You're Gonna Have To Serve Somebody

In order to sit atop the food chain, you must become a predator.  There are no two ways about it.  It doesn't matter the industry or discipline, if you want to reach the highest echelons of power and fame, then the price is nothing less than all you have.

And there is no greater price than integrity.  Once you have sold that, then you have nothing left to call you own.  If you have talent (can make the bosses rich), but are unwilling to sell your integrity, then you will be allowed 'success', meaning that you can feed your family and maybe buy a house and/or a car, but that is the limit of your rise.

One of the reasons I went into media was that I could work in any industry.  I could go anywhere, do anything and experience all that the world had to offer, because I had a skill that was necessary to every market...the ability to craft high-quality communications.  As a consequence, I have delved deep into the petroleum industry, the medical industry, the financial industry, the religion industry, and the entertainment industry.

I have put my hands deep inside a human body.  I have climbed to the bottom of oil tankers and played with ROVs.  I have sat in board rooms on Manhattan's lower east side with views of Hudson Bay.  I have worked side-by-side with household names.  In every case, the price is the same.

It always starts the same way.  You are given tastes of the top.  There are limo rides from JFK to the Meridien at the base of the Twin Towers.  There are private jets.  There are dinners for ten where the wine bill alone is $5,000, and there's more silverware at each place-setting than the average family owns altogether.

And then there's the parties.  Hot and cold running bimbos.  Horizonless pools overlooking LA.  Snack trays and punch bowls full of prescription and non-prescription drugs.  Orgy scenes that make anything in the film Caligula seem overly modest and sedate.  And should you require a brief respite, there's the Montana mountain home with a 12-person jacuzzi, maids and butlers, and beds pre-heated by the 'skin pillow' of your choice.

This sets the hook.  You get addicted to the lifestyle, not to mention anything else.  You don't move in the same world that 'normal' people do.  You don't stand in lines or fight for scraps.  You make the scraps.

But at some point, the Moment of Truth comes.  You are presented with the keys to the next level.  You have seen what is waiting.  You are ready to throw integrity to the wind to put your name on that mountain house or have the pilot's number on your speed dial.  You are hungry to make Maxim' in Paris your personal breakfast stop, where the Eggs Benedict is your Egg McMuffin at $53 a pop.

So as you stare at the bottom line and all the legalese blurs behind your daydream of fame and wealth, and you take pen in hand and start to initial the bottom corner of each page, somewhere in the back of your mind, a small, almost vanishing voice says, "But at what price this?"

At some level, you are aware of the photos and videos of the orgies and nights in the jacuzzi.  Somewhere there are photos of you playing strip pool with hookers and straws up your nose.  You know, even without verbalizing it, that the road back from this point will mean wading through your sins.  This time, though, it will involve all the wrong people seeing and judging those sins, even though everyone standing in judgement of you secretly wishes they had been there too.  And maybe that's why it gets so surreal.

What few people ever realize, though, are the connections between the severe emotional tragedies in your life and the contract sitting in front of you.  Whether the tragedies were created, or simply taken advantage of, they are used to control you.  They are milked for every drop of emotional anguish that can be inflicted on you.  At some point, most people will surrender thinking they have nothing else to lose.  They will develop personas that hide the vulnerable True Self from further harm and take over the public face of the individual.

The potent combination of desire and fear combine on the bottom line of that 50-page contract sitting in front of you.  You think to yourself, "If I sign this, not only will I have the good life, but the power to slay my personal dragons."

Ah, and the revenge.  Yes, the revenge lies at the bottom of everything.  With power and money, you can get back at all those who hurt you, who made you feel inadequate, ineffective and unconsequential.

With these powerful motivations, you hurriedly march through the contract to the last page, and there, shining like a beacon in the darkness, is a single line with your name neatly typed under it.  Just one more quick scribble and your bank account will swell, your power will increase, you will have it all at your fingertips.

Within seconds of signing, you realize you've lost it all.  You feel the profound loss of having traded your soul for paper.  Suddenly, all the people who were just fawning all over you begin to act as if you aren't there.  They have what they came for: your pound of flesh.  You know instinctively that the way back is far more treacherous than anything you braved to get here.

The vision of fame that you had moments before turns to sharks ripping the flesh off your bones.  You are now fodder for the masses and any sense of privacy and individuality have fled the scene.  You are left with only two choices: wield the sword you picked up, or fall on it.  In either case, someone must die for your choice.

It dawns on you that the reason people who have it all never look happy is because of what they lost to gain what they have.  For what does it profit a man that he should gain the world but lose his soul?  Everyone wants it until they have it.

Show me anyone who is rich and famous, and I will show you an empty vessel.
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Mens Rea

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HAL computer was given a set of secret knowledge and a mission based on it that required the computer to carry out its instructions at all costs.  The computer interpreted that mission to mean that nothing should be allowed to compromise the secret until the appointed time.  Thus, when the astronauts Bowman and Poole start to question the mission and the computer's ability to function, the computer takes the only logical action and eliminates the threat.

This is such a human experience.  How many individuals and organizations have chosen this path in order to keep hidden their secrets?  One could speculate that nearly every violent crime, war included, involves hiding something at some level.

I would venture to speculate that the western governments got derailed somewhere around WWII and the creation of the national security concept.  Over time, more and more information needed to be classified as secret in order to continue the obfuscation.  Ultimately, nearly everything becomes a national secret to the point that even within the organization, things must be hidden from the internal structure with no one individual having the true key to it all.

As time goes on, the threats begin to mount that the secrets will be exposed, and because of the mounting number of secrets, the price of exposure grows exponentially.  Consequently, the only logical conclusion is that all threats to exposure must be eliminated in order to perpetuate the secret.  In the end, there are armed drones, mercenary police, indefinite detention, torture, and mayhem with the true cause of it all being nearly lost in the noise.

What is even more concerning is that at this point in time, there seems to be a confluence of protective interests hiding a great many secrets, both from each other and from the public at large.  The banking and financial system has its secret agendas and manipulations that would cause its utter collapse if exposed.  Governments have amassed great gobs of secrets that would trash their existence.  Corporate interests have their secrets, and so on down the line.  In the end, they all begin to view each other and the rest of the world as threats to their exposure and must take the only logical step to prevent that from happening.

And even that step requires an ever escalating series of crimes, and the first murder becomes a secret that must be protected in its own right.  Then, as others begin to question and probe, they too must be eliminated to continue the cover-up.  It becomes an ever snowballing problem that demands ever increasing crimes to hide the original sin.

And so it is with our current global situation.  As secrets amassed under various cloaks of interest, it became necessary to commit ever greater crimes to maintain the status quo.  Ultimately, this is unsustainable, and that is the position we are in now.

On some levels, things like Fukushima and the BP Gulf fiasco can be explained as crimes to cover up other crimes which were covering up deep secrets.  How does one commit murder on a mass scale with plausible deniability.  Horrible freak accidents that poison the waters and atmosphere of entire hemispheres?  Not impossible, nor unthinkable.  Prince Phillip, the consort of the erstwhile Queen of England, has stated on record that he would like to be reincarnated as a virus that would wipe out a vast majority of humankind.  What kind of secrets must he be concealing that could generate a thought like that?

It stands to reason that the greater the secret, the more heinous the crime must be to hide it.  How many lives have been sacrificed to this point to conceal the hidden agendas in the Middle East?  How many people have died to prevent the revelation and proliferation of nuclear technology?  What terrible truths were behind the genocides of history?  How many people vanished to hide the dirty laundry of our so-called leaders?

Genghis Khan once said that every man must kill another to make room for himself in the world.  I am of the mind that any man in a position of power must have a great many secrets to hide, which drives him to greater seats of power to continue the ruse.

There are only two ways out of the trap of secrets.  One is to have everyone quit trying to expose them, and the other is to actually expose them.  History teaches us that when secrets are exposed, kingdoms crumble, yet it further teaches us that having secrets in the first place ultimately leads to the same fate.

Think of the great spiritual healing that would take place if the US government's treasure troves were laid open, or the Vatican's archives were made public, or the true originas of humanity were finally revealed.  Like a massive, festering boil on the butt of society being lanced, we could finally put to rest the secrets that have driven so much hatred, fear and death, and then proceed confidently into the future.

If all the mystery and intrigue behind the world's greatest secrets were laid open, think of the burden that would be removed from our collective conscience.  The Truth would indeed set us free in ways we can't even imagine, as we stand here inside the pus-filled mass we can modern society.

Perhaps that is the Great Trend of our times, the Great Tension, as well.  On the one hand, we have an entrenched elite willing to advance any plan that continues the Big Ruse.  On the other hand, the inevitable revelation of all that is hidden seems to be crushing down on their best laid plans.  Between them hangs the Rest of Us, whose fates are contingent upon who will win the battle of the Irresistible Force meeting the Immovable Object.

Perhaps the biggest decision we, as individuals, face is what sacrifice we are willing to make in order to clear the path for our species' survival?  When lancing a boil, there is a tremendous amount of voluntary suffering that must be endured in order to achieve the long-term benefit of relief and health.  Are we willing to endure the short-term exteme discomfort of draining the infection?  Or do we perceive the on-going, though slightly less intense pain of status quo more to our liking?

One bit of rather odd Biblical advise comes to us from the New Testament, where Jesus admonishes his listerners: if your eye offends you, pluck it out; if your right hand sins against you, cut it off and throw it away.  Though rather graphic, there is some great truth in there.  Allowing an infection to continue unabated leads ultimately to the demise of the organism.  By allowing our cultural and societal institutions to persist in secrets and cover-ups will ultimately be the end of all we know.

Benjamin Franklin rightly pointed out that we have nothing to hide if we live lives of integrity.  It is time that we demand this of our institutions, in order that we may heal our civilization and continue to grow.

But we must also demand it of ourselves.  If we practice right thinking and right action, then we will perceive the world clearly.  If we perceive clearly, then we will not be fooled by wizards and charlatans.  If we are not fooled, then fools can not lead us.  As Buddha and so many other great thinkers have pointed out, clearing our public sphere begins with cleaning our own.  Our personal integrity and actions ripple into the greater collective.  If we as individuals are sane, then our public life must also follow.

The real meaning of the unfinished pyramid is the individual.  We are, as unique creatures, the penultimate result of Creation.  It is we who must guard our thoughts and actions, and discipline our hearts and souls, so that we are not taken in by sweet smelling trickeries, but rather demand of our culture those things that we demand of ourselves.

What we have now is nothing more or less than what we are as individuals.  Our institutions are a reflection of each individual member of them.  To begin cleaning up our mess, we must start in our own rooms and work outward.  In the quest for secrets revealed, we must be the first, so that we can clearly demand the same of those who would lead and serve us.  As goes the Master, so goes the servant.

One other bit of wisdom that both Buddha and Jesus mentioned: you can not practice to remove the cinder from your brother's eye, when you can not see the plank in your own.  We must be what we demand in others.  And we must achieve it soon.

Otherwise we are all doomed to become cannibalistic zombies, or worse.  If we want civility, we must first be civil.