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With their 'roots,' the trees break down the walls of Isengard, and with Gandalf's engineering advise, they move rocks and divert the river Isen and build a great dam, which they later destroy in order to let the stored up waters and mud drown out all of Isengard. With this single, simple act, the synarchist's logistical base becomes destroyed. It becomes flooded with mud and water, beyond recovery. Thus, Saruman the synarchist looses his capacity to be a menace. His power is broken.
All of this unfolds as the result of the hobbit's simple truthfulness and their organizing effort to cause Treebeard to discover the truth for himself, and to acknowledge it, and to understand it. Shouldn't we be able to do this too, beginning with the recognition that there exists such a thing as the truth? All of us have that capacity to be honest with ourselves. Isn't that what it really means to sharpen ones 'sword' and to sharpen ones 'wits'?
Secrets yet to be revealed
It is easy to say, sharpen your wits, but it isn't that easy when one stands at front line in the jungle of professional liars.
Here we meet great names of the evil craft, such as Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Public Relations Minister who made an entire nation believe that the grass is blue and the sky green. He had a simple formula for that: The greater the lie, and the more often it is told, the stronger it is believed as the truth. His formula of course was well hidden and remains so, even though it was a crude stab in the dark in comparison with the modern professionalism in this line of highly prized evil wizardry.
Still, the writing had been on the wall much earlier in time, of this sort of thing unfolding. Mary Baker Eddy wrote in New England in 1875: "The looms of crime, hidden in the dark recesses of mortal thought, are every hour weaving webs more complicated and subtle. So secret are the present methods of animal magnetism that they ensnare the age into indolence, and produce the very apathy on the subject which the criminal desires."*1 Her terminology is right on the mark, the evil wizardry of lies drags us away from our humanity to the point where truth recedes from sight and gives way to the crude animal impulses of fear and subjection to domination in countless ways.
So, what is Tolkien telling us about that in the Lord of the Rings? Oh, he is telling a beautiful tale that is actually more appropriate today than it has been during the years in which the saga was created. For this reason I will relate the story that he tells to our modern world what he has foreseen as a possibility that has already come to pass.
A meeting of the minds
The story begins in the immediate aftermath of the ruin of Saruman by the flooding of Isengard and the destruction of his ten-thousand beast-men army. Gandalf decides on one final fare well visit, facing Saruman. He calls this last 'task' with Saruman "dangerous," but says that it needs to be done. Many of his followers choose to come with him.
"Beware! Do not jest! This is not the time for it." Gandalf cautions them.
"Will he cast a spell on us?" asks Pippin.
Yes, "If you come with a light heart," Gandalf confirms.
Oh, if Gandalf's counsel had only been heeded in modern time, many millions of people would not have died from the causes that the leaders of nation allowed themselves to be drawn into, like so many victims of snake oil salesmen. Those salesmen wore fine clothes then. They still do. Only the snake oil has given way in modern times to financial contracts, free trade contracts, transparency contracts, shock therapy contracts, privatization contracts, coupled with a total immunity for the thieves. The thieves come in countless shapes and colors, as private vultures acting as pirates for profit. Some of them are called banks, even central banks, all private, all with their fingers out seeking profit, backed by powerful international institutions that are backed themselves by the most powerful governments of earth. They lend their loot in rigged games that allow them to maximize the looting, and when the resulting debt cannot be paid by the borrowing nation they drive the nail deeper into the coffin that comes attached with the loans, which increases the death rate of the looted population.
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Stories about
Sex
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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