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Guest Post: Are You Loving Your Servitude Yet?
Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds
Are You Loving Your Servitude Yet?
Aldous Huxley imagined a world in which the Status Quo satisfies its lust for power by "suggesting people into loving their servitude."
Yesterday I discussed the Convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka as a means of understanding the global crisis. It's not just financial fraud on a vast scale, or debt or leverage or derivatives or a hundred other arcane mechanisms of parasitic predation; it's the partnership of a mindlessly expansive Central State with Monopoly Capital and the media machine that serves them.
I considered including Aldous Huxley in the convergence, as he too anticipated the essential nature of modern life. But perhaps his insights are more complementary than convergent, for he understood the media and State's capacity to not only present a deranged and destructive Status Quo as "normal" but to persuade the serfs to embrace it.
Aldous Huxley foresaw a Central State that persuaded its people to “love their servitude” via propaganda, drugs, entertainment and information-overload. In his view, the energy required to force compliance exceeded the "cost" of persuasion, and thus the Powers That Be would opt for the power of suggestion.
He outlined this in a letter to George Orwell:
"My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."
As prescient as he was, Huxley could not have foreseen the power of electronic media hypnosis/addiction as a conditioning mechanism for passivity and self-absorption. We are only beginning to understand the immense addictive/conditioning powers of 24/7 social and "news" media. What would we say about a drug that caused people to forego sex to check their Facebook page? What would we say about a drug that caused young men to stay glued to a computer for 40+ hours straight, an obsession so acute that some actually die? We would declare that drug to be far too powerful and dangerous to be widely available, yet the Web is now ubiquitous.
Servitude comes in many gradations and forms. Relying on the Federal Reserve to constantly prop up our pension and mutual funds lest reality cause them to collapse is a form of servitude; we end up worshipping the Fed's every word and act as mendicants worship their financial saviors.
That the Fed is unelected and impervious to democracy or the will of the people is forgotten; all that matters is that we love our servitude to it.
I have discussed the atomizing nature of social media and the way it conditions self-absorption in 800 Million Channels of Me (February 21, 2011), and the way that the consumerist ethos generates insecurity, alienation and social defeat. The only "cure" for social defeat is to love the servitude of consumption, convenience and the resulting debt-serfdom: The Last Refuge of Wall Street: Marketing To Increasingly Insolvent Consumers (December 12, 2011).
I have covered these topics in depth in my books Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change and Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation.
The Central State has the power via welfare (individual and corporate) and bailouts to buy complicity. Since the human mind rebels against hypocrisy and insincerity--we can all spot a phony--we subconsciously persuade ourselves of the rightness and inevitability of servitude and self-absorption.
And that is how we come to love our servitude; we persuade ourselves to believe it's acceptable and normal rather than deranged and destructive.
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when do they invent soma for the masses?? (if you havent read the book brave new world.it was the drug that the populace was allowed to use)
They have. It's called "debt".
They have. It's called 'debt' with a TV chaser.
Ya gotta serve somebody.
-" you didn't make love to your wife....someone else did that for you. Those kids of yours, you didn't build those, they were made with the help of your neighbours"
Yeah! And can you believe what this moron said? Skip to the 1:45 mark for the good stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Yp9SVSWJU
Some of you are just too gullible. Let me guess. Libertarians again? Why is it always you?
Of course other people help you achieve great or small things, that's not the point. The point is, Obama wants to make a fetish out of your inability to do anything without others, so that when you are successful, he can tax the crap out of you -because it isn't really YOUR success/money/achievement; it belongs to the state, the people (as marxists are fond of saying).
If Obama is right, then I guess I really didn't have to do anything to become a neurosurgeon/truck driver, etc. -I could have just stayed in bed and collected my check.
Romney said exactly the same thing, but that's okay? No, you want to find fault with Obama no matter how hard you have to contort yoursef to do it, and you hope it convinces others to think the same way you do, that's all.
It's just like his health care plan, ths scourge of the nation, except when a conservative think tank dreamed it up, it was wonderful.
Anyone who is truly successful, if he's honest, will admit that luck and other people's help made a big difference.
Even your hypothetical surgeon, who was taught by someone else, in a school built by someone else, and works in a hospital built by someone else, supported by staff educated at someone else's expense.
Hey, did you see the Romney ad in response to what Obama said, featuring that guy who objected as he and his kid built their business with ther own two hands? As it turns out, it was their hands, and an $800,000 loan from...the government!
Like I said, you people are just too gullible. But fun as shit to dump on!
Step outside the false left-right paradigm for a moment there bob. I know it is scary, but you can get used to it.
Left+Right=FAIL.
More of that horseshit from you again?
There's no left/right paradigm, with every Supreme Court decision split along party lines? With every vote in Congress split along party, and left/right lines? Fox noise and MSNBC and the people who watch one or the other?
Very large political donors, millionaires and billionaires, giving loads to either party, along left/right thinking? I wonder what you know and understand that none of the above does?
Give it up already.
one of my kids does resemble the fedex guy.
-" you didn't make love to your wife....someone else did that for you. Those kids of yours, you didn't build those, they were made with the help of your neighbours"
And then if U could make love 2 her twice in a row it was called a honeymoon.
He forgot to mention the excessive use of pharmaceutical happy pills, the equivalent to SOMA in our society.
We have turned into a society of sheep grazing on the pasture of mass media LCD devices...
Net's really nothing more than brain viagra. See a psychiatrist after 4 hrs of hard thought.
Thinking is HARD work, which is why so few engage in it. :>(
Coupled with iProducts. iPhone 5 should be renamed iServitude.
Think pharmaceuticals in general; anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, anti-confront your own emotions, etc....
"Delicious Soma" has been synthesized into a virtual state, whilst retaining its potency: "American Idol;" "Dancing With the Stars;" "The View," et al.
I just love it when they increase my chocolate ration from 30 grams to 20 grams!! Thats so nice of them!!!
Are you tired of getting only zero point five percent returns? Come on down to Fast Timmy's Treasury and you can get zero point TWENTY-FIVE percent returns!
Meanwhile...how many here at ZH are likewise glued to the screen, refresh, refresh, refresh...heh.
I just come for the junk.
A very salient point.
That's because most t.v., newspaper, & radio sucks.
Well... this is one of the last bastions of hope in getting more truthful news and analysis of wtf is going on in the world. If not for ZH and a couple of other sites, I might as well be living under a rock. I don't mind living under a rock, but it would break my heart a millionfold if I was to find out the truth after all is said and done and I didn't have a moment's time to prepare for anything, physically or psychologically.
So yeah, I'll take the refresh option for now, because the discourse on the threads here is invaluable. When the web is long gone and inaccessible, I won't miss it one bit. I will, however, be glad that I spent a bunch of my valuable time learning about what is to come.
Just came in for dinner thought i'd check ZH to see what's up. Now back to canning green beans & tomatoes.So kindly fuck off Wjunk :)
I just had the sudden realization that I should log out and stop reading this crap.
Soma is TV,prozac, computer games, corn syrup, porn, motocycles, sex with young hotties, movies, fashion, radio, the sports culture and all the bullshit things that the sheeple love to spend their time on rather than improving themselves or their familes culture, economic circumstances or humanity as a whole.
Brave New World is not a book, it is a reality that I live in everyday of my life. Nice post and right on the money.
The self is the problem. All of those things are designed to engage the self ( the egoic mind ). Self improvement is just masturbation. Self dissolution is the key. Learn to be still and observe is all that is required.
The technology is new, but the game is the same as it ever was. Distract, distract, distract. The common denominator is we are still easily distracted.
Distracted so we can not realize the lies we tell ourselves.
I gave you a thumbs up, because I get what yur saying. I just think the problem is deeper than what most want to admit.
As the real master pointed out long before Jeebus was even a twinkle in God's eye:
Life is suffering, then you die.
Pain is intrinsic to life. Suffering is optional....suffering comes from not totally accepting what is....another egoic mind trick! In my experience/opinion.
Agree with you Juangrand, very Buddhist flavor to your post. It takes a great amount of discipline and mindfulness to negotiate the world today though it can be done even with the incredible noise of this modern life. I practise daily meditation and yoga just to try and keep some of the world at bay and I still struggle not to be hooked in. Of course here I am typing this on my iPad!
Be still and know that I am.
Miffed:-)
Yep, we're still on the wheel aren't we!
I instituted a NO TV policy for 2012 and have stuck to it. So far my IQ has increase significantly,my health has improved, and I haven't subjected myself to the mind pablum it is ..... get out and enjoy life. Life isn't 5-6 hours of TV a day.
Libertus you're (wait for it) THE MAN.
Isn't it nice? But be careful, you tend to become incresingly frustrated with those who flock to the telescreen every waking moment to be told what to think; you know, "watch their program". Gotta' remember to keep that in check and turn that frustration into pity. At least, that's what works for me.
It is impossible for our fake system to end in anything other than starvation and scarcity. When the government and its cronies set prices via interventions, buisnesses and farms close. It is that simple. It is just like the Law of The Maximum. You don't have to kill the beast. Just stock up and watch it die by itself. The US was given an expiration date the day that the Fed was created. Nixon's ponzi scheme, that the government spends every iota of energy and wealth it has to sustain, just set the date in stone.
I got 99 problems but servitude aint one...
Bradbury nailed it better in Farenheit 451, in my opinion, because it wasn't exactly a government-run operation. "The cousins" were probably Viacom or somesuch.
We're a lot closer to a state/corporate merger than a simple government control-system. You can't really blame the State for the fact that many people WANT to be pacified with meaningless drivel.
Everyone should read Farenheit 451 before it's burned.
"You can't really blame the State for the fact that many people WANT to be pacified with meaningless drivel."
I'm afraid you're right.
Well we know why johnnie isn't going anywhere..
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/07/26/REVEALED-Corzine-s-MF...
Self slavery is the in thing now. Everyone advocates it.
"Women who shop to win shop at Kohl's."
I shit you not, that is their new tagline for radio ads.
We will never learn.
pods
I thought this was their new slogan:
"Kohl's Staples Dick's"Actually it's the same thing when you think about it.
The left wants Socialism for the poor the right for corporations.
Until we get to a point where everyone agree's SOCIALISM is bad irregardless of whether it's for the Corporations or the People things will stay the way they are.
What would we say about a drug that caused people to forego sex to check their Facebook page?
Like Richard Pryor says: you know you have a drug problem when you have the [slang for female genitalia] here and you have the drugs over here and you say: "Just a minute baby..."
What would we say about a drug that caused young men to stay glued to a computer for 40+ hours straight, an obsession so acute that some actually die?
Love you guys but hopefully we'll all live in a world some day where we won't have to read Zero Hedge!
Just re-read BNW and the final conversation between Mustapha and John was so topical it's scary. John (the Savage) was right: "I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin." Great novel.
Huxley:
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."
After single payer healthcare is the law of the land the government will be in a position to pathologize and "treat" all kinds of behavior it deems "unhealthy" or likely to drive up future medical costs. Outlawing 16.9oz. sodas is just the beginning.
Ritalin is basically Huxley's Soma and is prescribed for formally "normal" childhood behavior.
Update: Holy crap! Soma is Soma
It's hilarious that "SOMA" is actually the brand name of an often prescribed MUSCLE RELAXER medication. Try it the next time you strain yourself and you won't give a GeitnerDAMN about anything. It's the "LEARNED HELPLESSNESS" that is driving people to depression. Check this out: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=learned%20helplessness&source=web&cd=8&sqi=2&ved=0CGkQtwIwBw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DgFmFOmprTt0&ei=IXMRUMaoFoKE8QSf_oHYAw&usg=AFQjCNHHtenObgdDLdWxQ_WS2KkPVdVFjg
it was Bertrand Russell who talked of loving servitude.
Ref : Impact of science on society By Bertrand Russell
It is turning out that the corporations and government are just two tools in the hands of the banksters.
Nobody can top the power to counterfiet legal tender without controls.
All the bs to keep us distracted is working like a charm, and we pay for it ourselves, they don't have to.
When prozac came out, my brother said here is the drug they have been looking for, turns the sheeple into zombies but they still make it to work on time and functional.
He was right. They are starting them younger and younger on the mind altering drugs. Soon it will be in the womb.
Death by iPad. There's an app for that.
How ironic that the previous article tells us the Twitter is down, whatever that means.
I said it yesterday.. "We the People" is something we like ...the elites prefer "We the Supplicants"
An interesting trio of minds presented in the thread. All jump out at you.
We should not forget several vital observastions on Marx. Even during his time his writings became so bastardized as to eventually force Marx to state."I am not a Marxist" A modern subtext of that, similar to the misuse of "facism", is that no less than Dr. Thomas Sowell in his book on Marx states that no one really understands or can explain Marx. Marx is simply the blow-out hair king of the global Left who have hijacked a very sorry excuse, or should I say attempt, at explaining economics. They use it in the manner campers use a Leatherman all-in-one tool.
Marx has over the years acquired an undeserved mantle as a economic seer, but only by the Laft. Few credit the precursors of Marx..... Hegel, Feuerbach, and of course that man who actually wrote most of Marx ..Engles,his buddy.
Engage a Leftist in a conversation on economics is as futile an endeavor as I can think of. Since Marx himself repudiated the contemporary interpretations of his work, so the modern Left (anyone since Marx) continues to use Marx as a utility.
Lastly, Marx and Engels never explained in any of their writings the "How" of initial capital formation, a critical point.
Marx wasn't an economist, that's the thing. He was a philosopher. There's always a disconnect between the model and the reality.
Economics is not a science, though, so there's good reason for confusing it with philosophy.
Anyone here actually read any of Charles Hugh Smith's novels? If anyone has please tell me what you think of his work. His editorial posts here are very impressive. I like how this guy thinks and have decided to check out one of his books.
I read his "Survival+" - great book!
so if I follow your logic then it must be true that the first world countries being forced to print are doing so at the insistence of various types of conscientious objectors within their own populace. I would add that mass interaction facilitated by the internet has the potential to alter Huxley's brilliant observations.
I think zerohedge fits also in this sheme.
Many of you commenters here it seemes never leave their screen.
The quality of most comments is another story.
Can't speak for all of us, but many have been waiting for this sham to implode for a long time. ZH lets you watch that happen in real time. Who can look away as a train wreck or a plane crash occurs?
The servitude will be coming to an end soon in the form of MASS ARRESTS of everyone from Obama and Brenanke on down, the virtual dissolution of the federal government, and the unleashing of countless supressed planet-saving, human race-saving technologies. Don't believe the fear-bot keyboard jockeys who dismiss what's coming. http://tinyurl.com/cd5cyjo/
The servitude will be coming to an end soon in the form of MASS ARRESTS of everyone from Obama and Brenanke on down, the virtual dissolution of the federal government, and the unleashing of countless supressed planet-saving, human race-saving technologies. Don't believe the fear-bot keyboard jockeys who dismiss what's coming. http://tinyurl.com/cd5cyjo/
Sorry, double post courtesy nasty Chrome browser.
Charles, while you have painted the internet as a technological equivalent of the Roman Colliseum, it also offers an alternative to the corporate-owned mass media. Thus, the internet is as important to the New Enlightenment as the Guttenberg press was to the old one. Herein lies the hope.
The logic of decrying all media technology because it can be misused: printing presses are evil because the Nazis used them to print Mein Kampf.
They're all just tools folks. Tools invented by humanists with an instrumental(ist) view of nature and technology, but tools all the same.
I forego sex daily to check ZH.
Alcohol = Soma
To me it seems that the Sleep that people are in about not recognizing the bank, government changes are equal to the effect of Spousal abuse and the wives that stay in the relationship and hide their abuse. I apears to me that the people subconsciencially ignore and cannot see the wrongs being done them and the way to freedom is within their reach.
Fear to trust those that dare to try to open their eyes and suggest a way to approach an awareness of the surrounding envioronments.
SO YES I think that the people love their servitude. They just don't know it. Thay need intervention.
Happiness in Slavery by Nine Inch Nails seems to fit this rather well:
I left a lot of my hearing behind at the 5 NIN concerts I went to in the mid to late 1990's.To my knowledge, neither Huxley nor NIN released anything less that genius.
So, basically, to undo all of this conditioning, we just need to do a few things.
1. Delete your Facebook etc
2. Switch off your mobile phone permanently/indefinitely
3.Make use of older forms of communication
4.Don't read the WSJ on your mobile/tablet device
5.Don't run to the pharmicist, don't believe advertisements which try to sell you junk
Yes, that and address the cultural, social, religious, historical, economic, political, etc. systems that have led to this situation (many times throughout history).
so now we live in this mix, half Huxley and half Orwell. they try for the compassionate, subtle, "non lethal" enslavement but the threat of force is always there and we the surfs are constantly reminded of it in ways both subtle and very much direct.
don't step to far out of line or you will be shot down in the street, or have a hart attack or simply dissapear never to be heard or seen again. should you return to your family and friends you will be changed and broken to the point that they will not even recognize you. the PTB's have the power to destroy you either by devious means of lies, deceit and false witness that turn you into villain, a monster in society or they will simply crush you under the boot.
that is the message, the threat we live under. but if we fall in line, be good consumers, good citizens, good batteries for the matrix, then we are rewarded with the illusion of prosperity, choice and freedom. if we vote for our republicrat teleprompter, if we buy "hope and change TM" or "believe in America TM"then we get universal health care and war with Iran, we get "America, fuck yeah!" and 200 channels to ignore the real world on.
on the statue of liberty it mentions America being a refuge, a land of opportunity for oppressed peoples "yearning to breath free".
sure didn't take long for us become the one doing the yearning did it?
I'll second that.
OTOH, it's probably too late anyway.
'so many hearkened souls
so few spirits
forbearance rivals destitution
squalor breaks the bond and assumes the unknown aggressor
whilst the impenetrable mask of cowardly deception exhibits thy keeper
futures past discern an ugly truth... for behind the mask was but you'
just musing ?
great read CHS :-))
question as old as time itself__ ??? why won't my horse drink
The Central State has the power via welfare (individual and corporate) and bailouts to buy complicity.
I would say "rent", not "buy".
come on ZH/"tyler". this is conspiratorial tripe. just stick to the facts and lay off the spin... you do the facts good.
The only people who are really free are the ones that ain't afraid to get in a full on, knock down bar fight.
The rest is excuses.
Life is struggle. Conquer fear, you conquer life.
Don't believe me? Go talk to a skydiver sometime. They don't think like most people you know.
Why are people surprised when they work so hard to eliminate risk or change that they end up with a bland Campbell soup life?
He's right... embracing the "right" or "left" is stupidity... do your homework sheeple, there are very FEW differences between
the two camps... nothing meaningful, that's for certain. Blame Obummer? Nope, he had a LOT of "help" and more than anything
is a puppet of those behind the scenes with money and power who make the real decisions. I'm constantly astonished at how
gullible some of you are out there.
The right is the cultural/moral descendant of the left.
It seems like the more that we learn, the more we really don’t know.
http://www.elliottwavetechnology.com/2012/07/the-more-we-learn-more-we-dont-know.html