USADA Findings On Lance Armstrong Doping - How The Idolatry Of Hyper-Competitiveness And Aggression Embraced By Fundamentalist Capitalist Cultures Are Creating Modern Society Collapse

I just finished perusing the documents regarding the Lance Armstrong investigation on the USADA web site and it appears incontrovertible that Armstrong won all of the Tour de France victories aided by various forms of drug use in addition to regular doping.  Until now, there seemed to be some doubt but now there is clear testimony from eleven teammates, including close friends.  There is so much evidence that it would take a conspiracy beyond anyone’s wildest dreams for so many to tell so many lies under oath. 

Unfortunately, in the testimony of his teammates, Armstrong gave the reason for drug use.  It was that everyone else was doing it.  This dynamic is far from an isolated incident.   Modern day capitalist culture around the globe operates around a dynamic of hyper-competitiveness and winning at any cost.   This type of culture rewards the most aggressive personality types.  (As noted on here before, aggressive personality types are highly dysfunctional motivated primarily by the ego.)  Being the global economic system’s cultural and social values are very substantially defined by hyper-competitive, fundamentalist, corporate capitalism, this propagandized dynamic permeates nearly every aspect of modern society and culture. 

In this post I am going to focus on the U.S. and hyper-competitiveness because it is oftentimes more overt and easy to see.  But obviously this type of systemic hyper-competitiveness and associated aggressive, patriarchal behavior permeates every corporate capitalist culture.   Given capitalism and corporations are inventions of the state, these corporate capitalist values are reflected throughout capitalist-statist culture everywhere.   And, that is why we are seeing the seeds of modern day society collapse everywhere.  Don’t worry.  If your country hasn’t experienced it, like Canada as an example, it’s coming to your country.   Be prepared.   If you don’t see it in your culture, you need to wake up and look deeper.  It is there but it’s more covert.  Europe, as an example, has for centuries been entrapped in a feudalistic form of corporate capitalism.   As noted on here before, it was the basis of two world wars.  There is almost no movement up or down the class structure in Europe.  The oligarchs maintain their power without any question of their authority.  Until now.  People in Europe long ago became institutionalized serfs in this corporate state system.  It’s just that people have oftentimes had a hard time seeing it.   If you live in Europe, look out your back door now.  What do you see?  The exposure of a greater truth.  You are a serf in a system where you really have little economic freedom and no say over your own determinism.  And, with the system collapsing you have even less every day.   Just like the U.S.   In the end, that’s a good thing. 

War, sports, business, education, fundamentalist religion, journalism, etc.  Everything in today’s world derived through hyper-competitive winning.  There must be a winner and loser to everything.   What was the best selling book coming out of the Clinton era deregulation of capital?  The World Is Flat.  A book of incredible incompetence and fiction glorifying the hyper-competitive, aggressive values of the Godless corporate state.  And, being that this system is devised and manipulated by people who don’t compete for anything, ie, those at the top of the power structure, almost everyone else is impacted to some degree.  A major driver for this hyper-competitive cultural shift in American values, in particular, is that there is so little money available in our economy….. a dynamic shared by more and more countries around the world.   Our citizens are starved for money because corporations deny their democratic access to our own capital.  That is because you are a slave and as a slave your corporate masters determine your worth.  And as noted before, they do that through the control of the money in the economy.  That is not a banking statement.  Multinational corporations, monopolies and oligopolies in every industry, including finance,  have just as substantial of an impact of the money available in our economy as Wall Street through rigging the system.   Europe is now awakening to the reality that their system is no different.  It just looked “prettier” on the surface for some period of time.   It’s still the same pig regardless of how much lipstick it wears.

This dynamic manifests itself in a U.S. culture that oftentimes grants people one chance, maybe two, to create a career or “make it” economically.   And most people who aren’t born of extravagant means recognize this.  Most athletes in professional cycling and other competitive sports around the world come from societies with similar dynamics.  In other words, if I don’t win in sports, there are often very limited economic opportunities that may exist.  So, each win or loss, not only in sports but in every possible economic opportunity, can possibly make or break a deal, a job or a career.  Make or break whether someone is going to be”successful” within this system.  Self-sufficient or hit it big as is so glorified in corporate capitalism.  This type of hyper-competitiveness encourages people to rationalize behavior that most would never consider otherwise.   Winning at all cost is literally a reality across all aspects of our culture.  The next thing you know, these rationalizations become part of our nation’s belief system and thus our social values.   Modern society’s social values are derived mainly through corporate capitalism’s values.  If you really want to make it within the corporate state, there is some degree of emotional self-abandonment that often goes with it.  To be in the system, there is some degree of giving up some part of oneself to conform and fit in. Ironically, this very dynamic of hyper-competitiveness to fit in or conform to corporate capitalism’s rules of success defeats the very essence of nonconformity that democracy needs to survive.   Nonconformity that may have given Lance Armstrong the fortitude and emotional freedom to say no to cheating.  Or his teammates to say no to Lance Armstrong encouraging their cheating.  Or no to a Wall Street minion who was encouraged to cheat by his management, cheaters themselves.  The hyper-competitive corporate state culture thrives on exploitation, predation and victimization to some very large degree.   And, sports culture is very substantially dominated, if not derived, through the hyper-competitive, free market fundamentalist corporate culture of capitalism.  Where does all of the sponsorship money and wages for sports come from?  Corporations. 

Hyper-competitive parents send kids to cram schools and pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to learn basic reading and math skills to conform to the values of success defined by the corporate state.   What values does this instill in children?  Umm, maybe that I’m not worthy?  All because parents somehow derive their own worth through the acceptance of corporate capitalism’s social values and associated achievement of their children.  Children learn that they have to do more and more and more to gain their parent’s acceptance and validation.  Competition for acceptance, validation and love becomes ingrained in their psyche.   It fuels this entire dynamic from the instillation of corporate propaganda from childhood.   The effects?  Children grow up learning to live their existence pleasing others including their corporate masters.  And, in the process they never actually learn who they are or what they actually want.  They are told what they want starting with their hyper-competitive corporate-indoctrinated parents and continuing their entire lives by a hyper-competitive corporate capitalism value and belief system.   They are told to focus on academics, go to Harvard and become a corporate slave.  People spend their lives obediently following without any understanding of their own divinity, their own interests or their own emotional needs.   That is, until one day that belief system comes crashing down.  Some event shatters that belief system because eventually we realize no one is ever going to know what I need.  Especially the corporate state where my values were derived.  Only I will ever know that.  And, only I will ever be able to give it to myself.  Yet, by this point of crisis I have no idea who I am or what I need because I’ve never stopped to breathe and actually ask myself who I am.   The hyper-competitive, free market fundamentalist, corporate capitalist belief system has always done that for me.  It’s always been about what someone else believes I should be.  The crisis of identity ensues.  We are a nation with an identity crisis.  And, so it is and will continue to be around the world.  These are reflections of a morally-bankrupt social value system that is literally collapsing because it is destroying the emotional well-being of its citizens.   And, that’s just one example.  

It’s not uncommon for hyper-competitive parents to be in fist fights or shouting matches over their kids athletic events.  The competition to get into highly-esteemed universities is big business.  People are fired on the spot for losing a large corporate deal.  Wall Street turns new hires into looting machines and being right out of their corporate-manufactured university business degree programs, they are pliant minions more than willing to oblige.  Keeping up with the Jones and associated hyper-consumerism defines social success in our nation.   Corporate Hollywood’s inane vacuousness, excesses and self-importance are glorified values in the corporate media.  We are constantly bombarded with advertising messages of buying up.  Upward mobility is defined by having a bigger mortgage and a larger car payment.  And, for those who can’t, there is a substantial underlying social message of inadequacy.  And, nothing is more representative of this hyper-competitiveness than the glorification of war, murder and torture.  This continuous dynamic of feeding citizens into a system of corporate empire, death and destruction is only possible by convincing society that somehow others are worthy of our wrath; a form of competitiveness in comparative values that belies a deeply ingrained underlying bigotry.  All of these values are driven very substantially by hyper-competitive, free market fundamentalist, corporate capitalism.  This dynamic pervades every aspect of the Godless corporate state’s social values. 

All of this and more leads to endless rationalizations across every aspect of our existence.   Leads to Lance Armstrong’s rationalizations.  Leads to his teammates rationalizations.  To my rationalizations and yours.  And, it will lead most people to rationalize voting for corporate shills Romney and Obama.

The reality is that people are capable of rationalizing anything.   Human beings are rationalization machines.  In some specific situation, almost anyone can even rationalize the most heinous of acts, murder.  Our nation has probably killed more than half a million and maybe even one million people around the world in the last decade.  99.9% of whom never did anything to anyone in this country.  That is rationalized murder.  Especially since these deaths are a result of undeclared, and therefore, unconstitutional wars.  As noted in my Obama impeachment post a few weeks ago, there are retired military officers and former members of the Justice Department calling these undeclared acts nothing more than cold-blooded murder.   They have awoken from their rationalizations.  And, if you haven’t, you soon will too.

In a culture full of destabilizing dynamics, everyone will most certainly rationalize any and every behavior.  Our corporate-controlled “leaders” provide the roadmap of how that is consistently so.  Is the rationalized behavior of Wall Street looters any less of a rationalization than the kid living on the streets of Detroit selling crack cocaine to stay alive?  Both are rationalizations.   Both rationalizations are positively reinforced by the win at any cost hyper-competitive corporate values.   The kid on the street is a capitalist first and worries about democracy and justice second.  At least the kid selling crack cocaine may have a more likely chance of using that money to feed his family.  And he’s only going to destroy a handful of lives.  The professional crooks on Wall Street are more likely to harm our entire nation and then use that money to act out their own emotional insecurities through selfishness, extravagant showings of wealth & power, violence against women (prostitution), violence against themselves (drug and alcohol abuse) and hyper-consumerism.

People who rise to the top of this dynamic are those most willing to cheat, lie, steal and stomp on the face of their fellow man.  That is why we live in a leaderless society.   Those who set the tone for our nation are often the most vile people in our society.  Or, at least the most willing to rationalize anything to conform to the values of the corporate state.  And, in the process, sell their humanity for a dollar.   Their hyper-competititeness guarantees they are willing to do what is necessary to rise to the top of this heap of cut throat, dog-eat-dog corporation-inspired culture.  That is why there is such a disconnect from timeless human values and our nation & corporate capitalism derived social values.  Rather than embracing kindness, acceptance, dignity, community, selflessness and the like, our social values as defined by corporate-inspired patriarchal power are exploitation, violence, predation, selfishness and control.   Which values do you believe best serve democracy?  We are not a democracy.  We are a fundamentalist corporate capitalism.  Democracy is dead and deregulating for-profit, corporate capital(ism) killed it.

Those who think Americans are fat, dumb and lazy, as Jim Rogers is notorious for saying, really live in a rationalized, delusional reality.  Of course, that reality is driven very substantially by their own feelings of inadequacy.   While corporate capitalism’s values transcend the entire “civilized” world, the reality is people in this nation born with limited means live in a jungle. In my experience, Americans are the toughest sonofabitches in the developed world.   Because to survive here, you have to be.   The American dream is to rise to a level in this corporate-inspired violent, predatory, exploitative madness to be able to provide your family with some level of dignity.  Because the Godless corporate state has come to be based on indignity and injustice.  And unless you fight like a dog to get your head above water or are born into wealth, its hyper-competitiveness will eat many alive or turn them into another in a long list of nameless Lance Armstrongs.   Of course, there are the other options in this system.  That is, hide in academia or the government.  Or, resign yourself to extraction from the system for either healthy or unhealthy emotional reasons. 

All of these sociological factors leads to endless, self-reinforcing delusions and violence.  And, the only way anyone can accept this type of system that we have degraded into is through one massive rationalization.  We lie to no one more than we lie to ourselves.  This begs a fundamentally obvious question?  Do you really know who you are? Who you were really meant to become? Or do you still derive your identity, including the hyper-competitive corporate social values, from what others have placed inside of you?  Wall Street, Hollywood, sports, politics and your identity acquired through school and work are not representative of any kind of reality or truth.   They are corporate advertising-manufactured delusions that keep you from becoming who you really are.

Modern fundamentalist, corporate capitalist-defined society is collapsing because it doesn’t meet the needs every human being, well other than psychopaths and predators who created and thrive in this system of control, must have to flourish – connectedness, community, acceptance and safety.  To the contrary, it works toward destabilizing all but psychopaths, predators,  people who hide in academia that dream this stuff up or those who happen to enforce this system as state-employed drones.

If Obama wants to really understand why people cling to their guns and their religion, it’s because they both provide some perception of safety from a propagandized, corporate-values derived society gone mad.    For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.  Neoliberal fundamentalist capital and capitalism destabilizes societies.  Without change, we will have corporate-inspired social collapse everywhere. 

Want to change the world in ways most people probably can’t even begin to imagine?  Ways that would literally go a long way to resolving every single issue facing our nation and the those of other nations around the globe?  Including every social ill that is contributing to collapsing societies?  And the endless propagandized, corporate-manufactured beliefs that pervade modern corporate society?  We need both a public (democratic) banking system and democratic money that empowers citizens, democracy, community and safety rather than corporate and political power-mad megalomaniacs.    Capitalism can never be consistent with democracy until the capital in capitalism is owned by democracy and not private, for-profit corporations. 

One simple change that would be so profound you wouldn’t recognize what comes out the other end. 

USADA findings.