By Caitlin Johnstone
May 14, 2023:
Information
Clearing House -- It's time
for another US presidential race where populist factions on both sides spend a
few months angrily decrying the establishment before voting for candidates in
the general election who will fully serve that same establishment.
I think this is just the norm now. Public discontent with the US political
status quo is now so great that there's going to be a new "Hey kids, you can
vote your way into revolutionary change!" feature built
into every presidential election. 2012 was the end of a political era.
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The biggest misconception about politics is that political differences have
any meaningful existence at all. Everyone's herded into two mainstream factions
who both serve the interests of the powerful, while those few who can't be
herded are marginalized into political impotence.
And I am of course mainly talking about the English-speaking world here. The
global south has real political diversity of real consequence, and has real
differences from the status quo politics of the US-centralized empire. But
within that empire, political differences are effectively illusory.
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I feel like maybe we didn't make a big enough deal about that
revelation the other day that the US
government now has so many institutions dedicated to "perception management" and
regulating "disinformation" that it created a new agency within the ODNI to
oversee all of them. I mean everyone made a lot of noise about the DHS's "disinformation
governance board" last year, and rightly so, but as a whole this seems way
more egregious in terms of government interference in human communication.
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The problem with opposition to dissent-crushing measures is that it mostly
only comes from those at whom such measures are directed. Mainstream journalists
know they won't be imprisoned like Assange, because they won't do work like
Assange did. Mainstream liberals know they won't be censored online, so they're
happy to cheer for online censorship.
Measures designed to control the narrative and suppress dissent are directed
at the fringes, not the mainstream, because that's where dissent of real
consequence always first emerges. It won't be those with mainstream political
leanings seeing their speech increasingly marginalized and hidden away by
algorithms and AI, it will be those who oppose the political status quo. In the
future it won't be those with a mainstream worldview being oppressed by things
like tech surveillance, police robots and CBDCs, it will be those well outside
the Overton window of permissible debate. The average person will be unaffected
by such measures, because in our current mind-controlled dystopia the average
person is compliant and innocuous.
This is why attempts to get a large movement of opposition to these
totalitarian measures typically fail to gather significant public traction:
because only people on the fringes have reason to fear them. By controlling the
mainstream consensus, our rulers eliminate any meaningful opposition to their
tyranny toward the real dissidents whose politics generally lie well outside
that consensus. And since it's only widespread mainstream opposition that would
ever give them reason to fear public backlash, they can keep ratcheting up these
dissent-crushing measures.
I don't really have any solution to this problem; I've been staring at it for
years and don't see any easy answers. I'm just putting it out there in the hive
mind so that awareness of the problem can grow and we can start collectively
looking for solutions.
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This civilization is so mentally ill that you'll get treated like a gibbering
lunatic for expressing the most sane and rational opinions anyone can possibly
express. Something as basic as "The world's most powerful government should stop
ramping up nuclear brinkmanship on multiple fronts" will get you treated like a
kook, when really it's so obvious and common sense it shouldn't even need to be
said. That's how crazy mass-scale brainwashing has made everyone.
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I will never support any form of capitalism, because no form of capitalism —
real or hypothetical — will ever have an answer to the problems of ecocide and
the need to care for the needful.
Every capitalism-based solution that has ever been proposed for these
problems is self-evidently ridiculous; the notion that privatizing the natural
world can preserve oceans and rainforests is infantile nonsense that's refuted
by all of human history, as is the notion that the needful can be cared for
solely by voluntary charity. No intellectually honest person believes this is
true. No ancap who's thought hard enough about ecocide and caring for the
needful sincerely believes that capitalism can address these problems. At their
most honest, they'll say that ecocide and starvation are necessary sacrifices
that must be made for the freedoms and conveniences they want to have for
themselves.
I appreciate a right-libertarian who straight up admits that they're fine
with environmental destruction and the weakest members of society dying off
rather than pretending the "free market" can address these issues, because at
least they're being honest about where they stand.
And of course the current western status quo model of capitalism with a
little state welfare and a few superficial environmental restrictions isn't
working either, because here we are. Every possible capitalist school of thought
has failed to find a solution to these problems. You can yell "but communism
bad" at me all you want, but that doesn't address the fact that people are
struggling to survive and our biosphere is hurtling toward collapse, and that
literally nothing anywhere in capitalist thought has anything resembling a
viable answer for this.
We won't ultimately have a solution to ecocide and exploitation until
mass-scale human behavior ceases to be driven by the pursuit of profit
altogether, because ecocide and exploitation are profitable. We're going to have
to find another organizing principle if we're to survive on this planet.
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Never let yourself lose sight of the reality that as bad as things are, the
fact that there are things at all is vastly more significant than any
of our puny human problems.
It's not something you can talk about all the time because people will think
you're being callous about human suffering and all the problems that we do have,
but the truth of the matter is that even if things were ten times worse than
they are now, it would still be vastly less significant than the fact that we
get to live in a world and perceive it and think about it and share ideas about
it instead of nothing existing at all.
Yes, pay attention to our problems and do what you can to fix them, but
never, ever let yourself lose sight of the fact that we are living in
the middle of a continuous miracle of unfathomable beauty, and that we ourselves
are inseparably unified with that vast miracle. If you only fixate on thoughts
about our problems you will become bitter and ineffective in the fight against
injustice, and more importantly, you will have wasted your time here
failing to appreciate the wondrousness of a human life on this amazing planet.
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