The Nightmare and the Dream

“For four long years,“ Wulf went on to say, “they tried to con­vince me this way of life is a nec­es­sary evil. They almost suc­ceeded until I went to Viet­nam, sup­pos­edly to stop the spread of Com­mu­nism, and saw the truth for myself.

“It appears they suf­fer some grand delu­sion that we are the good guys who’re going to save the rest of the world from bad guys, like the Com­mu­nists. They mis­led me, for awhile, with this white lie of theirs, until I dis­cov­ered they were only pro­tect­ing their delusion—some fan­tasy called the Amer­i­can dream which, for many through­out the world, has become a nightmare.

“For the real fight’s not out there, over in Viet­nam, it’s in here, within our­selves. It’s the strug­gle with our own delu­sions, the lies we live by, espe­cially the one which has us so con­vinced that what we need is more of what’s out there in Nature.“

“I don’t under­stand,“ I interjected.

“Since time immemo­r­ial,“ he went on, “have we fallen for this lie, that our future lies hid­den within our mate­r­ial progress. And yet, in our pur­suit of this delu­sion, we’ve only suc­ceeded in impov­er­ish­ing the earth and its peo­ple. Thus have we helped to cre­ate a bipo­lar world, con­sist­ing of the haves ’n’ the have-​​nots, who have fur­ther polar­ized them­selves over the issue of mate­ri­al­ism by squar­ing off on either side of an iron cur­tain into two heav­ily armed, ide­o­log­i­cally opposed camps or isms.

“As I chipped away at all the hype ’n’ hys­te­ria sur­round­ing com­mu­nism, I began to see it as a rather ambi­tious attempt by the have-​​nots to right the wrongs of cap­i­tal­ism, which has only suc­ceeded in glob­ally impov­er­ish­ing the many for the ben­e­fit of a few. How­ever, in their strug­gle to purge from the masses the sins of cap­i­tal­ism, that is, its rugged indi­vid­u­al­ism, greed and failed trickle-​​down eco­nom­ics, the com­mu­nists have only suc­ceeded in cre­at­ing a total­i­tar­ian night­mare instead of a utopia. As this night­mare invaded the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness of the world, it struck fear into the heart of the Amer­i­can dreamer and cre­ated mass hys­te­ria. For this Red scare threat­ened to take every­thing away from the Amer­i­can dreamer in order to redis­trib­ute the wealth, he’d mis­ap­pro­pri­ated in the first place, more equi­tably amongst its right­ful inher­i­tants, the have-​​nots of the world.

“That’s when I saw the night­mare and the dream as two sides of the same coin, for both of them have resorted, in the past, to pro­pa­ganda, eco­nomic ide­ol­ogy and guns to force their inhu­mane ways of life on the rest of us, the guilty bystanders caught up in this Mex­i­can stand­off. Whether we choose heads or tails, we lose—the many are impov­er­ished for the ben­e­fit of a few—for a sin­gle coin was given to us long ago to ben­e­fit not only the indi­vid­ual but also the collective.