So what is the average world citizen to do against the heart of darkness?

You have to be willing to sacrifice some of your innocence in order to remain open to believing that humanity’s dark side knows no bound, and that where the conditions for evil exist, it will inevitably occur. Like an open wound becoming infected, the body politic is always vulnerable to the temptations and dark desires of those given power without an equal degree of accountability.

That sort of morally compromising position can exist anywhere, at any level of society. It can be as simple as a single parent abusing their child with nobody around to witness it, or as complex as as entire world governments being beholden to the rich and powerful because they have accepted so much cash and favours from them.

Thus is our human instinct for reciprocity, the desire to do good things for people who have done good things to us, twisted to serve the amoral desires of the rich and powerful.

Luckily, most of this sacrifice of innocence has been done for us. It was not an easy task and the job is not yet completely, but we have all had to learn about things like domestic abuse, genocide, people who prey on children, wretched poverty, and dozens of other ways in which life is nothing like the Ozzie and Harriet worldview that now seems hopelessly childish.

We are an older but wiser people in today’s world.

Along with the willingness to sacrifice a portion of one’s innocence, the darkness also requires a dedication to tight vigilance of those who wish to fight it. We must be able to direct our attention to those in power and let them know that they are being watched and no longer operate under a cloak of darkness.

Keeping our eyes on those in power is not easy. The first thing anyone does with power is use it to make sure they get to keep their power, and that inevitably leads to hiding what they do from all prying eyes, including those of the people who are explicitly tasked with keeping them in line. Power, as we all know, goes to people’s heads, and people who were perfectly normal citizens before they got power can turn into paranoid tyrants in a shockingly short amount of time.

They have power, and thus, the means to hide what they do with it. But we the people have time, patience, intelligence, and most of all, numbers.

It doesn’t take a huge percentage of us to track everything those in power do. And there are many ways to deduce what is not explicitly revealed. If we are willing to tear ourselves away from all the wondrous distractions the corporate world has provided for us to fixate upon and just spare a little time to scrutinize those in power who are NOT celebrities, we could bring much needed accountability to the power structures of the world.

And then, there is the issue of whistleblowers.

The world desperately needs whistleblowers. A lot of times, it is only those people on the inside who are willing to, in effect, defect to the outside world who can take down large and well organized evil. Often it is only those inside the operation but considered too unimportant to bother keeping secrets from who are in a position to take the giant down from the inside.

But I do not claim that becoming a whistleblower is easy. This is why there are so few of them. Often, it means sacrificing your entire current life, including your financial stability and your safety, just to speak up for a moral principle. It means leaving behind the world you knew and entering a colder, harsher, more anxious one where people in power are using every means at their disposal to discredit, degrade, and destroy you. You have to be willing to turn on all your co-workers and your boss, not to mention the organization that has been paying you for however many years. You have to be willing to shoot your arrow at the giant’s eyes, and flee before he falls, leaving everyone else you know at work to their own devices.

None of that is easy, especially if you have obligations outside yourself, like a spouse, children, elderly grandparents,and so forth and so on. Sure, you might find the corruption and abuse you see all around you intolerable, but what about them? What right to you have to disrupt their lives?

The only solution to this that I can see is if someone with wealth and power of their own takes up the cause of protecting and supporting the brave whistleblowers who are willing to step out into the cold. Someone with enough power of their own to face down all the other rich and powerful people who want the whistleblower’s head on a platter and will call them a class traitor to their face for sheltering them.

So in a way, the rich person must become a whistleblower themselves.

We can bring accountability to these out of control moral imbeciles who we have somehow allowed to access the lever of power, but it will cost us. It will cost us our time, our addicting distractions, our attention, our lifestyles, and maybe even our jobs.

But we are legion, and they are a tiny minority who only wield the power they do because the systems to keep them in check have been allowed by weak and corrupt leadership to be eroded away to nothing.

We the people are still in charge, if only we unite against them. No regime in history has ever been able to stay in power if the people unite against them in sufficient numbers. The politicians and governments of the world need to be told, in no uncertain terms, that they can only survive if they rein in the rich and power and restore law and order to the top income tier.

Only then will we take back our democracy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s blog entry was inspired by this brutally revealing GQ article. It does not make for light and pleasant reading, but I ask you to read it anyway, because it is only by understanding and acknowledging that things like this can and do happen that we can find the way and the will to stop them.

The gist is that men get raped in the military too. And unsurprisingly, men are far, far less likely to report it than women, and women aren’t exactly eager to do so either. Men are ganged up on, brutally raped, told that they will be killed if they speak a word of it to anyone, and if they do try to report it, they are met with a system that is perfectly willing to slap them with a mental illness label and give them a dishonorable discharge, thus wrecking the victim’s lives forever. And because their discharge is a dishonorable one, they cannot even get help from the VA. It is a most perfect hell.

This saddens me but does not surprise me. Absolutely anywhere there is unchecked power and insufficient scrutiny, especially in a highly charged, testosterone laden atmopshere, the darkness within men’s souls will rise and corruption of the worst possible kid will creep in, take hold, then take over.

And it is always the same kinds of evils. When power can use its power to protect itself from accountability, you always get the same evils of power, sex, and greed – the reptile takes over from the monkey.

But it not just the people with power who do these evil deeds that are to blame. They are merely the active component of a system far bigger than their little spiderwebs, and that system protects them not because it approves of their actions, but because people prefer to believe that these things do not happen.

Here’s how that works :

Suppose you are a child psychologist in the 1970’s. A very troubled patient of yours, an eight year old girl, has just tearfully told you that her father routinely and brutally sexually abuses her. What do you do?

From the point of view of the here and now, this is an easy question. You counsel the girl, report her father to Social Services and local police, Dad goes to jail, end of story.

But from the point of view of that child psychologist, the world has just split in two and he has a choice to face.

He could accept that what the girl is saying is true, and have his entire world view shattered. He would have to accept that this sort of thing really does happen and that would change everything he thought he knew about love, family, innocence, and the nature of evil. He would have to live the rest of his life in a much harsher, colder, crueler world, and sacrifice his entire sense of security and safety.

Or, he could call her a liar, get her out of his office, and go back to the world he lived in before that awful little girl opened her mouth and said those awful things. The steel shutters of total denial go down in his mind, he tells himself “it can’t be true. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen.”, and goes back to his life, never thinking about it again and going back to his more “normal” clients, of whom he has plenty.

We know which of those choices is right. But we also know which one is easier, and therefore which one he is most likely to choose. He’s only human, after all.

And that’s how evil grows.

If you want to get away with evil, simply do the unthinkable. Commit crimes so unspeakable that people do not want to think that kind of thing happens at all. If you do this, you will enlist a powerful ally called denial. Good, decent, wholesome people who are kind and benevolent and good citizens will commit profound crimes of negligence and heartlessness by turning away your victims, or even attack your victim themselves, simply because they want to preserve their candy-colored world view, where such things simply don’t happen.

That is why the world will always need those of us who are willing to go directly into the very heart of darkness in order to learn what is there and how to stop it. It needs those of us who are willing to give up all our illusions of comfort and safety in order to find the evil that lurks within the heart of humanity, and by exposure, destroy it.

People like myself, who are willing to think and ask questions like… exactly how does a rape gang organize itself? It’s not something you can advertise. Somehow, like-minded people find each other, and somehow the first time they find a victim and do the deed happens, and after that, they can do it again and again without ever mentioning it out loud. They just know what to expect will happen when they get together.

And in the case of men raping men, how much of a role does internalized homophobia play? It is clearly not about the sex. If the perpetrators were just looking for gay sex, they could have sex with one another.

But if they did that, there would be no way to deny to themselves that they are gay. Only by making the sex as violent, brutal, and most importantly dominating as possible can they reassure themselves that they are, as it were, the man in the relationship, and therefore not gay at all.

That would be at least a partial explanation of why, time and time again, when men have unchecked power over other men, the Abu Ghraib scenario repeats itself over and over and things always get more and more sexual.

If you want to know the true heart of darkness, that is it : the darkness in the hearts of humanity coupled will power using power to prevent accountability, and the public’s desire to maintain a happier worldview than reality will allow.

Now you understand why I am pro-surveillance.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.