Watch this video, a commercial from the recent Super Bowl:
I saw this in FaceBook City a couple of days ago and I thought to myself “what utter bullshit.” I watched it again, then downloaded it for repeated viewings, my blood rising and my heart pounding. Bullshit, I thought again. Lies. Fairytales. Half-truths.
I couldn’t ask for a more concise encapsulation of the foundational stories of the world-spanning culture we call Empire than is present in this commercial. It’s about putting humans in charge and ruling the Earth. It’s about how that role was supposedly given to us by God His-Own-Self. It’s about the endless hard work and devotion required to extract a living, to extract our very lives, from an inhospitable “natural world.” It’s about “God and country, about community, loyalty, steadfastness, and resolve.” It’s about bootstrapping, about order and control, about never giving up and getting ‘er done.
And it’s about selling Dodge Ram Trucks.
Please understand that some of my best friends are farmers. Sally, my own wife, can now fairly claim that label. (And maybe even I, as the chief chicken-kisser, should try on that hat to see if it fits.) I was born and raised on farms, surrounded by Grandparents and Aunts and Uncles and Great Aunts and Uncles, most of whom worked the vast stretches of rolling farmland which comprised my haunts and my playgrounds. I grew up feeding orphaned lambs and making tunnels in the hayloft and growing vegetables in our garden and running through the tall corn. My memories of this are fond and wistful. There was beauty in that life.
But when I look at it all through my current habitual lenses, I see the global ecological consequences of our devotion to these stories. I see species extinction and climate change and depletions of forests and topsoil and water. I see greed and corruption and denial and debt. I see toxins and technofixes and terminator seeds. And I see that, while there are now many farmers trying to find a better way, working hard to bring good, clean food to their local markets without destroying their landbase, and while we are now doing that out of seeming necessity as we seek to transition from what clearly does not work to something else which might, I see little questioning of the foundational stories that undergird our assumptions about life and death and power and collaboration and what it means to be a human being on this planet.
You see, from what I think I know, God did not make a farmer, no matter what Paul Harvey said. Certainly not the sort of farmer that we’ve become. I think both science and the Judeo-Christian scriptures are in complete agreement on this point. Evolution made hunter-gatherers, who lived for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years (depending on your definitions), before some of them began to tell themselves the Planet-Ruling stories that now shape and inform both our “agriculture” and our Dodge Ram commercials. God made Adam and Eve, who lived in a garden that provided everything they needed, a world of “low hanging fruit” there for the easy plucking. It was not until Adam and Eve were banished from that garden that the “sons of Adam” got into the whole farming thang, and we all know how that ended. Whether it was snakes and sin, global catastrophe and trauma, alien influence, the “parable of the tribes,” or simply the scarcity that resulted from overpopulation, whether it was inevitable or avoidable, human beings left the garden and entered into what Daniel Quinn calls the most labor-intensive lifestyle yet invented. For whatever reason, it seems we humans made the farmer. And ever since, we’ve been telling ourselves that this hard-working, land-destroying, extra-people-producing work is not only good, but blessed by the Almighty.
Which is why we get to have one of those trucks: we’re on a mission from God.
Okay. Stop. Having made that point, I want to stop and step away from it. All of the above? I’ve done that for years. That sort of analysis comes as easy as cake to me. Piece of pie. Been there done that and all that and amen. It’s my automatic setting. And I’m good at it.
But what really interests me here is this suite of questions: what the hell is that blood-rising, heart-pounding feeling inside of me all about? And why am I so strongly compelled to rant and rage? Does such ranting help any more? Did it ever help? Or have I been spending my own life energy to little avail? If I stopped spending my energy in this way, what else might I do? What’s needed now? What’s wanted? What will help? Can I help? Am I supposed to help? Is it good to help? Is the rant above even correct? Or are there much larger perspectives to take into account, and different lenses through which to look, which might shed some very different light on these issues?
I won’t go any further today than to ask these questions. I have too many juicy things on my plate right now, and they require my attention. But this is a beginning, and a way to simply release that ranting energy from my body, knowing that I can come back to it when the time is right.
I want to take off my habitual glasses and see what else is there. I have not found that ranting and being Right™ has served me in the way I would have hoped.
Thank you for this.
This commercial made me sick to my stomach, especially knowing that so many other people are sucking up its baloney like sacramental wine.
Is it the rage of the trapped and caged consciousness, perhaps? That sense of helpless frustration that comes from seeing the enclosing bars and recognizing what they are? That seems to be the root of my blood-rush.
Tim, before I got half-way through your blog, I thought to myself, “Holy shit!! Can that man rant! I love this!” Then I got to your paragraph questioning the worth of your ranting… and I got very, very apprehensive… possibly even scared!… that you might stop ranting. And, of course, if you do, oh I so very much understand it - having done a bit of ranting and self-examination about it myself. But. The world needs those who speak the truth. Firmly. With conviction. As a bon fide no holds barred goddamned rant. Just my opinion.
Wow, that’s a beautiful commercial. Very well made, even if it is selling trucks (and Empire) using bullshit, half-truths, fairytales. Tim, I can’t speak for you, but my own frustration (occasionally rage) comes from the knowledge that this shit is ubiquitous, mainstream, and even loved within the Empire, and that I’m helpless in the face of it. Perhaps the rage isn’t useful except as a reminder to rethink my relationship with Empire. I don’t know, maybe it’s time to just watch, bemused, as everything seems to inexorably slide down its long descent, and simultaneously be grateful for the love and beauty and strength that we saw glimpses of in the video.
WOW!
I did not watch the ‘Super Bowl’, mostly because I don’t care who wins.
I have seen this form of gradious exploitation of persons and ideas by commercial interests for some time.
Spin takes many forms, religious, green, political, civil rights, and historical. Selling need not have a conscience, a social commitment, a political calling, or a green interest, it is only a platform that uses ‘everything’ for one goal, ‘move our crap out the front door by finding a sucker to buy it’. So why not exploit identity, religious conviction, social causes, political movements, and conservation/green values to do it? Pretend to be ‘Green’, or ‘care about farmers’, it all can work once it leaves the editing room. Sadly we are waking up from a long sleep, believing these people care about anything…
I, too, perhaps with your help Tim, begun to look at my level of attachment to whatever story is operational in me at the moment; to being Right (TM) in my own way. Thanks for this blog.
I used to love listening to Paul Harvey and was one of the sleepwalkers until I was rudely awakened by a vision of the future I received in March 1982. I tried to understand what I had been shown and that led me to read and explore beyond the “stories” I had been told in my life before then. I came to understand that a time of great destruction was coming and that it was part of the natural cycle in the life of a Creation. I became aware of data gathered under hypnosis that charted 6 other futures than the one I expect to live in, of David Sunfellow’s vision quest that showed him the 12 paths, and I came to the conclusion that we would be emerging from this one shared reality across 12 different timelines, each of which would arise from a small fraction of the current global population. One of those timelines is the one envisioned in this movie, of turning back the clock to a pre-technological time.
On the timeline I expect to move forward on, it will go beyond the present planet and form a totally new civilization based on those principles recognized in What a Way To Go, but taken to the level where the requisite consciousness is present in ALL things, such that nothing occurs that is not in keeping with the needs of the whole. No individual organism will be more important than any other, and each will function perfectly within its place within the whole. This will be participated in by lifeforms from throughout our galaxy and it’s not a “the aliens will save us” scenario. It’s something that provides a bridge between this world and the next step for all lifeforms on this planet that are not part of the cycle of death, disease, and decay, which we tend to take as a given in this present version of Earth.
As Einstein is often quoted as having said, “Problems cannot be solved by the level of awareness that created them.” This implies the existence of a higher level of awareness. This higher level of awareness has been described by many as part of other stories, but for me the best description comes from Eckhart Tolle’s recent book, “A New Earth” and is well-defined in the YouTube videos describing his own awakening.
For me, it has come through a series of what might be called mystical experiences, and it has taken me out of the story of a personal God (God as a person) to the experience of the Creator as being present everywhere and in everything simultaneously, experiencing Itself through Its creations.
Until one can transcend ALL illusions of separation, especially in the stories we tell ourselves, we are stuck in those illusions and while we may be able to recognize the bars of our prison, I believe that the “source of the problem” is in the level of awareness we bring to our lives and how we live them.
The movie “What a Way to Go” is an exploration that seeks to raise awareness in those who see it. However, in my opinion, it is beginning a search for a higher level of awareness that — according to the data I have seen — will evolve over centuries to come before it results in the kind of leap to a higher level of existence than the one we are currently familiar with.
I have built a boat and I have been sailing in uncharted waters for almost 32 years. I am too old (71) to consider returning to the land for my sustenance. Back in 1993, I had an epiphany where I “saw” the tentacles of the “beast” of our economic system were everywhere and penetrated everything. I also saw that there seemed to be two choices available that would allow me to not contribute to furthering that economic system. One was to become totally aboriginal. The other was to work on attaining total mastery over the physical plane until I reached that goal. I chose the latter and have put all of MY energy into doing the intense inner work required by that path.
In the model I work with, everyone and everything has a “Plan” for its life, in keeping with a multitude of conditions to be met, and the people associated with this movie are fulfilling THEIR purpose, just as those who are part of the Empire are fulfilling theirs. I applaud that this movie at least (unlike the Zeitgeist and Thrive movies) did not fall into enemy-patterning thinking. There is hope for the few, not for the many, but over the coming millennia, the results will evolve so that many will find their way to the new planet I was shown in my vision in 1982. If you want to know more about MY vision for the future, you can read about it on my website at http://www.operationterra.com. I agree with the problems identified in What a Way to Go, and I have been feeling my feelings about what I have seen unfolding for a very long time. However, rather than trying to go back into the past as a way of getting beyond the Age of Empire, I am choosing to put my energy into helping to create something totally new — a new planet, at a new level of awareness than the one that created our present problems.
Hi Sara,
Thanks for checking in. I think you’d be hard pressed to find some place in What a Way to Go where I say we should “turn back the clock to a pre-technological time.” I have no idea where we are heading, or where we should head, and don’t consider “going back” the point at all. The film’s function is simply to notice that we are heading somewhere, as we certainly cannot keep going the way we have been. But going back is surely impossible and always has been, as we are not who we were, and the Earth is no longer what she was. The only way is forward, I think. And it would feel a huge shame, to me, to go through all of this and not come out the other side transformed in fundamental ways.
We made the film back in 2007. In the time since, Sally and I have continued to process our way through the news of the world, including the ever-spiraling climate news. You might be surprised to learn that our journey mirrors yours in many ways. As a follow up to What a Way to Go, I published a novel, All of the Above, in 2011, and am now working on the sequel. I’m using fiction to explore how the present situation on planet Earth might provide the background and motivation for our freeing ourselves from the underlying materialist paradigm. It takes off into the “mystical realms” and includes “aliens” who are not here to save us. I have also been writing my weekly blog again, in which I continue to explore the spiritual journey in the face of the Doom™ of our present systems. I’m currently exploring that very “enemy-patterning thinking” of which you speak, and into which so many fall.
To Sally and myself, the “spiritual journey” feels like the only journey worth taking at this point, though such terms would need a great deal of teasing apart for us to deeply understand each other, I would guess. I’ll go check out your website as soon as I can.
Until then, here’s to the search!
Tim
Tim,
I got the idea that the film was talking about turning back the clock to a pre-technological existence because of the numerous times the speakers referred to the way man had lived for millions of years (before agriculture changed things) as sustainable, and being the way that we could go on living sustainably again. It was not ever spelled out precisely as such, but that was the impression I got from that period of time being referred to so many times. THAT was the “aboriginal option” I looked at in 1993 and rejected as something I wanted to pursue. Even Helen and Scott Nearing, whose book, “Living the Good Life” inspired many to take the “back-to-the-land” approach in the late ’60s, could not get completely off the system and had to barter their maple syrup for things that they couldn’t produce for themselves, like tractor parts. In spite of their organic approach to raising food, both of them died of cancer, and I realized that their approach was not right for me.
I did look at your weekly blog just now, and since there was no place there to post a response that I could see, I’d like to say that I, too, was a see-er who was not welcomed or received for who I was by the family who raised me. I began saying what I saw at the age of two and from the reactions of the adults around me, I quickly concluded that they didn’t want what I was offering. I did my best to fit in and follow the patterns that my family tried to shape me into, but that didn’t work for me, either. At the age of 8, I concluded that there was nowhere in my world where I could express my authentic self and be received, so I consciously made the decision to leave until I was out on my own. However, by the time I was out on my own, I couldn’t find where I had gone to and spent many long years trying to find my way back.
I was totally numbed out during that time, in part because of being raped when I was 3 years old, but also because of having to suppress my own nature so completely in order to try to fit in with the world I found myself in. I stood at the edge of it and observed everything, but said little about what I observed. However, when I was called to my present path in March 1981, I felt I had to follow it, no matter what. It wasn’t until I started posting the Messages on the web in mid-summer 1999 that others like myself found their way to me and began to coalesce into a group of sorts. The common theme I heard over and over was “I thought I was the only one.” I thought I was the only one and now there were others who had thought THEY were the only ones who saw and felt as I did. I was a female and allowed to have feelings according to my culture, but because of the numbing out, I could not feel anything at all until I consciously chose to seek out a psychiatrist who specialized in helping people feel their feelings. I attained the breakthrough I sought, but it was absolutely terrifying when it happened because I had to then learn how to be at home with myself as a person who could feel things again. Your rage and ranting is just stored up stuff, and in the model I work with, the frequency shift that the planet is going through right now is flushing out everything that is made up of the lower frequencies. Emotions express across a range of frequencies, and there is even a man who has quantified their range of vibration using kinesiology, but my point here is that what you are experiencing is a GOOD thing. It means you are being healed and cleansed of all that made what was “right with you” in the first place, the “wrong” way to be, so hang in there. You are not alone and there are others on the planet like yourself and like me. Many of them have found their way to Operation Terra and it has given them a framework of understanding what they see and what they are experiencing. It is definitely NOT the pink cloud, blue sky fluff one often sees in the “new age” genre. It’s “tough love” that calls us to that hard inner work, but also explains the reason we are doing it. It provides a very large frame for the picture that might also be helpful for you.
The monkey mind is the ego that Eckhart Tolle speaks about, It has its place in things, and it keeps us locked into survival mode and repeating our prior pain, but there is another part of us that I call the observer, and it is the part that “knows.”
Yep. Certainly many people, when they look at our present predicament, look also to the time before our present predicament, as a means of deciphering “what went wrong.” I find that there’s lots of useful information and perspective to be gained by looking to the past. But the game has changed too much since then, I think, for “going back” to be an option, even if that’s what We™ wanted. I’m not convinced that we™ do. We’ve put ourselves into a situation where even the old ways will no longer “save us.” All the bridges have been burned, and so there’s no choice but to go forward. Perhaps, unconsciously, we’ve done this on purpose.
All of my blog posts are open to comments, so there should be a place for you to do so at the end of them. If there isn’t, I don’t know why. It should be working.
I think many many of us share a similar story in terms of being different and not fitting in, as you have found. It seems to be the basic conflict with our inborn humanity/spiritedness and the inhuman or unhuman and spiritually bereft cultural matrix into which we are born.
Yes, my path has all been a good thing, as the Jeff Foster piece I posted on Tuesday makes clear. Healing and cleansing is exactly what I have been doing. I am a healer by nature, and so post my story and my process with the intention that it will help others. I’m on the ground every day, shirt sleeves rolled up, doing the work of healing with my wife and others around, in my writing and in my music. It’s a good life and I’m glad to be living it.
Thanks again for checking in. You take care,
Tim