The Sinking of ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’
Interference, Stratification and the Weaponization of Ideology
‘Forgive us…for we know not what we do’
There is a recurring theme which acts as an undercurrent to many of the essays contained within this writing sub-site and that theme is based upon the phenomenon of ‘interference’. In particular, human interference with nature’s ancient and time-enduring laws of balance and order. And that most of our social, environmental and geopolitical ills today can be traced all the way back – courtesy of the infallible laws of consequence and causality – to that pivotal moment, to that seminal moment in which the element of interference was first introduced into three-and-a-half billion years of biological evolution on Planet Earth. The human-specific phenomenon of interference first reared its ugly head in the form of two disastrous ideas (agriculture and animal husbandry).
Why disastrous? Because via those two ill-conceived ideas, early modern humans (unwittingly) began altering, manipulating, meddling and interfering with things that should have been left well enough alone. This included meddling and interfering with the central tenets upholding natural law, one of which prescribes balance and order in all things (i.e., species population management). The inventions of agriculture and raising livestock upset nature’s apple cart. As well, those two ideas triggered an exponential process whereby early modern humans began (slowly at first) to wrest control of the planet away from nature. A bad, bad idea.
The two seemingly innocuous ideas (agriculture and raising livestock) were so inherently poisonous and virulent that they irreversibly infected the DNA of western thinking (and western civilization) with a self-destructive gene. The self-destructive gene has been incubating, mutating and spreading in all the wrong directions for the past ten-thousand years (since agriculture). The unchecked and uncontrolled mutation and spread of the deadly contagion has resulted in the now-imminent collapse of the human system.
The Good Ship Lollipop
But the element of human interference was itself only a symptom of a much broader, much more ominous phenomenon which was, and still is, ideology. The explosive (aberrant) growth of genus Homo’s brain – during the two-and-a-half million years leading up to the invention of agriculture – endowed early modern humans with the dubious ability to arbitrarily synthesize ideas…ideas which (being arbitrary) were not necessarily in alignment or accordance with the fundamental laws of nature. This is where things began to go sideways for the hapless and witless human subspecies. This is where the conflicting relationship between modern humans and nature first began to fester. Early modern humans went quite berserk with their new-found ability to hyper-think and hyper-ideate which unceremoniously ushered in the Ideological Era…the age of ideas.
Ideology (i.e., the ability to arbitrarily construct synthetic ideations) has been, and continues to be, the single most destructive force on the planet going back say nine to ten thousand years to the invention of agriculture. It is the single most destructive force responsible for the imminent sinking of the ‘Good Ship Lollipop’. Yes, I’m sorry to be the bearer of ill tidings but the ‘Good Ship Lollipop’ is going down and this time it is ideology – and not an errant iceberg drifting around somewhere in the North Atlantic – that has sealed our fate.
How could a phenomenon as seemingly benign and harmless as ‘ideology’ become the most destructive force of the modern era? To answer this question we must first dissect the word ‘ideology’. The word itself provides the first clue to our query…it is a system of thinking based entirely upon ideas. Ideas – being themselves based solely upon images, imagery and imagination – have no basis in pure reality. Ideas are in fact the negation, the absence and the antithesis of pure reality. They are electronically, synaptic-based manufactured conjurations, concepts, fabrications, beliefs, fantasies, caprices, memories and linear daydreams synthesized within the vacuity of the advanced human super-mind (which evolved in tandem with the human’s aberrant over-sized brain).
“It’s like the planet woke up one day and discovered a creature running around on the loose who was capable of arbitrarily synthesizing its own ideas, its own laws, its own ethics, its own morals independently and disassociated from the higher laws of nature. And being arbitrary, those ideas, laws, ethics and morals could be anything the creature wanted them to be. Ouch!”
(Excerpt from essay titled ‘Sliced Bread’)
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to grasp the foreboding implications contained within the above excerpt. In fact, this dystopian scenario has been playing itself out on the planet since early modern humans first introduced the element of interference into the mix. The idea, the notion that a subspecies of lowly primates could begin altering, manipulating, tampering and interfering with the natural order of biological life on Planet Earth…that a subspecies of lowly primates could attempt to take control of the planet away from nature. Pure lunacy.
Ideology – both as a unique phenomenon and as an experiment in social engineering – was predestined to fail from its very inception. Think about it. A somewhat crazed and psychotic little creature running around on the loose with the ability to manufacture its own arbitrary and independent laws while in the midst of a universe unfolding in accordance with a primordial system of fundamental, infallible and indomitable laws which (by the way) have been around and functioning perfectly since the ‘big bang’. The mere inclusion of these two dichotomous forces (the puny laws of man and the universal laws established by the Creator) in the same sentence is, well, laughable.
Stratification and the Weaponization of Ideology
The introduction of human interference, the agricultural revolution and the Ideological Age (combined) spawned another failed experiment which was the stratification of human societies. Stratification created a disparate class system where the newly-minted ‘elites’ i.e., the land barons, the royalty, the merchants, the religious, the military and the intelligentsia gained (asserted) control over the masses. And it was those same ‘elites’ who weaponized ideology (religious and political) as a means to further their own agendas which meant ensuring that the society’s wealth and power remained concentrated in the hands of the few. Sound familiar?
The more things change…the more they stay the same. It has been a mere 8-9 thousand years since early modern humans first began capturing wild animals and plant seeds, domesticating them, mass-breeding them and mass-producing them into destructive mono-cultures. And here we are today in the age of space travel, nanotechnology and cloning sheep, and yet the basic structure of our social order has changed little. It’s still the elites (i.e., the New World Order) in control of the masses.
‘When a society’s laws, morals, ethics and values are anything the elite’s want them to be…well, good night and good luck’
(apologies to E. R. Murrow)
An idea can start out as benign and harmless but can easily morph into a belief and then on into an unquestionable truth. The road through human history is littered with the carnage caused by ideas morphing into beliefs and then into truths.
Take religious ideology for example. The ‘flat earth’ concept and Ptolemy’s geocentric universe (cited in earlier related essays) are two excellent examples of misconceived ideas morphing into irrefutable truths. These two distorted worldviews (flat earth and geo-centrism) were both hatched during the dark ages and were the result of an extremely limited and skewed perspective (and understanding) of how things work, how we work, how the world works, how the universe works, how nature works, how God works. Granted, earlier societies didn’t have access to the many advancements in the physical sciences as we do today but those societies (and their religious ideologues) went ahead anyway and began adopting the short-sighted, misconceived notions into their ideological paradigms.
The practice of taking a simple idea and transforming it into an agenda-driven instrument of control (weaponization) is as old as the idea of God itself. The newly-established class of elites – spawned by agriculture and stratification – quickly realized that the element of fear could be used effectively as an instrument of control over the unruly and gullible masses. Fear became an essential element for many of the earlier religious and spiritual movements and has remained an essential element right through to the present day. Fear of God, fear of his wrath, fear of judgment day, fear of eternal damnation, fear of the devil, fear of excommunication, fear of everlasting hell fire, etc.
At last count there were 245 major religious and spiritual movements spread across the globe and many of those movements (even today) profess beliefs and truths which are still based upon distorted concepts and ideas devised back in the dark ages. When ideas morph into beliefs and then into unquestionable truths, some cultures have been known to fight to the death defending those truths…regardless of how ill-conceived the ideas that those truths were based upon. The last five-thousand years of human history has witnessed a virtual bloodbath on Planet Earth…much of that caused by religious ideology.
Dennis Lakusta
Nanaimo, 2025