Soap Opera World

Few people are more deeply enslaved than those who won’t walk away.
These days the thing which angers me most is one person seeking to remove the options God granted to others. This ranges between literal physical force all the way down to the most subtle deceptions. Does the physically impotent bear any less guilt than the one simply distracted from birth? If all you’ve ever known are restrictions, then lightweight chains look like freedom. The widow who simply must have her daily dose of TV soap operas is no more guilty than the prisoner who avoided all those opportunities to work out so as to be harder to capture. Both forms of captivity were carefully planned by someone with a will to harm others for their own gain.
The world is a predatory place, and the consumption of life takes all forms. The balance of advantage swings like a pendulum. The cycle is familiar to most of us. Some shift in the natural environment brings a wealth of passive food, and the grazer population explodes. Behind them, the predators explode to exploit the grazers. At some point, the predators overpower their own food supply. Increasing competition eliminates the less able, sending them away empty handed to die. Among humans, the predators have implemented herding and controlling the grazers, but that can also be carried too far to work right.
In many ways, our world is currently near the end of that cycle. You can read chase the news sources, both mainstream and alternative, and find lots of soap opera, in all flavors. Name your poison. A current theme popular in many of these dramas is the impending crisis from excess debt. Whole countries have borrowed more than they could possibly repay. It was okay while the economy was rolling along, but there has been a contraction, a reduction in economic activity. We seem to see the system breaking down, unable to support the previous frenzy of activity. We see the very wealthy scrambling to maintain control, refusing to reduce their own frenzy of consumption. Because of the levers they can touch, which are completely out of our reach, we find them sucking up all the available wealth and leaving us nothing. So we stop producing and start scratching for survival, and a great many will simply not make it, lacking any comprehension and capability to adapt.
But when it all comes to a halt, will the plutocrats suffer any? Have they so confined the herd of grazers there is nothing left to strip from those bony carcasses?
That’s the drama, at least. The real threat is not that Greece is on the verge of defaulting, threatening to be the first domino to fall, knocking the whole thing flat in cascading waves of failure. The real threat is that we have been such suckers for those who actually run this system. If you read the news from all the various sources, it’s easy to miss the one important item: You and I are not in control of our destinies on that level. Sure, there are limits to this control, particularly for those of us who possess some superior ability to escape, either fleet of foot or smart enough to anticipate and dodge the predators’ swipe. The real problem is that we have chosen to be herded.
The reason soap operas succeed in capturing viewers is because we all need a sense of belonging. We are not solitary creatures unless something inside is broken. But substitute socializing on the TV or Internet cannot really fill that void, that sense of loneliness which is a primary effect of the Fall. Somewhere along the path out of the Garden, we forgot something which we were permitted to carry away with us. We were slapped with the curse of living by the sweat of our brows, but that didn’t mean we had to work alone. We could still reach across the gulf of isolation from others and include in our work routine the burden of keeping relationships alive. The hardest thing you’ll ever do is create community the way it was meant to be.
One of the biggest chains on all humanity right now is the false logic of specialization and division of labor. That’s fine if you are a machine, but you shouldn’t aspire to that. No one can do all things possible to humanity at large; there are limits. Each of us carries our own unique collection of them. But we need not assume without question the limits we are told by someone else. Such information serves merely to help us estimate the likely cost of something we haven’t yet tried for ourselves. It may turn out the price of pushing some limit is pretty cheap compared to the returns. The principle of high efficiency of labor utilization for greater economic production presumes too much on human wisdom. Better to hedge your bets by cross training into everything for which you can estimate some value. Never believe you are out of choices simply because what you did before is no longer possible.
Right now the plutocrats are trying to set Greece on fire. They are playing both sides of the conflict between government austerity and popular dissent. They are guiding the discussions between government figures in the Eurozone, then leaking selective details mixed with lies so the various news sources will play their role in stirring support for what appears to be two sides to a debate which ignores the real questions. The soap opera with all its plot twists keeps everyone glued to their sources. About the only thing of genuine interest here is it seems the plutocrats have decided to set their first ambushes in Europe, seeking to begin the final plan of enslavement there first. What we see there may be a clue to what’s coming here to America.
The plutocrats will continue playing us to the end. Stirring the fear of economic collapse on one side, they drop the bait of stability on the other side, which rests on the most hideous trap of all — voluntary enslavement. The most powerful chains of all are those you forge for yourself. The conditions of life may well be constrained by circumstances far outside our control, but not all of them. Who said cows can’t climb cliffs? Who said you were a cow in the first place?
Most of what we think we know about the coming tough times is surely wrong. That life on this planet is about to become much more unpleasant for a sizable chunk of humanity is pretty obvious, but it’s not some accident arising from a series of miscalculations. It’s not simply the combined foolish choices of a string of elected rulers. They were herded, too. The whole system is a pile of lies meant to teach us to be cows. Selective breeding and feed lots produce meat which makes a profit, not a life to make cows happy, nor to produce the best quality of meat. It’s a vast supply of nearly toxic flesh with only a vague resemblance to real food, but it’s predictable and almost totally under the control of the meat companies. Or so they think, until we start seeing plagues resistant to the medications they’ve been slipping in the feed. It’s not just a lie for us as consumers, but a lie for the meat company executives, because the whole thing is on the verge of breaking down. Even more important is how it symbolizes the much bigger lies. We have been herded into nasty feed lots and fed a most unnatural diet of falsehoods, and the plutocrats have decided it’s time to eliminate all the free range and feral cattle so there is no competition for their system of production. The problem is, most of the alternative styles of life offered to our awareness still come with horns and mooing. The plutocrats’ hired cowhands are saddling up right now, and will be roping and herding, but you don’t have to make it easy — at least take the horns off.
What we often consider our best protection and proud distinction is nothing more than an excuse to be prickly and weaken your chance at friendships. When you start looking for excuses to overlook someone else’s foibles, when you start remembering you have your own foibles to overlook, and you don’t try to conform every link to other humans according to some convenient formula, you’ll find yourself with fewer friends, but real ones. Keep your friendships in the moment, because you know better than to want control over the supply of friendship. Only what’s freely given is worth having. There’s plenty of real soap operas in simple free human society on this fallen plane. You don’t need to experience it vicariously through someone else’s fake dramas.