Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones “keeps it real”. It gets rid of all the social delicacies in favor of “honesty”. The result is a brutal, totalitarian social fabric. The Western World that has thrown away it’s welfare state.

In Game of Thrones those who speak truth are powerful and those who lie are weak. Those who penetrate others and themselves with the rod of truth are always respected, by every character, without exception.

Game of Thrones is a modern totalitarian and Neoliberal fantasy. Characters live to know everything about everyone who is or can be a threat to their power-goals. Their words are weaponized, armored, or supportive as the need arises, but never otherwise.

As a result of this brutal madness, this “keeping it real“, everyone is afraid. There’s no security in Game of Thrones, only whatever confidence characters can muster by means of whatever control they can exert on the world around them.

Because everyone is afraid, everyone seeks to dominate. Peace is obtained only through domination, the same ideology which rules the American and Israeli states.

In episode 7 Cersei Lannister says “When you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die”. Noone in the series even considers the third option, the insight of the 1984 movie War Games: the only way to win is not to play. The characters in Game of Thrones are in a state of perpetual war, against whoever and whatever stands in the way of their ambitions.

The psychological backdrop for the series is the awakening of an ancient, powerful, mystical, awe-inspiring evil force, which provides a justification for the “no pain, no gain” ideology of the characters. Game of Thrones tells us that only through perpetual training, perpetual suffering, perpetual sacrifice, perpetual honesty, perpetual war, will we become strong enough to face the ultimate evil.

And then, so the myth goes, we will obtain eternal peace. Or death. The same thing.

As the world suffers under the “no pain, no gain” of Austerity and the continued rule of neoliberal ideology and as a result accelerates towards the apocalypse, so the world experiences Game of Thrones. Unlike in the real world the totalitarian ideology in Game of Thrones won’t turn out nearly so badly. It’s fictional fantasy, after all.

Welcome to the 20th and early 21st century in the West

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.

The myth of entertainment

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.

The American people are addicted to the elite

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.

Targeting the RNC Welcoming Committee: A Case Study in Political Paranoia

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The primary purpose of television and video games

Television is largely about protecting oneself from reality. It’s the intentional interaction with unreal events – artificial creations, people pretending to be other people (acting), people and events which have no relationship to one except through the poverty of the television screen.

Two cultural creations were invented at about the same time – television remote controls and video games. The similarities are striking – both increase a “user’s” control over this technological environment. Video games take the next step in domination – enabling the “player” to possess a digital agent, controlling his every move. It is this power and control over the digital environment that is the primary source of pleasure found in playing video games.

A substantial aspect of culture over the past few thousand years has been the struggle to free oneself from slavery of various forms – the current form of slavery is capitalist slavery, otherwise known as wage slavery. One of the most insidious methods the elite currently use to ward off attempts at freedom is to corrupt the slaves by making them masters of their own little worlds. So people click away with their remote controls, enjoying their power and control over what appears on the television screen, or progress through a game – they are masters of those domains.

In this way the elite are training the slaves – teaching them to become masters, teaching them the thrill of mastery, of control, of domination, but always in an environment controlled by the elite themselves.

On George W. Bush’s verbal affectation

This is a reply to Myles Hoenig on Dissident Voice:

” Fool me once shame on you.
You fool me you can’t get fooled again.
– GWB

Spoken like the true idiot that he is. ”

No, spoken like an affectation.

This way of speaking by GWB is an affectation, occurring only in his recent years. GWB is a political monster and made the calculation that speaking in this way would be beneficial to the Neoconservative cause (by condescending to the American public and thus angering and depressing them).

It is a way for GWB to say: “See, this is what I think of how Americans speak”. The media got in on it, saying that GWB is trying to “talk like Americans do”. What an odd remark – I’ve never heard an American speak like GWB does, not even drunk ones.

By repeating calling GWB an “idiot”, Americans justify not doing anything about him. Him being an “idiot” is a substantial amount of the reason why GWB isn’t sitting in jail. Who’s the real idiot?

Modern US presidents are primarily PR spokespeople. Developing a condescending way to speak is (potentially) a very potent way of conducting the presidency. And since Americans were manipulated successfully, taking the bait and thus the hook of GWB being an “idiot”, we might as well take our hats off to a man who has gotten the best of us.

GWB did exactly what he wanted to do in office – help his cronies and buddies get richer, be re-elected for a second term, and get away with it scot free. He succeeded in all of this with flying colors. Yet somehow he’s the idiot?

So indeed, “Fool me once shame on you. You fool me you can’t get fooled again”.

Public Relations isn’t about speaking *clearly* or *articulately*, it’s about speaking *powerfully*. Americans fell into the trap GWB laid.

Restructuring Inner-City Schools for the Global Marketplace: Locke High School and the Green Dot "Solution"

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9/11 and the Great American Decline

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RFID: "Smart Cards" in a Surveillance Society

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Arrested at the RNC – Amy Goodman talks about being detained at the RNC

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Defense Intelligence Agency Seeking "Mind Control" Weapons

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Totalitarianism: It Can Happen Here

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