Our social systems are (in
effect) having their own Near Death Experience. We're beginning to recognize our paradigm
filters, finding out how we got them, and deciding what they mean for us now. It's not
pretty. Social filters say, for instance, that it's all right for groups to
behave in ways that individuals cannot. Systems play be their own rules. If a group or
institution says "wrong is right", "that's the way it is".
Governments can decimate people if it wants
their land, minerals, resources, or wants to enslave them for labour, but when individuals
do this it's murder, theft, kidnapping or torture. Congress exempted itself for decades
from laws applying to everyone else. Schools develop policies to humiliate students,
beginning with swallowing John Locke's "tabula rasa" concept - that
students are "stupid and useless until 'teachers' fill their heads with 'facts' --
and extending to ridicule and beatings. However, if individuals regularly belittled
and beat each other, no one would call it education; quite the contrary, they would be
arrested for harassment and assault.
Churches insult people publicly and call it
redemption. People turn up to announce that if everyone elses spirituality doesn't match
theirs, everyone is "going to hell", and they'd have plenty of institutional
backing to say so. Many churches worked to destroy the American Indian way of life [
not to mention other people's way of life as well ] "in the name of savings
souls for god". People can't make friends behaving in this way -- only a lot of
enemies.
A collective "near death
experience" may be just what we need to observe, evaluate, and evolve our systems'
paradigm filters -- to apply to the systems the same yardstick that we apply to ourselves.
However, change doesn't have to involve trauma, except by choice.
From The
Paradigm Conspiracy