The Fake Four Agreements
Breaking News –
Just to be transparent this is a fake headline.
What I am writing about as indigenous wisdom is Toltec’s The Four Agreements, and I am going to discuss it here. But please read the book as it contains great wisdom. I will discuss the four agreements later but I want to begin with the principle of agreement that undermines the wisdom.
From early childhood we go through a learning process. We begin with our family upbringing in which through love we learn what our parents want us to learn. Then in school we learn the school curriculum, and through this social upbringing we are then in a position to become active productive members in society.
What the Agreement principle makes clear is that through this upbringing process we accept agreements our upbringing asks of us. These agreements are a consensus, a way of living together in society, But there is no truth content; what we learn growing up is not true, it is an agreement.
We can see this upbringing as agreement by the way in which different societies raise their children, agreements are different for different societies. No one society has a monopoly on the way we bring children – there are different ways, different upbringings.
But for teachers and many liberals in society these agreements are seen as truth. So in their truth factories (institutes of education) teachers present these agreements as truth, and until recently were not questioned about these “truths”. The fact that the truth factories presented these agreements has led to two problems, both of which expose the vulnerability of the truth factories, a vulnerability that has been manipulated.
The first problem is that of omission. These truth factories omitted to tell the truth that many of the products of the truth factory found out. Students spend years in education become qualified, and can’t find work; they also have huge student debt. This is Teal’s millennial problem.
But they also omit to present a complete description of the society we live in. What tends to be agreed about education is that we learn agreements about what life is, about what society is, and about how we can be successful. What is omitted is that society is a 1%-satrapy in which we become wage-slaves (if we can find work) and benefit from wars for profits whilst the 1% develop huge accumulations. When students find they don’t have work, when others in society find they don’t have work, they question the agreements. They see injustice and quite rightly become angry.
This is where my (fake) breaking news alert comes in. I postulate that some right-wing think tank (here euphemistically called the Heritoge Foundation) had recognised this agreement process, recognised that all we learned were agreements, and decided that what was agreement could be manipulated. Because the process was consensus-based they decided that they could manipulate the consensus through repetition, a repetition they financed. By repeating and repeating from different sources as well as using bots, the think tank realised they could change the agreements.
The first way they chose to undermine common-sense consensus agreements was to attack science. There was promotion of scepticism, not the positive scientific scepticism that science needs to be involved in to question and develop, but the destructive negative type of scepticism that undermined scientific method. This was done relatively easily because scientific research is controlled by funding, and some science became corrupted by the need for 1%-funding. Specifically climate science was undermined by Koch industries, and once undermined in this way oil was able to continue to exploit once Trump relaxed regulation.
The second way that think tanks undermined the consensus of agreement was during the Trump campaign and since he has been in office, tactics which have been mimicked by many right-wing campaigns leading to WEGemony. Politics has always been corrupt – people’s egos desiring power being manipulated, but certain aspects of that corruption were agreed not to be exposed. Trump exposed them in others. At the same time he developed the fake news bluster whereby all who disagreed with him were fake news. Because the 1% were backing him, he had sufficient funds to repeat and repeat so that the consensus of agreement could be manipulated moving the political spectrum to the right whilst criticising fake news.
Unfortunately the liberals involved in the truth factories failed to recognise the limitations of their education. They continued to put forward the position that they were teaching the truth, something so many individuals recognised as false because of their experience of system failure, and this further brought questioning on the truth factories. This has led to an end of agreement, and we now have a polarisation of liberals and right-wing populism that benefits no-one but the accumulation of the 1%.
Once the think tank recognised this consensus that could be manipulated, they then moved onto the wisdom that helped people deal with the agreements. Indigenous wisdom recognised that the agreements were not truth, and that there was a path to be followed by the wise to live with and move beyond the agreement process. This path was the four agreements:-
It has already been recognised by the think tank that manipulating the word can be beneficial to the 1%. “Be manipulative with the word.”
The think tank recognised the need to focus on a certain group – white men. Not all white men were needed. For the 1%-Republicans to win the elections they needed an increase, there was a significant group of the wealthy voting but a few more were needed as the populist right. Groups of white men were under attack because they were racists and unhappy at being classified in the patriarchy. So the think tank encouraged these white men to “Take things personally”. Because their egos had been manipulated, these men were happy to form a Qult around one of the 1% - Trump.
Compassion is not encouraged by the populist right, so the think tank encouraged the racism in these men for them to “make assumptions about black people, latins etc.” And finally they encouraged these men to “always be as selfish as you can” because no-one will help you. And with these fake four agreements:-
Be manipulative with the word.
Take things personally
Make assumptions
Be as selfish as you can.
the think tank created a populist right that made up the electoral shortfall – a WEGemony not only in the US, but in the UK, Australia, Brazil, Eastern Europe etc.
What is so ironic about these white men is the arrogance that they are independent thinkers and have not been manipulated – many claiming libtards are totally manipulated.
With the fake four agreements these white men are not pleasant people, but we do need to send metta to these white men. Our only hope is unity.
The integrated path of compassion, insight and creativity - the struggle for GAIA and against the 1%-satrapy of war and wage-slavery.
