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It Doesn't Have To Be This Way
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
"Induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same things, feel the same threat, then their behavior is already captive--you have acquired your consumers or your cannon-fodder."
The potential for transformation can be expressed in one simple phrase: it doesn't have to be this way.
The structures that benefit from dominating the current system maintain their dominance by convincing us that "the way it is" is inevitable and impervious to systemic change. That is the primary mythology that generates and maintains their dominance.
The second level of dominance is created by persuading us that not only is the current "way the world works" inevitable, it is the best way possible because it enables self-expression and convenience via consumption.
R.D. Laing described the essence of the hidden machinery of dominance in his bookThe Politics of Experience:
“All those people who seek to control the behavior of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of those other people. Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways. Induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same things, feel the same threat, then their behavior is already captive - you have acquired your consumers or your cannon-fodder.”
The essence of dominance is not force (which is only deployed when there is no other way to maintain dominance) but the molding and internalization of a specific set of beliefs about how the world works. These beliefs include a set of values and myths that guide our behavior and how we experience the world around us.
All the structures that dominate our society and economy (the central state, crony-capitalist cartels, the Federal Reserve, the financialization/banking sector, those benefiting from Empire) need do is persuade us that their dominance is not only inevitable and natural but ideal.
We can delineate the core beliefs that enable their dominance with a set of simple if-then statements. If we believe what they want us to believe, they have won and we have lost: their continued dominance is assured without force or even persuasion.
1. If we believe that debt is inevitable, they have won and we have lost.
2. If we believe that what we wear, buy, drive, display and consume defines our identity and place in the world, they have won and we have lost.
3. If we believe that we express ourselves through what we buy, consume, display and own, then we have entered a state of permanent insecurity and adolescence; they have won and we have lost.
4. If we believe that without its Empire, America would perish, they have won and we have lost.
5. If the "news" leaves us fearful, anxious, frustrated and angry, they have won and we have lost.
6. If we believe that being connected to and consuming digital media during every waking hour is not just necessary but desirable as a display of coolness and status, they have won and we have lost.
7. If we believe fast food and packaged food is cheap, tasty and convenient, they have won and we have lost.
8. If we believe we would perish without a payment from the Central State, they have won and we have lost.
9. If we believe that measures such as the unemployment rate and gross domestic product (GDP) are meaningful metrics, they have won and we have lost.
10. If we believe that our identity and self-expression flow from our membership in various "tribes" defined by signifiers such as sports team logos, corporate logos, tattoos, programs and music we consume, brands and other consumables, they have won and we have lost.
11. If we believe the America of today is the perfection of all that is good about America rather than the suppression of all that is good about America, they have won and we have lost.
12. If we believe that learning and intellectual accomplishment are to be scorned as "elitist," they have won and we have lost.
13. If we believe that health results from consuming handfuls of pills, they have won and we have lost.
14. If we believe it is normal to transfer the vast majority of our earnings to the state and a handful of crony-capitalist cartels, they have won and we have lost.
15. If we believe the world is controlled by secret cabals over which we have no power, they have won and we have lost.
16. If we don't know what to do with ourselves when shopping, buying, consuming and entertainment/news are unavailable, they have won and we have lost.
17. If we believe there is a meaningful difference between the two political parties, they have won and we have lost.
18. If we believe we are entitled to convenience, state support, etc. as a birthright, they have won and we have lost.
19. If we believe we are powerless to change anything other than our current mix of consumption, they have won and we have lost.
20. If we believe that lying, cheating, fudging the numbers, exaggerating our victimhood or accomplishments, gaming the system and being silently complicit in others' lies, fabrications, deceptions and embezzlements are required to get ahead, they have won and we have lost.
Here are some "it doesn't have to be this way"-related aphorisms:
"There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity." (Douglas MacArthur)
"We are what we repeatedly do." (Aristotle)
"Do the thing and you shall have the power." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." (E.F. Schumacher)
"Do you know what amazes me more than anything else? The impotence of force to organize anything." (Napoleon Bonaparte)
"Whatever remains unconscious emerges later as fate." (Carl Jung)
"A healthy homecooked family meal and a home garden are revolutionary acts." (CHS)
"Any sufficiently advanced cartel's actions are indistinguishable from magic." (CHS)
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)
"Passive absorption of marketing-dominated media is the primary activity on the plantation of the mind, and that of course is the goal of the colonial overlords: distraction, passivity, confusion, divide and conquer, and the old stand-by, financial desperation." (CHS)
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Death and taxes- both are over-rated.
Our whole life 'didnt have to be this way'...
.
We are controlled and ruled by powerful bloodlines and the occult.
I'm changing, with or without permission.
+100, Newsboy!!
Nothing changes as long as we wait for permission.
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." (E.F. Schumacher)
And we do so and thrive or do not and perish.
It really has come to that, I believe.
Some of those aphorisms are great. Who is CHS? He or she is a genius!
That would be the author, Charles Hugh Smith.
I'm reading his latest book, The Nearly Free University & The Emerging Economy.
Absolutely brilliant.
And most people just love it!
And most people just love it!
Actually, they generally just pretend that they love it. They don't know what else to do, and they're confused and scared.
"It is a matter of for what and why;
Do we live to live or live to just die?"
Who knows? Maybe our lives DID have to be this way--when looking at the situation from a Calvinistic viewpoint. Perhaps it's always been this way. Just saying.
The object of life today is to have the most iTunes, right? Isn't life today only about 1-upping your peers, having more bling...in general just showing off? Of course it is, that's all society cares about today.
You sound like a Subaru drivin' vagitarian.... My ford truck is huge, and so is my McMansion (although my yard is quite tiny, as is my pee-pee)...
I have encountered a surprising number of people recently who do NOT fit your description of self-absorbed, bling-worshipping, off-showing one-uppers.
Maybe you need some different friends.
It could be that there are those who benefit from having us think "that's all society cares about," when in fact it's not so at all.
an iTune is symbolic of modern techno society. 90% of the information stripped out for the same price. You'll never notice the difference, so they tell us.
Yes, Sheepdog, for some it's more bling. For some it's a life of ease. There are a few who seek more work and fewer still who work hard to help others. Not everyone is the same but selfishness seems to be what is in the majority.
It has not been my experience that selfish people are in the majority. Maybe I'm just a lucky so-and-so.
"No one honest has an easy life, Edward. And it's aching for one that causes the most pain." - Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
Propaganda, indoctrination = control. There's no mystery or surprise here.
Marshall Mcluhan: "The medium is the message."
Well, the medium is a bunch of MSM conglomerates under statist control and speech is no longer free and neither are you. That's the real message you are intended to receive.
Zbigniew Brzezinski called this a coming Technocracy, a surveillance society with a "New set of values". Peoples' actions in the future will be directed by technocrats using technology to exploit and amplify emotional content. ZB is describing total control of behavior and mob action for select purposes.
And Zbig's Daughter Mika ensures that it happens every morning on Morning With Joe pseudo news program.
Better a pseudo news program with low viewership than the pulling strings within the corridors of power. Now that the progressive science freaks are producing designer babies I'm surprised some sick fuck hasn't tried to create a Brzezinski-Kissinger hybrid to install it behind the curtains of the Oval Orifice.
Once understood that it's all smoke and mirrors, most people choose to make their own exit out of another person's fun house.
Chris Hedges is way beyond figuring out it's all smoke and mirrors in
The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies: Chris Hedges.http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/chris_hedges_jan_27_column_transcript_collapse_of_complex_societies_2014012 … …
Requiring perhaps 20 minutes of quiet time, this spellbinding Oct. 2013 allegorical speech/sermon by Hedges is wise and instructive in it historical/philosophical analysis of "revolution" and the "sublime madness" needed to resist and oppose the corporate police state's fixation on crushing beauty, truth, imagination and the human spirit-- in order to perpetuate its lying, thieving, self-destructive self.
"Our financial system—like our participatory democracy—is a mirage. The Federal Reserve purchases $85 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds—much of it worthless subprime mortgages—each month. It has been artificially propping up the government and Wall Street like this for five years. It has loaned trillions of dollars at virtually no interest to banks and firms that make money—because wages are kept low—by lending it to us at staggering interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent. ...our corporate oligarchs hoard the money or gamble with it in an overinflated stock market. Estimates put the looting by banks and investment firms of the U.S. Treasury at between $15 trillion and $20 trillion. But none of us know. The figures are not public. And the reason this systematic looting will continue until collapse is that our economy [would] go into a tailspin without this giddy infusion of free cash.
...The degradation of education into vocational training for the corporate state, the ending of state subsidies for the arts and journalism, the hijacking of these disciplines by corporate sponsors, sever the population from understanding, self-actualization and transcendence. In aesthetic terms the corporate state seeks to crush beauty, truth and imagination. This is a war waged by all totalitarian systems."...Chris Hedges
"But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.” - Ishmael
when Chris chooses to open more than just his Left Eye, he might find more of an audience willing to listen.
Moby D's a great metaphor for sure, but the true genius of Melville is that he saw beyond the political lens into the nature of humanity itself, even & especially that part which believes it's on the "right" side of humanity.
+1. I find it hard to take someone seriously who rails about the risks of climate change when tons of radioactive contamination are spilling into the Pacific ocean on a daily basis. For me, it makes the author appear to be more interested in promoting a political agenda rather than addressing issues based on some rational measurement of potential threat.
@ CALLTOACCOUNT....AMEN BROTHER!
When Hedges calls for a voluntary system rather than his beliefs in charge of the status quo, I will agree.
In reality it may have to be this way now. It is not going to reverse because evil men have bribed fools with lies.
It will not change until the fallacy is proven in ugly ways.
NO! It does NOT have to be this way now!
It's this way because of moral cowardice on the part of the many and a sick drive for dominance on the part of the few.
"evil men"
Hard wired "evil men" and hard wired dupes equals current and future failures.
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)
I like this one, and I would say it was probably formulated ironically. To me, it sounds as the best implicit admission, that the "sane" ones are exceptions.
Marcus Aurelius may have been the last sane Emperor of Rome. I don't think he was kidding in the slightest, or even speaking ironically. Being the most powerful man in the world of his day meant the things he dealt with every day were very different from what we mere modern mortals deal with, but we're still all human beings, all with the same propensity toward self-delusion.
" I don't think he was kidding in the slightest, or even speaking ironically. "
I really don't know for sure.
But you can express a truth through irony .
This is basicly Gramsci's Cultural Hegemony.
F*cking Italian midget. Musollini should have just shot him.
why, even if you reject the notion of Cultural Hegemony, Cultural Imperialism etc. you have to admit that the American Culture "lights" shine
to the point that for many it's very difficult to see in the relative darkness that is the rest of the world, like gazing in the night from a bright-lit room
ask yourself how many cultural products, be them books, poems, movies or even news you have consumed, lately, which were not "made in USA"
and don't get me into food. or basic habits, or worldviews, or political commentaries, etc. etc.
you have to admit that the American Culture "lights" shine
indeed, the question is if there is a reason why that is beyond the hegemon(s) shoving it down everyone's throats.
Collective identity is necessary for change to be brought about by mass hysteria.
Is there a more effective way to get rid of the bankers and oligarchs?
They always have died at their own hands. They are bankers. That's what bankers do.
Most people love the Matrix because all they know is the Matrix.
11. If we believe the America of today is the perfection of all that is good about America rather than the suppression of all that is good about America, they have won and we have lost.
if "America" = the world, then +1