- The Personal 'Sting' -
Although this section will be relatively short, we are making it a separate section so as to emphasize the importance of the 'Sting' of the Great Swindle at the level of the personal lives of individual human beings.
The reason this section will be relatively short, as compared with the following section on the Institutional 'Sting', is that the actual 'Sting' of the individualized Swindle, ie., the result of the Swindle's direct operation in the most intimate and private aspects of our personal lives as individuals, happens to be more easily and concisely stated than that of the 'Sting' at the institutional level.
But that doesn't mean that the Personal 'Sting' is of less importance, or of less damaging impact on us, than the Institutional 'Sting'. It isn't. It is simply easier to put into words.
Indeed, if anything, the 'Sting' at the individualized level has a deeper and greater impact on us than does the 'Sting' at the institutional level. If the 'Sting' of the Great Swindle did not operate at the individual, personal level, it wouldn't be able to operate nearly as effectively, if even at all, at the level of our social institutions.
In our final chapter, dealing with how we can actually stop the Great Swindle, the bulk of the discussion will be on the Swindle at the personal level, at which point we will go into the matter in great detail.
But for now, we shall simply state the problem.
The 'Sting' of the personalized Swindle hits every one of us right where we live; right within the privacy of our very personal mind, heart, guts, and spirit.
It is at this level of the Great Swindle that we are cheated out of our individual sense of inner Creative Power, self-confidence, and even of self-respect.
The inner Creative Power which each of us, as individuals, possess, to establish and maintain fulfilling and meaningful lives for ourselves, is snatched right out from under our very noses, and turned against us.
And, we not only don't see the fraudulent 'con game' and theft, we, for the most part, aren't even suspicious of it.
When our inner Creative Power is turned against us, so as to deprive us, to one extent or another, of self-confidence and self-respect, a chain of events automatically follows which are devastating, to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon how deeply the fraud has embedded itself within each individual.
The Personal 'Sting' of the Swindle is the primary cause of broken dreams, broken hearts, broken marriages, and the emotionally crippled children of broken homes.
It is the primary and direct cause of the broken lives of alcoholism and drug addiction.
And it is the direct cause of all the 'silent' suffering of all the people who live in an emotional and spiritual 'twilight zone' of desperate and numb survival; all the people who live out their lives within their own little emotional and spiritual cocoons, swapping the sense of being alive for the illusion of 'security', and firmly imprisoned behind the walls of their own inner FEAR and doubt as to their own worth and inner strength.
The world is full of despairingly lonely people, of all ages, races, social classes and religious beliefs. And it is the 'Sting' of the personalized Swindle that locks them into the prison of their own barren loneliness.
There is little warmth and little LOVE in the lives of these people. And the only reason for this dearth is that they are being Swindled out of it. The world, for them, is truly a cold and cruel place.
And they, themselves, don't realize that the major reason their world is so cold and cruel is that they, themselves, have locked their own warmth and LOVE out of it.
The 'Sting' of the personalized Swindle is each and every one of the Grand Distractors, and all of them combined together, reaching right into the heart of our innermost being and, by way of the grandest 'snow job' in the cosmos, deluding our inner Creative Power of CHOICE into becoming a traitor against us, and thereby yanking our strength and confidence to be happy, whole and very much alive human beings right out of us.
It is our own personal IGNORANCE and FEAR within our innermost selves, combining together to prevent most of us from even coming close to realizing what we are capable of being as the truly creatively powerful creatures we are.
And, it affects every one of us, to one extent or another.
Some of us are totally devastated by it.
Others of us seem to be barely scratched by it.
Most of us are somewhere in between the two extreme ends of the broad spectrum of the Swindle's personalized 'Sting'.
But all of us are paying the price of its bite in our personal lives, to one extent or another.
Yet, it is curable.
Indeed, of the two levels of the 'Sting' of the Great Swindle, it is the more easily curable.
As you will see as you read on.