In a hundred odd years a lot can happen. Yet again much seems never to change. Even across millennia there can be signs of little or no change. We all love to feel we become more civilised, growing exponentially as the years tick by. Yet if we were a tad more forensic we notice how stuck in the old ways we have allowed ourselves to be.

The only thing changing greatly is our illusions of personal development and by extension collective development.

Today we focus in on our ability to insult each other, find difference and use that as an insult tool, division methodology and cleave to prove ourselves better/worse or just superior. We massage our collective ego with a sense of civilised conduct in so many areas, while allowing our base reactions and instincts to run rampant over our public and private lives.

Learning from history was and always has been a practice of utter and complete solipsism. Religious indoctrination and control in the past laid out the ways and means people must conduct themselves to be seen as righteous members of the tribe. Deviation from that edict was considered barbarous, primitive and ignorant, not to say disobedient. Today adherence to political correctness, the absolutism of group think/theology, no matter how small a minority put forward, becomes a marker to the degree tolerance, emotional correctness and societal adherence are measured.

Shunning, shaming and ostracisation of any group, majority or minority has mostly, save perhaps for small indigenous groups been the manipulative tool of those in power. Presently those in power and those controlling those in power use every self created, well used practice to shame, debase, ostracise and ruin any carrying an ioto of desire to create an equitable society.

The measure of expanse of any practice has always been conditional to the reach of the message, order or edict. Today with global reach in nano seconds this measure has become all encompassing. Its effectiveness also has increased its efficacy. Yet by these markers alone it does not define an evolved nor more developed mindset, let alone consciousness. It merely increases the power of the message, manipulation.

Fascinatingly, within indigenous cultures the act of shaming was used positively and effectively to aid an individual’s growth and better intergration into the tribe, not of totally ostracising him or her. Many practices in these cultures were and still are way ahead of what we love to preen our belief in imagining ourselves to be a civilised lot. Also worth noting is how easily we have marked these societies as being savage.

The madness, the mind controlling, manipulative ways in which we enforce in our so called Western civilised societies the ‘rights’ of all sorts of minority groups, of life style choices must seem most barbaric, inhuman and downright primitive to those whose respect for culture, the collective group with its differences has always been the bedrock of the group.

A most telling way in which these ageless cultures have been treated by the so called ‘modern man’ has been the brutal, genocidal and total desire to eradicate such examples of humanity from the face of the earth. Today holds no lessening of such practices. It is merely conducted with deadly efficiency and expedition. Any ideas of learning from these sectors is wiped away along with their souls.

We are witness today, as the practice of minority superiority gains more and more traction, to a concomitant rise in totalitarian, repressive regime. While the distraction of showering political correctness on each and every niche of divisive sub sectioning, the plan of lock down on civil liberties, individual expression and differentiation from the laid down line is tightened. Fascism, oligarchy, tyrannical rule and psychopathic power is covered in schmaltzy, sweet looking benevolence and care for the masses while all the time extinguishing them.

The stocks of olden days have been replaced by the social media shaming and naming. This process of seeming irreproachable ‘fruit and veg’ throwing or worse excremental insults is allowed to run riot over viral and cyber channels. The very organs supplying the vehicle are themselves total servants of their master controllers. Bait and switch, carrot and stick all confusingly wrapped in collective ease of communication and information availability.

Intelligent and tolerant discussion, sharing different viewpoints with civility becomes a dinosaur across communication media. Attention span having been driven to its nadir point of 5 seconds or less has aided mindless chatter and ostracised much of the written word beyond the length of a title or subtitle.

Hooking the well moulded belief structure to accept vacuous virtue signalling, incanted incoherent propaganda and even more mindless incongruous, sensible sounding paff is the daily diet spun, tweeted and woven into a collective stunned and dumbed through distraction, mind controlling, insatiably fed on disaster, fear and the next celebrity scandal.

One hundred years ago the Western world (considered to be the civilised world) was entering a decade of decadence, distraction, sexual liberation leading to yet another bloody rampage of humans slaughtering humans, under the auspices of a small elite psychopathic few who never considered life for the many an option.

Today technology has mercifully brought us to a place where that outcome will entail a far swifter result with the concommitent baggage of committing the whole of humanity to dust. Not so mercifully yet with no real surprises allowing perversion, degradation and the basest of human activities free rein is once again their drug of choice for the masses, led from the top.

When asked: What do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi responded: I think it would be a good idea.

History repeats itself over and over and over. Lessons must be learned and other vacuous imprecations are mere catch phrases those powerful and self righteous use to gloss over truth, obfuscation and sheer bloody ignorance.

Division of people on every level is the guiding rule. Maintaining in-fighting through emotional and mental manipulation is managed at even greater and more persistent levels as the utter lack of a true education of the self is fostered.

One day perhaps when small pockets of humanity remain, most probably from the indigenous sectors, the slow process of reintegration into the balanced co-existence of all things will begin again as it has done so for eons beyond our own pathetic assumptions of life on earth.

Then perhaps peace on earth will reappear in a pristine and beautiful form it always has maintained within itself. I’ll be long gone but watching progress all the same from the viewpoint of profound love for every effort taken.

 

Jonathan L. Trapman

Author and photographer writing since aged 9 and  photographer since aged 16. Beginning his professional career as a photojournalist, working for some of the top titles in Fleet Street among them the London Times, Daily Express and a very short and boring stint with the Sun newspaper., he became exposed to the amount of propaganda and half truths demanded from photo/journalists in the ‘70s and 80s. Deciding his soul was worth more than shekels earned from the news rooms of corporate cronyism, he went on to  become one of the industry’s foremost photographers. He enjoyed getting to know the world, its peoples and a far wider vision of life on earth on others’ behalf and at others’ expense. He has appeared on TV and radio including the BBC, France Inter and online radio. Invited to speak at creative and literary conferences across the globe, in early 2012, in partnership with his wife, having accomplished several translations of foreign writers they made the first ever English translation, in over 900 years, of 11th century Sufi founder and mystic saint Hoja Ahmed Yassawi’s Diwani Hikmet (Divine Wisdom) poetry and sacred verse. Currently he is working on a 7 volume opus The Freedom Cycle, Dreams and Realities being the first.