Sunday, January 8, 2012

Fom A Gift to A Murder (6)
The Road in Winter.
© Eso A. B., 2012

Whether it is a man or woman, who is infected by the Wealth Virus, they goe through a long period of adjustment to the illness. The adjustment is unusual, because it comes with a feeling of unreality—as if one is able to have anything one wishes or wants.

Who ever is infected by the Wealth Virus life no longer feels real and he or she feels that they never had a childhood, because mother did not breast feed them. One feels disconnected and as if hung in a tree and seeing all as if one were a bird. The virus attaches to young princesses with an especial pleasure, while old men are said to behave like emperors wutrhout clothes.

The Wealth Virus first began as a gift, a gesture meant to make friends. It is a habit not yet altogether lost, because when we go visit a friend, we may take with us a bottle of wine, or a bouquet of flowers. Long ago gift giving served also as a means of redistributing wealth, which is known as “potlatch" among American Indians in the northwest of Canada and the U.S.

For reasons not fully understood, some gift givers gave their friends more gifts than their friends were capable of returning. This created among these ‘friends’ uncertainty of how to ‘pay back’. Some on the receiving end of such ‘gifts’ may have thought that the giver wanted ‘more’ than simple reciprocity. That is when the idea may have arisen to offer the guest—if he stayed for an overnight—one’s wife or daughter for a bed mate. If such a gift resulted in the conception of a child, then, of course, there was a much greater to do than a mere ‘gift’ exchange. In the modern world, men are known to sometimes ‘disappear’ in order not to have to pay the woman visited alimony, but leave the woman deal with the child as best she can on her own.

Because such circumstances leave some people with the feeling of entrapment, they are likely to have bad feelings, which may result in violent conflict. In order to avert physical injury or even death, there came the idea of compensatory gift giving, which led to barter, trading, and accumulation of the gifts perhaps in a store house. In Latvian, a storehouse for unprocessed grains is called “rija http://www.vecpiebalga.lv/imgs/545/turisms/rija.JPG ” or, literally, “the gulp”. If a farmer’s “gulp” is struck by lightning or burns down due to maliciousness, he and his household may face starvation. Thus, a clan leader may supply the man with food in return for cutting trees for him in the winter, ploughing extra land in the spring, or have the man’s household help weeding the turnip field in the summer. This is one likely way how indentured labour came about.

Needless to say, the result of a surplus of anything is a shift in established power relations. More goods usually bring more power.

Changes in traditional power relations, especially among people who still made their homes in the forest, could not be so easily neutralized as gift exchanges or even a potlatch seems to indicate. This all too often resulted not just in bad feelings, but also in  violence, which if it resulted in death, complicated matters greatly, because it could lead to war among households and clans, and the winner in such conflicts could subjugate a heretofore independent people.

In short, the innocent desire to make friends with one’s neighbours, eventually led not only to conflicts and warfare, but warfare then created artificial societal groups. Such groups were inherently unstable and challenged the elders of the community. The problem efforts may have begun what we now call “religion”. As most of us know, “religion” does not begin with a sense of there being God, but a ritual and symbolic object that signifies community, for example, a totem http://edu.glogster.com/media/5/27/19/54/27195404.jpg
Because problem solving of societal conflicts tends to be a short-term proposition, there also came about creations of models—of “ideal”,  “artificial”, and “virtual” societies. Today, we live in a society that is “virtual” entirety. One of the solutions of “modern” leadership is to seek for a gift that suggests “infinite wealth”. Nuclear power may be sought of as such a gift. This is of course yet another “virtual” and unstable proposition. The most effective solution struck upon by the centralized  “great powers” of our times was to increase the effectiveness of violence. Needless to say, this is what created what we call a “dangerous world”.

A giant step in creating a unipolar global system (believed to be more effective than a bi-polar world) occurred when secular leaders replaced the “gift” or exchange value of gold with an abstraction called fiat currence, i.e., “money”.

Though “money” is an abstraction, the value of which depends on a highly disciplined concordat among those who use it, its value may also be imposed through a dictat—if the necessary charisma, factor of persuasion, violence—is at hand. This is why in our day a unipolar world is so appealing to the powers who have in their possession means of delivering violence or that ‘almost’ cannot be opposed, because it is also backed by police.

In effect, law and violence go hand in hand. Since the end of WW2, violence has been utilized in imposing on the people of the world an economic system known as “global capitalism”, also  “militarized capitalism”. Such a capitalism has had enormous success in the United States of America, because the land mass under the control of American government was the entire continent, unlike in Europe and South America, wheare the condenders for the land were many and whose existence was backed by long traditions.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, led by Russia, which was a holdout of the egalitarian democratic system that was a consequence of the traditions of forest dwelling people, a liberal democratic ideal has been thrust on the people with unipolar capitalism as a replacement of the older bipolar egalitarian democracy that prevailed in the selva, re sils (old Latvian), whence the words saime (household) and Saeima (legislature) , when the world was largely covered by what is not called a forest.

The rise of “the new world order”, the one in which we live today, was bloody, dramatic, and costly in the number of people sacrificed as is to be expected from a culture that rules by violence. Though liberal democracy shows every sign of being a failure, its leadership, a form of national socialism (fascism) that includes only the political leaders, does not perceive itself as a failure, and is, in fact, attempting to consolidate its hold on the world by surrounding what is left of older “socialist” powers.

The wars that are being waged from the Middle East to the Far East mark the rough border for the tectonic plate between the two systems. Unfortunately, the opposition of liberal democracy, is, too, but a half a swallow from being swallowed by liberalism. The only hope one has in the opposition is that the seeming victor cannot take that half a swallow, because it is about to puke most of the half-digested stuff it has gorged itself on and cannot stomach.

* * *

Wealth accumulation has crystallized another phenomenon that hints at the more stable nature of the older forested world. I wish to point to the phenomenon, which shows that the most active accumulators of wealth are men, while in terms of wealth and power women remain in a secondary position. This is one of the weak links in the power structure of the West. The “weakness” shows no signs that it will let go and be overcome, which is why one may predict an ultimate collapse for the societal structure created by the male gender of the human species.

The reason why there has not been a quicker cure of the Wealth Virus among women is of a genetic in nature: women tend to be less virtual than men in their physical and psychic makeup, because their childbearing function keeps them tied to the physical world. No matter how high a woman flies into the virtual skies, she is pulled back to Earth by her children.

The radical psychic tilt toward virtual reality by men is causing major disruptions in  perceptions of reality, and, at the same time, the social goals of males (virtually unlimited) tend not to extend beyond violence. Because there is not enough physical gold to go around to satisfy everymans desire for it, the Wealth Virus mutated and is the limitations were overcome (for a brief period) by the Money Vaccine. It is only among men of another age, the forest age, where wise men impose limits on ambition. The priests of the cathedrals of Money (the stock exchanges) impose no limits on how much Money anyone may possess.

A  world that puts no limits on accumulation, has brought about a mutation known as Electronic Money. Electronic money is created by a touch to the keyboard rather than by the printing machine. Why is this?

When the Wealth Virus reaches its peak potency,  it brings a social crisis (gross inequality) never witnessed before. Today, we are at a point of social evolution that has exhausted all possible solutions. As professor Rene Gerard, who has written extensively on human sacrifice, especially the scapegoating kind, says: “…the sheer escalation of the crisis, linked to progressively accumulating mimetic effects, will make the designation of such a victim automatic.” The “victim” is victim of murder.

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