How unchecked ambition is killing our world
by SIMON HEATHCOTE
Our once high and noble aspirations have been replaced by madness.
IN years to come, when this epoch of collective madness has come to an end, people will - once again - wonder what went wrong. How did we place unchecked and unlimited power in the hands of a few?
Why did we not stop them sooner? Why on earth did we fail to learn from recent history? Millions will have died for no reason and already have.
Perhaps parallels will be drawn with Nero and Caligula, Hitler and Stalin. A new generation of young leaders - Johnson, Ardern, Macron, Trudeau and Dan Andrews - will have been firmly linked with a shadowy banking elite, desperately pushing an agenda intent on depopulation and total dominance.
Hiding behind NGOs and other unelected bodies, the robber barons are manipulating, perhaps even bribing and blackmailing, our now weary-looking leaders to do their bidding.
Time is running out. Not to save the Earth (certainly not in the way they claim), but for a brainwashed humanity to arise from its slumber and act to save itself from impending disaster.
Some us have been writing and talking about the mass psychosis now engulfing the world, often called mass formation, that deliberately casts a spell on the unwitting populace through constant lies and repetitive television announcements, and the employment of behavioural psychology to terrify.
In a recent interview, the departing peer Sir David Puttnam warned Britons about the rise of populism, even comparing its methodology to the Nazi playbook:
“I believe we are sleepwalking towards a form of unaccountable power the like of which, in the modern era, the UK has never previously experienced.”
He goes on to exhort Britons to wake up or walk into self-inflicted disaster.
Early in his career, he had met one of the architects of the Third Reich, Albert Speer, and discovered an ambitious man who had lost his moral compass. How easy it is to be seduced, get sucked in, says the film-maker, even become someone you never intended to be. That is not just a warning for this age, but any other, travelling the human story like a poisoned vein.
Yet as damaging as it can be, ambition which is built into the very fabric of our existence of course, becomes a god in the psyche just like Eros. It is only when it falls into shadow and places service to self way ahead of service to others that it becomes problematic.
I always remember the moment in the film Gandhi when Martin Sheen’s reporter suggests the titular protagonist is a “very ambitious man”. Gandhi takes a long pause before answering with “I hope not.”
Why? Because he knew the dangers inherent in ambition and ego and steered himself away from them. For as Puttnam says, we are all vulnerable. Anyone can sell their soul.
Jacinda Ardern, once a bright and breezy new mother, now looks and sounds more like Lady Macbeth, grinning gleefully in an interview about the creation of a two-tier society. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We can learn much from the astrological wheel, with the first house archetype (Aries) coming from the darkness of the unmanifest (Pisces) into the dawn of birth, as yet invested with little light.
Small wonder the Aries energy is connected with the task of overcoming fear, its warrior energy often acting on impulse - for the native has not yet developed enough inner light to be self-reflective.
Examine the chart of the ambitious and successful and you will probably see this archetype features strongly along with the nimble mountaineering Capricorn. At first glance, this is about the drive into form - how the manifest world is built - although at a deeper level it is always about the inculcating of more light.
As we progress through the wheel, more and more light is available until the drive of ‘I’ becomes the peace of ‘we’, the realisation that all is one, not just the illusory ‘me’ that can think only of itself, its plans and ambitions.
And woe betide anyone who gets in the way - they will surely be smashed into non-existence. I believe we are witnessing this now, although most do not recognise what they are seeing, again because of a lack of light or, more accurately, their gaze being deliberately focused on false light.
In short, humanity has been betrayed and led by a cohort of seductive Pied Pipers who only care for themselves and will - if we let them - destroy everybody else, apart from those they can exploit towards a terrifying future.
Young cultures are particularly vulnerable to the same energies, for what applies to the individual applies to them as well.
Colonists and founding fathers have to create worlds, build railroads and cities, perfect ground for any ambitious man or woman.
Yet blind ambition without a spiritual focus - the cause of a higher power - soon becomes a killing machine, wiping out indigenous societies, ruining nature and trashing the idea of community.
We have lost sight of the age- old question: whom do you serve? A central motif of literature from the old story of the Fisher King to Schaffer’s Equus, and the pertinent question of astrology’s eighth house.
The choice is always between ego and soul. The erosion of our values has thrown out this central and vital dilemma; we are now hostage to rampant individualism, answering to no-one.
As the rabbi Jonathan Cahn writes in his bestseller The Harbinger, 9/11 was a warning for a nation to turn back to its founding principles. That warning was ignored.
The concept of the servant leader, the knightly traditions of old lie in tatters. Our once high and noble aspirations have been replaced by madness.
God has left the building and everything is in peril.