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Escaping the Cul-de-sac

Professor PopulistApr 17, 2021, 4:20:28 PM
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"The infant child places an innate trust in those it finds itself with...The infant could not survive otherwise.

In a sane and healthy society, this deep instinct would evolve as the psyche developed. As self-awareness, the cognitive and reasoning abilities and scepticism evolved in the individual, this innate trust impulse would continue to be understood as a central need of the psyche. Shared belief systems would exist to consciously evolve and develop this childish impulse in order to place this faith somewhere consciously – in values and beliefs of lasting meaning and worth to the society, the individual, or, ideally, both.

...

What occurs when there is a childish need within us which has never evolved beyond its original survival function of trusting those in our environment who are, simply, the most powerful; the most present and active? When we have never truly explored our own psyches, and deeply interrogated what we truly believe and why? When our motivation for trusting anything or anyone goes unchallenged? When philosophy is left to the philosophers?

I suggest the answer is simple, and that the evidence of this phenomenon and the havoc it is wreaking is all around us: the innate impulse to trust the mother never evolves, never encounters and engages with its counterbalance of reason (or mature faith), and remains forever on its ‘default’ infant setting." [Source]

The common enemy we face is not Socialism or Communism, it is Totalitarianism. In the past we have incorrectly labeled it Socialism or Communism but we cannot make the same mistake again. What is being pushed for is not something which seeks to help the masses, it does not seek to raise all of us up using our collective abilities. Instead, it seeks to divide us, to pit us against one another, and to keep us ignorant while the elite feast upon our collective wealth.

The Totalitarian regime currently seeking to consolidate its power possesses the most powerful tools of violence and manipulation in history. If they succeed they are the first one capable of a implementing an erasure of the historical record at this scope & scale. It will devour the Socialists and the Communist too, eventually. And so we cannot further divide ourselves. The Totalitarian elite is our common enemy.

The bars of The Final Cage would seem to all be in place. The only step remaining is to lure us inside and slide the door closed. The melding of psychology, marketing, censorship, genetic modification, economics, etc into one all-encompassing religion were necessary to bring us to this point. And make no mistake, this is not simply about destroying your way of life as you previously knew it, this project will change all life as we know it. It is no exaggeration to say that these people wish to re-engineer humanity itself and they possess the hubris to believe that they can, and the ignorance to believe that they should.

"We don't know enough to play with the vehicle that made life. We're not that intelligent, not by a long shot." 

--@themorrigan1973

Forcing changes to your beliefs are only just the beginning. Widespread acceptance of mRNA vaccines is simply the foot in the door, this technology has the potential to lead to an attempt at an entirely new evolutionary track for humans (and likely other "useful" species as well). We're hurtling towards what should be bright red lines. Yet far too many seem colorblind.

The elite actually want to make themselves physically different from you, not just symbolically different. That's their goal. Especially the censorious and tyrannical Silicon Valley types. It's madness. It's suicidal folly. If we allow ourselves to be lured into The Final Cage there will be no escape once that door slams shut. This would not be a setback, this would be the end.

People's humanity is tethered to people, places, and things. Take away enough of them and you will take the humanity as well. Our current society has reached a dead end. Transhumanism seeks one path out of the cul-de-sac which would end Homo Sapiens. It's important that those who reject such a path develop viable alternatives or the current societal inertia will simply choose Transhumanism by default.

And while a backlash to such overreach is certainly a plausible outcome we would be wise to remember that any backlash requires active participation. History is littered with instances of overreach which met insufficient resistance, resulting in truly dark periods. Our enemy possesses truly terrifying weapons of manipulation and control. Underestimate them at your (and our) peril.

If a second Civil War is fought, it too will pit a group of people seeking absolute control over others against those that reject such barbarity. Unfortunately, it too is likely to see the bodies and minds of the poor & working class used to advance causes that go against their interests. Just as occurs on a daily basis today.

I'm not sure what the correct label is, "capitalism" may not be it, but I think whatever you want to call the system which has spent most people's entire lives bathing them in propaganda designed to make & keep them dumb & docile consumers...well I think that system deserves at least a little blame for people's poor choices. Not all of it mind you, but certainly a non-zero amount, I think.

All of us critics of the status quo would be wise to remember: There's no undeniably, totally good time in American history to go back to. All periods of our history have been flawed in some way. But we are more than just our flaws. There are values we could again cherish, even if they were imperfectly expressed.

Criticizing an existing system and developing a new one require fairly different skill sets. There's certainly some overlap but much does not. So critics of capitalism will often just pick up whatever alternative system is lying around and say they're "for" that one. Critics of communism will often do the same.

But they're all flawed ideologies that end up empowering a tiny group of elites. The sooner enough of us recognize this the sooner we can begin working collectively to develop something that actually can work for average people. I've got a hunch that "something" will look nothing like Capitalism or Communism as we know them today.

I think perhaps the most difficult issue we face is how to properly deal with people who seek to gain power over others. How much of our existing government structures are really just centered around this goal? Though of course often they become (or sometimes are from their inception) tools of oppression themselves.

It seems that we have repeatedly failed throughout history, in this country and others, to properly scale our communities up from the simple tribe. Every seemingly necessary more complex social construct ends up twisted and perverted. As time passes we even forget what particular pieces of the social construct are even "for."

In some sense, once we got beyond our small tribes culture has always been used by the elite for control. I think now that we exist in a globally-connected society it becomes both clearer and more dangerous: We no longer have the buffers of distance and slow communications. Bad ideas spread faster and faster. Unfortunately the speed of analyzing bad ideas has not necessarily increased in tandem.

Such a task would, I think, be significantly easier with fewer minds to make aware. In a world of nearly 8 billion, is it ever possible to make enough "see" at the same time? And do it without harsh acts of repression? Changing a mind isn't like changing a tire.

"Imagine a large population of Bertrand Russells—a Bertrand Russell Island—each of whom will inspect every doctrine placed before them, and will infallibly consign each doctrine to its proper place: the error bin or the correct bin. However, in each case, it takes a week to decide. Even on this ideally rational island, all new bad ideas would propagate for a week or more. Bertrand Russell Island is like any normal population with birth and death. Because there’s always youthful Bertrand Russells who have yet to inspect the bad ideas, bogus ideas could, in principle, last forever. There would still be a disconnect between the system of ideas spreading and the rationality/cognitive power of the individuals in the population. You don’t have to think that some people are irrational or closed to argument to explain the prevalence of error or stupid ideas. Even Bertrand Russell Island would have fake news." [Source]

In the past thirty years we have seen an imposed culture sweep across the developing world. The increase in processed foods, the increase in mindless entertainment options, all designed to create the same docility and timidity that the first wave of culture imposition had created in the West.

For me it's been fascinating to watch how the Chinese government has increasingly turned their people into consumers resembling citizens in the West. It's not quite the same as getting into a time machine and going back to watch Bernays begin his manipulations but it certainly rhymes. I suppose this is a great example of how #WeThePeople of the world need to unite to fight these things.

I don't think people appreciate enough just where certain tendencies of our current elite's thinking will lead. Everything is being "perfected" and standardized. There is quickly becoming one "right way" to do things (unless you're really drunk on the CRT kool-aid in which case "one right way" is clearly white supremacist thinking). Everything is being turned into data points that can be analyzed and mined and tweaked in the quest for efficiency. The logical outcome of that kind of thinking is a global managerial class coordinating all 8 billion of us so that we can exist "optimally & efficiently."

"Having squeezed every last drop of “value” from the earth, and with no more land to settle or markets to discover, capital’s approaching apotheosis finds it looking for a lifeline by creating a virtual copy of itself, where intellectual property supplants physical property and human biological and behavioral processes are recast as a grotesque form of human labor.

Efforts are now underway to “translate” the real world into a digital counterfeit that can provide financial markets with the figures and statistics it needs to execute the contracts of the incipient human capital markets – an insidious new form of capital assembled from our genetic code and other kinds of data that will form the basis of a financialized wonderland, enforced by blockchain technology and constantly monitored and updated through the burgeoning biosecurity state.

Led by the world’s most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations, the so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn humanity into datasets, which they can use to create more profits for themselves and their clients." [Source]

As is often the case, these things are trialed within institutions first, where the Watchers already possess a greater amount of control & autonomy, often combined with less transparency. Prisons, schools, and healthcare systems are the usual suspects.

"The concept behind social impact bonds requires a fully digital ecosystem that can track and aggregate data on individuals who are a part of any kind of state or municipal service such as prisons. With such pervasive tracking, a subject’s progression through that system can be measured and linked to milestones tied to financial instruments, which investors (or stakeholders) can hold, buy or sell on the open market.

Known as stakeholder capitalism, this new form of exploitation is already being tested in many places around the world and prisons are among the main targets for its implementation, as they provide an ideal and literally captive market for its proof of concept.

Alison McDowell’s pioneering independent research on this topic has exposed many of the insidious ways in which pay-for-success schemes like SIBs and other human capital market ideas are being foisted onto America’s public education and healthcare systems through the “gamification” of schooling and health pathways." [Source]

We as humans aren't equipped for this kind of existence. The meaning and real social bonds that we crave cannot be properly met by their digital "replacements". Living a life without any real meaning is a tiresome affair.

For most of human history, the ideas and individuals you interacted with were largely those that were physically close to you. Without Wikipedia, Twitter, etc, the minds of the people around you were the ones you reached out to. Now how many children see their elders as nothing but repositories of outdated, useless knowledge? How many homes are filled with people who barely speak to one another?

Instead we speak increasingly where Big Brother's friends can hear us loud and clear. Private intelligence outfits are being used to get around constitutional prohibitions on government conduct, and because they're private entities far too many people don't have a problem with what they're doing. One of the most insidious things at least a few of these outfits will be doing is attempting to use AI to deanonymize & connect every identity & alias online to a real person using tools like writing analysis. A database like this in the hands of government is a freedom killer.

I must admit I'm not sure how much good any of the old political labels do us (Populist included). But since we're going to keep using them for some time I think we need to not place so much emphasis on past incarnations & understandings and instead dig into what people who are labeling themselves (or being labeled) actually believe. We could also, when analyzing both past & present incarnations, pay much more attention to their authoritarian or libertarian nature, regardless of what the label is. These days you can tell a lot about a person's character & worldview simply based on their principles related to censorship & free speech (and how consistently they apply them).

Some form of Populism or Nationalism (though, as I say, I'm open to the argument these terms are not wholly accurate or useful descriptors) seems to be the only thing capable of putting the brakes on these trends. But it needs to be a perhaps odd form of Nationalism or Populism, one which seeks to also empower the #WeThePeople of other nations as well. Because we Americans are only a mere 300 million souls and the elites of the the world must all be crushed before their technocratic tools of oppression are fully implemented. If the Chinese people and the Indian people and all the peoples of Africa are brought to heel by the elites there will be no hope for the rest of the world's peoples.

"People are wonderful, religions & government are corrupt." 

--@robertemmet

I think if we cut away all the frilly rhetoric we probably only have 3 camps in this country:

  1. The Elites
  2. The Captured
  3. The Free-ish Thinkers

Which, in that framing, would mean you could look at it two ways:

  1. You've got two smaller groups fighting over control of the larger third group, The Captured
  2. You've got a tiny group weaponizing a large group against a small group.

Though like everything in life it's probably some melding of the two.

I also wonder if a majority of The Captured & The Free-ish Thinkers actually do have very opposite views on meaningful issues or if it is just a vocal minority of The Captured (amplified by The Elite) which creates the illusion of widespread divisions. The tendency of many humans to shy away from conflict would also enhance the illusion I think since silence can be seen as agreement or at the least acquiescence.

One issue we face is that too many of those who might be considered Free-ish thinkers have taken counterproductive stances that ignore real-world reality. For example, the "rugged individualism" thing so many conservatives have adopted works fantastic for an elite seeking to consolidate their power. We can't do this alone.

I also wonder to what extent various fictional depictions (and even some glossy historical summaries) of change have contributed to the apathy toward real activism & organization. It's always so neat and tidy in media portrayals, the gritty & tedious work fades into the background and the final outcome shines prominently in the spotlight. But real change is mostly nothing but gritty & tedious work and much of the time you get no praise or applause, instead you just get criticism and pessimism.

If you could create and develop a set of processes which would actively empower people while they trained and developed their analytical skills you would be providing something with a higher likelihood of becoming self-reinforcing. The problem is this type of thing is dominated by wannabe gurus and grifters of all sorts. And all want to lock it up behind various paywalls or offer up tidbits as bait for their little business schemes. Which is absolutely going to influence the ideas and concepts themselves, likely in a negative way.

Social media provides an excellent tool to do what I outlined above, perhaps helping to make up for all the negative effects it has had. So I'm attempting to use this channel to provide a real-world, live, evolving example of putting such processes to use in the hopes that others will be inspired to join in (and ideally end up doing a much better job than I am). We need to find ways to remind people that everything meaningful was once small and insignificant but through diligence and effort and a bit of luck it became something magnificent & massive. Like our home did.

Rather than feed desperate people narratives to keep them misinformed & docile like Q, we need to feed them narratives to make them informed & powerful. The same emotions and energies Q tapped into are still there, ripe for the harnessing by those willing to step up and make the attempt. And if the good people don't, some no good shifty grifter sure will.

Always remember: Every planet was once a tiny speck...and then BAM, the moment hits and what was once but a speck in the vacuum begins to agglomerate and grow ever larger. That's all "great" people ever are: specks that got bigger.

We find ourselves perched upon the sole rock for many many miles capable of maintaining our lives. Yet we exploit & defile the only home we've ever known, the planet which gives us life, our Eden. Why? I think the reason humans destroy their Eden is a desire for control ultimately rooted in fear of death. This fear is made so clear by Transhumanism's goals of "freeing" the human mind from the physical body.

The social construct is corrupting. The child may be born "pure" but hardship, struggle, and fear will soon be known, one way or another. Without a solid cultural foundation these fears can become neuroses and...well terrible things usually ensue.

We often fear the unknown, so we attempt to make the unknown known, by whatever means we can. Today we argue that science is great tool for doing so and before that we relied on stories, myths, fables, Gods, etc. But both are just the imperfect human's attempt to make sense of the world.

I think awhile back a particular culture or group of cultures ended up settling on stories which made them increasingly more powerful. This was to the detriment of cultures with different foundations, most of whom are now extinct. Our society is the end result of that.

Before this COVID nonsense the Transhumanist thugs were prowling the neighborhood, maybe lurking on the lawn. COVID is them getting us to open the door a crack so they can jam their boot in the gap. The consequences of this technology are going to so outweigh any meager benefit. And that we're rushing it into use over a virus 99% survive just makes it all the more insanely foolish.

But it's hard to recall what the experience of being thoroughly propagandized feels like once you've gotten yourself disenchanted. From the outside it clearly looks like absolute trash, but from the inside it seems like the only logical course.

"I am trying to save the world for my family"

--@eucaliptus

That is, I believe, the hardest path of all to walk. But likely the most necessary for more and more of us to take. We all have within us the capabilities to create great things. We just need to be allowed the time to explore & develop those skills.

"The Russian anarchist, geographer and writer Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) observed both nature and natural beings and related his findings to human beings. In the book “Mutual Aid in the Animal and Human World”, Kropotkin writes that in nature and society there is by no means only a struggle of all against all (social Darwinism), but that the principle of “mutual aid” also prevails. Those living beings that implement this principle would survive more successfully.

...

Karl Marx was right: when man has the security of his life, he thinks differently. He has different thoughts, different feelings and a different relationship to his fellow man. Man becomes different when he has the table laid. He has different feelings than the one who lives in insecurity, is exploited, is poor...In his whole emotional life and thinking he is taken up by this." [Source]

Unfortunately, "time" is exactly what so many have so little of these days. I don't think the old adage of "Slow & steady wins the race" is applicable here. Though, how fast is careless and how fast is prudent? I fear we won't know that until our ability to decide the pace is already gone.

We've (Humanity) seen this show before. The people asking such questions may dress differently but we're connected across time by the same uncertain inquiry. Though, our friends in the past were better off than us in one sense: they didn't have to contend with things like nanotechnology, nuclear weapons, and genetic engineering.

With the technocrats pounding on our door it's "now or never". But look at what these technocrats accomplished in the past twelve months. If modern revolutions are largely a PR game then #WeThePeople would lose bigly given the current status quo. But time IS running out. There's a deadline but when it exactly is remains a mystery. And if we want to meet it, and truly have a chance at defeating the technocratic elite, we'll need to begin building resilient communities. And we'll need to start now.

A divided We the People is an empowered Elite. It always has been. It always will.