Mind Mis-management

The ability of rulers to control the consciousness of populations has reached its peak through electronic information technology. What fascist societies once created as theory, democratic (?) societies have now created as practice. Never before have dominating forces been able to make an occupied territory of their subjects_ collective minds, and to do so with hardly any question from the mainstream of society.

Our system is a market anti-socialism of isolated individuals who are the sum total of reality, with no connection to one another except during wars, church meetings or tax collections. Any other idea of public or social cooperation is seen as traitorous suppression of freedom for the individual to shop, and without asking any questions about the merchandise. This enables the social structure to remain largely unquestioned, while a variety of individuals are blamed, revered, despised, beseeched or murdered, with minimal attention to the organizing principle that often governs their individual behavior, however disorganized and unprincipled it may seem.

The present bloodbath in Iraq and Palestine relies on the simplistic presentation of individual villains and overlooked people, maintaining a deadly situation that threatens more than just those two geographic regions.

The horrendous lie about Palestine, where good Israelis are supposedly preyed upon by evil Palestinians, is similar in its staggering cynicism to the image of Iraq, where demonic villains play a major role in shielding the horrible treatment administered to an innocent people. While a theatrical farce has the primary demon, Hussein, being tried by a puppet court for his alleged crimes, a lesser villain was created on the battlefield, whose murder was then treated as a great victory by the screenplay writers of every day reality.

We saw a sensationally bizarre and moronic fixation on the death of this latest in a series of villains. Photos of a corpse were run endlessly on magazine covers and TV, detailed studies were conducted of his wounds, background offered as to the consumer goods found in his hideout – which was blown to smithereens – and other fictional details were served from the fast food outlet which our mind managers use to feed us indigestible meals of disinformation.

While these tales of international terror and its demonic leaders fill our heads and leave our minds empty, we are also given homeland heroes and villains, whose escapades may not be as dramatic but who serve the same purpose; to keep us occupied while ruling power continues its assault on our future, without any serious complaint from us in the present. Except as angry individuals, helpless in any organized sense and reduced to lashing out at one another, or at groups identified as menacing because of their individuality. And while the anger is sometimes justified, our controlling manipulators direct it toward scapegoats who usually represent an element in the process, and hardly the root of the problem.

Media entertains or infuriates us with its folk idols, sports villains, celebrity child births and corporate scandals, glamorizing wealth and extolling mediocrity while assuring that we are occupied with meaningless fiction presented as meaningful truth. Meanwhile, reality becomes more threatening, a global population more disgusted with American power, and the world a far more dangerous place.

The conflict between perception and reality is nothing new, but the power of major media has made it even more baffling. We have good reason to not know what is actually going on in the larger world at any given moment, being just barely able to cope with what goes on in our own smaller world. This is exactly the result desired by the controllers of our consciousness.

The more we are captivated by images of ugly villains or beautiful heroes, the less we are able to confront the social ugliness at the root of so much fabricated individual beauty. The more we fear the scapegoats created for us, or the threats that exist to us because we cannot stop our ruler’s interference in other people’s lives, the less we are able to achieve individual security, or even sanity.

It is nearly impossible for much of the American public to see the forest, with all those trees in the way. How can people know what is going on in the world, when major sources of information fill their heads with lies, distortions, giddiness and escapist entertainment. That last is probably the most welcome and least harmful of the assaults on pubic consciousness.

Those who smugly demean some Americans for watching TV or sports and voting for what is deemed greater evil, are often themselves consumers of pointless pap they call high culture, while they vote for lesser evil. This simply strengthens evil and further divides individuals into opposing camps, and thus does the bidding of our mind controllers by strengthening their system of individuals, which threatens all of us as a society.

Whatever we individually watch, read or think – If we are able to think of anything other than purchases or payments – we are all endangered by a social system that needs an organized, truly democratic response. That means not only opposing the dreadful policies of one administration, but the bipartisan policies of division and market subdivision that alienate us from one another and prevent actions to make our nation and our world a better place for all of humanity. That calls for democracy in information access, as well as in politics and economics. And that means far more attention must be paid to what we are told and who is in charge of telling us. We need to take control of our individual minds away from our social managers, in order to gain social control over our individual matters. We’ll never achieve one without the other.