One can envision a New Age Party, a fascistic, sparkling ooze of white lighties, taking over the world. Led by sorts like Eckhart Tolle and Wayne Dyer, they lobotomize anyone whom they deem as having egos, or send them to "re-education" camps, where the victims are slotted away into lightless cubicles where, like Room 23 in "Lost," they are force-fed a continual stream of Celine Dion, images of lakes at sunset, yoga poses, Gandhi and Rumi quotes, lectures on "enactivism" by Ken Wilber, and, between electro-shocks to their gonads, a looped recording of the mindless "Questions and Reflections" found on Gaia.com. The converted will emerge, a vacuous smile on their face, their nether regions smoking, with an irrepressible urge to yammer on about "abundance" and "conscious living" and "serendipity" and antioxidants; a copy of The Secret in one hand, their nads in another, where they'll be quickly whisked to the organic farm camp to die in the fields harvesting insecticide-free produce for their "enlightened" übermasters.
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Think it's a bit over the top?
It isn't at all. Because as long as humanity insists on herding itself, regardless of the ostensible aim of those herds, the end result is always the same: oppression, repression, violence, dominance, control, dogmatism and, ultimately, oligarchy (the "best" and the "brightest" being determined, of course, by those that rule), and fascism.
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The New Radical Party. I can see it, can you?
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Of course, a decade ago the white lighties were blathering on about a phenomenon known as the "cultural creatives." They even wrote a book about it, proclaiming, in essence, that this segment of the American populace, some 50 million strong, by their estimates, was to herald in everything from world peace to twelve-hour orgasms to rainforest-free McMansions for everybody. Utopia was on the way, the authors practically screamed on every page; look at our charts and data tables and graphs and endless statistical analyses, all in four-color process, all designed to have you putting Celine Dion in the CD player and cranking it up full volume.
Problem was, it was all a big, heaping, steaming pile of horse hockey.
We all know what happened. The Worst President in the History of the Republic stole the office--twice. The Worst Congress in the History of the Republic, in each of the years following, joined him in raping and pillaging what was left of our Constitution, our air, our climate, our water, our freedoms, our paychecks. A massive, worldwide yawn of indifference to the genocides in Darfur, in Tibet, in Rwanda, in ... (you get the bloody picture). Christian and Islamic fundamentalism at all-time highs. Suicide bombings, 9/11, Iraq, Lebanon, China ... (you get the bloody picture). Peak fresh water, Peak Oil, Peak natural gas, Peak precious metals. Dick Cheney; and now, even more evilly, incredibly, a bloody, tundra-hided creationist monster, Sarah Palin.
Where were these "cultural creatives" in all this?
Answer. These "creatives" were helping these monstrosities along! They were doing so either consciously, as willing participants, or unconsciously, as nimrodic Gaia.com members, or The Secret readers, or Prius owners, or Whole Foods shoppers. They were unwilling to wake up and do the things necessary, up to and including bloody revolution, to stop them. They were too busy being Upwardly (& Organically) Mobile™, growing fatter and stupider by the millisecond, answering "Questions and Reflections" and thinking, astonishingly, that this will somehow change the world, as the Gaia.com mission proudly proclaims. It is, in the final analysis, the fallacy of "no effort, no pain" as brilliantly elucidated by Erich Fromm, who saw that the emerging white lighty movement birthed by the abject failure of the sixties was not, in the end, about social change, but crass materialism fed by delusion. Of this slothfulness he writes:
The causes for [no effort, no pain] today are not difficult to discover. The increasing need for technicians, for half-educated people who work in service industries, from clerks to minor executives, require people with a smattering of knowledge as our colleges provide it. Second, our whole social system rests upon the fictitious belief that nobody is forced to do what he does, but that he likes to do it. This replacement of overt by anonymous authority finds its expression in all areas of life: Force is camouflaged by consent; the consent is brought about by methods of mass suggestion. As a consequence, study [work, revolution, political change, world change] should be felt as pleasant, not enforced [not "egoic," as Eckhart Tolle puts it], and all the more so in fields in which the need for serious knowledge is minimal.
Summa summarum: your endless diversions into yoga, into organic food, into Wayne Dyer pulp white-lighty literature, into putting solar panels on your suburban McMansion, into recyclable shower curtains, into blogging on Gaia.com, occur because you're an automaton that does not want to wake to the fact and do the honest, authentic work necessary to both save yourself and your planet. You're a fraud, doubly dishonest because you lie, not only to yourself but to everybody around you, and not just in words but by action and by dint of action.
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And so, it is not such a leap to envision these automatons, these "cultural creatives," these "new radicals" coming together to perpetuate the idiocy. They'll select a leader: Alan Cohen or Ken Wilber or Sri Mamabamashammalamma and they'll have millions of followers, and they'll do what every other herd in human history has done: continue the plundering, the pillaging, the oppression, the poisoning (both physically and spiritually) of everything around them.
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Not such a big leap of imagination at all.
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Fractal image: As Your Soul is Sucked Away by SM Montaigne
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