Mind Plague 1: The 21st Century Lies Pandemic

Greed is good

These human-made phenomena combine to broadcast and support a socially divisive and eco-catastrophic narrative: the chosen world-view of state elites and the hyper-acquisitive 0.1%.

I’ve described this narrative, not entirely hyperbolically, as a mind plague: malign, viral ideas which are causing us all harm.

Ideas like these:

– We’re competitive by nature; evolution designed us that way, so that’s how we should behave

– The economy self-balances… Don’t interfere!

– Poor? It’s your fault…

– People need the fear of poverty and joblessness to goad them, otherwise they’d be lazy

– People are just another resource (‘Human Resources’) to be exploited or used

– You’re a small cog in a big machine. There’s nothing you can do to change things

– Greed is good

– Wealth and power are admirable

– Nations are more important than people

All these ideas divide us from one another, encourage atomisation and alienation, and feed the industrial machine which is blindly destroying our biosphere.

I’ve written here on Dangerous Globe about a range of features in modern culture which jeopardise human survival:

> Corporations

https://dangerousglobe.com/news/a-short-conversation-about-corporations/

> The economy

https://dangerousglobe.com/news/a-short-conversation-about-the-economy/

> Our self-destructiveness

https://dangerousglobe.com/news/a-short-conversation-about-a-perfect-storm/

On Dorset Eye I’ve also written about:

> The super-consuming, super-polluting 0.1%

https://dorseteye.com/public-enemy-no-1/

> A lackey media controlled either by the 0.1% or nation states

https://dorseteye.com/i-bought-a-newspaper-and-then-i-bought-another/

Diagnosis

But it’s easy to diagnose the problem – and I’m not alone in doing so. As Leonard Cohen observed, ‘everybody knows’ we’re the civilian casualties in an asymmetric comms war, where nation states or the billionaire owners of the media act as super-spreaders of concepts that serve them well but badly fail the rest of us. As Cohen put it, “The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor”.

So we need more than a diagnosis. We need to be able to defend ourselves. We need a vaccine against the mind plague, and a cure for the infected.

The cure

I’ve spent a long time thinking about diagnosis and cure and I believe I’ve found something.

I’m going to share it with you in a series of articles here on Dangerous Globe over the next few weeks.

I’ll talk about a ‘shield of values’ and a ‘wall of truth’. These are two sides of the same coin: a vaccine against malign, viral ideas; a cognitive firewall against our 21^st Century pandemic of lies. You could describe them as ‘weapons of resistance’ in our asymmetric comms war.

And I’m going to talk about the cure – techniques like the Socrates Bomb, Chaplin’s Stiletto and The Alternatives Ambush, which target the socially divisive and eco-destructive concepts with which we’re being overwhelmed. You could call these ‘weapons of attack’.

The concepts embodied in the mind plague need to be rendered harmless.

If we find ourselves unable to achieve this – and if we fail to achieve it soon – then human civilisation and the biosphere that sustains us may well be f***ed.

That’s not alarmism.

Take a look at where we’re heading as a species and a civilisation and you’ll see it’s common sense.

Join me

I hope you’ll find this series useful, and perhaps even essential.

I hope you’ll get the jab and join me in applying the cure.

Luke Andreski

Luke Andreski is author of Short Conversations: During the Plague (2020), Intelligent Ethics (2019) and Ethical Intelligence (2019).

You can connect with Luke on LinkedIn, https://uk.linkedin.com/in/luke-andreski-ethics, on WordPress,  https://lukeandreski.wordpress.com/, or via the EthicalRenewal co-op on Twitter https://twitter.com/EthicalRenewal.

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