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When scientists a thousand years from now will be studying our time, much about it will strike them as strange. They will be puzzled by how technically advanced we were, but how little we were able to understand each other. It will be hard for them to comprehend why, with such rare, once in thousands of years, scientific and technical ability to create a true paradise on earth, we continued to choose the path of wars, violence, and destruction.

They will be mystified by our persistent failure to heed our scientists’ dire warnings that the Doomsday Clock was seconds away from midnight, abandoning ourselves to unbridled consumption and greed. Why we believed tenaciously that truth is always on our side, even as it deprives others of life and justice?

The big question is: will there be scientists at all a thousand years from now, or will our planet go back to the age of reptiles? In fact, it is high time we start tackling some of these questions, if only so there will be somebody to study US many years from now. 

Our main problem lies in our relationship with our elites. This relationship, in turn, reflects our fundamental misunderstanding of ourselves.

We as homo sapiens still have not learned to coexist with each other. This is no accident. By and large, our ruling elites do not consider themselves created the same and equal with the rest of us. This gives them the right to control, manipulate, and sacrifice us, while enriching themselves at our expense. It is not a problem for them, because– in their opinion – we are different, they are superior to us, we are slaves, and our lives don’t matter, aside from whatever material benefit we may bring to our masters.

Such superiority complex, especially when combined with psychopathy, is a manifestation of psychological pathology. Accordingly, we live in a “pathocracy” that was described nearly half a century ago by the Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski as “a system of government…wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society…”[1]

Our history of wars, with tens of millions of victims in the two world wars only in the last century, confirms this. However, as Steve Taylor writes in Psychology Today, “The problem is not that all people are inherently brutal and cruel, but rather that a small number – those with personality disorders – are brutal and cruel, intensely self-centered, and lacking in empathy. And this small minority has frequently held power and managed to influence the majority to commit atrocities on their behalf.”[2]

This is usually done by impressing the same psychopathic worldview upon US as well. In order not to see other human beings as our brothers and sisters, we are taught to fear them, blame for our troubles and grievances, and be proud of our own superiority. This belief that we are DIFFERENT and EXCEPTIONAL, endowed with the rights of a victim, and with absolute truth on our side only, feeds our sense of primacy and allows us to ignore all violations of their rights, including to life. This is how we all become hostage to the psychopathology, greed, and fighting of the elites for power.

Humanity has always had rulers throughout the entire history of our civilization. There were always those who owned nearly everything and could control multitudes of human lives. Our social contract always relied on their power and edicts. On the other hand, the elite’s social duties, depending on the degree of fairness of a particular system, always included certain responsibility for us, their subjects.

The ruling elites, one way or another, needed the support of their population to carry out their functions. So their goals always included the creation of a certain consensus, frequently by means of fear and violence, around the rightness of their actions. But inevitably, the further the results of their actions diverged from the true interests and realities of people’s lives, the harder it was to maintain the semblance of such accord. This would strain the relationship between the powers and the people to the point of riots and rebellion.

Excesses and abuses by the ruling elites and the flooding rivers of people’s suffering led to several countries, such as Russia and China, conducting revolutionary experiments in violent regime change during the last century. Under the slogans of equality and brotherhood, they gave birth to new social forms rooted in the same old principle of hierarchy and control. Except now they relied on the coercion and exploitation of the many by the privileged party few. The elites and the slogans changed, but the people remained separated from the truth and manipulated just the same.

The relationship that developed between the rulers and the people in the USSR is not alien to the XXI century either. Soviet elites concluded rather quickly that they didn’t need the people as coparticipants in historic decision-making. At best, they needed only producers and performers, but continuing to believe mindlessly in choosing their own leaders and their destiny.

In the U.S., in its turn, sophisticated methods of public opinion control were described almost a century ago by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays (1891–1995). In his understanding, people must be kept in subordinate submission by distracting our attention with desires and sexual lusts. While the fueling of consumer greed allows for public opinion to be maintained within the confines of manufactured “consent” on key social and political issues. As for the public policy itself, it is dictated in the U.S. through the “Overton window”[3] exclusively by the elites (the “invisible government,” in the words of Bernays’ book, Propaganda[4]).

These “invisible” elites are producing ever more colorful characters and intricate narratives, taking us further and further away from the truth and the possibility of changing anything. Yet such is the lot of the people from the rulers’ point of view – to live by the habits, desires, and myths assimilated while we are being programmed by the social and mass media.

While our attention is occupied with the ephemeral glamor, luxury, and endless intrigue, entertaining us from the ubiquitous screen, it doesn’t have even the slightest chance of recognizing the most urgent challenges of our collective existence. And these challenges multiply daily.

World elites compete for power and limited natural resources that they can never have enough of. They apparently have come to believe that we the people are no longer needed and that at this point, there are simply too many of us for “their” planet.

National and religious ideologies are used to justify all their actions, their ends evidently justifying any means. The mass media, controlled by them, spotlight events from their point of view and allow them to get away with unthinkable atrocities.  (Professor Lance deHaven-Smith defines these as “State Crimes against Democracy” (SCAD) in his book, Conspiracy Theory in America.[5]) This is all done under the pretext of the most noble intent and on our behalf, but without our knowledge or consent.

In contempt of the collective karmic burden that will be passed on to our offspring, the range of acceptable opinion for the media is quite narrow. Ruling elites view the free individual as competition and, therefore, a threat. The modern man perceives himself with their help as a material appendage of a certain system, competing with other appendages of his and other countries, or as a believer whose God doesn’t love some people, or as a member of the community with elements of both in the form of a nation. Our convictions dictate our behavior, and when your God doesn’t love some folks, you don’t have to love them either. Speaking of the roots of racism.

Contemporary elites, just like their predecessors, benefit from racism, for it allows them to control mass movements, directing and diffusing their energy into mutual enmity within disaffected masses.This prevents the possibility of their broad solidarity and rallying against the oppressor. Meanwhile, the system of power and control itself remains by design unaffected.

Image on the right is from Wikimedia Commons

Take Black Lives Matter. While crowds destroy monuments and fight each other, the American public has lost the ability of understanding and dialogue, and with it, the capacity to escape conflict and further escalation of violence. In the meantime, appropriations for the Pentagon, militarism, and endless wars continue to grow, as intended, despite the fact that militarism not only prevents the American society from addressing its most pressing problems, but also aggravates them catastrophically.

After all, the real issue in Minneapolis was not the identity of George Floyd, but rather the method that was used to pacify him. Its application doesn’t make it less brutal and inhuman, when it is used to suppress civilians of any other skin color and nationality.

But shifting public attention solely to the race of the victim and channeling mass protests in this direction have led only to the widening schism and polarization of society, given the colossal historical burden of slavery and the psychological and economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. The racial conflict, in the meantime, has completely overshadowed any serious discussion of why the American police use such methods to begin with. What is the purpose of police militarization? Why is the local population being viewed as the enemy and treated in much the same way as foreign adversaries?

Meanwhile, physical abuse is a litmus test of the attitude towards others. The application of brute physical force, even to the point of lethality, to suppress another human being is an indication that one side considers itself to be superior and above the law, with the full right of using such measures. These harsh methods must first and foremost attract our attention in order to reject their application to us and our kind.

In this respect, the issue of Palestinians is in many ways the question of conscience for our time,[6] as was the question of Jews in the 1930s and 40s. Oppression of Palestinians is a symbol of the condition that all non-elite humanity finds itself in. Certainly, Palestinians are not the only ones who suffer. But their suffering personifies and embodies the suffering of mankind at large from oppression by the ruling class, who consider themselves above all the rest of us and crave to own everything around them, including us. Our opinions and even our lives do not matter; we are only pawns in the game that tilts the status quo further and further not in our favor.

The physical violence inflicted on Palestinians incarnates the intellectual violence of lies and distortions that constantly afflicts and numbs our consciousness, lest we notice their suffering and the injustices committed by the powers that be against us and our brothers and sisters. We are distracted, misinformed, miseducated, trained to fight and live in ignorance, fear, and distrust of each other. And it’s becoming quite obvious.

For example, the declarations of Russian interference in American elections by and large boil down to acknowledging the fact that broad swaths of the electorate have been reduced to such lamentable cognitive condition that some Russian bots on Facebook were able to completely disorient the legendary freedom of American citizens in their individual political choices.

The argument is as remarkable as it is instructive. Just imagine what kind of resources are necessary to bring the country’s system of education and mass culture into a state of crisis and deliberately reduce large segments of its population to a position of emotionally underage consumers of things and ideas.

Intelligence agencies with such abilities, above all America’s own, with their colossal resources, could most certainly bring order, prosperity, and cognizance to their countries, if that were the priority. But, unfortunately, this clearly does not apply to the situation in either the U.S. or Russia. The Russian population is being treated in much the same way by its own ruling elite, as Americans are by theirs, also under all kinds of pretexts, including external interference, and with similarly deplorable consequences.

The reality is that there is nothing inherently more evil about the regime in Russia than about the regimes in America, Great Britain, or the majority of European nations. The ruling elites in all these countries think and act about the same, as can be witnessed by the profound similarity of their response to the coronavirus pandemic.[7]

They all fear and manipulate public protests by dividing and conquering, as thousands of years ago. Real pain and anger of the people against the elite degenerate into civil strife, without changing the structure of power. Then the media can even participate in fanning the flames of such unrest against the backdrop of intense struggle of the different segments within elites for power, resources, and information, as is happening in the U.S. right now.[8]

In the case of Russia, this intra-elite fighting has to some extent been temporarily settled in Moscow’s favor in the course of the evolution of Putin’s regime. Nonetheless, the conflict between central and regional clans of the ruling elites continues, periodically spilling into regional unrest. But the favorite method of Russian media, especially television, controlled by the central authority, is to simply withhold coverage of unwanted protests in the regions, as they have been doing for over half a year with demonstrations in support of the former governor of Khabarovsk Krai Sergei Furgal.[9]  

These peaceful protests in the far-eastern region of Russia have been largely ignored by central TV, which is unable to compromise them in the eyes of the general public absent acts of vandalism and violence. In this way, average Russians are deprived of the temptation to join the protests.

But despite the difference in media tactics, the essence of the struggle within the ruling elites both in the U.S. and Russia is the same – being able to use public unrest to advance their own interests. The main thing for them is to retain control over state resources and the right to determine government policy on their use.

As is well known, the military-industrial complex in the U.S. has attained enormous budget allocations over the last 75 years by manipulating the population with fears of an “external threat.” Now the U.S. has the most powerful military machine in the history of mankind. In order to divert the lion’s share of state resources to build weapons of destruction, constant presence of an external enemy is required. And the majority of citizens have to be convinced that military might is necessary as the most effective instrument of foreign policy. Because militarism and democracy are in this sense incompatible (average American doesn’t need war), the image of an external enemy is inevitably projected inside the society to control dissent in the process of law enforcement militarization. That is indeed what we have been observing – and not only in the U.S. – in recent decades.

According to the authors of the Anti-Nuclear Manifesto dedicated to the 75^th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Eisenhower formulated the “law” of the military-industrial complex. “Only the MIC [military-industrial complex, whether American, Russian, or any other] requires and benefits from constant global confrontation, tension, hostility, suspicion, mistrust, alienation, fragmentation, lies, deception, falsifications, threats, sanctions, destruction of cooperation and solidarity in all spheres and relations. The MIC creates a so-called “militaristic security system”, built on balancing “on the war brink” and intimidation by force: “PEACE THROUGH FORCE.””[10]

If Palestinians have become the symbol of contemporary humanity in confrontation with the world elites, the military-industrial complex fully personifies the latter. See this.

“The MIC has become the only source of “nuclear death of humanity”, the main threat to its survival and a danger to the life of the biosphere, noosphere and the planet as a whole that President Eisenhower first realized and expressed.” The MIC is a shared enemy of all nations that “continuously targeted for extinction each of us” and “has become that genocidal terrorist with nuclear weapons who commits “the outrage of holding the entire world hostage.””[11]

Seven Catholics who call themselves the Kings Bay Plowshares are seen April 4, 2018, before they entered the Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia to protest nuclear weapons. On Oct. 15, Rev. Stephen M. Kelly (center, wearing glasses) a 71-year-old Jesuit priest, was sentenced to 33 months in jail, three years’ probation and restitution fees after he and others infiltrated a nuclear submarine base as part of a nuclear disarmament action. (CNS/Kings Bay Plowshares)

To preclude the possibility of our awareness in the middle of all this, world elites have erected a separation wall of state propaganda between us and reason. This “invisible” wall blocks our common sense, hiding from us the urgency of the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty,[12] which entered into force on January 22, and the repeated warnings from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of just 100 seconds to midnight left on our Doomsday Clock,[13] and the unjust trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, who with their biblical act of nonviolence tried – for a 100^th time! – to wake our world from this insane nuclear nightmare.[14]

Three of the remaining four KBP7 defendants, including Martha Hennessy, the granddaughter of one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement Dorothy Day, received their sentences, ranging from 10 to 14 months, in November. The last defendant, Mark Colville, is scheduled to appear before the federal court in Brunswick, Georgia, for sentencing on February 19, 2021. Have you heard anything about it in the media? 

If we don’t overcome this wall of silence, wake up and unite with our long-blocked reason, there will be no hope for the Palestinians, nor for the Israelis, and certainly not for us. Our incited enmity and unchecked technologies of destruction will sooner or later blow up our planet along with us.

Our individual scaling of this wall (the actual process of waking up and becoming aware) is no simple task. We really are our breath, and the beating of our hearts, and the firing of neurons, and the toiling of our cells that make it all possible. The critical component of all this is our consciousness. The more we become aware, the less we are okay with the tendency in our modern human society to take this all for granted, abusing and defying the miraculous gift of life.

Everything within and without us is interconnected. Information that enters our consciousness creates the mental and physiological imprints, which form and shape who we are and how we behave. A famous Russian neurolinguist Tatyana Chernigovskaya says that “If your brain is going to read idiotic magazines, communicate with fools, listen to light mindless music, and watch dumb movies, then there is really nothing to complain about.”[15]

We are all reading the book of life, and what we choose from it depends first and foremost on what we have developed in our consciousness. Per Chernigovskaya, “There is always an object and the one who reads it all. “If there is an ancient papyrus in front of us, and nobody can read it, then that is not information. It is just a physical object. And what I read from it depends on my education, on my plans, and my reasons for reading it.“”[16]

How we react to and perceive ourselves and others is determined to a large degree by the quality and direction of our internal monologue. Our thoughts and our words reflect and create who we are and who we become, and they lead to actions and consequences for ourselves and those around us. Yes, the media and the powers that control them have long ago learned how to take advantage of it. However, we do have some patient “teachers” on our side in stubborn circumstances. The more we pay attention to what happens in our life, the less we are affected by the hypnotic spell of the media and the more we reclaim the sovereignty of our own mind.

One of the most important concepts in our development is WORK. Work forms a cornerstone idea in many world religions for good reason. We realize ourselves and fulfill our mission through work. A great spiritual master of the twentieth century Siva Yogaswami taught that “All work must be done with the aim of reaching God.”[17] In the understanding of Pope Francis, “Work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfillment.”[18]

According to Cyberspheronics, which the authors of the Anti-Nuclear Manifesto, including several Nobel Peace laureates, consider “a holistic Megascience…of humanity for its spheral third way in the XXI century,”[19] society consists of four spheres: People, Information, Organizations, and Things (PIOT). These four spheres of the social production/autopoiesis of PIOT constitute the noosphere created by our society’s life on Earth. These four spheres of production and the social groups employed in them form the basis for the spheral structure of humanity, which was heralded by Mahatma Gandhi.[20]

Cyberspheronics offers a theoretical and practical basis for harmonizing the life of humanity in equilibrium with our Planet and in equality and inevitable interdependence of the four spherons, or classes, of society.

The class employed in Sociosphere, the main resource and product of which are People, bears tremendous responsibility for the future of our species that is impossible to fulfill without cooperation of the other spherons.

This responsibility is expressed in the words of Chernigovskaya: “…right now a lot depends on whether we will find the strength within us, we adults…to think of how we should live in this new world and how we should bring up our dependents. Because the world will fall into their hands very soon…and upon their outlook on life in general, not on what type of a phone they have and whether they need a new one, but the earnest outlook, will depend not just what kind of a world it will be, but whether it will exist at all, and whether it will withstand the terrible onslaught that is currently taking place.”[21]

It is vitally important, therefore, that our work not cause harm. Buddhists consider the right livelihood and the right effort indispensable parts of the Noble Eightfold Path, leading to liberation in nirvana. And the Native American nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy believed that “we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”[22] As far as our time is concerned, we are not even taking existential interests of our children into account, to say nothing of the seventh generation! Thus, we allow the military-industrial complex to take control of our lives.

Weapons of mass destruction created by our labor threaten annihilation to our entire species and to life on our planet as we know it, while most of us don’t give it even a second thought. This underscores the role of the spherons of Information and Organizations in human society, the critical function of which we must grasp and put in order. Only bringing the four spheres of society in harmony and equilibrium will allow people employed in Technoecosphere, which produces Things, to neutralize nuclear weapons and finally “beat swords into plowshares.”

It is hard to disagree with Deepak Chopra that “Human evolution is the history of human choices.”[23] We have reached a stage in our historical development, at which our individual and collective choices can end the history of ourselves and our civilization. We all have responsibility in this life for ourselves and for our loved ones. We have to take care of our and their existence. The natural corollary to this responsibility is that we have to do it in harmony and balance with our environment, for it is critical to our own survival and that of our children.

“To care for humanity, we must care for nature.” In these words of the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on World Environment Day in June[24] is the simple truth that our attitude towards each other reflects and personifies our attitude towards nature. We don’t take care of nature and destroy it just as much as we don’t understand and don’t spare each other. And the ever-increasing weight of our lethal impact on our Planet inevitably darkens our collective destiny with the ever-rising stream of violence and mutual destruction. The ubiquitous destructive force of wars and conflicts is just another face of the catastrophic harm that we are inflicting upon our environment and the diversity of life on our planet.

Our individual lives in the comfort of western civilization haven’t been directly affected by this evil for some time, but just like that proverbial frog in the gradually heated water, we are starting to realize that something is not right. The question is: are we going to wake up from this stupor in time to change anything, while it’s still possible?

Even the elites have started to realize that the path we are on leads to ecological catastrophe and ultimate destruction. Although from their perspective, the problem lies in affluence, which leads to overconsumption. Referencing the conclusions of a new scientific report that “Affluence is the biggest threat to our world,” and “True sustainability will only be achieved through drastic lifestyle changes,” the World Economic Forum is calling for “a great reset of capitalism in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.”[25]

This, in turn, makes you wonder what motives are behind the coordinated demolition of the global economy under the auspices of fighting COVID-19. It is taking a significant physical and psychological toll on humanity, far exceeding considerable direct losses from the pandemic.[26]

It also makes you think about the words of one of the great Russian writers of the twentieth century Alexander Solzhenitsyn that, apart from repentance, “there is no moral escape route from the pit into which we have fallen. And every other way out is illusory, no more than a short-lived social delusion.”

…the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not even between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts across nations and parties, shifting constantly, yielding now to the pressure of light, now to the pressure of darkness. It divides the heart of every man…[27]

My friend, Professor Vladislav Krasnov, who has dedicated several decades of his life to the Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) he had founded, likes to quote the great Mahatma Gandhi’s advice: “The Satyagrahi’s goal is to convert, not to coerce, the one who disagrees.”[28]

We all have a good reason to recognize our interdependence and learn to use it for mutual benefit. We all strive for the same things in this life – health, happiness, and prosperity. Only by treating each other as equal partners, can we attain self-realization and not burden the future for ourselves and our descendants with inescapable destructive consequences of enmity with our Planet and each other.

We can see them all around us already, from catastrophic wildfires and super hurricanes to the warming, polluted oceans and melting glaciers. Our earthly home can barely withstand the never-ending and increscent human mischief. Our wars and our waste, including nuclear, have mutilated the world around us for the majority of planetary life forms. When there is more plastic in the oceans than fish in some 30 years, we may become aware of this, but I’m afraid by then it will be too late. It is time to start changing something right now.

We always have to start with ourselves. We all have a choice when it comes to using the resources available to us. Solzhenitsyn called this “self-limitation” and considered it critically important to be applied in the life of every person and the whole nation. Russian Old Believers in the nineteenth century called this “self-restriction” and wrote that “Save through self-restriction, there is no other true freedom for mankind.”[29]

And again Solzhenitsyn: “Every nation without exception, however persecuted, however cheated, however flawlessly righteous it feels itself to be today, has certainly at one time or another contributed its share of inhumanity, injustice and arrogance.” Indeed, “The nation is mystically welded together in a community of guilt, and its inescapable destiny is common repentance.”[30]

At all times, all the pathologies of humankind have come from the dominance of one part or another over the whole. In the assessment of the authors of the Anti-Nuclear Manifesto, “The source of social pathologies/diseases of humankind…have occurred at various historical stages among various, historical transient parts…of humanity: nations, classes, groups, parties, elites, states, etc.”[31]

Only in the indivisible unity of all the “equally necessary and sufficient groups of the population,” spherons, genders, and ethnicities on our Planet, having dealt with enmity and its causes, can we solve the problems of the military-industrial complex and the pathologies of our elites, eliminate nuclear weapons, rehabilitate the system of education, create a just and sustainable economy, and overcome the catastrophic ecological consequences of our activity. The Anti-Nuclear Manifesto of the “Humanity Spheral Third Way of the XXI Century…[is] the Manifesto of the Norm Replacing the Humanity Pathologies.”[32]

Science will play a leading role on this third way of humanity. Without science uniting all the institutions that advance it with the entire collective structure of society, we cannot even hope to solve the most vitally important public goods challenges, such as health security, sustainability of our way of life, and climate disruption, that we are facing in our time.

In the assessment of Andrzej Łobaczewski, “The development of science, whose final goal is a better understanding of man and the laws of social life, could, in the long run, cause public opinion to accept the essential knowledge about human nature and the development of the human personality, which will enable the harmful processes to be controlled.”[33]

Science could even now help us deal with the pathologies of those small groups of people, who are lacking the capacity for empathy and repentance, and allow us to safeguard our society from their dominance. One of the proposals: “All potential leaders (or members of a government) should be rigorously assessed by psychologists to determine their levels of empathy, narcissism or psychopathy – and hence determine their suitability for power.”[34]

At the same time, psychology, neurolinguistics, medicine, and other sciences understand even today how words and images affect our mind. And can help us grasp how different ideologies use this to their advantage, and which of their goals and beliefs are beneficial to us, as a society and as individuals, and which cause harm to us and our kind.

That would be easier to accomplish if in the U.S., for instance, we had more scientists conducting research, such as the four-year inquiry into the collapse of the World Trade Center Building 7 completed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks last year.[35] With their help, we would have better chances of comprehending the crux of world events and searching successfully for a safer path for America and for the Planet.

Furthermore, climate research initiatives, like the recently-launched by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Climate Grand Challenges,[36] coordinated among the leading research centers and government organizations, could increase our odds of survival in the impending ecological calamity.

In the end, science united with Cyberspheronics will let humanity on our third way figure out when we are being misled and for what, as well as how we should be directing ourselves and where to. And will enable us to make our own informed choices. In this way, not only will we facilitate the task of future scientists in studying our time but also ensure the possibility of their existence. Not to mention the safety of our own and of our children for the foreseeable future.

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Anna Tolstoyevskaya grew up in the Soviet Union and came to the U.S. as a student of Philology and Foreign Service in the mid-1990s. She is an analyst by trade and an Austinite at heart, having spent a third of her life in that beautiful city. She can be reached at [email protected]. 

Notes