Searching for God # 138...the fable of the spiders and the insects

 A long-held and generally consented-to perception is that each and every expert ‘should’ or even ‘must’ stay in his/her chosen lane. Economists must never comment on national security, while security experts have no business commenting on economics; similarly, the military ‘brass’ has no business making public statements about politics, and doctors have no ‘right’ to express their views on the application of the law. Lawyers, however, seemed to have the presumed/assumed? right and privilege of commenting on the case of their clients, irrespective of their ‘legal specialty’. Those who are most easily dismissed from venturing into the public debate, whether it is about economics, military strategy, or even social policy, expect perhaps for some clergy venturing into the political/social/ethical issue of abortion. And only to enhance, paradoxically, the division, clergy are welcomed in a nation’s public, dramatic, reverent and ‘special occasions’ of honouring the dead and the wounded from war. 

“Keep to your own lane!” is a public dismissal, unless and until it comes to the political class who, given their diverse, and varied levels of both experience and expertise, are free to explore any and all subjects/issues/files with abandon. The media generally have attempted to select and then to develop ‘special’ reporters, for example, in fields of considerable public interest such as medicine, health; they have also contracted with former military generals as ‘authoritative voices’ on matters of military conflict, military strategy and occasionally geopolitical affairs. Former diplomats, too, are frequently appearing as talking heads on matters of international relations and occasionally a ‘former’ career expert transitions into some editorial role within the media. 

Without attempting to point a finger at this ‘balkanization’ of our public discourse and media coverage as the single cause, the dynamic might have contributed to the current rise to supremacy as the public issue of the almighty dollar as the factor that crosses all intellectual, academic, public professional and media-designed separators. Given the personalization of news coverage, along with the legal framing that all cases are based on evidence gathered and trials prosecuted as individual human behaviour, the convergence of ocean-liners filled with tonnes of cash owned, displayed, deployed and invested by a very small number of billionaires, the headlines are repeatedly echoing the theme (meme?) that a very small number of mostly men are now governing the United States of America. 

One of the more prominent scholars observing and publicly commenting on the convergence oif wealth with a multiple range of issues is Jeffrey Sachs who claims the U.S. is now a corportatocracy. It was former president Eisenhower who warned of the military-industrial complex; approximately seventy-five years on, Professor Sachs has enhanced that model to include the military-industrial-digital complex. 

From CGTN (China Global Television Network) in a piece entitled, Jeffery Sachs: War is the oligarchs’ business but the people foot the bill, August 20, 2026, we read: 

‘A group of narrow wealthy interests’--pro-war, pro-destruction and pro-mass murder—is driving US foreign policy, according to Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist and professor at Columbia University. In an interview with former U.S. judge Andrew Napolitano on Judging Freedom, Sachs described the US government as a ‘military-industrial-digital complex’ made up of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Big Oil and the politicians they fund. Sachs said the American people are ‘completely disgusted by all of this,’ but are ultimately left to bear the costs. 

While no sentient, aware and concerned person will likely be prepared to argue with the veracity, nor the cogency nor the implications of these observations, we all face the conundrum of how to bring about the level/degree of change that is needed? 

We seem to be caught in the spider’s web of our own making.  

In the natural world, spiders’ webs serve a primary purpose of absorbing flying insects for long enough to enable the spider to attack. With poor eyesight, spiders rely on their web as an external nervous system they can and do read its frequency of vibrations to know where their prey is trapped. Some webs feature a zig-zag pattern, stabilimenta, which may camouflage the spider, attract insects via UV light reflection, or warn birds not to fly through and destroy the web. Female spiders often lace their webs with pheromones to guide male suitors directly to them.  (From AI) 

Billionaires are neither intelligent enough, nor sufficiently linked in purpose and method to design such a web. The public, on the other hand is, and has been, left for centuries, to fend off ‘various’ enemies’ designing, deploying, redesigning and redeploying various ‘webs’ of both protection and seduction. Like a unique species, with the involuntary(?) participation of a profoundly anxious and easily duped public, helping to endorse both wealth and stealth, both of which have an archetypal radioactive influence, the billionaires’ metaphoric ‘web’ has the attractive quality of being silky smooth, as well as being engineered to be able to catch unsuspecting victims and ‘hold’ them long enough for eventual ‘capture-and-destroy' by the metaphoric oligarchic spiders. 

Spiders as oligarchs, plebians as ‘insects’ of prey, many of them gaping in both awe and intense motivation to become ‘rich’ like the spiders, and thereby easily and readily ensnared by this ‘web,’ together offer a mini-human-arachnid encounter spawned as another archetypal conflict between the power of money and the impotence of poverty. All the agents of media, government,   and the already self-fulfilled affluent of the ‘spiders’ (for this image) align as representatives of the elite, the web spinners, the seducers, not for any highly valued qualities of their own, rather for the image of power, status, wealth and ‘untouchability’ given that whatever they might choose to do, or to think or to imagine will never be really challenged beyond their own capacity and resources to defend themselves, successfully.  First, those of us insects have no resources even worthy of our contemplation of challenging the mighty spiders who seem to own the web. And, it is our very scarcity of those resources that impales us in the webs of the spiders.  

We want, whether we are willing and able to acknowledge our scarcity, our envy, and our attraction to the magnetic web of the spider, what those spiders already have....and no one knows that better than the spiders! And beyond their vaults of money, investments, bonds, shares, stock options, dependent insects who toil without protections or respect or dignity from the spiders, the inherent ‘influence’ even of the appearance of the ‘gold’ of affluence, irrespective of its authenticity in the gathering, or its integrity in the distribution is sufficiently ‘seducing’ to engender both real and fake images among the spiders. 

And those images, as is believed and captured by the unique species of spiders who are in charge of the public discourse, shaped public attitudes, and ward off all signs of public displeasure, continue to ‘arm’ the spiders in their oblivion to any risk or danger from the insects. And while there are insects invariably being ‘caught’ in the web, thinking they/we are now safe from harm, we are dangerously at risk of being destroyed by those spinners of the web in which we seem to be impaled. 

As is nature, where spiders ‘eat’ their prey, these unique spiders have no qualms about metaphorically, as well as literally, ‘devouring’ their insect prey. These unique spiders have no need of, nor do they seek access, to acquiring the skills they could use to negotiate with the insects. The only focus on their ‘mind’ is to enhance their own menu for power, their own obsession for influence, their own pursuit of dominance and their own seductive absorption, consumption and destruction of the universe of insects on which they feed. 

It is not precisely a ‘scorched earth’ kind of campaign; that would be far to undignified for the spiders whose ‘elan’ in spinning their web has entitled them to a conviction of superiority, supremacy over the insects. These unique spiders have actually found a way to link one web to several others, in a much larger, creatively designed and far more powerful than a single web, to spread their ‘prowess’ and their ‘superiority’ and their ‘entitlement’ in order to capture even more insects. 

And, it is not only by devouring those insects that these unique spiders take delight. Before they devour their captives, they actually ‘brain-wash them’ into believing that their life inside the web is one of full protection from the vast (if totally imaginary enemies) which are obviously gaining in power and influence, rendering the spiders’ web a safe sanctuary, free of danger from those hordes of lethal foes. Indeed, having secreted their potion into their unique potion into their web, these spider already know that their insect ‘prey’ will feast on the flagrantly false and highly seductive potion for a considerable time, enabling the spiders to enjoy the power of their ‘torture’ even for a longer period. Some insects have actually reported being trapped in their respective web for up to several months, some even for years, without coming to any conscious awareness of the trap in which they have been caught. 

Some of the insects already ensnared in a spider’s web, of this unique design and source, have managed to get a message to their families who have been searching for them. Those families have attempted to engage the appropriate agents to administer those chemical sprays, dessicant dusts that target the spiders’ nervous system, without so far having much impact. Even the highly potent ‘bifenthrin’ (in this case the highest legal authorities in the land) that waws intended to disrupt the nervous system of the spiders, has proven ineffectual. The peppermint and eucalyptus oils mixed with water, (the metaphor for the national media), which would have been expected to create a scent barrier that repels spiders, has so far proven impotent. 

Only recently, a unique network of insects that stretches around the equator, has carried an urgent message to faraway forces who alone have access to something these insects only recently learned about, something called Diatomacseous Earth, which, as a natural powder is supposed to lacerate the outer shell of spiders causing dehydration. There are reports that something analogous to this kind of deterrent may be available to the insects in their battle to escape the entrapments of these unique spiders. (scientific names and properties from AI) 

The scientific, and the world communities will be watching to see if any approach will be effective.