A Matter of Life and Death

by Paul Cudenec, Winter Oak
November 13, 2023

The way in which divide-and-rule tactics are continually used to create confusion and control has become increasingly evident since 2020.

More people than ever have woken up to the fact that these manufactured horizontal divisions within populations serve primarily to conceal the existence of a split which can be imagined as vertical.

This is the conflict between the ruled and the rulers, between the 99.9% and the 0.1%, between the dispossessed and the dispossessors, between the slaves and their slavemasters, between below and above, between the people and the power that oppresses them.

It can also, I believe, be understood as a conflict between life and death.

Let me explain why I say this.

Human beings are, as readers might have noticed, living entities. We come into being through the processes of nature.

In the same way that a tiny acorn contains the potential to become a mighty oak, we carry the seed of our potential within us: our “growing up”, from the embryo stage through childhood, adolescence and adulthood, is the self-realisation of that potential.

We are not machines. We don’t need to be “programmed” in order to become the human beings we were meant to become, any more than a tree needs to be taught how to sink roots or grow branches.

Ideal circumstances allow us to fulfil our innate potential, to be all that we could have been. In reality, of course, circumstances often thwart that potential: constant interference from external factors, such as society’s attempts to restrict and programme us to suit its requirements, can leave us stunted, lop-sided, frustrated, bitter and unfulfilled.

Because individual humans are living entities, groups of humans can also be living organisms.

The relationship between an individual and an organic community is a symbiotic one: the individual contributes his or her unique potential to the community and the community, in return, provides the structure, solidarity and support through which the invididual can find fulfilment.

Culture, of the authentic kind, is an expression of this natural belonging-together of individuals in a community.

Human beings and our communities form part of the wider living natural world on which we are dependent for our survival and well-being.

The understanding of our belonging to a larger living organism was part of human consciousness for hundreds of thousands of years.

We have also long had the idea of a level of aliveness above that of the physical world, an all-pervading sense of purpose and goodness that we can find impossible to name.

All of this then, is our living, our self-fulfillment, our freedom to flourish as intended by nature and the unnamable force of good.

Against it stands an entity, the entity of death, which has somehow taken over human society and sets out to destroy each and every aspect of our living.

It refuses to allow individuals to develop according to their own nature, either physically or mentally. From the moment we are conceived, it never stops monitoring, scanning and measuring us, pumping our bodies full of its toxic substances, hammering us into shape, crushing our desires, locking us down in its thought-prisons, chaining us to its concrete floor so that we can never soar high above its work-camp reality.

It thinks it owns us. It resents anything we do, say or think that lies outside its control. It doesn’t even like babies being born naturally and now wants to deny our biological reality and extend its cruel monopoly to the process of reproduction.

Its societies are dead things, in which its top-down control stamps out any possibility of choice, self-determination or the expression of a culture which comes from the shared human heart.

For the death-entity, the living world is nothing but a resource for the expansion of its poisonous power.

It parades its contempt for nature with its giant machines that rip into her flesh, with its vast and ugly industrial infrastructures that scar her face, with the defecations of its development that pollute and infect her organs.

And then, with a snigger, it justifies the next wave of its destruction with the lie that it wants to “save the planet”.

It sees no beauty in life, no value in life, no meaning in life.

In its negation of all that is good, it revels in its power to do evil.

It rubs it hands with glee as men, women and children suffer and die in their thousands, nay millions, in its spectacles of horror and then sells us back our sorrow as a ticket to its next infernal show.

That has been the story until now, in any case.

But I suspect that the death entity has now gone too far in its arrogance, surrendering the invisibility that was necessary for its deceit-dependent domination.

We are thus entering a new phase in the conflict, a long-awaited turning of the tide which will eventually see the energy of life and goodness restored to its rightful place at the centre of human existence.

Natural order – fresh, green and vital – will grow up in the ruins of the death-system, leaving humankind free to fulfil its true potential.

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Cover image credit: GeorgeB2