At
birth, a child's nakedness is a joy to behold with its totally open,
mind, and emotions. We celebrate it, photograph it, and parade it to
friends and family. In the next 5-7 years, parents shock it with a
shockingly opposite guidance as their bodies start to take shape. They
then suddenly tell them to hide and be embarrassed by their physical
nakedness to the extend they often cause the children to abhor the
bodies of the opposite sex. How often we hear a child's "yuk" when
confronted with a thought about the physicality of the opposite sex; an
example of harmful nurturing, not nature.
Then through their teens, they are further guided to hide the nakedness of their pure thoughts with a "more appropriate" mind set that hides their sentiments lest they reduce their chances of success and lose their "edge" over their peers which are then to be treated as opponents to step over and beyond.
By their twenties, most young adults finally lose their emotional nakedness due to their having had little or no training in emotional interaction in the classroom of the increasingly dysfunctional family unit where emotions are taught to be a handicap to be repressed or sublimated into alternatives such as hardheartedness, cool emptiness, aggression and to avoid the "baring of souls" at any cost.
Having suffered through their schools of higher rearing, a majority of graduates leave with the belief that their chosen roles in life need to become their true selves and any remnants of their naked selves that remain will somehow be safely masked by the purple robes of social conformity and acceptance - not unlike the emperor's new clothes. Most have lost all awareness of their naked selves and choose to perceive any such lines of thought as nothing more than chimeras of childhood detritus.
Those with a few years under their belt should well remember how often Suzy Homemaker or John Di Breadwinner, if in a conversation that accidentally strayed into the realms of one's naked self, would pause as a brief flash of mental consternation glinting their eyes, then feign surprise, and say, "Oh, dear! Would you look at the time. Would you like another coffee before you go?"
Whether people choose to believe it or not, we are all in very close communications via the back channels of our naked selves. Our sub-lingual messaging, body language, voice patterns, body scents, and pheromones all speak in a highly expressive language that is far more complex and powerful than words alone. With that in mind, politics might be defined as speaking in words amidst a torrent of naked communications that are quite different and cannot be acknowledged or referenced in any overt way.
However,
be they naturally or unknowingly naked, their most intimate selves are
prey to the rapidly evolving, nefarious, and sociopathic constructs that
are misleadingly termed "instant communication" and "social media".
Like potently addictive drugs, they are enjoyable to use, hard to stay
away from, and contain little or no long term value. Combining instant
gratification, anonymity, 24/7 availability, global reach, and access to
absolutely anything anyone ever wanted to read, view, or fantasize
about, there is little to guide one's path.
However,
the very attributes that make faux-social platforms so enticing and
hard to avoid - especially when so many have succumbed to them - are
also infinitely more efficient as machines of crime and war. Just as you
can now connect with any of the billions who are connected to the
Internet, any one of those billions can connect to you and/or attempt to
violate your persona, hijack your identity, and steal your private
files, photos, data, and bank information. OK. So now imagine that
same capability of immediate access being utilized by millions of
sociopaths to attack your very essence. This is worse than rape which
is limited to your physical person. This "irape" is the raping of one's
your personal information, identity, and internal self. In most
explicit terms, it is not unlike being repeatedly gang raped by
invisible attackers from all over the globe while you are in a a state
of unawareness. How did this all come to be? Though not a new phenomenon, it has meteorically accelerated from the start of the 21st century due to the onslaught of instant electronic communications and the ability to instantly find, collate, and evaluate unlimited data about ourselves by stalking our lives on the outmoded internet which has absolutely no security whatsoever.
Email, text messages, and most other forms of communication are completely “in the clear” as we say in the military, meaning un-encrypted and openly readable by anyone. Any tech person in the companies that operate your services has total access to everything you put there - your emails, texts, family photos, documents, medical or legal notes, passwords, embarrassing moments, and/or items related to nudity, sex, or other enjoyable pastimes.
After centuries of democratization and our last tangible advancement of enlightenment circa 1950 to 1970, the societal impetus supporting that movement withered to a shadow of its former self. Hitherto, we enjoyed an expanding appreciation of our naked mind, bodies, and spirit which, in turn, distributed joy across large swaths of the population.
However, that trend toward naked truth and exposure reversed course and we began to add back our self-perceived layers of protection in the form of denial, distraction, and social superficiality. Though naked as ever, everyone began to see themselves back in the emperor’s court, deluded with visions of being covered in purple robes and a future wealth while the other members of the court living the same delusion plotted and conspired how to make a profit off of them.
When the emperor’s glass house syndrome takes effect, no one dares think of the fact that everyone around them is also naked and exposed for that would mean they were, too! So, rampant obfuscation, the careful maintenance of façades, and self-delusion became futile tools in the secreting of true motives. This mass stupification became a necessary tool for the denial of the shame of selfish and abusive actions needed to take more from others while giving nothing substantive in return.
One of the harbingers of the fall from grace of the “nobility of social cause” began to appear in the late 1980’s when it became socially popular to promote “priority of self”. Over the next 2 decades, the mainstream’s rediscovery of the easy rewards of selfishness reached a pitch reminiscent of the roaring 20’s despite major market drops in 1973, 1987, 2008 and the prophetic release of the movie “Wall Street” in which actor Michael Douglass immortalized the phrase, “Greed is good”.
With that much wind in the sails of egoism, “Who can I love” became “Who can I profit from”. “Who can I help” became “Who can I make a profit from”. “How can I better the world” changed to “how can I profit from the misfortune of others”. After all, they say we are a “free market society”. It is our right to take as much as we can. That’s good business as a few minutes of any business news will attest to.
Things got a bit worse in the decades after 1990, as hopes for further social evolution were quashed by the blatant events of:
- corruption of the US Supreme Court by corporations and groups
- legalization of entitlements for corporations and the rich
- legislating corporations to have the same rights as people
- rewriting history while the ignorati dawdled in their cultivated delusions
- acceptance of public sedition by political parties without sanction or penalty
- redefinition American creed "for, of, and by the people” to "for business and a free market”
- accepting acts of overt treason, obstructing justice, and flagrant racism
- resurrection of a feudal class system that indentures the poor and rewards the rich
If that weren’t enough, the onslaught of the instantaneity of electronic communications, email, texting, and the use of social media sites subjects us to far more advanced forms of violation by leveraging their computerized access to our most intimate aspects – our naked selves. That malfeasance is further advanced by the unbridled social pressure to engage via media sites from thousands of unknown "friends" who became so by the intended or inadvertent click of a button.
That
was the beginning of a pseudo social tsunami that proliferated and
increased the efficacy of anonymous con artists, click through malware,
phishing sites that impersonate valid ones to steal your codes, keyboard
loggers to record your activity, remote webcam access to view your
intimate moments, account theft, data mining, and your enticed
engagement with ubiquitous faux-social media (called then irape for
info-rape) sites that unabashedly record and harvest your choices,
location, pictures, habits and routines; selling it all to partners in
crime such as Apple, Coca Cola, Pfizer, et al.
E.g, such nefarious activity is one of F*Book's publicly recorded largest income streams. If that weren’t enough, such sites intentionally create environments whose default behavior is to share your data. More than that, shared or not, their license agreements give them the rights to your data. Even worse, shared or not, all of your data is now collected, packaged, analyzed and the results sold to others. The practice is so widespread that there is a huge 3rd party market of data brokers that maximize the distribution of information. At the very least, they sell your supposedly anonymous personal profile but with so many data points, it's a click away to identify you specifically.
E.g, such nefarious activity is one of F*Book's publicly recorded largest income streams. If that weren’t enough, such sites intentionally create environments whose default behavior is to share your data. More than that, shared or not, their license agreements give them the rights to your data. Even worse, shared or not, all of your data is now collected, packaged, analyzed and the results sold to others. The practice is so widespread that there is a huge 3rd party market of data brokers that maximize the distribution of information. At the very least, they sell your supposedly anonymous personal profile but with so many data points, it's a click away to identify you specifically.
These sites purport to give you the option to disable sharing of various kinds (“opting out”) but it is impossible to know what they automatically had you “opted in” when you opened an account. No matter what you set, they still profile you and sell the result. It can only be through ignorance and greed that such behavior isn’t patently illegal and their CEO’s aren’t in prison by now.
A federal mandate needs to force sites to guarantee the default for any new account is absolute and total privacy without any profiling of any kind. Thereafter, each and every sharing option needs to be with a clear pop up confirmation and warning that it could cause loss of privacy and identity theft, like the warnings on cigarettes. Further, that every screen needs a button that lists each and every thing that is being collected and/or shared and who, by name, is sharing the data they collect.
Last, but not least, the owners of the service need to encrypt all information so that no one, not even the chief officer of their servers farm or highest IQ techie in the back room, can access user information, files or communication! Failure to comply should be a federal offense punishable by imprisonment. After all, in cases of home invasion or rape, most would bless the shooting of the perpetrator. Yet, those that steal and sell the deepest essence of our being are rewarded by being made billionaires.
Is there any hope?
By now, you should have surmised the use of “nakedness” in this context is not simply being without clothing but, more so, our naturally naked states of mind, desire, habits, and life choices - our deepest essences - and the sanctified rape and abuse thereof in the name of Profit! Is this any different than decades ago? Not really. It's just that the process is infinitely faster, deeper, more efficient and accurate. Automated mass crime!
Your thoughts, movements, actions, prose, and your social and physical intercourse reveal your naked self. Try as you may to keep them hidden, nothing can cover your naked self when cavorting in the gutters of social media. We are all naked and always have been. Despite the simplicity and commonality of our naked selves, modern civilization has evolved to avoid their acknowledgement at any cost. So, on one hand, we walk naked in a dark cage with vipers in every corner and, on the other, we try to hide everything including that which is obvious to others, let alone private and intimate. It is a complex and risky scenario in that one’s actions to avoid the nefarious needs to be measured and thoughtful so as not to destroy our most valuable possession, our naked selves.
One
of the most important and effective defenses we had against the abuse
of our natural selves is that early lessons learned from good parentage
or through accidental discovery – that which goes around, comes around.
Unfortunately, the transfer of basic Karmic knowledge has long been on
the decrease since its last peak in the mid 20th century when we were
happy to learn and expand our understanding that we are all truly one.
The human race and the fragile ecosystem we live in depend on this. It
is simple logic that, as we live longer, produce more babies, take more
for ourselves, and cripple the ecosystems that produce that which we
take, there is only one tragic outcome.
One would think this was all incredibly obvious to anyone with minimal brain power but the strength of our fears knows no bounds. The worse things get, the more humans tend to forget the Golden Rule in the hopes of taking more for themselves before others get a chance to take what’s left. As vile and deadly as that is, it at least proves those who are doing the taking and espousing an endless future in which we can all be as rich as they are, in naked truth, are aware enough to know resources are running out and hence their increased desire to take yet more. It’s a deadly, downward spiral that can be depressing to watch.
One would think this was all incredibly obvious to anyone with minimal brain power but the strength of our fears knows no bounds. The worse things get, the more humans tend to forget the Golden Rule in the hopes of taking more for themselves before others get a chance to take what’s left. As vile and deadly as that is, it at least proves those who are doing the taking and espousing an endless future in which we can all be as rich as they are, in naked truth, are aware enough to know resources are running out and hence their increased desire to take yet more. It’s a deadly, downward spiral that can be depressing to watch.
Nor
does it take much intelligence to understand that, since we are the
ones that created this scenario by our own actions, changing our actions
will produce a different result. As such, it boggles the mind to see
humans who have had the wherewithal to reach positions of prominence
proselytizing totally irrational and opposite points of view that have
no grounds in reality.
It is at such points in a civilization’s life cycle that interesting things begin to happen. To wit: If you get enough people to suspend their logic, band together, and appeal to the ignorant senseless child in themselves, they can turn the unhappy state of affairs that their own ignorance produced into something to rail against and purport the cause of such affairs to be anything but themselves. In that newfound belief of the irrational, they find a camaraderie of false faith and hope which further deepens the insanity.
I wish this was a philosophical debate but, alas, events since year 2000 have undeniably validated this sociological effect. One example is how the greed of the so-called “developed nations” have essentially raped the ecosystem and, in the process, the rest of the world’s people, leaving them wide open to the sirens call take arms against everyone else. At the most fundamental level of ignorance, this makes as much sense as a baby who wildly cries for attention and eventually gets it. Unfortunately, in this case, there will soon be nothing left to get!
Just as certainly as our debilitating actions have produced this result, any mitigating or countering actions will have the opposite ameliorating effect – providing there are any resources left to salvage. This is basic logic, people. All things, all actions, and all solutions always start with a single action by a single person.
So, what are we to do?
It is at such points in a civilization’s life cycle that interesting things begin to happen. To wit: If you get enough people to suspend their logic, band together, and appeal to the ignorant senseless child in themselves, they can turn the unhappy state of affairs that their own ignorance produced into something to rail against and purport the cause of such affairs to be anything but themselves. In that newfound belief of the irrational, they find a camaraderie of false faith and hope which further deepens the insanity.
I wish this was a philosophical debate but, alas, events since year 2000 have undeniably validated this sociological effect. One example is how the greed of the so-called “developed nations” have essentially raped the ecosystem and, in the process, the rest of the world’s people, leaving them wide open to the sirens call take arms against everyone else. At the most fundamental level of ignorance, this makes as much sense as a baby who wildly cries for attention and eventually gets it. Unfortunately, in this case, there will soon be nothing left to get!
Just as certainly as our debilitating actions have produced this result, any mitigating or countering actions will have the opposite ameliorating effect – providing there are any resources left to salvage. This is basic logic, people. All things, all actions, and all solutions always start with a single action by a single person.
So, what are we to do?
We need to start by recognizing and acknowledging the obvious:
- We are only on this earth an average of 70-90 years and rarely a decade more.
- We are all totally naked no matter how many purple robes we wear.
- Each of us is a burden to our ecosystem with a responsibility to atone for that.
- Human existence and its ecosystem are measurably finite and diminishing.
- Unbridled consumption and pollution destroys and reduces our finite resources.
- More births than deaths results in more humans fighting for less resources.
- There is no profit to life. Anything we take simply reduces what’s left for others.
- Negative actions hurt ourselves, the ecosystem and injure future generations.
- Failure to communicate and support these tenets fosters anarchy and terrorism
So we have a few choices:
- Suspend
logic; ignore reality; eschew basic math; pretend finite means
infinite; scratch our way to climb over others; gang rape Mother Earth;
and pretend no one sees the naked truth as we march together, yelling
our discontent while destroying, taking, burning, and killing, without
concern for the end of humanity as we know it.
- Suffer the short-lived chill of diving naked into the waters of truth; open our eyes to a myriad revelations; appreciate and support the same fragile nakedness of everyone else swimming with us; relish the identification and acknowledgement of our shortcomings – helping each other to minimize or eliminate them; acknowledge that from birth we are all a burden to Mother Earth and make that awareness the foundation of our responsible stewardship of her well being; enjoy the increasing happiness, love, and calm that such efforts invariably produce; and truly “make the world a better place!” for us, future generations, and Mother Earth herself.