More Citadelization Circuit Breakers
Last time I blogged about self-remembering as a circuit breaker to mental and emotional identification with an external event that disempowers the individual human through the draining of attention and harmony. Going back to the three-body problem, it seems as though the human design is to be easily destabilized and milked to produce a type of raw material for greater unseen processes upon Earth and in the cosmos. This is called life and the ability to catch yourself in the heat of the moment with self-remembering is a masterwork.
On a personal level, the ability to restore peace and harmony to disturbing situations is the way of the Christ and it has its own long-standing religion. Its simple message is rarely mastered but is essential within a fallen world with the constant disturbances of division. So how do we incorporate the peacemaker component into a larger human organization? In families and in kingdoms, the disproportionate power of the authority gives it the ability to impose order within a meltdown or mass psychosis. While a necessary tool that every parent has used, imposition resolves nothing but the immediate crisis and is the bluntest of tools.
Today we will discuss circuit breakers within larger organizations that should keep us free of emergency impositions. While self-remembering is a fine tool for oneself and promotes citadelization, its mass application is even more of a mystery. It is not hard to imagine a pressure gauge connected to our emotional body with a dial that has green, yellow, and red color-coding for easy reference. When we “blow our top” it is usually because our mind grabs ahold of some dormant memorized sensation fully charged with emotion triggered by some current event. A feedback loop of memory, mind, and emotion feed each other to expand the pressure and self-remembering is a tool to break the cycle. How do we replicate this on a scale of humanity? To see the gauge hitting yellow and to take action before we hit the red zone?
We have tried to teach peacemaking as a religion. The wars among the European Christians in the last century had some kind of shadow ferocity that belie the peacemaking effect of a regular Christian observer nation. We need circuit breakers designed into the organization to combat mass psychosis. Every nation going to war has a significant minority (Christian or not) who either silently or out load resists war but is shouted down in the stampede of a people rallied by their leaders. The last time the United States really resisted a war was during Vietnam. What was the circuit breaker? The military draft. In the 1960s the US still had a citizen military that was required to be called up to fight an enemy. Now we have a professional military who follows orders or loses their lifelong pension and benefits.
Returning to a citizen military with mandatory service would citadel-ize the true defense of our nation while also enhancing citizen ownership of collective action. At the same time, we would be re-installing a circuit breaker designed into our constitution to counteract rash and self-serving decisions of our military-industrial-congressional complex in times of crisis.
A second circuit breaker we removed which has empowered the government against the people was fiat money. In the 1960s coins were made of silver and the price of gold was fixed at $35/ounce. Sixty years of deficit spending first wiped out real tangible money, then encouraged debt financing with interest, and became a Ponzi scheme of borrowing ever more digital money into existence with no plan to ever pay back the debt to buy votes and attempt to rule the world. Financialization has been a fifty-year sugar high that is collapsing. Some countries (we now call our enemies) are attempting to re-establish a commodity-backed international currency system and its natural circuit breaker. At the same time, the west wants digital money tracked via embedded chips for total and individual control of each citizen. All the circuit breakers would be in the hands of the government, not the people. It’s ironic that our “enemies” trying to break the power of the debt-based financial system are helping to prevent the enslavement to digital control.
A third circuit breaker is closely associated with the government’s income taxing, regulation, and deficit spending. These policies have become a consolidation of control with the awarding of federal money and grants as the prize for adherence to government dictates and therefore increased federal control over education, health care, and law enforcement. This breakdown of citadelization within these major sectors that diminish local control has a proven track record of failure of outcome while being a great success in the consolidation of power within an insulated bureaucracy. Being taxed solely to collect and consolidate power over the natural and everyday functions of a society is a removal of the circuit breaker of local control.
Here we have three examples of the mind of humanity having used crisis as an opportunity to remove circuit breakers designed into the system to promote citadelization against an over-reaching government. Bad policy creates more crisis and further control. The body has its own way to tame the wayward, confused and obsessive mind called sleep. A revolution against the current government to put it to sleep may save us from further catastrophe, but does nothing to re-institutionalize the proper, time-tested, and proven (again) necessary balance of power between the people and their government.
As individuals, in trauma and crisis, we may institutionalize bad habits like drinking, smoking, self-loathing, and negative self-talk. It happens. And it can lead to soul growth or to an early death. While this can be a metamorphosis or a tragedy to the individual, a failing civilization is a mass casualty event that reboots the innocent with the guilty. For everyone to suffer a mind or a government that uses every crisis to diminish the life of its people is objectively evil and must be reformed.
Humanity needs to remember and re-establish these and other circuit breakers of citadelization to prevent systemic breakdown or devolution during crisis. The promise of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness is a collective agreement amongst free people that can only be maintained with an economic and political system that maintains and enforces certain rules upon the government. The constitution’s Bill of Rights was our original circuit breaker. In the next post on citadelization we will discuss necessary updates earned in the wisdom of hard experience.