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Slavery of Fear

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By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

Flee, fight or freeze

In the natural world, there are two kinds of responses to imminent threats: either flee or fight. Most of the time, in order to maximize chances of survival, the decision has to be made by individuals or groups in less than a split second. On one hand, the option to flee is motivated by this immediate assessment. It has, of course, an important fear factor. On the other hand, the option to fight seems brave on the surface, but intense momentary fear perhaps had to be overcome by a massive adrenaline rush. Fear is a primal and powerful emotion that is essential for survival, but it can also be used as a tool to control people through mental, emotional and even physical paralysis.

There is a third behavioral option when fear completely paralyzes the individual or a group: it is the freeze option, similar to the imaginary sense of the impossibility to act or react for someone going through a deep clinical depression. As a collective or a nation, this freeze or depressed state when facing danger is also possible. Eighty years ago, with the exception of General Charles de Gaulle and a few men who decided to flee to carry on the fight, France capitulated to the German enemy. France froze and became trapped in the ignominy of a collective depression that was the collaboration by the Vichy government.

In human society, during the barbaric lunacy that has been called the art of war, many substances have been used in history to make soldiers less fearful before combat. Drinking alcohol is an obvious one in Europe; chewing coca leaves for South American native tribes; smoking or eating hashish in the Middle-East and Asia — this concentrated form of cannabis is the etymological origin of the word assassin; more recently, during World War II’s spectacular German Blietzkrieg 1940 attack on France, German troops were given the powerful methamphetamine Pervitin. Naturally, the notion of the fearless master-race Nazi soldiers was nothing but a mythology! The intrepid soldiers of the Reich and their beloved Furher, Adolf Hitler, had the fearlessness of crystal-meth addicts. Pervitin kept Nazi troops awake and fighting for days and nights, and increased their aggressive behavior.

Of course, one cannot reduce the apparent fearless madness of the entire German nation during World War II to the massive consumption of Pervitin. What was probably the most sophisticated propaganda machine of the time had been put together by the Nazis; it had been brainwashing the minds of Germans, young and old, for almost a decade. Hitler and co. spent about 10 years molding a sophisticated and cultured society into their ideological monstrosity with the mythology of the purity of blood, master race, and crucially the invention of Jews as evil, depraved and subhuman personified. If this was possible in an advanced society like Germany circa 1930, one must consider that such a gruesome turn of events is possible anywhere at any time, as madness can be a contagious disease.

Fear of other cultures is a crucial component of racial hatred. Once a group of people like the Jews in Nazi Germany or the Africans during the slave trade to the Americas have been thoroughly dehumanized, it becomes easy, almost trivial, to torture and kill them. All propagandists are psychologists. Therefore they understand that their manipulation of fear gives birth to powerful dark impulses. A fear of abandonment as a child can later bring about morbid jealousy and various sociopathic behaviors. A fear of destitution drives the compulsion to greed. Collectively, fear can be a giant web of invisible chains that enslave a society in a psychological straight jacket. In this regard, September 11, 2001 and its aftermath was a turning point, and to some extent the Western world has been conditioned to live in fear ever since.

The war of terror

Putting aside the inside-job narrative, what matters is how crises are used. The net benefit of 9/11 for some was to create a constant sense of uncertainty for the population, and cynically a jackpot for the military-industrial complex. It was the notion that the enemy could be lurking anywhere. The war on terror was, and still is, a conceptual war: an absurd Orwellian war without end because it is supposed to fight diffuse groups of people called terrorists whose only common ground is the use of fear as a weapon. Because fear breeds more fear, the 20-year conceptual war made people, almost worldwide, believe security was more important than personal liberty. The war on terror made people slaves of fear, and they were told it was for their own good.

Do not blame only Donald Trump for the current authoritarian police state in the US. The Department of Homeland Security was a fascist invention of George W. Bush, using 9/11 as a pretext, and it was maintained by Barack Obama, every time with the complicity of Congress. On one hand, the war on terror wrecked several countries: killed or displaced millions at a cost of several trillion dollars. Everyone knew it was not winnable. On the other hand, what worked for the US and its Western allies was the almost 20-year old war of terror that slowly victimized their own populations with the jackboot of a police-military apparatus constantly on their throats. When fear overcomes an entire society it can be beaten to submission. Where fear rules, servitude becomes acceptable.

Strategy of fear and the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has given an entirely new dimension to the slavery of fear initiated on 9/11. There have been almost two decades, which is one generation, of a war of terror on the collective psyche. There could not have been a better introduction to the global fear of a pandemic. A diffuse Muslim fundamentalist enemy who could be anywhere has morphed to an invisible virus that is everywhere. The quantum leap was easily made, because it is intrinsically the same mechanism. It went a lot further than 9/11, because governments managed to convince their populations to submit themselves to various level of lockdown. Imagine this! Almost all complied worldwide, with little resistance and absolutely no organized rebellion.

Just like the post 9/11 world infringed on human rights and privacy with various invasive policies, the post COVID-19 world has adopted its own arbitrary rules. They have in common that they fuel a fear of everyone and everything and engender agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, Stockholm syndrome, and depression. The panoply of mandatory social distancing measures and mask wearing decrees have made people hostile, fearful, and paranoid. Authorities worldwide have been on a joy killing mission. Populations have been successfully infantilized and traumatized by forbidding the most essential human behaviors: the joy to see a smile or the surprise of a flaring nostril; the smell of a ripe fruit at a market; the fortitude of what seems to be a time gone when you could dance with a stranger and perhaps steal a kiss.

More than two hundred years ago, Haitian slaves managed to free themselves, and in the process they defeated the world’s three largest empires: respectively, the French, British, and Spanish. Have we all become such pathetic shadows of our former selves? Are we so weak and cowardly today that we cannot free ourselves from the billionaire class and the fear it is imposing on us?

The Fatal Attraction of Techo-Fascism

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Art work source: audioxide.com

By Mark Petrakis

Source: Off-Guardian

Those who are serious in ridiculous matters will be ridiculous in serious matters.”
Cato the Elder

The enduring beauty of fascism is that it requires so little from us… so little independent thought; just our basic belief and adherence to a limited set of popularly-shared directives and narratives that once fully accepted, relieve us of the need to address stubborn questions or to fret over subtle differences of opinion and feeling.

Propaganda reassures us that we are complete, that we know all there is to know, that we are rational, pragmatic and pure, that the science has been settled and that we are a part of something special.

Such a surrender to reductionist narratives cuts across all classes and income brackets. Neither the most educated nor the least uneducated retain any special advantage in the face of powerful consensus-shaping propaganda.

PROPAGANDA is, of course, the life-blood of fascist control. Maintaining the economic, governmental and scientific frameworks of a technocratic-fascist “operating system” is unthinkable without propaganda and disinformation. When truth is seen as a liability to power, it must always be disallowed, and all instances of it effectively penalized.

Radio and television and their constant enabler, popular “science” – operate today as their own religions, reliant for their success upon the devotion of the masses. As McLuhan told us, the experience of electronic media is always more powerful than the specific messaging it contains.

The currency that we use to pay for the electronic spectacle is our attention, and in such hyper-mediated times as these, the charges mount up exponentially, until we find ourselves saddled with soul-crushing denial and disconnection.

Three defining historical moments (among many) have defined the confluence of fascism, propaganda and technology.

  1. The fundamental principles of propaganda were first defined 100 years ago by Edward Bernays, often referred to as the father of public relations.
  2. Joseph Goebbels served as Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. The stunning successful lessons of his Nazi propaganda programs were not lost on the world’s political and economic leaders in the post-war era, and in the time since then.
  3. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was founded in 1947, for the expressed purpose of conducting secret intelligence operations that could serve political aims at the same time they generated huge and untraceable profits. The extent of the CIA’s illegal enterprises necessitated the creation and maintenance of a permanent ministry of disinformation, managed by our own taxpayer-funded “Shadow Government” and “Deep State.”

In retrospect then, it is clear that these propaganda campaigns have proven SO successful, that even today, few of us ever realize how ongoing, vast and wide-spread they are.

Propaganda’s efficacy is so indisputable, that it is commonly the case that those who are the most certain that they are NOT among the propagandized, are in fact its most overt victims.

Corporate media focuses on those stories they are paid to propagate, i.e., those which support the financial and ideological
agendas of their owners, who themselves are all, without exception, central parts of the larger global ruling oligarchy.

A key part of the propagandist’s handbook is to simply leave unexplored stories that they are NOT given approval to manage and control; stories which, we might assume, do not generate sufficient advantage for the owners. Such calculated sins of omission are essential to keeping the mass of believers unperturbed by the vagaries of complexity in the delivery of their daily dogmas.

If an individual were to insist upon learning more about any of these less-discussed stories, they would soon arrive at the realization that while an abundance of relevant facts can easily be found, and often hidden in plain sight, the truth is that most people simply do not WANT to know, think or talk about any such truths that differ from those accepted by their peers, for whom cognitive dissonance causes such literal pain and disorientation, as to keep them docile and compliant to the dictates of the media.

As McLuhan said:

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”

Perhaps, the grandest illusion of all, and which must be maintained at all costs, is that both the world and the stories we tell of it, must be made to appear as though they are generated randomly. It must always appear that the media’s coverage and the comments of experts are entirely free from any preconceived manipulation.

In the terminology of the media, news must always be “Breaking!” – even though in reality, we know the news more closely resembles a cooking show, where ingredients are chopped and sliced before-hand, after which they are mixed and served up live on camera in ways that keep the public hooked on happy hash-slinging and enticingly-scripted recipes.

Technocratic-Fascism, the advanced fusion of the multinational technology-dominated corporatocracy with the authoritarian global and surveillance state, allows its initiates to believe they are a part of something bigger than themselves. Witness the magical left’s lockstep belief in the pure villainy of Donald Trump, or the magical right’s equally lockstep belief in Trump as a self-sacrificing national hero.

Clearly both parties to the constant heist of human freedom need each other to better manage their greed for consumer profit and civilian control. Such mental assaults secondarily require that all truthful motives remain hidden and obfuscated in a fog of weaponized storytelling.

This accounts of course for the abiding value of bullshit, does it not? Bullshit effectively misleads without upsetting the natural order of things, without irreversibly tearing apart the fabric of credibility. Nothing can stand in the way of the constant flow of messaging, profit and growth, which are after all, the primary justifications for all this deceptive disorder.

This is another aspect of what makes technocratic-fascism so irresistible; in realizing how effective it is at knowing us better than we know ourselves. The assumption is that if we were to know ourselves better than the stories we are told, we would not be seduced by such obvious lies. Since we don’t, our “betters” are left with no choice but to keep up the constant barrage of lies, at least until our thinking eventually locks up and we capitulate and collapse, like a stack of wooden blocks.

If for example, we did not always obey or give our attention to propaganda, we would soon grow alarmed by the many contradictions that we are told exist, say between the Covid monster and the daily vaporous disease statistics, or between maskers and non-maskers, between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, between crushing economic destruction and the mewling need for safety, between the lunatic left and the lunatic right, between black and whites, between males and females… between one piece of orthogonal bullshit and another equally opposing piece of bullshit.

ALL of these dichotomies, of course, are at some fundamental level FALSE… every last one of them, each constructed by skilled media professionals and put in place to overwhelm our critical thinking and that of millions of others from seeing what’s really going on in the limitless background.

In this remarkably cost-efficient way, human energy and intelligence are siphoned off, and directed towards the task of turning us into helplessly confused and easily-controllable “lab rats,” forcibly cut off from each other, lest we experience ourselves as intelligent and sovereign beings. If something like that were to happen, the driving agendas of big business and global governance to keep us marching in lockstep towards a more divided and disempowered fate, would soon disintegrate.

It is in such a state of debilitating surrender that we are divided one subset “targeted” demographic against another; all herded into a wicked mental trap with one side thinking one thing, while the other side thinks something else – such that half of us hate the other and the other half hate the other right back.

At this point, and after so many years of unqualified victories for the industries supported by the propaganda industry, the pathetic truth is that propaganda doesn’t even NEED to be that entertaining anymore. Knowing they have the situation in tow, the purveyors of propaganda can save a ton of money by just being sensational, confrontational and redundant in their narratives.

Recall this quote from the singular Frank Zappa:

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

Once we have learned to carry on absent the need for verifiable truth, or without the need to discern authentic and honest voices from deceitful and manipulative ones, we gradually lose our interest in so-called “truth,” preferring instead to keep splashing about in unsubstantiated speculation, pompous judgments and opinionated fluff.

Let’s be honest…the only people who might actually CARE what any of us think about the blaring big topics of the day (masks or vaccines or climate change or Black Lives Matter, etc.) are other equally thin-skinned victims of propaganda, who much like the majority of us, still believe that the government cares about them and that the mainstream media is telling them the truth.

That is why a growing number of people have given up on the media’s crudely fictional depiction of reality, and are instead trying to figure out how to thrive and to reconnect energetically with others – and with truths that can only exist OUTSIDE the reach of the propaganda ‘spectacle.”

The media, of course, with their sophisticated surveillance tracking tools knows full well when there is an uptick in negative reactions to their toxic narratives, but since it is also aware that it is after all pushing nothing but sugar water bullshit, it is left with little choice but to double-down and turn the levels up even higher… thus ramming even more bullshit at us.

Whacky Joe Biden, Greedy Green Greta, Covid, Aunt Jemima Race Wars and endless offenses… all come at us so fast and so hard as to leave us bent and broke under the weight of it all, as we stumble around like headless chickens desperately trying to win the approval of our friends by looking like we are at least doing the only “acceptable” thing.

Arriving at his frenzied point of screwball hyper-polarization, is the essential endgame of Propaganda… locking us into its agenda, at the same time it demands that we think we are making these choices of our own FREE WILL!

To get us to that point though, they must keep us constantly preoccupied; agitated, offended, attacking each other and defending ourselves against all threats, both real and imagined. The more they can get us ensnared in mind-numbing opinions and outrages, the less energy and attention will be left to notice the deeper more manipulative agendas of techno-fascism.

Mid 20th Century fascism was woefully limited in its capacities and in what it could extract from its victims… and yet still it worked! The new technocratic-fascism is here to mine the population for all the bio-capital commodification it can. Those who can invent the most efficient and ingenious means of converting human confusion, poverty, crime and illness into impact markets will quickly take their place among the prior generations’ titans of technology.

Once you step back far enough though to experience the sheer SCALE of this ongoing and unlimited propaganda WAR on us, it grows a bit easier to see why so few are able to escape the media’s influence. Oh, for a while perhaps, you can rise above it… but eventually, you will get pulled back down into the muck. Even if you kill your TV, unplug yourself from your media feeds, and turn off the Wi-Fi, each of us, at some point, will relapse and fall off the wagon.

This is because propaganda is not just about what’s in the news or in the media. It’s even more importantly about the broadly consensual layers of social hallucination that are created and shared across all of society, which make it difficult for any of us to function socially, absent those commonly shared reference points and signals that we have convinced ourselves are required in order to allay our anxiety, confusion and isolation… all of which are primary raisons d’etres for propaganda in the first place.

I wish there was one simple way to break propaganda’s voodoo spell. There isn’t. I’m not even sure how to do that for myself, or how I can avoid falling prey to it again, just as I and most of us have done for the great majority of our lives.

What seems obvious to me now is that propaganda in the service of a transhumanist-centered technology has become so pervasive and insidiously forceful, that in many ways, our thinking has ceased to be entirely our own, and that the portion of our soul that remains recognizable as uniquely us, is shrinking fast.

The effect of all this leaves our spirits infected, and easily convertible into compliant puppets under the top-down control of truly diabolically puppet masters, who in order to keep us subservient to their untruths, and to doing whatever we are told, have become masterful at pretending to be something they are not.

This is perfectly exemplified in the character of Bill Gates, who working with his Bain and Co. handlers and account managers, (who previously managed the Iraq War for Dick Cheney) have constructed these elaborate biopharma/ biocapital/ vaccine public health/fear narratives and investment pyramids that are then fed to the media and Wall Street, who reheat and serve them to the public, generating criminal profits while making such that Mr. Gates is always portrayed as an altruistic philanthropist and protector of the public… when any fool can see he is nothing of the sort.

NOT seeing just how obvious and laughable propaganda campaigns have become in this one-size fits all era, leaves us painfully vulnerable and ready to be further subsumed by more of the same.

The complexity of today’s master plans for disinformation are unparalleled compared to the past. Looking back to the 1950’s and 60’s, when all the above long-term plans for centralized and technocratic control were slowly being tested, being part of America’s growing middle-class was actually a pretty sweet deal. It is in a return to more bucolic and “normal” times as these that we pin our nostalgic hopes, by the media but especially by politicians.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in, can hope to escape.”
William S. Burroughs

Looking at our world, we can see that the reach and authority of the transnational global capitalists who run the world’s nation-sized casinos has been cemented. All systems are now in place, up and running LIVE on that criminal syndicate’s vast web of networks. Each one of us has by now been targeted by them for some form of surveillance and financialization – just as “nature” has, just as “disease” has, just as “social justice” has, just as everything will eventually.

The “A.I. control grids” are all active and expanding. The technocratic agendas are now fully ready for prime-time. We have been gradually “shepherded” by propaganda and psychological torture techniques, just as we have also been physically compromised by toxins in the geo-engineered air and water, by disruptive electromagnetic frequency radiation, by weaponized technologies that include the release of nano-particulates inside our bodies (either by way of inhalation or injection) which are then governed by oxygen-absorbing 5G which at the higher millimeter wave frequency, will bring remote alteration of our very DNA under the “persistent” control of A.I., which will guide the process of transmuting us into commodities, into plunderable assets, into digitally-regulated and genetically modified “livestock.”

Sadly, this is where decades of constant acquiescence to propaganda and institutional hypnosis has brought us…bent over, staring at our shoes and bracing for the “BIG ONE.”

I remember in my own youth, being convinced that the evil genius of Hitler and Nazism had somehow transformed the mass of decent German people into BEASTS, possessed by demons, as if in a dark fairy tale… into something less than human.

We know that once we begin to regard others as LESS than us…as something OTHER than us, it is only a short step to unleashing our hate upon them, even to the point of becoming violent and criminal.

Needless to say, these very same psychological imperatives are everywhere apparent today; in how we are instructed by propaganda to regard the Chinese, Russians, Muslims, white supremacist Trumpers, deluded depraved liberals, defective racists, misogynist sexists and quivering face-ists (with their acute disdain for anyone who questions the dogma of e-mask-ulation.)

Same as it ever was, you might say, but as we approach the much-touted singularity with its accompanying convergence of man and machine, how will the media respond in the face of that Huxleyan “solution?” In that light, how might propaganda shift its focus?

I expect it will change-up the pitch and tell us that THIS time, things will be different. This time won’t be like last time. No, this time, things will have changed, so that we will no longer be “brainwashed” by the media as we were before. No, when the coming big change happens to us, it will not be like that. We will rather be transformed into advanced independent humans augmented by perfectly blended combinations of technology, science and engineering.

Our DNA will be carefully crafted by brilliant doctors and scientists to enhance only the “preferred” qualities in their human subjects, and under their wise direction, we will gladly do as we are told. For so great a future, we will willingly offer our support and so grow accustomed to our new life, lest we become like those poor unfortunate souls, so lost in their unreason, that they cannot fully appreciate the wisdom that derives from enthusiastically embracing PROGRESS.

In our leaders inspired and time-tested plans, we will of course have every convenience at our fingertips, such that doors will magically open when we approach. We will be able to download all manner of rich media and data with the blink of an eye. We will be as supermen.

Our definitions of what is valuable and what is not, will fluidly shift to suit changing circumstances. We will see ourselves as the very picture of modernity, and the envy of the world…just as we have always been. We will be as American as our multi-racial forefathers, even though they lived in unenlightened times…long before today’s great social justice transformation allowed us, their proud descendants, to wake each day into this glistening new world.

In such a world, when we ask ourselves what we might be grateful for, we will no longer need to struggle for an answer. We will know exactly what is good, true and beautiful and we will commit ourselves to those lofty ideals each and every day.

Therein too, and most mercilessly, resides the fatal beauty of technocratic-fascism.

Dystopia Isn’t Sci-Fi—for Me, It’s the American Reality

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Cadwell Turnbull is a contributing author of The Dystopia Triptych. Photograph: Broad Reach Publishing

By Cadwell Turnbull

Source: Wired

Imagine a city where a group of people have managed against all odds to carve out prosperity for themselves, at least for a little while. These people used to be owned by other people. Now, they are permitted freedom, but only so much, subject to the whims of the once-masters.

Prosperity is a dangerous thing for the oppressed. It is a dry hot day in a forest bound to catch fire. And so, eventually, there is spark. A teenage boy assaults a teenage girl of the once-master class in an elevator, or so the story is told. Truth doesn’t matter here. A story is enough. The once-masters want justice, which means all the once-slaves must be punished. Men, women, and children are dragged from their homes and shot, their stores and houses bombed or burned. The exact number of dead will remain uncertain, the story buried for so long that people will watch it in a television show almost a century later and mistake the dramatization of the event for pure fiction.

Imagine another city where the once-slaves are told they are getting treatment for a devastating illness, when they are in fact receiving a placebo. Imagine four decades of this lie, the originally infected passing on this disease to their spouses, their children, so that the once-masters can study the long-term effects of the disease on people they don’t consider fully human.

Imagine these cities are part of a great nation. The once-slaves are tired of their second-class citizenship so they begin a movement for justice and equity. This movement is met with a violent backlash. The once-slaves are attacked by dogs, blasted by hoses. Their churches are burned, their institutions subject to random acts of retaliation by the once-masters. Their activists are monitored. Their leaders are jailed or assassinated. There are victories, but even after the successes, once-slaves are shot down in the street for minor offenses or looking “suspicious.” Their neighborhoods are over-policed. Their children are denied quality education. Many of them are sent to prison, where they work for pennies or for nothing. But it isn’t called slavery. It is treated as coincidence that this forced labor disproportionately affects the oppressed class, the once-slaves.

These are the makings of dystopian fictions, and yet many in America don’t need to imagine them. It is their reality. However, most Americans would not call America a dystopia.

If the edges are filed off, the names of places and events changed, a few injustices amplified, Americans can pretend the sorts of things that happen in dystopias don’t happen in their backyards. They can call it fiction, create enough distance to make themselves comfortable with their country’s own sins. But this doesn’t change the fact that the American experience is dystopian for many marginalized people. And like in any dystopia, real or imagined, it is up to all Americans to recognize this storyline, imagine a better society outside of the current reality, and then work toward it. Otherwise, America consents to a normal that is grotesque.

I read my first dystopia in high school. As a teenager, 1984 terrified the hell out of me. I didn’t read it as a warning, but as a mirror to my own experience. I identified with the protagonist Winston Smith’s feeling that something was deeply wrong with his society and the overwhelming sense of helplessness that followed. In college, I read my first utopia. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin, in every sense, was an antidote to that despair I felt when reading 1984.

And then, many years later, I read “The Day Before the Revolution,” the prequel short story to The Dispossessed, and found in it the practical application of the novel’s revolutionary ideas. The story is beautifully quiet. It follows Odo, the founder of the radical movement at the heart of The Dispossessed, as she goes through her day and remembers important moments in her political and personal journey. Le Guin prefaced “The Day Before the Revolution” with a brief definition of the Odonian belief system: “Odonianism is anarchism … its principal and moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.”

To be clear, the Odonians are not perfect. They are resistant to change and have allowed other forms of institutional privilege to develop and calcify in their society. But, because they believe in their utopia and have lived their lives in accordance with that belief, they’ve managed to build a reasonably just and equitable society

And this is where, in life just as in science fiction, a distinction must be made. A just and equitable society is not the same as a perfect one. I’d argue that everyone would benefit if we defined utopia as a move toward justice and equity, and not just the state of perfection. But in America, especially in discussions about social justice, “just” and “perfect” are treated as synonymous objectives. And because perfect is never attainable, justice, too, becomes out of reach. Under this framing, injustice becomes normal, oppression is realistic, and any move towards justice and equity must come from struggle. A disturbing unspoken belief is born from this framing, that marginalized people will never receive full humanity because a just society is not possible. By failing to recognize the dystopia, and dismissing the possibility of a utopia, America has resigned itself to its current, dark narrative.

As a result, in America, universal social welfare is too costly and politically unfeasible, while trillion-dollar corporate bailouts and endless wars go unquestioned. Police and prison reform are aimed towards harm reduction for marginalized communities, instead of daring to imagine a society where these institutions are mostly unnecessary. In American discourse, a society can’t take care of all its citizens or remedy the causes of crime.

In a society where injustice is normalized, justice becomes a goal that can only be achieved through sacrifice—tragedy becomes currency, a thing to be used, not prevented. It takes decades of confirmed police brutality before America considers even the most minor reforms. This is not by accident. Black and brown bodies have been the fuel used to drive this society towards slightly lesser states of injustice since the very beginning. The oppressed have always paid the price for progress.

And yet, Americans have never shown this kind of defeatism when it comes to technological advancements. When this nation decided to go to the moon, it was framed in terms of “How do we get there?” not “Is this possible?” And no one ever said, “This rocket may only get half-way to the moon, but first many must die.”

Americans once oblivious to the dystopia are waking up. That’s good. But the price of waking up should be considered, and the lives sacrificed to incrementalism must be mourned. It is easy for a pragmatist to ask for incremental change when the current reality favors them. But pragmatism hits differently when it is forced at gunpoint. Every loss on the way to justice is a collective sin, because it was decided that the road must be long and the oppressed must struggle for every inch.

Do not normalize the losses happening right now because of the gains. Assume where America has always been is a tragedy. What is done in hell isn’t romantic; sacrificing bodies to dystopia isn’t beautiful. As I write this, people protesting brutality are dying at the hands of law enforcement. No one should pay for progress with their life. And it isn’t naive to believe every member of society should have a healthy, empowering, and fulfilling time on earth. The ones that have suffered deserve nothing less than faith in that possibility. This moment may provide a way out of dystopia, but there has to be a collective reckoning with the dystopian aspects of American society as well as the cruel price of progress repeatedly placed on the backs of the oppressed. Through solidarity there is a way out of these bitter realities, but the way there must be just if the destination is to be just.

In science fiction there is a notion that the universe is filled with possible worlds just waiting for humanity to come settle. It has some of its more troubling roots in manifest destiny, but also in hope, and the idea that better worlds are possible. But what if this corner of Earth could be that imagined place? Imagine a better world right here, instead of elsewhere. The price is in going all the way, doing all the work, believing all the work can be done. That’s the only way to get to the moon. Human beings have to believe it exists.

The Political Value of Psychedelics

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By Dr. James Cooke

Source: Reality Sandwich

Psychedelics and Politics

Psychedelics are political.  Their use in the 1960s had a political impact that is still being felt today, and their widespread banning was driven by political motives.  But how can a class of chemicals consistently impact our opinions of how we organize and relate to each other?  Psychedelics can affect the brains of individuals in ways that produce consistent insights.  These insights have direct relevance for our individual and collective wellbeing, and can point the way towards political change that would benefit us all.

The 1960s

The LSD-fuelled hippie movement was instrumental in the origins of the modern ecological awareness in politics that is so widespread today.  It helped birth modern anti-war peace movements and the practice of living in sustainable, eco-friendly communes.  What is it about the time we live in and the effects of psychedelic substances that result in their producing this kind of change in political thinking?  To understand this, we have to not only consider how psychedelics act in the brain, but we also have to understand both the unusual situation humans have found themselves in since the advent of civilization and the psychology that gave rise to it.

The Human Animal

We live in an unusual time.  For approximately 97% of human existence our species lived close to nature in small social groups.  Like other animals, evolution programmed us with a survival instinct and fear of death.  This fear incentivized us to control the world around us in order to make us feel safe.  Unlike other animals, however, we succeeded in dominating nature.  Thanks to our capacity for language and our dexterous hands that were freed up by our walking upright, it became possible for us to create culture and technology.  The preservation of knowledge from generation to generation that comes with language allowed for greater and greater control of the world around us.  Eventually we found ourselves in complex civilizations, a very long way from home.

The Price of Progress

This way of being that led to the relentless growth of civilizations is characterized by a particular kind of psychology, one that is governed by fear.  Sacrificing one’s happiness today in order to prepare for tomorrow can often make sense, but being consistently emotionally hijacked by fear without realising it can lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering.  This is true for individuals suffering with trauma and it’s true for our species as a whole.  In such a situation, there is the loss of the ability to find peace and wellbeing in the present.  We desperately look towards the future in the hope that if we just keep pushing forwards we will find a way out of our situation, not realizing that this way of being in itself is the problem.  The result is that, while we may no longer be routinely at risk of being eaten by predators, we are suffering from an epidemic of disorders of alienation, such as addiction, anxiety and depression.

The Fear Trap

Why do we continue to do this?  One reason is that we are naturally fearful creatures.  It makes sense that we would have evolved to sacrifice our wellbeing today in order to ensure our survival tomorrow.  Evolution is about staying alive, it’s not about being happy.  Another reason is that evolution has endowed us with incredible coping mechanisms.  We can be living in agony but, if we see now no other option, our capacity for language allows us to tell ourselves a story about why our situation is actually fine.  It is by taking these stories to be more real than our felt conscious experiences that we manage to repress our anguish.

Civilization and Control

Beyond the individual, there are other dynamics that keep us trapped in the game of “progress” at the expense of our wellbeing.  Once agriculture had been invented it became possible to generate surplus food, paving the way for a minority of individuals to hoard resources.  This made it possible for wealthy individuals to coerce the majority into doing their bidding as they had something that they needed for their very survival.  The ability of humans to live in stories has also been crucial in perpetuating this control.  Our ability to rationalize and normalize our experiences made it possible for each generation to grow up believing that this situation was correct or right in some way, instead of seeing how they are being exploited.

Deep Ecology

It wasn’t always this way.  Prior to the hierarchical arrangements of control that define civilization, humans throughout the world routinely explored their being part of the natural world through religious and spiritual practices.  Psychedelic plant medicines were widely used in order to explore our interconnectedness with the natural world.  The Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss coined the term “deep ecology” to refer to the non-hierarchical principles of interdependence and interconnectedness that are deeper than a superficial concern for the environment.  Ecology in this sense can apply equally to the natural world, to social arrangements or even to the contents of your own mind.

Ecology vs. Hierarchy

While the systems of control that define “civilized” states typically separate and atomize people so they can be used to generate wealth for others, human communities centred around ecological and spiritual principles are based on collaboration and the valuing of individual and collective wellbeing.  Psychedelics promote these ecological and spiritual perspectives, making them a threat to dominating systems of control.

Psychedelics and the Wisdom of Ecology

How do psychedelics promote ecological thinking?  In the brain of the individual, psychedelics can temporarily topple the hierarchical, control-based modes of thought that usually dominate our minds.  As is well attested to in Buddhist philosophy, it is these modes of thought that are responsible for the majority of our suffering.  With these structures of control dissolved, what’s revealed is a sense of interconnection and a more harmonious way of being.  This experience can produce insight into the wisdom of ecological principles such as openness, collaboration and naturalness as opposed to the controlling, atomizing and artificial arrangements that currently dominate society.  As our well-being as social primates depends on the community as a whole, it only follows that their relevance of these insights would extend beyond the individual to those who have an impact on us in society.

Hippies, Peace, Communes and the Environment

LSD use in the 60s pushed the brains of a generation in the direction of ecological thinking.  Many young people who might otherwise have unquestioningly fought in the Vietnam war suddenly saw their situation afresh, the propaganda of their home country replaced with a vision of a world of collective collaboration rather than one of conflict and domination.  The suicidal logic of ecological destruction was also laid bare, the narrative of progress through the domination of nature seemingly nothing more than an excuse for the powerful to line their pockets, a project that would soon take the earth and all of us with it.  A critical mass of young people came to similar conclusions and the hippie movement was born.

Science and Psychedelic Personality Change

Modern science is now mapping how psychedelics change people’s political opinions.  A study published in 2017 found that the number of times people use a psychedelic and the strength of their most powerful ego-dissolving experience correlate with increased nature relatedness, openness and reduced authoritarian thinking [1].  These aspects of the personality all reflect this movement towards greater ecological thinking.

The Psychology of Control

Without the benefit of psychedelics to help us travel in the direction of ecological thinking and greater wellbeing, many get trapped in coping mechanisms of control.  The traumatic nature of existence pushes some to move in the opposite direction, disowning their capacity for empathy and connection and reaffirming their sense of separation.  This process can result in disorders of the ego such as narcissism, sociopathy and psychopathy, all characterized by a lack of empathy and a delusionally high opinion of oneself.  We currently live in a system crafted to suit such personality types.  The coping mechanisms emerge in response to severe trauma early in life, when the child is learning how to connect with the world around them.  Investment in the ego and lack of concern for others is a pathology that can help such people cope with this powerful trauma.  It also represents the psychological dynamic that keeps society sick and blocks collective healing through the widespread adoption of the ecological perspective.

The Key Roadblock to Change

Society only consists of individuals interacting.  As a result, our political crises largely originate in the internal crises of individuals.  The collective trauma carried by the human race is passed on generation after generation.  A critical amount of narcissistic behaviour results in a society based around the separation and atomization of individuals, as well as around domination and control, of the environment and each other.  The extent to which our fellow humans are unconsciously trapped in narcissistic coping mechanisms is the extent to which our species will be trapped in its current mode of domination, control and suffering.

Psychedelic Medicine and the Healing of Collective Trauma

Psychedelic medicine holds the promise of moving culture in the direction of trauma healing and deep ecological thinking that is necessary to save our species and the planet from ecological destruction.  The main challenge will be how we engage with those at the other end of the spectrum, the narcissists and psychopaths so affected by trauma that they will defend their protective systems of domination at all costs. Psychedelic medicine may be able to reach some but perhaps the single greatest impact of psychedelics in years to come will be moving the public conversation toward a greater awareness of how the dynamics of trauma have deranged our world.  The creation of a global ecological culture that centers around trauma healing, emotional wellbeing and an awareness of the psychology of narcissism is the only hope our species and planet has for survival, and psychedelics are perhaps the most powerful tool we have in making this culture a reality.

 

References:

Nour MM, Evans L, Carhart-Harris RL. Psychedelics, Personality and Political Perspectives. J Psychoactive Drugs. 2017;49(3):182-191. doi:10.1080/02791072.2017.1312643

Abnormalize The Status Quo

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

If we’d been living in a healthy society and then suddenly had this society’s sick, insane status quo thrust upon us by powerful people, we’d have all been out in the streets making life very hard for those powerful people in an instant.

We are in the same situation now. We are having a wildly insane status quo thrust upon us by the powerful and for the benefit of the powerful. Only difference is we’re not all out in the streets, and instead of thrusting this horrible situation upon us suddenly, they’ve been doing it this entire time.

Which is precisely why we’re not out in the streets. We were born into this mess, so we assume it’s normal and that things are supposed to be this way. But it isn’t, and they aren’t.

What is normal is health. Health is the normal default condition. If you wake up with a fever and stabbing pain in your abdomen you don’t say “Ah well I guess that’s normal now, you can’t expect to just not have a fever and stabbing abdominal pain,” you recognize that there’s an urgent problem and you take action to fix it.

Even if you’d been sick your entire life, you would understand that your situation is not normal. You would understand that the basic default condition is health, but some dysfunction in your specific system has deprived you of that normal state of being.

In order for us to begin pushing back on the dysfunction of our current system, we need to begin looking at it in the same way. We need to clearly come to see how spectacularly divergent it is from the basic default condition of health. How sick it is. How abnormal it is.

We need to see clearly that health is normal and sickness is abnormal, whether you’re talking about an individual or a society.

It’s not normal for a civilization to be dominated by plutocrats and secretive government agencies and to only get offered the choice between two authoritarian corporate warmongers in a pretend election to a position of leadership that is almost entirely fake.

It’s not normal for there to be enough wealth to feed and care for everyone and yet instead have people with unfathomable amounts of money while others die of lack.

It’s not normal for a globe-spanning empire to dominate our species with endless military violence and starvation sanctions for the sole purpose of maintaining and expanding the unipolar hegemony of a few sociopathic manipulators.

It’s not normal for us to be destroying our ecosystem in order to grow an economy that is ultimately an imaginary construction in our minds instead of learning to collaborate harmoniously with that ecosystem.

It’s not normal for us all to be competing against each other at the expense of the entire world instead of collaborating with each other for the good of the entire world.

We need to get crystal clear that these things are not normal, because our entire society is completely saturated with skilful manipulations telling us that they are.

I write a lot about the more egregious, incendiary lies that the mass media have notoriously promulgated like WMDs in Iraq, Russiagate, the imaginary Labour antisemitism crisis etc. But the most destructive lies the mass media tell us are not the ones that stand out the most in our collective memory. The most damaging lies they tell us are the little ones they tell us many times every single day by way of spin, omission, half-truth and distortion in order to give us the impression that this status quo is normal and inescapable.

You see it in the way they talk about politicians who stand even a tiny bit outside the warmongering oligarchic beltway consensus like they are radical extremists. You see it in the way they’ll focus on protests in Belarus or Hong Kong while ignoring them in Bolivia or France. You see it in the way they ignore Yemen when it’s the single most horrific thing happening on our planet right now. You see it in all the sitcoms and movies where debt and low wages and other symptoms of status quo dysfunction are almost never a featured concern.

You see it in innumerable other ways, day in and day out, and they add up. They add up for someone who was born into a gravely dysfunctional system and has never known anything resembling health to compare it to. They’re like someone who has always been sick, who has also never known or heard about anyone who is healthy.

You can tell me we’ve never had a healthy society since the dawn of civilization all you want. All you are telling me is that we have always been sick. Being sick all your life doesn’t mean health isn’t normal or that health shouldn’t be urgently sought; if anything it means it should be sought more urgently.

It is not human nature to be this sick, and anyone who tells you it is is lying. Anyone who tells you it’s human nature to be greedy, violent, domineering and abusive isn’t telling you about humanity’s nature, they’re telling you about their own nature. And it’s probably a bad idea to turn your back on them.

We can have health. We can have normality. But just as you won’t return to health by pretending that your fever and abdominal pains are normal, we can’t create a healthy society as long as we allow ourselves to be manipulated into the belief that our backwards, insane status quo is what normality looks like.

So abnormalize the status quo. Abnormalize it every chance you get. Abnormalize it by holding a clear idea in your mind of what a healthy society would look like, then point out all the bizarre deviations from that vision at every opportunity. Remind people that this is crazy. Assure them that it doesn’t have to be this way. That the only thing keeping it this way is the fact that the powerful keep pouring vast troves of wealth into manipulating us into thinking that we should.

Help people see what health is so that they can see what sickness is. Interrupt conversations about which flavor of sickness would be preferable this election season to point to what real health would look like. Disrupt all attempts to normalize our status quo, and use whatever reach you have to help abnormalize it.

Global Chaos Is The Needed Catalyst To Evolve Consciousness

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By Joe Martino

Source: Collective Evolution

IN BRIEF

  • The Facts:The global chaos ensuing with COVID-19 is pushing humanity to ask deep questions and understand deep truths about our world. It also is pushing us to reimagine our reality.
  • Reflect On:Are you truly inspired to go back to normal? Or could this be a good time to observe the frailty of our current systems and perhaps re-imagine a world where we can truly thrive?

Global ‘chaos’ is happening in response to an emerging consciousness within us that no longer resonates with the society we have created. The ‘chaos’ inspires us to let go of many of the current systems we have in place that were created from a way of thinking and being we simply don’t connect with any longer. More than ever, people are feeling the urge to imagine and create new systems and structures in our society that better match this emerging level of consciousness.

Of course, none of this goes without those that wish to hold on to our current ways of living, calling out a desire to go back to ‘normal.’ At the same time, many are looking upon the measures being put in place during this COVID-19 event and are asking: are we headed for a totalitarian state?

From my observation, sure, we can head there, if we choose to collectively stay asleep. But there is another path, one that is being seen by those who are awakening to a new state of being, a new state of consciousness within themselves. This state of consciousness is showing them they are connected to everything and everyone. There is an understanding that what is done unto others is done unto themselves. Oneness is a feeling at the core of this state of being.

From this emerging state of being, most of what we have created in our world no longer makes sense, and a desire to create something new that matches this new state of consciousness is creating ideas that we must have conversations about. YES, it is OK to think outside the box, YES it is OK that you don’t resonate any longer with many of the things and ways of doing things in our current society, there is nothing wrong with you in feeling these things.

Chaos, as it is often called, happens as a way to reflect what we are currently doing and feeling. If we are living in a world almost completely disconnected from our hearts, built and moved by the mind’s incessant desire for more, we will create chaos. We will especially create chaos when we continually miss all the signs that it is time for a change, and instead choose to keep our heads down and simply go about ‘normal life’ as if it’s something that truly fulfills us. This chaos is simply an alarm clock going off telling us to wake up.

Will chaos always be needed? No, but in a world where we are so distracted, unconscious and not paying attention, it is a beautiful catalyst.

Not only does it show us what experience happens when we stay in this level of being that is disconnected and that thinks more about individual survival than anything else, but it also continues to push the needle further and further to destruction, acting as a fire being lit under our asses to wake up.

You may not agree with me on these ideas, and I would love to challenge another way of seeing this. The truth is you can see this chaos in multiple ways. We can stay busy, caught up in the emotion and drama of all that is happening. We can fight and resist all that is happening, and in this way, we might see chaos as something to fear. Another way to look at it is, we can slow down, tale a breath, tune into this emerging consciousness and approach changing our world from this manner.

As I often say, what reality do you want to plug into and keep feeding? You can create change by energetically feeding and nurturing new ideas, anger isn’t necessary. It reinforces the polarity.

Not long ago we did a meditation and conversation afterwards that was designed to explore this topic further, I invite you to check it out below.

America’s Death March

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By Chris Hedges

Source: Mint Press News

The terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by elections. The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults — movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial distress. These crisis cults, already well established among followers of the Christian Right and Donald Trump, peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that promises — in exchange for all autonomy — prosperity, a return to a mythical past, order and security. The dark yearnings among the white working class for vengeance and moral renewal through violence, the unchecked greed and corruption of the corporate oligarchs and billionaires who manage our failed democracy, which has already instituted wholesale government surveillance and revoked most civil liberties, are part of the twisted pathologies that infect all civilizations sputtering towards oblivion. I witnessed the deaths of other nations during the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and later in the former Yugoslavia. I have smelled this stench before.

The removal of Trump from office will only exacerbate the lust for racist violence he incites and the intoxicating elixir of white nationalism. The ruling elites, who first built a mafia economy and then built a mafia state, will continue under Biden, as they did under Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, to wantonly pillage and loot. The militarized police will not stop their lethal rampages in poor neighborhoods. The endless wars will not end. The bloated military budget will not be reduced. The world’s largest prison population will remain a stain upon the country. The manufacturing jobs shipped overseas will not return and the social inequality will grow. The for-profit health care system will gouge the public and price millions more out of the health care system. The language of hate and bigotry will be normalized as the primary form of communication. Internal enemies, including Muslims, immigrants and dissidents, will be defamed and attacked. The hypermasculinity that compensates for feelings of impotence will intensify. It will direct its venom towards women and all who fail to conform to rigid male stereotypes, especially artists, LGBTQ people and intellectuals. Lies, conspiracy theories, trivia and fake news — what Hannah Arendt called “nihilistic relativism” — will still dominate the airwaves and social media, mocking verifiable fact and truth. The ecocide, which presages the extinction of the human species and most other life forms, will barrel unabated towards its apocalyptic conclusion.

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it,” Pascal wrote.

The worse it gets — and it will get worse as the pandemic hits us in wave after deadly wave with an estimated 300,000 Americans dead by December and possibly 400,000 by January — the more desperate the nation will become. Tens of millions of people will be thrown into destitution, evicted from their homes and abandoned. Social collapse, as Peter Drucker observed in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, brings with it a loss of faith in ruling institutions and ruling ideologies. With no apparent answers or solutions to mounting chaos and catastrophe — and Biden and the Democratic Party have already precluded the kind of New Deal programs and assault on oligarchic power that saved us during the Great Depression — demagogues and charlatans need only denounce all institutions, all politicians, and all political and social conventions while conjuring up hosts of phantom enemies. Drucker saw that Nazism succeeded not because people believed in its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities, he pointed out, had been “witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” Nobody, he noted, “would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” The poet, playwright and socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship when the Nazis took power in 1933, wrote much the same in his autobiography: “The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.” After Toller committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem “In Memory of Ernst Toller” wrote:

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

The poor, the vulnerable, those who are not white or not Christian, those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of a perverted Christian nationalism, will be offered up in a crisis to the god of death, a familiar form of human sacrifice that plagues sick societies. Once these enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised, America will recover its lost glory, except that once one enemy is obliterated another takes its place. Crisis cults require a steady escalation of conflict. This is what made the war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of conflict reaches a crescendo it loses its efficacy. It must be replaced by ever more brutal and deadly confrontations. The intoxication and addiction to greater and greater levels of violence to purge the society of evil led to genocide in Germany and the former Yugoslavia. We are not immune. It is what Ernst Jünger called a “feast of death.”

These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood, irrational and schizophrenic. They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside down. They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and celebrity culture become politics. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities and murder become heroism. Crime and fraud become justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. What these cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. At the height of the reign of terror on May 6, 1794 during the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre announced that the Committee for Public Safety now recognized the existence of God. The French revolutionaries, fanatical atheists who had desecrated churches and confiscated church property, murdered hundreds of priests and forced another 30,000 into exile, instantly reversed themselves to send to the guillotine those who disparaged religion. In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and internal contradictions, these crisis cults yearn for self-annihilation.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book “On Suicide” found that when social bonds are shattered, when a population no longer feels it has a place or meaning in a society, personal and collective acts of self-destruction proliferate. Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity. They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The breaking of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress. Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as “ruleless-ness.”

Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color, nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered some Americans — especially those from the white working and middle class — modest social and economic advancement. The disintegration of these bonds has unleashed a widespread malaise Durkheim would have recognized. The self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States — opioid addiction, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings — are products of this anomie. So is our political dysfunction. My book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” is an examination of these pathologies and the widespread anomie that defines American society.

The economic structures, even before the pandemic, were reconfigured to mock faith in a meritocracy and the belief that hard work leads to a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now, not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote, the average middle class family’s net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40 percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent. Some four million evictions are filed each year. One in four tenant households spends about half its pretax income on rent. Each night some 200,000 people sleep in their cars, on streets or under bridges. And these stark figures represent the good times Biden and the Democratic Party leaders promise to restore. Now, with real unemployment probably close to 20 percent — the official figure of 10 percent excludes those furloughed or those who have stopped looking for work — some 40 million people are at risk of being evicted by the end of the year. An estimated 27 million people are expected to lose their health insurance. Banks are stockpiling reserves of cash to cope with the expected wave of bankruptcies and defaults on mortgages, student loans, car loans, personal loans and credit card debt. The ruleless-ness and anomie that defines the lives of tens of millions of Americans was orchestrated by the two ruling parties in the service of a corporate oligarchy. If we do not address this anomie, if we do not restore the social bonds shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, the decay will accelerate.
This dark human pathology is as old as civilization itself, repeated in varying forms in the twilight of ancient Greece and Rome, the finale of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, revolutionary France, the Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslavia.

The social inequality that characterizes all states and civilizations seized by a tiny and corrupt cabal — in our case corporate — leads to an inchoate desire by huge segments of the population to destroy. The ethnic nationalists Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tudjman, Radovan Karadžić and Alija Izetbegović in the former Yugoslavia assumed power in a similar period of economic chaos and political stagnation. Yugoslavs by 1991 were suffering from widespread unemployment and had seen their real incomes reduced by half from what they had been a generation before. These nationalist demagogues sanctified their followers as righteous victims stalked by an array of elusive enemies. They spoke in the language of vengeance and violence, leading, as it always does, to actual violence. They trafficked in historical myth, deifying the past exploits of their race or ethnicity in a perverse kind of ancestor worship, a mechanism to give to those who suffered from anomie, who had lost their identity, dignity and self-worth, a new, glorious identity as part of a master race. When I walked through Montgomery, Alabama, a city where half of the population is African-American, with the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson a few years ago, he pointed out the numerous Confederate memorials, noting that most had been put up in the last decade. “This,” I told him, “is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia.”

A hyper-nationalism always infects a dying civilization. It feeds the collective self-worship. This hyper-nationalism celebrates the supposedly unique virtues of the race or the national group. It strips all who are outside the closed circle of worth and humanity. The world instantly becomes understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. These tragic moments in history see people fall into collective insanity. They suspend thought, especially self-critical thought. None of this is going away in November, in fact it will get worse.

Joe Biden, a shallow, political hack devoid of fixed beliefs or intellectual depth, is an expression of the nostalgia of a ruling class that yearns to return to the pantomime of democracy. They want to restore the decorum and civic religion that makes the presidency a form of monarchy and sacralizes the organs of state power. Donald Trump’s vulgarity and ineptitude is an embarrassment to the architects of empire. He has ripped back the veil that covered our failed democracy. But no matter how hard the elites try this veil cannot be restored. The mask is off. The façade is gone. Biden cannot bring it back.

Political, economic and social dysfunction define the American empire. Our staggering inability to contain the pandemic, which now infects over 5 million Americans, and the failure to cope with the economic fallout the pandemic has caused, has exposed the American capitalist model as bankrupt. It has freed the world, dominated by the United States for seven decades, to look at other social and political systems that serve the common good rather than corporate greed. The diminished stature of the United States, even among our European allies, brings with it the hope for new forms of government and new forms of power.

It is up to us to abolish the American kleptocracy. It is up to us to mount sustained acts of mass civil disobedience to bring down the empire. It poisons the world as it poisons us. If we mobilize to build an open society, we hold out the possibility of beating back these crisis cults as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide. This requires us to acknowledge, like those protesting in the streets of Beirut, that our kleptocracy, like Lebanon’s, is incapable of being salvaged. The American system of inverted totalitarianism, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it, must be eradicated if we are to wrest back our democracy and save ourselves from mass extinction. We need to echo the chants by the crowds in Lebanon calling for the wholesale removal of its ruling class — kulyan-yani-kulyan — everyone means everyone.

The Ultimate Divide and Conquer

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By Russ Bangs

Source: Off-Guardian

It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over people who are isolated against each other and that therefore one of the primary concerns of tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from people acting together, acting in concert; isolated people are powerless by definition.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Western civilization, led by the US government and media, has embarked upon a campaign of mass psychological terrorism designed to cover for the collapsing economy, set up a new pretext for Wall Street’s ongoing plunder expedition, radically escalate the police state, deeply traumatize people into submission to total social conformity, and radically aggravate the anti-social, anti-human atomization of the people.

The pretext for this abomination is an epidemic which objectively is comparable to the seasonal flu and is caused by the same kind of Coronavirus we’ve endured so long without totalitarian rampages and mass insanity.

The global evidence is converging on the facts: This flu is somewhat more contagious than the norm and is especially dangerous for those who are aged and already in poor health from pre-existing maladies. It is not especially dangerous for the rest of the population.

The whole concept of “lockdowns” is exactly upside down, exactly the wrong way any sane society would respond to this circumstance.

It’s the vulnerable who should be shielded while nature takes its course among the general population, who should go about life as usual. Dominionist-technocratic rigidity can’t prevent an epidemic from cycling through the population in spite of the delusions of that religion, especially since Western societies began their measures far too late anyway.

So it’s best to let herd immunity develop as fast as it naturally will, at which time the virus recedes from lack of hosts (and is likely to mutate in a milder direction along the way). This is the only way to bring a safer environment for all including the most vulnerable.

The fact that most societies have rejected the sane, scientific route in favor of doomed-to-fail attempts at a forcible violent segregation and sterilization is proof that governments aren’t concerned with the public health (as if we didn’t know that already from a thousand policies of poisoning the environment while gutting the health care system), but are very ardent to use this crisis they artificially generated in order radically to escalate their police state power toward totalitarian goals.

The whole concept of self-isolation and anti-social “distancing” is radically anti-human. We evolved over millions of years to be social creatures living in tight-knit groups. Although modern societies ideologically and socioeconomically work to massify and atomize people, nevertheless almost all of us still seek close human companionship in our lives.

(I suspect most of the internet police-state-mongers are not only fascists at heart but are confirmed misanthropic loners who couldn’t care less about human closeness.)

This terror campaign seeks to blast to pieces any remaining human closeness, which means any remaining humanity as such, the better to isolate individual atoms for subjection to total domination. Arendt wrote profoundly on this goal of totalitarian governments, though even she didn’t envision a state-driven cult of the literal physical repulsion of every atom from every other atom.

So far the people are submitting completely to a terror campaign dedicated to the total eradication of whatever community was left in the world, and especially whatever community was starting to be rebuilt.

Some dream of this terror campaign somehow bringing about a magical collective transformation. They don’t explain how that is supposed to happen when everyone’s so terrorized they’re desperate to detach physically from their own shadows, let alone physically come together with other people. But any kind of political or social action, any kind of movement-building, requires close person-to-person contact.

It seems that for most erstwhile self-alleged dissidents, the fact that social media is no substitute for face-to-face organizing and group action, a fact hitherto universally acknowledged by these dissidents, is another truth suddenly to be jettisoned replaced by its complete antithesis.

Thus the terror campaign is a virus causing those it infects to abdicate all activism and all prospect for all future activism, for as long as they remain insane with the fever of this propaganda terror.

Far more profoundly and evoking despair, the terror campaign is a virus causing those it infects to fear and loathe all human contact, all companionship, all closeness, all things which ever made us human in the first place. Prior totalitarian regimes sought this lack of contact and trust through networks of informers.

These networks are part of today’s terror campaign as well, encouraged from above and spontaneously arising from below as a result of the feeling of terror as well as the exercise of prior petty-evil intentions on the part of petty-evil individuals.

But today’s totalitarian potential is far worse than this. Now the regimes aspiring to total domination have terrorized and brainwashed the vast majority of people into an automatic physical distrust of all other people. One no longer fears that someone is an informer, but fears the very existence of another human being.

Any kind of human relations, from personal friendship and romance to friendly social gatherings and clubs to social and cultural movements become impossible under such circumstances. This threatens to be the end of the very concept of shared humanity, to be replaced by an anthill of slave atoms with no consciousness beyond fear and the most animal concern for food and shelter, which already is allowed or denied in the same way experimenters do with lab rats.

And the more people fear and loathe the literal physical existence of all other people, the more the situation becomes ripe for every epidemic of murder, from the spiking rate of domestic violence and killings to incipient lynch mobs to pogroms to Nazi-style extermination campaigns.

This is the system’s end goal. It’s the logical end where every trend of today leads. All of it is trumped up over an epidemic which objectively is a flu season somewhat rougher than average.

Why do the people want to surrender and throw away all reality and future prospect of shared humanity, happiness, freedom, well-being, over so little? Is this really a terminal totalitarian death cult, the globe as one massive Jonestown?

So far it seems this is what the majority wants. If they don’t really want this consummation of universal death in spirit, emotion and body, they’d better snap out of their terror-induced mental delirium fast, before it’s too late.