Category Archives: conditioning

Humanity’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children

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© UNICEF/UN0126672/Brown
A drawing by a Rohingya boy reveals the horrific experiences he endured while fleeing from Myanmar to Bangladesh, October 2017.

By Robert J. Burrowes

In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’, I pointed out four conflict configurations that are paid little attention by conflict theorists.

In this article, I would like to discuss a fifth conflict configuration that is effectively ignored by conflict theorists (and virtually everyone else). This conflict is undoubtedly the most fundamental conflict in human society, because it generates all of the violence humans perpetrate and experience, and yet it is utterly invisible to almost everyone.

I have previously described this conflict as ‘the adult war on children’. It is indeed humanity’s ‘dirty little secret’.

Let me illustrate and explain the nature and extent of this secret war. And what we can do about it.

Every day, according to some estimates, human adults kill 50,000 of our children. The true figure is probably significantly higher. We kill children in wars. See, for example, ‘Scourging Yemen’. We kill them with drones. We kill them in our homes and on the street. We shoot them at school.

We also kill children in vast numbers by starving them to death, depriving them of clean drinking water, denying them medicines – see, for example, ‘Malaria is alive and well and killing more than 3000 African children every day’ – or forcing them to live in a polluted environment, particularly in parts of Africa, Asia and Central/South America. Why? Because we use military violence to maintain an ‘economic’ system that allocates resources for military weapons, as well as corporate profits for the wealthy, instead of resources for living.

We also execute children in sacrificial killings after kidnapping them. We even breed children to sell as a ‘cash crop’ for sexual violation, child pornography (‘kiddie porn’) and the filming of ‘snuff’ movies (in which children are killed during the filming), torture and satanic sacrifice. And these are just some of the manifestations of the violence against children that have been happening for centuries or, in some cases, millennia. On these points, see the video evidence presented at the recent Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Human Trafficking and Child Sex Abuse organized by the International Tribunal for Natural Justice.

The opening statement by Chief Counsel Robert David Steele refers to an estimated eight million children trafficked annually – with 600,000-800,000 of these children (excluding both those bred within the USA without birth certificates and those imported without documentation) in the United States alone – and mentions such practices as ritual torture and ritual murder as well as training dogs to rape children and toddlers. He mentions the range of organizations involved from Oxfam and the Boy Scouts of America to ‘child-service’ agencies and police forces as well as various United Nations organizations, where pedophiles (those who prey on children) rise through the ranks to exercise enormous control. He also points out that many of the children bred or kidnapped into this system usually last about two years before dying (often after being raped several times each hour for some of that time) or being killed outright. He also mentions (with evidence provided in other video presentations) the forced removal of body organs from children of Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Steele, who is a former CIA operations officer, also points out that the 1,000 US military bases around the world are ‘not there for national defense; they are there to serve as lilypads for the smuggling of guns, gold, cash, drugs and small children’. The obvious and clear inference to be drawn from his statement is that the US military is heavily involved in child trafficking (as well as its well-known involvement in drug and weapons trafficking, for example), which means that vast numbers of US military personnel know about it too. And do nothing.

The compelling testimony at the Commission of Inquiry of survivor/perpetrator Ronald Bernard will give you a clear sense of the deep elite engagement (that is, the 8,000-8,500 ‘elite’ individuals running central banks, governments, secret service agencies, multinational corporations, terrorist organizations and churches) in the extraordinary violence inflicted on children, with children illegally trafficked internationally along with women, weapons, drugs, currencies, gold and wildlife.

In a particularly poignant series of moments during the interview, after he has revealed some of the staggering violence he suffered as a child at the hands of his father and the Church, Bernard specifically refers to the fact that the people engaged in these practices are terrified (and ‘serving the monster of greed’) and that, during his time as a financial entrepreneur, he was working with people who understood him as he understood them: individuals who were suffering enormously from the violence they had suffered as children themselves and who are now so full of hatred that they want to destroy life, human and otherwise. In short: they enjoy and celebrate killing people and destroying the Earth as a direct response to the violence they each suffered as a child.

There are more video testimonies by survivors, expert witnesses, research scholars in the field and others on the International Tribunal for Natural Justice website and if you want to read scholarly books documenting aspects of this staggering violence against children then see, for example, ‘Childhunters: Requiem of a Child-killer’ and ‘Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape’.

For further accounts of the systematic exploitation, rape, torture and murder of children over a lengthy period, which focuses on Canada’s indigenous peoples, Rev. Kevin Annett’s evocative report ‘Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust – The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada’, and his books ‘Unrelenting’ and ‘Murder by Decree: The Crime of Genocide in Canada’ use eyewitness testimonies and archival documentation to provide ‘an uncensored record of the planned extermination of indigenous children in Canada’s murderous “Indian residential schools”’ from 1889 to 1996.

Apart from what happened in the Indian Residential Schools during this period, however, the books also offer extensive evidence documenting the ongoing perpetration of genocide, including child rape, torture and killing, against Canada’s indigenous peoples by its government, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Catholic, Anglican and United Churches since the 19th century. Sadly, there is plenty more in Kevin’s various books and on the website of the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State which also explain the long-standing involvement of the Vatican in these genocidal crimes against children.

Of course, Canada is not alone in its unrelenting violence against indigenous children (and indigenous peoples generally). The United States and Australia, among many others, also have long records of savagery in destroying the lives of indigenous children, fundamentally by taking their land and destroying their culture, traditional livelihoods and spirituality. And when indigenous people do not simply abandon their traditional way of being and adopt the dominant model, they are blamed and persecuted even more savagely, as the record clearly demonstrates.

Moreover, institutional violence against children is not limited to the contexts and settings mentioned above. In the recently conducted Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse undertaken in Australia, childcare services, schools, health and allied services, youth detention, residential care and contemporary out-of-home services, religious activities, family and youth support services, supported accommodation, sporting, recreational and club activities, youth employment, and the military forces were all identified as providing contexts for perpetrating violence against children.

Over half of the survivors suffered sexual violation in an institution managed by a religious organization such as places of worship and for religious instruction, missions, religious schools, orphanages, residential homes, recreational clubs, youth groups, and welfare services. Another one-third of survivors suffered the violence in an institution under government management such as a school, an out-of-home care service, a youth detention centre or at a health service centre. The remaining 10% suffered violence in a private organization such as a child care centre, a medical practice or clinic, a music or dance school, an independent school, a yoga ashram or a sports club, a non-government or not-for-profit organization.

Needless to say, the failure to respond to any of this violence for the past century by any of the institutions ‘responsible’ for monitoring, oversight and criminal justice, such as the police, law enforcement and agencies responsible for public prosecution, clearly demonstrates that mechanisms theoretically designed to protect children (and adults) do not function when those same institutions are complicit in the violence and are, in any case, designed to defend elite interests (not ‘ordinary’ people and children). Hence, of course, this issue was not even investigated by the Commission because it was excluded from the terms of reference!

Separately from those children we kill or violate every day in the ways briefly described above, we traffic many others into sexual slavery – such as those trafficked (sometimes by their parents) into prostitution to service the sex tourism industry in countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and India – we kidnap others to terrorize them into becoming child soldiers with 46 countries using them according to Child Soldiers International, we force others to work as slave laborers, in horrific conditions, in fields, factories and mines (and buy the cheap products of their exploited labor as our latest ‘bargain’) with Human Rights Watch reporting over 70,000,000 children, including many who aren’t even, technically-speaking, slaves, working in ‘hazardous conditions’ – see ‘Child Labor’ – and we condemn millions to live in poverty, homelessness and misery because national governments, despite rhetoric to the contrary, place either negligible or no value on children apart from, in some cases, as future wage slaves in the workforce.

We also condemn millions of children, such as those in Palestine, Tibet, Western Sahara and West Papua, to live under military occupation, where many are routinely imprisoned, shot or killed.

In addition, while fighting wars we cause many children to be born with grotesque genetic deformities because we use horrific weapons, like those with depleted uranium, on their parents. See ‘“Falluja Babies” and Depleted Uranium: America’s Toxic Legacy in Iraq’ and ‘Depleted uranium used by US forces blamed for birth defects and cancer in Iraq’.

In other cases, we cause children shockingly debilitating injuries, if they are not killed outright, by using conventional, biological and chemical weapons on them directly. See ‘Summary of historical attacks using chemical or biological weapons’.

But war also destroys housing and other infrastructure forcing millions of children to become internally displaced or refugees in another country (often without a living parent), causing ongoing trauma. Worldwide, one child out of every 200 is a refugee, whether through war or poverty, environmental or climate disruption. See ‘50mn children displaced by war & poverty worldwide’.

We also inflict violence on children in many other forms, ranging from ‘ordinary’ domestic violence to genital mutilation, with UNICEF calculating that 200 million girls and young women in 30 countries on three continents have been mutilated. See ‘Female genital mutilation/cutting’.

And we deny children a free choice (even those who supposedly live in a ‘democracy’) and imprison vast numbers of them in school in the delusional belief that this is good for them. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ Whatever other damage that school does, it certainly helps to create the next generation of child-destroyers. And, in many countries, we just imprison children in our jails. After all, the legal system is no more than an elite tool to control ‘ordinary’ people while shielding the elite from accountability for their grotesque violence against us all. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

While almost trivial by comparison with the violence identified above, the perversity of many multinational corporations in destroying our children’s health is graphically illustrated in the film ‘Global Junk Food’. In Europe, food manufacturers have signed up to ‘responsibility pledges’, promising not to add sugar, preservatives, artificial colours or flavours to their products and to not target children.

However, the developing world is not in Europe so these ‘responsibility pledges’ obviously do not apply and corporations such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Domino’s Pizza sell their junk food in developing countries (with the video above showcasing Brazil and India) loaded with excess oil, salt and sugar and even using fake cheese.

The well-documented report reveals corporations like these to be nothing more than drug dealers, selling toxic food to ill-informed victims that deliver a lifetime of diabetes and obesity to huge numbers of children. So, just as weapons corporations derive their profits from killing children (and adults), junk food corporations derive their profits from destroying the health of children (and adults). Of course, the medical industry, rather than campaigning vigorously against this outrage, prefers to profit from it too by offering ‘treatments’, including the surgical removal of fat, which offer nothing more than temporary but very profitable ‘relief’.

But this is far from representing the only active involvement of the medical industry in the extraordinary violence we inflict on children. For example, western children and many others are rarely spared a plethora of vaccinations which systematically destroy a child’s immune system, thus making their health ongoingly vulnerable to later assaults on their well-being. For a taste of the vast literature on this subject, see ‘Clinical features in patients with long-lasting macrophagic myofasciitis’, ‘Vaccines: Who’s Allergic To Thimerosal (Mercury), Raise Your Hand’ and ‘Vaccine Free Health’.

And before we leave the subject of food too far behind, it should be noted that just because the junk food sold in Europe and some other western countries has less fat, salt, sugar, preservatives and artificial colors and flavours in it, this does not mean that it is healthy. It still has various combinations of added fat, salt, sugar, preservatives and artificial colors and flavours in it.

Separately from this: don’t forget that virtually all parents are systematically poisoning their children by feeding them food grown by the corporate agribusiness giants which is heavily depleted of nutrients and laced with poisons such as glyphosate. For a taste of the vast literature, see ‘The hidden truth about glyphosate EXPOSED, according to undeniable scientific evidence’. Of course, in many countries we are also forcing our children to drink fluoridated water to the detriment of their health too. See ‘Research Exposes How our Water is Making us Depressed, Sick: Fluoridated water is much to blame’.

Obviously, organically/biodynamically grown food, healthily prepared, and unfluoridated water are not health priorities for their children, according to most parents.

As our ultimate act of violence against all children, we are destroying their future. See ‘Killing the Biosphere to Fast-track Human Extinction’.

So how do we do all of this?

Very easily, actually. It works like this.

Perpetrators of violence learn their craft in childhood. If you inflict violence on a child, they learn to inflict violence on others. The child rapist and ritual child killer suffered violence as a child. The terrorist suffered violence as a child. The political leader who wages war suffered violence as a child. The man who inflicts violence on women suffered violence as a child. The corporate executive who exploits working class people and/or those who live in Africa, Asia or Central/South America suffered violence as a child. The racist and religious bigot suffered violence as a child. The soldier who kills in war suffered violence as a child. The individual who perpetrates violence in the home, in the schoolyard or on the street suffered violence as a child. The parent who inflicts violence on their own children suffered violence as a child.

So if we want to end violence, exploitation, ecological destruction and war, then we must finally admit our ‘dirty little secret’ and end our longest and greatest war: the adult war on children. And here is an incentive: if we do not tackle the fundamental cause of violence, then our combined and unrelenting efforts to tackle all of its other symptoms must ultimately fail. And extinction at our own hand is inevitable.

How can I claim that violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence? Consider this. There is universal acceptance that behavior is shaped by childhood experience. If it was not, we would not put such effort into education and other efforts to ‘socialize’ children to fit into society. And this is why many psychologists have argued that exposure to war toys and violent video games shapes attitudes and behaviors in relation to violence.

But it is far more complex than these trivialities suggest and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (e.g. by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (e.g. by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behavior in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioral change in the direction of functionality be possible. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? We do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen. In other words: a slave.

Of course, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorize a child into accepting certain information about themself, other people or the state of the world, the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what they have been terrorized into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information out of hand.

In short, the child has been terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of thinking critically or even learning (or their learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what they already ‘know’). If you imagine any of the bigots you know, you are imagining someone who is utterly terrified. But it’s not just the bigots; virtually all people are affected in this manner making them incapable of responding adequately to new (or even important) information. This is one explanation why many people are ‘climate deniers’ and most others do nothing in response to the climate catastrophe.

Of course, each person’s experience of violence during childhood is unique and this is why each perpetrator becomes violent in their own particular combination of ways.

But if you want to understand the core psychology of all perpetrators of violence, it is important to understand that, as a result of the extraordinary violence they each suffered during childhood, they are now (unconsciously) utterly terrified, full of self-hatred and personally powerless, among another 20 psychological characteristics. You can read a brief outline of these characteristics and how they are acquired on pages 12-16 of ‘Why Violence?’

As should now be clear, the central point in understanding violence is that it is psychological in origin and hence any effective response must enable both the perpetrator’s and the victim’s suppressed feelings (which will include enormous fear about, and rage at, the violence they have suffered) to be safely expressed. As mentioned above, for an explanation of what is required, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Unfortunately, this nisteling cannot be provided by a psychiatrist or psychologist whose training is based on a delusionary understanding of how the human mind functions. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ and ‘Psychiatry: Science or Fraud? The professor’s trick that exposed the ongoing Psychiatry racket…’ Nisteling will enable those who have suffered from psychological trauma to heal fully and completely, but it will take time.

So if we want to end violence (including the starvation, trafficking, rape, torture and killing of children), exploitation, ecological destruction and war, then we must tackle the fundamental cause. Primarily, this means giving everyone, child and adult alike, all of the space they need to feel, deeply, what they want to do, and to then let them do it (or to have the feelings they naturally have if they are prevented from doing so). See ‘Putting Feelings First’. In the short term, this will have some dysfunctional outcomes. But it will lead to an infinitely better overall outcome than the system of emotional suppression, control and punishment which has generated the incredibly violent world in which we now find ourselves.

This all sounds pretty unpalatable doesn’t it? So each of us has a choice. We can suppress our awareness of what is unpalatable, as we have been terrorized into doing as a child, or we can feel the various feelings that we have in response to this information and then ponder (personal and collective) ways forward.

If feelings are felt and expressed then our responses can be shaped by the conscious and integrated functioning of thoughts and feelings, as evolution intended, and we can plan intelligently. The alternative is to have our unconscious fear controlling our thinking and deluding us that we are acting rationally.

It is time to end the most fundamental conflict that is destroying human society from within – the adult war on children – so that we can more effectively tackle all of the other violence that emerges from this cause too.

So what do we do?

Let me briefly reiterate.

If you are willing, you can make the commitment outlined in ‘My Promise to Children’. If you need to do some healing of your own to be able to nurture children in this way, then consider the information provided in the article ‘Putting Feelings First’.

In addition, you are also welcome to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which maps out a fifteen-year strategy for creating a peaceful, just and sustainable world community so that all children (and everyone else) has an ecologically viable planet on which to live.

You might also consider supporting or even working with organizations like Destiny Rescue, which works to rescue children trafficked into prostitution, or any of the many advocacy organizations associated with the network of End Child Prostitution and Trafficking.

But for the plethora of other manifestations of violence against children identified above, you might consider using Gandhian nonviolent strategy in any context of particular concern to you. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. And, if you like, you can join the worldwide movement to end all violence by signing online ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In summary: Each one of us has an important choice. We can acknowledge the painful truth that we inflict enormous violence on our children (which then manifests in a myriad complex ways) and respond powerfully to that truth. Or we can keep deluding ourselves and continue to observe, powerlessly, as the violence in our world proliferates until human beings are extinct.

If you want a child who is nonviolent, truthful, compassionate, considerate, patient, thoughtful, respectful, generous, loving of themself and others, trustworthy, honest, dignified, determined, courageous, powerful and who lives out their own unique destiny, then the child must be treated with – and experience – nonviolence, truth, compassion, consideration, patience, thoughtfulness, respect, generosity, love, trust, honesty, dignity, determination, courage, power and, ideally, live in a world that prioritizes nurturing the unique destiny of each child.

Alternatively, if you want a child to turn out like the perpetrators of violence described above, to be powerless to respond effectively to the crises in our world, or to even just turn out to be an appalling parent, then inflict violence – visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – on them during their childhood.

Tragically, with only the rarest of exceptions, human adults are too terrified to truly love, nurture and defend our children from the avalanche of violence that is unleashed on them at the moment of birth.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

Twelve Tips For Making Sense Of The World

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In an environment that is saturated with mass media propaganda, it can be hard to figure out which way’s up, let alone get an accurate read on what’s going on in the world. Here are a few tips I’ve learned which have given me a lot of clarity in seeing through the haze of spin and confusion. Taken separately they don’t tell you a lot, but taken together they paint a very useful picture of the world and why it is the way it is.

1. It’s always ultimately about acquiring power.

In the quest to understand why governments move in such irrational ways, why expensive, senseless wars are fought while homeless people die of exposure on the streets, why millionaires and billionaires get richer and richer while everyone else struggles to pay rent, why we destroy the ecosystem we depend on for our survival, why one elected official tends to advance more or less the same harmful policies and agendas as his or her predecessor, people often come up with explanations which don’t really hold water.

The most common of these is probably the notion that all of these problems are due to the malignant influence of one of two mainstream political parties, and if the other party could just get in control of the situation all the problems would go away. Other explanations include the belief that humans are just intrinsically awful, blaming minorities like Jews or immigrants, blaming racism and white supremacy, or going all the way down wild and twisted rabbit holes into theories about reptilian secret societies and baby-eating pedophile cabals. But really all of mankind’s irrational behavior can be explained by the basic human impulse to amass power and influence over one’s fellow humans, combined with the fact that sociopaths tend to rise to positions of power.

Our evolutionary ancestors were pack animals, and the ability to rise in social standing in one’s pack determined crucial matters like whether one got first or last dibs on food or got to reproduce. This impulse to rise in our pack is hardwired deeply into our evolutionary heritage, but when left unchecked due to a lack of empathy, and when expanded into the globe-spanning 7.6 billion human pack we now find ourselves in due to ease of transportation and communication, it can lead to individuals who will keep amassing more and more power until they wield immense influence over entire clusters of nations.

2. Money rewards sociopathy.

The willingness to do anything to get ahead, to claw your way to the top, to betray whomever you need to, to throw anyone under the bus, to step on anyone to pass them in the rat race, will be rewarded in our current system. Being willing to underpay employees, cheat the legal system, and influence legislators will be rewarded exponentially more. People with a sense of empathy are often unwilling to do such things, whereas sociopaths and psychopaths are. About four percent of the population are sociopaths, and about one percent are psychopaths, with some five to fifteen percent falling somewhere along the borderline. The less empathy you have, the further you are willing to go, and the further up the ladder you can climb.

3. Wealth kills empathy.

If that weren’t bad enough, studies have shown that controlling large amounts of wealth actually destroys one’s sense of compassion for one’s fellow man. When you are able to use wealth to obtain everything from security to loyalty to personal relationships, you no longer have to be tuned in to the brain’s empathy center the rest of humanity depends on to get an accurate reading on what’s going on with the people we’re surrounded by. Most people need to be constantly feeling around their families, coworkers, employers, friends and acquaintances in order to ensure their own safety, social standing and security, whereas a wealthy person can simply purchase those things. Being born into wealth or having it for a long time can prevent that sense of empathy from being as strong as it is in the rest of the population.

4. Money is power.

A 2014 Princeton study showed that ordinary Americans have essentially zero influence over their nation’s policy and behavior regardless of how they vote, while wealthy Americans have a great deal of influence. This is because the ability to use corporate lobbying and campaign donations effectively amounts to the legalized bribery of elected officials, which means that money translates directly into political power. This creates a ruling class which is naturally incentivized to use their influence to increase their own wealth while decreasing everyone else’s, because since power is relative, the less money everyone else has the more power the ruling class has.

This is why billionaires keep hoarding more and more wealth while using legalized bribery to stifle economic justice legislation. It isn’t because they want to be able to buy thousands of luxury cars or dozens of private jets; they can only use one at a time the same as everyone else. They hoard wealth to keep the rest of the population from having it. Because money equals power, spreading wealth around would be tantamount to making everyone king, and because power is relative, making everyone king would mean that no one is king.

Rulers, historically, do not give up power easily, and this elite wealthy class is no exception. Hence all their aggressive attempts to suppress any movement against the status quo from the unwashed masses.

5. This same ruling class controls the media.

It’s common knowledge that most media is controlled by plutocrats, whether it’s the old money plutocrats who control the legacy media or the new money Silicon Valley plutocrats who control much of the new media. Media control is an essential component of rule; this has always been the case, since the days when kings would order dissident books burned and bishops would torture dissident orators to death. This is why the first thing a new plutocrat does as soon as rising to a certain level of wealth is start buying up media influence, like Jeff Bezos did when he bought the Washington Post in 2013. Bezos bought WaPo not because he is a stupid businessman who thought newspapers were about to make a lucrative resurgence, but because he is a brilliant businessman who knows that the status quo he is building his empire upon requires a propaganda firm that the public will trust and believe.

6. People are always manipulating each other.

Cultivating an acute awareness of when you are being manipulated, and considering whether someone might have a motive to do so, is an essential component to making sense of the world.

It is very rare to encounter someone who won’t try to manipulate you in any way. Generally people you’ll encounter in your life will try to influence the way you perceive them and your relationship to them, they’ll try to pull you in in some ways and push you out in others, try to hook you up to their personal agendas and goals and shape you in a way that fits with their shape. There’s nothing inherently malevolent in such behavior, it’s just what people do and what they always have done. Again, humans are social creatures, and we do what we can to increase our standing within our social circles.

The big problem is when skillful manipulators find their way into positions of large-scale influence like government or media. Unfortunately, these are the types who tend to get elevated into such positions, because they can manipulate their way in, and generally they do so for reasons of personal ambition rather than altruism. These skillful manipulators form an essential echelon of the ruling class’ loyal servants, and are the minds behind the pro-establishment narratives you’ll suddenly see circulated from think tanks to media platforms to the establishment lackeys on Capitol Hill.

7. Society is made of narrative.

Most of human experience is filtered through our mental stories about it, from our sense of self, to our ideas about who we are, to our beliefs about how we’re supposed to behave in society, to what money is and how it works, to where power exists and who we’re supposed to obey. All of these things are purely conceptual constructs which only exist in the realm of thought; a “dollar” exists to the extent that we’ve all agreed to pretend it’s a real thing and that it has a certain amount of purchasing power. At any time we could collectively decide to change the rules about how power functions or what money is and how it operates, and then instantly the rule of the elite class would be over without anyone firing a shot. It really would be that simple.

That’s how powerful a force narrative is, which is why the ruling plutocrats fight so hard to keep us from seizing control of it. This is why whistleblowers and outlets like WikiLeaks are aggressively and constantly smeared and demonized in the corporate media; if they can create suspicion of truth-tellers then they can keep them from being trusted, and thus keep them from being believed. This tool has been used to minimize the impact of everything from on the ground reports of what’s happening in Syria to leak drops from Edward Snowden; if you can create enough suspicion of someone it doesn’t matter if they’re speaking 100 percent truth; nobody will believe them, and thus the dominant narrative will remain the same.

Maintaining an awareness that there is always an unending battle to control the narrative and manipulate it to advance plutocratic interests is an essential part of understanding the world.

8. The lines between nations are imaginary.

Those lines drawn on the map between countries are pure narrative as well; they’re only as real as the collective public agrees to pretend they are. The ruling elites know this and exploit this. They don’t think in terms of nations and governments, they think in terms of individuals and groups of individuals.

Key strategic region in the Middle East? No need to take over the whole country, just flood it with extremist groups who are loyal to your agendas and control its oil fields. Primo naval real estate in the southern hemisphere? No need to annex it and plant your country’s flag there, just secure enough influence over the important moving parts using corporate contracts, trade agreements, military/intelligence treaties and secret deals and you can use it however you want.

This is why I am dismissive of arguments that “Israel controls America” or “America controls Europe”. There is no “Israel” or “America”; they’re made-up ideas which rulers once upon a time treated as real, but in the modern days of nationless plutocracy they no longer do. There are individuals, there are corporations, there are government agencies, there are factions and groups, and these are what the ruling elites deal with. Governmental structures are only tools which are used by the ruling elites for the purpose of manipulation, control, and military violence, and they only do so insofar as it is useful. The idea of real nations and governments is a cutesy fairy tale sold to the masses so they won’t see the manipulations.

9. Powerful forces are naturally incentivized to collaborate with each other toward mutual interests.

You can be a low-grade millionaire and still live like a relatively normal civilian, but once you start obtaining giant amounts of wealth control you need to start collaborating with existing power structures or they’ll snuff you out to prevent you from rocking their boat, because again, money equals power. This is why Jeff Bezos contracts with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board, and it’s why Facebook and Google collaborate extensively with government agencies; they never would have been allowed to grow to their size if they had not. Plutocratic dynasties which have been in place since long before Amazon, Facebook and Google figured this out many generations ago, and have agreed to push forward in a direction of mutual interest that doesn’t upset the status quo that their wealth is built upon.

This is extremely true of the west, where an effective empire has been created by a complex transnational alliance of mostly western plutocrats, but it is true outside of that empire as well; there are power alliances to be found everywhere that there is power.

10. There is an immense amount of wealth that can be grabbed in the chaos of war and conflict.

In the same way that existing power structures are naturally incentivized to quash any emerging power which would upset their status quo, alliances of power structures push to crush non-aligned power structures the world over. Whenever you see the tight western alliances and their media propaganda arms attacking the interests of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Venezuela etc., you are seeing an alliance of power structures working to disrupt the interests of another alliance of power structures in order to absorb their assets.

The chaotic, Wild West environments that these conflicts create allow for an amount of underhanded looting and pillaging that you could never get away with in your own country, in the exact same way the colonialists and conquistadors of old could never have gotten away with brazenly grabbing gold, land and slaves from their fellow Europeans in Madrid or Rome but were given no legal trouble in the new world. The colonialists and conquistadors pushed into the Americas, Africa and Asia on the pretense of spreading Christianity and civilization; modern day conquerers push into non-aligned power structures on the pretense of spreading freedom and democracy in precisely the same way.

This chaos doesn’t require direct military conflict to be profitable; the uncritical enmity against Russia that the western plutocratic alliance has manufactured with its media control has allowed them to be blamed for everything from incriminating WikiLeaks documents to a corporate raid by Ukrainian oligarchs without any questions asked. Anyone who has ever had to deal personally with a sociopath knows how much they love to exploit the gray areas that chaotic situations give them, and geopolitical conflicts create those situations in spades.

11. The neocons are always wrong.

This one’s really easy. If you ever want to be on the right side of history for a foreign policy debate, look at what Bush-era PNAC neocons like John Bolton and Bill Kristol are saying about it, and take the opposite position. Neocon thought leaders have been loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything since the turn of the century, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria, and they’re not about to start being right now.

12. The push towards truth always starts with yourself.

You can’t out-manipulate seasoned manipulators. The main error most people make when trying to deal with a sociopath is to try and manipulate them back. Don’t even try. They have years of experience on you because they literally have done nothing else. While you were laughing and crying and worrying and connecting and relating to people, they were working out how to play humans like Garry Kasparov worked out how to play chess. And when you have literal teams of sociopaths collaborating together to amass power, you my dear child, do not have a chance. Don’t play their game. You will lose.

The only way to win this is to set your compass resolutely to “true.” Always be honest with yourself. Find all the different ways that you are manipulating others and see them and acknowledge them. Find your tribal allegiances and your desire to be right, and tip your hat to their existence. The more self-aware we are, the less levers we have to be manipulated by. If you are blindly partisan or loyal to a particular faction, that makes you gullible to propaganda because your wishful thinking and your desire to be right come into play. Get honest with yourself about who you are and what you want, and you will start to become an un-playable piece on the board.

If we can’t beat these bastards with truth, we don’t deserve to win.

SHAME: How To Beat The Two-System Blame Game That Takes Us Down & Keeps Us Stuck

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By Jack Adam Weber

Source: Collective Evolution

Shame is different from guilt, because guilt is to feel badly about something we have done; shame is to feel badly about who we are. We might develop shame because we have been shamed at some point in our life. Shame can be a kind of anger and violence directed at ourselves or others.

Shame can get us into a vicious cycle of sabotaging ourselves, as if to prove to ourselves, to validate and enforce the belief of how worthless we perceive ourselves to be. This can be a form of self-abuse used to violently express our anger, often unconsciously. Self-shame also helps us remain in a victim role, as we victimize ourselves with self-administered punishment and negative reinforcement.

When shamed, we develop an internal persona that feels badly about who we are as a person. As a result, we might condemn ourselves, feel less-than, and perceive the world negatively. Shame is also often concomitant with some degree of depression, when we feel worthless. Yet, this feeling of worthlessness might be more a symptom of depression than bona fide shame. On the other hand, depression can also arise from being shamed by others and by ourselves.

Surprisingly, it can be scary to leave the insular world of shame. To maintain this suffocation and prevent against realizing that we have been living a small life and that we can change our reality by working through our shame, we seem to find every justification to stay in our little box of mediocrity.

To this end, we sabotage ourselves, turn away goodness (also because we don’t yet know how to let it in,) engage in negative perspectives and consider these negative beliefs we have learned and to which we have grown accustomed to be facts about who we are. Of course, this is not the case, as we can change our beliefs and perspectives, even if we have harboured shame for a long time.

One-Two Punch

Shame is a one-two punch in that it both creates a negative and impoverished sense of self and it perpetuates that poverty.

Shame’s first punch is a negative self-image dealt to us by impoverished and condemning others. To heal the punitive false beliefs about our core sense of self we need to contact and reprogram this narrative. To recover through shame we also need to address the emotions caused by the violence done to us, emotions that often remain repressed until we confront and begin to work with our shame.

We can uproot, unearth, and replace the negative operating system of false beliefs about ourselves. Releasing any pent-up rage, fear, and sadness from being unloved and shamed instead is also key because these emotions keep us stuck, especially by preventing us from receiving goodness. This way we can disarm shame’s first, original blow.

Shame’s second punch is a fear of feeling shame again, of admitting and seeing shame’s first punch. If we were to see shame’s architecture inside us, we might shame ourselves for being this way, which is to shame ourselves more and build more shame on top of shame’s first punch. In other words, shame scares us into believing that we would shame ourselves for admitting and embodying our original shame.

So, not only do we have the first punch of a negative shame operating in us, but to recognize and reveal that programming can trigger more shame: self-shaming ourselves on top of that shame that’s already there. This is why shame is particularly insidious: it prevents us from pursuing our healing because we shut down our recognition of it for fear of activating our self-criticism, the critical shame that hurt us in the first place.

Shame’s second punch might trigger this kind of self-talk: “Oh God, I’m so awful for having these feelings, for failing, and for being such a loser for so long.” Of course, if we are afraid of this voice, we might knee-jerk into shutting down awareness of our shame altogether so we don’t have to feel worse for self-judging ourselves over our shame. This of course only keeps our shame hidden and lethal.

Shame, self-condemnation and judgment can also develop through unhealthy envy. It’s one thing to feel envy — to covet what someone else has — but it’s another to spin a story about our unworthiness or being a complete failure because of it. Competitiveness can spark us to excel and even be fun, but when it’s used as a weapon against us, it becomes toxic and leads to shame that gets in the way of our thriving.

When we can recognize when shame’s second punch is being delivered, we can cut through its lies to get to our core shame. Remembering that shame’s first punch is not our fault and something we learned from someone else, often as vulnerable children, we can similarly work with shame’ second punch the same way. We can treat  shaming ourselves over our shame the same way we do our original shame: deconstruct, reprogram, and release any toxic emotions in our shame. Expressing and acting with self-compassion is crucial at this point as we allow the stuck feelings to emerge and learn to treat ourselves kindly and to tolerate relationships that also treat us well.

Sadly, we often learn shame’s second punch from those who dealt us the first. We might even hear in our own self-shame the haunting echo of a parent, sibling, or teacher. We break through shame’s double-whammy by recognizing the dynamics of all this. If we’re not able to notice and admit it, we don’t stand a good chance to heal shame that keeps us down. After all, we all have wounds, and to be a grown-up means to take responsibility for our own healing and not remain in old beliefs that perpetuate our mediocrity. In fact, healing our emotional wounds is a key initiation into adulthood, as we learn to free up the vitality, creativity, and aliveness that got squelched in us once ago.

Comfortably Numb

Part of the cage of negativity shame builds for us seeks to keep us in that cage. We humans like to stick with what we know. Believe it or not, it’s easier to remain stuck (and remain bitter) than to break free and learn a new way of being. To break out of the shame-game requires courage, humility, and an ability to tolerate the fear of scary emotions and to live outside our comfort zone.

If we have not recognized and decoded shame’s dynamic in us, we keep our world small by shooting down solutions, thwarting goodness and dismissing promising opportunities—because we don’t believe we deserve them. And, a less obvious reason why we do this is that growing into accepting goodness and abundance would rattle our comfortable, familiar cage and put us in touch our sense of unworthiness. It’s much easier to stay small and bitter rather than confront our fears and shadow by acting differently.

If we don’t mount the fight to overcome shame, it will cleverly and often covertly (beneath our awareness) sabotages goodness, as if to say, “See, it’s true, life is unfair and I’m right about how useless and worthless I am.” Mounting this “fight” against shame, mind you, includes lots of self-acceptance and self-compassion, because part of healing shame is to recognize the survival dynamics of why we developed shame: because once ago when we were unawares and powerless at the behest of adults, we took on shame for a fear of offending or upsetting our elders for fear that we would be abandoned by them—physically and/or emotionally.

Of course, these fears may not be true and to a child they are as real and terrifying as anything. As adults, these shameful beliefs we harbor aren’t factual unless we make them so. It’s the lie we tell to further sabotage ourselves. It’s what we secretly do to fend off the scariness of change and the realizations that come with it, which often includes some remorse for not doing the healing work sooner. But, hey, better late than never, and we can grieve and shake off the lost months and years so that we at least rescue the remainder of our life from the shackles of shame’s iron fist.

So, if we don’t recognize our shame, we never get to move beyond our illusory limitations. We never get to experience, hang onto, and build upon abundance because we don’t believe we are worth it. This goodness is so incongruous with our perceived self-image and inner dialogue that we just aren’t able to accept it, hold onto it and build upon it . . . until we break through. Having the cognitive understanding of shame’s first and second punches helps us navigate and cope ahead as we travel healing shame’s unsettling and unsettled waters.

Becoming Conscious

We will do almost anything to keep ourselves down, just the way we are, so we don’t have to confront our shame and all the dreadful emotions and regrets that come with it. Often, we do this unconsciously. But if we can see the territory before entering into it, then we have a better chance to move beyond the apparent roadblocks that prevent us from healing the toxic mess shame makes of our lives.

Shame operates unconsciously until we become conscious of it. Some of these unconscious mechanisms include gambling away our savings, talking ourselves out of or compulsively rejecting an attractive and worthwhile partner and coming up with many reasons not to accept better opportunities. These include a) focusing on and emphasizing the negative or risky aspects of anything new b) attacking others’ suggestions for how to move into a different and better life and to make different, often uncomfortable, changes c) treating ourselves poorly by not exercising or eating poorly, and c) repeatedly recreating stressful, impoverished, abusive scenarios.

Shaming, especially what we receive from an early age, is pernicious. While we might feel that the people who shamed us or otherwise instilled worthlessness in us might be evil and deserving of the cruelest punishment, at some point we have to be willing to move beyond blame. Paradoxically, at first this might look like unleashing our hatred towards them in a safe, therapeutic context in which we let out our venom for being abused. We don’t have to express ourselves directly to the person who shamed and hurt us. Working with a psychotherapist can help determine appropriate action and how to vent and purge without causing more damage and burning bridges in the process. As this toxicity is purged, we naturally move through and eventually beyond blame . . . and shame.

By releasing the hatred in our toxic shame instead of directing it towards ourselves or others, we also diffuse the backlog of anguish we have used to punish and keep ourselves down (as well as our loved ones). Simultaneously, we learn to talk and treat ourselves more kindly. As we take responsibility, learn to receive goodness from everyone and everything, we might find we stop blaming the world for our misfortune . . . which we realize was just a way for us to defend against healing and moving through the gauntlet of shame.

So yes, we have obstacles, yes we have suffered, yes we have some tough healing to do. Yes we are angry and full of rage, yes we didn’t deserve it and yes we have every good reason to be exactly as pissed off and resentful as we are. At the same time, we have every reason to take responsibility for and transform our current state and reclaim our lives. We overcome shame by noticing and admitting our dynamics, processing hurt feelings, thinking differently to gain positive new perspectives, and acting in ways that build resources to improve our lives. All these obstacles require that we endure the uncomfortable lies and mediocre ways of being we have learned and are now unlearning. This way we learn to tolerate goodness until it becomes a new normal.

In Sum

Tolerating newfound goodness from the graveyard of shame can be difficult because it pushes our buttons; it flies in the face of who we have believed and witnessed ourselves to be. This is part of why we sabotage and try to keep our world small: so we don’t have to deal with the distress of cognitive dissonance, of moving beyond our self-image, which only keeps our world small and suffering large.

Another reason we might not want to confront goodness and abundance is that we might have to stop complaining and condemning as much. Yet another reason is because we might wake up to the fact that we have been sabotaging ourselves for a long time, maybe years or decades. And this sad realization can sink us into grief or even depression. So, coming out of shame is no small task and if the going gets too rough or we can’t seem to break through, it’s probably best to seek the support of a therapist.

Once we see the dynamics of shame’s one-two punch—how it diminishes our lives and then perpetuates that poverty—we can set out with courage and confidence and appropriate humility to purge the toxic emotional backlog, rewrite the narrative for our self-care and care of others, and inhabit a new life of prosperity. Heck, one day we might even help others heal from their own toxic shame. If you or someone you love suffers from shame, I hope this writing has helped you.

 

Identity Theft and the Body’s Disappearance

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By Robert Bohm

Source: The Hampton Institute

“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”

– Allen Ginsberg from his poem “ Howl “

Identity theft, at least the most familiar type, is possible because today the individual exists not merely as flesh and blood, but as flesh and blood spliced with bank account numbers, user names, passwords, credit card chips, etc. These added parts aren’t secondary to the individual’s overall identity, they’re central to it. Sometimes they’re all there is of it, as in many banking and purchasing transactions. In such instances, the data we’ve supplied to the relevant institutions doesn’t merely represent us, it is us. Our bodies alone can’t complete transactions without the account numbers, user names, passwords, credit card numbers, and ID cards which have become our identity’s essence. Without them, in many ways, we don’t exist.

In a worst case scenario, if someone gets hold of this private data, they can become us by possessing the data that is us. Following this, who or what we are is no longer a question. We don’t exist, except in the form of a stolen dataset now under someone else’s control.

In such a case, an unknown proxy has eliminated us and become who we once were.

Although problematic, the above form of identity theft is relatively minor. A worse form is one we all know about, yet chronically underestimate because we think of ourselves as too canny to be conned. Nonetheless, this other form of identity theft frames and limits everything we do. In the process, it fleeces us of the fullness of our identities and subjects our lives to a type of remote control. This remote control consists of the combined influence on us, from childhood onward, of society’s major institutions and dominant activities, which seed us with a variety of parameters for how to acceptably navigate society and and its particular challenges.

This process is usually called “socialization.” However, it’s better seen as a sorting procedure in which society sifts us through a citizenship sieve in order to eliminate supposed defects, thereby guaranteeing that, despite each of us possessing unique characteristics, we share an underlying uniformity. Ultimately, this process is a kind of identity eugenics which strives to purify the population by eliminating or weakening troublesome qualities – e.g., an overly questioning attitude, chronic boundary-testing, a confrontational stance toward authority, a fierce protectiveness toward whatever space the body inhabits, etc. Such traits are frowned upon because they’re seen by the status quo as a likely threat to society’s stability.

Such indoctrination is much subtler yet, in many ways, more pervasive than outright propaganda. Its theater of operations is everywhere, taking place on many fronts. Public and private education, advertising, mass culture, government institutions, the prevailing ideas of how to correct socioeconomic wrongs (this is a “good” form of protest, this a “bad” one), the methods by which various slangs are robbed of their transgressive nature through absorption into the mainstream, the social production of substitute behaviors for nonconformity and rebellion – each of these phenomena and others play a role in generating the so-called “acceptable citizen,” a trimmed down (i.e., possesses reduced potential) version of her or his original personality.

Make no doubt about it, this trimming of the personality is a form of identity theft. It is, in fact, the ultimate form. Take as an example the African slave in the U.S.: abducted from her or his homeland, forbidden from learning to read or write, denied legal standing in the courts, given no say over whether offspring would be sold to another owner or remain with them. The slave was robbed of her/his most essential identity, their status as a human being.

In his book, The Souls of Black Folk , W.E.B. Du Bois described this theft in terms of how slavery reduces the slave to a person with “no true self-consciousness” – that is, with no stable knowledge of self, no clear sense of who she or he is in terms of culture, preceding generations, rituals for bringing to fruition one’s potential to create her or his own fate. As Du Bois correctly argued, this left the slave, and afterwards the freed Black, with a “longing to attain self-conscious manhood,” to know who she or he was, to see oneself through one’s own eyes and not through the eyes of one’s denigrators – e.g., white supremacists, confederate diehards, “good” people who nonetheless regarded Blacks as “lesser,” etc. Du Bois understood that from such people’s perspectives, Blacks possessed only one identity: the identity of being owned, of possessing no value other than what its owner could extract from them. Without an owner to extract this value, the slave was either identity-less or possessed an identity so slimmed and emaciated as to be a nothing.

The point here isn’t that today socialization enslaves the population in the same way as U.S. slavery once enslaved Blacks, but rather that identity theft is, psychologically and culturally speaking, a key aspect of disempowering people and has been for centuries. Today, because of mass culture and new technologies, the methods of accomplishing it are far more sophisticated than during other eras.

How disempowerment/identity theft occurs in contemporary society is inseparable from capitalism’s current state of development. We long ago passed the moment (after the introduction of assembly line production in the early 20th century) when modern advertising started its trek toward becoming one of the most powerful socialization forces in the U.S. As such, it convinces consumers not only to purchase individual products but, even more importantly, sells us on the idea that buying in general and all the time, no matter what we purchase, is proof of one’s value as a person.

To accomplish this end, modern advertising was molded by its creators into a type of PSYOP designed for destabilizing individuals’ adherence to old saws like “a penny saved is a penny earned” and “without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.” Once this happened, the United States’ days of puritan buying restraint were over. However, modern advertising was never solely about undermining personal fiscal restraint. It was also about manipulating feelings of personal failure – e.g., dissatisfaction with lifestyle and income, a sense of being trapped, fear of being physically unappealing, etc. – and turning them not into motives for self-scrutiny or social critiques, but into a spur for commodity obsession. This wasn’t simply about owning the product or products, but an obsessive hope that buying one or more commodities would trigger relief from momentary or long-term anxiety and frustration related to one’s life-woes: job, marriage, lack of money, illness, etc.

Helen Woodward, a leading advertising copywriter of the early decades of the 20th century, described how this was done in her book, Through Many Windows , published in 1926. One example she used focused on women as consumers:

The restless desire for a change in fashions is a healthy outlet. It is normal to want something different, something new, even if many women spend too much time and too much money that way. Change is the most beneficent medicine in the world to most people. And to those who cannot change their whole lives or occupations, even a new line in a dress is often a relief. The woman who is tired of her husband or her home or a job feels some lifting of the weight of life from seeing a straight line change into a bouffant, or a gray pass into a beige. Most people do not have the courage or understanding to make deeper changes.

Woodward’s statement reveals not only the advertising industry’s PSYOP characteristic of manipulating people’s frustrations in order to lure them into making purchases, but also the industry’s view of the people to whom it speaks through its ads. As indicated by Woodward’s words, this view is one of condescension, of viewing most consumers as unable to bring about real socioeconomic change because they lack the abilities – “the courage or understanding” – necessary to do so. Consequently, their main purpose in life, it is implied, is to exist as a consumer mass constantly gorging on capitalism’s products in order to keep the system running smoothly. In doing this, Woodward writes, buyers find in the act of making purchases “a healthy outlet” for troubled emotions spawned in other parts of their lives.

Such advertising philosophies in the early 20th century opened a door for the industry, one that would never again be closed. Through that door (or window), one could glimpse the future: a world with an ever greater supply of commodities to sell and an advertising industry ready to make sure people bought them. To guarantee this, advertisers set about creating additional techniques for reshaping public consciousness into one persuaded that owning as many of those commodities as possible was an existential exercise of defining who an individual was.

In his book The Consumer Society , philosopher Jean Baudrillard deals with precisely this process. He writes that such a society is driven by:

the contradiction between a virtually unlimited productivity and the need to dispose of the product. It becomes vital for the system at this stage to control not only the mechanism of production, but also consumer demand.

“To control … consumer demand.” This is the key phrase here. Capitalist forces not only wanted to own and control the means of production in factories, it also wanted to control consumers in such a way that they had no choice but to buy, then buy more. In other words, capitalism was in quest of a strategy engineered to make us synch our minds to a capitalism operating in overdrive (“virtually unlimited” production).

The way this occurs, Baudrillard argues, is by capitalism transforming (through advertising) the process of buying an individual product from merely being a response to a “this looks good” or “that would be useful around the house” attitude to something more in line with what psychologists call “ego integration.” It refers to that part of human development in which an individual’s various personality characteristics (viewpoints, goals, physical desires, etc.) are organized into a balanced whole. At that point, what advertising basically did for capitalism was develop a reconfigured ego integration process in which the personality is reorganized to view its stability as dependent on its life as a consumer.

Advertisers pulled this off because the commodity, in an age of commodity profusion, isn’t simply a commodity but is also an indicator or sign referring to a particular set of values or behavior, i.e. a particular type of person. It is this which is purchased: the meaning, or constellation of meanings, which the commodity indicates.

In this way, the commodity, once bought, becomes a signal to others that “I, the owner, am this type of person.” Buy an Old Hickory J143 baseball bat and those in the know grasp that you’re headed for the pros. Sling on some Pandora bling and all the guys’ eyes are on you as you hip-swing into the Groove Lounge. Even the NY Times is hip to what’s up. If you want to be a true Antifa activist, the newspaper informed its readers on Nov. 29, 2017, this is the attire you must wear:

Black work or military boots, pants, balaclavas or ski masks, gloves and jackets, North Face brand or otherwise. Gas masks, goggles and shields may be added as accessories, but the basics have stayed the same since the look’s inception.

After you dress up, it’s not even necessary to attend a protest and fight fascists to be full-blown Antifa. You’re a walking billboard (or signification) proclaiming your values everywhere. Dress the part and you are the part.

Let’s return to Baudrillard, though. In The System of Objects , another of his books, he writes about how the issue of signification, and the method by which individuals purchase particular commodities in order to refine their identity for public consumption, becomes the universal mass experience:

To become an object of consumption, an object must first become a sign. That is to say: it must become external, in a sense, to a relationship that it now merely signifies … Only in this context can it be ‘personalized’, can it become part of a series, and so on; only thus can it be consumed, never in its materiality, but in its difference.

This “difference” is what the product signifies. That is, the product isn’t just a product anymore. It isn’t only its function. It has transitioned into an indicator of a unique personality trait, or of being a member of a certain lifestyle grouping or social class, or of subscribing to a particular political persuasion, Republican, anarchist, whatever. In this way, choosing the commodities to purchase is essential to one’s self-construction, one’s effort to make sure the world knows exactly who they are.

The individual produced by this citizen-forming process is a reduced one, the weight of her/his full personality pared down by cutting off the unnecessary weight of potentials and inclinations perceived as “not a good fit” for a citizen at this stage of capitalism. Such a citizen, however, isn’t an automaton. She or he makes choices, indulges her or his unique appetites, even periodically rebels against bureaucratic inefficiency or a social inequity perceived to be particularly stupid or unfair. Yet after a few days or few months of this activity, this momentary rebel fades back into the woodwork, satisfied by their sincere but token challenge to the mainstream. The woodwork into which they fade is, of course, their home or another favorite location (a lover’s apartment, a bar, a ski resort cabin, a pool hall, etc.).

From this point on, or at least for the foreseeable future, such a person isn’t inclined to look at the world with a sharp political eye, except possibly within the confines of their private life. In this way, they turn whatever criticism of the mainstream they may have into a petty gripe endowed with no intention of joining with others in order to fight for any specific change(s) regarding that political, socioeconomic or cultural phenomenon against which the complaint has been lodged. Instead, all the complainer wants is congratulations from her or his listener(s) about how passionate, on-target, and right the complaint was.

This is the sieve process, identity eugenics, in action. Far more subtle and elastic than previous methods of social control, it narrows what we believe to be our options and successfully maneuvers us into a world where advertising shapes us more than schools do. In this mode, it teaches us that life’s choices aren’t so much about justice or morality, but more about what choosing between commodities is like: which is more useful to me in my private life, which one better defines me as a person, which one makes me look cooler, chicer, brainier, hunkier, more activist to those I know.

It is in this context that a young, new, “acceptable” citizen enters society as a walking irony. Raised to be a cog in a machine in a time of capitalistic excess, the individual arrives on the scene as a player of no consequence in a game in which she or he has been deluded that they’re the game’s star. But far from being a star, this person, weakened beyond repair by the surrender of too much potential, is so without ability that she or he has no impact whatsoever on the game. Consequently, this individual is, for all practical purposes, an absence. The ultimate invisible person, a nothing in the midst of players who don’t take note of this absence at all. And why should they? The full-of-potential individual who eventually morphed into this absence is long gone, remembered by no one, except as a fading image of what once was.

This process of reducing a potentially creative person into a virtual non-presence is a form of ideological anorexia. Once afflicted, an individual refuses nourishment until they’re nothing but skin and bones. However, the “weight” they’ve lost doesn’t consist of actual pounds. Instead, it involves a loss of the psychological heftiness and mental bulk necessary to be a full human being.

One can’t lose more weight than that.

Human life as we once knew it is gone, replaced by the ritual of endless purchasing. This is existence in what used to be called “the belly of the beast.” Our role in life has become to nourish capitalism by being at its disposal, by giving of ourselves. Such giving frequently entails self-mutilation: the debt, credit card and otherwise, that bludgeons to death the dreams of many individuals and families.

This quasi-religious self-sacrifice replicates in another form: the Dark Ages practice employed by fanatical monks and other flagellants who lashed themselves with whips made from copper wires, thereby ripping their flesh and bleeding until they descended into a state of religious hysteria. The more we give of ourselves in this way, the thinner and more weightless we become. Meanwhile, the god whom Allen Ginsberg called Moloch grows more obese day after day, its belly is filled with:

Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!…

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

What capitalism wants from us, of course, isn’t merely self-sacrifice, it’s surrender. Hunger for life is viewed negatively by the status quo because it nourishes the self, making it stronger and more alert and, therefore, better prepared to assert itself. The fact that such an empowered self is more there (possesses more of a presence) than its undersized counterpart makes the healthier self unacceptable to the powers that be. This is because there-ness is no longer an option in our national life. Only non-there-ness is. If you’re not a political anorexic, you’re on the wrong side.

Wherever we look, we see it. Invisibility, or at least as much of it as possible, is the individual’s goal. It’s the new real. Fashion reveals this as well as anything. It does so by disseminating an ideal of beauty that fetishizes the body’s anorexic wilting away. Not the body’s presence but its fade to disappearance is the source of its allure. The ultimate fashion model hovers fragilely on the brink of absence in order not to distract from the only thing which counts in capitalism: the commodity to be sold – e.g., the boutique bomber jacket, the shirt, the pantsuit, the earrings, the shawl, the stilettos, the iPhone, the Ferrari, and, possibly most of all, the political passivity intrinsic to spending your life acquiring things in order to prove to others and ourselves that we’ve discovered in these things something more useful than Socrates’ goal of knowing thyself or Emma Goldman’s warning , “The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.”

What is true on the fashion runway is also true in politics. Just as the best model is one thin enough to fade into non-presence, so our democracy, supposedly ruled “by and for the people,” has thinned down so much that “the people” can’t even be seen (except as stage props), let alone get their hands on democracy except in token ways. No matter how often we the people are praised rhetorically by politicians, we aren’t allowed as a group to get in the way of the capitalist system’s freedom to do whatever it wants in order to sustain commodity worship and guarantee capital’s right to permanent rule. If the military-industrial complex needs another war in order to pump out more profits, then so be it. We have no say in the matter. The identity theft built into society’s structure makes sure of this. It’s stripped us of our “weight” – our creativity, our willingness to take political risks, our capacity to choose action over posturing. After this forced weight loss, what’s left of us is a mess. Too philosophically and psychologically anemic to successfully challenge our leaders’ decisions, we, for all practical purposes, disappear.

As a reward for our passivity, we’re permitted a certain range of freedom – as long as “a certain range” is defined as “varieties of buying” and doesn’t include behavior that might result in the population’s attainment of greater political power.

So, it continues, the only good citizen is the absent citizen. Which is to say, a citizen who has dieted him or herself into a state of political anorexia – i.e., that level of mental weightlessness necessary for guaranteeing a person’s permanent self-exclusion from the machinery of power.

***

Our flesh no longer exists in the way it once did. A new evolutionary stage has arrived.

In this new stage, the flesh isn’t merely what it seems to be: flesh, pure and simple. Instead, it’s a hybrid. It’s what exists after the mind oversees its passage through the sieve of mass culture.

After this passage, what the flesh is now are the poses it adopts from studying movies, rappers, punk rockers, fashionistas of all kinds, reality TV stars, football hunks, whomever. It’s also what it wears, skinny jeans or loose-fitting chinos, short skirt or spandex, Hawaiian shirt or muscle tank top, pierced bellybutton, dope hiking boots, burgundy eyeliner. Here we come, marching, strolling, demon-eyed, innocent as Johnny Appleseed. Everybody’s snapping pics with their phones, selfies and shots of others (friends, strangers, the maimed, the hilarious, the so-called idiotic). The flesh’s pictures are everywhere. In movie ads, cosmetic ads, suppository ads, Viagra ads. This is the wave of the already-here but still-coming future. The actual flesh’s replacement by televised, printed, digitalized and Photoshopped images of it produces the ultimate self-bifurcation.

Increasingly cut off from any unmediated life of its own, the flesh now exists mostly as a natural resource for those (including ourselves) who need it for a project; to photograph it, dress it up, pose it in a certain way, put it on a diet, commodify/objectify it in any style ranging from traditional commodification to the latest avant-garde objectification.

All these stylings/makeovers, although advertised as a form of liberation for the flesh (a “freeing” of your flesh so you can be what you want to be), are in fact not that. Instead, they are part of the process of distancing ourselves from the flesh by always doing something to it rather than simply being it.

When we are it, we feel what the flesh feels, the pain, the joy, the satisfaction, the terror, the disgust, the hints of hope, a sense of irreparable loss, whatever.

When we objectify it, it is a mannequin, emotionless, a thing that uses up a certain amount of space. As such we can do what we want with it: decorate it, pull it apart, vent our frustrations on it, starve it, practice surgical cuts on it, put it to whatever use we like. It isn’t a person. It is separate from our personhood and we own it.

In fact we own all the world’s flesh.

We live, after all, in the American Empire, and the Empire owns everything. As the Empire’s citizens, we own everything it owns. Except for one thing: ourselves.

***

The flesh is both here and not here. Increasingly, it is more an object that we do things to – e.g., bulk it up, change its hair color, mass-kill it from a hotel window on the 32nd floor, view in a porno flick – than a presence in its own right (i.e., self-contained, a force to be reckoned with). In this sense, it is a growing absence, each day losing more of its self-determination and becoming more a thing lost than something that exists fully, on its own, in the here and now. Given this, the proper attitude to have toward the flesh is one of nostalgia.

Of course, the flesh hasn’t really disappeared. What has disappeared is what it once was, a meat-and-bones reality, a site of pleasure and injury. Now, however, it’s not so valuable in itself as it is in its in its role as a starting-off point for endless makeovers.

These makeover options are arrayed before the consumer everywhere: online, in big box stores, in niche markets and so on. Today, it is in these places, not at birth, that the flesh starts its trek toward maturation. It does this by offering itself up as a sacrifice to be used as they see fit by the fashion industry, the gym industry, the addiction-cure industry, the diet industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the education industry, etc. Each body in the nation reaches its fullest potential only when it becomes a testing site to be used by these industries as they explore more and better ways to establish themselves as indispensable to capitalism’s endless reproduction.

In the end, the flesh, the target of all this competition for its attention, has less of a life on its own than it does as the object of advertisers’ opinions about what can be done to improve it or to reconstruct it. Only to the extent that the flesh can transcend or reconstitute itself can it be said to be truly alive.

This last fact – about aliveness – represents the culmination of a process. This process pertains to the visualization and digitalization of everything and the consequent disappearance of everything behind a wall of signification.

A televised or computerized image, discussion, commentary, conjecture, etc., becomes the thing it meditates on, depicts or interprets. This happens by virtue of the fact that the thing itself (the real flesh behind the televised or computerized image, discussion, commentary, conjecture, etc.) has disappeared into the discussion or into the image of it presented on the computer or TV screen.

In the same way, an anorexic model (her/his flesh and blood presence) disappears into the fashions she or he displays for the public.

In each instance the thing (the flesh) now no longer exists except in other people’s meditations on it; it has become those other people’s meditations. The ultimate anorexic, it (the thing) has lost so much weight it’s no longer physically there except as an idea in someone else’s mind or in a series of binary codings inside computers.

This is the final victory of absence over there-ness, of the anorexic ideal over the idea of being fully human (i.e., “bulging with existence,” “fat with life”). The self has been successfully starved to the point of such a radical thinness that it can no longer stand up to a blade of grass, let alone make itself felt by the powers that be.

How false flag operations are carried out today

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By Philip M. Giraldi

Source: Intrepid Report

False Flag is a concept that goes back centuries. It was considered to be a legitimate ploy by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation just before launching an attack. In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain, France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one’s own to confuse the opponent was considered to be a legitimate ruse de guerre, but it was only “honorable” if one reverted to one’s own flag before engaging in combat.

Today’s false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. There is nothing honorable about them as their intention is to blame an innocent party for something that it did not do. There has been a lot of such activity lately and it was interesting to learn by way of a leak that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has developed a capability to mimic the Internet fingerprints of other foreign intelligence services. That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look like it originated in Moscow or Beijing. Given that capability, there has been considerable speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016 national elections in the United States.

False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year’s two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time. The most recent reported attack on April 7 might not have occurred at all, according to doctors and other witnesses who were actually in Douma. Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful.

The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by “doing something.” If the U.N. investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime.

The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, on March 4. Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. The allegations made by British Prime Minister Theresa May about the claimed nerve agent being “very likely” Russian in origin have been debunked, in part through examination by the U.K.’s own chemical weapons lab. May, under attack even within her own party, needed a good story and a powerful enemy to solidify her own hold on power so false flagging something to Russia probably appeared to be just the ticket as Moscow would hardly be able to deny the “facts” being invented in London. Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA.

The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if “an incident” looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. A bit of caution in assigning blame is appropriate given that the alternative would be a precipitate and likely disproportionate response that could easily escalate into a shooting war.

Social Media Behemoths Sweep Alternative News into the Memory Hole

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

The squabbling between self-identified progressives and conservatives continues as social media transforms itself into a news, information, and opinion gatekeeper.

All information that contradicts the establishment narrative will either be downgraded into obscurity or excluded outright on social media.

Take for instance ThinkProgress, the Soros-financed news website, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund welded to the infrastructure of the Democrat party. On May 2, it complained that a bias study at Facebook will be run by conservatives, that is to say establishment Republicans, notably former Arizona Congress critter Jon Kyl.

ThinkProgress believes there is no such thing as bias aimed at conservatives—it’s the liberals who are routinely downgraded at Facebook while so-called conservatives are free to post what progressives characterize as an evil and poisonous ideology.

According to Libby Watson at Splinter News, conservatives are involved in “grift,” flimflamming poor Mark Zuckerberg with untrue claims of bias against the likes of Breitbart News.

It’s all part of a never ending and hugely counterproductive “culture war” that has raged between the ostensible right and left going on thirty years now. Ms. Watson manages to squeeze identity politics into her screed.

“The conservative movement has done a remarkable job over the last half century to bellow and bully its way into having its most ridiculous and reality-divorced concerns taken seriously,” she writes. “It lies about and distorts everything: about tax cuts, about Benghazi and her emails, about immigration, about healthcare, about Diamond and Silk. The further Facebook descends down the path of letting that screaming white face of faux outrage dictate how they run their platform, the harder it’s going to be for them to get away from them.”

The progressive news website Common Dreams complains it has weathered “significant drops in traffic since Google and Facebook began changing algorithms and talking openly about their new attempts to control the kind of news content users see. According to internal data and Google Analytics, traffic to Common Dreams from Google searches fell by 34 percent after the powerful search giant unveiled its new search protocol in April 2017.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the yawning divide, Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, rallied around 60 conservatives and fired off an open letter to the social media giants demanding transparency, clarity on the definition of hate speech, equality for conservatives, and respect for the First Amendment.

“Social media censorship and online restriction of conservatives and their organizations have reached a crisis level,” the open letter states. “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s hearings on Capitol Hill only served to draw attention to how widespread this problem has become. Conservative leaders now have banded together to call for equal treatment on tech and social media.”

Both liberals and conservatives are missing the point.

Facebook and Google will continue and enlarge the effort to gatekeep information that does not jive with the establishment narrative, be it from the right or left.

The internet and web upended the establishment’s carefully constructed propaganda machine—the CIA’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” under its Operation Mockingbird beginning in the early 1950s—deeply embedded within corporate media.

Beginning with Friendster, MySpace, and like projects in the early 2000s and eventually morphing into the corporate behemoths Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, social media platforms have extended the reach of alternative media, much to the displeasure of the establishment. Its preferred propaganda conduits have withered and this has seriously hampered its ability to control the narrative.

Both the right and left need to nurture their own social media platforms and drive traffic there.

Of course, this will not be as effective as plugging into the massive matrix of social connectivity provided by the corporate tech giants, but the alternative is to be marginalized and eventually swept into the memory hole as the context of “extremism” narrows and constricts expression, excluding all but the most token disagreement with the establishment narrative.

However, I’m not sure we’re up to it.

The elite has done a remarkable job of using the time tested divide and conquer concept, endlessly pitting the so-called right against the amorphously defined left and vice versa. Liberals and conservatives continue to fight over frivolous ideological points as the funny money asset-driven economy prepares to implode and the mission of infinity war expands to the point where it endangers life on planet Earth.

Fake News Is Fake Amerika

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By Philip A Farruggio

Source: Global Research

Robert Stinnett wrote his book Day of Deceit ( 1999) to suggest that the FDR administration knew of the upcoming attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and allowed it to happen. Stinnett’s  rationale, from his extensive research, was that FDR needed to get us into WW2 and was facing much opposition here at home. Dusko Popov, a Serbian double agent during the war, wrote his autobiography Spy/Counterspy ( 1974) whereupon he stated that around March of 1941, he personally met with J Edgar Hoover. At that meeting he passed along  information, obtained by him directly from the German Abwehr, of the planned Japanese attack at one of our Pacific naval bases, most likely Pearl Harbor, set for around the end of the year.

Former New Orleans prosecutor and judge Jim Garrison wrote his 1988 book On the trail of the Assassins, which Oliver Stone based his 1991 blockbuster film JFK on. Both the book and the film make a compelling case that Lee Harvey Oswald was NOT the killer, and may not even have been involved in the conspiracy, except as a set up patsy. Garrison and Stone both felt that JFK’s assassination was literally a ‘coup d’etat’ orchestrated by factions deep within our own government. At least 21 witnesses to the assassination turned up dead during the few years afterwards. That alone would give anyone pause to consider that the 1964 Warren Commission Report was full of holes.

 On August 2nd of 1964 the destroyer USS Maddox was said to have been attacked by the North Vietnamese. This (so called ) incident gave President Johnson the impetus to urge the Senate to pass the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that legalized LBJ’s plans to get involved in a war there. History and lots of fine investigations have more or less proven that the whole event was faked by our government.

William Pepper wrote the most spellbinding book Orders to Kill: The Truth behind the Murder of Martin Luther King (1995). Pepper researched this case for years and points the finger at various agencies and NOT at James Earl Ray, for the plot and execution of King’s murder. The interesting thing about King being murdered in April of ’68 was that it was exactly one year after he gave his chilling speech at the Riverside Church, coming out publicly for the first time against the war in Vietnam. He made sure to call our country the ‘ Greatest purveyor of evil…’ On top of that, in April of ’68 he was in Memphis to offer solidarity to the mostly black Memphis sanitation workers who were on strike. This was a far cry from the MLK who spent most of his activism marching and speaking out for civil rights.

The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy by Dan Moldea has just been re-released for the 50th anniversary of RFK’s murder. In the book Moldea covers lots of details concerning  who may have been involved and why. Once again, he, along with countless other investigators, throw out the assertion that Sirhan Sirhan was the gunman. Interesting point here: Before the trial of Sirhan, the government had psychiatrist  Dr. Jolyon West examine him. Dr. West had an extensive background working for covert operations spanning back to the Korean War. He had Jack Ruby as a patient after Ruby was imprisoned for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. The real interesting fact is that later on, after the Sirhan case, Dr. West worked in a program run at Vacaville Prison’s Medical Facility and had none other than inmate Donald DeFreeze as a patient in some program to treat ‘violent offenders’. DeFreeze, a few years later, became the leader (Field Marshall Cinque) of the obtuse home grown terrorist group calling itself The Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst… who Dr. West also treated after her capture/liberation… and of course DeFreeze was killed during that event. There have been suggestions by other researchers over the years that DeFreeze was both a police informant AND agent provocateur.

In the Spring of 1990 Saddam Hussein of Iraq was angry with Kuwait for basically two major reasons:

A) He had to loan money from them for his decade long war with Iran, and felt they should erase his country’s debt because Iraq did all the fighting and dying;

B) Hussein felt that Kuwait was angle drilling (underwater) Iraqi oil in violation of their sovereign right for it.

Things got testy and Bush Sr. sent US Ambassador April Glaspie to meet with Hussein… who was, at that time, one of our cherished allies in that region.

Transcript of Meeting Between Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. – July 25, 1990 (Eight days before the August 2, 1990 Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait)

July 25, 1990 – Presidential Palace – Baghdad

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – I have direct instructions from President Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait. (pause) As you know, I lived here for years and admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. We know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. (pause) We can see that you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of your threat s against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship – not confrontation – regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?

Saddam Hussein – As you know, for years now I have made every effort to reach a settlement on our dispute with Kuwait. There is to be a meeting in two days; I am prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief chance. (pause) When we (the Iraqis) meet (with the Kuwaitis) and we see there is hope, then nothing will happen. But if we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – What solutions would be acceptable?

Saddam Hussein – If we could keep the whole of the Shatt al Arab – our strategic goal in our war with Iran – we will make concessions (to the Kuwaitis). But, if we are forced to choose between keeping half of the Shatt and the whole of Iraq (i.e., in Saddam s view, including Kuwait ) then we will give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be. (pause) What is the United States’ opinion on this?

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie – We have no opinion on your Arab – Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960’s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)

We know the rest: Hussein attacked and occupied Kuwait and became Public Enemy #1 to the USA. Bush Sr. referred to him as another Hitler, and you know the rest.

A mere 10 years later, in September of 2001, the Twin Towers were taken down like pancakes and this set off our ‘never ending’ War on Terror. David Ray Griffin, in 2008 wrote 9/11 The New Pearl Harbor, his investigation into what really may have gone down that tragic day… and the why along with the how of it. Once again, his book refutes the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report that it was a small band of terrorists, lead by Osama bin Laden, that did the heinous act on their own… without any aid from other covert agencies (of our government?).

In the aftermath of the 9/11 horror, many sources have shown that the Bush/Cheney cabal always had their sites on Iraq. In July of 2002, the inner circle of the British government met to discuss the Iraq situation. This is directly from Wikipedia:

The most controversial paragraph is a report of a recent visit to Washington by head of the Secret Intelligence Service Sir Richard Dearlove (known in official terminology as ‘C’):

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

The British analysis of US policy is also stated elsewhere in the minutes:

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

We all know what transpired afterwards, as the country that we true patriots love, along with our British stooges, had committed a most heinous action, worse than even the Vietnam debacle. The ‘Fake News’ empire was working on steroids… and it still is with our illegal and immoral dabbling in other Middle Eastern affairs. Isn’t it time for the majority of our fellow citizens to stop believing in the lies and disinformation that passes as truthful news?

Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 300 of his work posted on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House,  Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net

Disarming the Weapons of Mass Distraction

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By Madeleine Bunting

Source: Rise Up Times

“Are you paying attention?” The phrase still resonates with a particular sharpness in my mind. It takes me straight back to my boarding school, aged thirteen, when my eyes would drift out the window to the woods beyond the classroom. The voice was that of the math teacher, the very dedicated but dull Miss Ploughman, whose furrowed grimace I can still picture.

We’re taught early that attention is a currency—we “pay” attention—and much of the discipline of the classroom is aimed at marshaling the attention of children, with very mixed results. We all have a history here, of how we did or did not learn to pay attention and all the praise or blame that came with that. It used to be that such patterns of childhood experience faded into irrelevance. As we reached adulthood, how we paid attention, and to what, was a personal matter and akin to breathing—as if it were automatic.

Today, though, as we grapple with a pervasive new digital culture, attention has become an issue of pressing social concern. Technology provides us with new tools to grab people’s attention. These innovations are dismantling traditional boundaries of private and public, home and office, work and leisure. Emails and tweets can reach us almost anywhere, anytime. There are no cracks left in which the mind can idle, rest, and recuperate. A taxi ad offers free wifi so that you can remain “productive” on a cab journey.

Even those spare moments of time in our day—waiting for a bus, standing in a queue at the supermarket—can now be “harvested,” says the writer Tim Wu in his book The Attention Merchants. In this quest to pursue “those slivers of our unharvested awareness,” digital technology has provided consumer capitalism with its most powerful tools yet. And our attention fuels it. As Matthew Crawford notes in The World Beyond Your Head, “when some people treat the minds of other people as a resource, this is not ‘creating wealth,’ it is transferring it.”

There’s a whiff of panic around the subject: the story that our attention spans are now shorter than a goldfish’s attracted millions of readers on the web; it’s still frequently cited, despite its questionable veracity. Rates of diagnosis attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children have soared, creating an $11 billion global market for pharmaceutical companies. Every glance of our eyes is now tracked for commercial gain as ever more ingenious ways are devised to capture our attention, if only momentarily. Our eyeballs are now described as capitalism’s most valuable real estate. Both our attention and its deficits are turned into lucrative markets.

There is also a domestic economy of attention; within every family, some get it and some give it. We’re all born needing the attention of others—our parents’, especially—and from the outset, our social skills are honed to attract the attention we need for our care. Attention is woven into all forms of human encounter from the most brief and transitory to the most intimate. It also becomes deeply political: who pays attention to whom?

Social psychologists have researched how the powerful tend to tune out the less powerful. One study with college students showed that even in five minutes of friendly chat, wealthier students showed fewer signs of engagement when in conversation with their less wealthy counterparts: less eye contact, fewer nods, and more checking the time, doodling, and fidgeting. Discrimination of race and gender, too, plays out through attention. Anyone who’s spent any time in an organization will be aware of how attention is at the heart of office politics. A suggestion is ignored in a meeting, but is then seized upon as a brilliant solution when repeated by another person.

What is political is also ethical. Matthew Crawford argues that this is the essential characteristic of urban living: a basic recognition of others.

And then there’s an even more fundamental dimension to the politics of attention. At a primary level, all interactions in public space require a very minimal form of attention, an awareness of the presence and movement of others. Without it, we would bump into each other, frequently.

I had a vivid demonstration of this point on a recent commute: I live in East London and regularly use the narrow canal paths for cycling. It was the canal rush hour—lots of walkers with dogs, families with children, joggers as well as cyclists heading home. We were all sharing the towpath with the usual mixture of give and take, slowing to allow passing, swerving around and between each other. Only this time, a woman was walking down the center of the path with her eyes glued to her phone, impervious to all around her. This went well beyond a moment of distraction. Everyone had to duck and weave to avoid her. She’d abandoned the unspoken contract that avoiding collision is a mutual obligation.

This scene is now a daily occurrence for many of us, in shopping centers, station concourses, or on busy streets. Attention is the essential lubricant of urban life, and without it, we’re denying our co-existence in that moment and place. The novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, writes that the most basic requirement for being good is that a person “must know certain things about his surroundings, most obviously the existence of other people and their claims.”

Attention is what draws us out of ourselves to experience and engage in the world. The word is often accompanied by a verb—attention needs to be grabbed, captured, mobilized, attracted, or galvanized. Reflected in such language is an acknowledgement of how attention is the essential precursor to action. The founding father of psychology William James provided what is still one of the best working definitions:

It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.

Attention is a limited resource and has to be allocated: to pay attention to one thing requires us to withdraw it from others. There are two well-known dimensions to attention, explains Willem Kuyken, a professor of psychology at Oxford. The first is “alerting”— an automatic form of attention, hardwired into our brains, that warns us of threats to our survival. Think of when you’re driving a car in a busy city: you’re aware of the movement of other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, and road signs, while advertising tries to grab any spare morsel of your attention. Notice how quickly you can swerve or brake when you spot a car suddenly emerging from a side street. There’s no time for a complicated cognitive process of decision making. This attention is beyond voluntary control.

The second form of attention is known as “executive”—the process by which our brain selects what to foreground and focus on, so that there can be other information in the background—such as music when you’re cooking—but one can still accomplish a complex task. Crucially, our capacity for executive attention is limited. Contrary to what some people claim, none of us can multitask complex activities effectively. The next time you write an email while talking on the phone, notice how many typing mistakes you make or how much you remember from the call. Executive attention can be trained, and needs to be for any complex activity. This was the point James made when he wrote: “there is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time… what is called sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to the mind.”

Attention is a complex interaction between memory and perception, in which we continually select what to notice, thus finding the material which correlates in some way with past experience. In this way, patterns develop in the mind. We are always making meaning from the overwhelming raw data. As James put it, “my experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”

And we are constantly engaged in organizing that chaos, as we interpret our experience. This is clear in the famous Gorilla Experiment in which viewers were told to watch a video of two teams of students passing a ball between them. They had to count the number of passes made by the team in white shirts and ignore those of the team in black shirts. The experiment is deceptively complex because it involves three forms of attention: first, scanning the whole group; second, ignoring the black T-shirt team to keep focus on the white T-shirt team (a form of inhibiting attention); and third, remembering to count. In the middle of the experiment, someone in a gorilla suit ambles through the group. Afterward, half the viewers when asked hadn’t spotted the gorilla and couldn’t even believe it had been there. We can be blind not only to the obvious, but to our blindness.

There is another point in this experiment which is less often emphasized. Ignoring something—such as the black T-shirt team in this experiment—requires a form of attention. It costs us attention to ignore something. Many of us live and work in environments that require us to ignore a huge amount of information—that flashing advert, a bouncing icon or pop-up.

In another famous psychology experiment, Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Test, four-year-olds had a choice of eating a marshmallow immediately or two in fifteen minutes. While filmed, each child was put in a room alone in front of the plate with a marshmallow. They squirmed and fidgeted, poked the marshmallow and stared at the ceiling. A third of the children couldn’t resist the marshmallow and gobbled it up, a third nibbled cautiously, but the last third figured out how to distract themselves. They looked under the table, sang… did anything but look at the sweet. It’s a demonstration of the capacity to reallocate attention. In a follow-up study some years later, those who’d been able to wait for the second marshmallow had better life outcomes, such as academic achievement and health. One New Zealand study of 1,000 children found that this form of self-regulation was a more reliable predictor of future success and wellbeing than even a good IQ or comfortable economic status.

What, then, are the implications of how digital technologies are transforming our patterns of attention? In the current political anxiety about social mobility and inequality, more weight needs to be put on this most crucial and basic skill: sustaining attention.

*

I learned to concentrate as a child. Being a bookworm helped. I’d be completely absorbed in my reading as the noise of my busy family swirled around me. It was good training for working in newsrooms; when I started as a journalist, they were very noisy places with the clatter of keyboards, telephones ringing and fascinating conversations on every side. What has proved much harder to block out is email and text messages.

The digital tech companies know a lot about this widespread habit; many of them have built a business model around it. They’ve drawn on the work of the psychologist B.F. Skinner who identified back in the Thirties how, in animal behavior, an action can be encouraged with a positive consequence and discouraged by a negative one. In one experiment, he gave a pigeon a food pellet whenever it pecked at a button and the result, as predicted, was that the pigeon kept pecking. Subsequent research established that the most effective way to keep the pigeon pecking was “variable-ratio reinforcement.” Give the pigeon a food pellet sometimes, and you have it well and truly hooked.

We’re just like the pigeon pecking at the button when we check our email or phone. It’s a humiliating thought. Variable reinforcement ensures that the customer will keep coming back. It’s the principle behind one of the most lucrative US industries: slot machines, which generate more profit than baseball, films, and theme parks combined. Gambling was once tightly restricted for its addictive potential, but most of us now have the attentional equivalent of a slot machine in our pocket, beside our plate at mealtimes, and by our pillow at night. Even during a meal out, a play at the theater, a film, or a tennis match. Almost nothing is now experienced uninterrupted.

Anxiety about the exponential rise of our gadget addiction and how it is fragmenting our attention is sometimes dismissed as a Luddite reaction to a technological revolution. But that misses the point. The problem is not the technology per se, but the commercial imperatives that drive the new technologies and, unrestrained, colonize our attention by fundamentally changing our experience of time and space, saturating both in information.

In much public space, wherever your eye lands—from the back of the toilet door, to the handrail on the escalator, or the hotel key card—an ad is trying to grab your attention, and does so by triggering the oldest instincts of the human mind: fear, sex, and food. Public places become dominated by people trying to sell you something. In his tirade against this commercialization, Crawford cites advertisements on the backs of school report cards and on debit machines where you swipe your card. Before you enter your PIN, that gap of a few seconds is now used to show adverts. He describes silence and ad-free experience as “luxury goods” that only the wealthy can afford. Crawford has invented the concept of the “attentional commons,” free public spaces that allow us to choose where to place our attention. He draws the analogy with environmental goods that belong to all of us, such as clean air or clean water.

Some legal theorists are beginning to conceive of our own attention as a human right. One former Google employee warned that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.” They use the insights into human behavior derived from social psychology—the need for approval, the need to reciprocate others’ gestures, the fear of missing out. Your attention ceases to be your own, pulled and pushed by algorithms. Attention is referred to as the real currency of the future.

*

In 2013, I embarked on a risky experiment in attention: I left my job. In the previous two years, it had crept up on me. I could no longer read beyond a few paragraphs. My eyes would glaze over and, even more disastrously for someone who had spent their career writing, I seemed unable to string together my thoughts, let alone write anything longer than a few sentences. When I try to explain the impact, I can only offer a metaphor: it felt like my imagination and use of language were vacuum packed, like a slab of meat coated in plastic. I had lost the ability to turn ideas around, see them from different perspectives. I could no longer draw connections between disparate ideas.

At the time, I was working in media strategy. It was a culture of back-to-back meetings from 8:30 AM to 6 PM, and there were plenty of advantages to be gained from continuing late into the evening if you had the stamina. Commitment was measured by emails with a pertinent weblink. Meetings were sometimes as brief as thirty minutes and frequently ran through lunch. Meanwhile, everyone was sneaking time to battle with the constant emails, eyes flickering to their phone screens in every conversation. The result was a kind of crazy fog, a mishmash of inconclusive discussions.

At first, it was exhilarating, like being on those crazy rides in a theme park. By the end, the effect was disastrous. I was almost continuously ill, battling migraines and unidentifiable viruses. When I finally made the drastic decision to leave, my income collapsed to a fraction of its previous level and my family’s lifestyle had to change accordingly. I had no idea what I was going to do; I had lost all faith in my ability to write. I told friends I would have to return the advance I’d received to write a book. I had to try to get back to the skills of reflection and focus that had once been ingrained in me.

The first step was to teach myself to read again. I sometimes went to a café, leaving my phone and computer behind. I had to slow down the racing incoherence of my mind so that it could settle on the text and its gradual development of an argument or narrative thread. The turning point in my recovery was a five weeks’ research trip to the Scottish Outer Hebrides. On the journey north of Glasgow, my mobile phone lost its Internet connection. I had cut myself loose with only the occasional text or call to family back home. Somewhere on the long Atlantic beaches of these wild and dramatic islands, I rediscovered my ability to write.

I attribute that in part to a stunning exhibition I came across in the small harbor town of Lochboisdale, on the island of South Uist. Vija Celmins is an acclaimed Latvian-American artist whose work is famous for its astonishing patience. She can take a year or more to make a woodcut that portrays in minute detail the surface of the sea. A postcard of her work now sits above my desk, a reminder of the power of slow thinking.

Just as we’ve had a slow eating movement, we need a slow thinking campaign. Its manifesto could be the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s beautiful “Letters to a Young Poet”:

To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered.

Many great thinkers attest that they have their best insights in moments of relaxation, the proverbial brainwave in the bath. We actually need what we most fear: boredom.

When I left my job (and I was lucky that I could), friends and colleagues were bewildered. Why give up a good job? But I felt that here was an experiment worth trying. Crawford frames it well as “intellectual biodiversity.” At a time of crisis, we need people thinking in different ways. If we all jump to the tune of Facebook or Instagram and allow ourselves to be primed by Twitter, the danger is that we lose the “trained powers of concentration” that allow us, in Crawford’s words, “to recognize that independence of thought and feeling is a fragile thing, and requires certain conditions.”

I also took to heart the insights of the historian Timothy Snyder, who concluded from his studies of twentieth-century European totalitarianism that the way to fend off tyranny is to read books, make an effort to separate yourself from the Internet, and “be kind to our language… Think up your own way of speaking.” Dropping out and going offline enabled me to get back to reading, voraciously, and to writing; beyond that, it’s too early to announce the results of my experiment with attention. As Rilke said, “These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing.”

*

A recent column in The New Yorker cheekily suggests that all the fuss about the impact of digital technologies on our attention is nothing more than writers’ worrying about their own working habits. Is all this anxiety about our fragmenting minds a moral panic akin to those that swept Victorian Britain about sexual behavior? Patterns of attention are changing, but perhaps it doesn’t much matter?

My teenage children read much less than I did. One son used to play chess online with a friend, text on his phone, and do his homework all at the same time. I was horrified, but he got a place at Oxford. At his interview, he met a third-year history undergraduate who told him he hadn’t yet read any books in his time at university. But my kids are considerably more knowledgeable about a vast range of subjects than I was at their age. There’s a small voice suggesting that the forms of attention I was brought up with could be a thing of the past; the sustained concentration required to read a whole book will become an obscure niche hobby.

And yet, I’m haunted by a reflection: the magnificent illuminations of the eighth-century Book of Kells has intricate patterning that no one has ever been able to copy, such is the fineness of the tight spirals. Lines are a millimeter apart. They indicate a steadiness of hand and mind—a capability most of us have long since lost. Could we be trading in capacities for focus in exchange for a breadth of reference? Some might argue that’s not a bad trade. But we would lose depth: artist Paul Klee wrote that he would spend a day in silent contemplation of something before he painted it. Paul Cézanne was similarly known for his trance like attention on his subject. Madame Cézanne recollected how her husband would gaze at the landscape, and told her, “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.” The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes a contemplative attention in which one steps outside of oneself and immerses oneself in the object of attention.

It’s not just artists who require such depth of attention. Nearly two decades ago, a doctor teaching medical students at Yale was frustrated at their inability to distinguish between types of skin lesions. Their gaze seemed restless and careless. He took his students to an art gallery and told them to look at a picture for fifteen minutes. The program is now used in dozens of US medical schools.

Some argue that losing the capacity for deep attention presages catastrophe. It is the building block of “intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress,” argues Maggie Jackson in her book Distracted, in which she warns that “as our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming, and a dehumanizing merging between man and machine.” Significantly, her research began with a curiosity about why so many Americans were deeply dissatisfied with life. She argues that losing the capacity for deep attention makes it harder to make sense of experience and to find meaning—from which comes wonder and fulfillment. She fears a new “dark age” in which we forget what makes us truly happy.

Strikingly, the epicenter of this wave of anxiety over our attention is the US. All the authors I’ve cited are American. It’s been argued that this debate represents an existential crisis for America because it exposes the flawed nature of its greatest ideal, individual freedom. The commonly accepted notion is that to be free is to make choices, and no one can challenge that expression of autonomy. But if our choices are actually engineered by thousands of very clever, well-paid digital developers, are we free? The former Google employee Tristan Harris confessed in an article in 2016 that technology “gives people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so that [tech giants] win, no matter what you choose.”

Despite my children’s multitasking, I maintain that vital human capacities—depth of insight, emotional connection, and creativity—are at risk. I’m intrigued as to what the resistance might look like. There are stirrings of protest with the recent establishment of initiatives such as the Time Well Spent movement, founded by tech industry insiders who have become alarmed at the efforts invested in keeping people hooked. But collective action is elusive; the emphasis is repeatedly on the individual to develop the necessary self-regulation, but if that is precisely what is being eroded, we could be caught in a self-reinforcing loop.

One of the most interesting responses to our distraction epidemic is mindfulness. Its popularity is evidence that people are trying to find a way to protect and nourish their minds. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who pioneered the development of secular mindfulness, draws an analogy with jogging: just as keeping your body fit is now well understood, people will come to realize the importance of looking after their minds.

I’ve meditated regularly for twenty years, but curious as to how this is becoming mainstream, I went to an event in the heart of high-tech Shoreditch in London. In a hipster workspaces with funky architecture, excellent coffee, and an impressive range of beards, a soft-spoken retired Oxford professor of psychology, Mark Williams, was talking about how multitasking has a switching cost in focus and concentration. Our unique human ability to remember the past and to think ahead brings a cost; we lose the present. To counter this, he advocated a daily practice of mindfulness: bringing attention back to the body—the physical sensations of the breath, the hands, the feet. Williams explained how fear and anxiety inhibit creativity. In time, the practice of mindfulness enables you to acknowledge fear calmly and even to investigate it with curiosity. You learn to place your attention in the moment, noticing details such as the sunlight or the taste of the coffee.

On a recent retreat, I was beside a river early one morning and a rower passed. I watched the boat slip by and enjoyed the beauty in a radically new way. The moment was sufficient; there was nothing I wanted to add or take away—no thought of how I wanted to do this every day, or how I wanted to learn to row, or how I wished I was in the boat. Nothing but the pleasure of witnessing it. The busy-ness of the mind had stilled. Mindfulness can be a remarkable bid to reclaim our attention and to claim real freedom, the freedom from our habitual reactivity that makes us easy prey for manipulation.

But I worry that the integrity of mindfulness is fragile, vulnerable both to commercialization by employers who see it as a form of mental performance enhancement and to consumer commodification, rather than contributing to the formation of ethical character. Mindfulness as a meditation practice originates in Buddhism, and without that tradition’s ethics, there is a high risk of it being hijacked and misrepresented.

Back in the Sixties, the countercultural psychologist Timothy Leary rebelled against the conformity of the new mass media age and called for, in Crawford’s words, an “attentional revolution.” Leary urged people to take control of the media they consumed as a crucial act of self-determination; pay attention to where you place your attention, he declared. The social critic Herbert Marcuse believed Leary was fighting the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom, which Marcuse defined as the ability “to live without anxiety.” These were radical prophets whose words have an uncanny resonance today. Distraction has become a commercial and political strategy, and it amounts to a form of emotional violence that cripples people, leaving them unable to gather their thoughts and overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy. It’s a powerful form of oppression dressed up in the language of individual choice.

The stakes could hardly be higher, as William James knew a century ago: “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.” And what are we humans without these three?