Global Enema

I think that we are going through a phase. The world of our species is a strange little terrarium. Many countless attempts have been made to describe and encompass its sense and its meaning. One that springs to mind is ancient in origin. It attempts to liken the world to a wheel (an apt image). It describes the affairs of the world as being a wheel, and that at any given point some on this wheel are on the ascent and others are on the descent. But there are myriad wheels within wheels, that is, not only the world but all its individual components are also trapped within a cyclic pattern. So that an individual, say you, will experience in your lifetime ups and downs by the motion of the wheel. In narrow terms this describes how in your say daily wheel, you may awake sad and lacking in energy, but as that day travels to its night, you may suddenly find your mood building up to a burst of energy or joy, or something else positive. Well that is as simply as the idea can be described.

But this wheel also has another application. If we look at our collective history, I think another perhaps more ominous pattern can also be discerned. One that I think may well fit the troubles we're witnessing today.

If you were to look back on our recorded history, you will find periodic, let's for argument's sake say once in every Century (although many smaller wheels of the same sort are turning within the big world wheel, always) attempts at curing our societal ills by means of a purgative. These purges normally coincide with time on the downside of the wheel. They almost invariably take the form of baptisms of fire, be that war, witch burning, Communist hunting, Jew baiting, racism or whatever.

When things are not going well for us, we tend to look to outside elements for something or someone to blame for our ills.

Take the classic times of the Inquisition. The 12th through to the 18th centuries were rife with a raging in-house struggle for supremacy, which, it may be argued, continues into our times. The Church and the Secular arm were at odds over who would take charge of the masses. But the Church was also fighting a battle within its own corpus. The countless cults of saints, from the followers of Francis or Dominic, to the various brotherhoods of the so called heretics, to the larger power struggle between the popes of the Eastern and Western arms of the Church, and in turn their disputes with various European Emperors over control of the hearts and minds, not to mention souls, of the mass of the population. The Church stigmatised those it wished to rid itself of, as witches, Devil worshippers, heretics and followers of the Antichrist. Those who disputed the legitimacy of the Popes were put before the Inquisition, and could make no defence that would absolve them, since the method of Inquisition was such that no matter what proof the accused brought forth to prove his innocence, it was seized upon and presented as, in fact more proof of his guilt. (The classic Monty Python trick that was used again and again on those accused of witchcraft, for example, was that the test for discovering a witch was to drop them in a body of water, since witches had the same quality as wood. If the accused floated, they were then burned since it was irrefutable proof of their sin, if they drowned and died then they were not a witch and their soul was dispatched to heaven forthwith. A lose-lose situation, and ingenious in that if you want to get rid of someone, the best strategy for keeping your hands clean, and avoiding accusations of bias is to say they had a fair trial as outlined by the law.) You may ask what possible interest could it serve the Church to falsely accuse ordinary people, and offing them, since these same had no power to begin with. The motive force behind these purges was multiple in aim. One was to apply pressure within the body of the church to kill all resistance to the status quo, as determined by the Pope, and secondly to strike fear amongst the uneducated public, to quell any rebellion that may be brewing against the monopoly of power that the Church exercised, but also to alleviate the tensions that may have been building up amongst the flock due to the depravations of their daily oppression by the Church and by the lords of the land. Not to mention earn a tidy income from those accused.

"The persecution of witchcraft enabled the Church to prolong the profitability of the Inquisition. The Inquisition had left regions so economically destitute that the inquisitor Eymeric complained, "In our days there are no more rich heretics ... it is a pity that so salutary an institution as ours should be so uncertain of its future." By adding witchcraft to the crimes it persecuted, however, the Inquisition exposed a whole new group of people from whom to collect money. It took every advantage of this opportunity." (An extract from the article 'The Witch Hunts: The End of Magic and Miracles 1450-1750 C.E.', by Helen Ellerbe.) The accused were even charged for the cost of their torture, the ropes that tied them to the stake and the woodpile that burned them.

So what did we have. On the one hand an uneducated, terminally poor, population, paying a huge chunk of their meagre annual income (be that in money or in livestock or harvest) as tithes to the Church, working the land as surfs for the rich land owners, for just enough of the fruits of their toil to keep body and soul together, and having no other source of information than the Church and the state. On the other two hugely powerful forces, rich, educated and in deadly combat over supremacy, each jealous of the other's power, influence and wealth. Meanwhile, the populace was not only hit with the propaganda of the Antichrist, witches and so on, but also variously by the Black Death, and other less devastating epidemics. And these in themselves helped fuel the need for scapegoats. All in all a multinational advertising agency could not have handled the campaign better.

What am I leading to with all this? Well for a start I think to most readers it must also be ringing some similarity bells. Think Nazism, think Stalinist purges, the McCarthy witch hunts, think in general of all the demonisation that takes place regularly in everyday propaganda of one or other faction in our society. Always behind the purges that we cyclically witness or are involved in, a greater and perhaps more sinister struggle for power at the top. From the simple ambitions of the few in power, to the more sweeping ideological battles, always the scapegoat is something of a useful tool. It is mostly a way of keeping the majority frightened and distracted while those in power and those with what they call vested interest, carry on building toward their goals. It is what we do to a screaming child, distract and obfuscate, turn their attention away from what they want by offering them a placebo, and therefore shut them up.

It seems we are happy to do anything to avoid or side-step looking to ourselves and finding solutions from within. We are willing to accept that whole populations around the world are daily, actively going about hating 'OUR WAY OF LIFE', we are willing to accept this as a reasonable explanation for our disappearing health, education, civil rights, and other social systems. We are willing to allow ourselves to hate foreigners, to look out for the barbarian just beyond the gate, to the underbelly of our social structure, anywhere to find something to purge that doesn't involve our looking in the mirror and seeing the faults and mistakes in ourselves. Those who wish to have power are very well versed with this tendency, and use it as a cudgel to beat us down with, to keep us quiet, to gain our consent, to legitimise their license to do what they need to achieve and retain their power, their own aggrandisation, to justify themselves to history and to reconcile themselves with what shred of conscience they may still have. As Pilate washed his hands so can they.

Today we have the spectre of Islam, terrorism and immigration, before that it was Communism, in Germany not so long ago the Jews, in Russia Capitalism...

You fill in the rest.