In this warped and twisted madhouse, we are trained to believe that “success” is making a lot of money, earning large amounts of esteem and adoration, having a certain body type, living in the right neighborhood in the right kind of house full of the right kind of products to impress the right kind of people. We are trained to believe we need to rack up all kinds of accomplishments, academic achievements, promotions, impressive stories, social ascendence. We are trained to believe we must attract a certain type of partner who will be approved of by everyone whose approval we crave.
Caitlin Johnstone, today. At a political level I don’t buy the Melbourne blogger’s remedy – “write your own rules” – but I’m not sure she’s offering it as such. As a moral compass, even a spiritual one in a world run by and for the criminally insane, 1 her gospel – “find your own truth .. set your own values and priorities .. define your own idea of success .. your own idea of sanity” – speaks to me.
Maybe to you too …
Don’t Take Instruction On How To Live Your Life From A Stark Raving Mad Society
This civilization is sick. It is genocidal. It is ecocidal. It is omnicidal. We are ruled by psychopaths, while the best among us are relegated to the fringes of the fringe. We are hurtling into totalitarianism and armageddon at breakneck pace while our attention is aggressively pulled toward the vapid and the inane.
You should share none of the values and priorities of this freak show. You should not let any aspect of this dystopia inform your decisions regarding who you should be and what kind of life you should live.
In this warped and twisted madhouse, we are trained to believe that “success” looks like making a lot of money, earning large amounts of esteem and adoration, having a certain body type, living in the right kind of neighborhood in the right kind of house full of the right kind of products to impress the right kind of people. We are trained to believe we need to rack up all kinds of accomplishments, academic achievements, promotions, impressive stories, social ascendence. We are trained to believe we must attract a certain type of partner who will be approved of by everyone whose approval we crave.
If we cannot achieve these goals, we are trained to believe we should feel bad about ourselves. That we don’t deserve happiness. That we should either spend our time stressing and striving for worthiness as defined by our crazy civilization, or go and join the ocean of miserable failures who couldn’t win the capitalism game and sedate ourselves with alcohol and entertainment waiting for death to carry us into the nothingness where we belong.
This is clearly insane. It’s a stupid game with stupid prizes. The only reason anyone takes it seriously is because we were raised and taught how to live by other people who take it seriously. Our parents have been indoctrinated into the power-serving worldview that has been forcibly imposed upon the denizens of the empire, and we want to make them proud. Our friends, families and acquaintances have been likewise brainwashed, and we want to impress them.
But to do so is to take lessons on how to live from a collective disease that is pointed at misery and dysfunction. It is impossible to lead a truly fulfilling life while also trying to live the way the people around us think we should live, because the society which shaped their ideas about how we should live is insane.
If you want to really live an awake and inspired life, you’ve got to blaze your own trail. You’ve got to unlearn everything you’ve been told about what a life properly lived would look like, and write your own rules. Because the rules everyone else has been playing by were written by madmen.
Find your own truth. Set your own values and priorities. Define your own idea of success. Define your own idea of sanity. Consider the possibility that just being present for the beauty of each moment on this wonderful planet is worth more than anything the imperial insane asylum has to offer you. Consider the possibility that your very next breath, deeply relished, would be enough.
We are destroying our planet and driving every living organism toward annihilation. The status quo has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. The old ways of doing things plainly do not work. So try some new ways.
Be different. Be strange. Be a freak. Do everything the wrong way. Disappoint your parents. Fail to live up to your potential. Transgress your family doctrine. Anger whatever gods you were taught to believe in. Nothing anyone has done has worked. It is therefore necessary to travel off the beaten path.
The world won’t get better until humanity changes its ways. Humanity won’t change its ways if it keeps insisting on trying the same failed approaches over and over again. Our survival as a species depends on diverging from our patterns.
Maybe we’ll succeed in surviving, and maybe we won’t. But at the very least we can rescue ourselves from spending one more day on this amazing blue world trying to live by the rules of lunatics.
* * *
Another angle on all this, the most profound issue facing us, humanity’s profound insanity. Our alienation from our natural selves, our collective betrayal of the animal body and our dreadful fear of death, and therefore life, are intrinsic to the very humanity we need to find our way through the inevitable insanity that follows such a path. Only our terrible human separation from life can lead to an awareness of life. Without darkness we cannot know light. The other animals simply are alive, we KNOW we are alive because of our very separation from the vast river of all life. Through us the universe is evolving consciousness. Outside the dimensions of space and time, in the energy fields of existence, this consciousness plays a vital role in the very creation and evolution of life itself. In the heart of our insane separation from the natural flow of life is our greatest gift and greatest curse. So one road is to go so deeply into our own insanity we discover the love of life and the conscious awareness of life that is being forged in the depths of our terrible insanity. Yes find our own truth, go our own way, but also contribute to the collective evolution of life itself by becoming conscious and full of love for life. The energy field generated by this is in my opinion our only hope. The systems of power and money are hell-bent on the road to destruction. And all he evidence is that this juggernaut is not going to change. We have to go another way now – into the insanity within ourselves and through to humanity’s great gift to existence – a conscious love of it all. Enjoy your Sunday Phil, wherever you are!
Thanks Anne. You too.
I agree with all you say. The reason I spell out, when referring to our species, its full Latin name – homo sapiens-sapiens – is that we are doubly wise. We know that we know.
So much horror, and so much extraordinary potential, flows from this.
After listening to this podcast featuring one Dimitri Lascaris talking to Pascal Lottaz……
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcqnmTDJJMI&ab_channel=NeutralityStudies
……I’m inclined to concur with Ms Johnstone.
Particularly when the conclusion of an informative and gripping discussion disappointedly boils down to the trite ‘it could take twenty years’ to, in effect, get to where we need to be.
A conclusion which misses the point entirely. As in that time not only will millions of more people be murdered by these sociopaths and countless citizens will be outlawed through lawfare, and impoverished etc*, but also that those perpetuating these crimes who are running this crime syndicate with impunity will get away Scott free.
* See here, for example…….
https://skwawkbox.org/2025/07/12/state-targets-jewish-anti-genocide-activist-greenstein-with-financial-terrorism-debanking-attack/
……or here:
https://skwawkbox.org/2025/07/12/jewish-anti-genocide-activist-bash-arrested-as-starmer-continues-lawfare-on-pro-palestine-speech/
The bottom line is that there is no recognisable rule of law at any level as a result of the reality that a small number of powerful elites control the entire system for their own convenience.
There exists no legal, peaceful or rational mechanism to prevent these people and their paid political, security, media agents from continuing to slaughter, imprison, outlaw and wage war against anyone either abroad or within their own population with impunity, indefinitely.
While ever the delusion persists that the present rigged system, as described in the above podcast, can somehow be used or reformed to tackle what is taking place more and more people will be slaughtered; more and more people will be imprisoned as “terrorists”; and more and more people will be outlawed – denied bank accounts, basic services, access to facilities and so on.
Right now, the only practical, viable way to stop what is going on would seem to be summed up in John F. Kennedy’s observation that: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Police arrested more than 70 protestors in London yesterday. Terrorists all.
I’ve been mulling over that podcast on and off most of the afternoon. It’s not that I disagree in any way with the analysis and the observations; the problem is that it falls into the trap identified by Ron Suskind in that Rolling Stone article about the GW Bush administration in the early two thousand’s of merely recording the “reality” constructed by the Oligarchy.
In that regard, it reminds me of an old Andy ‘Capp cartoon from decades ago in the Daily Mirror newspaper.
Andy is in a pub trying to hit on two young ladies half his age by bragging about how good he is in bed.
The punch line put down from one of the two young Geordie lasses is “Oh aye! Talking about it, or thinking about it?”
Point being that talking about trying to change a corrupt structure and its processes via the same rules and processes has zero chance of working. It is why we are where we are; still stuck in the Alfred E. Neuman pose of the first Labour Chancellor, Viscount Phillip Snowden who following the collapse of the first Labour Government as a result of a Sterling crisis was apparently aghast when the incoming Conservative Government immediately solved the run on the currency via taking Sterling off the Gold Standard with the plaintive cry of “no one told us we could do that!”
As both the current masthead quote from Jonathan Cook implies, and the Caitlin Johnstone’s article makes explicit, decades of indoctrination has left Western populations with the blind spot of being unable to envisage any other way of doing anything whilst at the same time arguing that the anything of TINA is not working.
The cognitive dissonance is off the scale.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world echoes the “go canny” asymmetry (which probably originated in Geordieland) of the early British Trade Union Shop floor movement of the 19th century:
https://globalsouth.co/2025/07/11/trumps-tariffs-are-worse-than-hated-theyre-ignored/
Look and learn. There’s more than one way to skin a rabbit (or is it a cat?):
“Trump’s Tariffs Are Worse Than Hated. They’re Ignored”
“If you tariff one country, terrific. You have leverage. If you tariff every country, terrible. You’re the one paying demurrage at your own ports, while the rest of the world moves on. Abu Donald (our man inside) has done what the world should have done long ago, unionize against America, and make blood-sucking American importers eat the difference. That’s all Trump’s tariffs do, as you can see from the coverage inside my country, Sri Lanka.
In April it was all, ‘Yes Massa, how can we whip ourselves faster?’ but now we’re looking at the other slaves and comparing wages amongst ourselves. Americans are going to pay 20-30% more by default, and we’ll compete for the 5-10% on top.
Trump has effectively unionized every exporter in the world against American importers. It’s one of the most spectacular self-owns in economic history. If you tariff one person, more power to you. But it you tariff everyone, more power to us.”
Cutting the dole by 10% in his 1931 emergency budget, Snowden said it would be unfair for the unemployed not to make sacrifices too …
Which merely highlights yet again the utter bankruptcy of the Labour Party. A party founded on the idiotic ideas of ‘gradualism’ and ‘Fabianism’ and converting ‘capitalism’ to ‘capitalism with a faint smile’ in the hope that that will feed the poor, liberate the workers, etc. The ‘Labour’ party is the worst thing that ever happened to the UK labour movement.
A false promise of change, with in reality the substitution of tinkering at the edges to keep the dispossessed happy while not alarming the business community. Of course there have been partial successes like the NHS, dental care, the pensions system etc. which were well worth having – but overall one can only conclude that the battles have been lost, the goals not achieved, because of poor analysis of the system, a lily-livered avoidance of confrontation and the lack of solidarity with the grass roots. And it’s now far too late for all that – the previous gains are disappearing. In the period just before WWI there was mass radical feeling, which could have led to real change, but it was successfully dissipated by the myopic lack of vision and commitment from the top of the movement. Such a chance will never return. The ‘Labour’ party blew it, as was inevitable. F*** them.
The best one-stop history of Parliamentary Socialism I’ve read is a book of that name by one Ralph Miliband, father of Ed and Dave. Says this review in the SWP’s, International Socialism: