I Will be a Lion for the Lamb
A manifesto on courage, truth, integrity, virtue and standing strong for the underdog against empire
We live in a very weird time and warped state of human affairs. Everything appears to be inverted. Good has been made bad, and bad has been made good. It is about time we fully recognize this and learn to effectively deal with it.
The evidence is all around us at present— a widespread and blatant emergence of global moral and societal assaults on human decency. Cowardice is being rewarded as courage is attacked. Inconvenient truth is censored while repeated official lies have become the “community guidelines” for allowable content on social media. The virtuous and innocent are being arrested and thrown in jail while neo-fascist perpetrators and apologists run free with impunity.
I will detail a few personal and social examples below, but first I want to take stock. How did we get here? “The rules based international order” had everything planned so well! Why did it all fall apart? Must be the powerless immigrants searching for a better life or fleeing wars created by that “international order.” And anyway, all the little people and “useless eaters” (which now includes not just the poor but the middle class) should “own nothing and be happy” (says the World Economic Forum) while bottom feeding oligarchs consolidate power in a transnational coups against democracy and nation-states, right?
Catching on? Maybe the “international rules-based order” is neither orderly nor rules-based, but a corrupt global cabal of billionaires, technocrats, corporate cronies, and security state operatives looking to pay off a professional managerial class with scraps from their table to keep everyone in secure serfdom while they steal all the assets, control all the retirement accounts, and buy up all the means of livelihood.
The “best laid plans of mice and men” come to ruin
The global order started to crumble from its own corruption far before Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and Britain voted to secede from the European Union. These surprises were the reactions of a global popular sovereign “immune system.” People knew they were being ripped off and entrapped, and they channeled this dissatisfaction and rage into a statement against the direction of the world.
All of a sudden, the so-called “elite” (they are nothing of the sort— better to be called URCs, the “unscrupulous ruling caste”) were in a traumatized panic from this off-script state of affairs, and they needed to strike back. And they got stupid, and obvious, and clumsy. Their mask of fake virtue and insincere paternalism came off. Their contradictions piled up amid a mountain of incompetent coercion. As a result, the “frog” of public awareness has finally woken up and is threatening to break containment to jump out of the New World Order’s slowly boiling water.
We, the public, are definitely NOT pleased to witness what we are witnessing, the excused killing of children in Palestine, the war machines that matter more than innocent lives, the global slave wages that grind people’s lives into nothingness all to stoke the already bulging pockets of a global caste of idiots, liars, perverts, killers, and thieves. This is all administered by the glad-handing Barbie and Ken dolls of the professional managerial class pretending to care about democracy while taking their 30 pieces of silver to carry water for oligarchy and disembowel real grass-roots challenges to ruling caste power.
We all saw this on complete display with the takedown of the Bernie Sanders insurgency in the United States and the ongoing, unapologetic support and excuse-making for a murderous and human-rights abusing Israeli regime that only gets “stern words” to go along with their gift-wrapped weapons to kill more people. They know the game: Make an example of the Palestinians to keep a slave revolt from spreading.
But it is falling apart.
We now have different imperial, ideological factions among the ruling caste vying for power against each other, even though they share the same modus operandi— control over others and consequence-free greed, criminality, and power consolidation. They are weakened by their internal incoherence. In contrast, by our awareness and solidarity we are strengthened, that is, if we develop the courage, truth, integrity, and virtue to act on what we know and co-create a grass-roots solidarity across the racial, gender, class, divisions and non-stop wars foisted on us.
The following analysis is meant to aid understanding and to equip effective action and organizing in the face of global, unrepentant, upper-crust thug-ism.
The biblical story of the lion lying down with the lamb has also been unmasked. There is no compromise or peace with rapacious, insatiable Empire. It will slaughter every lamb and hunt every lion to extinction. It will have no trouble making earth life unlivable if doing so will put a few more trophies on the wall and a few more trillions of dollars in the pockets of financial gluttons already bursting at the seams with ill-gotten gains.
A new story
There is a new story emerging. The story of collaboratively massing power for the powerless, of being a Lion FOR the Lamb, and against the scapegoating of the innocent and disadvantaged. In this new story, institutions will be an impediment. For they have been willing handmaidens to this madness. Faithless cowards on the neo-liberal left and the idolatrous authoritarians on the neo-conservative right, have co-dependently teamed up, and they are both adversaries to the grassroots. Whether it is the neo-liberal sexualization of children or neo-conservative war porn, we, the free and undivided, will be the ones who call these assaults out and strike them down.
We will create new educational systems to replace the state-controlled manufacture of compliant “consent”. Critical and creative thinking will emerge within our ranks along with leadership to challenge the corporate drone-ology now being taught in universities. We will achieve a more permanent peace and ceasefire through effective, organized boycott, divestment, and public sanction. We will leverage the will of the people, even when government doesn’t listen. We might eventually choose to run and elect true public servants those, for instance, who do not pretend to be helpless as they approve deliveries of bombs to slaughter children.
We will create globally interconnected, self-sufficient communities to take on pollution, global exploitation of labor, “sick care”, and food deserts in favor of family farms, health enhancement, and active respect and learning across borders of difference. We will call out boondoggles like “carbon trading” and “15-minute cities” and other efforts to commodify and own Mother Nature, restrict the freedoms of average citizens, and weaponize idealism against itself for dystopian ends. We we will collectively recognize the sham of enabling new multi-trillion markets for “green energy”, etc. which allow the international jet-set to fly to Davos in their energy-hogging, pollution spewing private jets by buying “off-setting” carbon credits.
We will turn off the endless procession of personal vanities and pre-manufactured identities that are blasted out by social media to corral us into “Team Red”, “Team Blue”, or “Team Green”. We WILL “do our research” and not cede power, democratic control, and decision-making into the hands of unelected so-called “experts” and technocrats, whose greed and incompetence created our problems to begin with.
We will not abide another repeat of the raft of catastrophic leadership failures, authoritarianism, and mismanagement that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to escape the research labs in Wuhan and cause a world-wide panic and official response that only made problems far worse for us than what turned out not to be nearly as deadly as the pseudo-scientific hype would have us believe. No more fear porn. No more “trust us; we are the experts”, no more “elect me, I’ll get you single-payer health care.” No more “we must protect civilians” while supplying the bombs to kill them.
Leadership
The “leadership” of failed oligarchs is over. And now it is time for we humans with heart to take over from the bureaucratic system and the artificial stupidity called AI which serves them. No more “computer modeling” which proves itself wrong the real world but which justifies lockdowns. No more use of AI as a silicon shield to murder 12,000 Palestinian children under the pretext of targeting Hamas.
Nor more “The Science”(TM) touting “safe and effective” Covid vaccines that are NEITHER safe NOR effective in the real world. We, the grass-roots, democratic global movement, will not only gain power, knowledge, and momentum, but we will have new operating principles in place of an unaccountable “new world order”:
Acknowledge facts.
Admit you are wrong, when you were wrong.
Apologize to those you attacked as demons, quacks, and crazies, when they are proven correct.
Own your own hysteria and prejudice.
Roll up your sleeves, work up a sweat, and actually directly contribute to improving the world, rather than talking about it and handing out awards.
It really shouldn’t be such a stretch to call a genocide a genocide and the indiscriminate mass murder of children unjust. I have written previous articles on my Citizen Zeus Substack giving loads of absurd rationalizations and propaganda meant to justify atrocity. Please feel free to to back and read them.
Empire
The disease of EMPIRE is a cancer of domination in which one’s own emotional comfort and material advantage become more important than being a courageous, compassionate, creative citizen of the human spirit and the larger world. When we follow along with a convenient, self-serving lie we are proving our moral and spiritual depravity. When we break from this, we become spiritually, morally, socially, and personally free and empowered. We just have to want it bad enough and have the courage, truth, integrity, and virtue to follow through on our challenge of empire.
Below are some inspiring true stories and examples to help in that cause.
Courage, strength, and endurance
To take on the empire of vice within the self and within the world, to ally with the powerless rather than the powerful, one must have the ability to exhibit courage, strength, and endurance, This may include the courage to take “slings and arrows” to your employability, your friendship and family networks, and your reputation in order to stand up for that which is morally just. Those of you who once enjoyed “insider” status may find yourselves on the outside after siding with unpopular people and uncomfortable truths over favoritism and comfortable lies. Jesus did it. So did Gandhi. You’re in good company.
If you need inspiration look to Dunia Abu Mohsen, a 12-year-old Palestinian girl, a martyr and saint, in my opinion, who had her family killed by bombing and her own leg amputated as a result. After that trauma, instead of stoking resentment, she openly committed herself to becoming a doctor working with prosthetics to help others who have been so injured. She was subsequently killed in her hospital room by an Israeli tank shell.
I believe she was targeted. Her sympathetic and inspirational story could not be allowed to continue. Her moral and spiritual sunlight was like a searing ray through the black heart of global vampires. So they killed her. We too must be willing to die and be reborn for a better world, not only physically but spiritually. We must become aware and cast off the economic-comfort bribes we are being offered as people in privileged countries to allow murder and exploitation in our name and with our tax dollars.
Truth
The above commitment cannot happen without another inextricable commitment: The lying must end. We need our courage to be informed and strengthened by truth, and we need truth to be emboldened by courage. That means speaking out and calling vice for what it is and virtue for what it is, truth for what it is and falsehood for what it is. Yes, this may mean losing your job or not being considered for one.
My social media profile is not “corporate friendly,” that’s for sure. Search my name and you will see reasons to exclude me from any tribe on the so-called left and right. Even progressives, in their current state of sell-out, would not have me. Tribal or “team” identity has substituted sentiment (what one wants to believe) for truth (what is actually, provably happening). Speaking the truth to these groups is tantamount to betrayal against the sacred falsehoods and vanities that hold these tribes up. Your witness to truth becomes fatally inconvenient to their credibility.
I have currently decided to pursue some great local resources and mentoring in small business development. I have inventoried my strengths— critical-thinking, truth, pro-social education and strengthening among the cast-aside and neglected— to re-start my education counseling, tutoring, and consulting in central Ohio. This will actually pay better and addresses real needs when compared to tenure-track professor job (requiring a Ph.D.) at an expensive local private college. The salary (54,500/yr) is only 10,500 dollars more than I earned as a starting professor 25 years ago, and 500 dollars LESS per year than offered by a charter high school teacher down the street that required no advanced degree! Good riddance.
I was interviewed to teach two ethics classes at a local nursing college that had a pressing need. They paid only 1,860 per class and said they wanted a long-term relationship because they had problems retaining people to teach it. In me they had someone who was supremely qualified and experienced, and was willing to simply do the job for the low pay to keep my mental engine running and help future health care workers make sound decisions that supported their patients. Maybe that was my mistake. I suspect the interviewers got wind of my opposition to vaccine mandates, and my research-based articles in support of alternative therapies (i.e. ivermectin). Clearly I would not be preparing my students to take up their cue at the drug-driven corporate feeding trough of lucrative ill-health, which currently runs the American sickness-for-profit “health care” system.
I have no problem admitting I am wrong. I want to know the truth, and I want reality to inform my stances and outlook. Though I still do not support Trump, and will not be voting for him OR Joe Biden, I have found the Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is very real, and that the crazy suspicions of many Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters have proven valid. They were right to oppose vaccine mandates, cancel culture, censorship, the medical mutilation and sex-trafficking of children, and right to support exercising sane control of the border with Mexico. They are wrong about Israel and a host of other issues, but one has to give credit where credit is due.
Neo-liberal pseudo-progressives have chosen to support authoritarian surveillance, Big Pharma, censorship, and have come out AGAINST stalwart formerly feminist red lines, like the inclusion of men in women’s sports (because they “identify” as women) and AGAINST “my body, my choice” when it comes to forced injection of damaging and poorly tested vaccines.
“You’ve come a long way, baby?” Not so much. This 2015 quote from proto-liberal feminist Gloria Steinem is steeped in unintentional irony:
It seems to me that every child has the right to be born loved and wanted, and every person has the right to control — male and female — to control their own bodies from the skin in. I think we need a legal principle called something like "bodily integrity" which recognizes that though the state may jail us, they can't insist on injections or tests or pressuring us for organ transplants. Our skin needs to be the line of defense between our own dignity and will and any outside force. (my emphases)
Integrity and Virtue
Speaking of integrity or lack thereof, let’s look at the current state of Western-style “democracy”, which has devolved into some kind of compromise between oligarchy (rule by the ultra-wealthy), corporatocracy, bureaucracy, and technocracy, oiled by artificial (alleged) intelligence that seems concerned only with “process” and not people. The irony goes well beyond make-the-rich-richer policy, the multi-trillion dollar Build Billionaires Back Better bill, murderous double standards when it comes to the lives of brown and black people versus white people (where seven murdered white aid workers in Gaza gets more action on Capitol Hill than 30,000-40,000 murdered Palestinian people, over 70% of whom are women and children).
Germany is seeking to do them one better by having Aryan policeman overwhelmingly arrest Jews of conscience, including Holocaust survivors, in Germany who are protesting Palestinian genocide. Apparently some 30% of such arrests in Germany have been against Jews, who comprise only about 1% of the population. Who has the integrity here? Who has the virtue? I encourage you to watch this short ethics class in the real world in which one of those Jewish protestors eloquently outlines the stakes for humanity (Owen Jones channel— “Jewish German ARRESTED Over Gaza Speaks Out— w/ Udi Raz):
Commentator Owen Jones sums it up well in a second video on the topic of 2,000 German police officers being deployed to put down a peaceful, democratic conference aimed at international integrity and truthful non-violent grassroots activism around the Palestinian genocide:
Over 2,000 Berlin officers, an army, were involved in blocking access to the building, taking down the live stream and cutting off the power. Now Jewish activists played a key role in organizing this Congress. One of them is Udi Raz who was then arrested along with at least two other Jewish activists… Police, you are taking a Jewish person and then you're talking about anti-Semitism. Another Jewish activist was arrested outside for holding a “Jews Against Genocide” banner. Absolutely remarkable. According to the journalist James Jackson, the activist said “The banner was rolled up and the police targeted me after they saw my Jewish star necklace. We know who the [real] anti-semites are.” Let's just be very blunt. The sight of German police officers dragging away Jewish citizens because they're speaking out against genocide well that gives me the “ick” which is an understatement…. You feel comfortable with that do you? Really? Is that what washing away Germany's obscene sins [against Jews] looks like?
End note on what to do now
So where do we turn in the near term to support ourselves while we get our collective grass-roots act together? We turn to each other at the grass-roots level, and refuse to be divided. And we must deeply rely upon and draw from spiritual integrity and strength at the core of our beings. Make coalitions across ideological lines and find the REAL interest that binds us and unites us against those who would trash our humanity, privacy, integrity, honesty, and love of neighbor, spirit, and world. Pray… a lot. Walk in the woods regularly. Reflect, contemplate, ask the divine for guidance and support. We cannot do this without being honest with ourselves. We have been lied to and many of us have lied to ourselves to “go along to get along.” Now we must take that leap into a rigorous but welcoming and liberating truth.
We are seeing the innocent in overwhelming numbers taking the fall for the sins of the corrupt and depraved so-called “powerful”. Is there anything weaker than a bully, abuser, and mass murderer? These are not “strong men” leaders, but the weakest and puniest hearts on the planet! The so-called “powers that be” have chosen their side, but have you? Are you willing to enlist on the side of courage, truth, integrity, and virtue, and if so what are your practical commitments and plans to move things in an ethically and spiritually coherent direction?
The adventure awaits.
Please leave a comment, and let me know your thoughts.
Blessings, Zeus
Zeus, I have one question after reading your impressive missive.
I think I understand ‘neo-conservative war porn,’ but I’m stumped by ‘neo-liberal sexualization of children.’
Is this a reference to the current attention on gender identification?
I’ve enjoyed your insightful sharing on other platforms and, although I have to read your writings more than once to grasp the intricacies and depth of your opinions, this is the first time I’ve needed to ask for clarification.
With keen interest,
Kryste Andrews
Zues,
Thank you for the firehose manifesto on courage. As a member of the tribe of "Those of you who once enjoyed “insider” status may find yourselves on the outside after siding with unpopular people and uncomfortable truths over favoritism and comfortable lies." I too have found myself on the outside of many comfortable circles where truth has been subverted in favor of comfort and convenience. I can only emphatically agree and offer a new motto: "Unite and Win!" It is that simple. We have the power, the creativity, the connection and the wisdom. Enjoy your time in the forest and connecting with the beautiful beings that are so plentiful and looking for deep interaction. The layers of falsehood being promoted are so multifaceted and intricately engineered it is only patient one on one safe interaction that seems to be able to gain a foothold at this point. Perhaps through the loving dynamic from a heart to a heart we can realize our way to a new sphere of being. One heart at a time.
Lets Unite and Win, David