MANKIND ON THE PRECIPICE
Date: Friday, February 06 @ 08:03:26 UTC Topic: Brains Missing
In the last two hundred years or so, the world has been so pre-occupied with machines and all the attendant products such that little or no time is left to discuss the fall-out of these man-made machines on human thought and human activities. The machine, advisedly used in place of technologies, has almost taken over the human mind and the human conduct.
Mankind has literally submitted its life to robots and robotic manipulations. And when matters come up which require deep thought, reflection and reassessment, the machine in our lives takes over, and rather than apply humanistic solution, we allow the machine to dominate our world-view.
Humanities, another umbrella name for all the subjects in that realm, have been relegated to the lowest rung of human ladder. Disciplines like history, philosophy, religion, ethics, the arts, logic, and language are almost extinct in most institutions of higher learning. Mankind has substituted these human moderators with programs in finance, banking, insurance, the stock market and with myriads of technologies.
Thus what we now have are Machine and Money as the new gods for the human race! And with Mongering as a new world concept of War and Adventurism, the three Ms are on the lead to human demolition and demise. They have conveniently placed mankind on the cliff.
Allied to these three mighty Ms are the jungle concept of might is right, the insatiable greed of moneyed people and the ultra inhuman wickedness and sadism inherent in war mongering. The word moderation has completely disappeared from the human dictionary, substituting itself with indecent excesses and wanton perversion.
We are going to examine how mankind had dragged itself to this despicable low ebb, and how, rather than move forward in civilized behaviour, it has taken itself back to the prehistoric barbaric stage. And this talk is not about sermonizing; it is about the stark realities of our existence, and the realities which are dangerously driving us to mortal extinction as human race.
We had the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and finally, political revolutions which tended to change how mankind governed itself. Each of these revolutions, aside from the political revolutions, brought new technologies supposedly intended to aid human labour and to ease the burden attendant there-upon. But these technologies went beyond their intended goals. More technologies were called in to aid the domination of one group of people over another, and, as greed started to show its fangs, these technologies were deployed to help one people exploit another.
Moneyed individuals took advantage of the excessive wealth at their disposal to create new political order and impose on the world a draconian political system, plutocracy, euphemistically called ‘democracy’. And with greed injected into the system, plutocracy was advanced to ‘oligarchy’. Senator Byrd of West Virginia must have had this pervasive oligarchy in mind when he cried out in exasperation in July 2000 that “America is not a democracy, it is a capitalist republic”. This view of course is not limited to the United States, it applies to all nations which practice the worst forms of plutocratic oligarchy while pretending to be democratic. The world’s political culture as it has now become obvious, is monstrously dominated by the rich and powerful, while the rest of mankind must submit to their bullying and dictat.
As a natural follow-up to political domination, the people of immense wealth also created a new social order. The world must be seen in the mirror image of the stupendously rich. They initiate and approve fashions. They decide the new moral code. They tell the world what clothes to wear, what food to eat, and what drug to take. They influence scientific thought and findings, since they finance most of the human activities. With big Money in control, and with Greed as a driving force, ‘the end justifies the means’ becomes the new moral code. The new ethics.
In order to completely dominate the world, the media was taken over. In other words, what you hear, what you see, what you think, and what you are supposed to say, and the way to react to things are all programmed, thereby making robots of the rest of mankind.
We are now reaping the fall outs of this absolute control of our technologies, of our political thought, and of our moral and ethical code. The world is dangerously inching towards a uni -culture. One culture. One government. One market. And one religion, the religion of money-worship.
This imposed monolith is already having its toll. The most significant is the confusion which has enveloped mankind. The whole world is confused. The youths of the world are confused. This mass confusion is finding escape route in drugs and gangsterism. The new opium is cultism, with its inherent contradictions. My eyes almost jumped out of their sockets when an Iranian friend of mine told me there are 2 million drug addicted youths in South West Iran with a corresponding rate of 10 suicides per day.
And Britain now spends 9 billion pounds Sterling a year to support teen age mothers!
We now know how many wars were pre-programmed and sponsored by the greed for gold, diamonds, oil, and even water. We know the role played and being played by arms manufacturers and ubiquitous international contractors in war mongering. We now know the insidious role being played by big time financiers in induced wars the world over. And we know the role being played by power drunk politicians who relish the gory sight of blood in instigating and creating wars.
If we start rolling out informed statistics about the raving depravity in the world, the financing of the manufacture and distribution of fake and dangerous drugs, or about unprovoked criminality in the hands of the real masquerades behind the cultivation of hard drugs in Columbia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, or senseless atrocities including homicides and genocides, we are not likely to finish this speech in a month.
I challenge you all to take a look, for an example, at the marriage institution, hitherto the most sacred institution in the world. Look at that life-sustaining institution with your mind’s eye and tell me the picture staring back at you!
Can we carry on like this and expect the planet earth to survive this thoughtless onslaught? Can we survive the tongue-in-the-cheek double speak and double standards? Can we survive the near total loss of individual liberties and freedoms now dominated by the Big brother watch a la George Orwell’s 1984 and Kafka’s The Trial? Can we survive the raging wickedness unleashed on fellow humans by the moneyed men and women who have cornered political power? Can we survive the terrorism of oligarchy and the maddening dictatorship of the manic sadists rampaging all over the place?
We should take a hard look at the immense financial powers in the hands of a negligible few. Take a look at the corporate board rooms and see the way the rest of mankind is being reduced to glorified labourers to satisfy the gluttonous appetite of the moneyed minorities.
Can we continue with this scandalous equation of the moneyed and the moneyless, the propertied and the property less, the overfed and the underfed? The soul of the world is being trampled upon. Mankind has lost its soul. And in its place a guaranteed waterloo.
Our only hope is in organizations such as the Rotary Club International, and world bodies genuinely dedicated to promoting peace and equity, to summon enough courage to challenge the forces of darkness set to devour mankind. Humanities must return to our class rooms in full force, and we must begin again to feed our minds with rational thoughts so that the caring world we once knew might return.
Otherwise, we may conclude by assuring ourselves that the race to the end of our journey as a race has begun. The machines we created including those we unleashed on the innocent souls at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the oligarchy we created, including the one terrorizing the entire solar system, and the Money worship we created, including the one that has made debtors of the majority, are progressively digging the graves that will sooner or later swallow us all.
In the end, the oppressor and the oppressed, the privileged and the underprivileged, and the terrorist and the terrorized, shall all find themselves in the rubble of scandalized earth. And to dust.
E-mail:adetolaadeniyi@hotmail.com
abasaheed@yahoo.ca
Chief Adetola Adeniyi is the author of POLITICS OF LANGUAGE already posted on Race&Culture category.
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