CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN. HOW TO KILL A HYDRA: THE DOMINO THEORY

Written by: Rick Staggenborg, MD on Oct 13, 2009 9:01 PM PDT

This chapter is devoted to Harry S Truman, who did his best to give the commies Hell when he saw what they were after, and didn’t take any crap off egotistical war lovers in the process. Let’s hope no MacArthur ever returns again to America. War is not a glorious thing, and the military must remain under civilian control.

If we had a decent public education system and an involved citizenry, every school child would be taught that Truman sent troops to Korea to stop Asian countries from falling under the spell of communism one by one, like dominos. The domino theory was part of the collective consciousness at the time, so widely accepted that there was no effective way to challenge it until after the fall of the Berlin wall. Even now, those who trumpet most loudly the inherent superiority of unregulated capitalism ignore the fact that centralized communism is doomed to rot on its own, without the trillions of dollars wasted on the arms race that Reagan and other modern Presidents used to further their political careers at the cost of a ruinous national debt.

We now know that Orwell was right when he described the world as being run by three interconnected power groups. Each sought small advantages for itself, essentially working together to maintain the status quo through perpetual warfare or the continual threat of war. The situation is a bit more complex now with the rise of OPEC, competition among eastern powers, and the destabilization of the former USSR. Still, the basic problem of the loss of sense of nationalism Orwell predicted persists among rich industrialists and financiers from erstwhile countries accustomed to regarding the world as their plaything.

America has become a machine with a malfunctioning CPU and that is pre-programmed with a logic that inevitably leads to breakdown. The fact is that no one is running the machine. All the parts are interconnected in their functions, no one in power seems to know how to run a proper status test and those who do understand the errors in the programming of our collective consciousness seem to lack the ability to repair or replace the political CPU without waiting for the whole thing to overload and shut down.

The social engineers in the progressive community each hold a piece of the solution in his or her hands, but lack the organization to attack the problem collectively. Only by working together to determine how to accomplish the changeover to a new mother board can we succeed at our task of reprogramming the nation’s consciousness without shutting down the whole system through violent revolution. Fortunately, the signs are evident every day that we are learning how to do this.

We must pray that the leaders of the Progressive movement do not lose sight of the ultimate goal in their efforts to fix each programming error in isolation. As with any highly technical fix to a complex problem, it is likely that there is a unique solution to solve it. More important than hoping or praying, we need to get off of our collective asses, leave our isolated existences and go out into the world prepared to meet it on our terms.

We need not fear reprisal from our neighbors for speaking the truth and challenging their programming in a respectful and loving way. Check your egos at the door before you enter this fight, because we are all Americans and citizens of the world, equal in the sight of God and equally deserving of his forgiveness, if not his forbearance. We will live or die together in this final war for democracy and eternal freedom from war and want.

Our hope and our threat lie in the interconnectedness of our actions. It is time to choose to work together to save ourselves from self-destruction or allow the self-interested, self-destructive and self-selected “masters” of the planet to continue to crush democracy, freedom, and our hope for survival of the species. This requires an unprecedented willingness to allow the leaders of this peaceful revolution to direct us. There is a way to reach the shining city on the Hill. I know, because I believe that I have seen it.

Our problem is complicated by the fact that as in America, no one among world leaders really directs events on a global scale. The world as we know it is the result of the collective actions of an economic elite who are all acting in their own self-interest, cooperating as allies when it is mutually beneficial and attacking viciously when it is perceived to be to momentary advantage. It is hard for sentient beings to imagine the mentality of creatures that assume that this is not only natural, but desirable.

This is the prevailing paradigm among our economic elite, and in America and other proto-fascist societies it results in bland acceptance by our politicians of the notion that nothing can realistically be done to change it. These are not evil men and women, simply people who are trapped in their own logic by the snare of self-interest. They have convinced themselves that by staying in office, they can somehow serve the people better than if they simply spoke the truth, regardless of the personal political consequences to themselves.

The solution then is to find our way through this thicket of thorny issues in which we find ourselves, our nation and our world. This is a painstaking, step by step process, if we are not to cut ourselves on razor-sharp barbs in the process. Fortunately, the briers are not so thick as to obscure our goal and the path to it. The problem is that since we are all in the thicket together, we must choose our moves carefully, lest we harm the ones beside us. This is a war, and in a war we must watch each others backs and protect their lives and welfare as if they were our own sisters and brothers.

It is a legitimate question to ask what is the first step by which we proceed together, and one that is begging for an answer. The brier patch in which we find ourselves is on fire, and our efforts to stomp out the flames around us is doomed to failure, because all the branches in the thicket are woven together and are all around us. The only way to save ourselves is to find the quickest way out of our current sociopolitical reality.

The international web of interests that collectively directs events can be likened to a hydra, the Greek serpent monster with many heads that grow back the minute they are cut off. The only way to kill a hydra is to pick which head is most vulnerable at any time, and cauterize it as soon as it is cut off. In this way, we can move a bit closer to the beating heart of the thing and destroy it completely.