Echoes in the Desert: The Awakening of Individuality

By Cornelius G. Wiseman

“If we want to know where we go, we must first know where we are coming from”
“Genuine democracy is not about options and free will. It is about awareness. It is about being aware. “
“I am not creating a new ideology. I simply invite you to observe the Nature as it is, without prejudices, aware and deep.”
‘‘The basic instincts and energies connected to them cannot make the object of any evolution process. Feeding, defending and reproduction are done by any living creature. Human means something above and beyond that. Evolution and civilization is whatever instinct isn’t.’’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Oct 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781984592163

Cornelius G. Wiseman

Born and raised în Eastern Europe, în Romania, I left my country when i was very young, to experience the World, to live and to understand life. Being influenced by western traditions and culture, i turned my gaze towards Eastern traditions too, and so I can look to the world from a different perspective. I want to share to the world my views and my ideas, hoping that I will change something in the human mind.

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Copyright © 2019 by Cornelius G. Wiseman.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-9845-9217-0

                eBook            978-1-9845-9216-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date:  10/15/2019

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CONTENTS

Preface

Meaning of the Individual and the Crowd

Keywords or Concepts

The Irony of the Story

The Emotions Are a Sentinel and a Catalyser of the Mind

Crowd Making

Kardashev’s Theory

Doing Business

Currency and Blood: Similarities

Mentality

Psychological Mechanism

Warfare: Next Level

Family

Psychology of the Masses

Ideologies and Their Failure

Democracy

Europe

Animals and Nature

Discipline

Food

Taxes

Empires, Kingdoms, and Rulers

Sexuality

Addiction

Religions: The Eternal Debate

Artificial Intelligence

How Should the Future Be Set Up to Sustain Human Society?

Civilisation of the Future

Happiness

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PREFACE

We are living years of tribulation and suffering. Our present is rooted in our past. To step forward we need to understand the lessons of history. To achieve a safer future we must make a change now, in this very moment. Not to hide the dirt under the carpet or to paint the old building, but to rebuild it from the foundation, according to our present needs. What will our children inherit from us? A world of suffering, of pain and insecurity? I am optimistic that out of this age of tribulation, the humanity will be able to wake up from the deep sleep of death and ignorance. I blur waters the pearls grow. Pain and suffering and disappointment are the great teachers of humanity which will shake us to achieve awareness and wisdom.

We lived as crowd and we forgot to be individual. We are taught that life is a fight, that life is a struggle and a competition and we are totally forgot to be ourselves, to be individual and this is the main cause of all our suffering.

We entrusted for too long in governments and authorities and they failed to offer us safety and well-being. There is no single pill for all the diseases. There is no global solution for local and individual problems. Our life and our happiness lie only in our hands, it is our choice. We alone can choose to be free and happy or to be enslaved and unhappy. We destroyed our planet and nature making a hell out of them, but we still dreaming with open eyes to a promised paradise, which never comes.

Wake up now, my dear friend! Be happy! Be free! Be yourself!

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MEANING OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE CROWD

Since the first steps were taken by human beings on this planet, human communities have been organised in a manner which provides well-being, protection, and all the means of survival to all their members. And this is the case not only with humans but also with many other living beings such as mammals, birds, fishes, and insects. The common effort to gather food, to protect, and to reproduce is better than any single effort. Our nature contains these impulses from the beginning, and the impulses manifest in these directions through laws and tendencies.

Human society evolved in this natural way up to a point. After that point, individual interests arose and came to change the shape of many communities of people. There came leaders, kings, and emperors and, in recent history, governments and political parties. Humanity has experienced how ideologies and religions have an impact on daily life to the point of destruction, massacre of entire groups of people, and a great deal of pain and suffering. Why all this? What lies deep inside every ideology or religious concept that the practice of the idea proves the opposite? No one preaches about war, hatred (with a few exceptions), or suffering but about the opposite. What do we have now—what we have had for centuries? We have campaigns of blood, disasters, fires, and screaming for justice. Who knows how many times in history civilisations have disappeared in a tragic way.

All religions and ideologies are trying in a way to bring about social order, a sort of peace, and a painkiller for suffering. The failure of a newly implemented religion or ideology is visible after few generations, and sometimes the scars shows that the wounds are very deep. Obviously, the impact on the consciousness has been deep each time for contemporary generations, but after that the religion or ideology become tradition. These traditions and ideologies were spoiled by the passing of time and sometimes brought about a destructive outcome or at least lost their initial fragrance. This is natural because change is a tendency of nature; nothing remains the same.

We must try to understand why we came to be in this situation, how we have come to the edge of chaos, and why as a human society we are under threat of extinction. But to understand this, we must look at it from a different angle, not from the angle we’ve been looking at it for centuries.

What is common to all the social forms throughout history? The answer is the attitude of looking at human beings as crowd, as masses of people, to the detriment of the individual. Monarchies, democracies or republics, and states or governments since time immemorial up to today have used this approach to control people. Crowds are easily controlled and led in a specific direction.

If a certain ideology is applied, the crowd is guided to the desired direction. But desired by whom? Who is this Mister Who?

Obviously Mister Who is one man or one group of people with a personal interest in achieving something specific. This achievement requires intelligence and power. Intelligence comes from this Mister Who or from the group interested in the particular outcome, but the power comes without exception from the crowd. The individual is a force—each person is oriented in a different way. A society of individuals cannot be directed in a certain way unless all the different vectors (individuals) are aligned in a single direction. But that means the destruction of individuality. The crowd is the destruction of the individual.

Let’s compare it with the ocean. The ocean is the assembly of many drops of water. The drops of water are the individuals. The waves move in all directions as a natural phenomenon. There is balance, there is existence, and there is preservation. But when all the forces are directed at the same time in the same direction, then we have a catastrophic tsunami.

We humans can be either individuals or crowds because we have an open and infinite nature. We can be simply everything. A certain concept or ideology is enough to amass us into a crowd. Wolves live either in packs or in families depending on the situation. If there is lack of food, they gather together and organise themselves hierarchically to find and get food. When the need for food is fulfilled, they split off and become families. What does this mean? Crisis or balance.

The Two Aspects of Existence Cannot Coexist at the Same Time

Balance is natural and is longer term in comparison to crisis. A crisis arises when change is necessary. When resources are decreasing, when certain forces disappear from the system or change their direction, the necessity of making a shift increases until a critical point is reached. And we can name that point critical because there is no way back, and it triggers an entirely natural mechanism. The outcome is always beyond our control.

After the crisis, there is a period of regeneration and reshaping. The opportunists use this period to assign their own direction. Only during this period people are vulnerable and can be easily exploited. A balanced society is not easily disturbed or changed. It is not easy to lead or redirect it such a society. It protects itself naturally because all the systems are self-protecting.

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KEYWORDS OR CONCEPTS

Throughout history, Mister Who (whom I define as a person who cunningly sees personal interests as being higher than common interests) has done his work successfully in one single way: by destroying individuality and building crowds instead. All societies without exception, whether kingdoms or empires, republics, communist or capitalist societies, political parties, or religious groups, have tried to change human instinct from being oriented towards the individual to being oriented towards the crowd. This is absolutely immoral. We can say it is a crime against nature and the human race. Such as attempt always has tragic consequences.

We hear and use the word discipline very often, on a daily basis. What actually is the meaning of discipline? To compel individuals to become a crowd, to be directed in a single direction with a central goal. This is quite normal and necessary if we are facing danger and/or when there is a crisis. An army goes to war to defend the homeland, at which time discipline is a must. But if there is peace and quiet, where is the need for an army or discipline?

We also hear or frequently use the word strategy. This word comes from the Greek stratos (Στρατος), which means army. A strategy is also a way of shifting the individual towards the crowd. This is necessary if a crisis arises, but if there is peace, what is the meaning of a crowd? An economic strategy leads us to the idea of imposing some products or services upon some marketplace (also upon crowd-becoming individuals) by using different kinds of forces. Most of the time these forces are aggressive, especially psychologically. Then there are violations of the laws of human nature and a rape of the subconscious. The market principle should be used to meet people’s needs and not to sell by force, at any price, refrigerators to Eskimos.

Obviously, the shifts in the history have occurred at critical points when the old principles ceased working. The Roman Empire was in its time the biggest empire that had ever existed, and it was achieved by way of the sword. But to maintain the integrity of an empire is much harder than to build one. With the Roman Empire under threat of disintegration, it adopted the Christian religion across all its lands. This was a very intelligent move, and at the time it was also original. The ruling forces moved into the shadows, and the energy needed to appease the masses was very small compared to the huge investment required to engage in warfare and maintain an army.

In order to produce this shift, people worked very hard to create an ideology capable of ruling over people’s subconscious, to destroy the individual, and to reshape individuals into a crowd. The idea of self-sacrifice for the good of society (church) was often highlighted by the scriptures and sermons. Those who opposed the religion were often labelled as black sheep. Every person who tried to be different from the herd of sheep was burned alive, tortured, or hanged, or at least expelled from society, excommunicated, to serve as an example for others who in the future might attempt to remain individuals to the detriment of the crowd. This cruel attitude against the individual has been evident many times throughout history, whenever the few have attempted to take control of the many to satisfy their personal or ideological ambitions.

There is an urge for change, but at the same time, striving to keep the old patterns results in too much tension and, many times, unnecessary forces in the system, making this way to change a very painful process. The coming of the new is always painful. The birth of a baby is painful. The birth of a new society or of a new individual is likewise painful.

We fail to understand simple natural principles like this one, and we try to hide our failure under imaginary concepts such as good and evil (and to extend the idea, reward or punishment), with me or against me, religion and science, God and the Devil, and so on. This approach leads to polarity, to duality, to crowd-isation, and finally to conflicts. The individual is sacrificed on the altar of the crowd, destruction becomes certain, and pain becomes the background of the existence. And so the meaning of existence is lost. Happiness becomes an empty word, an unfulfilled dream, a sermon, and a promise of Mister Who, who cannot offer anything else in exchange for his lustful, greedy deeds.

It seems that the individual has no significance. We can see the result of devaluing the individual. We have believed for too long that the individual can be sacrificed for the sake of the community. This might happen sometimes to spare the whole, but such a case implies a kind of danger or an extreme situation. Because of survival instincts, it is necessary that the individual make a free, conscious choice to sacrifice herself in order to save the many. But what applies in extremis must not be seen as normal in normal circumstances. Every system manifests itself in a certain way while it is in balance, and it manifests itself in a totally different when it becomes unstable.

Let’s analyse what happens in our nature to understand these natural processes:

The mind needs safety, stability, a predictable future, clearly defined or comprehensible concepts, deeds, and things, and predictable situations or outcomes. Because of this, the mind builds the necessary situation, and because it is afraid of present or imaginary danger, it gathers together with others who are also afraid in a common effort to reject the threat. If the danger is real, then humans (and it is the same for many other creatures) gather in armies and are guided in war by a general, a king, or a leader of a different kind.

But what happens when the danger is not real but imaginary? Some greedy Mister Who will offer an invisible danger, either a threatening nation or an upcoming hell or Day of Judgement, and we name those people political leaders, spiritual leaders (prophets, sons, or messengers of God), or great philosophers or ideologists (such as we did with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Edward Bernays). This is nothing other than bondage and slavery.

Individuality is the opposite of this in a way, or maybe it is better to say that it is more than that. Creativity, freedom, experience or exploration, knowledge, happiness, and self-realisation can be known only by the individual. There is nothing that can replace the sense, the value, and the significance of the individual. Peace and balance are really experienced only by the individual, and the fact is that loneliness is currently shaping the personality at the utmost state of existence.

We can clearly define two aspects of existence, living and surviving. The individual gives life to the crowd, but the opposite is not possible. The crowd grants to the individual a kind of safety or social achievement, a state of survival, but not freedom. A crowd is essentially opposed to freedom. A crowd is a necessary state only for a short time and only for a specific purpose.

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THE IRONY OF THE STORY

Please observe the world around you! Too many things in our lives tend to make a crowd out of us. Political parties, unions, associations, the United States, the United Kingdom, United Europe, the United Arab Emirates, the United Nations, unity in diversity, globalisation, corporations, marketplaces, the G8, the G20, forums and summits, different alliances, NATO, and different religions and sects are examples of people losing their individuality to join others instead. No matter how honest or great any particular crowd sounds, the fact is that we are giving up our individuality. We are surrendering ourselves to wear colours that are not ours and accepting an ideology and taking action which finally does not represent our personal interests. Neither does it bring us even a drop of happiness or any real benefit. Ultimately any mass of people is only about one single thing: money.

What does all this mean? Somebody, somehow, tries to make us believe there is a crisis, a danger, an immediate need, and then says that we should join this or that organisation to be saved from the imminent danger.

It is not possible for a crisis to last very long because it is in the nature of things to exist and preserve themselves in balance, and to change or transform into something else only when there is a crisis or an imbalance. A crisis is a sort of saturation or an outdating of the old paradigm, the old system. And if a crisis cannot last for too long, then the meaning of these unions, alliances, strategies, and armies becomes irrelevant, at which point they should cease to exist or dissolve. If all these exist, then there is a Mister Who wishing to keep them alive. Once they are instituted, then a whole project of manipulation and different actions begins.

Many great opportunities had to arise in the course of human evolution, but most of them were lost, having a common cause. The French Revolution is one good example. A kingdom was to be replaced by a republic where people should become free, equal, brotherlike. What happened instead was a total disaster: massacres and much pain and suffering for the people. Soon the French accepted a return to monarchy when Mister Who, an opportunist, decided that it was his divine right to do this. The cause of the failure was that the new political forces in the young French Republic used the old pattern of ruling over the crowds in the same aggressive way as the previous regime—or even worse.

Another important example is World War II. Germany was the evil which had to be defeated by the Allies, and the image of the US Army was that of the good guy willing to bring freedom, democracy, and peace to the European nations and other nations across the world. Soon after World War II ended, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created to prevent some power from rising again to produce another destructive world war as Nazi Germany had done. The irony of this story is that Germany is now a full-rights member of NATO. After the saviour US Army came to rescue the world, this soon started another war, far more destructive and painful than the previous, in many parts of the world. This other war is still going on today in 2018 as I write these words. NATO has no meaning without an enemy, and by creating the organisation, it was a way to find another enemy. The Soviet Union, the former ally of the United States against Nazi Germany, became this enemy. After the fall of the USSR came the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Afghanistan. And at present the enemy is Russia and Syria, along with other countries such as Iran.

If we genuinely observe the events as they are, we will easily conclude that a crisis must be maintained because only in this way is the state of crowd, of flock, maintained.

Any individual who dares to come up with a new idea which initiates a movement towards awakening and returning to individuality and freedom is crushed in many ways, killed, or in our times denigrated and ostracised. However, a very few reach their goal, making the world tremble. A very important example is Mahatma Gandhi, the founder of the Indian National Congress. His movement started with a frustration, with an injustice (he was thrown out of a train in South Africa by a white English citizen), and was finalised with Indian independence from the British Empire. Mahatma Gandhi eventually inspired others with his original way. A few decades later Nelson Mandela did almost the same thing for the apartheid regime of South Africa. Martin Luther King did a similar thing to ensure the rights of the black population of the United States.

These examples show us the other side of the crowd-isation of people, one with a positive outcome, which in fact uses the mechanism of human psychology described in the beginning of Echoes in the Desert, a natural mechanism that can be used for the benefit of or to the detriment of human individuals.

This mechanism is valid for a large number of living creatures that live often in a social group. For all of them it is an instinctive, built-in mechanism with a fundamental role to play in the survival of the species. For humans it is also a built-in instinctive mechanism, but because we have a developed mind, it is possible to interfere in this natural process, and the outcome is sometimes dramatic. Besides, there is a maximum, not very large number of individuals who can live in a community without any significant toxic interference with their nature.

For animals, instinct is the main law of survival, and it acts uncorrupted upon the mind. The urge to eat, to defend, or to reproduce is provided entirely by instinct. Animals cannot bypass or avoid it. There is no meaning to existence apart from instinct. Organising in a flock is a way of surviving with the least loss, especially for the herbivores because they are missing powerful weapons