The Cassandra Syndrome by Colin Brookfield, Colin Brookfield (an ebook reader .txt) 📕

Moral malleability

Myths, should remind us about our careless habits but does anyone listen? The Greek myth of the nine-headed Hydra perfectly symbolises some of our ineptitudes. It explains that in cutting off a Hydra’s head, two more will grow in its place. In its more worldly objective sense, this allegorical inference has lived on unlearned within the nature of our kind. Unhealthy biases corrupt our social mores and this factors into major human decision making. It is by this process that we ineptly turn problems into much larger ones because we habitually strike at the subsidiary ‘head’ of problems and not the causal body.

Creating human chimeras

The allied coalitions in Afghanistan were under orders not to damage the poppy fields, which reeks of complicity! 

As far back as 1998, the size of the illegal drug trade was estimated to be between a hundred billion to one trillion annually. This ‘cancer’ has continued to grow exponentially year on year, for the reason that conventional containment methods try to resolve this problem from the wrong end. Again, in translation, this is just cutting off ‘Hydra heads’ for many more to grow. In the meantime, physical and mental disfigurements upon drug users, is so widespread and hideous that it cries out in pity for our tainted social mores to be overridden in favour of more rigorous resolutions. 

It is only from the fear of subsequent pain that all creatures learn not to harm themselves. It is the deviation from this principle by naive social tinkering, that drug addiction has proved so conspicuously destructive to our society. All users should be isolated securely from their craving (cold turkey) at an early stage until withdrawal symptoms were thoroughly dissipated and knowing that future lapses would incur repeat treatments, would serve to motivate their future drug avoidance (self responsibility). This approach would have created a discouraging environment for this illegal industry and we would not now have our disastrous drug related crime figures. 

It is the sheer size of these social problems that mostly claim our attention but in doing so, can divert our focus away from the symbiotic relationships that will inevitably feed off them. In effect, crime becomes the money machine of vested interest and it is a continuing volume of crime that validates the demand for additional resources. Thus, regulatory bodies acquire self-serving concerns in the ‘health’ of their industry and no institution is going to welcome change that would diminish their structures and influence. 

Furthermore, any system that in anyway supports the human rights of those committing crime – must itself stand guilty of complicity in those criminal pursuits and be in violation of the human rights of the victims of such crimes. 

The answer to this drug addiction problem can only follow from a different course of events taking place from which, such monstrous human creations would be swiftly brought to a decisive end. 

In this strictly theoretical exercise, following media warnings, all illegal drug seizures would then be infiltrated continuously back into the illegal markets but, having first been contaminated with undetectable, irremovable, pharmaceutical substances. The point being that it would render those illegal drugs utterly and immediately repellent to a user’s biology. More importantly, when end-users stop buying, the complete illegal supply system behind them that they had created, would collapse. 

There is already evidence of illegal drugs having been life threateningly poisoned on many occasions – it being the work of rival organisations and petty grudges, these crimes will grow as the trade does.

Facing extinction

Moreover, another psychotic human phenomenon is busily expressing itself in the world’s wild places, indulging in an epic and rapacious slaughter of the planet’s exotic creatures. From this, flows the supply of body parts, mainly to the Asian vanity markets. It also serves those specious medicinal benefits that are fancifully thought to be obtained through the ingestion of certain wild creature parts.

Elephant

In 1930, there were between five and ten million elephants in Africa, less than one percent is now left. Currently, up to 38,000 African elephants are poached every year. On 14/15th of March 2013 in Chad, more than thirty-six elephants were slaughtered for their tusks, including over thirty pregnant females. Their calves then killed or, left to starve. In Zimbabwe’s Hwange National park, ivory poachers supplied local villagers with cyanide to poison animal salt licks and drinking places. It killed eighty Elephants and continues to do so to all creatures that are having to use those resources. Twenty-three metric tons of tusks were seized in 2011 before they could reach the Asian markets – this quantity represented the slaughter of 2,500 Elephants.

Tiger

Within the last thirty years, three tiger species have become extinct. As few as 3,200 tigers are left in the wild. Between 1995/2011, over a thousand registered tigers in India were poached.

Rhino

Between 2007/2011, rhino poaching increased by several thousand percent. In 2012/13, over 600 rhinos were killed in South Africa alone. On a similar scale the lists of atrocities widen into other species – too numerous to be included here. Since 1970, 50% of world wildlife has gone extinct.

Striking at the Hydra’s heart

There are whisperings that some South African game reserves have struck back at the slaughter of their rhinos, wherein rhino horns captured from poachers, are being poisoned and then sold on into the illegal trade. The purpose being, that the end user would subsequently become seriously ill. Therefore, in this small, unregulated way, the war has already been taken to the primary evil – the buyer/end user. 

Once again, in our theoretical exercise we would see an officially sanctioned contamination process being used on all elephant tusk seizures, rhino and other wild animal skins and parts, prior to them being filtered back into the illegal trades. The contaminants used in these cases would need to be different from those used against illegal drug users, whilst still needing to be enduring and visually unapparent; the effects of the contaminants would need to be immediate upon all that come into physical contact with them. 

Of course, we are only game playing with theories. The diplomatic fallout and reprisals from countries suddenly deprived of their wealth-creating, immoral industries would be significant. The ramifications would also extend to heavy job losses within former containment and enforcement agencies. Now that would rock our sinking morality boat. And we don’t want that do we!

Homo proselytizer

I wonder how many people have read the acclaimed ‘Statement of Universal Values’ by Pastor Martin Niemöller, who, whilst living in Hitler’s Germany, highlighted the complicity repercussions that come from turning one’s eyes away from illegal or legalised social crimes being committed. Of course, his statement of values does have further meanings but in the widest possible sense. One wonders therefore how many people might recognise something of themselves within that wider meaning and, be changed for the better by it. 

First They Came

(Pastor Martin Niemöller) 

 First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

and there was no one left To speak out for me.

**********************************

The Malevolent Child within us

(Adapted from Pastor Niemöller’s ‘ Statement of Universal Values’)

They corrupted our young with illegal drugs and associated crime; I did not speak up because I do not use drugs.

They killed the last of the elephants and I did not speak up because I do not live among them.

They killed the last of the rhino and I did not speak up because they live elsewhere.

They killed the last of the tiger and I did not speak up because they were someone else’s problem.

They killed the rest of Nature’s creatures and I did not speak up, because I am not an interfering person.

They have all gone now and a most terrible loneliness has come over me

Wizards apprentices

Life is awash with matters to which we turn a blind eye. This is the small print in life, in which the Devil lies; the skipped-over traits in our psychology that we do not want to look at. In simple arithmetic terms, if we were to leave certain important symbols out of an equation because we do not like them, then the wrong answer comes up every time. It is this kind of odd reasoning that, systems of logic guidance and beliefs from one culture to another are in many ways, asymmetric to one another as views so often are, between individuals over same issues. 

We have an example of this (small print) phenomenon at work within today’s sciences of psychology and neuroscience; they have moved closer together in a marriage of mutual supra-empowerment. Moreover, their intentions echo that of theology in older times, a need to become the final judge and jury over the workings of the human mind’s spiritual aspects and manifestations. 

It is worrisome therefore in these ‘enlightened’ times that this new science-led slant on a Middle Ages control formula, should again be making its unwelcome appearance, which of course is no more than another bridling institution, seeking to bury the paranormal manifestation phenomena for the sake of their own aggrandisement and empowerment. 

Did they think we had not noticed that the United States police and others often have their crime cases solved with the help of real productive Psychics? 

In its effort to bolster their case against the paranormal, neuroscientists conducted experiments. They used electro-magnets affixed to the sculls of volunteers, who then claimed to have had ‘out-of-body’ experiences, at one with their Creator. 

These results emboldened psychology and neuroscience to state categorically, that these experiments had finally proved that all paranormal activity was quite simply, delusional activity taking place within the scull of the person experiencing it. 

Neuroscience further supported its assertions through technical jargon, stating that paranormal activity is merely the neural stimulation of the temporopariental junction and from which, originates all ethereal altered states of consciousness. Put another way, the paranormal is delusional activity due to neural stimulation of the brain’s temporal lobe. The underlying message being sent is that all such experience can now be construed (in layman-terms) as a trip down the rabbit hole with Lewis Carol’s, ‘Alice into Wonderland’. 

Reality, as I have previously pointed out, has a different statement to make. A person that has experienced extensive paranormal interactivity will in fact, possess some aspects of arcane, enhanced cerebral abilities and by that, be more than the social expression of itself – more than the sum of its particle matrix make-up. Therefore, as I boringly need to reiterate, these abilities are now rare, because the neural pathways associated with these mystical abilities, became atrophied over time within the majority, due to continuous pogroms and denigration, inflicted by all malevolent authorities. It is widely recorded that autocracy has never tolerated the abilities of others that are guided by higher individuating influences. This erasing of pristine abilities by malevolence, began mankind’s detachment from the very essence of its inner spiritual self, until eventually, the echoes and yearnings of this loss would only leave traces within the collective unconscious of the species. Nature abhors a vacuum (as previously mentioned), a space then filled with subliminal yearnings. This spiritual detachment then left mankind vulnerable and exploitable by fraudulent personalities into specious superstitions and other destructive beliefs. 

Furthermore, in the knowledge that leadership, old and new, gives itself such a free hand in decisions over rights and wrongs, there can be no surprise that it still applies pariah status to the paranormal. Orthodox positions are then further strengthened against the paranormal, though vicariously by the over-abundance of those ignorant psychic charlatans and equally ignorant psychic debunkers. These carping and quackery personalities are of course, history’s