Listen to a reading of this article: If you live in one of the so-called free democracies of the western world, the worst mistake you can make is to buy into the hype. To believe you are a free individual in a nation that respects and protects your freedom and individuality.
Well, that's why there is a huge difference between us Central and Eastern European citizens who were once (before 1989) born and lived in a communist dictatorship, and between you so-called "free Western" citizens ! We are initially suspicious of all government bodies, while you unprincipledly (unsuspectingly) trust them, because you have been trained by your excellent propaganda to do so ! There was a time when we believed that we would enjoy real freedom in the West compared to the former commie regimes, but as we know it, that has passed ! Now we knew its only a dirty illusions ! The difference is that eastern communists were replaced by western communists, but the essence behind the scenes remained the same ! The feeling in my stomach is the same when I enter the border of the USA to the immigration officer when I once wanted to cross the border of the Warsaw Pact Iron Curtain ! I'm always amazed at how naive and deceived Western people are, when the only difference between them and the rest of the world is that they have full (for now) stomach and can buy many colorful, beautifully packaged goods (made for them by Communist China :)) at Walmart at that price that their country robs and intimidates the rest of the world. They act exactly like the joke about how to cook a frog by slowly boiling the water under it ! Unfortunately, due to their lack of education, they do not know history (not by chance :)) including the history of the Roman Empire! Because then they would know what it means that Odoaker is already knocking on the gates !
Jimmy Dore said "We're debating how many bombs to drop on a country, but we're never allowed to suggest we don't drop bombs."
The perceived freedom problem shows up in all walks of life. Since we can't change human nature, one way is to work with what we know. For example, I make propagandart related to land use planning & transportation. It works to rally a fringe groups of people who want their neighborhoods to be delightful places to live.
We live in a twilight zone between what is officially pronounced or implied, and what we get. It's far worse than knowing what the government is and expects from you, and what you can expect from the government. But I reject the view previously expressed concerning "totalitarian" governments in Europe. Many East Berliners were unhappy about reunification and felt the quality of their lives had deteriorated, not improved. The great majority of Americans show a preference for what constitutes a socialist system, and are now even calling it socialism. The unrest and dissatisfaction in Europe over austerity is underplayed in the media. If the methods used to force this situation on the people isn't fascism, it renders fascism redundant.
When indoctrination is the topic, where does one begin? Does the 5 year old who was suckled and hugged and kissed and overstimulated have the slightest inclination to wonder if his parents are flawed beings who are following a script? What about the 5 year old who was born into a meth house, left to cry in a toxic squalor? Americans are very much an addled people that collectively are ordered to follow rules much more consistently than they’re invited to question them. The latter influence is the role of schools, educators and mentors, but it’s easy to see how these roles have been undermined by calculated underfunding, usurped by extremists and zealots a la HS football coaches and preachers, and big questions that ought to be asked are effectively erased from social and academic discourse.
In 1985, an educator named Neil Postman wrote a book titled Amusing Ourselves To Death, in which he argued that the totalitarianism that was a favored message of doom from our parents and teachers and political leaders was a bogus message. Postman believed that Huxley’s Brave New World was a much more appropriate projection of life in the liberal society than was Orwell’s 1984. As it happens, the American systems of control are in fact total, but those systems still require a level of investment by the majority. So the cell phone is a tracking device, and the 401K depends on a bullish market. Americans are largely invested enough in their corporate straitjackets, that big questions become too inconvenient to entertain. Only an economic collapse will shake the tree, I fear.
The strongest shackles in Western Democracy is the economic chains the Elites invisibly place upon ordinary people. You are expected to work as soon as you are within age - and your work throughout your life is exploited to enrich those at the top. You are psychologically abused by being indoctrinated with the Horatio Alger myth, that you too can some day become a billionaire, and that if you remain a working wage slave your entire life without accruing "wealth" - you are at fault, and not the system.
The economic chains also extend to the judicial and governmental institutions that now rules only for those Elites with obscene amounts of money. That allows the Elite rich to control the dynamics of society where Capital is paramount over Labor, so that Railroad workers never can enjoy decent sick leave, or humane work hours, even while the Capitalists who own the Railroad are making record profits in the billions. Where Walmart workers must seek governmental subsistence to even survive each month because Walmart pays slave wages, while the Waltons are among the richest families in the US that pay less taxes than you do.
And the economic chains reach out to your education and you ability to understand who you are and your potentialities. The quality of public schools have been in rapid descent in the US, especially if you find yourself in an impoverished neighborhood. Higher education has been corporatized, made into a for profit industry that results in debt peonage, even while the so-called professors of "Higher Education" no longer teach the majority of lower level undergraduate curriculum, left to exploited graduate student lecturers - who even right now are on strike in the California UC system - a system that has decided to leave the UC students this year without grades or adequate education because it does not want to provide decent working conditions or pay for their graduate student lecturers.
Wage slavery is simply a small step up from Roman slavery in ancient Rome. Worker exploitation has become even more extreme in the last number of decades. In the US, more Americans have been plunged into desperate poverty than ever before, while record profits in the 100s of billions are raked in by Wallstreet and monopolistic corporations owned by a few Elites. Americans claim they are free even as they spend the majority of their time working each day, with most having very little vacation time, no decent health care options that won't devastate them financially if they or their loved one's become sick, and wages that keep them chained to the work yoke that allows less and less the freedom the Elites enjoy everyday - in their Jeff Bezos 500 million dollar yachts.
Much of the "dumb luck" for me came from an early and persistent interest in philosophy. If you keep asking the big questions and looking for more answers, it leads to even more big questions, which can (if you're lucky) seep into your consciousness and affect how you view everyday assumptions. Eventually you question the whole thing, and that's when the fun starts.
I was given the incredible gift of teaching an Introductory Philosophy class about 12 years ago. Out of sheer necessity, I had to derive a basic understanding of dozens of big ideas from great minds, so that I could then ask my students to think about these ideas. I highly recommend this, by the way. For me it was far more life-changing than taking a class or studying someone else's version of Philosophy -- I got to create the curriculum, and it changed every term for 12 years. Every time I learned about some fascinating new idea, I thought about how to put it into my class so the kids could think about it themselves. And every new idea connected with all the other ideas and, along with a steady diet of writers like Caitlin (and many others), nudged my thinking further and further outside the "mainstream" of contemporary American life.
I've retired from teaching now, so I don't have the motivation to keep discovering new ideas, but somehow they keep coming my way anyway. I can't help it if I'm lucky.
Control in the West is not only via propaganda. Some western European governments jail people for publicly attacking, or even questioning the veracity of an official historical narrative. If not jailed, the accused is subject to life altering vilification. The more prominent victims pay a particularly heavy price. Witness the case of British Historian, David Irving who raised questions about aspects of the widely accepted WWII Holocaust narrative.
Unlike lesser lights who do Time for raising similar questions, the good Doctor never saw the inside of jail, but he did pay a heavy price in terms of Career and legal expenses.
Well, that's why there is a huge difference between us Central and Eastern European citizens who were once (before 1989) born and lived in a communist dictatorship, and between you so-called "free Western" citizens ! We are initially suspicious of all government bodies, while you unprincipledly (unsuspectingly) trust them, because you have been trained by your excellent propaganda to do so ! There was a time when we believed that we would enjoy real freedom in the West compared to the former commie regimes, but as we know it, that has passed ! Now we knew its only a dirty illusions ! The difference is that eastern communists were replaced by western communists, but the essence behind the scenes remained the same ! The feeling in my stomach is the same when I enter the border of the USA to the immigration officer when I once wanted to cross the border of the Warsaw Pact Iron Curtain ! I'm always amazed at how naive and deceived Western people are, when the only difference between them and the rest of the world is that they have full (for now) stomach and can buy many colorful, beautifully packaged goods (made for them by Communist China :)) at Walmart at that price that their country robs and intimidates the rest of the world. They act exactly like the joke about how to cook a frog by slowly boiling the water under it ! Unfortunately, due to their lack of education, they do not know history (not by chance :)) including the history of the Roman Empire! Because then they would know what it means that Odoaker is already knocking on the gates !
Knock Knock !
Jimmy Dore said "We're debating how many bombs to drop on a country, but we're never allowed to suggest we don't drop bombs."
The perceived freedom problem shows up in all walks of life. Since we can't change human nature, one way is to work with what we know. For example, I make propagandart related to land use planning & transportation. It works to rally a fringe groups of people who want their neighborhoods to be delightful places to live.
We live in a twilight zone between what is officially pronounced or implied, and what we get. It's far worse than knowing what the government is and expects from you, and what you can expect from the government. But I reject the view previously expressed concerning "totalitarian" governments in Europe. Many East Berliners were unhappy about reunification and felt the quality of their lives had deteriorated, not improved. The great majority of Americans show a preference for what constitutes a socialist system, and are now even calling it socialism. The unrest and dissatisfaction in Europe over austerity is underplayed in the media. If the methods used to force this situation on the people isn't fascism, it renders fascism redundant.
When indoctrination is the topic, where does one begin? Does the 5 year old who was suckled and hugged and kissed and overstimulated have the slightest inclination to wonder if his parents are flawed beings who are following a script? What about the 5 year old who was born into a meth house, left to cry in a toxic squalor? Americans are very much an addled people that collectively are ordered to follow rules much more consistently than they’re invited to question them. The latter influence is the role of schools, educators and mentors, but it’s easy to see how these roles have been undermined by calculated underfunding, usurped by extremists and zealots a la HS football coaches and preachers, and big questions that ought to be asked are effectively erased from social and academic discourse.
In 1985, an educator named Neil Postman wrote a book titled Amusing Ourselves To Death, in which he argued that the totalitarianism that was a favored message of doom from our parents and teachers and political leaders was a bogus message. Postman believed that Huxley’s Brave New World was a much more appropriate projection of life in the liberal society than was Orwell’s 1984. As it happens, the American systems of control are in fact total, but those systems still require a level of investment by the majority. So the cell phone is a tracking device, and the 401K depends on a bullish market. Americans are largely invested enough in their corporate straitjackets, that big questions become too inconvenient to entertain. Only an economic collapse will shake the tree, I fear.
The strongest shackles in Western Democracy is the economic chains the Elites invisibly place upon ordinary people. You are expected to work as soon as you are within age - and your work throughout your life is exploited to enrich those at the top. You are psychologically abused by being indoctrinated with the Horatio Alger myth, that you too can some day become a billionaire, and that if you remain a working wage slave your entire life without accruing "wealth" - you are at fault, and not the system.
The economic chains also extend to the judicial and governmental institutions that now rules only for those Elites with obscene amounts of money. That allows the Elite rich to control the dynamics of society where Capital is paramount over Labor, so that Railroad workers never can enjoy decent sick leave, or humane work hours, even while the Capitalists who own the Railroad are making record profits in the billions. Where Walmart workers must seek governmental subsistence to even survive each month because Walmart pays slave wages, while the Waltons are among the richest families in the US that pay less taxes than you do.
And the economic chains reach out to your education and you ability to understand who you are and your potentialities. The quality of public schools have been in rapid descent in the US, especially if you find yourself in an impoverished neighborhood. Higher education has been corporatized, made into a for profit industry that results in debt peonage, even while the so-called professors of "Higher Education" no longer teach the majority of lower level undergraduate curriculum, left to exploited graduate student lecturers - who even right now are on strike in the California UC system - a system that has decided to leave the UC students this year without grades or adequate education because it does not want to provide decent working conditions or pay for their graduate student lecturers.
Wage slavery is simply a small step up from Roman slavery in ancient Rome. Worker exploitation has become even more extreme in the last number of decades. In the US, more Americans have been plunged into desperate poverty than ever before, while record profits in the 100s of billions are raked in by Wallstreet and monopolistic corporations owned by a few Elites. Americans claim they are free even as they spend the majority of their time working each day, with most having very little vacation time, no decent health care options that won't devastate them financially if they or their loved one's become sick, and wages that keep them chained to the work yoke that allows less and less the freedom the Elites enjoy everyday - in their Jeff Bezos 500 million dollar yachts.
You just created something beautiful right here, Caitlin, if not "together". You're out there doing the hardest part of the hardest job. Thank you.
Much of the "dumb luck" for me came from an early and persistent interest in philosophy. If you keep asking the big questions and looking for more answers, it leads to even more big questions, which can (if you're lucky) seep into your consciousness and affect how you view everyday assumptions. Eventually you question the whole thing, and that's when the fun starts.
I was given the incredible gift of teaching an Introductory Philosophy class about 12 years ago. Out of sheer necessity, I had to derive a basic understanding of dozens of big ideas from great minds, so that I could then ask my students to think about these ideas. I highly recommend this, by the way. For me it was far more life-changing than taking a class or studying someone else's version of Philosophy -- I got to create the curriculum, and it changed every term for 12 years. Every time I learned about some fascinating new idea, I thought about how to put it into my class so the kids could think about it themselves. And every new idea connected with all the other ideas and, along with a steady diet of writers like Caitlin (and many others), nudged my thinking further and further outside the "mainstream" of contemporary American life.
I've retired from teaching now, so I don't have the motivation to keep discovering new ideas, but somehow they keep coming my way anyway. I can't help it if I'm lucky.
We already own nothing. As we come to realize it we aren't happy. Happiness does not exist at the point end of a gun. We have always worked for them.
Control in the West is not only via propaganda. Some western European governments jail people for publicly attacking, or even questioning the veracity of an official historical narrative. If not jailed, the accused is subject to life altering vilification. The more prominent victims pay a particularly heavy price. Witness the case of British Historian, David Irving who raised questions about aspects of the widely accepted WWII Holocaust narrative.
Unlike lesser lights who do Time for raising similar questions, the good Doctor never saw the inside of jail, but he did pay a heavy price in terms of Career and legal expenses.
Freedom is an illusion
Brilliant and inspiring.
Elon Musk – for Nobel Peace Prize !! He might have saved us from the fascist partisan US War party.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/89954921 -- Caitlin Johnstone - 12/11/2022
The Biggest Obstacle To Real Freedom Is The Belief That We Already Have It
Excellent. Sharing
"It's not because people are stupid."
So what is it...ignorance?
As someone said: "It’s not what they don't know, it's what they know....that ain't so!"
Ain't that stupid?
And again , Thank You ,Caitlin .
Now, what kind of words should I say to my son, to make him read this wonderfully written and needed essay ?
" Putin is The Terrible cause he is topless riding horse he, he . How dares he ? " .
The only true freedom you can ever have comes from your mind.
What a wild time to be alive.
We were born into the theatre of empire. Neoliberalism is the stage.
We will abandon it, or we will burn in the flames of its planetary collapse.