The Cassandra Syndrome, Colin Brookfield, Colin Brookfield [i like reading books .txt] 📗

of avoiding important issues (our blind side) that disturb its comfort zone preferences. Furthermore, it is the knowledge of such traits that allows leadership to manipulate public perceptions, in directions most favourable to itself.

 The ‘Wiki’ information leaks and other major whistle blowing events have already given us a glimpse behind the sullied facades of world leadership but this is only scratching the surface.

 The results of research on such problems were addressed by British psychologists in the ‘New Scientist’ periodical and were repeated in the British national papers in August 2004. These publications went on to describe a social aberration in the following terms:

 “There are psychopaths at work in our society and that they tend to thrive in high powered professions such as politics, the media, law and business, where they can dominate others as part of getting the job done. Psychologists estimate, about one percent of Britons fall into this category”. This amounts to approximately 670,000 that are in circulation, a phenomenon from which we can extrapolate to the rest of the world.

Professor Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia and one of the world’s leading authorities on psychopaths said:

 “Psychopaths are social predators and like all predators they are looking for feeding grounds, wherever you get power, prestige and money you will find them.”

 

 Psychopathy

The narrow view of science, informs us, there is a biological basis for the urge towards domination and violence, for which there are markers. For instance, the MAOA gene helps to regulate serotonin; too much in-utero, de-sensitises the calming effects of serotonin in later life, e.g. the Warrior gene is made active, as it is also where limbic system malfunction is present. 

 

 

Observing psychopaths

In recent years, one of these oppressive influences confronted my wife and me. We had boarded a tram in the suburbs of Prague in the Czech Republic (formerly part of the USSR), when two brusque young men in black leather jackets boarded to check the tram tickets and soon found a victim. She was a frail tourist whose new ticket although paid for, had not been dated. The men bullied the terrified lady for more money so violently, that I intervened on her behalf. I was quite astounded at what had then been set in motion. Every Czech national on the tram quickly placed their upper bodies flat to their knees and their heads to the walls. I was extremely angry at this fearful subservience to bullying and more so, because this exposure was obviously just a microcosm of the underlying fear within the wider population and of course, in many others across the world. 

 

History’s repeating patterns

The above disclosures are merely a limited display of such abuses and an overview of worldwide patterns in leadership abuse. It plays out everywhere like a perverse pyramidical board game, designed in such a way as to ensure preferable achievability to that of its murkiest board piece, in its scramble for top position through other vying-board elements of the pyramid layout. Then the similarly disposed but lesser pieces on the pyramid arrangement, scrabble for their achievable levels down through the framework, until finally bottomed out to its layers of protective cohort components. Such are the perverse tribal patterns that have fuelled oppression and the world’s killing-fields endlessly through time. 

Counterfeit Reasons

Hubris covert, sometimes not,

diverse in type and needs,

endemic to its species

on which it mainly feeds

 

Covets creatures, things or both,

incomplete when it’s alone

For monarchs without subjects

sit upon a futile throne.

 

Self apotheosis has

both large and lesser kinds

though congruence with ability

elects the niche it finds.

Insinuation is its stratagem

when it feigns respectability;

the ingenuously blind oblige

their part in culpability.

 

Getting closer to home

When bringing all of this (need to control) down to base level, its psychology is simply the fraternal manifestations of the primary street gang mentality, functioning beneath the guise of their official capacity. These are personalities whose debased mission in life – whilst getting the job done – is to impose dominance, fear and usability upon the vulnerable from within a secure power base. (Psychopath traits being expressed.) 

Sadly, though not unexpected, we saw the same official fraternal brutality at work on the streets of the United Kingdom. One incident involved an elderly man who was thrown to the ground with maximum violence by a large police officer. A few minutes later, the assaulted man collapsed in the street from a heart attack. 

Another episode occurred when elements of the British police removed their personal identifications before coming on duty, so that they could brutalise without fear of being caught. Their brutality was filmed during the ‘kettling’ of peaceful demonstrators but for the good name of the service – it was soon hushed up. 

The case that lives in greatest infamy, concerns the innocent Brazilian boy who was wrongly identified as a bomb-carrying terrorist, even though he had no means by which to conceal such a thing. The media evidence was, that police in civilian clothes fell upon the frightened boy in a railway carriage, pinioned his arms, then callously shot their captive to death with multiple rounds into his head. Some of the normally efficient cameras on the London Transport tube train seemed to have strangely malfunctioned on that day and time but for the good name of the service – it was soon hushed up. 

Within the cosy camaraderie clubs of politics, we have that long overdue exposure of the widespread criminal expense scandal. For the ordinary public, a whole swathe of custodial sentencing would have followed but for the good name of those institutions – much of it was soon hushed up. The further cataloguing through the decades of this continuous malignant activity is on public record for anyone to access. 

It is towards these ‘pillars’ of society that the young look upwards for guidance. The young are inquisitive, watching, listening and learning, consequently, they are aware of what really goes on behind the higher facades. Thus, the wayward young are a reflection of their ‘betters’ and doomed to follow in the footsteps of those unworthy tutors – tutors who then feel free to castigate their feral creations.

 

Lessons prove, not to be chastening

There are of course, no exclusion zones to these inclinations; they are at work right across social spectra in every society across our planet. 

Predatory activity is also well ensconced within all public service institutions that, whilst getting the job done, also pursue a course of self-serving empowerment. The process is role-reversal; those in service to the general public will inevitably manoeuvre the public into service to them. It is systemic in all societies and subverts the aspirations of social democracy. Why is that? It is because the mechanisms to frustrate this kind of activity are not in place; those who dare to expose a wrong will be pilloried.

 

Sexual predation

Another malignancy has had an airing – that of the child abuse scandal within European religious child ‘care’ institutions. Media investigations revealed that despite it being common knowledge, the people within these religious communities turned a blind eye to the abuses, as indeed their forebears had done, right back to the inception of such institutions. 

The reality behind this seemingly, ‘blind-eyed’ phenomena, is that religion is a construct of human elements, brought together in common belief. However, for each element (person), religion is its personal ‘life-boat’ to heaven that it will not have disturbed by unwelcome truths. Moreover, human nature being what it is, will affirm that this activity is not confined to just one religious order or region. Similarly, it finds expression within secular environments. 

There are many barbaric cultural and religious customs still at work today, such as the genital mutilation to young girls, added to which, is the paedophilic practice of female children placed in marriage to adult males.

Another medieval custom is that of forced marriages imposed by parents upon their daughters. 

The shadow of self-deceit must surely now hang over our self-appellations, such as ‘enlightened’, ‘progressive’, ‘democratic’ and ‘humane’. Moreover, weasel words have long since rendered truth untrustworthy.

To extract pivotal causes from all of this collective interactivity, seems a minefield of complexity and blind alleys but, not if we look in the right way; the causes are universal in nature and distribution, clearly expressed in my other writings. 

Honeypot Syndrome

There are very many bees

preferring different honey

with interest not upon

the type that’s sweet and runny.

 

There are varied kinds of honeypots

not difficult to find,

though bees that seek to sample

must not show they’re so inclined.

 

For reasons that’s unique

to every single bee

some will only rarely taste

whilst others fill with glee.

 

This leaves one to concede

that bees that do such roving

are something other than they seem,

masqueraded in bees clothing.

 

The journey into Synthetic Man

Our species is awash with unreal disbeliefs that we have carelessly awarded factual status. In contrast, there are realities of critical importance that the hubris of academia has disparagingly discarded, leaving unsounded, the vast oceanic depths of our otherworldly possibilities. By this means, our infinitely greater potentials were left to atrophy upon ‘intellect’s’ shallow shores. Life is proved, infinitely more mysterious than common views.

 

 Fingers in Nature’s till

Perhaps in all our plundering of Nature’s assets, we have become too confident in our feelings of supremacy and whilst doing so, overlooked that every advantage we wrest from Nature will always bring something with it that we do not want. Did we forget Nature’s immutable laws of opposites? They clearly inform us that every seemingly positive creation of ours will also arrive balanced with its negative inputs. 

It cannot be denied that we are the greatest inventive living force on the planet; a planet that is now awash with the toys of our inventiveness, also, with all the damaging attachments that arrived with them. 

So what is wrong? We are clearly out of balance on our evolutional ladder, too psychologically backward against the exponential pace of our evolution in technical and mechanical creativity, which in turn, informs us we are not safe with them.The phrase ‘Synthetic Man’, relates to mankind’s progressive estrangements from its natural-world origins and into a separate order of things artificial to Nature. It has brought us to where we are today – over-focussed on ourselves and acquisitive to the detriment of the planet and its myriad life forms. The lands, waters and creatures are now exclusively the property of Homo sapiens - they are all harnessed and exploited.

 

Insane predation

Our exploitation knows no bounds. The world’s glorious tigers are being slaughtered into extinction for the Asian market in the insane belief, that the ingestion of those processed body parts is medicinal in effect. Neither should we overlook that psychotic vanity market whose self-centred demands are savagely exterminating the Rhino and Elephant. Despite there being means by which to quickly stamp out these vile activities, there is no collective resolve to do so. 

Moreover, such invasive proclivities for control and exploitation of other creatures, we also turn upon ourselves.

 

Cuckoos in the nest

Then we have those troublesome hallowed beliefs that arrived cloaked as genuine bestowals, when in fact they are no more than ‘hand-me-down,’ theological superstitions, whose substance in reality, is no more than hearsay and Chinese whispers. 

These superstitions have also infiltrated most aspects of social interactivity. They place regressive constraints upon democratic process, whereby civil regulatory decision-making within institutions in many cultures are primarily, skewed towards theocratic considerations. This distort is also prevalent to varying degrees in the decision making of all secular administrations. It indeed beggars the words ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’, that our 21st century world is still awash with these Middle Age style theological superstitions. These beliefs are not real, they are nothing more than a display of our primitive, regressive aspects whose effects infest the better possibilities of our kind with injustice, friction and conflict.

 

Religion has many faces

What is going on? Why is mankind such a gullible escapist, always dodging around life’s harsher realities? To that end, we have inflated