Informant38

"I can't believe what I'm reading - every page grabs my attention. Every article is relevant. You've done a tremendous job in making accessible some of the most censored stories in the British media. I want to congratulate you from the bottom of my heart on the content, style, design and relevancy." Anita Roddick

The Ecologist (UK) online

Kirkpatrick Sale in The Ecologist:
But I would add this: if there is any hope here, if we can convince enough people of the true nature of our economic system and the reality of the threats it poses to the world it will be because of our asking all the relevant questions. Not just the obvious ones: `Where does it hurt? Who did it? How long has this been going on?' But the harder questions, too: `Why is this happening? What will it take to stop it? And how can we fashion the elements of an ecological society - one that is modest, attentive to nature's laws and embraces the values of the living earth - as if that society were the only one available, and prevent a return to previous wrongs?'
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{Many things are happening at once. On the one hand, hedonism and greed-affect autism, the super-predators of global finance, and on the other, religious delusionals, whose dreams and fantasies have no resolution this side of the mortal divide.
And down the middle, dancing in a thin ragged line, people who want it to be alright, who want the ugliest bug in Madagascar, the handsomest aboriginal in Patagonia, the penguin, the Inuit, the Giant Tortoise and the suburban ten year-old, to all live, to be healthy and part of something bigger that's not only viable, but vital.
So those two voices that seem so separate maybe are the same forked tongue. The greedy and the Godly. And both came from the same place. A little creature talking to God, to nature, to what is, outside the self, above the little course of existence. And the dialog was something like,
'Ok you have to go now.'
'No! I won't!'
'But you have to, that's the way this works, look around.'
'No!'
'Well it's not really that you have to go so much as you have to change beyond what you are, what you seem to be, to what you really are, what you were all along.'
'No! I'm going to stay just like this!'
'Ok, but you can only defer it, it won't go away. And the change will just get bigger and harder the longer you wait.'
'I don't care.'
And there we started this long progressive chain of compensations for each step away from the natural order. Each advantage creating its shadow of necessity.
Two fundamental assumptions became more and more necessary for this to continue. For the greed/hedonists, it was that there's nothing higher, nothing but the flux of inanimate matter, a cold sea of things. So you can mess with it anyway you want, it's only about who gets away with whatever they do.
For the God-says crew it was that there is something higher, but not here, this earth doesn't matter, only somewhere else does. See how both views end up at the same place?
It doesn't matter what you do to things here.
That's the goal, to get permission for that. That was the source of the original conflict.
My personal belief is that all this is alive. Everything, in ways our minds can't fathom. That the harmonic rules are there to be discovered, listened to, opened up to. That there is no conflict with spiritual truth, not really. That selfishness was the problem all along, that organized religion is infested with the same grasping selfishness as the economy, that every social institution is primarily a hierarchy of greed.
One of the traps along the way is that selflessness as an antidote to selfishness can leave you without a self. The old bogus argument of 'Well if you think cars are so bad, don't drive one!'
Right. After the whole place has been taken over by motorheads.
I was born on the shoulder of the road. It's part of who I am.
We are human beings. We have to be.
That means occupying a place in the world the size of our selves. Selfishness. And then submitting that self to something higher. Selflessness. Which is why the 'family values' sloganeering is so effective. Most of us can see the truth in that. Sacrifice for the greater good. But that's been going on long enough they got in front of it. You sacrifice for the family, they take the family. Your selfless acts augment their greed. Somewhere in that deceptive bargaining there's an intentional blindness.
It starts in the heart.}