Ram Dass parallels the German collective denial of what was being done to the Jews with the modern American collective denial that allowed leaders like Donald Trump to rise while a permanent underclass formed. He calls for a shift from individualism to a sense of common good.
Transcript
so I said we''ve gone from individualism to a beginning sense of the common good of the recognition we are part of systems it's been in the scientific and philosophical literature I mean it's Bates and it's all these people but that we could collectively I mean if you think of the collective the German Collective Consciousness they dealt with through much denial what was being done to the Jews and others is that different from our Collective denial that allowed us to idolize and place on our altars people like Donald Trump when we knew that the permanent underclass was being created because we could see it around us but we were busy denying what we were seeing we had Dynasty and we had Dallas and then we had an increasing number of people who are the ocean that spreads out into the world over that Mexican border and elsewhere of those who haven't and how much denial how much closing of your Compassionate Heart must it take to continue to play the game of King of the mountain what's in it for me and each of us gets the most we can for ourself trickling down of course is the assumption that once we have enough for ourselves we will then create ways to share it with everybody out of our bicent or out of Our obligation perhaps that's another level of Consciousness and it's why Chuck's involvement with social Venture Network his creation of it is an absolutely Exquisite moment of Shifting mythology that Ben and Jerry and Anita Wayne sby from calary fun and all these wonderful people who are playing with the edge of saying business has a social responsibility for the common good wait until television gets that kind of group going we're shifting mths from thinking that we were educated for facts to the recognition that we are educated regarding process not knowledge way to find it like computers you don't have to know it anymore you just have to know where to find it but also we are beginning to recognize the value of how our mind works of studying how our mind works which is meditation because it's sneaking into the culture through stress reduction basically and stress is a product of the fear that exists in an unstable situation in which everybody in the situation is caught in their own separateness and has lost the balance that they are part of systems we had a myth that you chose your career when you were 12 14 16 and then you saw it through it is now true that the present person in our society should expect to have five career changes in a lifetime so retraining is no longer something for losers it's something for winners it's how quickly you get retrained for your next round because you realize you're in an economy that's like a floating crap game and you just got to stay very loose as to how you're going to play it I think we've we're in an interesting transition period because of the bomb from the myth that war is a solution a political solution to recognizing that it is not that diplomacy is the only strategy and that unless you have a win-win situation nobody wins we're seeing how when somebody wins somebody loses and when somebody loses they they are the croats the serbs and the bosnians everybody feels they lost and now they're going to win but really in history there can be no winners and losers because we're all in it together but notice how little compassion there is across those borders between the Muslims and the Christians the Jews and the Arabs Palestinians the inner city and the suburbs we had an interesting myth that I had in my history books about 1492 in the great benefit of Columbus discovering America I think we have matured with our Mythic structures I now feel that we are looking for a way to make an apology for the fact that we built our system on genocide and we are as culpable as Hitler ever was for what we have done as a people and feel how deep the justifications were in the culture John Wayne this is an older one but we had the myth that we were a a moral force in the world and then we had the Vietnam War and we realized how fallible our systems were that our fallible meaning that we were caught in Acts that were not harmonious with our deepest wisdom that's the pain of it the pain for each of you is to be living your life in a way that is not harmonious with your deepest wisdom and I would say that's my pain and that ever since 1961 when I took mushrooms ever since that moment I have recognized that I have a deep deep wisdom a connection to the universe that is at home and true and at one and that my separateness is just my separateness and that the systems I am part of are fallible systems and they are dissonant from the way my heart says my heart says there is Justice my heart says there is compassion because that is what my heart is it's a just and compassionate entity and so is yours and we armor them with rationalization to deal with the fact that we are acting in ways that are not just and they are not compassionate and I figure my whole life has been some an attempt to work with the dissonance and the attempt to integrate my inner truth with the way I live and it's very very fascinating as a journey fascinating as a journey