Nemesis: The Downfall of Trump
Everything that I have experienced in life and all that I have studied shows me that there is a moral order to the universe. None of us knows exactly what the laws of this natural order are. All religions, philosophical systems, and political systems attempt to answer that question. All have done so imperfectly. Beginning with the laws of Ur-Nammu, written almost 4,000 years ago, and right up to the latest arguments over testing for COVID-19 and policing methods, we have attempted to understand and put into practice such metaphysical concepts as the good, justice, and truth.
Great thinkers and mystics have intuited this natural order through the ages. We have come to know this, in part, because we have observed that most often there is a positive outcome when we are alignment with nature’s laws and a negative consequence when we go against nature’s way. On the simplest level are the physical laws of cause and effect. Agriculture was developed through an understanding that if you could grasp and harness the laws of nature you could maximize your yield. If you betrayed those laws, starvation and death would ensue. Science shows that there are physical laws that affect our health. If we smoke cigarettes, we will be more likely to get lung cancer. If we eat too much sugar, we will likely get obese and risk diabetes. Yet, even these simple truths evade vast swaths of humanity. It is self-evident that if we cough tons of poison into our atmosphere the Earth will sicken and there will be dire consequences. Nevertheless, there are many who don’t — or won’t — believe it.
But there are more subtle universal laws that have been understood by the wisest among us. For example, there is the Hindu and Buddhist concept of karma. This Sanskrit word refers to the spiritual principle that the intent and actions of a person influence that person’s destiny or fate. The symbol for karma is an endless knot — it is the law of cause and effect that good actions lead to good outcomes and bad actions lead to bad outcomes.
This principle was described in one of the most ancient sources of wisdom, The Upanishads, written almost 3000 years ago.
“Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;
And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.”
— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th Century BCE
In the Old Testament of the Bible, there was the erroneous belief that there was a direct correlation between our acts and God’s reaction. If you were good, God would give you good things, and if you sinned, God would make your life bad. But this was obviously untrue when it was observed that bad things happened to good people. The Book of Job attempted to answer the question of why this was by saying that God’s ways were inscrutable. It wasn’t that there were no moral laws, only that we couldn’t always understand what they were or how they worked.
Nicholas of Cusa, one of the first renaissance humanists from the 15th century, said that “All we know of truth is that the absolute truth, such as it is, is beyond our reach.” He, and many other great mystics, grasped that the workings of the universe were mysterious beyond our comprehension and this realization was the beginning of wisdom. Yet the question of how we are meant to live still needed to be answered. This question was not only important individually but also for the fate of all. Another mystic vision, Indra’s Net, revealed that everything is interconnected in space and through time. If everything is part of an interwoven fabric, then what we do impacts the whole. We cannot know the sum of universal law because the variables and interacting parts of the whole are infinite. Nevertheless, it is one aim of life to do our best to figure out what the good is, so we cannot only live the best life possible for ourselves but also for the sake of everyone and everything.
The ancient Greeks expressed the potential negative consequences of living against the moral law in the concept of hubris. Hubris (/ˈhjuːbrɪs/, from ancient Greek ὕβρις) is defined as “a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. In its ancient Greek context, it typically describes behavior that defies the norms of behavior or challenges the gods which, in turn, brings about the downfall of the perpetrator of hubris. In ancient Greek, hubris referred to “outrage“: actions that violated natural order, or which shamed and humiliated the victim, sometimes for the pleasure or gratification of the abuser.” Hubris would inevitably be punished by the Greek goddess, Nemesis.
The myth of Phaeton explicates the concept. In this story, the young protagonist is told by his mother that his father is the sun. The boy is emotionally wounded because of the absence of his father. When he tells his friends that his father is the sun, his friends mock him. To prove himself, he visits the sun and asks if, indeed, the sun is his father. The sun admits this and asks forgiveness for his absence by offering him any gift. The boy wants to ride the sun-chariot across the sky. The father, fearing the consequences, says he will give anything but that. However, the son makes his father keep his promise of giving any gift and commands the sun chariot with its powerful horses. Since he is not capable of controlling the horses, he scorches the Earth, causing untold damage.
A similar theme is played out in Goethe’s poem, “The Sorceror’s Apprentice.” When the young boy is left alone by his mentor the sorceror, he plays with magical powers beyond his training and skill level and causes great destruction.
We see this theme again in Mary Shelley’s story of Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein shows hubris in believing he can usurp the power of the gods in creating life and in so doing creates a destructive monster.
This theme is expressed in profound form in Goethe’s Faust. In this version, a man is seduced to make a deal with the devil to gain extraordinary powers and is damned as a result.
Another brilliant variation on this theme is played out in Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby Dick. The ship’s captain is mad, because of the inscrutable white whale which has bitten off his leg. He is possessed with the idea of vengeance. Starbuck, the first mate, knows this is madness and will come to no good end. But Ahab’s madness infects the entire crew. “It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.” The harpooneers on the ship, “quailed before (Ahab’s) strong, sustained, and mystic aspect.” The men should have known, as Starbuck did, that by following Ahab they had agreed to their death, but they all agreed to follow the captain, who was determined to outwit nature, a mission at which he was destined to fail. In the end, the ship and all but one of it’s men, including Ahab, are destroyed.
As the Bible put it in the Book of Proverbs, 16:18, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
All of these examples point to the intuited understanding that though nature’s laws may be obtuse to us, when we try to supersede them there is a price to pay. This is not only reflected in the physical realm but goes to the level of our character. Who we are on the inside leads to consequences for our life. If we try to live outside the moral law, we will suffer. As the esoteric phrase has it, “as above, so below.” This means that the same laws apply macrocosmically and microcosmically. What is true for the universe is true for the individual soul.
Philosophers have struggled with the question of moral law without resorting to the supernatural aspect of something imposed by gods. The existence of ethics as a branch of philosophy implies the notion that there is such a thing as a right or wrong way to conduct one’s life. For philosophers, nature’s rules can be discovered through reason. This conforms to the humanistic principle that we can discover the good from within rather than from a religious edict as the presumed passed down word of God. Existentialists make this explicit. They claim there is no rule beyond the ones we create. We each must take on the terrible task of defining for ourselves what the good life is. But even here, there is the notion that there is such a thing as a good life.
This humanistic principle, that we can find the good within ourselves, implies that humans are essentially good. This school of thought, for one, was represented by the Chinese sage Mencius, a disciple of Confucius who lived 2500 years ago. He claimed that if we have strayed from the Tao, or the Way, another symbol for living in accordance with universal moral law, it was because we had lost contact with our essential nature through some conditioning which interfered with our natural development. The goal of life, then became, as he put it, “finding the lost heart,” where the heart represents our conscience, or empathic goodness, which when found, would lead us to the good, where we would be in harmony with the “heavenly mandate,” and then be empowered by the energy of the universe, or what he called “flood-like ch’I.”
In contradistinction to this school of thought was the belief that man is essentially bad, as represented, for one, by Thomas Hobbes, who believed that man could only be controlled by strict, external laws. In this view, we must be shackled to conform to the moral law of the universe. But this lead to the question, who was good enough to determine what those laws would be? As it turned out, this justified a kind of control by those in power that has led to many of the problems we face in the world today.
Though the old testament notion of God’s direct punishment on the material wellbeing of the sinner and reward for the righteous is no longer believed in, this has been replaced with the idea that when we do not live according to nature’s way, our souls become corrupt. The first act where we go against our conscience provokes guilt, but the fifth and tenth no longer stir that inner voice that tells us we have strayed from the righteous path. This inner corruption leads us to a diminishment of self which ultimately sows the seeds of our own destruction. No matter our outward success, we have no inner peace, we are unhappy, we are lost souls.
Despite our distancing from our best self, or the self that lives in harmony with universal principles, that part remains — if hidden — within us. When we act against natural law the price we pay is shame — the feeling that goes along with the belief that somehow we don’t measure up as human beings. This feeling, when it becomes pervasive, infects every aspect of our being and leads us to self-destruction. If we feel badly about ourself, we treat ourself accordingly.
For many of us, living out of harmony with the Way can be experienced as a feeling of guilt. Though we may not be punished by God for our sinful acts, our nascent sense of conscience torments us and this can be the punishment we suffer. This is symbolized in stories like Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, where the lead character gets away with murder but is tormented by the sound of a beating heart, which is the relentless pounding of his own conscience which he cannot escape. This guilt, which in its purest sense is our inner voice that guides us toward universal law, is part of the suffering we endure when we live against nature’s way.
In psychological terms, when we are wounded in our sense of self, we do not develop optimally and become narcissistically damaged. This happens when our caregivers live against universal law in how they raise us. In extreme states, the person so wounded compensates for their impoverished inner life by trying to prove that they are more than human. We call this pathological narcissism, which is the psychological equivalent of hubris. Pathological narcissists, like Ahab in Moby Dick, may acquire great power, and render multitudes spellbound but eventually bring themselves, and their followers, to great ruin. The most extreme example of this can be found in someone like Hitler.
The ultimate psychological disturbance, when our sense of connection to the all is wholly severed, is the experience of nihilism. In this view, there is no moral order to the universe. Even a purely scientific view which eliminates all teleology, or purposefulness to our cosmos, and reduces everything to mechanism, understands the rigor of natural law. The nihilist, on the other hand, experiences the world as devoid of meaning. This world view can lead to nothing but destruction. When profound narcissistic wounding is combined with nihilism in an individual who has the skills to accumulate power, the potential for destructive hubris is at a maximum. This is the world of what we commonly call the sociopath, or if murderous, the psychopath.
Mencius understood that it is often the most narcissistically damaged among us that are drawn to accumulate power. A lack of healthy shame, which is another way of describing hubris, can be a tremendous aid in manipulating the masses to one’s own perverse ends. For most of us, we are inhibited by some healthy sense of our own limits and care and concern for others. But if you are devoid of a sense of connectedness and empathy, and have no humility, you are capable of breaking all the rules of society (which hopefully, at least to some extent, mirror the natural law) in service of your self-aggrandizement. This was why Mencius’s mission was to influence the leaders of his day. His self-appointed task was to help them “find their lost heart,” or the compassion and empathy that would lead them to do what was best for the greatest number of people. He believed that such a leader would receive the love of the people, and this would be the reflection of what he called the “mandate of heaven.” Sadly, Mencius failed in his day. But his wisdom outlived his lifetime. His teachings were passed on to Chinese students for 1000 years.
For that time, the Chinese believed that the central pillar of education was moral education. They taught what was called the Ta Hsueh, or, “The Highest Order of Cultivation.” In this great work, it was revealed that harmony in the world was inextricably linked to harmony within the individual, which has been translated as “integral wholeness.” Harmony was sought at every systemic level to promote harmony at every other level. Finding “the proper balance” was sought in the state, the family, and the person. The moral order was the same, whether we looked at nature, the political structure, the home, or the individual. In this view, the health of a person, family, or society was measured by the harmony within that system. If the individual had fully cultivated their moral character, the family would be in harmony. If the family was in harmony, the society would enjoy enduring peace and be perpetually renewed. And it worked the other way, too. If society was harmonious, the family would be harmonious and if the family was in harmony, so, too, would be, the individual. A lack of harmony was both cause and effect and reflected the level of pathology in that system.
From this view, one central purpose of child rearing was to guide the optimal development of our children’s understanding of, and living in accordance with, the Tao, or universal moral order, as well as we can understand it. This was not only the obligation of parents and schools but the nation’s leaders as well. If the leaders lived in accordance with The Way, so, too would the children. If the leaders strayed, the children would be lost.
Perhaps you are guessing where all of this is leading. Clearly, we live in a land that is rife with disharmony. This is a measure of how deeply pathological our culture is. It is sign and symbol that we are living out of alignment with universal law. Living out of alignment both leads to, and manifests in, leaders suffering with hubris. This is exemplified in the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, who is pathologically narcissistically wounded, nihilistic, and has what Mencius called a “lost heart” as seen in his lack of empathy. He is the virtual embodiment of hubris, which as you remember, is defined as “a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. His actions violate the natural order, he shames and humiliates his victims for his own pleasure or gratification.”
If the example of the leader, as the ancient Chinese would have it, is the supreme model for our children, for me, one of the most disturbing things about the election of Donald Trump as president of the US was the wrong message it sent to my children. What it said was that the way to succeed in life was to lie, cheat, and bully. This success appeared to disprove the theory of hubris which is inevitably supposed to be followed by the punishment of being brought down low by Nemesis. How could this man have gotten so far in life by going against the moral laws that we have tried so hard to teach our children are the necessary path to a good life?
For my friends who support Trump, this is what I want them to understand about why I am so against him. It seemed quite obvious to me that no matter what anyone thought of his policies or how he could win for your team, you would have to agree that this lesson would ultimately be the absolutely wrong one to teach our children. If one believed, as I do, that, in fact, there is a lawfulness to existence, and that karma and hubris were true, our children, in fact all of us, would one day pay a terrible price in learning this awful lesson.
Those of us who hold these truths dear did not want Trump to fail because he was simply the captain of the other team. We didn’t want him to fail so we could merely beat him, or win. We didn’t hate him because he won so much for the other side. We wanted him to fail because it would validate our view of the universe that good will prevail and hubris will be punished. Otherwise, we could do little to convince our children that it was better to be good than bad. Why be honest, work hard, and be kind, loving and compassionate, when cheating, lying, abusing women, and bullying worked so well?
When Trump was elected, I told my children that the ways of the universe were mysterious and that though Trump might succeed for a time, he would eventually be taken to task by Nemesis. I hoped and sincerely believed that would be the case both because it would confirm my view and belief of how the universe worked and because of the lesson it would provide for my kids.
I understood that the ways of the universe are mysterious and that there have been innumerable wrongs that have never been righted, there are endless examples of individuals who have at least apparently lived against universal law and yet for them there was no apparent consequence, and that many good people have suffered and do suffer unjustly. I knew that it was at least possible that Trump — and the country — would never pay an obvious price for his transgressions against the Way. It was possible that karma was a statistical game. Some smokers live till 100 with never a sick day — many a crook never gets caught. But I also believed, as Poe taught us, that we wouldn’t necessarily see, or know of, the price paid — that it could happen beyond our view in space or time. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.
More frighteningly, it could be that I had wholly misperceived what the universal law is and that I simply got it backwards. Maybe Trump’s supporters were right and he was really in alignment with the good and true. That was a scary enough prospect, but my worst fear was that my view of the universe and the view of all the wise from the beginning of time was completely wrong. What if the nihilists were right? What if everything was random — so why not be the worst if that would win? I refused to believe this was true and now we had a chance to find out. We had a grand experiment. Getting to observe a phenomenon like Trump would be a great test of the hypotheses of the wisest of all time.
What is the result of this terrible experiment? Is Trump, as the evangelicals will assert, an imperfect instrument of God, like King David, or are the corruptions of his character destructive to the whole? Is he, and are we as a country, paying a karmic price for his hubris? Or are the events that are happening right now random occurrences that have nothing to do with the state of our land and our leadership?
If we wanted to look at what is happening now in archetypal, mythic terms, the wrath of the gods is upon the land. Nemesis indeed is calling in her due. We are visited upon by a plague. Abundance has turned into loss and deprivation. Those called to protect us kill us. The people are depressed, anxious, and enraged.
If we use the measure of the ancient Chinese, society is about as “unharmonious” as can be imagined, short of civil war, which many people fear is upon us. We are fully polarized, divided into wholly separate camps, the one finding little to no common ground or understanding with the other. Our only commonality is the rage we all feel toward the opposite tribe. If this is the measure of our health or sickness, the patient is on life support.
It has been said of our leader, by his former Secretary of Defense, the esteemed general, James Mattis, that, ‘“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis writes. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. . .”
Trump is both reflection of society’s pathology and inflamer of it. He is an opportunistic infection. The body politic’s system was already compromised and Trump was there to take advantage of our illness and made it worse.
Trump certainly embodies the characteristics of one who suffers under the disease of hubris and reaps the consequences. He was the guy who said, “I alone can fix it.” He promised to end the problems of immigration by building a wall paid for by the Mexicans but ended up creating a crisis at the border with children being separated from their parents. He claimed he would end the conflict in the Middle East. He satisfied the ultra-right wing by moving America’s embassy to Jerusalem but the intractable Israeli/Palestinian problem hasn’t progressed at all. He promised to solve the North Korean problem, while just days ago the leader of North Korea lashed out at the U.S., and its nuclear program continues unabated. He promised that success would happen quickly, easily, and simply — there would be so much winning from his first day that we would become sick of winning — the promise of a con man who understands human frailty, when, in fact, none of the world’s problems have gotten better during his tenure. He demonstrated “a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. He showed, in his innumerable insults, whether it was to disabled journalists, to the parents of dead heroes, to John McCain, to any and all who did not succumb to his bullying, “actions . . .which shamed and humiliated the victim, sometimes for the pleasure or gratification of the abuser.”
Yet, despite it all, for a long time he personally managed not only to survive but to thrive. He survived “grabbing women by the pussy.” He survived at least ten counts of obstruction of justice — not only that — as his former national security adviser said, he employed “obstruction of justice as a way of life.” He survived getting caught paying off a porn star with whom he’d had an affair. He survived impeachment for betraying the constitution. His supporters crowed. And we were crestfallen, not as his supporters would have it because we simply hated him for no good reason, but rather because he was, in fact, as the definition of hubris put it, getting away with actions that “violated the natural order.” Was there anything that he could do that would bring him down to Earth and give him the just punishment that he deserved?
Finally, it may be that, as the cliché would have it, the chickens have finally come home to roost. God has visited a pandemic on the land. The United States has more cases and deaths than any other country by far. While much of the developed world has reduced its cases dramatically our are higher that ever. The economy in the U.S. is suffering far worse than any other advanced country. Mencius predicted that a leader with a “lost heart” would lose the “heavenly mandate,” defined as the love of the people. Trump casts his “strong, sustained, and mystic aspect,” on his followers, like Ahab, and for them the spell may never be broken — and like the followers of Ahab, they may all march to their death, as they ignore the reality of the virus that continues to spread across our country in ever increasing numbers. He may be loved by many but he is hated by far more. He is, in fact, the most hated man alive today. For a person so vain, who needs the approbation of the masses in order to have some sense of reality, it might seem strange that he does so much to be so despised by so many. But if you understand the psychological problem of pathological narcissism, you know that the fuel that drives the craving for attention is the deepest form of self-loathing — which unconsciously drives the narcissist to self-immolation. And what we are seeing on our streets is the broadest demonstrations of protest in our nation’s history, much of which is driven by a rejection of the racist-in-chief and all that he represents. Clearly, he has lost the “mandate of heaven.”
As it was said in Matthew 16:26, “what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?” As we have come to understand about karma, there is not necessarily a correspondence between bad action and material loss but rather it leads to a corruption of the soul. We see this in Mr. Trump with great vividness. He is clearly not a happy man. He has no joy, no love, no humor, no song. He fumes at all those around him. He eats and sleeps poorly — tormented in the middle of the night, he tweets shaming screeds against his enemies. He may have fame, fortune and power, but he lacks the most precious of commodities: peace of mind, harmony of soul, and love in his heart. He already is paying the price for his hubris in his misery and unhappiness. When an individual finds his only value in ratings, there is nothing more humiliating than a poorly attended rally, as he experienced recently in Tulsa.
The long drama is not yet over. An election is coming up where Trump will, if the universe in fact has an order, face the final ignominy of getting throw out of office after one term. He will go down in history, without a doubt, as the worst president of all time. We want this to happen not out of revenge or churlishness. We want this to happen because the soul of our nation is at stake. Our country is very ill. Our pathology runs deep. The price of Trump’s hubris, and all the sycophants, miscreants, cynics, crooks, and quislings who have participated in his kleptocratic regime, sadly, will not only be paid by him but is being paid right now by all of us. As the ancient Chinese understood, when the leader has a “lost heart” we all suffer.
The only possible upside to the continuing COVID crisis is that it provides evidence for universal law. The present conditions, where the virus is growing relentlessly in the U.S., have been completely predictable, based on our leaders approach and the response of too much of the public. If you ignore the reality of a problem, it doesn’t go away. It just gets worse. Dangerously, if we continue to go against natural law, the disasters of our out-of-control pandemic and economic collapse will be just the prelude to a far worse price that we will all be sure to pay.
But all is not lost. We can come out of this even better than we went in. We are like a pre-diabetic alcoholic patient where our our only chance of survival is to do all the right things. Will we follow the doctor’s orders, that is, will we try to become more in alignment with universal law?
If we live in a very sick society and our survival depends on a cure that involves doing the right thing, or reestablishing living in harmony with the Way, or universal law, what is it that each of us as individuals need to do? The symptoms that most of us suffer parallel to our disharmonious world is inner disharmony. We are in conflict with ourselves. What we suffer with is not hubris — rather, but it’s mirror image — self-denigration. The result of our inner conflict is that we are not authentically ourselves. We are plagued with shame. As stated, one way of defining shame is the feeling that goes along with the belief that in some way we do not measure up as human beings. The person who is poisoned with hubris believes they are more than human, that they can supersede universal law. Most of us are tormented by the opposite — that we are less than human and we are not entitled to our power, voices, and expression.
Another way of describing shame is as an inner inhibiting force. In other words, our hand reaches toward the cookie jar, and shame is the other hand that slaps it away. It is the inner voice that says, “No.” We feel an impulse, desire, or need and as soon as we feel this energy to act, there is a contrary force that we experience as anxiety — the force that stops us, or inhibits us, from acting. We experience who we authentically are as something dangerous and threatening that needs to be controlled. We all need self-control, and there is such a thing as healthy shame that protects us from hubris, but when this force is applied too powerfully we don’t manifest what Aristotle called our entelechy, or that which we are meant to be. We are taught — by our families, schools, religion, society — rules that are claimed to conform to the natural order but actually do not because when the rules we learn keep us from realizing our highest potentials, we are going against the natural order of things. To suppress our authentic selves is as dangerous as hubris, in that in this way, too, we are not in alignment with the Tao.
It often turns out that the consequences we are trying to avoid by silencing ourselves or inhibiting our needs are exactly what happens through our inaction. The woman who doesn’t show herself to the guy she likes because she fears his rejection gets rejected because he never sees who she is. The person who avoids their creative pursuits for fear of failure fail to create anything. The individual who never starts their business because they become frozen with terror about losing their money ends up without a way to make a living. The person who doesn’t speak their truth to power for fear of consequences ends up oppressed. This, too, is living against the universal Way.
In fact, it can be asserted that masses living in shame, anxious and inhibited, medicated with drugs and entertainment, seduced with jobs that provide no fulfillment but a paycheck, serve the current hubristic power structure. As long as people remain afraid to speak their truth and stand up for what they know is right and just, those in power will continue to maintain control. I wouldn’t go so far as to assert some kind of coordinated conspiracy, but the indoctrination we receive in our upbringing conspires to thwart us from our true path, from living in harmony with universal law, and this allows those who are mad with hubris to control and dominate us. This is all part of the syndrome that has led to the deep sickness we find ourselves in right now.
From the preceding, the solution is clear. The thing that we can all do to save our nation from destruction is to claim our power, our voices, our courage, our empathy, our compassion, our strength, our imagination, and our love. These aspects of the self are what the universe has given us, and what we need to rightfully claim to be in harmony with the Way. If everyone did this, the world would truly change. Liberating ourselves from the shackles of our conditioning which has been inculcated in us pervasively and multi-generationally is no easy task. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the task of “self-cultivation” that Mencius describes as “finding the lost heart.” As the ancient Chinese would have it, the way to bring the world into harmony is by bringing the self into harmony. And by bringing the world into harmony, we make it more possible for individuals to find their self-regard, self-esteem, and self-love, which are inalienable human rights.
We can be all but certain that we will not liberate the human spirit in one lifetime but if we each do this work as fully as we can, we will advance the cause and pass the baton on to the next generation to continue the Great Work. But hopefully, if enough of us do all we can to become free, we can keep ourselves from utter catastrophe and start the path of healing from the destruction wrought by Nemesis.
This needs to start through the “heavenly mandate,” the will of the people representing the gods, in punishing hubris by liberating our strength and will enough to do everything we can to make sure that Trump and his minions get crushed in this upcoming election and are thrown on the dustheap of history. That would be justice and there would be hope for our children. I have faith in universal law and so I am certain this will happen. It is up to you.
