14 Mar 2021

If The Rich Were Propagandizing Us, We’d Have Heard About It In The News + Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

'Both the plutocratic media and the modern schooling system are designed to indoctrinate people into accepting the status quo.

...Our indoctrination isn’t just in what to think, it’s in how to think.'

By Caitlin Johnstone: The primary obstacle in getting people to realize that they are being propagandized by our rulers is their unquestioned assumption that if there were a mass-scale narrative management operation geared at manufacturing consent for the status quo, they would have heard about it in the news or learned about it in school.

And, of course, they would not have, because both the plutocratic media and the modern schooling system are designed to indoctrinate people into accepting the status quo. From the time we are children our minds are deliberately and systematically warped to psychologically align us with the interests of the ruling class, and then we are passed on to the news media to ensure that we are continually shaped and reshaped in real time throughout our adult lives based on the specific needs of the oligarchic empire from year to year. A brainwashing institution is never going to teach you to be skeptical of their brainwashing.

Our indoctrination into the establishment worldview is not just in training us to espouse certain beliefs and think a certain way, it’s in training us to look to the sources of our indoctrination for guidance throughout our lives. What do we do when we are unsure about something, class? That’s right, we go to reliable, authoritative sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and any other outlet that has consistently supported every war we’ve ever been deceived into by our rulers.

Our indoctrination isn’t just in what to think, it’s in how to think.

This is the first and foremost reason why it’s so difficult to get people to realize that they have been lied to about the world and the way it works. You’re not just arguing against their perceptions, you’re arguing against their means of perception itself. You’re arguing against the very system they have used since they were young to orient themselves to an understanding of truth and reality.

If you are looking at a given facet of the oligarchic empire through a means of perception which for example takes it as a given that the news man would never lie to you and anyone who says otherwise is a Russian agent or crazy conspiracy theorist, there’s no way you’re going to be able to see that facet clearly. If someone suggests that you read an article by The Grayzone or Glenn Greenwald challenging your perspective, just their doing that will look like evidence that they are wrong, in the same way someone telling a devout Christian to read the Satanic Bible would be taken as evidence that they are evil.

It’s hard to get someone to see the flaws in their means of perception for the same reason you can’t get someone to directly look at their own eye: you can’t directly perceive the means by which you are perceiving. If I have “Anyone who doesn’t trust The New York Times is a liar” built into the means of perception that I have been trained to utilize, you’re going to have a very difficult time getting me to be skeptical about anything The New York Times has reported, and an even harder time getting me to be skeptical of the outlet itself. This will remain the case for as long as I am peering through that means of perception.

So what can we do? How can we ever hope to awaken people to the fact that an ecocidal, omnicidal oligarchic empire is driving us toward disaster while singing us to sleep using propaganda lullabies?

 

Well, we can create glitches in the matrix. We can draw as much attention as possible to the lies we’ve all been told and create enough dissonance with their means of perception that they begin wondering if something is wrong with the goggles they’ve been peering through. If you wear glasses and begin noticing strands of code running down your field of vision here and there, your first instinct might be to take off your glasses and examine if there is something wrong with them. Once you’ve got them examining and questioning their means of perception itself, there’s a chance that they may fall through that gap and wake up from the matrix.

As we would do if we were trapped in a collapsed tunnel, we start working on moving the loose rocks first. We help share truth with people who are close to our own level of understanding, who are on the cusp of awakening to how pervasively we’ve been lied to all our lives. The more awakening we can facilitate on the periphery, the looser the more stubbornly stuck pieces of rubble will become. Eventually they will begin noticing matrix code streaming down the periphery of their vision as a critical mass of perceivers begin drawing attention to the way we’ve all been deceived, and then even the most tightly wedged-in obstacles will begin to get some wiggle room.

All positive change in human behavior is the result of an increase in awareness, whether you’re talking about recovering from substance abuse, abandoning self-destructive patterns, ending racism and bigotry, or ending an oligarchic empire. Once the underlying sources of an unwholesome behavior dynamic have been sufficiently perceived, there’s a movement from dysfunction to health.

That’s the only path to a healthy world: getting enough people to perceive enough truth with enough clarity. Until that happens real change is impossible. After that happens real change is inevitable.

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Mainstream Journalism Doesn’t Exist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

By Caitlin Johnstone: Journalists should be exposing inconvenient truths about powerful people in their own nation and its allies. Instead the people we call “journalists” criticize enemy nations, smear political dissidents, demand increasing amounts of censorship, and advance narratives that are convenient for the powerful.

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The “war on terror” is a false pretext for interventionism in the Middle East and the “war on drugs” is a false pretext for interventionism in Latin America.

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Lula being free and eligible to run again in Brazil is a very big deal with huge implications for US imperialism. This isn’t like some fake leftist getting into the Democratic Party or whatever, this is a real thing that will have real consequences in a nation with huge geostrategic significance to the US empire. The empire invested many years staging a coup in one of the largest nations on earth, and it’s not just going to let it be reversed without a fuss. I’m bit nervous about what will happen.

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The Monroe Doctrine is literally just the US saying “Latin America is our Africa. You guys get those brown people over there, these are our brown people over here.”

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I love how pundits talk about the Monroe Doctrine like it’s a real thing that has actual legitimacy. “Well we can’t have Russia and China interfering in Venezuela, that’s just the Monroe Doctrine.” No, how about you fuck all the way off from any country not named the United States of America.

We could be collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem to create a beautiful, awesome, healthy world. Instead we’re all competing with each other working meaningless jobs creating pieces of landfill which serve no purpose besides turning millionaires into billionaires.

The overwhelming majority of human effort goes into competing against other humans. We do have the ability to take all that lost energy and re-route it toward collaborating with each other toward health and thriving. There is no real reason we can’t do this. There are no hard obstacles preventing us from moving away from our failed competition-based model to a collaboration-based model. All that’s stopping us is plutocratic propaganda and our collective belief in it. We do have the ability to drop that belief and move toward sanity.

Leftist thinkers who predicted that the inevitable decline in material conditions caused by capitalism would necessarily lead to its downfall failed to foresee just how powerfully effective capitalist propaganda would get at preventing revolution, and the US conclusively proves this. It’s like predicting that an abuser’s abuse will necessarily lead to the victim leaving; that’s simply not the case if the abuser is adept at manipulation, as many abusers are. The science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century. It is very potent.

Across nearly all sectors of thought, people consistently underestimate how easy human beings are to psychologically manipulate. The only sectors which are exempt from this rule are those which make manipulation their business: advertising, politics, and propaganda.

The left simply doesn’t have the numbers to advance socialist and anti-imperialist agendas in the western world. We don’t have the numbers because mass-scale plutocratic propaganda actively works to keep us from having the numbers. Until we address this head-on, meaningful changes are impossible.

It’s amazing how often leftists ignore this massive, glaring problem of not having enough numbers to accomplish anything real. You have to address it. You must find those numbers somewhere. Deteriorating material conditions aren’t doing the job for us; we need to do it ourselves.

I mean the Green Party presidential candidate got 0.2 percent of the vote in the US last year. The Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate got 317 votes, total. Three hundred and seventeen, in the entire United States. That’s not even an average-sized Italian wedding. I don’t care what your reasons are, you can’t just keep trucking along like those numbers aren’t a huge problem. Something needs to be done, and that something begins with directly tackling the problem of plutocratic propaganda.

 

 


Taking back the wealth that the plutocrats have stolen isn’t just valuable because it can be used to help the needful: it’s a defensive measure as well. Take their money and they can’t use it to buy politicians, buy up news outlets, fund think tanks, and propagandize the masses. The collective is entitled to confiscate any weapon that someone is using to harm the collective. If you’re using a rifle to fire upon a crowd, they’re entitled to disarm you for their collective safety. If you’re using your billions of dollars to exploit and manipulate, they’re entitled to disarm you for their collective safety.

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Very upsetting how whoever’s the next high profile western anti-imperialist turned out to be a sinister Kremlin agent and/or evil anti-semite.

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We are told that capitalism is responsible for accelerating progress, but capitalism’s version of “progress” is destroying the ecosystem, and is clearly progressing far too fast: the development of artificial intelligence without a thorough examination of the risks, medicines being released that haven’t been fully tested, etc.

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A socialist who only criticizes the GOP is called a liberal.

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In a world that is rapidly dying and at increasing risk of nuclear war there is no functional difference between a liberal incrementalist and a progressive who favors advancing change by slowly taking over the Democratic Party over the course of the next century.

 

 

How many of people’s mental health diagnoses are really just them not coping well with capitalism?

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If you’re a father to boys and you’re not having regular conversations with them about what consent is, what rape is and how important it is to not rape people, you are a big part of the problem. If you currently don’t know how to have these conversations in ways that are age-appropriate and informative then look it up, ask for directions, listen and learn. You are your kid’s only hope that he doesn’t cause irreparable damage to others. You need to take this seriously.

Oh, your dad never did this for you? Well color me shocked. It shows. Your son will not have the same excuse of ignorance. The world is getting brighter with far less places for rapey behavior to hide. He needs your help to navigate this.

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