In the days before…
Sylvia Shawcross
Photo by James Wheeler on Unsplash
So we’re having a Dogwood Spring some would say here in this part of the world. Early in the morning the ground frosts the edges of leaves and the bright taste of the cool air catches at memories of times passed.
Around us, despite our human scampering and musing, nature still does what it does so far, although some say it won’t always. The point would be right now, just for the moment, it does what it does.
We linger in its benevolence and its grace. It watches us with our madness of wars and politics and busy-ness. It wants us to full-fall into its fields and feel the growing beneath and around us reaching to summer and the soft winds it brings. It does not want us sad or mad or hurting… it is as an old person asking for our time. A little time. Just a little time away from the distractions that crease trails in our foreheads. Away from the technology that squeezes the lifeblood out of us. It wants to laugh with us again. It wants to tell us its stories. Stories that stretch so far back we can’t imagine. For we are just children on an old land bartering our lives for another day.
Some of us are older children than others. Our memories are longer. We remember what is no longer. And it is hard to explain this now when the frames of reference have been cracked and broken. When the span of memory is shortening. So much so that even we are forgetting. But we mustn’t forget. We must remember so that the future can catch the past and reawaken what once was. In the days before the psychopaths.
In the days before the psychopaths arrived we had the charity of hope and the grace of compassion and the gift of humour and a future we might have understood. We strived in the span of history for the good, to rectify, to reconcile, to compensate for the bad. Justice. Love. Truth. Peace. Tolerance. Charity. Even as crazy as the world seems right now perhaps those ideals before the psychopaths were even more utopian than what the artificial future proffered to us is now with all its soulless technology.
But we were in fact, making headway. We protested wars instead of gendered bathrooms. We protested totalitarianism instead of embracing it. We believed in the content of character rather than the colour of skin. We never believed in bringing others down to build ourselves up. Were we smarter or were we simply naive?
When the psychopaths arrived en masse (because of course there have always been psychopaths)—oh maybe they are sociopaths or narcissists or whatever you choose to label them, we learned somehow that Justice was in fact selective, Love was only expressed through hatred of the other, Truth was subjective, Peace warranted war and Tolerance was just a meaningless word. We learned that ends justified means no matter what the cost to the spirit of humans. And in the time of psychopaths we have learned more clearly than anything that money matters more than people. They’ve shown us this.
In such a short time we learned these things. Swift like a sudden storm playing out its dark destruction and leaving us in its wake confused and unsettled. Unsettled because we remembered a different way but it was drifting now away from us.
It is our job to remember.
It is our job if nothing else to remember that our instincts to betterment was the best of human striving. In the days before the psychopaths.
Syl Shawcross lives in Canada. You can read more of her work through her substack.
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I’m disappointed there aren’t more comments for this beautiful essay. But that’s inevitable when something poetic is followed in rapid succession by an essay on viruses (but I won’t question people’s priorities).
God knows viruses are important – but are they really more important than poetry? Especially if they don’t even exist. What does that say about our culture?
That we place non-existence above existence? And we think we’re so enlightened.
This was a superb article, written with a breadth of understanding and compassion. It also has a deeply spiritual perspective. This kind of depth is not always appreciated by others as often they don’t understand it. Some may even feel threatened by it.. There was a deep sense of mourning and loss in the article too. Such elegant evocative prose!
OffG dissolving into pointless prose and self-indulgent narrative. What was the point here?
If you have to ask a question like that, it’s unlikely you’ll understand the answer.
Everything ever written is pointless and self-indulgent to someone somewhere. There is a certain mindset which is kind of what Ayn Rand used to call a “concrete bound mentality” which sees no value in anything but the most mundane things.
SOYLENT GREEN
Re “In the days before the psychopaths arrived we had the charity of hope and the grace of compassion and the gift of humour and a future we might have understood. We strived in the span of history for the good, to rectify, to reconcile, to compensate for the bad. Justice. Love. Truth. Peace. Tolerance. Charity. … what the artificial future proffered to us is now with all its soulless technology.”
That’s but a pipe dream. A comforting distortion of historical reality. Pure hypocrisy. Populace propaganda.
Fact is that the vast majority of the public throughout modern human history has always been asleep/blind/silent and compliant and conforming with the sinister exploitative decrees, order, laws, and agendas of the psychopaths in power (eg nearly all people have been eagerly using all along whatever “soulless technology” they wanted us to use). THAT is a deadly combination (the psychopaths combined with the compliant/blind/silent), a force that increasingly gets more destructive and immoral, or soulless, in the collective over time, having arrived at today’s horrific state — The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room
Lying to ourselves is self-defeating and destructive.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” — Martin Luther King Jr, 1929-1968, Civil Rights Activist
indeed.
and pushing away responsibility from ourselves. someone else did it/did it first ectr.
Fortunately for the human race, it is not usually the vast majority that brings change to the world. It begins with the individual. The descent to cynicism is an easy out. It requires little effort and is ultimately irresponsible. “It” is the lie you speak of that defeats and destroys. IMHO. It is an easy place to go to though and I understand your sentiments.
One of the things that characterized what we call “the good old days” was the difference between the richest and poorest among us. It wasn’t millions of times; it wasn’t even thousands; it was a mere hundreds of times.
Still a lot; but it did make a difference – at least in how most people viewed the world and their countries.
Poetic.
Wonderful article! The sooner we all understand and accept that we are in a war for the very survival of life on planet Earth, the better. We must bring the ever increasingly unrestrained rampage of global industrial, technological capitalism to a granding halt. It is the task that we must perform to ensure that a future of any kind for living brings on planet Earth can be preserved. https://joeanderson.substack.com/p/collection-of-musings-about-our-world
Beautiful article and writing.
“In the days before the psychopaths.”
What an image! Yes, I’m all for it: Nature takes everything back. That includes us humans. Our spirit will hopefully prevail over what’s coming.
Great article!
West really had its blossom time in the 60-70’es. You are right. We showed we were able.
Bjs.
We would do well to heed the positive lessons of the organizing of that time period. The United States was already a massively powerful military and bureaucratic power, and yet grassroots organizing was able to force concessions such as the civil rights act, creation of the EPA, and even the abolishment of the national draft which would have been previously inconceivable.
We must reconnect to the roots of the radical traditions of our ancestral forebears, who fought and died and sacrificed greatly to protect the fundamental rights of future generations.
Because they are inclined towards control and have the optimal aptitude to rise up in hierarchies, private and public, and there is so far no way to prevent public hierarchies of the state from being captured by private interests, immediately, I’m fairly certain now that functional psychopaths have always run the essential show, regarding the bigger and biggest picture things, about which the average person is not consulted and has no say, and never has. The differences now seem to be that their reach is near total with the rapid advancement of technology, and that the different, multiple factions of these people and hierarchies the world over would appear to be coming together, merging.
I’m certain that it never was what we thought it was. This group, the ownership class, just didn’t have such fine-grained control until recently, and so I think we thought the systems and institutions themselves were of much greater integrity than they really were.
True. We were more innocent back then, though. At least I know I was. I still believed in people and in life. I had hopes and dreams and the world looked beautiful to me and so full of possibility. Explaining to young adults the difference between now and then is a daunting experience. I know as I’ve been trying it on my daughter for 20 yrs. She doesn’t understand the kinds of books we loved or the music. She cannot grasp what life was like without mobile phones or internet. It’s a huge chasm. I do know some young adults who get it. They are rare.
Thanks, Cathy. Yes, innocent, and naive, and unaware. But previous generations were also – my parents, in particular and certainly – better raised. Way better. My parents’ high school education would have been on a par with a college degree now, at least far as basic thinking skills go. Maybe better. And they had a better, more refined sense of humor, irony, sarcasm, manners, etiquette, dress. All of it. Watch a movie with Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn, and it’s obvious these people were more enlightened, genteel people than are now found almost anywhere among us, much less in Hollywood.
Going further back, I saw a 19th Century grammar school test for some rural one-room schoolhouse type thing in middle America somewhere, and was unable to answer ANY of the questions, and I’m a college graduate of a well regarded northeastern US college, magna cum laude, of fairly high IQ. Not one question.
Further back still, reading a book about George Washington years ago, in it were several letters and excerpts of his writing; to his daughter, friends, associates, etc. To his peers, like Jefferson and Adams, Washington was considered a man of clear leadership quality and high morals, but of only middling intellectual capacity; he was quaint to them in his thinking, amusing almost. Well, reading his letters, he might as well have been Shakespeare. He sounded brilliant to me, his writing beautiful and eloquent. So, a super high bar at that point, lowering continually since.
So, two things at work up until the end of WWII: an ownership class without the near perfect global technological reach they now have, and a population of much better bred people who actually thought things were legitimately run, for the right reasons, and by people of fairly high integrity, and maybe, because they were indeed, much, much, sharper, astute, and savvy than most people now, the OC might not have been inclined to tip their hand so obviously as they do now, barely now concealing their actions or agenda, if they do so at all anymore. Now, though, we are bordering on Idiocracy levels of intellect and breeding, so the gloves are off, the curtain is gone, and those of us who can see things clearly are seeing what we never would have in an earlier time.
There is a huge silver lining to all this, in any case, in that this all HAD to happen, and because it has now finally become full blown, those of us that can and will agree to see it all for what it is have now discovered each other, and discussed the basis for a genuinely virtuous future human society, if we can avert the coming disaster utopia planned for us.
That’s a great development in the wake of some ugly realizations, and I don’t think we get here without those ugly realizations.
Any apologies, Cathy, for not responding sooner, but I failed to hit the little bell button that would cause me to get notified about responses to my initial comment.
Its really a cycle since our parents’ generation had to deal with some serious psychopaths at some considerable cost to themselves and the world they lived in. The result was that a whole generation grew up in a time that was apparently more enlightened than the ones that came before or followed. However, a closer look at history and current events would suggest that the psychos never really went away, they just drew their horns in while they worked on the next phase. They kept war on a low simmer in the 1950s (just a bit of Cold War for us and a handful of coups and ‘authoritarian regimes’ for the less fortunate), brought the whole thing up to a boil during the 60s, realized it was a bit premature so turned the heat down for a decade before really retrogressing in earnest. Or as my late mother said to us children — “They’ll claw it all back, just you wait and see”. And they did, with the truly sad part being that ‘they’ didn’t claw anything — we willingly handed it over, effectively trading our birthright for a handful of lottery tickets (because we all know we’re going to be winners, don’t we?).
What might disturb the pattern is that the world we know is largely based on imperialism, something that’s difficult to keep up once the natives start realizing that they’re just us. If they can avoid the trap of playing our game or imitating us then they can blaze their own trail as a global equal. Its a bit of a gamble because in order to deal with us they have to learn how to think like us, to be able to play our game while at the same time not becoming beholden to us. We in the west have evolved mechanisms to undermine this, primarily through training a future generation of leaders, people that we know we can rely on, backed up with a pretty sophisticated understanding of how to manipulate fledgling democracies to achieve the correct result. (Plus the usual tools of coercion for those societies that deviate from the ‘global community’.) It will be interesting to see how things work out.
I would disagree that war was kept at a ‘low simmer’ during the 1950s. On tje contrary, the capitalist war on life and dignity was in full swing. For example, women in the U.S. and elsewhere faced massive setbacks on their longstanding goal of achieving liberation, to thr point wjere many women were compelled by societal custom to serve as effective domestic slaves to their husbands.
Meanwhile, the Korean War resulted in the draft of hundreds of thousands of additional U.S. citizens, and resulted in tje deaths and destruction of countless millions of human beings and the natural environment on the Korean peninsula, with massive ramifications that extend to the present.
The institutionalization of the Cold War during this time also contributed to the creation of a permanent war footing / state of crisis as described in books such as 1984, so as to allow the government to continue to expand and consolidate its power in the name of ‘deterrence’.
There was also the creation and massive expansion of modern mass suburbia which function more as minimum security holding pens for laborers rarher than actual human communities.
I could go on….
I would disagree that war was kept at a ‘low simmer’ during the 1950s. On the contrary, the capitalist war on life and dignity was in full swing. For example, women in the U.S. and elsewhere faced massive setbacks on their longstanding goal of achieving liberation, to thr point where many women were compelled by societal custom to serve as effective domestic slaves to their husbands.
Meanwhile, the Korean War resulted in the draft of hundreds of thousands of additional U.S. citizens, and resulted in the deaths and destruction of countless millions of human beings and the natural environment on the Korean peninsula, with massive ramifications that extend to the present.
The institutionalization of the Cold War during this time also contributed to the creation of a permanent war footing / state of crisis as described in books such as 1984, so as to allow the government to continue to expand and consolidate its power in the name of ‘deterrence’.
There was also the creation and massive expansion of modern mass suburbia which function more as minimum security holding pens for laborers rarher than actual human communities.
I could go on…
Call Him by his name: God. Nature was designed. Anyone who thinks it’s an accident is seriously lost.
It’s not designed, nor an accident.
We just don’t know…
We might have a better idea if our ties to ancestral knowledge had not been completely severed and replaced with statist orthodoxy.
nature means from god
Yes but Syl was attributing God status to nature itself.
The beauty of what we call “chance” is that it is not accidental at all. Given a series of events, a coming together of matter, a host of forces working upon it all, and Nature was absolutely inevitable. Nothing could have kept it from happening.
In the days before the psychopaths arrived en masse, those of them who were here didn’t have direct access to us.
Then our governments sold us out. They opened the door to the psychopaths and our defensive barrier was gone. And all just so a handful can make more money than everyone else, that’s it.
The truth is it’s really all rather sad and pathetic, but the solution then should be clear …..
Governments ARE the psychopaths…
If there were days before psychos, then there will be days after psychos. And/or if ‘psychos’ have always been on a leash (cf. ‘Job’), then they can remain on that leash.
Either way, the splendor of Nature ever beckons. Especially in the (current UK) Spring sunshine. Romanticism providing its suitable antidote to those with an excessively inhumane Kantian Rationalism.
Nature – to be read in truth and clause
The world is made whole again by the antics of its little creatures, real or imagined. Even the psychopaths might enjoy watching something like this video; but their minds would be filled with wondrous visions of experiments to further control everything in existence.
Teacup Tattletail! – RxCKSTxR Comedy Voiceover – YouTube
🙂
People conflate Laws with Moral Code.
People conflate Liberty with Licence.
People conflate Safety with Surveillance.
People conflate Satan with God.
People conflate Good with Evil.
People, as in the masses, are living in a state of confusion and fear.
While we are taught that the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s was “antiwar” and for “peace and love”, those are the very people running the world today. The same people that freaked out over the Convid-1984 Scamdemic and screamed that everyone needs a shot.
William Charles Ayers, of the Weather Underground, is a great example of what that revolution was really about. A playground for MK-Ultra, MK-Naomi, Operation Mockingbird, etc.
The world is not what we think it is, and certainly isn’t what TPTB teach us.
paint the whole movement with that brush!
and if you had a you tube channel, it would be something along the lines of PJW.
you’ve become the oppsite whilst thinking your not.
Right because “Free Love”, drugs of all kinds, living like a bum, and “tolerance”, are all so virtuous.
Tell me how any of those “ideas” have lead to good things that we are experiencing today?
They were all so “antiwar”, that they couldn’t figure out that the draft for the Vietnam War was criminal when Congress never declared war. A war that lasted over a decade to boot.
The so called cultural revolution was created, curated, and instigated by TPTB, and was just the next step in the destruction of the nuclear family, the turbocharge of feminism, and the acceleration of the acceptance of amoral behavior.
Those weren’t the “good old days”.
If I am wrong, then please share with us the parts that were so unbelievably redeeming.
In the days before the Psychopaths, we found purpose…
On a positive note, now, we have common purpose.
Though most fail to see, yet . . .
👍 And to morph from a world of societies with conflicting or at least mutually indifferent purposes to one with a common purpose isn’t free.
So darn true, TCR: no free lunches, searching qualitative solutions to Quantitative problems created by Easing, then Tightening the reins on the bridle of the bit,
That bites painfully in the face of humans suffering,
Depleted Uranium Munitions.
To everybody’s detriment.
A human sickness …
Of the mind. Like,
Poisoning Ourselves.
Under O.P.C.W. ‘Permissions’
Poisoning Earth’s soil,
Meant Free Dinner,
Achieving Naff’All,
Objectively,
Balky
Common purpose is the route of all evil. Common Purpose (UK) is not an idea, its an organisation that creates our psychopathic leaders. It chooses its members at an early age and engineers them to become key high profile agents in the war against the people. https://www.cpexposed.com/
The common purpose is to live life not on our knees. Slowly the masses awaken.
Brian ‘kneel’ https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/svg/1f602.svg i hope you realise my comment was a reference to Tolstoy’s one permanent revolution >>> The Moral One <<< approaching rapidly.
A Human purpose in future endeavours, becomes an imperative, not an option.
In hedonistic times, some people actually took pleasure in human suffering, from the dissemination of depleted Uranium Munitions, for example…
In itself, there is nothing wrong in searching pleasure, & sharing purposefully,
For common minds, with moral integrity, without to kneel, without to KOWTOW.
The burden of human suffering, is of our making, by remaining silent…
Over horrific atrocities from military experimental ‘procedures’,
Upon Mankind, to control mankind: they pollute anything-anything
With everything-everything our science creates… thus, climate changeDoD’Math.
Theirs, is a different sense of Hedonism in purpose,
That borders evil , under psychological examination.
No need to H.a.a.r.p. on over Agent Orange or nay palm
You off with countless credible examples… ‘old’ World Order.
Just think A.i. in days gone by: not ‘new’ ! From 1997 onwards.
Nothing new under the Sun, basically
Do unto others, & reciprocity https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/svg/1f4d0.svg rules.
Testing times ahead,
Best begin within… BBW.
Bigminded breastfed women,
Purposefully sharing
Happy@Heartfelt Hedonism,
Tenders Relief,
From patriarchal
Psychopaths.
Greetings.
Balky
Beautifully wrought words! Thank you.
Yesterday in the train the conductor announced a small delay. You won’t believe the abuse he got from fellow passengers! The sense of entitlement is unbelievable.
Governing a country of entitled people must be a hard and unpleasant job.
No worries.
A robot will be doing his job after five years, and just try hurling abuse at a robot…
I don’t know about you, but I’ll be bringing a screwdriver with me on future train journeys…
The ‘confessions’ have begun.
From Bayer no less:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/bayer-head-admits-covid-19-vaccine-gene-therapy/5782481
Another misdirection? They are not vaccines or gene therapies, they are “military countermeasures.”
Sasha Latypova:
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/interview-with-andrija-klaric-slobodni?utm_source=cross-post&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=37889#play
good video.
Sorry, but 13 cases of SADS in US in 2023 is still not Armageddon.
Anyway the Bayer head is news, thanks.
Thirteen by THEIR count.
It’s called ‘creative’ accounting.
Old as the hills.
Movingly true and beautiful.
God bless you, Sylvia Shawcross.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
The privatizers, those who want to eradicate everything “public”… forest reserves, beaches, the very idea of a protected public sector from the greed-is-gooders because natural monopolies like healthcare, education, communication airwaves, utilities, etc., are essential to establishing a thriving society. When those become exploited for private profit, society begins to unravel, as we’ve seen over these past 40 years. That’s the fight. Keep public alive. Keep cash alive.
Everything concerning the great reset is to benefit the psychopathic greed of the big owners… reduced car use, restricted zones, mandates, etc. If we banned intellectual property patents, much of this race to own a synthetic derivative of nature and other bizarre and dangerous practices would end. We might even restore our humanity.
Since before Martin Luther[1492] the elite have been hiding secrets, technology, knowledge and inventing ways(by rule of law, misleading propaganda, and war) to destroy or silence equal rights . The PTB oppose all competition to their wealth and power. They oppose open everything, either you pay the elite to view, interact with, know about, or enjoy or you waller in the misery of a beggar. Most stock and bond market oligarch owned monopoly powered corporations would be reduced to nothing[92% of their assets are intangible], if patents and copyrights were recognized<= for what such monopolies are <= an attack on the right of all humans to enjoy the privileges and benefits of society. The war in Ukraine is to keep Russia from competing in the world. The knowledge, right, and privilege to use all knowledge, produced by all humanity everywhere, should be allowed to all, but monopoly power(copyright and patents, and privatization of public services prevent sharing.
Unless everyone benefits from progress, there is no reason for humanity to continue to develop civilization. Maybe that is why the world is fast approaching a nuclear war in Ukraine <=its time to clear the slate and to start again ?
I’m puzzled by your take on copyright. I realize you’re talking about institutional copyrights; but copyright laws (kind of) prevent exploitation of individuals.
To create something – a novel, a painting, a musical composition – in a perfect world is to willingly share it with others. But we don’t live in a perfect world; we live in a world where if the worth of a creation is perceived by others, that creation is likely to be stolen.
One might say “Does it really matter if someone else offers it to others and gets the credit for it?” Yes, it does; because those who would steal would just as callously change the very meaning of the creation.
Suppose the song embedded in the article – “The Strangest Dream” – had been stolen and changed ever so slightly to turn it from an anti-war statement to some patriotic clap-trap putting National Security above universal peace?
The patent offices should at least be regulated. Capitalism NEEDS regulations; otherwise, it’s a fire out of control that will burn down everything.
Two Decades That Boosted the US Middle Class
Sam Pizzigati considers new research on the U.S. mid-century home ownership boom in the context of today’s record levels of inequality.
The problem with monopolization is that they create a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Humans are anything but one size fits all. Frank Lloyd Wright considered tract housing an abomination. I agree. If we unleashed the abundance of creative wealth, we could have incredible 1-2-3-4 bedroom houses that are uniquely designed for the owner. You want a little wall closet for your ironing board in your favored room, okay, done! We have got to invest and trust in human ingenuity to guide us toward a TRULY sustainable future. We are all innate creators, not little king dictators.
I wish I could post a photo of a tree that overtook a sign in the reserve that I frequent. Nature, much older and wiser than these current little king despots will eventually overcome their trivial pursuits.
An example of today’s culture is a sign that read, near a pond, “NO BATHING”. Usually you see a sign that reads, “NO SWIMMING.” The elite have a major paranoia problem, totally unnecessary. Invest in our creative potential.
Healthcare shoukd not be considered to be a natural monopoly. There is a “healthcare” monopoly in the UK in the form of the NHS, making it impossible for wholistic options to thrive. It gives enormous power to The Medical Mafia.
Pure poetry Syl.
So is this (Just a tad more blunt):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3b6SGoN6dA
From, would you believe, more than fifty years ago.
I can always count on you Johnny… lol
50 years! unreal!