In order to transform a condition that is not healthy or beneficial, one must first and foremost acknowledge that a problem exists. In psychology, there is a phenomenon Freud called repression. It means that a person who has realized or experienced an unpleasant fact they cannot cope with chooses to repress or “forget” it. The immediate benefit is that the individual does not have to consciously confront the overwhelming discomfort or anxiety the experience evokes.
The downside of this strategy is that the person in question will develop some form of neurosis due to the internal tension and energy required to keep the unpleasant experience hidden. To untangle these emotional knots, one must bring the painful and traumatic feelings into awareness and process them. Otherwise, the tension will only increase.
Historically, people in positions of power have often played on feelings of guilt and fear of suffering and death to make people act in accordance with the wishes of the elite. On a larger scale, there was—and still is—the threat of God’s wrath for those who did not or do not “behave properly.” Secondly, there is the threat from authorities of withheld compensation, imprisonment, or death, and on yet another level, pressure from parents and one’s immediate social environment, with the threat of withheld love and belonging.
Human beings are social creatures, and the fear of being excluded from the group means that most people tend to conform. We are not designed to live in isolation or alienated from others; we need a social context in which we can interact with and reflect ourselves in one another. Therefore, it usually requires a considerable amount of self-esteem and inner strength to dare to challenge the prevailing dogmas within the group, society, and the wider world.
As early as the seventeenth century, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes claimed that humans are cruel, selfish, and power-hungry, and that we need the elite’s harsh rule to keep us in check. In the eighteenth century, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are born good. Other thinkers, such as John Locke, instead believed that humans are born as a blank slate. Research, however, shows that we are born with specific character traits and that most people are not willing to step over dead bodies to get what they want—although there are obvious exceptions.
Within evolutionary psychology, researchers study behavior and psychology in humans and other primates and argue that much of our behavior is the result of genetic adaptations developed to overcome obstacles in ancestral environments. Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard University believes that the role of the environment in shaping personality is exaggerated. He argues instead that more than nine-tenths of our personality traits are due to biological inheritance from millions of years of African hunter-gatherer life, and that the rest is the result of chance and environment.
I myself tend to argue that human beings are, at their core, curious, creative, and life-affirming creatures, and that our tendency toward conflict is more closely linked to being in conflict with ourselves due to a lack of self-awareness, and to living in an environment that in many ways wears down our nervous systems. When it comes down to it, however, we are usually inclined to help one another in difficult times. Just look at what happens when a major disaster strikes—most people are willing to help in some way, at least if they are asked.
It appears that it is primarily when we are exposed to stress (often subconscious), and due to fear and a lack of control over our lives, that we tend to become cynical and aggressive. Then the reptilian brain is triggered and our most basic instincts are activated, and like a predator we bite in self-defense or attack automatically, lashing out at our surroundings in various ways.
Professor Pinker states that between three and four percent of men in the United States are psychopaths. These individuals have a genetic variation that causes them to lack the most fundamental human capacity: empathy. As a result, they are manipulative, irresponsible, selfish, deceitful, and devoid of guilt. Paradoxically, they are also quite often socially successful, which raises the question: why didn’t everyone become a psychopath?
Lasse Berg, author of Dawn Over the Kalahari – How Humanity Became Human, has studied African tribes such as the San people, who live in ways similar to the Stone Age, and suggests that the explanation may be that this trait was very rare among ancient hunter-gatherers, since groups with too high a proportion of psychopaths lost the ability to cooperate:
“Perhaps they have become more numerous in modern hierarchical societies, where this personality makes it easier to step over others on the way to the top. The capacity for kindness, selected over millions of years of egalitarian group living, may no longer have the same evolutionary advantages in the hierarchical societies we have recently invented. A psychopath, on the other hand, finds it easier than others to advance, even though it is often catastrophic for the organization.”¹
He continues:
“In the private business sector, this is now a recognized problem. One conceivable hypothesis is that psychopaths are also overrepresented at the top of other organizations and social institutions where power exists.”²
This aligns entirely with the thesis I myself advance—namely, that those who wield real power in the world and dictate the conditions for the rest of humanity are often sociopaths, which is why we continue to spend trillions on military means while knowing that 900 million people go to bed hungry every night and half of the planet’s population lives on less than two dollars a day.
In light of this, statements such as “Those in power would never kill 3,000 of their own citizens,” used to argue against the idea that the 9/11 attacks were not the result of a man in a cave whose associates, with little flight experience, flew three Boeing airplanes with perfect precision into three buildings in a country with the world’s most advanced intelligence services and air force, may strike some as rather naïve.
Today, we know that the United States received several warnings about Pearl Harbor,³ and several researchers argue that they had broken the Japanese code during the war and knew an attack was coming.⁴ More than 2,500 people were killed—sacrificed so that the U.S. government could rally public opinion for war. We also know that the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, brought both Nazi officers—such as Reinhard Gehlen—and several Nazi scientists, including SS Colonel Werner von Braun, to the United States, while the Vatican assisted other Nazis in fleeing to, among other places, South America.⁵
We also know that American and British intelligence services launched Operation Gladio in 1958—a nearly 20-year operation consisting of secret guerrilla units across Europe that, after the Cold War, were ostensibly intended to act as a defense against communist influence. The core of the plan involved various forms of terrorism to shape public opinion. With the help of far-right groups, a series of attacks were carried out in which hundreds of innocent people died.⁶
We also know that in a 2003 interview, Robert McNamara—U.S. Secretary of Defense in the 1960s—admitted that the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, which was used to justify the Vietnam War, never happened at all.⁷
Such information turns much of what we have learned upside down. For years, we have been fed—by well-meaning teachers in school, more or less enthusiastic journalists in the media, and “educated” academics in televised debates—that the conflicts we see around the world are often the result of unfortunate political circumstances and coincidences.
Rarely does one hear even a hint that we are being lied to by those in power, that war is extraordinarily profitable for big bankers and the military-industrial complex, and that—particularly in connection with terrorism—it has also been used as a pretext to reshape societies and introduce Big Brother–style laws such as the FRA law, or even overtly fascistic legislation like the Patriot Act.
Frightened by various atrocities, often uncritically reported in the press, the unconscious citizen nods and says that this is probably for the best. Gradually, we are stripped of our human rights without protest, having learned to obey authority. Instead, we repress the uncomfortable fact that we have become cogs in a soulless machine that runs counter to our nervous systems, and we console ourselves with gadgets, fast food, sweets, drugs, and other distractions in an attempt to endure life on the materialist farm of a global board game in which the elite move people around and push them off the board at will in their great-power play.
They have succeeded in convincing us that this is completely natural, and if someone steps outside the corral and voices an uncomfortable or even revolutionary thought, others are quick to correct the “idiot.” It becomes especially legitimate if the correctors can cite academic training as the basis for their “sensible” and “realistic” worldview—unlike the “weirdos” and “truth lunatics” who, in their eyes, are merely “lonely, uneducated, and pathetic clowns” trying to understand the world. To the extent that “tin-foil hats” find any community, it is supposedly only with other “crackpots” stuck in some “conspiracy soup.”
It seems obvious that we need a new paradigm in how we think, see, and relate to the world. A prerequisite for this new paradigm is that we begin to perceive—and dare to look at—what has actually happened and is happening on the world stage, and that we believe in ourselves and in humanity as such.
Lasse Berg argues that human beings are fundamentally good. His observations of the San people show that they are both empathetic and helpful. He also recounts that when anthropologist Marjorie Shostak examined the self-image of San women of all ages, she found that they saw themselves as naturally desirable and beautiful, and perceived their own personalities as good and complete. “This is probably what our natural state looks like,” Berg says.
If this is indeed our natural primordial state—as I believe it is—then perhaps it is time that we try to reclaim it.
Michael Delavante, The New Paradigm: Our Natural State
Sources:
1. Lasse Berg: Gryning över Kalahari. Hur människan blev människa.
Ordfront 2005., (sid. 324-325)
2. Lasse Berg: Gryning över Kalahari. Hur människan blev människa.
Ordfront 2005., (sid. 324-325)
3. Declassified Memo Hinted of 1941 Hawaii Attack, Blockbuster book also reveals FDR scuttled war announcement against axis powers, By Paul Bedard, usnews.com, War comes at Pearl Harbor, by Alan Landsburg Productions; Films Incorporated, https://archive.org/details/betweenthewarswarcomesatpearlharbor_201505 Se även: 3 decades of warnings of an inevitable Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor went unheeded, By Colleen Killingsworth, .fox5dc.com/news, December 5, 2019
4. The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor by John T. Flynn, October 1945, www.academia.edu/5355854/The_Final_Secret_of_Pearl_Harbor Se även: Do Freedom of Information Act Files Prove FDR Had Foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor?, By Robert B. Stinnet and Douglas Cirigano March 11, 2002,
5. The Secret Operation To Bring Nazi Scientists To America,npr.org, Red Cross and Vatican helped thousands of Nazis to escape, Dalya Alberge, theguardian.com, Wed 25 May 2011 , Samt: http://www.scribd.com/doc/19419421/Hunt-Agenda-theunitedstatesgovernmentNaziscientistsandProjectpaperclip1945to19901990
6.Danielle Glanser, ”NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe”, Routledge; 1 edition, 2005, (sid. 1-6)
7.Gulf of Tonkin, McNamara admits It didn’t happen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EROOxBEZ3mk
