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.