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Nietzsche, Freud, Bernays, Barrie, Kafka, and Disney ushered in Western selfishness, paving the way for the rampant nihilistic consumerism of the 20th and 21st centuries.
In Nietzsche, Kafka, and Freud we see romantic dandies, shouting out their terror and terribleness to the world. These are humans who believe themselves to be monsters, and will only be happy when the world is made monstrous.
Barrie, Bernays, and Disney are the “good” side of the horror – they decided that what humans most needed was to return to childhood. Their project was to condemn the human soul to perpetual youth.
These are “great” men precisely because what the West needed during it’s Empire’s rule in late capitalism to perpetuate itself is existential angst (so it’s suffering can compare to the weaponized death, mass starvation, and disease it continually causes) and perpetual youth (so it can never take responsibility for it’s actions).
Any and all people who serve that purpose are lauded by the elite, and those who are particularly valuable, as each of the pathetic humans listed above, are called great by those same elite and each of their servants and devoted slaves.
As the West finished exploring the world in the 18th and 19th centuries it realized there was little left to exploit. It could fight within itself – a depressing option. Under these terms of an end of world expansionism it’s main goal became how to best maintain it’s system of world domination.
With the “3rd world” largely controlled and confidently held in control, the ruling class turned to “it’s own” citizens – the Western populace. This populace was no longer required to do anything – the end of world expansionism by the West marks the end of the desire for an active and able populace – the age of the rational individual was over.
The New Age which began in the 19th century and in which we are still living requires the individual to be useless. This uselessness is achieved in many ways – one is through bureaucracy and totalitarianism, as detailed in Brave New World, 1984, The Trial, and elsewhere. Another is through the use of trivia and distractions to socially render human useless – discussing sports scores for example, or watching TV, playing video games, etc. propagandistically termed “entertaining” the purpose of which is to remove the Western populace from having political effect.
Yet another method is psychological/physiological torture and control – the purpose of advertising is to control human wants. The purpose of pharmaceuticals is not to cure illness but to allow people to get sick safely – one can indulge in depression and then simply take an anti-depressant – indulge in fatty foods and take a diet pill.
The Western populace doesn’t mind any of this – it is literally bought off – the supposedly “poor people” of the West are actually part of the global middle class, while the “middle class” of the West are very wealthy on a global scale. The Western populace sees their utter uselessness as human beings, their degradation, their becoming a simple vessel for capitalist consumption, as merely the price paid for a life of ease and luxury. They look at the 3rd world and see the alternative for themself should they become “uppity”.
Corporations are the primary tool of this New Age, their power growing vastly during the 20th and 21st centuries. They are the rulers of the world, not governments.
One of the social outcomes of this new age is a complete loss of self-discipline. Any problem capitalism can fix and the individual is useless anyway – the logical conclusion as manufactured by the ruling class is that one must give in to despair and let consumer goods be the hope.
(Taken from an email to a friend):
Most journalists are not aware of their corruption – my argument does not require them to not be concerned about their reputation nor to attempt to hide or subvert the truth. Gary Webb, the journalist I mentioned to you in Ann Arbor, saw “the truth” about journalism and it drove him to commit suicide. He’s a typical example of the self-delusion of journalists regarding the honor of their profession. Most journalists have defense mechanisms in place which prevent them from traveling down the road Webb did which would result in their disillusionment.
Who creates the reputation of journalists? Surely not people like me – people like their bosses do – people like their co-workers. People like their willing readers.
Journalists are self-deluded. They are self-deluded in order to continue to maintain (and perhaps “improve”) their imperial lifestyles, which they could not do if they accepted facts about the world into their conscience. So tens of thousands of corpses per day created by the economic system the West invented and rules – irrelevant or “reinterpreted”. So mountains of corpses in Iraq and Afghanistan caused by imperial invasion and occupation – the same. So corporate totalitarian rule – laughed at.
Examine racism for a moment. Racism isn’t inherent in humanity – noone is born a racist. The primary point of racism is to lubricate the passage of colonization and imperialism. So for example the indigenous Americans the white settlers planned to exterminate were “Savages, horrifically uncivilized”, and therefore justified in being exterminated. Blacks from Africa imported for chattel slave labor, likewise. This is the exact reason why during imperial wars the enemy is given derogatory names (like kike, limey, gook, hajji) but then those names are forgotten and they return to their previous names when they are no longer being violently stolen from (just tacitly so).
Take a look at the Bush Administration for a moment. This is only the 2nd administration in history (Nixon’s being the first) to recognize on a level approaching consciousness it’s own deep corruption. Both administrations were punished for this terrible social blasphemy with extremely low poll numbers and Nixon’s impeachment. Though curiously, an examination of the actual effects of each administration places Reagan as arguably the worst president in modern history, and Clinton fares little better. Yet because Reagan was oblivious, optimistic, and smiled a whole lot, he’s applauded. Applauded by many of the same people who believe they are journalists crusading for the truth. If a president appears to be corrupt he sends the wrong message to the people.
This is why there is endless video mocking George W. Bush for his various verbal games and silly antics. It’s quite ok to destroy the world in imperial fashion, as Reagan and Clinton also did – the real crime is to know you’re doing it.
In Dante Alighieri’s work The Inferno, he says that the path to heaven is through hell. The social outcome of this belief is the embrace of corruption, the practice of evil for good ends.
Led Zeppelin references Dante in it’s most popular work, Stairway to Heaven, which features a woman corrupting her body (drug use) in order to climb the stairway to heaven.
What this spiritual methodology results in is the destruction of the earth for the sake of holiness, and I find no greater blasphemy, no more hideous conception, no more unfortunate embrace, than the West holding Dante in such high regard.
Dante coincided with the rise of capitalism in 14th century Europe. Capitalism and feudalism are similar systems, differing largely in that feudalism was linked closely to heredity, whereas capitalism is linked more socially (the concept of “networking” for example is strictly capitalist).
Under Dante Western culture shifted toward worldly destruction for the sake of spiritual ambition.
Under Dante, nuclear war and global warming are considered “holy”. They are necessary parts of the path through hell. According to The Rapture, the true believers will simply “ascend to heaven” and leave a smoldering earth behind (hence the “Left Behind” series).
Art is dead. Philosophy is dead. All that is left is politics.
Kafka and Nietzsche share the same personality – the creation of meaning through (their own) sacrifice – as plunging the knife into the virgin’s heart was meant to renew civilization for those we call “uncivilized”. But we’ve become disillusioned – the myth of culture is no more.
This disillusionment (on a popular level) occurred during the 1960s – the difference between music pre- and post- that period is that afterwards music understands it’s undead state. When people say the music of the 1960s was “alive” they mean that music understood it’s approaching death and decided to throw one last party – the party to end all parties.
Culture has been a horrific myth – it’s primary purpose and result is imperialism insofar as cultural production is “traded” for material goods – nevermind that this trade is only desired by the cultural producers. It’s death will either pave the way for global democracy or global totalitarianism.
Film critics make a critical error when they berate a film for it’s “emptiness”, such as J.K. Rowling being criticized for Harry Potter being a derivative work. All the undead can do is reference the living. That’s what modern films are – either that or they attempt to revive a corpse better off left dead.
The death of culture of course goes hand-in-hand with the “death of Western Civilization” – in the same sense that a community with nothing left to trade goes extinct. Or raises their military budget to $1 Trillion a year and tries to rule the world by force and domination, in which case the soul goes extinct and the mechanics of empire carry on.
The 19th century saw the rise of two related phenomena – a global imperialist network dominated by the West and existentialist philosophy. This philosophy was taken for THE modern problem, and psychoanalysis developed soon after to solve the problem.
Nietzsche and Freud were the two great servants of the Western ruling class – one to invent a grand reason for existential despair (the Death of God) and the second to invent a perpetual machine to keep Westerners focused on themselves and not on the world they are in the process of destroying.
The point of psychoanalysis is not to work or to cure, but to act as a shower, washing neurotic dirt off the body (real or perceived, it hardly matters) which due to the corrupt West simply piles up again. Psychoanalysis is a game.
The neurotic perpetually seeks to “cure himself” – the most successful neurotic turns inward to such an extent that the outside world barely exists at all – hence the rise in asceticism in the West.
Existentialism has been ridiculously profitable for Western capitalists – it’s progress enabled Western corporations to run rampant over the world, gaining great power and wealth.
The point of Existentialism is not to *describe* Western culture as meaningless, but to *invent* Western culture as meaningless – to will that the world as dominated by that culture be meaningless. Existentialism didn’t describe a world in despair but created a world in despair, to depress it’s victims (who believe themselves *enlightened*!) and make sure they wouldn’t stand in the way of world domination by global capital.
We now live in existentialism’s aftermath. A corporate totalitarian nightmare.
Existentialism and psychoanalysis were invented by the West in order to turn Western society’s attention inward, toward “it’s problems” rather than the problems it was causing in the world through world capitalism of which it was (and is) the imperial center. Existentialism is the leading cultural cause of Western global destruction. The neurotic is not waging a battle for his soul between wealthy dominator and compassionate decency, but endlessly self-absorbed, with ongoing “issues”, which serve as a perpetual bubble keeping the world at bay. The neurotic wants one of two things – either endless attempts at reconciliation, whereby he visits psychoanalysts, takes pills which don’t work, talks about his “feelings” over and over, or he’s “cured”, where he feels “peace of mind” with no substantial change in his identity.
Far from radicals, Nietzsche, Kafka and others are servants of imperial power, turning the West’s attention inward at the very time it was exerting increasing control through global capital networks. Existentialism fully succeeded in it’s tasks, and global capital reigned throughout the 20th century and so far into the 21st. Only the covert socialist Neoconservatives have thus far threatened global capital, and they’ve been shut down.
On a blank mind what will be written?
Then erase and try again
Adventurers ho! So surely smitten
Endless hope no place to go
Binge on love then throw up
Fandom’s price a heavy toil
Fated so convinced of value
In swill to see a pot of gold
Headshot! They lust
For glory blood and the final kill
To stand supreme on endless corpses
Drink their fill and see no more
Inner pain meets playful rage
They aren’t hurting anyone
Fun the reason and the excuse
To sacrifice themselves
Fast and frenetic, see them buzz
Vital energy so they say
Manic fingers, all to control
This plastic vacuum world
Who are they? Does it matter?
Bring on the next game!
They are whatever it takes to succeed!
Turn on, tune in, drop out
Sneer at the world they’ve left behind
A hopeless, feckless, riddled place
Only hopeless when abandoned
Dungeons and Dragons, a Vietnam pot-head
Entering that magical land with fairy dust
Be anyone! Why be anyone?
Yourself let wither and die
Back pain? No blame
Feel the cries of enemy anguish at another killed
Hear the happiness of teammates
Driving them on to the next goal
So so many Peter Pans
No cares, flying here and there
Tinkerbell their ideal woman
Hot tramp their last hope
The Land of the Rising Sun may be the grave
They are so adept at nihilism
With Godzilla there is endless fear
Dreams of destruction to rival Zionists
Oh brave new world! Alternate realities
Quantum theory, parallel universes
Anything to leave this place
Anything to neglect who they are
Saving the world, one corpse at a time
So many monsters everywhere
Paranoia the wisdom of the dark cynic
This is no news to anyone, no surprise
This might as well have not been written
Read it and nod, or more likely never read it
The low production values a “turn off”
There is no alternative, so they say
No reason to do otherwise
Reality no longer has value
Only new realities, as fast as can be produced
Hold any hope
They criticize me for my despair
They send me away to a dark corner
I’m not welcome in this brave new world
Plastic men hate the solid
Consistency is boring to them
And despite what they claim, a threat
We carry our own light
Live in the world as it is
Empty relativists are ignored
Mass media junkies lay feverish
While we vitalize the living world
Domination is not about truth – it’s about control. CNN doesn’t even care, much less know, about the various psychological and social effects of Twitter. What they DO care about is that we “learn” about those supposed effects from CNN – scientists are merely a tool CNN uses to attempt to increase their own degree of domination of the viewership and extended viewership (those affected by the direct viewers).
Western mass media (in conjunction with other elite allies) is about necromancy. Create a dead population and then animate this population in the direction they desire. All they care about is how easy it is to tug the populace one way or another as well as how powerful they can make a given tug. Truth is irrelevant except insofar as truth affects the power of the tug or their general credibility. A dead, irrational population themselves don’t care about truth, so perpetrators of lies no longer are penalized – hence the continuing popularity of Rush Limbaugh and the like.
We are living in a twilight zone of irrationality where elite factions (mostly various corporations through their products) vie for ownership of your soul. Americans then become mouthpieces and pawns of these elite – used against other Americans, used against foreign slaves in some cases, used mostly against themselves, as well as sucked dry of any humanity they have. Humanity just gets in the way.
With very little humanity left in America, the humans who are left feel alienated, isolated, as if they are living in hell. They retreat into their own minds, consoling themselves with the belief that they are much better than the zombie society around them. This belief in turn causes them to retreat further, into TV or video games and libertarianism, away from public events, in a rarified dead vacuum (imitating Nietzschean separation) that they deem “pure”. It’s “pure”, alright – purified of everything except their own beautiful and precious mind.
These humans, although they are the last to admit it, are every bit as much pawns of the elite as the rabid ditto-heads of Limbaugh – every bit as culturally dead as the rednecks they mock.
Their analysis of American society as hell is rational – but the only good response is to take up sword and shield and fight the demons and devils head-on. We need paladins, not hermits.
If we have insufficient paladins, then the zombie society will overrun us all.
The only winning move is not to play.
A side effect of nuclear war is deterrance of a powerful foreign state. The primary purpose is creating fear and terror in local people.
All nuclear powers have terrorized populaces. The most aggressive, the United States and Israel, have the most terrorized populaces. These populaces are easy to control and manipulate.
This is just one tool of terror. Television is another. Lotteries another (regressive taxation). Corporations another. Schools another. Prisons another. Nearly the entire public society of Western countries is designed and acts to instill terror in the populace.
In the movie War Games, the computer Joshua never learned the most important lesson, futility. The War Games Generation, the Americans who grew up in the 1980s, learned that lesson all too well.
“The game itself is pointless”.
“General, what you see on these screens up here is a fantasy; a computer enhanced hallucination. Those blips are not real missiles. They’re phantoms.”
In a terrorized society, the populace looks to create pockets of safety, of real life amid the terror of daily reality. It is *precisely* fantasy, entertainment, “computer enhanced hallucinations”, “phantoms”, video games, that this generation turns to. Curiously, they call the world they have abandoned “real life” while they attempt to construct a digital real life.
“Is it a game… or is it real?”
“What’s the difference?”
Once one attempts to create reality through a game, through a digital invention, there becomes little difference. The War Games Generation has abandoned reality, rendering it unreal, while the digital reality they experience expands in “realness”.
The principle of Divide and Conquer is that the elite acts to split current or potential political opponents. What better way to do that than to introduce a myriad of “alternative universes”, so that people will rarely if ever interact with the real one?
What is an “alternative universe”, if not simply a form of entertainment that one never leaves? A television without an off switch?
The War Games Generation embraces “alternative universes” and thus their own irrelevance in the only real universe.
Slaves do not have a slave (craven) mentality – they have a revolutionary mentality.
If someone holds a gun to one’s head one acts as a slave toward that person, that’s a form of wisdom. Notice that the phrase “give me liberty or give me death” has the outcome of death whenever liberty is not achieved. Death is the *antithesis* of slave values, thus death is the greatest threat to make against a slave, which masters well understand. Corporeal bravery, a devaluation of death, is largely held by masters not as a mark of their superiority over slaves (as they and their lackeys have long pretended), but as one of inferiority.
Every revolution has three possible outcomes – death (for the revolter), freedom (for the revolter), or a return to slavery (for the revolter). I’ve never seen any reason to believe that slaves are against *wise* revolution – the disagreement among slaves is about *how* and *when* to revolt, not whether to revolt.
One of Nietzsche’s tragic outcomes is the false assertion that humanity is cowed slaves. It’s not surprising that the 20th century featured so much fascism – Nietzsche was not an antidote to fascism but a *cause* of it.
Nietzsche said that humanity needed saving and he would provide the philosophy of salvation. But if humanity in fact does NOT need saving then his assertion degrades humanity. Nietzsche made humanity *into* pathetic slaves rather than recognized it.
A slave by necessity is deceitful. Master is always watching so the slave can never give away his revolutionary movement and intent, or he will be punished, perhaps even killed, and there goes the revolution.
So Western slaves watch TV, while retaining an ascetic distance toward TV. These slaves play video games, while retaining an ascetic distance. These slaves never enjoy the world as crafted by master, not because they ARE slaves but because this lack of enjoyment maintains an emotional distance from the master’s tools, does not lure him into the master’s tools, and maintains his revolutionary processes.
The normal Western slave, according to modern slave morality, is to pretend to be a happy slave while acting toward revolution.
Masters can speak openly with each other, deceiving each other only with respect to competition for profit and control. For slaves deceit is far deeper and more meaningful – slaves must always keep their true power a secret, from master. Slaves have hidden secret languages among themselves – a slave’s glance is nothing like the look of a master. For a master, truth is what is spoken. For a slave, truth is always what is not spoken.
The role of Nietzsche is not to save slaves, but to seduce them. To mock their weakness, to cause them to lose their composure, to make them insecure, to cause them to rage out and lose the fight for their freedom.
Slaves do not form freedom organizations or freedom structures until they openly revolt. Slave culture is completely amorphous and mostly involves interactions between individuals – family and friends. It’s primary language is comprised of empathy and emotion.
One way to exterminate slave culture is to kill these interactions. The final extermination of slaves will be by science – for science (and thus the elite) to gain control of human reproduction and take that control away from slaves.
Nietzsche ignored the identity of slaves, slave culture (for which Christianity is largely a front), and slave desires, so he could degrade humanity and offer his “redemption” for it.
Nietzsche wanted slaves to *express* power, to threaten the elite, and then for the elite to predictably respond. Nietzsche is harmful at worst and a fool at best.
Love is the greatest slave interaction and forms the core of slave culture.
The religion of slaves is not Christianity – it’s fellowship, friendship, love, and life.
This is a reply to rg the lg from Dissident Voice. His words are in italics:
“Sure doing away with slavery was a good thing … but it was strictly a side affect of the war … not a cause.”
The best slave is one who doesn’t realize he’s a slave. Getting rid of chattel slavery led to the integration of imported blacks into imperial America.
It was a huge propaganda and mind control victory. By eliminating chattel slavery and instituting wage slavery throughout the states, the elite could claim that they had “eliminated slavery”, and most of the people believe it. The people also believe that Lincoln himself “eliminated slavery”, thus making it all the easier for the executive branch to increase it’s power.
There’s also “moving up the corporate ladder” – which is another way of saying “I’m a slave now, but I might become a master later (and my life’s work is to become the most powerful master I can be)”. This is appealing to Americans, to become a master and have slaves of one’s own. “Everyone can be a plantation owner” is another phrase for the American Dream. In terms of morality there is no difference between a corporation with masters (executives) and slaves (workers) and a plantation. The same shape with a different paint job.
Examine Americans and their historical reaction to the “end of the American Dream”. The primary reaction was depression and despair – depression and despair at no longer having the expectation of mastery and possessing slaves. How many Americans celebrated the end of the American Dream? Does Hunter S. Thompson’s “life as burnout” strike you as a celebration? Yet we are told by the left of all people that Thompson is a “good guy”. Americans of all political persuasions need to take a very hard look in the mirror.
There’s no proof that getting rid of chattel slavery was a good thing. It’s riddance led to a relatively unified America and paved the way for American Imperialism, which officially began in 1898 and increased dramatically after WWII. If we use the judgment that what is good for the elite is bad for the people, the elimination of chattel slavery was a terrible thing.
One might note that this kind of analysis applies to many other “activist” issues. An activist is someone who pressures the elite to institute some change. But since the elite control the propaganda machine, any change they institute (pressured or otherwise) they can and will claim credit for, thus building their own power in the minds of the people. Thus, according to Americans, Lincoln was a “hero”. According to this thinking, Obama is a “possible hero”. Thus they have “hope in Obama”. With this additional power and people’s trust they further entrench their power. We can trace Neoliberalism from this line.
The only way around this problem is to seize power from the elite, such that the people themselves become the power structure. The elite *as a class* must be destroyed.
Activists who don’t see the big picture and act accordingly often do more harm than good. And they are the people who are the most self-righteous, the most incapable of believing in their own errors. Everything they do is fine as long as it’s “for a good cause”. The point of activists is not to save the world or really even help the world – it’s to feel good about what they are doing. At that they always succeed.
Activism is the greatest drug in the world. They get high and then get higher, and then go home while the people give the elite all the credit.
Quite possibly the beginning of the elite’s wanton destruction of the planet came when they dreamt of dominating the universe. This adds up historically, as the industrial revolution followed the major astronomical discoveries and the desire to colonize outer space.
So the “endgame” for most of us may well be called New World 2.0 – outer space or more specifically some determined new homeworld for the elite and whichever human slaves they select to join them. Humanity at large will rot on whatever is left of earth.
As the elite sail away on their “brave sailing ships”, valiant pilgrims all, they will weep sorrowful tears, but with gaze outward and hope filling their hearts, and arms locked with each other as they proclaim themselves the “special chosen ones” who will rebuild a new humanity (according to them, with superior DNA).
There’s a deeply tragic irony here. Humans looked into space and saw themselves as meaningless specks in the “greater cosmos”. But in responding to that emotion, in their “quest for space”, they have destroyed the only meaningful thing in their reality – their own world.
What does a priest who sees the glory of heaven do upon his “return to earth”? He shits on it, because he is forced to live on the dirty, filthy, horrible earth while God and angels get to be in heaven.
The elite, who hold the only meaningful thing in reality in utter contempt, shit on that reality every moment of every day. And we let them.
Much is said nowadays of The Rapture, about the “chosen ones” transcending the world and rising to heaven while the ones “left behind” suffer in eternal hell. It’s unfortunate that secular America so often treats this as a religious issue and with respect to “Christian America” – it’s most important analogy is with respect to colonizing space.
We often wonder why “Christian America” is all about accumulating capital these days. Well, if only the rich can “transcend the world”…
And prior to “transcending the world”, the elite will need to survive long enough on the rapidly-becoming-hell earth to enable their Rapture.
Secular America typically explains the “death of the left” during the 1990s in America with the blow to the left dealt by the fall of Soviet Communism and the supposed “end of history” with the eternal condition of free market capitalism. But there’s another explanation – the 1990s saw the rise in consciousness in humans of the end of the natural world. In the face of this despair humans became more entrenched in distraction and entertainment, and more beholden to capitalism with it’s ethos of “looking out for #1″.
Someone drowning doesn’t save the world. He lashes out at anything to grab onto to save himself.
Something rarely spoken but true – solidarity requires *strength*.
This is a reply to Tennessee-Chavizta from Dissident Voice. His words are in italics:
“But USA is just like any other country, i think that we will see a real change in USA in the near future, i think that there will be a popular uprising in this country, because american jobless citizens will not be able to conform to the misery food-stamp program”
The USA is not like any other country. It’s the heart of the global empire, and it’s people (pathetically) reflect that. There may or may not be a popular uprising in this country, but if so it will be the *last* among the Western countries.
Americans will defend their imperial benefits long before they will defend their freedom. It’s only when little hope exists for the continuation or recovery of those imperial benefits that Americans will “fight for their freedom”. This is precisely why the “shift to the left” in America only happened after 9/11, when Americans for the first time glimpsed the end of their empire.
This has always been the case in America, going back to the American Revolution when “fighting for freedom” was overheated rhetoric which translates into “fighting for power”. Once it became more profitable to overthrow British rule than live under it they did so, and Americans ever since have been brainwashed (most quite complicitly) into believing their country was founded on principles of freedom and equality. Tell that to the indigenous population, or the imported african population, or women, or various white ethnicities, or various capitalist losers, or the countless people outside the US enslaved or killed by these “freedom lovers”.
For Americans, it’s always been about power and it always will be. Now that the elite are weak and unable to provide Americans with sufficient imperial benefits sure, they may revolt. And then Dissident Voice can continue the centuries-old brainwashing by providing countless articles breathlessly extolling the “fight for freedom” of the American masses.
When will humanity move past ALL forms of propaganda and embrace truth?
“These policies punish innocent civilians with the goal of exerting pressure on the Hamas government, violating the rights of 1.5 million people who seek only to live ordinary lives – to be reunited with family, to pursue higher education, to receive quality medical treatment, and to earn a living.”
This statement is from ZNet, talking about the perpetual policy toward the Gaza Strip of Zionist Israel.
Here’s one big problem – if you’re in the Gaza Strip, and you seek only to live an ordinary life, you’re seeking the wrong thing.
“An ordinary life” doesn’t match up too well against air strikes, checkpoints, and minimal natural resources. The only effective way to live is to incorporate the destruction of these air strikes, checkpoints, and problematic access to resources into one’s everyday process.
The Gaza Strip is nothing but ordinary, and it calls for merely exceptional lives.
If the statement is truly correct and all 1.5 million Gazan residents are seeking only to live ordinary lives, the Gaza Strip is doomed.
A funny thing about entertainment is how not-entertaining it is. Yet people are seemingly quite convinced that Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are endlessly fascinating.
Let’s assume for a moment that you’re a slave. Your master tells you to look inside a box, and keep looking inside it indefinitely. Perhaps you object, noting that there’s nothing in the box. But given that your master is brandishing his sword and glancing meaningfully to several decaying sword-slashed corpses next to him, you decide that looking in the box is a good option.
But this situation is interminable! How shall this slave gain some relief from his predicament?
Simply pretend that the box is entertaining. And so the myth of entertainment is born.
We know that our masters, the elite, want us to stay out of their business. We likewise want to respect ourselves and not tell ourselves there is nothing in the box. These two factors combine to make looking in the box “entertaining”.
Entertainment is a totalitarian reality. It’s a slave consolation notion – it says that “I find this fascinating of it’s own accord” in order to remove the reality from the consciousness – the reality that one is a slave looking inside an empty box at the behest of those who have power over one’s life.
So Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? Quite fascinating. Or perhaps the slave sniffs with his nose high in the air and derides these people as pathetic, and thus turns the channel to the show “Lost” or plays his favorite video game. Merely other boxes, different colors of nothingness.
It’s this latter treatment, this “negative” treatment of Hilton and Spears, that are the real danger. The mass media doesn’t provide entertainment even by slave standards – it provides crap in order for the slaves to believe they are experiencing REAL entertainment by “choosing” their own box to look into.
The slaves have many words for people who deride all boxes – nihilistic is their favorite. The slaves turn on anyone calling what they call entertainment an empty myth instead of turning on their masters.
You believe in nothing, they claim.
That’s completely false. I believe in killing my master. Nothing else is worthwhile while I am a slave.
“What are you so afraid of?”, they ask me, sometimes with an air of aggression, sometimes with puzzlement, sometimes with pity.
For one thing, I’m terrified that so many people have to ask that question. The state of the world implied by having to ask that question is terrible.
Nietzsche said “What does not kill me only makes me stronger”. And so the 20th century saw the refinement of torture to a science, the development of nuclear weapons, the accelerated destruction of the environment, widespread totalitarianism and surveillance by the elite, and the making ignorant and infantile of the population. If Nietzsche lived today how very strong he would be!, whatever that means. Strong right up until an airtight scientific slavery, a quick death, or an increasingly certain death, apparently.
All being on a mountain does is ensures you’re the last to die. Perhaps that’s what Nietzsche wanted. Him and his non-human animals and his plausible deniability in the form of his writings.
But the terror goes far deeper. Women accept having sons who are torturers. Men commit atrocities and call it “feeding their family”. Only a small fraction of the society effectively condemns atrocities, and virtually noone blames the individuals responsible, saying the problem is “the system”. Yet instead of destroying the system, they merely try to ensure that their own individual lives are decent, and shut away their relationship to this system they say is the problem.
A much more rational question is to ask someone living a placid life, “What are you so not afraid of?” I’ve never heard that question asked, which is one more reason to be terrified.
This is a reply to Max Shields from Dissident Voice. His words are in italics.
“Brian K. yes, the US “democracy” is a tactic to provide un-democracy.
Look, even in the old Empire England, the Prime Minister has to go face to face, same level, against his/her opposition. Here, we perch the POTUS on a pedestal, looking down talking AT the crowd who routinely applauds every inane thing he says. NO disagreement from the mob.
We call that the “democratic process”.”
It’s a whole lot worse than that, to extend this psychological and sociological situation.
Most regular Americans believe that the elite are better than they are. Better in one or more ways – either smarter, wiser, more capable, stronger, sexier, or some other trait they deem positive. So in addition to an enslavement caused by a continued desire for imperial benefits, it’s also caused by a belief in inferiority.
Once inferiority is ingrained, and it is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, truth *becomes* what the elite say it is, in the same sense that a God-fearing Christian’s truth is what God says it is, or what God’s supposed representative (such as the Pope) says it is.
I’ve been examining regular Americans closely for the past year, after spending a few years examining the American elite (with a particular focus on the Neocons). Americans are deeply propagandized – they are beholden to television and movies to a degree which even the left underestimates. One reason they are propagandized is not the high quality of the propaganda – for the most part it’s mediocre. They are propagandized because they are desperate and in despair, and believe themselves to have little capability to improve their lives. So they turn to corporate media, even while knowing it’s *intended* to harm them, because, like God, there is a HOPE that their corporate masters will save them. It is precisely the decline in religion that allowed the modern propaganda state to gain power, not the quality of it’s propaganda. God has been splintered and replaced by various demi-gods – one is Bill O’Reilly. Another Rush Limbaugh. Another Jon Stewart.
The movie “They Live!” makes one terrible mistake. It assumes that after the aliens are revealed the humans will rebel. In the real world the humans already know about the elite. They already know the television is intended to harm them. They already know the elite lie or make up the truth or tell the truth depending on what serves their purpose.
The people go on supporting these harmful institutions for the same reason every slave sincerely smiles at his master – he hopes to placate him. He hopes to *change* him. He hopes to receive a pat on the head instead of the end of a whip.
American culture is about obedience, and in tough times instead of rebelling American culture is about more *determined* obedience.
Americans have seen the alien, and embraced it. That was John Carpenter’s mistake.
At work I often turn the television off. I hate that poison and want to spare myself and others from it. It’s turned back on within a few minutes, never with an angry look but often with a sad one.
The people know it’s poison. But they also know that only their corporate masters can save them. They know very well that I can’t do a damn thing other than turn the TV off.
Examine the culture of addiction and you find something which causes both pleasure (brief and fleeting) and pain (lasting). Then examine the elite’s effect on the people, with their “hits” of distraction followed by the lasting pain of slavery.
The American people are addicted to the elite. According to them, the elite are their only hope.
The same relationship is found in abusive marriages. The woman hates the abuse, but can’t leave the abuser due to insecurity and fear of being alone. So the woman hopes that things will get better, and placates and “makes her husband happy” whenever she can.
And so the American people hope that Barack Obama will save them.
This is the reality in modern America we need to deal with.
This is a reply to David from Dissident Voice. His words are in italics:
“yet if genocide was their goal shouldn’t they have already easily entirely ethnically cleansed the defenseless Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. After all Israel is efficient, ruthless and cunning, why are they taking so long to complete a genocide if this is their true goal?”
Precisely because they are efficient, ruthless, and cunning.
The project of Zionism is not just about the extermination and driving out of the Palestinians – it’s doing so without upsetting the global community and their own people. It’s this latter part which leads them to complex machinations and a very slow genocide.
The problem is not killing all the Palestinians. That’s easy. The problem is getting away with the crime. Zionists are building a political reality in the world so that they are successful in that world *during* and especially AFTER they’ve annihilated the Palestinians.
Any criminal can tell you that committing a crime is easy. It’s evading detection and capture that’s difficult.
An important question for Zionists has long been: “How will the world view us after the Palestinians are gone?”
Zionists examined America – examined how through American media and long-term economic domination America built a positive global image, despite the country being built on native American burial grounds and corpses with American settler weapons embedded. Zionists use the same propaganda tools and media manipulation as their father figure does.
It wants the same results, and very well might get them unless they are stopped.
This is the real reason America supports Zionism – not out of some pro-Jew or anti-Arab bias but because there is a deep recognition of the imitation by Zionists of American settlers – it’s PATRIOTISM among Americans, including much of the American left, that causes Americans to fade away with a sigh at Zionist atrocities. How can they destroy this monstrosity, when their very homes, their economic well-being, their global status, is built in the same way?
This is the fundamental success of the Zionist concept. Zionists are merely Americans, version 2. Oh brave new world…
