Atlantis Mark II?
Harold Hark
4 February 2005

For as long as I can remember, capitalism has feared the advent of a one world government. Their fear was based on the belief that individuals would be reduced to insects governed by a stupefying socialist collective whose ideals reached further than capitalism's one goal: extracting profit from every sentient being. To make sure this did not happen, capitalism has set up its own "one world government". We now live in a worldwide corporate dictatorship. And with it, the creeping implementation of just about every hope and dream of the cowardly conservative right.

The self-regarding, materialistic, and ultimately isolated individual --humanism's inglorious achievement--reigns supreme in a religiously active but spiritually empty and community-deprived world where every other individual is regarded with suspicion and is thus a potential enemy.

By accepting the corruption, hypocrisy and bald-faced lies of today's leaders as the natural way of things, the individual has ironically surrendered his or her cherished autonomy and become the insect so feared, ruled, not by a philosophy which, in its pure form sought to bring people together, but by a collective of corporate greed based on exclusion and exploitation.

The voices of outrage at the insanity of pre-emptive adventurism and the Thatcherite reduction of human beings to consuming units are still being heard, but nobody is paying attention.

George Bush has secured another four years to push his agenda of American hegemony under the banner of democracy through carnage. In Australia, beginning 1 July, John Howard will begin a virtual dictatorship of retro-racist ideology upon a willing populace. For the first time in living memory, there is no opposition, and consequently no hope of change for between three to six years. The damage done during this political nadir, and the damage already done from the ten years preceding it, will likely be felt for generations.

Against this backdrop to the death throes of that flawed but humane political form of government: democracy, I can no longer find any reason to continue contributing to this web site. Ten years of ranting and raving to no avail is enough for one person. This doesn't mean that I am resigning from the fight: I will continue to remind any and everyone I meet of the prevailing smallness of mind that is inexorably reducing the human race to a rabble of ciphers.

The decade between the inauguration of JFK and the coup that led to the removal of Australia's Whitlam government was an evolutionary burst in terms of humanity's slow progress from the primeval superstitions fostered by the church and other institutions whose interests are best served by ignorant, repressed populations. It must now be regarded as an aberration. In those ten years, Britain started the National Health Scheme, Australians began to enjoy free tertiary education, and in America, Timothy Leary encouraged a revolutionary end to repression in all of its ugly manifestations.

The conservative, reactionary right was outraged. JFK was assassinated, Whitlam thrown out of office, Thatcher cut the heart out community while paving the way for the insane world we now live in, and Leary became the victim of an orchestrated vilification that finally led to his imprisonment.

Hope for an expansive, intelligence-based blossoming of human potential nipped in the bud, the world quickly returned to the status quo of master and servant with a vengeance.

What is most frightening about this current era of philistinism is that for the first time in history, it is being conducted on a worldwide level. The Hun rules the world. Not just pockets here and there as before, but the whole planet. It appears that resistance to this corporate Armageddon and its environmental rape, its capture of governments and their willingness to follow orders by shutting down dissent and removing human rights, is futile. The corporates themselves will have to collapse from their own unrestrained folly. And for that to happen, civilisation may have to suffer a terminal or near-terminal breakdown.

To turn this around, we have to depend on the folk who support Bush and Howard to come to their senses. But they won't. They never have. They and their forebears have always supported tyranny. Just look at the massive support for Hitler. Fear of The Other combined with apathy and cowardice may yet bring humanity back to the gates of Auschwitz. Only this time the ideological death factories will have been replaced by millions of casual wage slave Auschwitzes, the unripe fruit of Calvin's insectoid work ethic, where the global inmates are conned into lifelong drudgery, their only respite a few hours of Schadenfreude at the expense of losers on the latest Orwellian humiliation show, or Hollywood's newest glorification of violence, meant solely to relieve the tension of a life not worth living.

Deep down, they know their weakness of character has been unable to resist the Gollum-like whispers of the hobgoblin* who sits on their shoulders encouraging them to surrender their humane impulses and believe the worst of everyone. In doing so, they have given up their souls and all that nourishes them is a death wish.

Bleak? You bet. But nowhere is it written that the human race is guaranteed perpetual existence. History shows that humanity's determination to remain unaware of what is in its best interests is the seed of its downfall.

Then again, maybe the above is just the verbal drool of a nincompoop who can only think in terms of political solutions. Terence McKenna thinks Chapter One, the chapter that began when we were "shit-hurling monkeys," will turn into Chapter Two on 21 December 2012, 11:18 GMT. I hope he's right, because it sounds like fun.

* Thanks to Guy Rundle for the "hobgoblin".