David DeGraw
Activist Post
Seventeen years ago, I read a book called The Evolving Self.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it profoundly affected the
direction of my life. Here’s the section of the book that became a
splinter in my mind and resonated the most with me:
In
order to gain control of consciousness, we must learn how to moderate
the biases built into the machinery of the brain. We allow a whole
series of illusions to stand between ourselves and reality…. These
distortions are comforting, yet they need to be seen through for the
self to be truly liberated… to come ever closer to getting a glimpse of
the universal order, and of our part in it.
Since reading
that, I have dedicated my life to coming “ever closer to getting a
glimpse of the universal order, and of our part in it.” After years of
research and analysis, I’ve come to hard-fought, battle-tested
conclusions that I’ve been sharing with people to great effect, and will
share with you now. This will not be for the faint of heart. It will
hit hard and we don’t have much time, so let’s get right down to it.
At this point, if you spend much time researching
power politics or the distribution of wealth, resources and basic
necessities, it seems evident and undeniable, dare I say, “common
sense,” that we, in fact, live in a neo-feudal society built on debt and
mental slavery.
That may sound like over-the-top rhetoric, and it obviously sounds
extreme to propagandized and conditioned minds, and yes, it is extreme.
However, it is the unfortunate reality of the present situation. The
facts are there for the rational and unbiased mind to absorb and
comprehend.
If you take a few minutes of your time and read this through, it will
easily be proven. We will look at how the system works, and then,
hopefully, we will begin the process of evolving society together, as
grandiose as that may sound.
Let’s start by giving some context and perspective on present
circumstances by breaking down some economic data. As Thomas Jefferson
once said, “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions
of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
I: Unprecedented Wealth
For the past 35 years, with technological advancements, there has been
an explosion in production and profits, in wealth creation. That
unprecedented increase in wealth, as many of you know, has gone to the
top economic 1%. Most of it, the lion’s share of it, went to not even
the top economic 1%, but to the
top one-hundredth of one percent, to the modern day aristocracy.
After analyzing the most recent data, here’s the headline: US millionaire households now have $50 trillion in wealth. They have
$39 trillion in legally accounted for wealth, and an estimate of
$11 trillion hidden in offshore accounts.
Let that sink in for a moment… 50 TRILLION DOLLAR$.
Most people cannot even comprehend how much $1 trillion is, let alone
$50 trillion. One trillion is equal to 1000 billion, or
$1,000,000,000,000.00.
Only one-tenth of one percent of the population makes one million
dollars a year, and, again, most of that wealth is in the top
one-hundredth of one percent.
To show how consolidated the wealth is, even in the upper most portion
of the top one percentile, the richest 400 people have as much wealth as
185 million Americans combined; that’s only 400 people with as much
wealth as 60% of the entire US population.
Before
continuing, let me defuse the reactionary propagandized mind’s
instinctive response. This is not about demonizing people just because
they have money. There are many people who are using their wealth and
resources to improve the human condition. It’s important to understand
that the focus here is not on the people who have a mere $10 million or
so in wealth. When discussing the modern day aristocracy, the main focus
is on the pathological, shortsighted and greed-addicted forces that are
doing much more to limit human potential than enhance it.
Broadly speaking, the aristocracy is composed of governments, political
parties, policy groups, think tanks, intel factions, private military
companies, large global corporations, banks and media empires. Included
in that are mega-wealthy billionaires and CEOs who have unprecedented
control of wealth and resources. For example, the Business Roundtable,
the people who run the 147 inter-connected corporations who control half
of the world economy.
However, the ultimate point here is to show people that there is presently
more than enough wealth and capabilities to solve societal problems.
We can truly evolve society in unprecedented fashion. At this point,
there is an overwhelming majority of the population, even a majority of
the mega-wealthy, who realize that our present systems are obsolete,
unsustainable and unstable. We don’t need to spend our finite time and
energy fighting with each other. We already have a critical mass of
aware citizens, we just need to inspire and organize them to build the
cultural and political will. Once we do that, we will be an unstoppable
force.
Let’s get back to that 50 trillion number, because we have had an entire
generation of mind-blowing wealth creation that has been systematically
withheld from the population.
$50,000,000,000,000.00
Can you comprehend how much money $50 trillion is? Just to give a little
context, we can end world hunger and provide clean drinking water to
everyone on the planet for an estimated
$40 billion. Again, one trillion is one thousand billion, and we are talking about $50 trillion.
Imagine what could be done with that amount of wealth. Imagine the
implications, the possibilities. Imagine how we could evolve society, to
the benefit of everyone, with modern technology and just a fraction of
that staggering amount of wealth.
The average American cannot comprehend how much wealth there is because
there is no frame of reference, no comparison of scale or historical
precedent. If Americans had an understanding of how much wealth is being
kept from them and the possibilities of what we could do with that
wealth, we would have a full-blown societal evolution right now.
II: Debt Slavery
It is the denial of wealth that keeps you in check; it keeps you in debt.
Just
at the point when technological advancement, production, distribution
and wealth increases should have made everyone’s life much easier, just
when basic necessities should have become much more affordable and
easier to obtain, they became more expensive.
The cost of production dropped dramatically and efficiency of
distribution skyrocketed. Housing, food, health and education costs
should have plummeted dramatically. However, most basic necessities now
come at a much higher price, and people are forced to take on increasing
levels of debt to keep up. As most people are aware, student debt,
consumer debt, medical debt and household debt have reached all-time
record highs.
As an old wise person once said, “There are two ways to conquer and
enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”
We live in a neo-feudal system of debt slavery. The indentured servant is now the indebted consumer.
When you understand the wealth at hand, you begin to grasp the crime
against humanity that is afoot. We live in the richest, most
technologically advanced society humanity has ever known. Yet, here we
are, in the 21st century, with an all-time record number of Americans
living in poverty.
Crime Against Humanity
After
careful consideration, it must be said that this is not only the
greatest theft of wealth in history; it is also the greatest crime
against humanity in history.
People
can’t afford to pay their medical billions. Millions upon millions of
American families have lost their homes, and millions more are on the
verge of losing their homes. An all-time record number of children are
going hungry. Meanwhile, record-breaking profits and record-breaking
bonuses for the bailed out banana republic aristocracy.
How healthy is a society when 400 people have as much wealth as 185
million of their neighbors combined? What kind of a system produces a
result like that? As famed social psychologist John Dewey said, “There
is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual,
group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective
powers, of other individuals, groups or classes.”
Now that you are beginning to grasp the wealth at hand, and the
possibilities of how that wealth can be used to evolve society, let’s
take a look at how we got into this situation and how exactly it is that
they got away with hoarding so much wealth.
To paraphrase a man who fought against the aristocracy, ‘The depravity
and amount of suffering required for the accumulation of such a
staggering magnitude of wealth, in the hands of a few, is kept out of
the picture, out of the mass media, and it is not easy to make people
see or understand this.’ Especially when you have an all-encompassing
mainstream media propaganda system.
III: Mental Slavery – Conditioned Consciousness
To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 246 BC
The mainstream media is the most effective weapon of mass oppression humanity has ever known.
Since the early 1900s and World War I, a massive propaganda system has
been in place. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is all well
documented. Research Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, Ivy Lee, George
Creel and the Committee on Public Information for starters. In fact, you
don’t even need a conspiracy theory; you just need a basic
understanding of propaganda, social psychology and behaviorism – more on
that later.
The bottom line, as Dewey once said, “We live exposed to the greatest flood of mass suggestion humanity has ever experienced.”
Speaking from personal experience, having been born and raised inside
this propaganda system, and still obviously living inside it, I have
come to realize that even the most independent minded among us vastly
underestimates how mentally conditioned we all are. Most people are no
more consciously aware of this mental domination then they are aware of
gravity. It’s like the air we breathe.
For two obvious examples, let’s start with television consumption and advertising. The average American watches more than
five hours of TV a day,
every single day of their life. American children view more than
40,000 ads per year, every single year of their life. Think about that. That’s intensive mental domination administered on a daily basis,
from the cradle to the grave.
Ultimately,
as Phil Merikle summed it up, “It’s what advertisers have known all
along: if we just keep the exposure rate up, people will be influenced.”
Repetition, it’s all about repetition.
Repetitive messages fill our mental atmosphere. To paraphrase Philip Lesley in
Managing the Human Climate,
‘When a message appears all around you, you tend to accept it and take
it for granted. You find yourself surrounded by it and your subconscious
mind absorbs and becomes immersed in the climate of repetitive ideas.’
They form the origins of your thoughts. It’s where your desires,
opinions and perspectives are born.
To spin a McLuhan riff, the mainstream mass media is the software on
which our minds run; it’s our operating system. It’s an extension of our
nervous system. Repetitive mainstream propaganda creates a belief
system, popular reference points, symbols, archetypes, mental patterns, a
mindset and groupthink, all based on repetition – and groupthink is a
highly contagious infectious disease.
It’s hard to escape groupthink. As with freedom and democracy, you must
be ever vigilant to avoid the tyranny of groupthink and cultural
conditioning. As Walter Lippmann said, “In the great blooming, buzzing
confusion of the outer world, we pick out what our culture has already
defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in
the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”
To remix a quote from Dostoevsky, "Leave people alone without mass media
and they will be lost and confused. They will not know what to support,
what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and
what to despise."
Malcolm X said it best, “The media’s the most powerful entity on earth.
They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty
innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the
masses.”
The mainstream media keeps everyone isolated inside a false reality, a
pseudo mental environment. People are trapped in a bubble of status quo
supporting reality, in a bubble of what’s good for shortsighted,
short-term corporate interests.
People’s consciousness and awareness gets conditioned and contracted, they become isolated and detached from wider reality.
People are born and raised inside mass media created illusions. As
Eduardo Galeano put it, “The majority must resign itself to the
consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor,
illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated
and of power to the weak.”
As Harold Lasswell said in 1927, “The new antidote to willfulness is
propaganda. If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept
its chains of silver. If it will not love, honor, and obey, it must not
expect to escape seduction.”
Now, let’s sharpen our focus a bit and look from a more practical perspective.
IV: The Spectrum of Thinkable Thought
The censorship that is most prevalent today is the most dangerous form.
Not censorship of explicit words, sex or violence, but censorship of any
thoughts outside of shortsighted corporate ideology. Any thoughts that
lead to critical thought on the established power structure or veer
outside of the spectrum of status quo supporting opinion are left out of
the debate, out of mainstream public consciousness.
The mainstream press does not cover the most vital social, economic and
political issues. The more important something is, the less they report
on it. If mentioned at all, it’s mentioned in passing, with little, if
any, in-depth reporting, discussion and debate on it.
It’s censorship by omission and bullshit on repetition.
As Noam Chomsky observed, this is how propaganda and social control
posing as freedom and democracy works: “The smart way to keep people
passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable
opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum…. That gives
people the sense that there’s freethinking going on, while all the time
the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put
on the range of the debate.”
To paraphrase Alex Carey, they create ‘the spectrum of thinkable
thought. They set the terms of debate, to determine the kinds of
questions that will dominate public consciousness, people’s thoughts.
They set the political agenda in ways that are favorable to shortsighted
corporate interests. The debate is never about the curtailment of the
manipulative power of entrenched global corporations.’
Imagine wall-to-wall 24/7 news coverage of the trillions of dollars in
fraudulent activity that got us into this mess. Imagine in-depth
coverage of the corruption of our political process through a system of
bribery that makes the mafia look like amateurs.
What about the staggering consolidation of wealth? Imagine if the media
kept discussing how a small percentage of the population has 50 trillion
dollars, then they started debating how we could use just a fraction of
that money to solve problems, create solutions and evolve society.
What if they reported on all the wealth and resources that a small
number of corporations control, then debated how that wealth and those
resources could be redeployed to get us onto a sustainable and thriving
path?
When you understand what is possible, you see how truly corrupt,
shortsighted, ignorant and obsolete our system of rule is. You then
realize that our mainstream media system is pure propaganda.
When you see the reality that they don’t tell you about, it becomes all
too clear. If you were to just look at what they don’t tell you, you
would see. Mainstream media is the most effective weapon of mass
oppression humanity has ever known. It’s hard to break free, when you
are always told you are free.
As Huxley put it in Brave New World Revisited, “The victim of
mind-manipulation does not know that they are a victim. To them, the
walls of their prison are invisible, and they believe they are free.”
You can’t break free until you see the walls. The whips and chains have
evolved into TVs and radios. As William Blum said, “Propaganda is to
democracy what violence is to dictatorships.” If television was around
in the 1770s, we would still be living under British rule.
In the land of propaganda, tyranny is democracy. It’s “enlightened
despotism.” When it comes to oppression, it’s all cyclical yet
evolutionary. Most people live in a mental cage now, they toil on
mentally conditioned plantations.
V: Behaviorism & Assembly Line Intelligentsia
People reading this may try to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. We
must always be conscious of the reactionary propagandized mind and the
army of paid off propagandists who uphold this system of mental
domination. “Conspiracy theory” is the ultimate label to trigger
dismissal without causing people to think about the content and
substance of the message.
When it comes to the reactionary propagandized mind, their impulsive,
instinctive dismissal further demonstrates how well they have been
indoctrinated and conditioned. Once again, you don’t need a conspiracy
theory to understand the system of mental conditioning; you just need to
have a basic understanding of propaganda, social psychology and
behaviorism. Modern indoctrinated intelligentsia have been produced like
products off an assembly line. In The Genesis of the Technocratic Elite, Zoran Vidakovic breaks down how the assembly line of indoctrination works:
Selection,
education, and specific indoctrination of technical and administrative
cadres are carried out first in metropolitan educational and research
factories and their branches in dependent societies, under the wing of
the superficially independent foundations which sustain the
international projects of ‘technical aid,’ and then within the personnel
policy of the transnational corporations that raise people from the
local environments to responsible managerial and technical functions in
their internationally located branches, or that in other ways
subordinate and direct the ‘modernized’ industrial entrepreneurs,
agrarian ‘reformers,’ functionaries, and leading intellectuals from the
ministries and banks, universities, and public information, cultural,
and scientific institutions.
The
essential effect of this great factory for the almost assembly line
production of dependent and emasculated ‘technocratic elites’ is that
the material position, status, and professional success of the members
of these groups imperatively depends on their conformity to the ideology
of dependence and the interiorization of the intellectual, political,
and ideological characteristics of this social type programmed in
metropolitan laboratories for the technological, social, and cultural
transformation of ‘developing countries.’…
The
ideology of total repression unites with the ideology of technological
and cultural dependency and assimilation; in this union repression gains
strength as the condition of the entire dependent economic growth,
technological progress, and ‘modernization of society,’ as a circle of
insurmountable dependency on the import of prefabricated knowledge and
technical and consumerist models is closed up by the ambitions of the
protagonists of authoritarian rule.
We live in a Skinner
box. It’s classic “behavioral modification” (b-mod) within a “token
economy.” We have an outdated system of incentives; you incentivize and
reward certain behavior, and you punish or withdraw basic necessities
for other behavior. It’s behaviorism 101.
Give people a paycheck to have certain opinions, to do certain things.
You can see it everywhere, in almost all professions, not just the
media. If you think a certain way, if you do certain things, you will be
awarded with a paycheck. If you don’t, you lose your paycheck. Or, as
Thomas Paine said in
Rights of Man, “Those who do not participate in this enacting do not get fed.”
People get paid a lot of money to spew bullshit talking point propaganda
on a daily basis. The truth of the matter: if you propagate the message
of tyrants, and if you are good at it, you can become rich and famous.
That’s what primitive self-obsessed ego-driven careerists do. They are
the ultimate pawns of empire. They enrich themselves by riding the
coattails of conquerors.
As
W.E.H. Lecky once said, ‘The simple fact of applying certain penalties
to the profession of particular opinions, and rewards to the profession
of opposite opinions, while it will make many hypocrites, it will also
make many converts.’
Our Skinner box society, our token economy is run by the modern day
aristocracy through a system of enlightened despotism. You either bow
down and play by their rules or you lose access to basic necessities.
It’s the root of modern monetary enslavement – debt and wage slavery.
The fact of the matter, the truth of the matter: we are not supposed to
be freethinking participatory citizens involved in the decision-making
processes that guide our lives and determine our fate. We are mentally
conditioned to be spectators, mindless reactionary consumers and wage
slaves.
VI: Totalitarian Minds Inside the All-Consuming Cult
If you want to get wicked about it, we could quote
extensively from the work of Edward Bernays, Gustave LeBon or Walter
Lippman on the “bewildered herd,” but that’s too easy. Let’s drop some
Jacques Ellul, from his 1965 analysis of the social mind,
Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes:
Propaganda is today a greater danger to
mankind than any of the other more grandly advertised threats hanging
over the human race…. Propaganda ruins not only democratic ideas but
also democratic behavior – the foundation of democracy, the very quality
without which it cannot exist…. Propaganda destroys its very
foundations. It creates a man who is suited to a totalitarian society….
A
man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to
propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself – of the
style of democratic life, understanding of others… he is a ‘totalitarian
man with democratic convictions,’ but those convictions do not change
his behavior in the least. Such contradiction is in no way felt by the
individual for whom democracy has become a myth and a set of democratic
imperatives, merely stimuli that activate conditioned reflexives.
The
word democracy, having become a simple incitation, no longer has
anything to do with democratic behavior. And the citizen can repeat
indefinitely ‘the sacred formulas of democracy’ while acting like a
storm trooper.
That is as accurate a depiction of the
average modern American as I have ever come across. In the same book,
Ellul went on to explain the inherent danger of our two-party system and
the general apathy Americans have toward politics:
The conflicting propaganda of opposing parties
is essentially what leads to political abstention. But this is not the
abstention of the free spirit which asserts itself; it is the result of
resignation, the external symptom of a series of inhibitions. Such a man
has not decided to abstain; under diverse pressures, subjected to
shocks and distortions, he can no longer (even if he wanted to) perform a
political act. What is even more serious is that this inhibition not
only is political, but also progressively takes over the whole of his
being and leads to a general attitude of surrender….
At
the same time, this crystallization closes his mind to all new ideas.
The individual now has a set of prejudices and beliefs…. His entire
personality now revolves around those elements. Every new idea will
therefore be troublesome to his entire being.
In
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,
Guy DeBord summed up the primary function of the mainstream media, “For
what is communicated are orders; and with perfect harmony, those who
give them are also those who tell us what they think of them.”
For an even deeper understanding on how propaganda works, let’s return to Ellul:
Governmental propaganda suggests that public
opinion demand this or that decision; it provokes the will of a people,
who spontaneously say nothing. But, once evoked, formed, and
crystallized on a point, that will becomes the people’s will.
The
government really acts on its own, it just gives the impression of
obeying public opinion, after having first built that public opinion.
The point is to make the masses demand of the government what the
government has already decided to do.”
They “amputate the argument” and replace it with “engineered consensus.” As Robert Lynd wrote in
Democracy In Reverse,
“They operate actually to confirm the citizen’s false sense of security
in totaling up ‘what the majority think’… The false sense of the
public’s being ‘boss’ that they encourage operates to narcotize public
awareness of the seriousness of problems and of the drastic social
changes many contemporary situations require.”
In 1935, Malcolm Willey explained, “An individual may be moved to action
through repetition, as, for example, in advertising; but his action is
made more certain if he is made to realize that thousands, even
millions, of others are thinking and feeling as he himself does. Herein
lies the importance of the contemporary communication network; it not
only carries its symbols to the individual, it also impresses upon him a
sense of numbers.”
James Madison also realized this when he wrote
Public Opinion,
“The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be
ascertained, and the less difficult to be counterfeited.” That was
written in 1791, when the US population was only about five million
people.
In 1901, Gabriel Tarde wrote, “Newspapers have transformed… unified in
space and diversified in time the conversations of individuals, even
those who do not read papers but who, talking to those who do, are
forced to follow the groove of their borrowed thoughts. One pen suffices
to set off a million tongues.”
Bertrand Russell also hit at the root in
Free Thought and Official Propaganda,
when he said, “it is much easier than it used to be to spread
misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is
more important than in former times to the holders of power.”
In
Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, Alex Carey summed it all up
in this one sentence: “That this simple regime of thought-control should
prove to have been so triumphant, with so little public resistance,
must be put down to its persistent, repetitive orchestration.”
For all the discussion and focus on political and economic policy, what
we really need to do on the individual level, first and foremost, is
transcend conditioned consciousness. Once we do that, positive political and economic policy will be the natural byproduct and inevitable result.
VII: Free Your Mind ~*~
You have to understand, most of these people
are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so
hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it…
Sooner or later you’re going to realize, just as I did, that there’s a
difference between knowing the path, and walking the path. I’m trying to
free your mind… But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that
has to walk through it. – The Matrix
In revisiting
the reactionary propagandized mind, when you confront a member of the
consumer cult and expose their mental conditioning processes, the false
reality and illusions that people are trapped in, they will
instinctively dismiss or attack you. People will bite your hand when you
try to remove the mental leash from their neck.
In
The Evolving Self, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains further,
“To prevent its annihilation, the ego forces us to be constantly on the
watch for anything that might threaten the symbols on which it relies
for identity. Our view of the world becomes polarized into ‘good’ and
‘bad’ – things that support the image, and those that threaten it.” This
is also how the third Mayan veil works. In this case, your media
created cultural programming; it distorts reality to make it congruent
with conditioned views.
Anything that deviates from the conditioned norm is ridiculed and
instantly, instinctively dismissed before critical thinking skills are
activated. The repetitious conditioning process leads to an amputation
of critical thinking faculties. That which people are not familiar with
becomes odd, evil and damaging to their mental construct, to their
thought patterns, to their fabricated self-image.
For instance, we tend to look for anything that confirms our
pre-existing beliefs while ignoring anything that goes against them.
This is how confirmation bias works, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell: ‘If
people are offered a fact which goes against their instincts or their
cultural programming, they will refuse to believe it. If, on the other
hand, they are offered something which falls in accordance to their
cultural programming, in accordance to their conditioning, they will
accept it, even on the slightest evidence.’
Having been bred within this all-pervasive propaganda system, I
understand the disbelief people feel. When our conditioned belief system
is called into question and comes crashing down, it is a hard pill to
swallow. No one wants to believe that they have been manipulated or
taken advantage of. This will stir up an instinctive dismissal, a
powerful emotional response. We are creatures of habit, and it is much
easier, over the short-term, to just stay on a path of denial and
ignorance. Hear no evil. See no evil.
The
task upon us is to consciously counter conditioned consciousness. The
most difficult and important prerequisite to freedom is the ability to
see past all of your culturally programmed biases. It takes great
personal inner-strength and determination to achieve this; you will
inevitably have to face many facts that will go against your programmed,
conditioned beliefs. If one can endure this, one will eventually come
to experience true freedom.
However, even if one is strong enough to have an awareness of their
conditioning, it is another level to confront and transcend it. As
Nietzsche said, “Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the
courage for that which they really know.”
Are you brave enough to see?
Do you want to change it?
–Trent Reznor
Noam Chomsky makes the ease in which you can free your mind clear, and stresses the importance of doing so:
To take apart the system of illusions and
deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary
reality [is] not a task that requires extraordinary skill or
understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness
to apply one’s analytical skills that almost all people have and that
they can exercise….
As long as
some specialized class is in position of authority, it is going to set
policy in the special interests that it serves, but the conditions of
survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the
interests of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global
community.
The question is
whether privileged elite should dominate mass communication and should
use this power as they tell us they must – namely to impose necessary
illusions, to manipulate and deceive…. In this possibly terminal phase
of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be
treasured; they may well be essential to survival.
Most
Americans are aware of the fact that we are on a disastrous path.
However, many of us feel powerless to change things. These feelings are
only a result of our conditioning and induced delusion. We have become
so propagandized that many of us do not realize the significant position
that we are in. We are not poor people trapped in a third world
existence. We are a mass of people who have the power to evolve society
and change the course of history.
It is stunning to hear all these people, so many people saying that they
can’t do anything about it. Far too many people think that we can’t
create change; that is why we don’t.
Why do you think that we can’t change the world? How did you come to that conclusion? Who taught you to believe that?
The overwhelming majority feels powerless to create political change. If
they would just realize that they are the overwhelming majority, they
would no longer feel this way. As Ellul said, “Only when he realizes his
delusion will he experience the beginning of genuine freedom – in the
act of realization itself – be it only from the effort to stand back and
look squarely at the phenomenon and reduce it to raw fact.”
VIII: Cyberspace Underground Railroad
Time comes and times go…
Thanks to the Internet, to the cyberspace underground railroad, people
are now freeing their minds from conditioning and entrenched power
censors. The Internet is to our generation what pamphlets were to our
forefathers’ generation during the first American Revolution. People are
going to the Internet to find out all the information that the
corporate mainstream media is not letting people know about. As a
result, we now have a critical mass of informed and outraged citizens
who are also using the Internet to organize. They are now transcending
conditioned consciousness and expanding their awareness on a scale
unprecedented in human history.
A new empowering collective consciousness, built on self-sufficient and
aware individuals, is quickly evolving. As William Adams Brown said, “We
are developing a social conscience, and situations which would have
been accepted a generation ago as a matter of course are felt as an
intolerable scandal.” John Dewey continues, “Liberty in the concrete
signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces;
emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life
but now experienced as bondage…. Today, it signifies liberation from
material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent
multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are at
hand.”
The inevitable demise of our current neo-feudal system was summed up by
George Orwell when he said, “For if leisure and security were enjoyed by
all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by
poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves;
and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize
that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it
away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a
basis of poverty and ignorance.”
If you are still wondering if we can truly create change, consider this
simple truth from Strobe Talbott, “All countries are basically social
arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how
permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they
are all artificial and temporary.”
Our government was created in the time of the horse and wagon. It took
days or weeks to deliver one handwritten message across state lines.
Today, we have instantaneous worldwide communication and an
unprecedented amount of wealth in the most technologically advanced
society. The masses are now connected and aware. It’s time to evolve our
obsolete system. You know it, and so does everyone else who pays
attention. We will soon have new ways of living that will make our
modern age like look the Stone Age.
People are throwing off their mental shackles and realizing their
potential. A new renaissance and age of enlightenment has begun. Another
world is happening. Humanity is rising.
Enough writing from the Underground. It’s time to contrive to be born,
to transform our world. We are building a decentralized global network
of self-sustaining community incubators designed to maximize the
transformative energy around us and facilitate the evolution of society.
If you want to join us in this effort,
enlist here.
Before It’s News – by Monica Davis
