The Tower of Babel
What if you were working to build the proverbial tower of Babel? Maybe you lived nearby and wanted to be a part of the “greatest show on Earth”. Maybe you were a slave? Or it was the only way to feed yourself or your family. Maybe it really was a spiritual exercise to try and assault the gates of heaven.
Today our tower of Babel is electronic. After all, it is said that heaven and the spirit world is an electronic realm. How different is our participation in the world economy today? And our choices? I wrote about the catastrophic collapse of Southwest Airlines from the point of the company in my last post. How about the hundreds of thousands of people who became confused, powerless and trapped as the system collapsed? It was so complex that it needed a total reboot to restart. And consider all the knock off effects cascading from this event? Will the affected people re-evaluate future choices or simply go back to sleep?
If there has been anything positive that came out of COVID-19 and all of the effects of its imposition upon our globalized world, it was a forced re-evaluation of our jobs, our relationships (especially with our governments) and our basic necessities during a forced reboot. Like a forecasting tremor that shook the tower to its foundation, COVID-19 has been a major wake up call and an invitation to what I call citadelization. At some instinctual level most people are more awake to the the need to re-establish the local area network that was attempted to be rendered obsolete by the internet, social media and Amazon’s amazingly prescient entry into food and home delivery.
Some significant portion of the population was completely seduced by the stimulus checks and freedom to binge watch Netflix and a more significant potion of the population got involved in their children’s schooling, started their own garden and gathered their tribe together instead of submitting to lockdown. Some fell asleep until the tower project was restarted and some woke up to see the tower with fresh eyes. Which were you?
If you were awakened to the rather ridiculously apparent proposition that we are all slaves to the modern tower project then you were faced with this choice of action. And it takes very little time in thinking about how to escape before wanting to enlist others to join you. Practically, a single family becoming a solo prep-per is a bridge too far to cross. Because complete decentralization down to the family or individual level is too hard and too big of a shock. And very unwise.
Roving groups of men that want to use force to take what they want is as old as humanity and its solution has always been citadelization, not decentralization. In fact, this is how governments formed in the first place. As soon as agriculture demanded the storing of seeds for the spring planting, also in demand was an organization that could protect the stored wealth and source of life.
Community is ingrained into our humanity in so many ways that globalization and modern governments have usurped. The call to build a tower of Babel or to globalize or even to adopt my proposed bioadministration must be countered and buffered by the enlightened self-interest we were forced to explore during COVID. We got to see what seductions we had replaced community with. If, we were willing to take an honest look.
Are the roving bands of robbers or the gods that confused our speech evil or are they a force of citadeiazation as necessary to humanity as diseases and personal demons that force individual humans to practice good physical, emotional and mental hygiene? Life is clearly a test whose passing grade is to remain alive. There is no avoiding the test, so strategies to pass the test are shaped by the Teacher. Nature and human nature show their love for the adoption of community by forcing its necessity. And that necessity comes from both above and below.
Whether being stranded by Southwest Airlines, locked down by governments during COVID or subject to the scrambling of speech into babel by the gods, there is always an appropriate response that the test implies. Local area networks. Community. Citadelization.
Staying stranded, locked down or confused is always a choice to fail the test of life. Organizing action is life and citadelization is a favorite tool.