Peace and love never had a chance.
Our present reality was all but fated long ago after societal decisions were made regarding how we relate to each other and then created things like top down centralized power, laws, standing armies, and a monetary system to perpetually spin the hate machines into motion. These kinds of dominator social systems have existed in parts of the world since before Greco-Roman times, but it’s never been as omnipresent as it is now in known history.
Western societies are not agents of sophistication and progress as we are told, though there has been progress of sorts on many fronts that primarily benefits centralized power. Top down control serves as a way to socially engineer civilizations based on the whims of the few while gaining leverage over competing interests. The technologies developed and agendas chosen are no accidents, it’s all couched in motivation for enhancing human behavioral control and coalescing social power, because you have to have some mighty powerful methods of persuasion to get people to fight a war for you. Effectively attacking strangers all based on the presumed word of a government that consistently operates in a clandestine fashion, seems rather sketch to me.
And believe it or not, but very few people if given a choice of things they’d want to do with their lives would choose to be miners, or work in a slaughterhouse, or dig trenches, or work in a weapons factory…that list goes on and on, so there has to be some sort of pressure applied to make those options palatable because empire needs them done.
Now that may sound on the conspiratorial side, but as George Carlin noted: “You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge” Though people in power do often work together to chase after their desires and create very real conspiracies, however those who share similar interests in a similar mindset are going to do very similar things without a need to form a secret cult dedicated to ruling the world.
Established power in modernity drapes itself in the invisible robes of heroic haughty sounding speech, which is then amplified by sold-out media platforms who help legitimize sitting power. The media tends to reduce debate by indicating that our overall problems amount to just a few bad apples who we frustratingly can never quite exorcize. While bad apples exist, it’s ignored that a system created by people with imperialistic dreams at the forefront of their minds are likely going to weave those deeply seeded beliefs into the system they create.
The centralization of power corrals and indoctrinates each successive generation into taking up the same ole system of inequality that derails any chance for meaningful change. The normalizing of it all is critical, because entrenched ideas don’t get questioned as much. The reality around us is much different if we aren’t deriving our conscious perception through societal filters based on identities within this culture, like democrat, republican, patriot, academic, jewish, christian, mother, father, husband, wife, etc. Almost all these are roles defined by western thought in some capacity, and most people within the confines of our culture believe these roles to be somehow innate and fixed.
These various roles subtly tell us what we should be feeling and thinking, they serve to set a reference point for normality. And when we don’t meet expectations of being somewhere close to what is called “normal” we feel like something is wrong with us. That’s basically how behavioral control works. Widespread gaslighting via reward and punishment systems.
Like for instance on tv there has been shaming for those who don’t stand for the national anthem, or don’t cheer for their respective country in every situation. Not to mention the blind obligatory praise for military personnel who “serve their country” regardless of what horrible outcomes often happen through military interventions, and there have been many. So it doesn’t matter much what they did in the military just that they served a perceived greater good to some amorphous cloud of righteousness that constitutes their image of a nation state or leader they believe in with absolute faith.
Praising military service dogmatically is undergirded with the idea that since someone was working for an institution that tacitly has their trust then what people were doing while serving that institution is deemed automatically a worthy undertaking so long as they were dutifully following orders. That method of convenient thinking has an effect of sweeping away any questioning of what is actually happening and creating some unearned virtue out of loyalty, like remaining loyal itself is implicitly good no matter what it is your loyalty is supporting.
The normalization of it all leads directly to incurious attitudes that allows for all this unthinking behavior to occur, and that’s just how hierarchical social power likes it. The powers that be are always trying to create a new self-serving normal. We can clearly see that the government, corporations, and anyone of power like say Bill Gates are consistently running some kind of public relations campaign related to bolstering their image with an agenda in mind. Without this public relations front normalizing their activities it would be much easier to see that the emperor is stark naked. It does seem that what the powers-that-be really care about is what we think, because they put a whole lot of time and money into creating narratives trying to control perception.
The gestalt of western society amounts to creeping intransigent gangsterism, backed by violence utilizing a reward and punishment system that knowingly causes chaos and division among the masses. In order for the system of gangsterism to maintain power it has to install patterns of social control that inhibit other ideas from emerging that might bring about a more natural social equilibrium.
Thus common underlying strategies are used to maintain and hold power, and that’s what I’m going to be discussing in part II of this essay, regarding what is rooted in every empire in western civilization, which is the structure of social hierarchy. And I’ll talk about how empirical science shows that this way of living is harmful to our health and sanity.
Lastly, this all seems like a damning polemic against western society, but it’s more about the tactics, mindset, and resulting outcomes of employing these kinds of societal systems than trying to vilify any particular group of people.
Thanks for reading.
