Who Am I?
May 22, 2023
I read George Orwell's books 1984 and Animal Farm as a teenager in the mid-sixties. I thought Orwell's predictions about society and its evolution were farfetched fantasies and too many years into the future. But I was wrong.
Orwell's book 1984 was published in 1949. This means that Orwell's predictions were to occur only thirty-four years from the book's publication. Thirty-four years is not long in the big scheme of things. And what has happened? The world has changed, and much of the change has been as Orwell predicted and in the period he outlined.
1. Just as in the book, Big Brother listens to us and watches us right in our homes and everywhere there is a camera. Indeed we all have a screen on our phones that feeds us information based on likes and preferences we voluntarily give to the economic lords.
2. In the book 1984, “Newspeak” was managed news that fed the people what the authorities wanted them to hear and kept from them what they didn't want them to hear. That goes on today not by the government but by groups who pay specific networks for designer news for targeted audiences.
3. Perpetual War - the reliance on having a war all the time for economic gain and to distract the ordinary people from realizing their own power.
4. Opium of the masses - this opium is not religion. The authority (Big Brother) regularly infuses people with food, alcohol, the lottery and pornography. The disadvantaged people became addicted, becoming the walking dead. Being narcotized, they never revolted against injustice and therefore were under control. Today, in the name of freedom, society popularizes and advertises everything that dulls us to reality. Those in economic and political power control uninformed masses and take advantage of them.
5. Totalitarianism in the form of Big Brother. Morning Consult Polling found that 26% (2021) of the U.S. population qualified as highly authoritarian and would favor a government that was authoritarian (dictatorship).
6. In the book 1984, there were big screens that recognized people's faces. These days this is facial recognition. And in the book, there is the Versificator, which produces music and literature in line with ruling party standards, without human input. Essentially, its content is created by artificial intelligence.
7. In the book 1984, Orwell wrote: "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." Today we hear this all this time.
I now see what my teenage brain could not: that the world is constantly changing and that unexpected changes can happen overnight. But what does all this have to do with consciousness and the study of the Enneagram? The things above (and many more from 1984 that I did not list), would not occur if there had been a critical mass of consciousness among the citizenry.
Only through consciousness-raising will our souls take charge of our beings and the collective. If our souls do not become conscious, sick individual and collective egos will rule, and the egos of the masses will be sleepwalking.
Inquiry: For what reasons is consciousness necessary for the survival of humanity and the planet?
Dear God,
Awaken us daily to more of your truth and to the world we may have if we continue to seek that truth. Amen.
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