13 September 2008
In Sura Ta Ha (20:128) The Qur’an speaks clearly. Allah asks:
Are they not guided
by the many generations We have destroyed before them,
among whose dwelling places they walk about?
There are Signs in that for people of sound intellect.
What, firstly, is the venous system of the present world society? The life-blood which activates every organ, limb and sinew of human life on our planet is of course, money. Not real-wealth, not commodities, not minerals and certainly not oil and gas. The money system is not specie, it is neither coin, nor bonds, nor bank-notes. It is pure number. Yet the numbers have been assigned to things. It is the connectedness of number to things that sustains that system which finally is showing itself as unsustainable.
In order that this money system continue to function, it follows from this, the relational pattern of number to thing must be in place.
Now, right away, we discover the hidden protocol on which that relational connection, that necessary relational connection, is dependent for its existence.
At the binding core of the world money system is the human creature, for it is his acceptance of the dynamic which agrees that between thing and number is a link which in turn authorises or licenses the whole global string of activities which propel the movement of things by the mutually agreed instrument of a number sequence unlocking itself from thing to person and from person to thing.
Thus the whole sequence is itself dependent on the activating person. For the monetary system of the current society to function – an accepting individual is necessary.
Now, in order to gain the acquiescence of the person in the sequence of events we have indicated, that person has to have accepted that both the specifics and their activation are real and have meaning. It must, in short, make sense – be reasonable.
The person concerned can be motivated to participate in the money process in two possible modes:
- He is convinced by verification that:
- The numbers are real, that is, have value intrinsically, that is, in themselves, prior to the money-thing propulsion.
- The thing is real, existent, present in a place.
- That the activating current that ‘assigns’ connection from number to thing is real, makes sense, and has social confirmation.
- He is compelled by the compulsion that obliges its acceptance:
- Because of his prior role in the money-thing process which entraps him into going along with the method.
- Because of an undifferentiated anxiety about both money and thing, as well as any possible linkage.
- While knowing the sequence is false, he feels helpless to dismantle it.
- He knows it is unreal and so false, and at the same time continues to practise it.
In the first case it is both known and demonstrable that the number has no intrinsic value and no existence except as abstract. It is also known that things exist in themselves. What cannot be proved is that the dynamic linking of number to thing is real in itself. It takes on existence by the evocation of it by a person who in turn must convince another that the pulsating link has an actual if unprovable reality. Therefore the whole sequence is determined by the convinced individual and by necessary extension a counterpart individual.
Nevertheless since the accepting individual cannot exist in reason, the individual, the activator of the system has to be in the second case: that means
- Compelled
- in anxiety
- nihilistic
- psychotic
Either one or all of the first three or the last, simply, or as a combination of the first three in crisis.
If man himself is the cause and the effect that energises the present disastrous world system, then man must be diagnosed, his sickness identified and his cure enacted.
In one of the most important medical schemas of our time there is a model of disease that is not reliant uniquely on specifying the viral agent itself, but rather proposes a more complex view that takes into account the social environment, the civic order and then the person as part of that total reality. In an epidemic event, the illness itself is seen not as a virus first, but as a diseased zone. The disease itself is defined as “miasma”. The polluted earth, the poisoned sea, the mineral depleted vegetables, the hormone-pumped meat, the disappearing species, the toxic air – all that is not merely the ambient setting of disease but the disease itself. Put simply, but differently from the accepted model, the sequence tuberculosis virus kills among the overcrowded poor, but penicillin cures it, is replaced by the view – industrial squalor flowers into a lung-destroying entity, which can be nursed on the mountain clinic. The viral view far from eliminating the illness has produced a now resistant super-bug, again without a cure.
The miasma of the current global disease has in it not only the imbalance of mass poverty and climactic disorder but a set of invented social mores that have smashed the model of man’s upbringing in a family nexus, abolishing marriage and casting the individual adrift without any intimate or civic ties. No family. No clan. No native land. No religion.
The miasma of the modern swamp called ‘the world community’ is made more obscure by two layers of patterning. The first is the structuralism of the whole social apparatus. Education is monitored by the State. Policing is outside the command of man, hidden by legal and government edicts. The structure of governance itself, being utterly divorced from the numbers-linked-thing system, which is the only empowered government that exists, is a kind of civic-centre theatre unable to dismantle the money-linked-thing monetarism of power.
The second is the imposed necessity of this individual man to accept that the money system a) is real and b) is actually working.
To prevent man from awakening before the system collapses, and before he can propose rescue, he finds himself re-defined as mass-man, and this is not just a communist phenomenon as in North Korea but it is essential to the new world system of democracy, and it manifests in Olympic Games, World Cup Sports Events, mass rock concerts and marathon runs.
The world miasma has seen and continues to see the extinction of specific species. In other words the genetic pattern of a species simply cannot survive the miasmic swamping which prevents that creature being precisely that creature. Only zoos are keeping alive some species just as the alpine sanatorium kept alive the dying tubercular patient. In the same way man is disappearing. Man, as understood by Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Ibsen may soon be gone.
