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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXV–Rackets: Keeping the Curtains on Reality Drawn


Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXV

Monte Alban, Mexcio (1988). Photo by author.

Today’s Contemplation is my comment on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest article that looks at the financial nature of our modern world.


Rackets: Keeping the Curtains on Reality Drawn

Excellent summation of our predicament and how reality is being ‘hidden’ by the story-telling nature of our species — especially the stories being disseminated by those benefitting most from our current practices and trajectory.

I’ve come to believe almost everything today is a racket of one form or another. And by racket, I defer to what U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler stated about this phenomenon with respect to war: “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

And this is where humanity appears to stand at the moment in our history on this planet: rackets are everywhere.

We are surrounded by rackets meant to keep the wealth-extraction/-generation schemes going and remaining in place in one form or another for at least another quarter or election cycle. And the stories associated with them are not only meant to keep the masses ignorant of the fraudulent nature of our practices and institutions, but to get the masses to support and cheerlead them on while ostracising and shouting down the voices that dare challenge or expose them.

And as our descent down the Seneca Cliff speeds up (due, of course, to the limits you discuss), the rackets are expanding in number and size in order to not only siphon more and more wealth from the masses towards the few at the top of our wealth and power structures, but to compensate for the expanding nature of our decline as the surplus energy needed to pursue growth quickly fades.

A perfect positive feedback loop expediting our descent and ensuring the inevitable ‘collapse’ is all the more spectacular and all-consuming in nature.

But, hey, let’s hear another feel-good story about our human ingenuity and technological prowess ‘solving’ all this and humanity living happily-ever-after, holding hands with each other and Nature…that tale is all lot more fun to listen to and believe in. Even if it is only a fairy tale told to make us feel safe and comfortable as the approaching storm grows in size and intensity.

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