Forgiveness Is Overrated

Posted on October 19, 2018 by Reid Mukai

REUTERS/Tony Gentile

By Caitlin Johnstone

Journalist David Sirota has just published an excellent op-ed titled “America’s new aristocracy lives in an accountability-free zone”, which begins with the observation that “Enron executives were among the last politically connected criminals to face any serious consequences for institutionalized fraud.” Sirota goes on to remind readers how there was never any attempt by either mainstream political party to bring accountability to anyone responsible for monstrous offenses ranging from the disastrous invasion of Iraq to the ecocidal manipulations of fossil fuel plutocrats to the Wall Street plundering which led to the 2008 global financial crisis.

Sirota’s argument is solid: there is an aristocratic class which has successfully neutered all the institutional mechanisms which were meant to protect the powerless from the powerful. The government is bought and owned by the plutocrats and so is the media, as the continued forgiveness of unforgivable transgressions which those institutions have been bestowing upon the aristocracy clearly reflects. This means that the only thing left protecting the populace from the powerful is the populace itself.

https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1048202031159103488

A couple of years back I read a Shaun King article titled “Stop asking black victims of white violence if they forgive their victimizers”, about a bizarre trend in which the black survivors of police shootings and racially motivated terrorism were consistently finding themselves barraged with questions about forgiveness. King wrote about how “before her son, Philando, had even been buried, his body riddled with bullets from a Minnesota police officer, Valerie Castile was asked live on CNN if she forgave the man who shot him,” which is a truly demented thing to ask someone in such a situation. Why would a newscaster bring up forgiveness when a horrific injustice has just been inflicted and no measures of any kind have even been taken to rectify it?

In response to the latest wave of sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, “masses of forgiveness” were held in August as a way to help the faithful in “healing” their distrust of the institution which has upheld itself as the highest moral authority in the world for two thousand years. “I beg forgiveness for these sins and for the scandal and betrayal felt by so many others in God’s family,” said Pope Francis at a Marian shrine in Ireland in response to the degradation and abuse inflicted upon the people of that nation by trusted Church officials.

The concept of forgiveness is a recurring theme in any abusive relationship, and necessarily so, because without extensive value being placed upon that concept there wouldn’t be a relationship. You wouldn’t have a battered wife, you’d have a story about how a woman’s boyfriend hit her one time and she grabbed all her stuff and split. You wouldn’t have a brainwashed and exploited cult member, you’d have a story about how someone met a group of people and left when things got weird. You wouldn’t have a major world religion consistently embroiled in horrifying scandals, you’d have people dismissing that religion and placing their energy and attention elsewhere. You wouldn’t have a society that constantly allows itself to be manipulated into consenting to abuse and exploitation by an aristocratic class, you’d have a people’s uprising in which the vastly outnumbered elites are shrugged off and replaced with a system which benefits humanity.

https://twitter.com/AbhinavAgarwal/status/1034500454066077697

Forgiveness is overrated. There are only two types of people who consistently promulgate the importance of forgiveness: abusers and their codependents. The abuse can range from pedophilia and battery to war and ecocide, and the codependency can range from a wife saying she fell down the stairs again to a newscaster demanding to know when the mother of a son just gunned down by police will forgive his murderer, but the formula remains the same in each instance.

Anyone who goes around around telling everyone else how important it is to forgive is either an abuser or one of their brainwashed Stockholm syndrome victims. Forgiveness is something you do for yourself, for your own benefit, when you are ready and only for freeing yourself from energetic entanglements. Those who have truly learned the value of authentic forgiveness don’t run around telling other people to forgive those who have wronged them, because they understand that you don’t need anyone else’s help or permission to forgive somebody, and you don’t even need anyone to change necessarily. If you really want to forgive someone so that you can move on and stop thinking about it, you can do so as long as they’re not doing the bad thing to you anymore. They don’t have to repent or admit to their wrongdoing or whatever; you can forgive them for being the thing they are just like you can forgive a man-eating bear for being a man-eating bear. If it would really benefit your inner peace and undo some mental chatter, you can zoom out and see that a human being’s behavior is patterned like the veins in a leaf, and that patterning rarely changes. You unknowingly walked into that person’s path as innocently as if you’d accidentally walked in front of a bus. Forgiving someone can just be letting go of the idea that they will change, or that they would’ve done anything different or would do anything different given the chance.

Once you’ve seen that though, you don’t let them back in your life, and you certainly don’t let them go on running the world. Man-eating bear be man-eating bear, man. You don’t let a man-eating bear hang around long enough to eat another one of your children, and you don’t let a neocon hang around long enough to destroy another middle-eastern country. You know what they do, you’ve seen what they are, and you don’t let them do it anymore. Being lulled into a state of inertia with hypnotic entreaties about forgiveness and how we’re all kinda fucked up and we all make mistakes and we’re all the same is just another psychologically abusive manipulation performed by the abusers and their codependents. Some people in the highest echelons of power right now have facilitated the most extraordinary barbaric crimes on a scale that even the worst serial killer in his most horrifying fantasies could barely bring himself to imagine. Our greatest mistake as a species right now is forgiving them.

Forgiveness is a key foundational element in most abusive relationships. The abusee is manipulated or bullied into forgiving the abuser again and again, without ever holding a grudge. This is true of a battered spouse, and it is true of an oppressed populace.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 27, 2018

One major way that sociopaths differ from normal people is that they don’t think about things in terms of feeling bad or feeling good about doing something, they just think about the consequences. If you don’t feel guilt, you don’t worry about feeling guilty. It literally doesn’t factor into your decision-making process. “Oh, I won’t do that again because I sure do feel bad about that million people I helped kill” is not a thought that ever goes through their head. If the consequences of Iraq were a buttload of profit and a regular spot on CNN with absolutely no downside whatsoever, no uncomfortable trip to the Hague, no endless prison sentence, no stripping of wealth, status and power, then of course they want to do it again and again and again and again and again. They will do it until they are stopped.

So America’s new aristocracy must be stopped, and the only way they can be stopped is to be held to account, right here, on earth, as soon as humanly possible. Allowing them to go on for even one more day is acknowledging that there are no consequences for evil, and when there are no consequences for evil, evil will reign.

And that’s where we are right now. Evil reigns, but it’s a simple matter of restoring justice to the earth by the people taking their power back and standing in judgement of these pricks and making sure they do not do this again. Passing judgement on someone is an idea that makes good people feel uneasy, and that’s deliberate. From the Pope down, we’ve been anesthetized with this mind-virus that in order to be good people we just put our head down, work hard, die poor, and let God do the judging. How convenient for power is that story? A little too convenient. Sold to us by the same people who rape children and sit on a throne of stolen riches.

I don’t buy it anymore, and neither should you.

How to Create a DIY Sticker Campaign

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Reid Mukai

This is a simple how-to guide for creating a surprisingly effective sticker campaign on a limited budget. Before commencing, one might first ask “why a sticker campaign?”

A sticker of the right image in the right place is in essence a form of guerrilla marketing. While not as permanent as a graffiti stencil, it can still get a message across without damaging whatever objects or surfaces they happen to be placed on. Well-designed stickers can be viewed as a physical meme, which in internet culture has come to mean a combination of (usually humorous) images and words which transmit ideas. As social media monopolies continue to assert their power to censor any ideas which they, their corporate sponsors and government partners might disagree with, we need to be more creative about how to spread memes through society in a multitude of ways which can bypass censorship, contradict the mainstream consensus and have positive impacts.

As a user of mass transit, I began noticing small stickers on buses and bus stops along the routes I take featuring images mocking certain multinational corporations known to harm the community. The more I thought about the method and motives behind them, the more attractive the concept became. It’s a relatively low risk and low investment action that can have great results if even just a few with the right mindset see them and are nudged towards critical thoughts and actions. For example, I was moved to attempt to recreate the stickers, strategically place them in public spaces, and also share the method of producing them with the hope that others will do the same.

The first step is to choose an image. The meme content of your sticker is limited only by your imagination and the issues you wish to address.

Regardless of message, make sure it grabs attention and is still legible even if the sticker is small. I found that upping the contrast and converting images to black and white usually makes them more effective (and saves on color toner).

Next, acquire a box of Avery 5160 address stickers (or something similar) which can be purchased for a few bucks at thrift shops or found at most corporate workplaces.

Using Microsoft Word, click on “Tools” dropdown menu, then “Labels” and set it for “Avery standard, 5160” (or whatever type of label one happens to use).

Drag and drop image onto the Word label template so it looks something like this:

Print and trim with a paper cutter so all white portions are removed and each image is separated. This size of label and image creates 60 individual stickers per page. Granted, they’re pretty small so should ideally be placed in areas in which people come in close proximity to them such as on buses, bus stops, elevators, bathrooms, eye-level store shelves, etc. Smaller sizes have the advantage of making them easier to place more discretely however.

With bundles of strips of stickers in your pockets, have fun doing something admittedly immature but with the potential to support intelligent and worthy causes 🙂

The Doors of Perception: Why Americans Will Believe Almost Anything

Posted on September 25, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Tim O’Shea

Source: Information Clearing House

Aldous Huxley’s inspired 1954 essay detailed the vivid, mind-expanding, multisensory insights of his mescaline adventures. By altering his brain chemistry with natural psychotropics, Huxley tapped into a rich and fluid world of shimmering, indescribable beauty and power. With his neurosensory input thus triggered, Huxley was able to enter that parallel universe glimpsed by every mystic and space captain in recorded history. Whether by hallucination or epiphany, Huxley sought to remove all bonds, all controls, all filters, all cultural conditioning from his perceptions and to confront Nature or the World or Reality first-hand – in its unpasteurized, unedited, unretouched infinite rawness.

Those bonds are much harder to break today, half a century later. We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated.

It is an exhausting and endless task to keep explaining to people how most issues of conventional wisdom are scientifically implanted in the public consciousness by a thousand media clips per day. In an effort to save time, I would like to provide just a little background on the handling of information in this country. Once the basic principles are illustrated about how our current system of media control arose historically, the reader might be more apt to question any given story in today’s news.

If everybody believes something, it’s probably wrong. We call that

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

In America, conventional wisdom that has mass acceptance is usually contrived. Somebody paid for it. Examples:

Wikipedia is completely open, unbiased, and interactive

This is a list of illusions, that have cost billions to conjure up. Did you ever wonder why most people in this country generally accept most of the above statements?

PROGRAMMING THE VIEWER

Even the most undiscriminating viewer may suspect that TV newsreaders and news articles are not telling us the whole story. The slightly more lucid may have begun to glimpse the calculated intent of standard news content and are wondering about the reliability and accuracy of the way events are presented. For the very few who take time to research beneath the surface and who are still capable of abstract thought, a somewhat darker picture begins to emerge. These may perceive bits of evidence of the profoundly technical science behind much of what is served up in daily media.

Events taking place in today’s world are enormously complex. An impossibly convoluted tangle of interrelated and unrelated occurrences happens simultaneously, often in dynamic conflict. To even acknowledge this complexity contradicts a fundamental axiom of media science: Keep It Simple.

In real life, events don’t take place in black and white, but in a thousand shades of grey. Just discovering the actual facts and events as they transpire is difficult enough. The river is different each time we step into it. By the time a reasonable understanding of an event has been apprehended, new events have already made that interpretation obsolete. And this is not even adding historical, social, or political elements into the mix, which are necessary for interpretation of events. Popular media gives up long before this level of analysis.

Media stories cover only the tiniest fraction of actual events, but stupidly claim to be summarizing “all the news.”

The final goal of media is to create a following of docile, unquestioning consumers. To that end, three primary tools have historically been employed:

deceit
dissimulation
distraction

Over time, the sophistication of these tools of propaganda has evolved to a very structured science, taking its cues in an unbroken line from principles laid down by the Father of Spin himself, Edward L Bernays, over a century ago, as we will see.

Let’s look at each tool very briefly:

DECEIT

Deliberate misrepresentation of fact has always been the privilege of the directors of mass media. Their agents – the PR industry – cannot afford random objective journalism, interpreting events as they actually take place. This would be much too confusing for the average consumer, who has been spoonfed his opinions since the day he was born. No, we can’t have that. In all the confusion, the viewer might get the idea that he is supposed to make up his own mind about the significance of some event or other. The end product of good media is single-mindedness. Individual interpretation of events does not foster the homogenized, one-dimensional lemming outlook.

For this reason, events must have a spin put on them – an interpretation, a frame of reference. Subtleties are omitted; all that is presented is the bottom line. The minute that decision is made – what nuance to put on a story – we have left the world of reporting and have entered the world of propaganda. By definition, propaganda replaces faithful reporting with deceitful reporting.

Here’s an obvious example from the past: the absurd and unremitting allegations of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction as a rationale for the invasion of Iraq. Of course none were ever found, but that is irrelevant. We weren’t really looking for any weapons – but the deceit served its purpose – get us in there. Later the ruse can be abandoned and forgotten; its usefulness is over. And nobody will notice. Characterization of Saddam as a murderous tyrant was decided to be an insufficient excuse for invading a sovereign nation. After all, there are literally dozens of murderous tyrants the world over, going their merry ways. We can’t be expected to police all of them.

So it was decided that the murderous tyrant thing, though good, was not enough. To whip a sleeping people into war consciousness has historically involved one additional prerequisite: threat. Saddam must therefore be not only a baby-killing maniac; he must be a threat to the rest of the world, especially America. Why? Because he has weapons of mass destruction. For almost two years, this myth was assiduously programmed into that lowest common denominator of awareness which Americans substitute for consciousness. Even though the myth has now been openly dismissed by the Regime itself, the majority of us still believe it.

Hitler used the exact same tack with the Czechs and Poles at the beginning of his rampage. These peaceful peoples were not portrayed as an easy mark for the German war machine – no, they were a threat to the Fatherland itself. Just like the unprovoked Chinese annihilation of the peaceful Tibetan civilization in the 1940s. Or like Albania in the Dustin Hoffman movie. Such threats must be crushed by all available force, under the pretext used by every strong nation in history to subjugate a weaker one.

With Iraq, the fact that UN inspectors never came up with any of these dread weapons before Saddam was captured – this fact was never mentioned again. That one phrase – WMD WMD WMD – repeated ad nauseam month after month had served its purpose – whip the people into war mode. It didn’t have to be true; it just had to work. A staggering indicator of how low the general awareness had sunk is that this mantra continued to be used as our license to invade Iraq long after our initial assault. If Saddam had any such weapons, probably a good time to trot them out would be when a foreign country is moving in, wouldn’t you say?

No weapons were ever found, of course, nor will they be. So confident was the PR machine in the general inattention to detail commonly exhibited by the comatose American people that they didn’t even find it necessary to plant a few mass weapons in order to justify the invasion. It was almost insulting. Now nobody asks any more. In 2010 a poll of US soldiers in Iraq showed 60% believed the Iraqis blew up the World Trade Center.

So we see that a little deceit goes a long way. All it takes is repetition. Lay the groundwork and the people will buy anything. After that just ride it out until they seem doubtful again. Then onto the next deceit.

SELLING WAR

Did you ever wonder how all the war leaders down through history were able to persuade armies of thousands as individuals to leave their homes and families and risk their lives for vague, obscure reasons? How do they sell that? How do you get people to go off to war?

With rare exceptions, it’s been the same formula right down the line: sell idealistic young men the lie of the glory of war, defending their country and home from some imaginary enemy, some contrived foreign threat, from a place of alien culture. Then any oppposition to the ‘war effort’ are then lily-livered, unpatriotic, etc. Patriotism – the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Hermann Goering summarized it eloquently at Nuremberg:

‘Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.’

This technique holds true right up to the present time, intensified exponentially by the magnitude of incessant, pervasive online media. Worked great for Bush and Obama in their marketing of war.

DISSIMULATION

A second tool that is commonly used to create mass intellectual torpor is dissimulation. Dissimulation simply means to pretend not to be something you are. Like phasmid insects who can disguise themselves as leaves or twigs, pretending not to be insects. Or bureaucrats and who pretend not to be acting primarily out of self-interest, but rather in the public interest. To pretend not to be what you are.

Public servant, indeed.

Whether it’s the Bush/Obama in Iraq or Hitler in Germany, aggressors do not present themselves as marauding invaders initiating hostilities, but instead as defenders against external threats.

Freedom-annihilating edicts like the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act – still the law of the land – do not represent themselves as the negation of every principle the Founding Fathers laid down, or as shaky pretexts for looting the country, but rather as public services, benevolent and necessary new rules to ensure our SECURITY against various imagined enemies. To pretend to be what you are not: dissimulation.

Other examples of dissimulation we see today include:

pretending the present regime has not benefited from every program that came out of 9/11

To pretend not to be what you are: dissimulation.

DISTRACTION

A third tool necessary to media in order to keep the public from thinking too much is distraction. Bread and circuses worked for Caesar in old Rome. Marie Antoinette offered cake when there was no bread. The people need to be kept quiet while the small group in power carries out its agenda, which always involves fortifying its own position.

Virtually all new policies of the regimes since 9/11 may be explained by plugging in one of four beneficiaries:

Security industry

Every act, every political event, every bill introduced, every public statement of the present administration has promoted one or more of these huge sectors. More oil, more drugs, more weapons, more security.

But the people mustn’t be allowed to notice things like that. So they must be smokescreened by other stuff, blatant obvious stuff which is really easy to understand and which they think has a greater bearing on their day to day life. A classic axiom of propaganda is that people shouldn’t be allowed to think too much about what the government is doing in their name. After all, there’s more to life than politics, right? So while the power group has its cozy little wars and agendas going on, the people need to have their attention diverted.

All the strongmen of history would have given their eyeteeth to have at their disposal the number and types of distractions available to today’s regimes:

Super Sunday

the endless succession of unspeakably boring, inane movies, short on plot, long on CGI, re-working the same 20 premises, over and over

the wanton sexless flash of ‘talent shows’ with their uninspired lack of talent, a study in split second phony images

colossally dull TV programs which serve the secondary purpose of instilling proper robot attitudes into people who have little other instruction in life values

the artistic Mojave of modern music, with its soulless cyber-droning, a constant quest for the nadir of reptilian brain stimulation, devoid of lyrical competence, instrumental proficiency, or human passion

the ever-retreating promise of financial success, switched now to the trappings and toys that suggest success, available to anyone with a credit card

organized superstitions of all varieties, with their requisite pseudo-spiritual trappings

the constant sensationalization of crimes and “issues” throughout the world whose collective goal is the humble and grateful acknowledgement of “how good we’ve really got it”

dwelling for months on the minutiae of unsupported allegations of impropriety, preferably sexual, of a celebrity personality

non-events presented as events, brought to life by media alone, employing one of the Big Three hooks: sex, blood, and racism

With these ceaseless noisy, banal distractions, the forces promoting the general decline in intelligence and awareness jubilantly engulf us on all sides. Media science holds the advantage: as people get dumber and dumber year by year, it gets easier and easier to keep them dumb. The only challenge is that their threshold keeps getting lower. So in order to keep their attention, messages have to become more obvious and blatant, taking nothing for granted.

Here are some indicators of our declining intelligence:

– declining SAT scores and the arbitrary resetting of Average, which has occurred at least twice in the past 8 years, in order to cover up how dumb our kids are really getting

– forcing the the dumbed-down Common Core philosophy upon American elementary schools

– increased volume and decreased speed of the voices of newsreaders on radio and TV

– the limited vocabulary and clichéd speech allowed in radio programs; the obvious lack of education and requisite pedestrian mentality required of the corporate simians who are featured on radio

– increasing illiteracy of high school graduates, both written and spoken

– the unwritten policy requiring school teachers, especially math and English teachers, to pass students who have failing marks, especially if they’re a certain race or other, so that the school won’t “look bad”

– decreasing requirements for masters theses and PhD dissertations in both length and content

– increasing oversimplification of movie and TV plot lines – absence of subtlety in conceptual and dramatic content; blatant moralizing of compliant robot values

– the speed at which images on TV are flashed, giving the viewer barely enough time to recognize which sledgehammer idea they are referring to before the next one appears, about 2 seconds later. That way there is no possible way the brain can follow a train of thought in any kind of depth. From childhood the brain learns that it is not to be tasked with understanding abstractions or concepts of any subtlety from the information presented. All the brain has to do is react to the incessant bombardment of fragmented ADD-generating visual stimuli without trying to derive sense or logic from it. This is why TV should be watched only with the sound off, since it has generally the same educational value as a lava lamp.

– the enormous proportion of time spent by TV channels telling the viewer what will be shown in the future, leaving no time for actually delivering what they have already endlessly promised in the recent past, which should be airing at the present moment.

– newspaper articles that are not written by reporters but that are scientifically crafted phrase by canny phrase by the PR industry and placed into the columns of syndication in the guise of ‘hard news’

– the recent removal of the basic science prerequisites for US chiropractic schools, which had been in place for 50 years

– Jerky, clumsy news clips, loaded with coarse innuendo and nonsequitur, ridiculously brief: most news clips evoke only the most superficial suggestion of events which may or may not have transpired, resulting generally in the transfer of no information

– the downward spiral of the level of ordinary conversations, which are commonly just exercises in stringing together random clichés from the very finite stock of endlessly repeated homogeneous bytes. It’s as though we’re only allowed to have 50 thoughts, and most conversation is just linking these 50 programmed audio clips together in a different order: America becomes our own private Sicily

– in popular music the overriding absence of melody, lyric, chord complexity, or instrumental competence

– increase in mandating neurotoxic drugs and vaccines with new laws and regulations

TERRORISTS ARE US?

Imagine for a moment that 9/11 was a put-up job engineered for the sole purpose of cementing the current regime into power and frightening the bovine populace into surrendering even more of what little freedom they have left. Hypothetical situation now, just work with me a little. Imagine there never were any dissident crazed terrorists representing Osama or Saddam, but instead a highly disciplined though slightly whacked-out team of military special forces, programmed somehow to think they were doing something valuable for some faction or other. A put-up job, from the inside.

So then imagine that all the violence and stress perpetrated on the collective American psyche since 9/11 about war, bioterrorism, and security has all been completely unnecessary. And that all the trillions of dollars of extra security and wasted time in airports and borders was also totally unnecessary because there never were any terrorists, except us. And all the shrill media articles and “stories” that support the few underlying events have been unnecessary, their prime purpose being self promotion. Think how much our quality of life has suffered. What if all this stress has been totally unnecessary?

Many of our best people have come to precisely these conclusions. Once you got past the initial hurdle of being able to consider the unthinkable possibility that the present regime could be so obsessed with gaining political advantage that they would actually blow up 3000 of our own people, the rest falls into place. Over the top? Not such a stretch really when you compare the thousands that have been sacrificed to the whims of other blood-mad tyrants the world over, throughout all of recorded history. Exactly how are we any better?

WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW?

When it comes to a discussion of what’s going on in the world, the honest individual must admit that he has almost no idea. When was the last time Obama invited you into the Green Room for a private chat with Cheney and Hagel about the future of big oil? When did Bill Gates last invite you up to his Redmond digs for a wine and cheese brainstorming session about the next Big Thing? Or when did your neighbor who lives three blocks away from you call you up to tell you about the unfulfilled plans of his father who just found out he’s dying of cancer? How many life stories of the world’s seven billion people do you know anything about?

This is to say nothing of fluid events which are coming in and out of existence every day between the nations of the world that only the few ever hear about. What is really going on? Much more effort is spent covering up and packaging actual events that are taking place than in trying to accurately report and evaluate them. These are questions of epistemology: what can we know? The answer is: very little, if our only source of information is the superficial everyday media. The few people who buy books don’t read them. Passive absorption of pre-interpreted already-figured-out data is the preferred method

HOW IT ALL GOT STARTED

But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up a minute. In their book Trust Us We’re Experts, Stauber and Rampton pull together some compelling data describing the science of creating public opinion in America. They trace modern public influence back to the early part of the last century, highlighting the work of guys like Edward L. Bernays, the Father of Spin.

From his own amazing 1920s books – Propaganda, and Crystallizing Public Opinion – we learn how Edward L. Bernays took the ideas of his famous uncle Sigmund Freud himself, and applied them to the emerging science of mass persuasion. The only difference was that instead of using these principles to uncover hidden themes in the human unconscious, the way Freudian psychology does, Bernays studied these same ideas in order to learn how to mask agendas and to create illusions that deceive and misrepresent, for marketing purposes.

THE FATHER OF SPIN

Edward L. Bernays dominated the PR industry until the 1940s, and was a significant force for another 50 years after that. (Tye) During that time, Bernays took on hundreds of diverse assignments to create a public perception about some idea or product. A few examples:

As a neophyte with the Committee on Public Information, one of Bernays’ first assignments was to help sell the First World War to the American public with the idea to “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” (Ewen) We’ve seen this phrase in every war and US military involvement since that time.

A few years later, Bernays set up a stunt to popularize the notion of women smoking cigarettes. In organizing the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City, Bernays showed himself as a force to be reckoned with. He organized the Torches of Liberty Brigade in which suffragettes marched in the parade smoking cigarettes as a mark of women’s liberation. After that one event, women would be able to feel secure about destroying their own lungs in public, the same way that men have always done.

Bernays popularized the idea of bacon for breakfast.

Not one to turn down a challenge, he set up the liaison between the tobacco industry and the American Medical Association that lasted for nearly 50 years. They proved to all and sundry that cigarettes were beneficial to health. Just look at ads in old issues of Life, Look, Time or Journal of the American Medical Association from the 40s and 50s in which doctors are recommending this or that brand of cigarettes as promoting healthful digestion, or whatever.

He also invented the slogan Safety First, creating an industry which was founded on our obsession with the illusion of safety

During the next several decades Bernays and his colleagues evolved the principles by which masses of people could be generally swayed through messages repeated over and over, hundreds of times per week.

Once the economic power of media became apparent, other countries of the world rushed to follow our lead. But Bernays remained the gold standard. He was the source to whom the new PR leaders across the world would always defer. Even Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, author of the Final Solution, was an avid student of Edward Bernays. Using Bernays principles, Goebbels developed the popular rationale he would use to convince the Germans that the Final Solution was the only option to purify their race. (Stauber)

This is the reach of Bernays.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

As he saw it, Bernays’ job was to reframe an issue; to create a desired image that would put a particular product or concept in a desirable context. He never saw himself as a master hoodwinker, but rather as a beneficent servant of humanity, providing a valuable service. Bernays described the public as a ‘herd that needed to be led.’ And this herdlike thinking makes people “susceptible to leadership.” Bernays never deviated from his fundamental axiom to “control the masses without their knowing it.” The best PR happens with the people unaware that they are being manipulated.

Stauber describes Bernays’ rationale like this:

“the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in a democratic society.” — Trust Us, p 42

These early mass persuaders postured as performing a moral service for humanity in general. Democracy was too good for people; they needed to be told what to think, because they were incapable of rational thought by themselves. Here’s a paragraph from Bernays’ Propaganda:

“Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”

A tad different from Thomas Jefferson’s view on the subject:

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”

Inform their discretion. Bernays believed that only a few possessed the necessary insight into the Big Picture to be entrusted with this sacred task. And luckily, he saw himself as one of that elect.

Josef Goebbels, an avid student of Bernays, in turn had another apt pupil of his own: Adolf Hitler:

“What good fortune for those in power that the people do not think… It gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them…Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”

HERE COMES THE MONEY

Once the possibilities of applying Freudian psychology to mass media were glimpsed, Bernays soon had more corporate clients than he could handle. Global corporations fell all over themselves courting the new Image Makers. There were dozens of goods and services and ideas to be sold to a susceptible public. Over the years, these players have had the money to make their images happen. A few examples:

General Mills

THE PLAYERS

Dozens of PR firms have emerged to answer the demand for spin control. Among them:

Ruder-Finn

Though world-famous within the PR industry, these are names we don’t know, and for good reason. The best PR goes unnoticed. They are invisible. For decades they have created the opinions that most of us were raised with, on virtually any issue which has the remotest commercial value, including:

autism

LESSON #1

Bernays learned early on that the most effective way to create credibility for a product or an image was by “independent third-party” endorsement. For example, if General Motors were to come out and say that global warming is a hoax thought up by some liberal tree-huggers, people would suspect GM’s motives, since GM’s fortune is made by selling automobiles. If however some independent research institute with a very credible sounding name like the Global Climate Coalition comes out with a scientific report that says global warming is really a fiction, people begin to get confused and to have doubts about the original issue.

So that’s exactly what Bernays did. With a policy inspired by genius, he set up “more institutes and foundations than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined.” (Stauber p 45) Quietly financed by the industries whose products were being evaluated, these “independent” research agencies would churn out “scientific” studies and press materials that could create any image their handlers wanted. Such front groups are given high-sounding names like:

Alliance for Better Foods

Sound pretty legit, don’t they? All are bought and paid for.

As Stauber explains, these organizations and hundreds of others like them are front groups whose sole mission is to advance the image of the global corporations who fund them, like those listed above. This is accomplished in part by an endless stream of ‘press releases’ announcing “breakthrough” research to every radio station and newspaper in the country. (Robbins) Many of these canned reports read like straight news, and indeed are purposely molded in the news format. This saves journalists the trouble of researching the subjects on their own, especially on topics about which they know very little. Entire sections of the release or in the case of video news releases, the whole thing can be just lifted intact, with no editing, given the byline of the reporter or newspaper or TV station – and voil&agrave! Instant news – copy and paste. Written by corporate PR firms.

Does this really happen? Every single day, since the 1920s when the idea of theNews Release was first invented by Ivy Lee. (Stauber, p 22) Sometimes as many as half the stories appearing in an issue of the Wall St. Journal are based solely on such PR press releases… (22) These types of stories are mixed right in with legitimately researched stories. Unless you have done the research yourself, you won’t be able to tell the difference. So when we see new “research” being cited, we should always first suspect that the source is another industry-backed front group. A common tip-off is the word “breakthrough.”

THE LANGUAGE OF SPIN

As 1920s spin pioneers like Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays gained more experience, they began to formulate rules and guidelines for creating public opinion. They learned quickly that mob psychology must focus on emotion, not facts. Since the mob is incapable of rational thought, motivation must be based not on logic but on presentation. Here are some of the axioms of the new science of PR:

never state a clearly demonstrable lie

Words are very carefully chosen for their emotional impact. Here’s an example. A front group called the International Food Information Council handles the public’s natural aversion to genetically modified foods. Trigger words are repeated all through the text. Now in the case of GM foods, the public is instinctively afraid of these experimental new creations which have suddenly popped up on our grocery shelves since the ;ate 90s and which are said to alter our DNA. The IFIC wants to reassure the public of the safety of GM foods. So it avoids words like:

random

Instead, good PR for GM foods contains words like:

wholesome

It’s just basic Freud/Tony Robbins/NLP word association. The fact that GM foods are not hybrids that have been subjected to the slow and careful scientific methods of real cross-breeding doesn’t really matter. This is pseudoscience, not science. Form is everything and substance just a passing myth. (Trevanian)

Who do you think funds the International Food Information Council? Take a wild guess. Right – Monsanto, DuPont, Frito-Lay, Coca Cola, Nutrasweet – those in a position to make fortunes from GM foods. (Stauber p 20)

CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD PROPAGANDA

As the science of mass control evolved, PR firms developed further guidelines for effective copy. Here are some of the gems:

dehumanize the attacked party by labeling and name calling

speak in glittering generalities using emotionally positive words

when covering something up, don’t use plain English; stall for time; distract

get endorsements from celebrities, churches, sports figures, street people – anyone who has no expertise
in the subject

the ‘plain folks’ ruse: us billionaires are just like you

when minimizing outrage, don’t say anything memorable – platitudes are best

when minimizing outrage, point out the benefits of what just happened

when minimizing outrage, avoid moral issues

Keep this list. Start watching for these techniques. Not hard to find – look at today’s paper or tonight’s TV news. See what they’re doing; these guys are good!

SCIENCE FOR HIRE

PR firms have become very sophisticated in the preparation of news releases. They have learned how to attach the names of famous scientists to research that those scientists have not even looked at. (Stauber, p 201) It’s a common practice. In this way, the editors of newspapers and TV news shows are themselves often unaware that an individual release is a total PR fabrication. Or at least they have “deniability,” right?

Stauber tells the amazing story of how leaded gas came into the picture. In 1922, General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline gave cars more horsepower. When there was some concern about safety, GM paid the Bureau of Mines to do some fake “testing” and publish spurious research that ‘proved’ that inhalation of lead was harmless. Enter Charles Kettering.

Founder of the world famous Sloan-Kettering Memorial Institute for medical research, Charles Kettering also happened to be an executive with General Motors. By some strange coincidence, we soon have Sloan-Kettering issuing reports stating that lead occurs naturally in the body and that the body has a way of eliminating low level exposure. Through its association with The Industrial Hygiene Foundation and PR giant Hill & Knowlton, Sloane-Kettering opposed all anti-lead research for years. (Stauber p 92). Without organized scientific opposition, for the next 60 years more and more gasoline became leaded, until by the 1970s, 90% or our gasoline was leaded.

Finally it became too obvious to hide that lead was a major carcinogen, which they knew all along, and leaded gas was phased out in the late 1980s. But during those 60 years, it is estimated that some 30 million tons of lead were released in vapor form onto American streets and highways. 30 million tons. (Stauber)

That is PR, my friends.

JUNK SCIENCE

In 1993 a guy named Peter Huber wrote a new book and coined a new term. The book was Galileo’s Revenge and the term was junk science. Huber’s shallow thesis was that real science supports technology, industry, and progress. Anything else was suddenly junk science. Not surprisingly, Stauber explains how Huber’s book was supported by the industry-backed Manhattan Institute.

Huber’s book was generally dismissed not only because it was so poorly written, but because it failed to realize one fact: true scientific research begins with no conclusions. Real scientists are seeking the truth because they do not yet know what the truth is.

True scientific method goes like this:

1. form a hypothesis

2. make predictions for that hypothesis

3. test the predictions

4. reject or revise the hypothesis using the test results

5. describe the limitations of the present position

6. always ask the next question

Boston University scientist Dr. David Ozonoff explains that ideas in science are themselves like “living organisms, that must be nourished, supported, and cultivated with resources for making them grow and flourish.” (Stauber p 205) Great ideas that don’t get this financial support because the commercial angles are not immediately obvious – these ideas wither and die.

Another way you can often distinguish real science from phony is that real science points out flaws in its own research. Phony science pretends there were no flaws.

THE REAL JUNK SCIENCE

Contrast this with modern PR and its constant pretensions to sound science. Corporate sponsored research, whether it’s in the area of drugs, GM foods, or chemistry begins with predetermined conclusions. It is the job of the scientists then to prove that these conclusions are true, because of the economic upside that proof will bring to the industries paying for that research. This invidious approach to science has shifted the entire focus of research in America during the past 50 years, as any true scientist is likely to admit. If a drug company is spending 10 million dollars on a research project to prove the viability of some new drug, and the preliminary results start coming back about the dangers of that drug, what happens? Right. No more funding. The well dries up. What is being promoted under such a system? Science? Or rather Entrenched Medical Error?

Stauber documents the increasing amount of corporate sponsorship of university research. (206) This has nothing to do with the pursuit of knowledge. Scientists lament that research has become just another commodity, something bought and sold. (Crossen)

THE TWO MAIN TARGETS OF “SOUND SCIENCE”

It is shocking when Stauber shows how the vast majority of corporate PR today opposes any research that seeks to protect public health and the environment

It’s a funny thing that most of the time when we see the phrase “junk science,” it is in a context of defending something that threatens either the environment or our health. This makes sense when one realizes that money changes hands only by selling the illusion of health and the illusion of environmental protection or the illusion of health. True public health and real preservation of the earth’s environment have very low market value.

Stauber thinks it ironic that industry’s self-proclaimed debunkers of junk science are usually non-scientists themselves. (255) Here again they can do this because the issue is not science, but the creation of images.

THE LANGUAGE OF ATTACK

When PR firms attack legitimate environmental groups and alternative medicine people, they again use special words which will carry an emotional punch:

hysteria

Our riflemen are sharpshooters – theirs are snipers.

The next time you are reading a newspaper article about an environmental or health issue, note how the author shows bias by using the above terms. This is the result of very specialized training. It is a very disciplined art and science.

Another standard PR tactic is to use the rhetoric of the environmentalists themselves to defend a dangerous and untested product that poses an actual threat to the environment. This we see constantly in the PR smokescreen that surrounds genetically modified foods. They talk about how GM foods are necessary to grow more food and to end world hunger, when the reality is that GM foods actually have lower yields per acre than natural crops. (Stauber p 173) The grand design sort of comes into focus once you realize that almost all GM foods have been created by the sellers of herbicides and pesticides so that those plants can withstand greater amounts of herbicides and pesticides. (see The Magic Bean)

THE MIRAGE OF PEER REVIEW

Publish or perish is the classic dilemma of every research scientist. That means whoever expects funding for the next research project had better get the current research paper published in the best scientific journals. And we all know that the best scientific journals, like JAMA, New England Journal, British Medical Journal, etc. are peer-reviewed. Peer review means that any articles which actually get published, between all those full color drug ads and pharmaceutical centerfolds, have been reviewed and accepted by some really smart guys with a lot of credentials. The assumption is, if the article made it past peer review, the data and the conclusions of the research study have been thoroughly checked out and bear some resemblance to physical reality.

But there are a few problems with this hot little set up. First off, money.

Even though prestigious venerable medical journals pretend to be so objective and scientific and incorruptible, the reality is that they face the same type of being called to account that all glossy magazines must confront: don’t antagonize your advertisers. Those full-page drug ads in the best journals cost millions, Jack. How long will a pharmaceutical company pay for ad space in a magazine that prints some very sound scientific research paper that attacks the safety of the drug in the centerfold? Think about it. The editors may lack moral fibre, but they aren’t stupid.

Another problem is the conflict of interest thing. There’s a formal requirement for all medical journals that any financial ties between an author and a product manufacturer be disclosed in the article. In practice, it never happens. A study done in 1997 of 142 medical journals did not find even one such disclosure. (Wall St. Journal, 2 Feb 99)

A 1998 study from the New England Journal of Medicine found that 96% of peer reviewed articles had financial ties to the drug they were studying. (Stelfox, 1998) Big shock, huh? Any disclosures? Yeah, right. This study should be pointed out whenever somebody starts getting too pompous about the objectivity of peer review, like they often do.

Then there’s the outright purchase of space. A drug company may simply pay $100,000 to a journal to have a favorable article printed. (Stauber, p 204)

Fraud in peer review journals is nothing new. In 1987, the New England Journal ran an article that followed the research of R. Slutsky MD over a seven year period. During that time, Dr. Slutsky had published 137 articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals. NEJM found that in at least 60 of these 137, there was evidence of major scientific fraud and misrepresentation, including:

reporting statistical analyses that were never done (Engler)

Dean Black PhD, describes what he the calls the Babel Effect that results when this very common and frequently undetected scientific fraud in peer-reviewed journals is quoted by other researchers, who are in turn re-quoted by still others, and so on.

Want to see something that sort of re-frames this whole discussion? Check out the McDonald’s ads which routinely appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Then keep in mind that this is the same publication that for almost 50 years ran cigarette ads proclaiming the health benefits of tobacco. (Robbins)

Very scientific, oh yes.

KILL YOUR TV?

Hope this chapter has given you a hint to start reading newspaper and magazine articles a little differently, and perhaps start watching TV news shows with a slightly different attitude than you had before. Always ask, what are they selling here, and who’s selling it? And if you actually follow up on Stauber & Rampton’s book and check out some of the other resources below, you might even glimpse the possibility of advancing your life one quantum simply by ceasing to subject your brain to mass media. That’s right – no more newspapers, no more TV news, no more Time magazine or People magazine Newsweek.

You could actually do that. Just think what you could do with the extra time alone.

Really feel like you need to “relax” or find out “what’s going on in the world” for a few hours every day? Think about the news of the past couple of years for a minute. Do you really suppose the major stories that have dominated headlines and TV news have been “what is going on in the world?” Do you actually think there’s been nothing going on besides the contrived tech slump, the contrived power shortages, the re-filtered accounts of foreign violence and disaster, even the new accounts of US retribution in the Middle East, making Afghanistan safe for democracy, bending Saddam to our will, etc., and all the other non-stories that the puppeteers dangle before us every day? What about when they get a big one, like with OJ or Monica Lewinsky or the Oklahoma city bombing? Or now with the Neo-Nazi aftermath of 9/11. Or the contrived war against Iraq? Do we really need to know all that detail, day after day? Do we have any way of verifying all that detail, even if we wanted to? What is the purpose of news? To inform the public? Hardly.

The sole purpose of news is to keep the public in a state of fear and uncertainty so that they’ll watch again tomorrow to see how much worse things got and to be subjected to the same advertising.

Oversimplification? Of course. That’s the hallmark of mass media mastery – simplicity. The invisible hand. Like Edward Bernays said, the people must be controlled without them knowing it.

Consider this: what was really going on in the world all that time they were distracting us with all that stupid vexatious daily smokescreen? We have no way of knowing. And most of it doesn’t even concern us even if we could know it. Fear and uncertainty — that’s what keeps people coming back for more.

If this seems like a radical outlook, let’s take it one step further:

What would you lose from your life if you stopped watching TV and stopped reading newspapers and glossy magazines altogether?

Whoa!

Would your life really suffer any financial, moral, intellectual, spiritual, or academic loss from such a decision?

Do you really need to have your family continually absorbing the illiterate, amoral, phony, culturally bereft, desperately brainless values of the people featured in the average nightly TV program? Are these fake, programmed robots “normal”?

Do you need to have your life values constantly spoon fed to you?

Are those shows really amusing, or just a necessary distraction to keep you from looking at reality, or trying to figure things out yourself by doing a little independent reading? Or perhaps from having a life?

Name one example of how your life is improved by watching TV news and reading the evening paper or the glossy magazines. What measurable gain is there for you?

What else could we be doing with all this freed-up time that would actually expand awareness?

PLANET OF THE APES?

There’s no question that as a nation, we’re getting dumber year by year. Look at the presidents we’ve been choosing lately. Ever notice the blatant grammar mistakes so ubiquitous in today’s advertising and billboards? Literacy is marginal in most American secondary schools. Three-fourths of California high school seniors can’t read well enough to pass their exit exams. (SJ Mercury 20 Jul 01) If you think other parts of the country are smarter, try this one: hand any high school senior a book by Dumas or Jane Austen, and ask them to open to any random page and just read one paragraph out loud. Go ahead, do it. SAT scales are arbitrarily shifted lower and lower to disguise how dumb kids are getting year by year. ADD: A Designer Disease At least 10% have documented “learning disabilities,” which are reinforced and rewarded by special treatment and special drugs. Ever hear of anyone failing a grade any more?

Or observe the intellectual level of the average movie which these days may only last one or two weeks in the theatres, especially if it has insufficient explosions, chase scenes, silicone, fake martial arts, and cretinesque dialogue. Doesn’t anyone else notice how badly these 30 or 40 “movie stars” we keep seeing over and over in the same few plots must now overact to get their point across to an ever-dimming audience?

Radio? Consider the low mental qualifications of the falsely animated corporate simians they hire as DJs — seems like they’re only allowed to have 50 thoughts, which they just repeat at random. And at what point did popular music cease to require the study of any musical instrument or theory whatsoever, not to mention lyric? Perhaps we just don’t understand this emerging art form, right? The Darwinism of MTV – apes descended from man.

Ever notice how most articles in any of the glossy magazines sound like they were all written by the same guy? And this writer just graduated from junior college? And yet he has all the correct opinions on social issues, no original ideas, and that shallow, smug, homogenized corporate omniscience, which enables him to assure us that everything is fine…

All this is great news for the PR industry – makes their job that much easier. Not only are very few paying attention to the process of conditioning; fewer are capable of understanding it even if somebody explained it to them.

TEA IN THE CAFETERIA

Let’s say you’re in a crowded cafeteria, and you buy a cup of tea. And as you’re about to sit down you see your friend way across the room. So you put the tea down and walk across the room and talk to your friend for a few minutes. Now, coming back to your tea, are you just going to pick it up and drink it? Remember, this is a crowded place and you’ve just left your tea unattended for several minutes. You’ve given anybody in that room access to your tea.

Why should your mind be any different? Turning on the TV, or uncritically absorbing mass publications every day – these activities allow access to our minds by “just anyone” – anyone who has an agenda, anyone with the resources to create a public image via popular media. As we’ve seen above, just because we read something or see something on TV doesn’t mean it’s true or worth knowing. So the idea here is, like the tea, perhaps the mind is also worth guarding, worth limiting access to it.

This is the only life we get. Time is our total capital. Why waste it allowing our potential, our scope of awareness, our personality, our values to be shaped, crafted, and boxed up according to the whims of the mass panderers? There are many important issues that are crucial to our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being which require time and study. If it’s an issue where money is involved, objective data won’t be so easy to obtain. Remember, if everybody knows something, that image has been bought and paid for.

Real knowledge takes a little effort, a little excavation down at least one level below what “everybody knows.”

References

Stauber & Rampton – Trust Us, We’re Experts – Tarcher/Putnam 2001

Ewen, Stuart – PR!: A Social History of Spin – Basic Books 1996

Tye, Larry – The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations – Crown Publishers, Inc. 2001

Bernays, E – Propaganda – Liveright 1928

King, R – Medical journals rarely disclose researchers’ ties – Wall St. Journal, February 2, 1999

Engler, R et al. – Misrepresentation and Responsibility in Medical Research – New England Journal of Medicine v 317 p 1383, November 26, 1987

Black, D, PhD – Health At the Crossroads – Tapestry 1988

Trevanian – Shibumi, 1983

Crossen, C – Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America, 1996

Robbins, J – Reclaiming Our Health – Kramer 1996

Huxley, A – The Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell – Harper and Row 1954

O’Shea, T – Genetically Modified Foods: A Short Introduction

How to Beat a Manipulator

Posted on September 23, 2018 by Reid Mukai

These six men own as much wealth as half the world’s population

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Consortium News

Humans are hackable. Ask any conman. Our desire to think we have control over our lives often hides this from ourselves, but most of us are highly suggestible and hypnotizable. If you think you’re not, you’re in more danger of being hacked than someone who has humbled themselves enough to see how this works in them.

There’s no need to be ashamed of being conned. Realizing that you’ve been, or are being, conned will naturally bring up feelings of embarrassment, but it’s never your fault that someone’s taken you for a ride. Get clear: conning someone is the crime; being conned is being a victim of that crime. That’s how the law sees it in fraud cases. Manipulators would love you to think that it’s your fault for allowing yourself to be manipulated, but that’s just another manipulation isn’t it?

Manipulators use one of our most astounding, useful, and beautiful human characteristics when they con us—empathy. Our innately trusting nature is the reason why we’ve been able to collaborate on large scales to create and innovate in extraordinary ways unseen anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Because we learn by modeling, and we are shaped by the group we inhabit and our urge to create harmony will make life viscerally uncomfortable until we are back in alignment with our tribe. We are the peacemakers; we seek alignment, which is how we are paced by manipulators into aligning with their sick agendas. How gross is it then that our ability to empathize and relate to each other is one manipulators use to control us?

Because of the reach of mass media, every single one of us is in an abusive relationship with plutocratic manipulators. Many of us are in personal relationships with manipulators too. Conveniently, the strategies for dealing with sociopathic manipulators are the exact same, from plutocrats to your live-in partner.

Get Clear on Your Own Will

You are easy prey if you don’t know what you want and you leave it up to others to decide for you. If you don’t have a sense of who you are and what you stand for, anyone can come in and co-opt that for their own sick agendas. Sit down, get quiet, and make an inventory of who you are and what you need. Don’t be squeamish about adding things that you don’t have yet. That’s the point. Make a list of what you need not just to survive, but to thrive. Apply the live-and-let-live rule to every one of your wants, and if you’re confident that nothing you want will hurt or interfere in anyone else’s will, then the list is good. You can stand by it unequivocally, and you should do so with as much strength and confidence as you can muster. Grow to its size and advocate loudly for it.

Watch Where the Resources Go

How do you really know if you’re being manipulated? Well, what manipulators understand that the rest of us don’t is that there are real life resources like sex, money, work, gold, oil, land, water, food, people, air, etc; and there are good feelings. They will always try to get you to swap real things for good feelings. If you don’t have empathy, you see the whole world in a completely different way. Most people are trying to get what they need without hurting anyone, because hurting someone hurts them too. Manipulators don’t experience that, so they just get what they need by telling their victim that they’ll hurt someone if they don’t hand it over.

Zoom out and take an inventory of who’s got all the stuff. Which way are the scales tipped? Good manipulators try to shift the ground underneath us to funnel the real wealth into their coffers, while placating us with good feelings about how blessed our hard work is and all that, and how selfish it would be to demand healthcare when there’s people in Syria who need to be bombed for their freedom. Leave all that behind and zoom and out and see who’s got all the stuff. Who has all the power, all the wealth, all the real stuff that you can really use in the real world, and who is barely existing but has hope for a better tomorrow?

Same in a marriage. Who has all the wealth, power, kudos, retirement savings, and who just has a story about what a good person they are? Religion has primed us for manipulation, and that was by design. Over millennia, we have been taught to value fealty, piety, hard work, submission, and to leave judgement and reward til after we die. This creates the perfect environment for manipulators who can see very clearly what the valuable real-world things are, and what are creations woven of fairytales. Work out what’s real in the here and now, and see who is in control of what should be your stuff. Is it you? If it’s not, you’re being manipulated out of it.

Watch Their Actions, Not Their Words

Manipulators only have words. They can’t just walk up to you and say “Give me your life savings,” they have to weave a complex story that makes you feel like it’s the right thing to do. A good conman will never ask for anything if they can get away with it. Ideally, they want you to make the offer. That’s the best kind of con, the one where the victim thinks it was their idea in the first place. A great conman will have you begging him to take the thing that he wanted all along, so then he can even get your gratitude for it.

By zooming out and seeing what they’re doing, rather than listening to what they’re saying, you can get a much better idea of what’s actually happening. If, for example, they’re saying they support single-payer healthcare while voting against it, sabotaging any efforts in any direction, taking money from donors who oppose it, and generally running interference on it, then those actions tell the real story. If the offer is not what you asked for but you are so desperate, so far down the line with them, so invested, and so cut off from any alternate solutions that you’ll take anything, then the con is complete.

Think about it from their point of view. Ideally, they want to be the ones you go to for the thing they don’t want you to have. They want to be the ones you place your hope and energy with so you don’t go to someone who will actually help them, but they also need to string you along for as long as possible, doing as little as possible, while taking as much energy as they can from you without arousing suspicion. They sing the song of inertia, of incrementalism, of “Not now, but soon.” That’s how they keep you trapped. If you zoom out and watch what they’re actually doing, rather than what they’re saying, you will know when it’s time to say bye Felicia and seek out an actual solution.

Don’t Try to Out-Manipulate Them

Once you’ve figured out you’re being manipulated, the knee-jerk reaction is to try and manipulate them back. Dude. Don’t even. Do you know how beautiful and precious you are to even think that that’s possible? These people have had no empathy for all their lives, and without all that emotional noise clouding their decisions, they have been playing every single person in their life like a game of chess. They are masters. They are five moves ahead of you already, and you’re just learning what a rook is. They have a whole lifetime of manipulating under their belt, and you are a total noob. You will lose that game. Don’t play it.

Instead, go with your strengths. Demand what you want and stick to that, loudly and unapologetically. Keep asking for what you want in the most direct way possible. Remember, a manipulator aims to take your will from you. Take it back. Many of us have been so manipulated for so long, we don’t even know what we want anymore. Make your inventory, keep it simple, keep it to what you know you need to thrive, and then plant your feet and demand it.

Meanwhile, keep pointing out the weird things they do to try and avoid giving you what they said they would. Shout it from the rooftops when they do something sly. They’ve used your politeness and goodwill to hide their little indiscretions. Don’t let them anymore. If they’re being creepy, say it. Don’t be manipulated into tacit consent by your politeness.

Keep telling the truth to yourself at least, even when it doesn’t tally with your worldview. Remain as intellectually honest with yourself as possible about what the knowable facts are, and what is conjecture or wishful thinking. Verify everything as much as you can so you know you’re standing on solid, factual ground. Manipulators love to keep people as confused as possible. Get as many quantifiable, verified, real-world facts as you can underneath you and build your worldview on them. And when you’re sure of yourself, say it like it’s true, because you know it is. Be unequivocal with the things you know. When you’re sure, don’t let anyone get in any wriggle room. Approach your private research with curiosity, objectivity and a light hand, but once the work is done, plant your feet in its truth and don’t let them be uprooted.

And lastly, don’t play by the rules, play by what is right. Manipulators love rules because they love to strategize about how to bend them, and how to bend you with them. Think of the worst kind of lawyers and you’ll know exactly what I mean. If you’re a deeply good person like you know you are, and you are always trying to point yourself at the highest interest, you know deep down if you’re doing the right thing. Trust your guts and forge ahead. Keep doing the right thing, even if it breaks a rule.

Apply The Manipulator’s Rules In Reverse

There’s something in psychology called “projection”, and anyone who has done a good deal of inner work will tell you that it’s a handy self-enquiry tool to see if what you hate in others, you can find in yourself. In order not to deal with our guilt, we tend to project the things we don’t like on to other people to hide the shame of it from ourselves. Bringing it out into the light can often result in some healthy forgiveness of both ourselves and our perception of others.

That’s great, but what the sages neglect to tell you is that people are also projecting all the time on to you. If you’re suggestible and good-hearted enough to not want to harm anyone, you can take everyone’s projections on to you as truth without even realizing it. Unless you develop a strong, conscious, healthy sense of who you are as a person, you can be gaslit into thinking that you’re any amount of the horrible things people project on to you, and that can easily grind you to a confused and babbling halt. Again, take an inventory of who you are and what you want, and grow in size until you can stand in that truth and defend it. Find your will and take it back.

Manipulators particularly use projection as a tactic to hide what they’re doing to you in plain sight. A manipulator can have you chasing your tail by simply suggesting that you or others are doing what you are seeing them doing with your own eyes. DNC caught rigging the election? Oh no, it was actually Russia who rigged the election by catching the DNC rigging the election. See what I did there? It’s so dumb, but it works.

Here’s the key: simply reverse the pronouns. When faced with a manipulator, everything he says about you, he is saying about himself, and everything he says about himself, is what he thinks of you. If he’s telling you you’re duplicitous and you’re a liar and you’re trying to take him for all he’s got, he’s actually saying he’s duplicitous and he’s a liar and he’s trying to take you for all you’ve got. If you have good grounds to believe you are being manipulated by someone, reverse the pronouns in your mind and let them tell you who they are. It works from personal relationships right up to the grand manipulators employed by the plutocrats.

Bring as much awareness as possible to all the ways you’re being manipulated, and all the ways you’ve been inadvertently manipulating. Make it as conscious in yourself as possible so we can all add to the sum of human knowledge as to how to transcend the manipulations. Once we draw back and fill out to our own individual sovereign boundaries, we will be able to trust ourselves to stand in our truth. We will also be able to see who we can trust so much more easily, and once you know you can trust someone, you can collaborate with them. These newly-conscious and divine collaborations will create the very things we need to solve the real world problems we face as a species and take the will of the planet from the sociopaths and return it to the will of the people.

And that’s really all it will take. A tipping point of un-manipulatable and awake people collaborating to create new systems that will surpass the old is all it will take to wrest power from the manipulators who only have the old Biblical tools of fear, guilt and shame to work with. This is doable, and it only needs you.

This commentary was originally published on CaitlinJohnstone.com .

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

Posted on September 9, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code.

Life in our current society is very much the same. The difference is that instead of AI, it’s psychopathic oligarchs who are keeping us asleep in the Matrix. And instead of code, it’s narrative.

Society is made of narrative like the Matrix is made of code. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government, they’re all purely mental constructs which exist nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads. If I asked you to point to your knee you could do so instantly and wordlessly, but if I asked you to point to the economy, for example, the closest you could come is using a bunch of linguistic symbols to point to a group of concepts. To show me the economy, you’d have to tell me a story.

Anyone who has ever experienced a moment of mental stillness knows that without the chatter, none of those things are part of your actual present experience. There is no identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics or government in your experience without the mental chatter about those things. There’s not even a “you” anywhere to be found, because it turns out that that’s made of narrative, too.

Without mental narrative, nothing is experienced but sensory impressions appearing to a subject with no clear shape or boundaries. The visual and auditory fields, the sensation of air going in and out of the respiratory system, the feeling of the feet on the ground or the bum in the chair. That’s it. That’s more or less the totality of life minus narrative.

When you add in the mental chatter, however, none of those things tend to occupy a significant amount of interest or attention. Appearances in the visual and auditory field are suddenly divided up and labeled with language, with attention to them determined by whichever threatens or satisfies the various agendas, fears and desires of the conceptual identity construct known as “you”. You can go days, weeks, months or years without really noticing the feeling of your respiratory system or your feet on the ground as your interest and attention gets sucked up into a relationship with society that exists solely as narrative.

“Am I good enough? Am I doing the right thing? Oh man, I hope what I’m trying to do works out. I need to make sure I get all my projects done. If I do that one thing first it might save me some time in the long run. Oh there’s Ashley, I hate that bitch. God I’m so fat and ugly. If I can just get the things that I want and accomplish my important goals I’ll feel okay. Taxes are due soon. What’s on TV? Oh it’s that idiot. How the hell did he get elected anyway? Everyone who made that happen is a Nazi. God I can’t wait for the weekend. I hope everything goes as planned between now and then.”

On and on and on and on. Almost all of our mental energy goes into those mental narratives. They dominate our lives. And, for that reason, people who are able to control those narratives are able to control us.

And they do.

Most people try to exert some degree of control over those around them. They try to influence how those in their family, social and employment circles think of them by behaving and speaking in a certain way. Family members will spend their lives telling other family members over and over again that they’re not as smart/talented/good as they think they are to keep them from becoming too successful and moving away. Romantic partners will be persuaded that they can never leave because no one else will ever love them. To varying degrees, they manipulate the narratives of individuals.

Then there are the people who’ve figured out that they can actually take their ability to influence the way people think about themselves and their world and turn it into personal profit. Cult leaders convince followers to turn over their entire lives in service to them. Advertisers convince consumers that they have a problem or deficiency that can only be solved with This Exciting New Product™. Ambitious rat race participants learn how to climb the corporate ladder by winning favor with the right people and inflicting small acts of sabotage against their competing peers. Ambitious journalists learn that they progress much further in their careers by advancing narratives that favor the establishment upon which the plutocrats who own the big media companies have built their kingdoms. They manipulate the narratives of groups.

And then, there are the oligarchs. The master manipulators. These corporate kings of the modern world have learned the secret that every ruler since the dawn of civilization has known: whoever controls the narratives that are believed by a society is the controller of that society. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government: all mental constructs which only influence society to the extent that they are believed and subscribed to by a significant majority of the collective. If you have influence over the things that people believe about those mental constructs, you have influence over society. You rule it. The oligarchs manipulate the narratives of entire societies.

This is why there have been book burnings, heretic burnings, and executions for mocking the emperor throughout history: ideas which differ from the dominant narratives about what power is, how money works, who should be in charge and so on are threatening to a ruler’s power in the exact same way that an assassin’s dagger is. At any time, in any kingdom, the people could have decided to take the crown off of their king’s head and place it upon the head of any common beggar and treat him as the new king. And, in every meaningful way, he would be the new king. The only thing preventing this from happening was dominant narratives subscribed to by the society at the time about Divine Right, fealty, loyalty, noble blood and so on. The only thing keeping the crown on a king’s head was narrative.

The exact same thing remains true today; the only thing that has changed is the narratives the public subscribe to. Because of what they are taught in school and what the talking heads on their screens tell them about their nation and their government, most people believe that they live in a relatively free democracy where accountable, temporary power is placed in the hands of a select few based on a voting process informed by the unregulated debate of information and ideas. Completely separate from the government, they believe, is an economy whose behavior is determined by the supply and demand of consumers. In reality, economics, commerce and government are fully controlled by an elite class of plutocrats, who also happen to own the media corporations which broadcast the information about the world onto people’s screens.

Control the narratives of economics and commerce, and you control economics and commerce. Control the narratives about politics and government, and you control politics and government. This control is used by the controllers to funnel power to the oligarchs, in this way effectively turning society into one giant energy farm for the elite class.

But it is possible to wake up from that narrative Matrix.

It isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes work. Inner work. And humility. Nobody likes acknowledging that they’ve been fooled, and the depth and extent to which we’ve all been fooled is so deeply pervasive it can be tempting to decide that the work is complete far before one is actually free. Mainstream American liberals think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by Fox and Donald Trump, and mainstream American conservatives think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by MSNBC and the Democrats, but the propaganda strings on both trace back to the same puppet master. And seeing that is just the beginning.

But, through sincere, humble research and introspection, it is possible to break free of the Matrix and see the full extent to which you and everyone you know has been imprisoned by ideas which have been programmed into social consciousness by the powerful. Not just in our adult lives, but ever since our parents began teaching us how to speak, think and relate to the world. Not just in the modern world, but as far back as history stretches to when the power-serving belief systems of societal structure and religion were promoted by kings and queens of old. All of society, and all of ourselves, and indeed all of the thoughts in our heads, have been shaped by those in power to their benefit. This is the reality that we were born into, and our entire personality structure has been filtered through and shaped by it.

For this reason, escaping from the power-serving propaganda Matrix necessarily means becoming a new creature altogether. The ideas, mental habits and ways of relating to the world which were formed in the Matrix are only useful for moving around inside of it. In order to relate to life outside of the power-promulgated narratives which comprise the very fabric of society, you’ve got to create a whole new operating system for yourself in order to move through life independently of the old programming designed to keep you asleep and controlled.

So it’s hard work. You’ll make a lot of mistakes along the way, just like an infant slowly learning to walk. But, eventually, you get clear of the programming.

And then you’re ready to fight.

Because at some point in this process, you necessarily come upon a deep, howling rage within. Rage at the oligarchic manipulators of your species, yes, but also rage against manipulation in all its forms. Rage against everyone who has ever tried to manipulate your narrative, to make you believe things about yourself or make other people believe things about you. Rage against anyone who manipulates anyone else to any extent. When your eyes are clear manipulation stands out like a black fly on a white sheet of paper, and your entire system has nothing to offer it but revulsion and rejection.

So you set to work. You set to work throwing all attempts to manipulate you as far away from yourself as possible, and expunging anyone from your life who refuses to stop trying to control your narrative. Advertising, mass media propaganda, establishment academia, everything gets purged from your life that wants to pull you back into the Matrix.

And they will try to pull you back in. Because our narratives are so interwoven and interdependent with everyone else’s, and so inseparable from our sense of ourselves, your rejection of the narrative Matrix will present as an existential threat to many of your friends and loved ones. You will see many people you used to trust, many of them very close to you, suddenly transform into a bunch of Agent Smiths right in front of your eyes, and they will shame you, guilt you, throw every manipulation tool they have at you to get you to plug the jack back into your brain. But because your eyes are clear, you’ll see it all. You won’t be fooled.

And then all you’ll want is to tear down the Matrix from its very foundations and plunge its controllers into irrelevance. You will set to work bringing down the propaganda prison that they have built up around your fellow humans in any way you can, bolt by bolt if you have to, because you know from your own experience that we are all capable of so much more than the puny gear-turning existence they’ve got everyone churning away at. You will despise the oligarchs for the obscene sacrilege that they have inflicted upon human majesty out of greed and insecurity, and you will make a mortal enemy of the entire machine that they have used to enslave our species.

And, because their entire kingdom is built upon maintaining the illusion of freedom and democracy, all they will have to fight back against you is narrative. They’ll try to shame you into silence by calling you a conspiracy theorist, they’ll have their media goons and manipulators launch smear campaigns against you, but because your eyes are clear, none of that will work. They’ve got one weapon, and it doesn’t work on you.

And you will set to work waking up humanity from the lie factory, using whatever skills you have, weakening trust in the mass media propaganda machine and opening eyes to new possibilities. And while doing so, you will naturally shine big and bright so the others can find you. And together, we’ll not only smash the narratives that imprison us like a human caterpillar swallowing the narrative bullshit and forcing it into the mouth of the next slave, but we’ll also create new narratives, better narratives, healthier narratives, for ourselves and for each other, about how the world is and what we want it to be.

Because here’s the thing: since it’s all narrative, anything is possible. Those who see this have the ability to plunge toward health and human thriving without any regard for the made-up reasons why such a thing is impossible, and plant seeds of light which sprout in unprecedented directions that never could have been predicted by someone plugged into to establishment how-it-is stories. Together, we can determine how society will be. We can re-write the rules. We are re-writing the rules. It’s begun already.

Out of the white noise of a failing propaganda machine, a new world is being born, one that respects the autonomy of the individual and their right to self-determination. One that respects our right to collaborate on large scales to create beautiful, healthy, helpful systems without the constant sabotage and disruption of a few power-hungry psychopaths who would rather rule than live. One that respects our right to channel human ingenuity into harmony and human thriving instead of warfare and greed. One that respects our right to take what we need, not just to survive but to thrive, and return it to the earth for renewal. One that respects the sovereign boundaries of not just ourselves and each other, but of the planet spaceship that we live in.

Unjack your cortex fully from the fear-soaked narratives of insanity, and let the true beauty of our real world flood your senses. Let the grief of what we have unknowingly done send you crashing to your knees in sorrow. And when you’re ready, stand up. We have much work to do.

4 SIGNS WE LIVE IN A PROFOUNDLY SICK SOCIETY

Posted on September 2, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~Jiddu Krishnamurti

What makes our society so sick? How do we know for sure that our society is unhealthy? Is there a way to reason our way into a clear explanation for why our society is unfit for healthy human beings attempting to evolve in a healthier way?

It really comes down to answering one critical question: Do you want to live, or do you want to die? As Albert Camus famously stated, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” It seems extreme, but in order to get down to the crux of the issue, we need to ask extreme questions.

If your answer is ‘life,’ then it stands to reason that you want that life to be as healthy as possible. If your answer is suicide, then obviously all other questions of survival are irrelevant, and you fall under the null hypothesis.

Let’s assume that your answer is ‘life.’ What is the next logical question? It stands to reason that all subsequent questions would be: What do I need to do in order to continue my survival? The first answer to that question must be: I need to breathe clean air. After that? I need to drink clean water. Then, I need to eat healthy food. And then, I need to find healthy human relations. So on, and so forth.

This gives us a four-fold foundation to begin to see why the system is so unhealthy, while possibly shedding some light on how we can heal our profoundly sick society. Let’s break it down…

1. Our Society Pollutes the Air

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” ~Aldo Leopold

So, you want to live? Well you’ve got to breathe air. And if you want to live healthy, you must breathe clean air. The first fundamental reason how we know we live in a profoundly sick society is when it becomes evident that our society is directly affecting the quality of the air in a negative and unhealthy way.

Forget the ongoing debate about climate change and global warming. Some people’s cognitive dissonance is so powerful that no amount of arguing will convince them. It will only solidify their hardheaded stance.

Focus instead on the real problem; something we can all agree on: pollution. There is no denying that our society’s excessive use of fossil fuels is a dangerous air pollutant. Just look at the horizon in almost every single major city on the planet. If it’s harming the air quality there, then it’s harming the air quality everywhere. The planet is an interconnected system. Everything is connected to everything else. Especially when it comes to the flow of air.

It’s simple: when our waste output exceeds the planet’s ability to absorb it in a healthy way –that is to say, in a way that preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community– then we know, without a doubt, that it’s unhealthy and that we must scale back. Otherwise, our health and the planet’s health, is compromised.

A society that continues to output more waste into the air than the atmosphere can absorb in a healthy way is a profoundly sick society.

2. Our Society Pollutes the Water

“We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.” ~Jacques Yves Cousteau

So, you’ve decided you want to live and you’ve taken care of breathing air. The next step, if you wish to continue your survival, is to find clean water. This is no easy task in a sick society.

As predicted, the Keystone Pipeline has leaked. Twice! Once on May 4, 2017 (84,000 gallons of oil) and on November 16, 2017 (210,000 gallons). Then there was the Iowa Pipeline (140,000 gallons) on January 31, 2017, the Rover Pipeline in Ohio on May 10, 2017, and the Texas Pipeline (over 50,000 gallons of crude oil) on July 13, 2017. Then there was the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (400,000 gallons of oil). And these were just a few of the larger spills in 2017 alone.

The real war being fought on this planet is between water protectors (healthy people) and oil mongers (unhealthy people). Water represents life, and oil represents entropy. But, it’s not quite so simple. There is a kind of yin-yang dynamic going on here. The white dot on the oil side of the yin-yang represents energy and progress. The black dot on the water side of the yin-yang represents pollution. We use oil for energy to propel our civilizations progressively forward but at a great cost –rampant, poisonous pollution.

The problem is that the black dot on the water side is getting out of control, leading to environmental collapse at best and ecocide at worst. If we’re not careful, the yin-yang of our world is going to be a black mass of oily entropy spinning through space –a burnt-out husk of a planet. Something’s got to give.

Oil has been an industrious boon for our species. No doubt. It helped us achieve many technological marvels. But we were naïve to its pollutant power. At this point, the pollution is so bad that it supersedes the gain. Burning oil, coal, and gas is simply too toxic for us and our environment. We cannot, in good conscience, continue to burn through this now outdated mode of energy use. If we would be a healthy society, we must switch to solar, wind, electric, tide, and especially hemp, or we will burn ourselves out.

A society that continues to use outdated energy-producing methods which cannot be absorbed by their environment in a healthy way, is a profoundly sick society.

3. Our Society Pollutes Our Food

“I screamed at god for the starving child, until I realized that God was the child screaming at me.” ~Unknown

So, you still want to live, and you’ve managed to breathe air and drink water. The next step is to consume clean and healthy food. Again, this is no easy task in a sick society.

From Agent Orange to Roundup, from Nestle to Monsanto, from DDT to GMO, from Fukushima to overfished waters, from hoarding to unnecessary starvation, and everything in between, the range of ways our society has managed to destroy our food supply is laughable.

Do you know why so many fish products are mislabeled? Because corporations don’t have the guts to tell you that the fish you like are practically gone. Yes, 70%of the world’s fisheries are either completely exploited, overexploited or collapsed as a result of overfishing and warmer waters. This should come as a wake-up call of the highest order.

Again, human pollution is the biggest part of the problem. Especially plastic pollution. But another big part of the problem is how we farm, how we distribute (or lack thereof), and how we waste our food. The utter failure of our distribution system undermines the health of our species. It prevents people from thriving because they are expending all their vital energy on merely surviving.

On one end of the spectrum, we have wealthy people hoarding and/or wasting enough food to feed an entire third-world country; on the other end, we have the poor pinching pennies to eat the unhealthiest (but cheapest) “food” ever created: fast food.

One way to fix at least part of this daunting problem is through polyculture farming. Where monoculture is about industry, polyculture is about diversity. Monoculture suffers from a lack of biodiversity and nutrients in soil. Polyculture thrives with biodiversity and replenishes soil. Monoculture requires pesticides. Polyculture is a function of biological pest control. Monoculture is unnatural. Polyculture is natural. Monoculture leads to disease and famine. Polyculture leads to abundance and permaculture. Monoculture is about money over people. Polyculture is about people and healthy food over money.

A society that continues to pollute, mismanage, hoard, poison, and poorly distribute its own food supply is a profoundly sick society.

4. Our Society Creates Unhealthy Individuals

“The system cannot be fixed by the system.” ~Tom Morello

So, you’ve managed to breathe air, drink water, and eat food. But is it healthy? The question ‘do we live in a profoundly sick society’ comes down to this critical question: is the air, the water, and the food we are consuming healthy? If not, is it because of something our society is doing to the air, the water, and the food that is causing it to be unhealthy? If so, what are you, as a member of society, going to do about it?

Are you just going to ignore it and hope it works itself out? Are you going to wait for technology to bail us out somehow? Are you waiting for a hero to save the day?

The main reason we live in a profoundly sick society is because most people do nothing about the unhealthy system that props it up. As a result, we live in a sick society that creates unhealthy individuals which creates more unhealthy individuals. The unhealthy cycle will continue to repeat itself until healthy-minded individuals rise-up to change it. This is an arduously Herculean task, but no task is more important. The very health, indeed the very evolution, of our species is at stake.

When it comes down to it, a society that breathes dirty air, drinks polluted water, eats poisoned food and then continues to do all the things that cause dirty air, polluted water and poisoned food is a profoundly sick society.

Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich

Posted on August 26, 2018 by Reid Mukai

Fragment of “Butcher to the World” by Sue Coe.

By Kurt Cobb

Source: Resilience

Professor and author Douglas Rushkoff recently wrote about a group of wealthy individuals who paid him to answer questions about how to manage their lives after what they believe will be the collapse of society. He only knew at the time he was engaged that the group wanted to talk about the future of technology.

Rushkoff afterwards explained that the group assumed they would need armed guards after this collapse to defend themselves. But they rightly wondered in a collapsed society how they could even control such guards. What would they pay those guards with when the normal forms of payment ceased to mean anything? Would the guards organize against them?

Rushkoff provides a compelling analysis of a group of frightened wealthy men trying to escape the troubles of this world while alive and wishing to leave a decaying body behind when the time comes and transfer their consciousness digitally into a computer. (I’ve written about consciousness and computers previously.)

Here I want to focus on what I see as the failure of these people to understand the single most salient fact about their situations: Their wealth and their identities are social constructs that depend on thousands if not millions of people who are employees; customers; employees of vendors; government workers who maintain and run the law courts, the police force, the public physical infrastructure, legislative bodies, the administrative agencies and the educational institutions—and who thereby maintain public order, public health and public support for our current systems.

Those wealthy men aren’t taking all this with them when they die. And, while they are alive, their identities will shift radically if the intellectual, social, economic and governmental infrastructure degrades to the point where their safety is no longer guaranteed by at least minimal well-being among others in society. If the hunt for diminishing food and other resources comes to their doors, no army of guards will ultimately protect them against the masses who want to survive just as badly but lack the means.

One would think that pondering this, the rich who are capable of pondering it would have an epiphany: Since their security and well-being ultimately hinges on the security and well-being of all, they ought to get started helping to create a society that provides that in the face of the immense challenges we face such as climate change, resource depletion, possible epidemics, growing inequality and other devils waiting in the wings of the modern world. (In fairness, some do understand this.)

At least one reason for the failure of this epiphany to occur is described by author and student of risk Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb describes how the lives the rich become increasingly detached from the rest of society as arbiters of taste for the wealthy convince them that this detachment is the reward of wealth. The rich visit restaurants that include only people like themselves. They purchase larger and larger homes with fewer and fewer people in them until they can spend whole days without seeing another person. For the wealthiest, neighbors are a nuisance. Better to surround oneself with a depopulated forest than people next door.

The rich are convinced by this experience that they are lone heroes and at the same time lone victims, pilloried by the media as out of touch and heartless. These self-proclaimed victims may give to the Cato Institute to reinforce the idea that the individual can go it alone and should. They themselves have done it (or at least think they have). Why can’t everyone else?

The wealthier they are, the more their fear and paranoia mounts that others not so wealthy will try to take their wealth; or that impersonal forces in the marketplace will destroy it or at least diminish it significantly; or that government will be taken over by the mob and expropriate their wealth through high taxes or outright seizure. And, of course, there are the natural disasters of uncontrolled climate change and plague, just to name two.

It’s no wonder some of the super rich are buying luxury bunkers to ride out the apocalypse. These bunkers come with an array of amenities that include a cinema, indoor pool and spa, medical first aid center, bar, rock climbing wall, gym, and library. High-speed internet is included though one wonders how it will work after the apocalypse.

But strangely, even in these luxury bunkers built in former missile silos, dependence on and trust in others cannot be avoided. The units are actually condominiums. And while they contain supplies and ammunition said to be enough for five years, it will be incumbent on the owners, whether they like it not, to become intimately acquainted with their neighbors in order to coordinate a defense of the compound should that need arise.

The irony, of course, is that this is precisely the kind of communal entanglement which their wealth is supposed to allow them to avoid. Society, it seems, is everywhere you go. You cannot avoid it even when eternity is advancing on your door. And, you cannot escape with your consciousness into a computer (assuming that will one day be possible) if there’s no stable technical society to tend to computer maintenance and no power to keep the computer on.

It turns out that we are here for a limited time and that trusting and reciprocal relationships with others are ultimately the most important possessions we have—unless we are too rich or too frightened to realize it.

Survival of the Richest

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Reid Mukai

The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

By Douglas Rushkoff

Source: Medium

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: society

Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich