Tag: Escapism

Cause & Effect, Climate Change, Karma, Musings, Satire

Escapism and the Saviour Fallacy

Rather than confront inconvenient truths there is a human tendency to engage is escapism. This may be entertainment, politics or a simple refusal to look at and/or accept truths.

“If we carry on just like we are, a fairy godmother will appear. At the swish of her wand the climate crisis will disappear and we can carry on raping the planet and shitting plastic into its oceans.”

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The kind of escapism, where only the bearers of good, upbeat news, get voted into power. Is dangerous and myopic.

“There is no problem with climate change, the coronavirus is just like a cold and the Swissies have bailed us all out in CHF, there will be no more repercussions.”

But people will over promise to get into power and then blame someone else when they don’t deliver.

“It is all down to that fairy godmother, she promised she would save us all. She has gone back on her promises, she even wrote a spell on the side of a big red bus! What a cow!”

This onus on some external “saviour” to put everything right, to conquer evil and save our souls aside from being ultra-passive negates our responsibility. There is a chance that Greta Thunberg is seen as a diminutive saviour and an IKEA prepacked answer to climate change. Because she is in the news we can relax and do sweet fanny Adams.

Really?

It is always some bugger else’s job to fix stuff. We can sit here and point the finger wisely and do jack shit.

The idea that Christ came to save our souls, to redeem us from sin, is both convenient and a cop out. It is a fallacy. He came to show the way and not to let us off the hook and do the job for us. The notion of a carte blanche slate wipe is the stuff of lysergic acid induced unicorn dreams. There is no get out of jail free card. It is a justification and an escapism.

Sooner or later the scales of karma await. Place your bets if you do not believe me.

“I know there is a financial crisis. Let us borrow money we don’t have so as to keep the level of services we have become accustomed to. We can always ask Acme Monopoly Inc. to print us some more currency, it is even more environmentally friendly these days. We have computers, there is no need for killing trees to make banknotes. Printing money is eco-friendly. Are we not wonderful green warriors? Don’t worry about the interest payments we can always borrow some more money to cover them.”

Putting stuff off until Monday next week when we can then re-schedule it for the next quarter is unwise and not timely. Of course, we can then reschedule until the next financial year, if it seems convenient so to do and we can thereby avoid any nasty decisions.

“In the context of inflation let us put off HS2 until next year to save money, when due to inflation the prices will be higher…Genius at work!”

The thing is the fairy godmother does not exist. I am sorry to piss on your fire / burst your bubble…

We cannot pin our hopes on a saviour to get us out of this mess, we as a humanity have to change…and swiftly so.

Cause & Effect, Climate Change, Decision Making, Karma, Musings, paradigm, Personal Development, Vision

Stalemate, Decadence and Waste

Over the last few days there has been mention of “victory” in Ukraine and the press commentary on Putin’s alleged health remains as it was a year ago. {He is a loony with some weird neurological disorder.} The Crimea has a history of difficult conflict, with long periods of stalemate. The rhetoric of sending planes to Ukraine continues and now the talk is of ammunition levels. There is a shortage {which was inevitable} as there is of fresh vegetables in the UK. America does not realise that it is not universally popular around the globe. Certain elements of the UK press personalise the war as Putin’s war, which is perhaps a facile view. In Palestine the Israelis and the Palestinians exchange death and weapons as has been the case for a long time.

Some wounds of cleavage resist healing.

History in some ways repeats itself.

There is, for example, now a walled off ghetto in Palestine.

The West does not accept that it has become decadent, flabby and suffers from illusion. Whilst it may want the war in Ukraine to go away and hence for wheat and gas prices to drop, it does not, to my eye, show any sign of doing so. “Pasta price rockets. OMG.” The politicians may tell people what they want to hear, rattle a few sabres, reality differs, this cleavage is not going away any time soon.

I personally think that the USA has real problems with its self-assessment as “land of the free”, it being riddled with pecuniary apartheid, homelessness, medical poverty, firearms, and fentanyl. It does not occur to it to get its own house in order.

And now the poor in the UK are being encouraged by Baldrick Coffey, an erstwhile inorganic chemist, to eat turnips.

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It is easy to blame Putin so as to distract attention from domestic problems. Before Putin it was Al Qaeda, The Taliban, Hussein, various Ayatollahs, Kim Il Jong, Bashar Al-Assad, Ghaddafi, and North Africa as a whole. Seems to me the West “needs” to have someone to blame for all their woes.

In terms of geopolitics, the depopulation of Japan and South Korea, these technology powerhouses, represents an incoming long-term shift. What would we all do without Samsung, Japanese and Korean manufacturing industry? Would we have to rely on China?

Western society it seems is willing to countenance within its midst human wastage. That is human lives deemed no longer important to “society”. The notion is to set them apart and, in some ways, let them fester. There is a waste of human potential. I perhaps am an example of human wastage. In that I am surplus to requirements and whatever potential I once had has failed to materialise. I will not be alone in this. Unwilling to play the socio-economic politics of one upmanship, I am of no importance in such a context. There will be many others who think “I cannot be arsed with all this BS, I can’t be arsed with all this petty squabbling.”

No matter how you want to dress it, society is now decadent. If it spends vast sums of money on dressing up gaudily and in an overtly sexual way engaging vast displays of public Bacchanalia, it is practising escapism from the problems inherent in its midst.  End of empire, end of times, was so often characterised by increased decadence. Opulence and time on hands, can easily lead to moral decay. Comfort brings errancy and the thin end of the wedge.

The news is rife with stories of corruption, pretty much everywhere you look. Pick a country, it is probably there. The Trump model of dissing democracy has propagated.

There are a lot of problems in the world and I do not believe they will ever be solved by pointing the finger of blame and stoking the bellicose rhetoric of division and war.

Of late the French air force have been more prevalent in our skies.

The world approaches a knife edge. And people like rent-a-gob Boris may be the ones to tip us over the edge.

If China helps Russia with ammunition supply… we are one step closer to the abyss.

In my opinion, it is necessary for each person, each country, to take a long hard look at itself and realise its own part in the crisis, we as a species, are in the act of materialising. The bellicose crisis in the East of Europe will be but an entrée at the upcoming banquet of climate disaster. People are using this “war” to distract attention from the impending more global ecological crisis.

“Look we still need fossil fuels so as to kill each other. You can’t run tanks on tidal or wind power…”

Greenwashing has become red-washing, with blood.

Escapism and failure to act in a timely manner precipitates crisis, it was ever thus…