HOW HUMAN RIGHTS SILENCE
OUR LOVE FOR OUR FELLOW MAN
Chet Shupe
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Amy Grossberg, a former Fox news producer at the center of a legal battle over Dominion voting systems, is suing the network, alleging she was pressured, by Fox, to give misleading testimony during the deposition in the case. In a broadcast exclusive, Grossberg spoke with ABC’s Cynthia McFadden.
McFadden: “People said you were a lousy journalist, that your behavior was shameful, because, among other things, you had replied to a question that you did not believe it was your responsibility to fact check whether or not what someone was going to say on the broadcast was the truth.”
Grossberg: “I felt awful. I mean it felt terrible because I knew that I was bullied, intimidated, and coerced into saying that, just to keep my job and save the company. And the question a lot of people would have is, why would I do that?
McFadden: “Why did you do that?”
Grossberg: “I made the decision to keep my job so that I can keep paying my bills. It seemed like the safer decision for me, at the time.”
Grossberg is not alone. Our need to pay our bills largely defines the way we live. Virtually everything we do, except eat, sleep, and have fun, is based on our need to economically succeed. It is so commonplace to lie about how we really feel, in order to keep our jobs, that, most of the time, we do it without even realizing it. For instance, most people lie about how they feel in the act of going to school, or by going to work each day. They do not realize that if there were no bills to pay, neither formal education nor workplaces would exist. All these lies are based on the fear that there will come a day when we have nothing to eat, or nowhere to sleep, if we don’t lie.
None of us really wants to lie about how we feel. It devalues our existence, even in our own eyes. That’s why Grossberg felt so terrible. Yet, everyone does it, because, as dependents of monetary systems, we have little choice. Though we all know this, we still blame the individual, whenever such lies come to light. But, no matter how strong our feelings about the situation at hand, we modern humans must always choose survival, as Grossberg did. Given that choice, our will to live always wins out. In other words, when our sense of wellbeing hangs in the balance, we will do virtually anything we are told we must do. Does it make sense to blame anyone, for that? Of course not.
So, if people aren’t to blame, how do we stop the lying? The lying won’t stop, as long as it remains critical to maintaining our station in life, within the Economic-legal Matrix that presently defines our fake existence. This begs the question: Why do we accept living in fear of not being able to pay our bills? We do it, because it’s the only life we moderns have ever known. We see it as normal, just as an animal, born and raised in a cage, would perceive its life as normal. But it’s not normal to be emotionally caged by the requirement that we spend most of our time doing things we really don’t feel like doing, in order to survive. Yet we accept, and even worship, our caged existence, because we wouldn’t know how to survive, without it, just as the caged animal would feel insecure, without its cage. You see, cages have advantages. For us, they make survival simple—just follow the rules!
But that observation ignores something crucially important—the fact that humans weren’t born just to survive—or to follow rules, for that matter! We were born to participate in life’s journey, by being true to the broad spectrum of feelings gifted us, by evolution. For instance, through feelings of love, evolution rewards us with pleasure for serving life by placing the needs of others above our own in interdependent relationships. Likewise, through feelings of loneliness, life punishes us with pain when, as subjects of monetary systems, we must place our needs above those of others for the sake of our own sense of wellbeing. Indeed, the feelings that arise from our inborn wisdom so devotes us to our species’ needs that we are hardwired to take pleasure in self-sacrifice, whenever circumstances arouse the feelings that inspire such behavior.
Like all animate beings, we inherited a natural addiction to doing all the things that enable our species to flourish. That’s how evolution works! But, as subjects of monetary systems, we are not free to honor our soul-felt feelings so, we can’t get high on life! Instead, we take what pleasure we can in following rules, to survive the “Economic-legal Matrix.” This is how we muddle through the anti-reality world created by our need to pay our bills. Indeed, if we were all able to stop living in fear of economic failure, the Economic-legal Matrix that substantiates the artificial reality in which we live, would immediately collapse.
Through citizenship, within this matrix that we call civilization, we gain so-called human rights, including the right to live on earth, and to accumulate personal wealth. But we pay an enormous spiritual price for these rights. Establishing human rights requires a massive and ever-growing bundle of legally imposed laws, each of which represents another bar on our cage. Not free to get high on life, we suffer emotionally. The only way to manage the pain is to take comfort in the idealized future promised by secular or religious beliefs, or the use of drugs—legal or otherwise. For many, these don’t sufficiently quell the pain, and it eventually overpowers their will to live. This renders suicide a rational choice, as the only means to terminate the suffering.
Emotional suffering is evidence of dysfunctional cultures, far more than of dysfunctional people. It is the human spirit’s rejection of any culture that measures success in terms of material wealth. The pursuit of material wealth keeps severing the countless emotional connections with one another that are required, both, for our ability to love and be loved, and for our species’ survival. In a natural culture there is no material wealth, thus no prescribed measure for success. Success is experienced individually, however, as spiritual wealth—the degree to which we love, and are loved by, our fellow man. From this perspective, suffering is evidence of exceptional people: People whose spirits will not tolerate a culture in which there are bills to pay, thus that deprives them of the freedom to love and be loved for the unique individual that Nature created. “Blessed are those who are poor in spirit.”
Anthropologist and archaeologist Doug MacDonald shed light on mankind’s hidden history in Smithsonian magazine. He said, “We’re proud of our technological advances, but, in historical terms, our society has lasted a split-second. We lived as hunter-gatherers for three million years. We moved around in extended family groups that took care of each other. It was egalitarian, because there was no wealth. It was a healthy way for humans to live, because we were well adapted for it, by evolution.”
Because of the billions of people now on earth, we can no longer feed ourselves by hunting and gathering. But the key to our distant ancestors’ happiness and contentment was not the way they acquired food. They served our species’ needs, by trusting their lives to the wisdom of the human spirit, thereby sustaining the process that has gifted each of us with life. Genetically, we are the same as the people who once walked a wild earth. If we were free to honor our innate feelings, we would be motivated by the same sensibilities that produced the social order enjoyed by our distant ancestors.
Our problem is the falseness of our institutional lives. Having to pay our bills—something that not one of our distant ancestors ever had to do—turns all of us into liars. This renders us spiritually untrustworthy. As things turn out, modern man’s “right” to secure personal wealth is an ever-tightening spiritual trap: Unable to trust one another, we become ever-more-dependent on acquiring personal wealth, to survive, and this renders us even more untrustworthy. So, we pay the ever-increasing price—social isolation and habitat destruction.
How do we escape our spiritual trap? To step out of the trap requires awareness of why feelings exist—not effort or intent. This is because effort without awareness results in more laws, thus increased spiritual repression. This only reinforces the trap! When we hear someone like Grossman lying about how she feels, we are witnessing someone being spiritually dishonest. To free ourselves from the trap, we need to start energetically recognizing that it’s the circumstances of the individual’s life that cause the spiritual dishonesty—not his or her spirit. With practice, that awareness will become ingrained, just as it has become entrenched to blame people, now.
Eventually, we will emotionally recognize that our “God-given” right to accumulate personal wealth creates spiritual distrust. Then, we will get our spiritual lives back, by trusting our lives to “extended family groups, in which individuals take care of each other” without any recordkeeping, just as our predecessors did, for three million years.
Given time, we will return to the land—life’s only real resource—as members of social bonds. We will attain our material needs, by gardening, and other means. Only the future knows how many humans this planet can sustain. One thing is certain: By living on the land, our per capita demand on the world’s resources will be miniscule, compared to now. And we will no longer have to take comfort in beliefs or drugs, to salve the emotional pain through which evolution is punishing us for lying about how we feel, thus not taking care of life.
Taking care of life, at the very least, requires spiritual honesty, because the human spirit is the only guide we have for serving life. That honesty, alone—combined with what the natural world has to offer—creates the reality in which our predecessors lived. Though there was no material wealth, life overflowed with spiritual wealth—our love for one another and the land that sustained us.
Who knows. Once we have returned to the land, where we can again celebrate life, by being spiritually honest, we may feel like we are in Eden—notwithstanding life’s hardships, uncertainties, territorial clashes, untimely deaths, and all. You see, through interdependent relationships, humans once celebrated overcoming life’s difficulties, the ones that, via the concept of human rights, we now seek to avoid. Our problem is: Without relationships bonded in spiritual trust, we cannot take care of life. Thus, we have nothing real to celebrate, nor anyone to celebrate with.
“Humans don’t mind hardship; in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.” —Sebastian Junger in his book, Tribe—On Homecoming and Belonging
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