

It may thus remain a scientific riddle forever.

 

A riddle whose probabilities, however, are real

 and impose themselves on our consciousness as such.

 

Taking care of ourselves is taking care of the Earth, 

taking care of the Earth is taking care of ourselves.

 

If there’s one thing to remember about any of this,

it would be just that one thing.

 

All of our fates, all of our destinies

are connected to Her.

 

The frailty that we do not want to see or acknowledge

makes us all the weaker and more foolish

as we choose not to see it or even acknowledge it.

 

Not knowing what makes us fragile and vulnerable 

necessarily exposes us to the dangers

whose existence we deny.

 

Not knowing one’s faults and weaknesses

would amount to forcing oneself to believe

that one could drive into a wall at 200 miles an hour

and get out of it unharmed.

 

Wouldn’t that be the exact opposite of wisdom?

 

Unfortunately,

the wall stands straight in front of us

as we’re rushing forward, heads down

at 3,000 mph an hour.

 

To know what makes us fragile and vulnerable

is the only way to make us less vulnerable and fragile.

 

In other words,

to recognize and accept our mortality, our weakness, our vulnerability, our sensitivity,

is the only way to make us confident and strong.

 

No one can defeat the one who knows the least of his or her frailties,

the least of his or her vulnerabilities.

 

Nothing alive can no longer impress the one

who has understood that weakness can be a magnificent and immense strength

as much as strength can be a tyrannical, inhuman and perhaps even cursed weakness.

 

*

Frailty and persecution

 

If only because everything that lives must one day suffer and die,

isn’t the nature of the Living to be weak?

 

By nature, life is fragile,

intrinsically, Life is synonymous with frailty.

 

This is how nature is made.

Humans are feeble and weak.

 

Echoes of an incessant and repetitive history of chaos, conflict and crime,

chained to competitiveness,

to hatred, enmity, fear, conflict and division, to the notion of the enemy itself,

because we’d rather not see it, because we cannot see it,

by denying weakness the right to live,

we deny the living the right to be weak.

 

We deny the living and the being the right to exist.

 

By denying the weak the right to exist,

it is our own weakness that we condemn.

 

By denying our own weakness,

we deny, we condemn the living within ourselves.

 

Thus,

unless humanity as a whole recognizes and accepts its own weakness,

humanity will never be able to stop persecuting the weak

and persecute itself.

 

The day when humanity as a whole acknowledges and accepts its own weakness,

only then will humanity stop persecuting itself,

and humans killing each other.

 

Only then will humanity be able to unite and flourish.

 

Because our neo-liberal model of society institutes conflict and power struggles

as the favoured interaction modes between all economic and social actors,

and insidiously, maliciously inoculate selfishness into the heart of human relationships,

then everything weak is repugnant to us,

then anything weak can be despised,

then anything weak can be exploited or disappeared,

in recklessness and indifference.

 

As a reminiscence of our own unconditional fragility,

which no one escapes from, not even the richest and most powerful,

since everything is weak, since sooner or later we are all meant to suffer and disappear,

it’s because we don’t want to see that we ourselves are weak and fearful,

that we lock ourselves into self-destructive / self-protective patterns

that are self-replicating, increasingly harmful and violent,

 and condemn ourselves to permanent self-destruction.

 

*

Valiance

 

I’ve never been in combat,

but no doubt soldiers who have fought on the battlefield know this.

 

To acknowledge one’s own weakness and vulnerability

in the face of death requires the utmost courage.

 

Our valour is all the stronger and subtler

as we know ourselves to be fragile and sensitive…

 

All the more sensitive to messages of pain or joy from the body, heart and soul

as the characteristic of being human is one’s emotional awareness and sensitivity.

 

We are all the more sensitive to joy and able to blossom

as we are sensitive to suffering,

all the more intensely aware of one thing

as we are aware of its opposite.

 

Frailty, consciousness and sensitivity,

three dimensions which, at the heart of the being,

by feeding and strengthening each other,

create an emotional spiral that,

no matter what it seems to us, whether we deny it or not,

is always strong and intense, genuine and valiant.

 

Every soldier who’s ever been on the battlefield,

who have lost a battle buddy, or any part of their body, flesh or soul,

is aware of that.

 

Since everything fragile is sensitive,

and because everything sensitive is sentient and conscious,

it is in the awareness, recognition and acceptance of our own frail existence

that lies our last hope, our only strength, our only wisdom, our only intelligence,

our greatest strength, our greatest courage.

 

Sentience is a strength,

in the highest sense of the word.

 

It is the denial of our humanity

that makes us fall into the opposite extreme,

into spiritual weakness, cowardice, concealment.

 

Truth be told,

aggressiveness, egocentricity and insensitivity are not strengths

but weaknesses.

 

Because we deny our weaknesses,

because we despise them in others,

because we’ve been conditioned to despise them,

because we do not know them, we do not perceive their natural limits,

we exaggerate them, we’re afraid of them,

and thus we perpetuate the domination of the strong over the weak.

 

Can persecuting the weak ever be considered an act of bravery?

 

Nothing and no one can be brave or strong

without a sincere desire to protect the weak,

to serve humanity with justice and humanity.

 

Do we still believe

that we have no other choice to live or survive

but to persecute, dominate, pillage, or even kill the powerless?

 

Do we still believe

that we have no other choice but to go on living

sacking the Earth and declaring war, stealing, injuring and even murdering?

 

This ancestral socio-historical conditioning,

this aggressive mimetic attitude leads us straight to the abyss.

 

Will we ever wake up in time to this simple obviousness?

 

We can assert it

as an undeniable psycho-sociological philosophical truth:

 

This standardized and globalized competition of all against all

is more a nightmare

than universal solidarity is a utopia.

 

Can’t we open our eyes to the Earth,

 which shouts out to us her greatness, screams out to us her generosity,

who extends to us her benevolence and bounty

as a hymn to life,

an inspiration to the universal, to grace,

as an exaltation of the other, and of oneself,

as an exhortation to unite, to share,

to self-realization, to knowledge, to wisdom, to joy, to tolerance,

to love, to consciousness

and the gratitude of being alive?

 

Our civilization could be so beautiful…

 

As diverse, multiple, problematic and contradictory as it may be,

our globalized civilization, in particular through computers and information, the right to free speech,

is still a chance as long as it exists.

 

A chance we must seize before it disappears…

 

It is from the sum of all the droplets that make it up

that the ocean draws its invincible power, majestic and fertile.

 

Likewise,

it is from the sum of our individual and collective decisions and actions

that humankind will draw its power and fertility,

or not.

 

For the People of the entire Ocean Earth,

there are no other ways

than the inclusive, universal, multiversal ways of the Earth.

 

*

The law of the strongest,

the law of money.

 

From a psychological, social and historical point of view,

the grip of money

on the spirit of man, woman and humanity

has strengthened over the course of the evolution for one main two-sided reason:

 

The law of the strongest.

 

And its opposite:

the submission of the weakest,

by servitude, poverty or death.

 

Immemorial heritage of our evolution from the animal stage:

the strongest is the one who survives.

 

So much so that we are convinced that this law,

 the law of the jungle

cannot but prevail over relations between men.

 

Man, like an animal, would therefore be a wolf to man.

 

Out of respect for the wolf,

we can say that since men kill each other,

since humans kill their own kind,

the man is definitely not a wolf, but a cannibal.

 

Yet,

would you define yourself as a murderer, a cannibal?

 

Chances are you wouldn’t.

 

Yet this belief, this blind allegiance to the law of the strongest

has consequences that are all the more powerful and destructive

 since it is a collective unconscious inheritance.

 

Having always been part of our organism and our psyche,

older than the most remote memories of humankind,

going further back than homo erectus and prehistoric times,

appearing long before the emergence of any form of consciousness

which would more or less correspond to what we mean by that word today,

we cannot have a clear vision of the strength of this heritage, this memory, this ancestral belief.

 

Is humanity still too young?

 

Throughout its long prehistory and relatively short history,

psycho-sociological, economic, monetary, geopolitical and historical conditions

 related to the evolution of our species

are the reasons why men keep on killing each other.

 

On top of that,

another decisive historical movement will develop from the 1850s onwards,

less than 200 years ago, during the Second Industrial Revolution,

which will considerably strengthen the Machiavellian process

of blinding souls with money:

the law of the strongest is theorized, sacralized:

 

The ideological consecration of the law of the strongest

– that primitive instinct

dating back to original, prehistoric times when humans were still in the animal state –

is legitimized, “legalized”, normalized

by a theory that asserts the balance of power between all human beings,

and institutionalizes competition at the heart of our capitalist system:

 

Social Darwinism,

first theorized in Europe in the 1850s and 60s,

then taken up again in the United States from the 20th century onwards*

provides an ideological basis and justification

to economic liberalism from the second half of the nineteenth century

up to the current economic neo-liberalism.

 

*Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

 

Today,

this ideology of the law of the strongest,

the foundation of capitalism in its present form

is used to justify overexploiting

all resources, both human and natural…

 

It is used to justify invading the entire planet,

lying to and manipulating our fellow humans.

 

It is used to justify ruling

in an aggressive, insidious or downright belligerent manner.

 

It is used to justify creating chaos wherever it is necessary,

on political, economic and social systems all around the world.

 

It is used to justify intruding into every nook and cranny of private life,

into our hearts and minds

so that they can better steal anything they can get their hands on,

all for one simple and transparent reason:

 

To keep getting richer,

no matter what the cost

for nature or humanity.

 

It goes without saying that the current monetary, financial system

makes this process quite exponentially worse.

 

In other words,

especially so since money creation

lies in the hands of these private and lucrative institutions that are the banks*,

competition of all against all lies at the heart of the system.

 

*See dedicated section

 

There were 7.7 billion of us at the beginning of 2020.

 7.7 billion human beings all competing with each other…

7.7 billion human beings all at war with each other…

 

Is this the humanity we wish for?

 

*

Deadly influence of power and money,

from which no one is fully free.

 

Through propaganda,

information and misinformation, instruction and conditioning,

lies and manipulation, smoke and mirrors as well as suffering, blindness and ignorance,

through the forms and levels of education that have prevailed and still prevail among men,

extremely few are those who can break at least almost fully free

from their historical, social, cultural, religious,

local, regional, national, transnational and global influences, beliefs, ideologies and conditioning.

 

Extremely few are the ones who can see beyond.

 

Born out of the need to look like everyone else,

so as to maintain our own protection, our own identity,

our own worth, our own dignity, our own existence in society,

born out of our primal fear of being alone and not being able to survive without anybody else,

by mimicry, as in a game of distorted mirrors,

we, our community, the whole world, ourselves,

are collectively conditioned by reflexes

that are constantly self-strengthening and self-intensifying as we pass them on to one another

through space on the one hand, i.e. from human being to human being,

and through time one the other, i.e. from generation to generation,

like a contagious and genetic disease,

detrimental to the development of beings and the awakening of consciousness.

 

So affected,

more dependent

as the stakes and dangers increase and multiply,

inevitably and almost simultaneously,

 the human psyche is then contaminated by fear,

the fear of losing rank, wealth, importance, relationships,

acquaintances, friends, spouse, family, children…

 

The fear of losing everything…

 

Fear of losing your identity, fear of losing yourself…

 

All the more fearful

as soon as the forms of solidarity disappear

and that the slightest life accident leaves us alone

in the face of unemployment, sickness, distress, death.

 

To such a degree that we can no longer do without money and power

and always want more.

 

We can see how this greedy obsession to make more and more profits

corrodes ultra-liberal corporations and societies.

 

The need to own money

is becoming increasingly uncontrolled and excessive in every respect.

 

Also, and perhaps most importantly,

our dependence on wealth, power, consumption, self-glorification,

and the constant improvement of our material standard of living

at the expense of our affective, relational, cognitive and spiritual life

is getting harder and harder to satisfy

as an ever more artificial, voracious and profound emptiness

hollows you out from inside out.

 

There’s more to it than that:

 

 Relationships of converging or diverging interests

with all the allegiances and betrayals, agreements, manipulations

associated with the enslavement of all through credit and debt repayment,

the need for a salary, the exacerbation of need and poverty,

are creating an even more complex global situation

as it is the product of a system of interdependencies

of everyone on everyone, of all economic players,

of every nation, every business and every individual,

so much so that we can no longer be free and sovereign,

and no one seems to be able to understand or control anything anymore.

 

Whereas as it turns out,

the situation becomes clear when we understand

that the monetary system is at the heart of the problem.

 

Sadly, few of us know that yet,

and that’s one of the reasons why much of our relationship with money is subconscious.

 

This situation is made all the more serious

as the creation of money by the large and profitable private banks

not only makes indebtedness, or even over-indebtedness, unavoidable

but also feeds the need for higher profitability and therefore speculation and speculative bubbles,

which under normal circumstances attract the majority of the capital

and which, when they burst, result in deflation

and thus the scarcity of money in the economy.

 

In other words, at all times, whether in times of euphoria or recession,

the money that banks create through credit, and therefore debt,

only goes for a tiny fraction into the real economy, and therefore society.*

 

*See dedicated section

 

Then the only choice left is to fight

and enter the great arena

of the universal economic war.

 

Global systemic trap

that makes it all the more difficult for us to question

and into which we sink all the more deeply

as we identify with our social status,

 the roles we have assigned to ourselves

as sticking to our identity model,

to the image we make of ourselves

that we are constantly striving to see confirmed in the eyes of others,

and that we don’t want to lose for fear of losing our identity,

of losing our ‘raison d’être’

as an employee, civil servant, financier, businessman,

honest or corrupt person, benefactor, mercenary,

‘representative’ of God on Earth, politician, member of the military…

 

All caught in the trap of sneaky ultra-liberal capitalism

that only stirs up our materialistic, egocentric,

possessive, selfish, proud, negligent, aggressive and arrogant inclinations

as well as our bestial, sexual and violent impulses

at the expense of our most beautiful, most precious possession;

Earth and ourselves, love and friendship, work and creativity,

the joy of living and fraternity, exchange, sharing and generosity…

 

Stemming from the influence and pressure that others exert on us,

 and from our own influence and pressure that we exert in return on others,

on a psycho-sociological level,

at the level of the frighteningly large and growing majority of individuals,

from further back in time than we can remember,

we’re pushing each other further and further into error,

misunderstanding, intolerance, aggressiveness and ignorance,

as if trapped in a downward spiral,

all the more perverse and uncontrollable

since it is unconscious for the most part.

 

This game of distorted identities of citizens among themselves,

taken individually as well as collectively,

through space and time,

through the geo-political-socio-economic context

and family and historical background

is the best hold, along with debt, that power has on society,

on the men and women who make it up.

 

Conditioned, we can manipulate and be manipulated.

 

Both victims and abusers…

 

The circle is complete.

 

The rich and powerful abuse their power, blind and divide us

and we, the people of Earth,

no longer have, may never have had,

the means to curb them, to democratically check them,

to set free from their yoke, their wanderings, their excesses, their abuses,

from their countless acts of violence.

 

The rich and the “financiers” can bet and speculate to get richer

in a seemingly never-ending way

as in a giant casino the size of the Earth.

 

Exactly the opposite of what would be required

to meet the energy, economic, climate, societal and emotional challenges ahead,

the market is there to exacerbate our needs and create new dependencies for us

for the sole purpose of generating money…

 

For money is profitable

not only in terms of quantity and quality

of what I can buy or sell with my money, 

but also and especially if we consider the diversity

of what I can buy or sell with my money:

 

Oil, gold, water, a human being, justice, plastic, carbon, technology,

the North Pole, the atmosphere, plants, seeds, food, GMOs, ecosystems,

politicians, industries, the military, laws, weapons, health, science,

pleasure, childhood, imagination, integrity,

love, life, Earth…? 

 

Basically, everything has to be turned into money.

 

And yet,

because in this age of speed and endlessly deceptive communication,

we are sorely lacking vision,

because all we see now is the image they give us of humanity, of ourselves,

because they control everything, because they’ve taken over the world,

so much so that we, so blind and thirsty for the crumbs they leave us,

we imitate them, we support them…

 

We believe that the law of money and markets

will provide the solution to all of humanity’s woes.

 

Today,

in a globalized age

and at the dawn of the convergence of the economic, energy, health, ecological and climate crises

that every serious scientist is predicting,

we can no longer afford to allow ourselves to be manipulated

by reflexes inherited from our history and culture,

we can no longer afford to remain conditioned

by beliefs without any rational foundations,

we can no longer afford to get carried away

by an economic machine that’s gone completely insane.

 

As the present is moving into the past, 

the Earth rotates and time runs out,

endlessly, as the situation worsens

and the struggle for survival intensifies.

 

It is therefore inevitable that our conception of the world

– seen as the battleground of a war,

that would at best ideologically, economically, at worst militarily, universally and perpetually

set all the nations of the Earth against each other -,

be sooner or later questioned and changed.

 

Because no matter what culture we come from or what nationality we share,

anytime, anywhere,

We, the unfavoured, the vast majority, as Stéphane Hessel says, 99% of humanity,

always and everywhere, are the hardest hit,

either to get poorer still, even more precarious and even more miserable,

or just plain cannon fodder…

 

*

Social Darwinism and Progress

 

Let us make no mistake:

 

We must stop confusing democratic progress, scientific progress,

freedom, entrepreneurial freedom on the one hand

and unbridled capitalism on the other hand.

 

We are too often led to believe that Capitalism

is responsible for human social, cultural and scientific progress.

 

On the one hand,

in a society where the poor and the sick would be allowed to die,

then how many geniuses whose talents would be of great benefit to humanity would die

without even having had the chance to put their lights to good use?

 

What would have happened to Stephen Hawkins, to name but him?

 

Even though freedom of entrepreneurship is a natural and inalienable right,

scientific advances are not so much the consequences of the omnipotence of the markets,

as the democratization of education and freedom of conscience,

of national wisdom and solidarity.

 

On the other hand,

if capitalism means the private ownership of capital,

it becomes evident that at a certain point of capital accumulation by a minority,

capitalism and entrepreneurial freedom become incompatible,

in any case for a very substantial part of society.

 

For all these reasons,

capitalism and social darwinism are not synonymous with entrepreneurial freedom,

social progress or scientific progress, or any progress at all.

 

*

Capitalist culture:

the worship of money.

 

Capitalist ideology and corporate culture

tell us that making a profit necessarily means working for the greater good.

 

Judicious theories that are very useful

to enable the rich and powerful to appease their conscience by persuading themselves that,

whenever they circumvent or seize the law, when they flout man, woman and nature,

in any case private capitalist interest is by decree superior to the common welfare of all.

 

But whether you are a private individual or a company,

you cannot work for the general good

when you blindly worship profit

especially when your profit turns out to be destructive.

 

This religion of profit

within the company affects society at large

and especially those who embody it by working for it,

at all grades, all levels of the authoritarian pyramidal,

essentially undemocratic hierarchy.

 

Today more than ever,

the one who, out of private interest,

seeks to convince the world and at the same time oneself,

that one’ s personal enrichment and well-being

merge with the well-being and the general interest

only wants to continue to exist as a rich fellow.

 

Whoever wants to convince us that such an ideology

is neither unhealthy nor unwise,

that it does not proceed from poor reasoning and inferior ‘ethics’,

that it is not the pseudo-legitimization of all biased and misleading ideologies,

of all the greedy and stupid policies, rules and laws

 that can justify to all and sundry

that everything can be bought and sold, that everything can be commodified,

that, in fact, for the common good,

everything has to be,

even the most fundamental rights of living beings, the earth and the oceans,

not to mention human beings and their children,

in truth,

this person only wants to continue to exist as a rich fellow.

 

Everything else is secondary.

 

It all seems the more logical

considering the size of my personal fortune

depends on the over-exploitation of the earth’s resources,

men, women, machines and technology,

as well as how effectively I can break down barriers

hampering the expansion of my empire, my profit and my power…

 

Unbridled capitalism

as we know it today and the irrational worship of profit

both embodies and reinforces the law of the strongest,

law of the strongest which, as we have said before,

cannot exist without its other side:

 

The subjugation, destitution and destruction

of the weak and weakness itself.

 

The only difference between today

and the time when man was still an animal

is that the lever of power and bellicose force in humans

is now primarily achieved through money.

 

For where wealth is synonymous with power,

power is synonymous with money.

 

And that perfect reciprocity between power and money

is the knot at the heart of humanity’s problems.

 

Indeed, if I have a lot of money,

I want to increase the power of money,

so that in return it can give me more power

and more money, endlessly…

 

Thus,

this reciprocity, this mutual reinforcement of power and money

 creates a vicious circle, an infernal spiral

that is very difficult to stop

both in the collective, political and in the intimate, personal spheres.

 

In a context of seemingly uncreated, eternal, irrevocable and universal

competitive, selfish and aggressive individualism,

our psyche is becoming more and more profoundly affected

by delusions of grandeur,

the illusory and futile fascination of oneself

that comes from the power of money

and the picture that that money sends us back,

self-image all the more magnified

as we all are the TV and the media’s children.

 

As a result,

our psyche is also and inevitably becoming more and more deeply affected

by the other side of the coin of our own delusions:

 

Fear.

 

Fear that this whole world might fall apart,

fear that our manufactured identity may collapse,

an identity that is all the weaker as it is contrived.

 

If not having money often means for a human being

a lot of suffering and therefore probably dying prematurely,

does having money necessarily mean happiness and life?

 

Is money more life than life itself?

 

Within a system of universal competition to death,

since everything must be subordinate to money and gain,

since money by definition corrupts,

do we all become virtually corruptible?

 

Let’s not deceive ourselves:

 

It is this ideology of profit that causes and justifies global disorder.

 

It is this sacralization of money

which is the source of all our troubles.

 

A source of wealth

when exploited wisely and moderately, with realism and foresight,

money has now become the major source of discord within the human race.

 

Not a single state,

not a single institution, not a single company, not a single human being,

no longer seems to have any control over anything.

 

Until recently,

their consequences could remain relatively limited,

though not in their horror, in their magnitude;

today,

the follies of men

take on gigantic, Dantean, inhuman, even irreparable proportions…

 

What do you expect?

 

There’s nothing humankind will ever be able to do

to prevent a tragic fate

if we can’t break free from the grip of money.

 

The supreme value status that money holds in our civilization

has its origin in the need and fascination

that, to varying degrees, we all have with regard to money

as the guarantor of our personal survival

as well as the powers it brings at the collective level

and the self-image it reflects back on ourselves.

 

Money has deep roots in our psyche,

all the more so as the current system of money creation through credit and therefore debt

makes our dependence on money total and absolute.

 

That’s why the role of anyone who wants to help save humanity

is to work for the overthrow of the cult of money,

the reform of the monetary system

and the end of the hegemony of finance and economy

over all other emotional, spiritual, relational, psychological, cognitive, creative,

social, professional, political, religious, cultural, etc. dimensions of life and the world.

 

Finance has to bend to reality,

not the other way around.

 

It is the present reality of men, women and children,

 of their living conditions on Earth

which should dictate economic and monetary policies,

and not some super-rich people’s delusions of grandeur.

 

Constantly new, often unpredictable,

with multidimensional, interrelated, infinite and infinitely complex forms,

the relentless reality of life on Earth can never be properly governed

by the blind and narrow-minded greed of the rich and powerful, markets and governments.

 

Believing this is a fraud, a tragic mistake.

 

*

In unity we stand strong.

The world oligarchy.

 

With the law of the institutionalized, globalized jungle,

with exacerbated neoliberalism imposed on the people, on the whole world,

everywhere, freedom and solidarity are receding.

 

Adversity hardens and multiplies,

inequality is growing, injustice is rampant and discontent is growing…

 

Our fear is growing,

our need, our dependence on power and money is growing…

 

Infinite spiral.

 

Thus,

in a context of global economic war

we who are rich and powerful

have no choice but to stick together

to keep our globalized wealthy elite in power.

 

Indeed, since I’m not the only rich person in power,

because the balance of power is too risky or even somewhat disadvantageous,

I willy-nilly have to share it with my peers,

in the shadow of the markets and the lobbies,

through collusion, intrigue, corruption and dissension,

just to carry on ruling.

 

By the by, so much the better.

 

Better indeed,

so as to get as much as there’s to get,

to share wealth and power

with fewer and fewer people

rather than with the greater number.

 

And even though we’ll devour each other at every opportunity,

as far as we’re concerned,

we want to continue to rule the rest of humanity.

 

And today more than ever.

 

For against all energy, climate, financial, ecological and economic crises,

against all the chronic instability of the system we defend and embody,

which we all the more fear since we are its instigators,

it seems that money is the only thing that can still protect us.

 

What could be more effective in continuing to be rich and powerful

 than to unite with those who share the same values and goals as me?

 

What is a better basis for unity than a common goal?

 

What is more feasible, easier and possible

than to unite in pursuit of a common goal

when we have the power and the means?

 

This is not the development of a new conspiracy theory.

 

All you have to do to convince yourself is open your eyes

and look at yesteryear’s peoples’ and nations’ history

as well as today’s state of the world:

 

The evidence is overwhelming.

 

You can be sure of that,

despite our countless conflicts of interest,

we share the same concern, the same desire:

 

In a world where competition rages on

and the law of money dominates as the universal king,

when in times of crisis money is lacking,

and you have lots of it, an enormous amount of it, an unreasonable amount of it,

what do you do?

 

Do you keep it, or do you share it?

 

Let’s keep the power to take it all!

 

Let’s take it all to keep the power!

 

Together we are strong, they say.

 

When the rich unite, they become even more powerful.

 

Thus, the system has succeeded in creating a hypnotic synergy

between all the rich people who, having built their identity on their wealth, power and privileges,

are willing to do anything never to lose them…

 

A purely circumstantial alliance,

this ‘shadow power’ has been established de facto,

as if guided and carried along by the capitalist spiral,

Adam Smith’s famous ‘Invisible Hand’,

embodied by no one in particular, except the market,

whose deregulation favours only two things,

like a bulldozer, to the detriment of everything else:

 

The constant increase of money’s power,

and thus indirectly but inevitably,

the establishment of a caste of very wealthy and powerful people.

 

The system,

 by creating circumstances favourable to the union of private interests of a wealthy minority

at the expense of a poor majority

spawned a Hydra with ten thousand heads,

which, drowned in numbers, has no name.

 

Escaping all control, transcending generations,

the law of money is very much alive,

animated by a mysterious, powerful, irrational, unbridled, unleashed, toxic, harmful force…

 

A machine that despises and crushes human and non-human beings…

 

Inhuman…

 

The “Beast”?

 

Fear,

for the power that this united and totally blind minority is concentrating

is unprecedented in history.

 

Its financial power, astronomical, out of all proportion,

defies imagination…

 

Even when you adjust the proportions of power and population through the ages,

never in the history of humankind have so few people held so much power.

 

For they possess a technological, military, propagandist and media power

without common measure, unprecedented in history,

which they have offered themselves with science, intelligence, creativity and knowledge.

 

However,

their union remains precarious because,

in a context such as the one we are trying here to describe as best we can,

when the balance of power is too favourable to one of the parties,

temptation to imperialism on the part of the strongest most of the time proves irresistible.

 

Like predators that can’t escape their own primal instincts,

they’re caught up in their own trap:

The law of the strongest reigns supreme over all their destinies,

and, by extension, the whole of humanity.

 

While increasing the concentration of money and therefore power

in the hands of an increasingly small elite in proportion to the rest of the population,

the intrinsic precariousness of the contemporary ultra-capitalist economic-financial system

exacerbates the competition, which in turn becomes increasingly fierce, ruthless, inhuman.

 

The state of war, latent or actual,

therefore becomes permanent and universal.

 

The constant increase in the value that humanity gives to money

is both our command and our slavery instrument,

both our means and our end:

 

To grow richer through power, to get more power through money…

 

Money is power

and vice versa.

 

Truth is, it’s an illusion, a two-tiered illusion:

 

1. Money has no value

if it doesn’t represent anything real that is necessary or desirable.

We will discuss this further.

 

2. Are power and money more valuable

than freedom, time, serenity, trust, spirituality, integrity,

love and dignity?

 

We believe that money gives us power…

 

At best, it lends some to us.

 

Actually,

we’re the ones who are mostly under its control…

 

We have abdicated,

 as beings and as a species,

our freedom and our powers, our spirituality and our talents

 to money.

 

If the sacrifice of a fundamental power is therefore a phenomenal and titanic sacrifice,

is it not reminiscent of the human sacrifices of ancient times?

 

Sadly, it is not just a similarity but a lot worse,

for it is indeed Humanity and Life

that are being sacrificed to their money god.

 

If it is a fact that humans will not be able to save themselves

unless they change their relationship to money and power,

by sacrificing the planet and the living on the altar of money,

haven’t we indeed already sold our souls to the devil?

 

Let me ask you a personal question:

 

Would you entrust your child to someone you don’t trust?

 

We have entrusted our lives, our lifestyles, our inclinations, our thoughts, our future,

our loved ones, our children, our wives, our husbands, the survival of the species, the Earth itself

to banks and markets, haven’t we?

 

Do you trust banks and markets?

 

Another question:

Exactly how many of these unwilling agents of chaos and ruin are there?

 

A few million at most…

 

We are 7.7 billion!!!

 

The world population is growing?

 

Let’s turn a problem into a solution:

The ratio of the powerful to ordinary human beings

is constantly changing in favor of humanity!

 

It’s a fact, they’re a minority.

 

What is the power of 7.7 billion human beings

united against the power of the super-rich, along with their subordinates and underlings?

 

Would they want 7.7 billion human beings to unite and demand justice,

rise up against the tyranny of money

and defend their right to life?

 

Who would want 7.7 billion human beings

to realize we’re wallowing in a real debauchery of devastating greed,

that we are indulging in orgiastic destruction of all the earth’s resources

only for our own petty personal gain and selfish pleasure?

 

Apart from politicians, so-called republicans, poor puppets,

 poor devils constantly forced to renounce their illusions or ideals

and to close the gap between social harmony, existing institutions

 and almost total economic deregulation,

at the behest of private interests, powerful lobbies and other pressure groups

with disproportionate means of persuasion and corruption,

these true masters of the world, no one has elected them!

 

Before it is too late,

the men and women who are part of this power, this privileged caste,

must come out of the shadows and seek to contribute

with all their strength to humanity’s well-being

so that the destructive excesses

 of an economic system and a financial market

over which no one really has any power

may come to an end.

 

Otherwise,

it will be collapse, chaos, nightmare.

 

The power of reason, cooperation, benevolence and their positive dynamics

shall overcome the law of the jungle,

that ultra-deregulated system, unstable by its very nature,

if and only if from the most enslaved to the wealthiest,

the vast majority of men and women throughout the world unite

without violence but with conviction and determination

in their efforts to accomplish our common and only destiny.

 

*

Universal Reconciliation

 

“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

said Jesus Christ.

 

Let us not be quick to condemn and/or scapegoat

for there is goodness in all beings,

and, as mentioned above,

we’re all caught up in the historical-psychological infernal spiral,

in the capitalist logic of permanent enrichment.

 

Let’s always keep in mind that in a system

whose ideology was born over 200 years ago in England and the United States,

men are just passing through and in the vast majority of cases,

have little influence, individually, on the system.

 

They only follow the tracks

traced by capitalist and even medieval, feudal legacies

that appeared before them.

 

It is the combined action of conditioned state of mind and conditioned behaviors

 of all men with each other throughout history

along with the current private monetary system

that makes this whole situation seem so inextricable.

 

When we so much as believe that something, even false or biased, is real,

the belief, the illusion itself becomes real.

 

Our western capitalist civilization is so permeated with this ideology of the strongest,

it has been built both with and through the non-altruistic values of money

so much so that the system survives when men die.

 

The monetary-economic machine has escaped the control of its creators,

as if carried away by itself, in its irrational logic of disrespect, of inhumanity,

of universal destruction in its mad rush to abuse, suffering, blood and tears.

 

With our backs to the wall

and our eyes open

to the financial and economic crises, climate change, the loss of biodiversity,

beyond the cataclysms that are looming,

this is perhaps where the real challenge for humanity lies:

 

To succeed in truly rising above the animal state

by ceasing to be slaves to the law of the jungle.

 

In spite of the problems that plague and divide us,

only a humanity that knows how to face itself,

so as not to clash, but to get to know itself and recognize itself,

will be able to come to terms with its challenges,

however insurmountable they may seem to be,

and thus avoid another mass extinction, another apocalypse.

 

No matter how far we’ve erred,

no matter what faults and sins might have been committed

 once we engage ourselves to the path of beneficence and reconciliation.

 

Only a reconciled and conscious humanity,

united in solidarity and in peace,

carried by all the peoples of the Earth, will succeed,

with as little violence as humanly possible,

in taking down the destructive power of money of the global neo-liberal capitalist regime.

 

Singular, unique and multiple at the same time,

supported by the voice of every man and woman on earth,

only a conscious humanity, united in solidarity and in peace will succeed

in transcending the competition of all against all on a global scale.

 

Which certainly cannot happen without yourself, whoever you are.

 

As if lifted to the skies by the realization of its universality, and its collective power,

 all the more legitimate as it is collective,

all the more powerful as it is legitimate,

then perhaps humankind will understand

that there’ s never been any enemy to fear but itself.

 

*

“The last shall be first.”

 

It is the law of the strongest

that governs interhuman relations

in the economic society which the world has become.

 

Since the ‘just’, the ‘righteous’ the ‘humanist’,

the generous and sentient human beings

do not by nature wish to become predators,

few have been able or willing to climb up the steps of power.

 

And those who did too often ended up murdered or discredited…

 

Thus,

 the wise and sensitive humanists,

not wishing to become violent, aggressive or inhuman

by responding to the blows dealt to them,

or not wanting to expose themselves to the corrupting temptation of corruptive power,

the system of universal competition can perpetuate itself

by keeping off men and women with hearts,

who would sincerely wish and so could reform it

for the good of all, for the common good of all humanity.

 

The supremacy of the strongest

is therefore constantly being strengthened.

 

Our social model is based on Darwinism,

i.e. the theories of evolution and the law of the jungle

applied to social and human relations.

 

However, let us not be fooled:

a sustainable natural balance exists within the animal kingdom.

 

Moreover, apart from a few species, insects for instance,

most living beings of the same species, plant or animal,

don’t eat each other, are not cannibals.

 

If that’s possible within the animal kingdom,

then no doubt that’s also possible

within what is said to be the most evolved species on Earth.

 

And yet,

what is still to last for humankind?

 

Today, and as surely as I’m getting older every moment,

any notion of equality, balance of human and natural forces, tolerance, solidarity and sustainability

is disappearing in human beings.

 

– In twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred years,

when the strongest have devastated everything,

what will they have left to devour?

 

– Will they devour each other?

 

– Of course, they will.

They already do!

 

Christ said:

“The last shall be first. »

 

In fact, if they weren’t,

if the humble were not made first,

if humility did not soon sit at the heart of governance and humanity,

someday soon,

there would be no more last and no more first.

 

Mark my words:

 

The only way for humankind to survive

is the wholehearted will of governments and peoples

to pursue peace, wisdom, justice, harmony and the survival of all humanity.

 

*

The boomerang effect of malevolence

 

The reign of violence concerns us all.

The law of the strongest is the curse of us all.

 

Let us take an example:

Being a man, if I disrespect a woman,

why shouldn’t another man disrespect women,

since I’m doing it myself?

 

In other words, disrespecting a woman

is tantamount to legitimizing the lack of respect for women,

it’s being disrespectful to all women.

 

In this sense,

since it is all the more likely to happen to them

since I legitimize this type of behaviour by my own behaviour,

disrespecting a woman is disrespecting my own mother,

my own sister, my own daughter, my own wife.

 

Likewise,

if a man disrespects another man,

the first man ‘justifies’ by his behaviour

the fact that another man could disrespect him.

 

Indeed,

if one gives oneself the right to disrespect another,

why couldn’t someone else in turn disrespect anyone else?

 

Whoever those people are,

whether they’re two or tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions,

not only when you disrespect others,

sooner or later, there’s a backlash, a boomerang effect,

but on top of that, it makes it ‘legitimate’ to behave that way

and the more people disrespect other people,

the more this spiral intensifies.

 

Harming others and causing suffering

are not things you can deliberately wish for when you’re free

because harming others is inevitably, instantly, irretrievably,

harming yourself.

 

Indeed,

whether evildoers know it or not,

to do evil is at least to condemn oneself

to feel neither the joy, the happiness of bringing joy and gratitude to others,

nor the serenity of a clear conscience and a pure heart,

nor the satisfaction of all that a clear conscience

and an wide-open consciousness

can see, know, express, accomplish and feel.

 

Not only does it mean making others suffer

and condemning oneself to live with one’s own conscience,

but it also means maintaining the interrelational climate of generalized unhappiness

among those close to me, of course, but also among those less close to me,

and thus cascading the curse down to all of humanity.

 

This is how it works.

 

Not only are we the creators of our own suffering,

but the survival of humanity is also getting more and more unlikely.

 

Innocent or guilty of the coming cataclysms?

 

Whoever I am,

if the whole of humanity has been suffering for millennia,

it is strictly impossible that the weight of this heritage

and the weight of the immense majority of humans to suffer from it

does not make me suffer as well on a personal level.

 

To become aware of this state of affairs, this conditioning, this curse, this suffering,

is to change, to transform, to grow, to improve.

 

By its very nature, all conditioning comes from ignorance.

 

Inherited conditioning,

cascading errors etched into all of our psyches, and into our society, 

manifesting itself in ignorance, flaws and suffering*,

this unconscious legacy has so much shaped society, shaped our human relationships,

has been embedded in our ancestors’ psyche for so long,

 from parents to children all the way down to us,

that if we can’t get rid of it, if we can’t break free from it,

then nothing will ever change.

 

*Albeit in varying forms and degrees

depending on individuals, depending on groups,

times, moments, influences, life experiences…

 

For humankind, for way too long,

the breeding ground for this curse, this immanent suffering,

 has been and still is ignorance, greed, fear and lust for power.

 

It thrives on division, threat and mistrust,

it manifests itself in psychological conflict, manipulation, defiance,

economic war, armed struggle, repression, violence,

and sooner or later results in the defeat, disgrace, death, ruin,

of the very person who lives by exploiting and causing the sufferings

of his relatives and fellow human beings,

and who by extension and by accumulation, participates in the defeat, disgrace, ruin,

and even the disappearance of the entire human family.

 

Our individual responsibility

is gigantic, titanic, immense.

 

No doubt about it,

it’s an absolute certainty.

 

And if, paradoxically,

perfection does not exist and error is human,

only mutual understanding and perpetual forgiveness of our own imperfections

can be a source of wisdom, justice, harmony and sustainability.

 

Salvation is our only option.

 

If we recover from this major challenge,

then perhaps we could be wise enough to master knowledge and science

to the point of knowing the most dizzying mysteries of the universe

without abusing this knowledge at the risk of exploiting and exterminating ourselves.

 

Only hope for our own species and ourselves

to touch the eternal?

 

The majority’s well-being is the best guarantee of my own well-being.

 

It is the most humanistic law there is.

 

No law can be totally good or lasting

if this law is not respected with humaneness by humanity as a whole.

 

The well-being of the majority is the best guarantee of my own well-being.

 

*

War or Peace

Civil, international, intercontinental war,

Total war

 

Throughout the ages,

those who have ruled without justice

have had to do so through chaos, conflict, suffering and ruin

of the people and the beings over whom they have ruled.

 

The powerful have always pitted different sections of the people against each other

in order to keep them all in poverty and to be able to dominate the whole population.

 

Currently,

 in a globalized world where justice and law

are still largely to be defined and created,

private multinational companies,

sometimes richer and more powerful than some states in the world,

take advantage of this state of international lawlessness and,

by sheer private interest, ego-capitalist interest, one might say,

aggravate it so as to enforce their will, their desire, their diktat,

so as to enforce the greed inherent to this rampant neo-liberal system,

so as to enforce the almighty corporatist diktat

of markets, finance, business and globalized industry across borders

so as to make their inflexible and ruthless law,

the law of the strongest, of the richest

where the most powerful prevail and enslave,

using all means, using force if necessary,

to dominate everything that can be conquered,

to exploit everything, and make their private interests alone

prevail over the whole world,

to the point of jeopardizing the future of the vast majority of humanity,

perhaps even all of humankind, right down to their own bloodline,

until the unfathomable end of time.

 

When the sum of a minority’s interests takes precedence over the general interest,

the breaking point in the social equilibrium sooner or later becomes inevitable.

 

Nothing could be clearer.

 

By destabilizing, by rendering pointless

the most legitimate, democratic and sovereign states in the world,

by depriving them of their power and wealth,

by taking away their hope of control over the creation and sharing of wealth,

by denying them any real justice and any real power of decision,

by dismantling their administrations, making them bloodless,

by weakening all our humanistic laws, by draining all of our public services and their benefits,

by impoverishing, starving and dividing the population,

by violating one by one all the most fundamental, natural, and sacred rights of the world’s citizens,

by debasing the nature of our roles, the purpose of our duties,

by destroying our dreams and our raisons d’être,

by damaging our connection to each other and to the Earth, to ourselves,

by leaving us no choice but to buy and sell, only to become slaves to money,

 eternally condemned to struggle and precariousness,

by making us so unhappy, so full of fear, envy, frustration, sorrow and resentment,

they can thus force us to oppress our own brothers and sisters,

to the point of forcing us to turn against our own people, against ourselves,

against our own species, against the Earth itself.

 

Not only cooperation, mutual aid between Nations

is made difficult, if not impossible, but solidarity, universal concord

between countries, nations’ citizens and the world

is largely hampered, if not outright fought,

by the most devious and dishonest means possible.

 

Will the rotten fruits of our rivalry once again have to be so disastrous

before we once again realize our suffering has no other source

than our rivalry itself?

 

Will the wrath of the climate and the Earth have to break loose,

will life on Earth have to rebel

before we realize that all our present rivalries

are the causes of both our problems and our future rivalries,

and that rivalry is childish and vain, stupid and fruitless?

 

Will we have to run the risk of getting so belligerent, greedy, unhealthy and evil

that our planet itself dismisses us altogether,

afflicting us with so many scourges and cataclysms of a devastating and as yet unknown power

that we’ll have no choice but to try hard, in an ultimate act of despair, to unite together,

and play the last chance card:

 

To finally experience the Universal,

and live in harmony on a planetary scale, in harmony with our Earth,

so generous, so fertile, so demanding, so powerful and fragile Earth?

 

Should we have to fall into the abyss

in order to realize that the abyss is the problem, not the solution?

 

Do you really think, at this point in time,

that we will be able to climb out of it?

 

At this point in history,

our destiny is no longer just a finality:

 

The unity of humanity is an absolute, urgent necessity.

 

That’s wonderful news:

even in the midst of economic competition,

we must unite!

 

In the age of globalization,

the only possible path is the humanist and cooperative planetary union.

 

The truth is, I’m telling you,

in all respects, even from a strictly economic point of view,

a united world is relevant.

 

Since at the universal level,

adversity is necessarily less adverse and less inhuman, 

 better even than relevant,

the world union, from all points of view, is optimal.

 

There are but two possible ways out of chaos:

Metamorphosis or destruction.

 

Chaos has only one deep root

from which arise all the scourges that befall us and lie in wait for us:

 

The power of the rich and powerful,

of all the wealthy capitalists and the political leaders who serve them,

is too big.

 

Let’s repeat the obvious:

 

When the sum of a minority’s interests takes precedence over the general interest,

the breaking point in the social balance sooner or later becomes inevitable.

 

Our productivity has never been so high,

 our technical expertise so efficient,

never has humankind been so rich…

 

 Never before have there been so many people so immensely rich.

 

And yet, ever more inexorably,

the world is sinking into poverty, precariousness, instability.

 

Between plunder and incompetence,

by greed and lust for power,

by sowing division, discord, fear, ultra-competition,

precariousness, poverty, envy, frustration, hatred and destruction,

those who dominate the world seem to be engaged

in a sinister contest that is truly genocidal.

 

To jeopardize the future of humanity, to risk the disappearance of the human species

is to risk the ultimate genocide of this almost infinite number of human beings

who may never see the light of day.

 

From that point of view,

the crime is total, ultimate, absolute…

 

In North America, Asia, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East…

if the good news is that the call to unite is growing louder and clearer,

the bad news is that it’s becoming increasingly likely that

if we continue on the path of aggressive neoliberal capitalist greed,

if we continue on the path of the great economic-political-planetary war,

we will self-destruct.

 

We have been fighting each other

in atrocious, inhuman wars of unimaginable barbarity,

which probably peaked during World War II…

 

While no war can hide the horror and monstrosity of all past, present and future wars,

the nightmare of the Second World War has traumatized humankind.

 

Regrettably, today the imbalance created by the governance

of those who monopolize all the wealth of this world

is leading humanity straight to the edge of the precipice,

to an ultimate form of totalitarianism and chaos

far worse than the Second World War and Nazism.

 

This is a fact that no human being or responsible person can ignore any longer.

 

Thus,

when the authorities strike a chord

with the pseudo-sacrality of nationalist and religious sensitivities and radicalities,

racial arrogance, economic, social and cultural susceptibilities,

when the rich and powerful exacerbate the abhorrence of difference,

playing on the slightest of our points of contention, on our divisions

in such a context of global economic and financial competition,

the flare-up of antagonisms in all the countries of the world is largely made possible,

chaos is made all the more likely

as what is negative is becoming stronger

while its positive counterpart, the only one capable of counteracting it,

is fading away.

 

As a political, economic or religious leader,

whose words and positions affect hundreds, thousands or even millions of people,

not to care about the fact that racism, rejection of the other, division and hatred

between different sectors of the population, between different peoples and different nations,

is tantamount to knowingly applying to our time and to the whole world

the same recipes that caused the rise of nationalism and fascism

in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and throughout the world.

 

It’s being unworthy of the power or influence

they’ve been given.

 

No matter how we gained that power or influence, ballot box, talent or whatever,

to advocate division and excommunication,

is to make oneself illegitimate with regard to the sacred right of human beings, of life and the living.

 

To create the same conditions

that led peoples to want and/or accept authoritarian ideologies

and the establishment of totalitarian states

that ended up throwing humanity into the worst bloodshed and tearshed

on the scale of the Second World War,

after 70 years of scientific discoveries and progress,

after 70 years of multiplying our powers of manipulation, malfeasance and destruction,

is nothing less than to be guilty of an unprecedented crime against humanity,

a crime that we may not have committed as such,

but that we will have greatly contributed to making it happen,

by actively promoting it, by knowingly risking an unprecedented escalation of violence.

 

Historic, inhuman and devastating,

our firepower will spell the end of time.

 

This intercontinental war, with its cataclysmic strike force,

would then inevitably be coupled with some kind of abominable global civil war,

with violent, barbaric and discriminatory acts swarming across the globe,

spreading suffering and tragedy throughout the world.

 

Since, in this age of globalization,

inevitably populations travel and mix,

in this war between continents,

where all the great nations, all the great cultures, all the great religions, would fight each other,

there would be no more front lines.

 

All of Earth would be its battlefield.

 

Not only would nations and continents go to war with each other,

but individuals of each nation and/or continent

would be at war with each other…

 

Total war, it would spare no one.

 

And yet,

all those who have much to lose,

the rich and powerful, capitalists and governments, but not only,

are already seeking protection from the chaos they’ve largely created

by creating more chaos and division, organizing repression, manipulating opinion,

and further enslaving the population,

by instilling fear, poverty, suffering in everyone’s heart and mind,

suspicion, mistrust, lies, ignorance, manipulation, threat,

incitement to hatred, envy and defamation.

 

Chaos is not only in the world,

but also in your hearts and minds,

all the way into the heart of your own family.

Into everything you hold dearest and most intimate.

 

All of humanity is being thrown into an infernal, devastating spiral,

as dark and dreary as it is powerful.

 

Day after day,

using the disastrous consequences of stupid and sterile policies

whose sole purpose is to serve the interests of the rich and powerful,

through lies, propaganda, economic or military crises, pressure and oppression,

we are deceived into believing

that the other is an enemy we should be afraid of,

 that we need to be afraid of each other,

afraid of those who don’t belong to the group we belong to…

 

For a divided people is a people easy to rule, to subdue, to exploit.

 

And they win as soon as the people,

 instead of uniting to hold accountable the true domineering culprits

is one divided people,

a people who has turned against itself.

 

Losing its raison d’être,

a people unaware of its identity and the basis of its power,

is a people easy to subjugate and dominate.

 

Those involved in this dynamic

are complicit in crimes against humanity.

 

No crime against humanity as understood in 1945,

where “only” a few tens, a few hundred million human beings

have been killed and/or tortured in atrocious and inhuman suffering,

leaving behind a trail of unspeakable despair among survivors…

 

But understood as a crime taking place in the twenty-first century:

a total and absolute crime:

the extinction of the species until the end of time!

 

So, deep down inside,

once we start thinking that the small favours

that the poor or minority communities may receive

by living in our society somehow harm us, despoil us,

the people have lost, we’ve all lost.

 

They’ve managed to make us look away from the real problem.

 

They have managed to divide us.

 

Against our own individual and collective interests,

we are divided as soon as we begin to be manipulated

into serving the ambitions, megalomania and greed

of autocrats and fanatics.

 

*

No scapegoating

is ever going to solve anything.

 

If there are several individuals, groups of individuals, several nations, several cultures, several religions,

there is only one nature:

 

The human condition on earth,

The ‘earthliness’, terrestriality of all beings, of the whole of humanity

is by nature universal,

or, to be more precise, multiversal.

 

If we recognise that the union of the world

is the most effective, the best and indeed,

the only solution to save the world and humankind,

then the cultural mix throughout the world is,

– in peace, awareness and understanding

of all that is said here, and indeed, in all the holy scriptures -,

in itself an undeniable source of hope, wealth and potential

for all peoples, for each of us, for all humanity.

 

Because forgiveness is given

when we recognize ourselves in the other,

and recognize the other in ourselves,

the salvation of the world will come from the meeting of cultures and civilizations.

 

In this respect,

the meeting of cultures and beings could prove to be a powerful and sublime driving force

for the peaceful cooperation of all the nations of the world,

without even highlighting the fact that the meeting of ‘foreigners’ coming from different countries

facilitates economic exchanges….

 

While the mixing of populations can be a terrible risk

which could degenerate into a kind of total civil war on a global scale

if we continue to exacerbate the abhorrence of difference,

the mutual disrespect and the ‘scapegoating’ of those who bear little resemblance to us,

it is also the mixing of populations that can prevent wars from breaking out between peoples and nations.

 

The meeting of cultures and populations is a risk

because the powers that be on every side and every party,

of every nationality and every religion

divide to rule.

 

Contrary to what they would have us believe,

since the union of the world is our only salvation,

cultural diversity is also an enormous opportunity.

 

We all have a responsibility

on the current state of the world.

 

We are all called upon to save it.

 

*

Suffer, leave, and suffer still…

Or stick together.

 

Uprooted for a growing part of us,

forced to leave, to migrate, to flee injustice, violence, war or poverty,

forced to be lost or isolated, to be precarious, flexible and mobile,

we form a mixed world population whose movements, migrations, displacements are endured

much more than wanted.

 

Yet this great international cultural melting pot is an immense opportunity:

 

Since we can hardly forgive

what we do not understand, what we know nothing about,

it offers us the opportunity to meet each other,

to get to know each other, and therefore to forgive each other.

 

It is by knowing each other better that we can forgive each other,

and forgive ourselves.

 

As there can be no happiness without peace,

can there be no peace without happiness?

 

Since there can be no peace in the rejection and fear of the other,

there can be no peace or happiness without accepting the other, ourselves

and our relationships with each other.

 

Nowhere on Earth

can there be salvation without any recognition or mercy.

 

*

Tilting the scales

 

Certainly, no justice, no form of governance or society is perfect,

and there’ s probably no such thing as a perfect balance.

 

Perfection is not of this world,

we know that.

 

Furthermore,

all human things have imperfections at one time or another.

 

From the infinitely small to the infinitely large,

so is everything in the universe.

 

From tiny to infinity,

everything develops from an infinitesimal imbalance between two or more entities.

 

The universe itself.

Life itself.

 

That, therefore, is good as is it.

 

In the same way that we always lean

towards more joy or more pain, more frustration or more satisfaction,

we must always at some point ever so slightly lean

to more or less, better or worse,

the right or the left, up or down.

 

Accordingly, an inevitable question arises:

 

At the risk that some of the dispossessed may benefit a little more than they should,

do we prefer to tilt the balance of justice towards a little more clemency, solidarity and tolerance,

but with the certainty of strengthening the social fabric and universal peace

through sober prosperity and sharing, the noble realization of the potential of the greatest number

as well as of the general interest by putting an end to the plundering

of all the resources of this endangered Earth by the wealthiest of this world

or do we prefer to tilt the balance of injustice towards intolerance and over-competition,

rivalry, fear, precariousness, suffering, hatred, crime, and great poverty

by taking the risk of an unprecedented atrocious, disgraceful and disgusting economic and social chaos,

by paving the way for neo-fascism, neo-nazism and a new total war?

 

Since there is always an excess of something over its opposite,

one must choose:

an excess of intelligence or an excess of intolerance,

an excess of kindness and solidarity or an excess of malice and violence?

 

Truthfully,

is an excess of suffering preferable to an excess of generosity?

 

An all-out war whose battlefield is an Earth gone mad

is a war no one will ever win.

 

What sincere person

within this conflicting, violent, absurd and stupid system

can say that he or she does not feel, to one degree or another,

vulnerable, precarious, in danger?

 

In order to establish their power over the world,

the privileged members of the oligarchic and elitist globalised ‘corporatocracy’

seek to impose on all the citizens of the world, on all the peoples of the world,

the management system they apply in their companies to their employees

by institutionalising austerity, by pressurizing citizens-employees all over the world,

by instilling fear and suffering, by isolating them,

by putting all the citizens of the world in competition with each other,

by fostering denunciation, selfishness, individualism, every man for himself,

and universal, total identity, cultural, social, military, psychological and emotional warfare.

 

To believe in messages of division and hatred,

to believe in all those who divide us, who divide the peoples of the world,

who set the religions of the world against each other,

is to fall into the same trap

that the Germans, Italians, Japanese and Spaniards fell into

in the 1930s.

 

In 1943, where would you have liked to live?

In Europe perhaps?

 

In its fullest form,

war

is war of all against all.

 

It’s a state of generalized lawlessness,

the tyranny of the cruelest, the reign of the meanest.

 

No one in full possession of their senses can desire,

neither for those he or she loves, nor for him or herself

such a thing as war.

 

If we can sometimes, in times of peace, be prey

to great and immeasurable suffering, physical or mental,

then what can it like be in times of war?

 

Do not deceive yourself:

 

Rich or poor, small or great, weak or strong, oppressed or oppressors,

with a heart of gold or a heart of stone,

in your soul, or in your flesh, in your heart, in your body,

war never spares anyone.

 

Dodger or cannon fodder,

total war never spares anyone.

 

Do we have to be crushed out, do you have to be crushed out,

do your loved ones have to be awash with its immeasurable pain

before realizing it?

 

Affective, human and humanist sentience,

in the broadest sense of these terms,

is the source of wisdom that alone can save us from the apocalypse.

 

Since it is our madness that brings us to the edge of the abyss,

the awareness that vulnerability is inherent in all that is mortal

is the only genuine force that can save us.

 

*

« To be or not to be »

 

We are well aware

that alas, the more political, economic and social chaos sets in,

the more certain situations can force us to behave like monsters

of selfishness, greed, ignorance and cruelty.

 

It is a vicious circle, a downward spiral.

 

And even though we may be weak, fragile,

we are all filled with greatness, humanism, gentleness,

gifts, talents and great sentiments.

 

These are qualities that are unique to human beings.

These are undeniable human characteristics.

 

With confidence, sincerity, simplicity and intelligence,

see for yourselves, see within yourselves.

 

Who, having a choice, would rather barely survive

in inhuman, negative, painful and degenerative conditions?

 

Any nation can achieve a social, economic, political, industrial, etc.

optimum

and attain balance, harmony and prosperity, serenity, happiness, greatness and dignity.

 

This nation can and must be the world.

 

A world whose absolute foundation,

whose political and legal foundations are respect for life in all its forms,

respect for life and for human beings,

is a world that is extremely capable of self-management and harmony

 because aware and respectful of who we all are:

human and alive.

 

In fact, sincere Humanism is extremely simple to perceive:

Everything that really harms life or humans is destructive,

and will always end up, sooner or later, harming us,

– this is the boomerang effect –

no matter how great or small our responsibility.

 

Societies, organizations or individuals

that do not respect this fundamental law

condemn themselves to commit injustices and crimes

that will not only sooner or later backfire on them,

but also keep them in a state of illegitimacy

with regard to the very thing that sustains them:

 

the nation, the people, the territory, the world, life itself.

 

Not only is the human and humanistic wisdom so clear

that a child can understand it,

but its benefits are effective, powerful and quickly felt.

 

This aspiration to well-being and harmony

is what holds any society, organization, company or association together.

 

It is the glue that holds any human relationship together.

 

Without it,

no society can survive.

 

On the one hand,

injustice is by nature a source of torment and worry

and by no means a source of fulfilment or real achievement;

on the other,

victim or executioner, rich and powerful, or poor and migrant,

we all aspire to well-being and harmony.

 

When generosity among people on a global level disappears,

the worst is to be feared.

 

On the other hand,

when generosity is active, the best is to be hoped for.

 

The solution is real, it already exists,

both outside and inside ourselves.

 

Sincere humanism is at the heart of human activism.

 

Today,

all men and women who are active in associations or NGOs,

all those who lament such an unjust and failing world,

all the visible and invisible heroes in the history of humankind,

whose dates and names may be forgotten,

but whose gigantic repercussions will remain in humanity’s organic memory as long as humanity stays alive,

must focus on what unites them more than what divides them

so that we can deal with a single emergency:

 

 To unite for the survival of humankind.

 

The universal principles and values of enlightened humanism

must now be exercised throughout society,

in politics as well as economics,

at all levels of the State and the Nation, throughout the world.

 

This is the way of history.

That is its purpose, its meaning, its finality.

 

 « To be or not to be? »

To humanity, the question stands on its own.

 

*

Blindness is despair.

Restoring hope.

 

By refusing to see

and perceive that humanity can one day live in harmony

with its earthly environment and with itself,

by refusing to endow it with the power to do much better,

by giving it no hope, no credit, no power to reach any possible state of grace,

we condemn humanity to permanent defeatism,

we condemn ourselves, humanity condemns itself to disillusionment, negation, inaction,

unreasonableness, corruption, brutality, submission, perversion, betrayal, and self-destruction.

 

The truth is,

this conviction is deadly.

 

Not to concede

to grant humanity the slightest potential of any kind of grace

is to deny it any hope of harmony, of permanence,

and therefore mere survival.

 

Blind and resigned,

have we already condemned ourselves?

 

We must make up for this lack of hope, this lack of trust, this lack of faith.

 

We must stem the contagion of despair,

reveal its causes, denounce its false, perverse and criminal nature,

refute the official ultra-capitalist neoliberal ideology,

eclipse it and lock it up

in history books and museums.

 

Because nothing can become real

 without first having been an inspiration, a hope,

it is in hope that hope lies.

 

Hope for a possible harmony on Earth,

harmony between men and women, between all human beings,

harmony with all my fellow human beings, among the immense human family,

capable of the worst,

but also, and above all, of the best and brightest.

 

In the best sense of the word,

humanity’s faith in itself is powerful and revolutionary:

 

Not only is it universal and its dimensions gigantic,

not only are its proportions astronomical and its consequences titanic,

but it is also, in the face of climate change and all the challenges that lie ahead,

a simple matter of survival.

 

Let’s open ourselves up to hope

and hope will come to us.

 

Let us find hope again,

and we will find our ‘joie de vivre’ again, our love of life.

 

No one wants to suffer.

And since suffering necessarily causes suffering,

the will to cause suffering, to harm, to exploit and to destroy

is not natural to anyone.

 

It is this ultra-competitive, dehumanizing system

that drives us ever more violently against each other,

oppressors and oppressed alike,

at our own expense.

 

Only faith in humanity and in ourselves can free us

from the perpetual struggle for life,

from chaos and senselessness,

from unimaginable violence and immeasurable suffering

 that this greedy neoliberal capitalist system,

increasingly tyrannical and inhuman,

imposes and burdens the whole world with.

 

If, in order for change to actually take place,

 a majority of human beings on Earth

must have faith in the union of all peoples and nations,

then that faith itself is change.

 

To have confidence in oneself,

in one’s own primordial, innate, universal nature, common to all beings,

full of wisdom, greatness and generosity,

to have faith in humanity,

in the mutual understanding and union of all peoples,

such is the way,

the only way in which real change can take place.

 

Without it,

no authentic or profound transformation is possible.

 

Without it, I’m afraid,

no metamorphosis of humanity, no regeneration of the species can ever happen.

 

Without it,

there will never be peace or real progress.

 

Only possible pacifist revolution,

humanity is its own raison d’être.

 

Humanity is its own destiny.

 

Hope shows us the way.

Hope is the way.

 

*

To see the invisible.

Restoring faith.

 

The reality of who we are is by nature invisible.

 

We can only see and perceive ourselves through our five senses.

 

If the mind is invisible,

there is no fixed or visible representation of the mind.

 

If there is no single image of the mind,

the mind can put on all of them,

the mind can manifest itself in every imaginable and possible form.

 

Through the ages and through time,

the human mind is in perpetual renewal.

 

The mechanisms underlying our own psychology,

that underlie our relationship to ourselves, to others and to the world

are thus invisible.

 

Invisible to the biological eye,

invisible to the closed mind that has not been forged

to the alchemy of our physical sensory ‘apparatus’, of our experience, of our environment,

of our heart and mind, of life, of the world and of others,

the inner and outer realities are all the more inaccessible to our five senses alone

as we apprehend separately the different parts of this whole

that constitutes being in the world.

 

Invisible to ourselves, it is difficult to know oneself,

and thus to know the other and the world.

 

If we do not know ourselves,

we cannot know anybody else.

 

If we know neither ourselves nor anybody else,

we can neither trust ourselves nor anybody else.

 

Where there is no trust,

there is necessarily fear and mistrust,

especially in a context of global competition.

 

We scare each other, we scare ourselves.

 

Because any vision or version of reality

is necessarily subjective, partial and incomplete,

it is easy to doubt:

 

Doubt about ourselves, about everybody else,

about everything that binds, divides or unites us.

 

Doubt about what we are, about what we feel or perceive,

doubt our intelligence, doubt our talents, doubt everything.

 

Without taking any time to try to pay attention and get to know ourselves,

our relationship to the world becomes intangible, obscure, almost unreal.

 

Events rush in, messages multiply,

fleeting, complex and elusive,

reality eludes us and seems to make sense no longer.

 

We no longer know what is right, what is wrong.

 

We no longer know what is true, what is not.

 

We no longer know anything.

 

We no longer have any deep conviction,

and we let others think for ourselves.

 

It then becomes almost impossible

to reach a global understanding of the world.

 

It then becomes almost impossible

to experience wisdom, justice and truth.

 

The confusion is all the more serious, anxiety-provoking and profound

because not only does the speed of the world prevent us from really reflecting upon it,

but also because what binds us to ourselves and to others,

to our own psyche and that of others,

language, our only means of communication,

all too often proves to be a vector of lies to others and to ourselves,

causing us to drag each other down

into an increasingly obscure and unreadable ‘non’-reality…

 

All the more so

since language is on the one hand too complex

to account for the extreme simplicity of the reality of the world

 – a reality that we are conditioned to believe

to be extremely complicated by nature, and therefore out of our reach…

 

…and on the other hand, language is too primitive

to account for all the constantly, never-endingly changing facets, subtleties and nuances

of the world we live in.

 

In its infinitely changing forms and manifestations,

so simple and yet so unpredictable,

life seems ungraspable.

 

Because life can’t be locked up in one speech;

Because the meaning of words is shifting and slippery;

Because they refer to different notions

depending on the context or setting in which they are used;

Because words always have positive or negative connotations;

Because language conveys ideas that are all the more positive or negative

as they’re built around a certain kind of rhetoric, itself articulated around multiple concepts,

then language has the property, the power

to construct crazy, baseless reasoning,

so as to come up with absurd and spurious ideas

whose words remain understandable,

whose syntax and grammar remain correct

but have very little to do with reality.

 

From then on,

it becomes easy to use language to distort and pervert the truth

in order to manipulate, and even to manipulate ourselves,

to lie to ourselves and each other.

 

As if animated by a life of their own,

words give rise to ideas that do not correspond to reality,

and often even end up contradicting it.

 

It’s well known,

the property of language to never be absolutely true to reality

 is a means by which international greedy materialist capitalist propaganda

can distort, reshape reality.

 

By disguising reality or by smearing it, by confusing, by complicating reality,

dogmatic rhetoric, be it economic, neo-liberal, political or religious,

 can occupy, control, ‘possess’ and divide minds

and bring them into conflict.

 

By imposing,

through lies and manipulation,

a false and biased view of reality,

dogmatists serve only their own interests.

 

For example, since the financial crisis of 2007-08,

all the forces associated with the markets keep telling us in all the media

that all reforms aimed at weakening public services, the administration, the welfare system,

the People, the Nation and the State

are inevitable progress.

 

They keep repeating that any initiative

 aimed at safeguarding public institutions

 as indispensable to democracy and the social contract

as the environment, justice, law, education, health, equality, well-being and social harmony

are nothing but poor, regressive, obsolete, primitive and unworthy policies!

 

What does this manipulation of language and minds amount to

if not a shameless insult to the pains of a people who,

for the slightest social advance, for the least right, for the mere right to live,

have had to sacrifice themselves, to shed their blood, to spill their tears!?!?!

 

Do they call them backward-looking

because they know that they are our only possible future

and that they have every interest in convincing us otherwise

if they want to keep their illusory privileges and power?

 

For a people

to give up its natural and sacred rights

is not an improvement.

 

For a people

to give up the right to live in dignity

is neither positive nor beneficial at all.

 

The truth must be proclaimed and heard.

 

Selling the people’s rule of law, citizen’s freedom, social justice and democracy

to private economic and financial interests

whose bottomless greed and economic irrationality

are well known today

is a nameless aberration

whose absurdity is no longer to be proven

and which must be denounced:

 

It is an abomination

that only serves to feed an obviously unlimited, planetary, extremely powerful, unjust,

counterproductive, destructive, absurd, stupid,

totally meaningless systemic rapacity.

 

Ultimate act of treason

to all peoples, all nations, all peoples of the world,

past, present and to come.

 

Unfaithful to the memory of all the social victories of History,

they seek only to deprive us of fundamental rights

acquired through hard struggle throughout all these last centuries,

snatched by our courageous ancestors, anonymous or surrounded by glory,

in blood, pain, torture and tears!

 

In the march towards humanist democracy,

it takes decades, even centuries for a people to wrest

from a privileged and very powerful ruling caste

all the rights and freedoms that are legitimately due to the people.

 

All it takes is a few agreements and a few laws,

a few signatures to have them stolen back again.

 

Through constant assertion

that public service is to be associated with the word ‘regression’,

and through constant repetition that privatisation and deregulation,

the ‘liberalisation’ of the economy, always in favour of ‘markets’

are inevitable progress,

they try to convince us that greed is a wise advisor at all levels of society.

 

Injustice, poverty, growing inequality and suffering

have never been and will never be improvements.

 

The organized theft of humanity

and the plundering of natural resources are worse than regressions:

they lead us into an unprecedented unknown.

 

They therefore use a word to refer to its very opposite.

 

Thus, as if by a hypnotic, linguistic sleight of hand,

they manage to tell and convince us of the opposite

to what’s true and real!…

 

They succeed in convincing us that the road away from peace and life

is the road it would be wise to take.

 

How can we, how can some of us be convinced

of the need to believe in this ultra-competitive neo-‘liberal’ system

based on ruthless global economic and social competition

as the only thing we should believe in?

 

How can one come to think,

in every country of the world,

that even democracy, the protector of general well-being and social harmony,

the culmination of centuries of history,

should submit and be surrendered

to globalized industrial and financial capitalist interests?

 

The foundation of democracy is justice, law and freedom.

 

In Democracy, the people is sovereign.

 

For a people to give up sovereignty is a tragedy

with unlimited repercussions.

 

Undermining democracy is a crime against humanity.

 

But by filling our heads with the same messages over and over again,

they have been so good at sowing doubt and confusion in our minds

that we no longer see it,

that we no longer see such simple and self-evident realities.

 

All the more profound and anguishing disconnection from reality

as our historical and socio-cultural realities are all upside down.

 

It is from the sum of all our individual illusions

that the illusions of the whole society are created,

which in turn push us even further down

into living in illusion, manipulation, lies and incomprehension.

 

As if drowning in widespread disbelief,

by believing so much that something false or biased is real,

we make the belief, the illusion itself, a reality.

 

All drowning in generalized incomprehension,

our personal illusions echo everybody else’s illusions…

 

Endless echoes and going crescendo,

there is nothing audible anymore

in this general and omnipresent hullaballoo…

 

Smokescreens get all over the place.

 

Through lies, threats, insults and even mental torture,

all dogmatists, powerful or not, use language as an instrument of domination

not only to sow doubt in people’s minds,

but also to shake the confidence that human beings have in themselves,

not only to create division and fear between different parts of the population,

between the different populations of the world,

but also between different parts of our own personalities.

 

Drowning in this ‘culture’,

in all this rhetoric of lies, of manipulation, exploitation, degradation, aggression and oppression,

in doubt and with no faith in themselves,

people can’t afford anymore,

or, to put it better, they’re convinced that they can afford

neither to understand the reality of this world,

nor to become aware of their fundamental, fundamentally human nature,

let alone challenge an increasingly ruthless system

which exploits them and makes them suffer.

 

Lost in the unreal,

can we still even realize that we are in an illusion?

 

They’ve managed to persuade us that we’re not experts enough to know,

not smart enough to understand.

 

Alienation:

breaking the bond,

the bond to the world, the bond to others, the bond to ourselves.

 

Alienation:

Are we aliens on our own planet?

 

Alienation:

Are we aliens to ourselves?

Are we aliens in our own heads?

 

Alienation:

What did revolutionaries mean

when they wrote in the Declaration of Universal Human Rights

that these rights were natural as well as inalienable and sacred?

 

*

The cure

 

Let’s regain our self-trust

because only trust can unveil the invisible.

 

Let us regain confidence in ourselves

because our perception is right:

 

This world is far too greedy.

 

Let us regain our self-trust

because reality reveals itself

to the sensitive, sensible and sentient, human and humanist consciousness.

 

We know this:

Injustice is devolution and justice is evolution.

 

If inequality is a step backwards,

solidarity is an objective, an alternative, the hope of a better future,

a step forward.

 

To seek justice is to give oneself a chance to find it.

 

Not to seek it

is to surrender any chance of salvation, any chance for our species to survive.

 

Undeniably,

the ecological, economic, political, social,

but also linguistic, historical, religious and metaphysical realities

 are such that, if we want, if humanity wants

to continue walking towards progress and social harmony,

if we, if humanity wants to stop destroying itself in chaos, blood and tears,

we have no choice but to be honest and trustworthy,

we have no choice

but to trust in ourselves, trust in each other, trust in reality,

trust in our own and only world.

 

Only trust can shed light on what cannot be seen.

 

Without trust,

there is no improvement,

there is no better world.

 

Without trust,

there is no hope, there is no light.

 

Some religions call this trust faith.

 

If we can know who we are,

then we can get to know each other,

then we can get a grasp of what otherness means.

 

If we can see ourselves,

then we can see the Other.

 

Today,

humanity has no other choice

but to live in understanding, solidarity and trust.

 

Today,

we have no choice but to have faith in our one world:

the whole world.

 

 We now have no choice

but to have faith in our ultimate homeland:

humanity.

 

Let us regain confidence in ourselves,

for, contrary to what they keep telling us over and over again,

not only is forgiveness of oneself and of others possible,

but on top of that, it is absolutely necessary.

 

The Earth’s harmony and solidarity is the way.

 

All at once one and multiple, one and universal,

intrinsically democratic and sovereign,

the way of the Earth is our only option.

 

As soon as planetary harmony becomes the way of all,

it becomes the way of each one of us…

 

One and multiple, plural and universal,

a newly born humanity

will give voice to what’s human in each one of us,

with the regained power to express itself

and blossom in that which is best in us

on a worldwide scale.

 

The world is one.

 

The union of the world is the hope of our world,

the light of our century.

 

Hope is and has always been

all that has given birth to a better world.

 

*

One and universal

 

Because there is only one planet Earth,

the only way to transcend

our many political, economic, religious, ideological and cultural divides

and to face the climate and ecological challenges that are by definition planetary,

the only possible future for humanity is to be built on a planetary scale.

 

The response of humanity must come from all of humanity,

in all its diversity.

 

Along these lines,

the democratic and solidarity-based world union

is not only the end, the goal to be achieved,

it is also the best means to achieve it.

 

As with natural, climatic, geological and cosmic quantum phenomena,

society has its tipping points

which can determine a major change of direction.

 

We’re going through one right now…

 

This tipping point,

which will bring sufficient positive energies to the fore throughout the world

can only be achieved through the ideology of Universal Humanism

and the widest possible respect

for the natural, inalienable and universal rights

of men, women and children.

 

To unite one’s uniqueness with multiplicity,

to open oneself to the universal in oneself,

to discover that I is universal

is to discover oneself in the other and the other in oneself,

it means making peace with humanity,

it means reconciling humanity with itself.

 

See, see her, see the Earth,

she will give you the truth.

 

*

I am someone else

 

We can only exist in each other’s eyes…

 

Each and every one a mirror of each other.

 

It is through me, through ‘myself’

that all of us refer to who we are,

to that elusive and strange entity we call ‘me’…

 

All people, everybody else and myself,

only refer to ourselves with the words ‘me’ and ‘I’.

 

While almost 8 billion human beings other than me

consider me as someone else,

am I the only one who considers myself as myself?

 

If I have almost 8 billion chances

 of being seen as someone else than myself,

then am I someone else to myself?

 

If humanity minus one is someone else,

then does the Other live in myself?

 

Are we, from this point of view,

 8 billion times more other than we are ourselves?

 

Are there 8 billion others or 8 billion of myself?

If humanity is populated by ‘mayselves’,

does the other exist in me?

And vice versa?

Do I exist in the other? In yourself?

 

Plus, considering time ticking by,

since I will inevitably be different

from what I am now in 10 or 20 years,

am I, on top of that, a stranger, another, to myself?

 

Other, we are all others.

 

The Other exists in all of us.

 

No matter how human and average, useless or rubbish,

no matter how sensitive and unique, extraordinary

or downright superhuman we may feel,

the fact is that the more genuinely fulfilled and happy

people around me are with the life they are living,

the more I increase my chances of blossoming

and achieving a destiny as happy as their own,

the more likely I am to be a self that I cannot even begin to imagine,

a magnificent or even invincible and sublime self

that I may never imagine, so screwed up this world is.

 

A me beyond myself.

A me beyond imagination.

 

No one can find a reason to exist without anyone else, or the world.

 

No matter how one looks at the question of existence and its meaning,

we really exist only through one another.

 

Without my mom,

how would I have been born?

 

Without my mother,

I wouldn’t even exist.

 

Without the Other,

the question of my reason for being and my existence

doesn’t even arise.

 

And where would friendship and love be?

 

It’s crystal clear,

without the Other,

I simply don’t exist.

 

Our raison d’être, the very purpose of our existence,

is an open door to the other within oneself and vice versa:

 

It consists in understanding, accepting and helping oneself

 as much as to understand, accept, help others

to realize themselves in the world,

in openness, balance, authenticity, trust, sincerity, harmony, greatness and simplicity,

intelligence, kindness, wisdom, creativity, poetry and reciprocity.

 

It is about understanding that what hurts others

inevitably hurts oneself, not only in the long run,

but also right here, right now, on this very spot.

 

It is not necessary to be altruistic in a sacrificial sense

to realize that we can only exist with and through the Other.

 

The Other is none other than ourselves.

I am another.

I is an other.

I is someone else.

I is everybody else.

 

To embody the other, to incarnate humanity is a sublime wish,

a gift, offered to all, without discrimination,

an incentive to humility all the more profound, intelligent and powerful

as the accomplishment is sincere,

an invitation to a humanity all the more sincere

as the fulfilment is deep, true, powerful and significant.

 

It’s hard for me to put it any other way.

 

Whatever our culture, religion or nation,

only the union with the Other can engender the ‘we’

whose conscience can give birth to the better world we all dream of,

the social and planetary harmony we all aspire to.

 

Excessive self-centeredness is illusory,

at worst chaotic and destructive, at best futile and vain;

in any case blind, useless, and barren.

 

Exacerbated individualism is a trap

that sooner or later will close in

on the person, organization or society at fault for malevolence.

 

All controlled by the same self-delusional mechanisms,

whether we like it or not, we are not so different.

Quite the contrary…

 

Whatever our religion, culture or education,

the unconscious, the psyche, whatever we call the mind,

 in a person or a group of people,

is controlled by realities that we do not want to see,

that we do not have the means to see.

 

Ignorance of reality is the reality of unconsciousness.

 

Reality of unconsciousness,

it is necessarily the reality of the consciousness.

 

In humans,

it manifests itself through doubt, ignorance, fear, wandering, neurosis, suffering,

in the illusory prison of thinking and believing

that we have nothing to do with this or that class,

this or that race of human beings,

all the while thinking ourselves as opposed to the rest of humankind,

fundamentally superior or inferior,

most often both at the same time.

 

To see and perhaps free ourselves up

with compassion, humanism and mercy

from all these complexes, from all these uncontrollable and unconscious compulsions,

which too often hurt us and make us suffer

in proportions that are all the more catastrophic and intense

as they are shared throughout society among my loved ones

and my fellow human beings,

is our only mission.

 

We must see for ourselves

that we are not just evil and harmful, greedy and selfish,

but that at the root of our actions, character and behavior,

at the heart of our being

Humanity shines,

one and universal at the same time.

 

In this reconciliation of opposites,

opposites that are only opposites in terms,

lies universal harmony.

 

What is common to all of us is necessarily universal,

what is human is necessarily universal.

 

It’s as simple and gigantic, humble and amazing as that.

 

Just as malevolent egocentricity generates drama and tragedy,

humane benevolence is fertile with harmony and magic.

 

Open your eyes to humanity’s universe.

 

This is our primordial and ultimate victory,

the object of all our struggles.

 

Because beyond it

there is something simple and human,

stable and serene, true, exhilarating, raw and powerful,

ignorance is a veil that must be lifted

so as to reveal the most insignificant miracle that can ever be:

 

Oneself.

 

Without any more harmful and pointless trick,

it is in the light of universal wisdom,

in the light of oneself in the other and of the other in oneself,

that we can unravel some of the greatest mysteries of human life on Earth

and draw from them the lessons that may help us turn towards her,

let ourselves live in her,

let ourselves be in peace and harmony.

 

Our only chance of survival, our only mission, our ultimate victory,

is to open our eyes and see.

 

*

« Opening to oneself fully is opening to the world. »

 

Chögyam Trungpa,

Tibetan Buddhist spiritual guide.*

 

*Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,

Shambhala Dragon Editions, 1987, p.164