Every species eventually hits a juncture where it must adapt to changing conditions or go extinct. Humanity is arriving at that point.
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
Israel has ramped up its assault on the West Bank with an incursion the likes of which has not been seen since 2002, at the same time we learn that the Biden administration has been scrambling to increase its weapons shipments to Israel.
Haaretz reports that August has been the second-busiest month for weapons shipments from the U.S. to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase, second only to October 2023.
This is the same Biden administration that Americans have been assured is working “tirelessly” and “around the clock” for a ceasefire in Gaza. They’re committing genocide and lying about it while laughing and grinning and celebrating the “joy” of the Kamala Harris campaign.
Meanwhile in the U.K., the government is going insane arresting critics of Israel’s Western-backed atrocities for speech crimes.
Prominent pro-Palestinian voices Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Barnard have all been targeted by counter-terrorism police in recent days under the British Terrorism Act on the allegation that they have been too supportive of forbidden groups in their expression of political opinion about recent events in the Middle East. They join British journalist Kit Klarenberg and former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who came under attack for speech crimes under the same law last year.
Something similar is happening in Australia, where high-profile journalist Mary Kostakidis faces charges of violating the Racial Discrimination Act for two retweets about Israel and Hezbollah which offended the Zionist Federation of Australia. This move came shortly after the Australian government appointed its first “anti-Semitism envoy,” a move many feared would lead to crackdowns on speech that is critical of Israel.
Acclaimed Journalist Charged With ‘Anti-Semitism’ https://t.co/oq5Zt0uB3V
Mary Kostakidis, for years the face of television news in Australia as anchor of the SBS nightly broadcast, has been accused of supporting ethnic cleansing of Jews for two reteweets about Israel’s war on…
— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) August 28, 2024
And in France, President Emmanuel Macron has refused to honor the results of an election, which saw the left-wing New Popular Front alliance win a plurality in July, by appointing a new prime minister. Many have accused the president of orchestrating a coup, and Macron’s actions are being widely cited as proof that the so-called centrists of Western liberalism will always side with fascists to stop any movement toward socialism. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads the largest party in France, the New Popular Front, recently vowed to recognize Palestine “as quickly as possible.”
While all this is happening, the Russians are warning of a third world war as the Western empire’s proxy war in Ukraine continues to escalate. Zelenskyites have been citing the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk as evidence that Moscow has been bluffing about all its red lines, saying the largest invasion of Russia since the second world war proves that the only real danger is NATO’s unwillingness to escalate further with more attacks deeper into Russian territory.
Sure, throw all caution to the wind and keep on ramping up brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. What’s the worst that could possibly happen?
Ukraine Says Its Biggest Problem Is Western Concern for Escalation
Ukrainian officials are pushing hard for the US and NATO to support long-range strikes inside Russia
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Ukraine #Russia #NATO https://t.co/XcjRMatPFL pic.twitter.com/p81r0srjub— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) August 28, 2024
So what’s the good news?
There is none.
There is no good news to be found in the unfolding of dystopia and Armageddon. Expecting otherwise would not be reasonable.
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be happy about, or that there’s no joy or beauty to be found in our world. Joy and beauty can be found everywhere you look. You’re just not going to be made happy by reading the real news stories about the times we are living in.
We live in an unfathomably beautiful world, and happiness is the default position of human consciousness underneath all the madness and egocentricity we’ve heaped on top of it. All it takes is a little inner work and inner clarity and you can experience as much happiness and beauty as you can stand in any moment of your waking life.
There is stunning beauty to be found on the crest of the wave of the apocalypse. The seagulls and crows fighting over the fast food garbage on the road. The rising smoke from the factories. The smell of the exhaust fumes and the frenzied din of traffic and capitalism. It is all so beautiful.
We’ve each been blessed with the gift of human life, and every human lifetime is an opportunity to experience more enjoyment than we ever would have dreamed possible if we can just learn to pierce through the illusions of ego and duality and start perceiving life as it’s actually showing up in each moment. All it takes is some sincere looking and curiosity about the true nature of mind, the true nature of self, and the true nature of perception.
And if we can open our eyes in this way, as an added bonus we can come to recognize that things aren’t hopeless for humanity after all. That while all the systems of our society are completely locked down to prevent health and change in every meaningful way right now, we all have within us a vast potentiality that we had previously never accounted for. That the human brain can actually transcend the unwholesome relationship with mental narrative which has allowed it to be propagandized and psychologically enslaved to the status quo this entire time, and begin moving with real freedom within our world.
All of humanity has the potential to awaken from its deluded propensity toward imbuing mental narrative with the power of belief. If it can happen to an individual human (and it most assuredly can), then it can happen to humanity as a collective. This potential sleeps within us all, waiting to be awakened.
Every species eventually hits an adaptation-or-extinction juncture at some point, where it must adapt to changing conditions on this planet or vanish into the fossil records. Humanity is arriving at such a juncture today. We’ll either awaken the potential which rests dormant within all of us to become a truly conscious species, or we will go the way of the dinosaur. We have the freedom to go either direction.
In the meantime, life is beautiful, and life is joyful, even on the precipice of the existential abyss. All we need to do is wake up enough to enjoy this fact.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The Logic of Power and the Human Brain
Everyone except fundies themselves finds horrific the assumption of a deity that would be so emotionally brittle as to demand total, unquestioning obedience. A deity willing to destroy the rest of life on Earth, no matter how beautiful and innocent. But for believers, this offers certainty, security, and meaning–the simple binary logic of saved or damned.
A similar logic has long operated in the intellectual west; the A not A of Aristotelian logic, the law of the excluded middle, either/or. Good person or bad person, with us or against us, one correct answer or error, corporate profit or irrelevant externality.
If we do not see the source of such thinking, we cannot oppose it effectively. Read Iain McGilchrist’s 2021 1500+ pp magnum opus //The Matter With Things (Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World)//. While both brain hemispheres process everything, how they do so is quite different.
The left side mode, dominant since the Enlightenment, wants certainty and control; it is disturbed by ambiguity. It wants to grasp things–the literal physicality of manipulation, ownership, and power over. Because it cannot sense what it lacks, it has great confidence in its own linear thinking and reasoned judgements. An apt description of what Halberstam called //The Best and the Brightest// about how the Vietnam war happened and now being repeated by the U.S. Dem party and their Ivy League “meritocracy.” Obey your betters!
In contrast the right hemisphere, aware of the left while the left is not aware of the right. The right processes by means of gestalts, flow and connection, multivalence, intuition. It communicates by means of metaphor, seeking meaning and purpose. Its ways are valued by artists and indigenous peoples. Carl Jung once visited a Comanche elder and shaman who told him: “the difference between the Red man and the White man is that we think everything is alive while you think everything is dead, including other people.” The contrast is pro-life realized.
Your referential recommendation of propagandist Dave DeCamp’s reckless screeds seems likely to justify doubts regarding your narrative forecasting of humankind being on the brink of some imagined fictional End Times in the midst of some sort of mindless joy and happiness?.
Talented writer ?
Informative discourse??.
As Usual,
EA
Screed? Invective? Harangue?
Your describing your comment.
I wasn’t aware of Dave DeCamp, but a quick look at his titles gives me more truth than MSM has given me in a year. So thank you for giving me someone else to read.
And what’s with the avatar for this version of yourself? Gravitas? Dignity? Loftiness?
Maybe a thumbnail of Gilbert Gottfried or Fran Drescher.
“Let me be clear,” the proverbs, “Every elephant carries his [her] own trunk;” &, “Where a donkey falls, is slippery ground,” are endemic, in the war zone, fka as the “land of the free and home of the brave.”
W/o a doubt, it’s understood, Caitlin Johnstone & Tim Foley have been driving the “Peace NOT War” train, forever. The take-away, imo, IS the Ship of “deplorable” $tate, herein named, The S.O.S., “Same Oligarchy SHEnanigans,” is docked, in the River of Democrats’ Seduction. Under the cover of darkness, the “S.O.S.,” dropped the anchor, JR Biden’s V.P., Comma La Harris. Head first, into the shallow waters.
…. “Numero Uno,” w/all due respect, “Madam, Vice President, “Give the People what they want, “Paz en la Tierra.”
“Que Mala, la Kamala!” ‘Let me be clear,’ N.I.M.B.Y., floats, 81 Million Democrats’ boat!!!
IMO, “when the bombs fall outta “our” American skies,” everyone’s hindsight will be 20/20. Til then, “they” “Hail the Chief. Hail the deafness & blindness, in “America.” Priority, One (1), “ALL “ Democrat hands on deck ARE on board!
….. “the “JOY” that you’re feeling is the low-spark of high-heeled” killers in high places. The “JOY” of Servitude is black, white, red w/a splash of grey, Blinken. Blinken. Blinken, “JOY” to the World!
AND, *“I don’t believe. And, I’m not consoled. I lean closer to the fire; but, I’m cold,” i.e., Under the “Homeland’s” $ecurity blanket, creeps a “Code Blue.” It’s “got” Aldous Huxley written all over it, “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
“You say ya wanna” RESOLUTION? IMO, Hear! Hear! “The Journalist & The Lawyer,” Cathy Vogan & Eddie Lloyd, respectively. Itsa 100% “Deep Dive,” into the Number One (#1) ASSAULT, executed on planet Earth’s societies’ mental health, “MORAL INJURY!!!” Consciously & Sub-Consciously. No One Is Immune.
….. “Every species eventually hits a juncture where it must adapt to changing conditions or go extinct. Humanity is arriving at that point.” Caitlin Johnstone
Summers over! Let’s, shut-it down!! Stay outta the fast waters!!! Hear, “HOW?” here @ hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/13/watch-cn-live-whistleblower-david-mcbride-followed-the-law-but-will-be-sentenced-tuesday/
*”I Don’t Believe,” Paul Simon
TY, CN!! “Keep It Lit!” Ciao
I’ve tried posting this article to Facebook twice, and twice Facebook has removed it from my feed. They claim it violates their “community standards.”
Just a detail about the situation in France which is where I live. The New Popular Front (named after the famous Popular Front of 1936 led by Léon Blum) is not a party but a coalitions of groups (Ecologists, Socialists, Communists and Unbouwed) Mélenchon is a founder and leader of the Unbowed. The New Popular Front does not have a single leader. It xon the most number of seats in the National Assembly in the recent elections by a decent margin, but still quite far from a dominant majority.
The program of the New Popular Front is excellent but is not a far left program and is not socialism (which by the way outlawed by the European Constitution). This program is hated by Macron who in many respects allied with the far right groups who have run everything under Macron’s rule.
Noam Chomsky has repeatedly warned us about it. Human kind is facing questions that have never arisen before and if they are not answered we will be finished. These questions are nuclear war threat, climate destruction and neolibral destruction of the society. As Caitlin Johnston put it, we are now at a juncture where we must adapt to changing condition or go extinct. As always, she brilliantly introduces another dimension (i.e. the true nature of human mind) to this devastating quagmire and the way out of it.
Biden is working ceaselessly for a cease fire. By sending more weapons, Israelis can kill more Palestinians and the sooner they’re all dead, the sooner the cease fire..
The strange thing is we think in this age we are invulnerable despite having created a Trojan Horse into civilization which just happens to include us too. Beyond that there is the world impacts on our ways of life coming to life on our entire planetary system.
Then there is the fear that western civilization may lose control of the whole economic and military system if we don’t initiate a preemptive first nuclear strike on all our major nuclear adversaries at once and publicize it too!
We didn’t harm ourselves enough with world wars in the 20th century we want to see what damage we can do to ourselves with WWIII.
Very truthful article both about the hell and the sadness! And now the news about the contaminated farmland from sludge. It’s not surprising. But we’ve got plenty of money for weapons…..
“We’ve each been blessed with the gift of human life”. Ask Mother Earth – we’re nothing but a damn curse.
I started reading, ONE NATION UNDER BLACKMAIL, The sordid union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffery Epstein.VOL 1 and 2, by Whitney Webb- These books are about the absolute corruption of the U.S.A
We as people need to come together and demand that University Students do comprehensive research on the history of their town suburb state and country,.
We are poisoning and destroying the earth University Students also need to do comprehensive research on the history of this problem and its solutions
Men and Women think differently. University Students also need to do comprehensive research on the history of this problem and its solutions
There are other problems, that need to be identified. University Students also need to do comprehensive research on the history of this problem and its solutions
University around the world must unite on these problems, and the public must be constantly informed as to their progress so this is a united effort
Thank You Caitlin Thank You CN
Humanity is clearly opting for extinction. All this is consistent with its nature–one of fear, loathing, and visceral hatred of the ‘other.’ Humans would rather facilitate their own demise rather than to share any bit of what they covet. How many wars must be fought to prove this point… repeatedly. These creatures seem to fancy there is such a thing as an afterlife, a place and plane of existence where they may continue the massacring happily ever after. What’s their evidence? Don’t be impertinent! Just try seeing the world through MY eyes for once, and the madness will become clear.
Fear and loathing is what we humans do best. We are animals with a little bit more intelligence and self-awareness than most other animals, but still basically animals nonetheless.
Like animals, we lash out at anything and everything we don’t like or understand that we perceive as threats, and with our extra abilities, we then seek to preemptively destroy the perceived threat before it can threaten us again.
So, with attack and destruction as our default response, well proven by our violent history, and occurring on an ever-increasing destructive scale, it is quite reasonable to expect us to eventually wipe ourselves out completely – very soon.
Caitlin, just one slight correction to your otherwise prescient article.
A large contingent of Born-Again Christians believe the immanent Armageddon is very good news indeed. To them the “unfolding dystopia” is a welcomed source of great beauty and joy….go figure.
Well, in my long life I do find some good news and it might even qualify for “beauty” if anything human can fit into the category. Once upon a time my opinion or critique of the depravity of government could only be expressed by letters to the editor, or a letter to the president, or standing on a soap box in the park to what good that would do me. But now I go to many places via the internet to find a lot of folks like myself who are fed up, revulsed, and very annoyed over idiots in charge bringing on, again, the worst atrocities we’ve seen in the history. And these people are noisy, which I figure is making the PTB very nervous. How many? I don’t know. But a hell of a lot more than there used to be.
If all the time that has passed since the earth was formed were to be represented by the span of a year.
“Lucy” woke up near the Great Rift Valley and went for water a little over 6 hours ago.
The ice began retreating a little over 2 minutes ago.
All of written human history can be represented in time by the flight of a firefly.
We dropped the first nuclear weapon half a second ago.
If you spend a long time, days, quietly sitting in the same spot in the forest. What will happen is that every living thing in that small spot on earth will eventually overcome it’s innate fear of you. Some of the creatures will come and say hi, in their way, and then carry on with life.
It is a fantastically beautiful thing to witness.
That is the Earths gift to us-all creatures-life.
To take life unnecessarily for political reasons, for the profit and self gratification of a few, is an abomination that is hard to put into words.
“proof that the so-called centrists of Western liberalism will always side with fascists to stop any movement toward socialism.”
“Ay, there’s the rub”.
(Shakespeare – Hamlet)
“So what’s the good news?”
“There is none.”
Well, with my sense of “black humour”, that gave me a good laugh Ms. Johnstone. Thankyou.
Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.
From Genocide Joe to Genocide Joy, as Daniel Mate’ has put it. It’s a testament to how flimsily disingenuous Zionism is that a piddly-ass retweet threatens it’s rhetorical stance in Western countries that host it. ‘Working tirelessly around the clock’ crap aside, a Harris presidency – like a Trump one – will ensure that nothing fundamentally changes in U.S./ Israel relations. The only tireless activity in the West is directed towards quashing free speech and not interrupting the flow of weapons to the 21st. century’s Nazi State. All ideologies are concentrated, organized mental activity that reduce human beings and the natural world to abstractions. Zionists colluded with the Nazis, helping send masses of European Jews to their deaths in exchange for a small number of their adherents being spared; so as to found the Zionist State. To replicate atrocities committed by the fascist power they just negotiated an exit from under. To Israel’s founders, like David Ben-Gurion, the Devil’s bargain was well worth it. Because the abstract goals of their ideology trumped moral concern for their own people’s fate. The great plague that has sickened and destroyed life on earth for millennia, and now threatens the very planet, is compulsive mental activity. For when a mental narrative forms our identity, eclipsing present moment awareness, we are a species capable of evil. Blinded by mental abstractions to the miracle of being and beauty that defies intellectual understanding. A reckoning is upon us as a race and there’s nowhere any longer to hide. Either human beings soon become conscious through intolerable suffering or extinction will surely be our fate.
I recently had a “conversation” with an Oz racist psychopath. He spouted the Pompeo/Zenz total lies about genocide of Uyghurs by China, yet he denied the fact regarding the genocide of Palestinians by Israel and the US now taking place. He is a Holocaust denier.
He said that China should leave Xinjiang and allow the Uyghurs to govern themselves.
I said to him that he was a despicable liar and hypocrite, that he was pointing his finger at a tiny speck of dust on someone else’s shoe but he himself was covered in shit from head to toe.
I told him that Xinjiang had historical ties to China for thousands of years, and before he demanded that China leave Xinjiang, he himself should get out of Australia to allow Aboriginals to govern themselves. He should go back to the English prison his ancestors came from.
One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
NEVER FORGET the sadistic targeted murder of 6 year old Hind Rajab by the Israeli Demonic Forces.
hxxps://www.greanvillepost.com/2024/08/23/american-crime-cowardice-epitomized-by-dems-harris-walz-nomination/
Multiply that horror by a million, because the Zionists have certainly slaughtered more than a million Palestinians since 1948, people whose only crime was that they were indigenous to a land that the settler colonial Euro AshkeNAZIs coveted.
Gaza’s death toll as of early August 2024
https://mf.b37mrtl.ru/files/2024.08/66c97f7420302712af0c32d8.mp3 [John Kiriakou]
The only way to prevent nuclear Armageddon is to eliminate the psychopaths.
“The only way to prevent nuclear Armageddon” is “when the wheels fall off”!
Indeed. In every respect.
My respect for Caitlin grows week by week. This article is brilliant in every way