Are we as a society being kept from discussing the big issues?
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http://humansarefree.com/2014/03/pedophillia-lawsuit-slave-children.html
Pedophillia Lawsuit: Slave Children Forced to Have Sex With "Royalty, Politicians, Academicians" -- Bill Clinton Also Visited the Villa
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...aire-paedophile-friend-visit-Sandringham.html
Prince Andrew's billionaire paedophile friend given permission to land private jet at RAF base for visit Sandringham
http://www.news.com.au/world/aussie...use-in-rape-case/story-e6frfkz0-1226013233010
Paedophile flew 17-year-old Virginia Roberts to meet Prince Andrew
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...-heir-accused-of-raping-second-child/6568787/
Du Pont heir accused of raping 2nd child in lawsuit
Pedophillia Lawsuit: Slave Children Forced to Have Sex With "Royalty, Politicians, Academicians" -- Bill Clinton Also Visited the Villa
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...aire-paedophile-friend-visit-Sandringham.html
Prince Andrew's billionaire paedophile friend given permission to land private jet at RAF base for visit Sandringham
http://www.news.com.au/world/aussie...use-in-rape-case/story-e6frfkz0-1226013233010
Paedophile flew 17-year-old Virginia Roberts to meet Prince Andrew
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...-heir-accused-of-raping-second-child/6568787/
Du Pont heir accused of raping 2nd child in lawsuit
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Exactly, all talk. What did you do? Oh I just talked to some people to spread awareness. Now I will post online for a few hours talking electronically to spread more awareness.
I've done lots of things
The least of which was joining an occupy rally. Although there was some merit in that i think there are far more practical things people can do. I mention a lot of these in my solutions thread and in lerxts solutions to capitalism thread
So for example i have spoken about the campaign to remove money from the banks and instead to deposit it in community credit unions
Imagine as awareness spreads that more people do that. If one person does it the banks don't even notice. Imagine if hundreds of millions of people globally do it: no more banks
That's just one simple action that anyone can do that would change the system if enough people do it
But everything i do in my life is guided by what i'm talking about. There are many small changes people can make to their lives which if enough people do the system has to change
Personally i think the political system is so rigged that voting has limited use unless people vote outside the bankster controlled parties but another way to look at it is to see every one of your dollars as a vote
Everytime you spend a dollar you make a vote for what kind of world you want to see
So if you spend your dollars in mcdonalds you are casting a vote of support for mcdonalds. if however you buy locally grown organic food or even better if you grow your own then you are casting a vote for that
Once again the actions of one person will not make any difference but the actions of millions will which is why there is a need for spreading awareness
An even better approach would be to try and transcend money eg through barter, gift economy, freecycle, swaps, freeganism, skill swaps, or the direct action approach of not paying tax (obviously this one carries risks!)
The other need is that the austerity that is being imposed on people is causing protests, riots and other unrest and without understanding the source of it all peoples energies are going to be directed in the wrong direction (they will be easily manipulated)
When you get into ideas about law of attraction etc though you find that the actions of an individual changes their subjective experience of the world massively.
Yes, all of the horror still exists in the background, a product of the collective consciousness. But it only comes into the foreground by paying attention to it and inviting that aspect of the collective creative process into your own individual creative process which is happening simulataneously but, for many, indistinguishable.
You can minimise its presence in your own life by changing what you give your awareness and energy to.
So, arguably, there is inherent value even in the most 'hopeless' of pursuits.
The post-scarcity thing is about Marx's theory about class struggle and classless society.
Marx and Engels believed that the industrial revolution made a classless society possible in a way it never had been before, like Smith and Ricardo and co. they believed that poverty would be remedied not by meddling with distribution but by maxing out production and industrial revolution had made super abundance possible in a way it simply was not previously in human history (there was a consensus about this among all economic theorists, not just Marxists).
However, for Marx and Engels they thought crucially that class divisions were a break upon creating superabundance, no factory owner would max out the true potential for production because they reduce the price of their goods in the process etc. etc. (Marx was theorising before designed obsolescence and other market fixes that monopolists, the later day corporatists dreamt up or decided upon) that would have to wait for the advent of a classless society but the eve of which would be soon because the divisions between factory owners, who had everything, and factory workers, who had nothing, made class struggles more evident and clear than ever before too.
Now obviously Marx was writing before the managerial revolution, before the financial sector grew like it did, before complex financial products or the ability of banks to socialise risk and consequences or spirit away public revenue to treasure islands and there's 101 other reasons why Marx's theories didnt come to pass, at least not as he expected. Although that's what I was talking about, not the latest talk about scarcity in terms of starship earth or any of the ecological schtick which I think you were talking about.
I'm not sure that the mindset creates the system, I think its much, much more reciprocal than that, force will always be inadequate social control, so society has to create "willing slaves" and it does, through social character. Erich Fromm's written about this at length if you're interested. Although it may come down to whether you believe that sociology or psychology and culture are the greatest determinants of human behaviour.
I think that is called the burying the head in the sand approach
If millions of people do that then they will definately lose their freedoms
The new age movement is steered the same as everything else. Who do you think is telling people not to pay attention to what is going on?
Sure drop out of their system but be aware of why youre doing it...no?
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erich fromm was part of the frankfurt school which i have spoken about here; they are obviously trying to bring about the change they want to see in the world; they are orientated towards creating a centrally controlled planned economy
Concerning the chicken and the egg aspect of what shapes society: thought preceeds action so the thought to control comes followed by the creation and maintainance of the apparatus of control
Yes once the apparatus is up and running there is a kind of feedback loop as people who then grow up within the upper echelons of the control system are themselves brainwashed and therefore not making a spontaneous decision to control others but rather are living out a pre-existing culture of control but the mindset to maintain that system is what allows its maintenance
Society does not need to create 'willing slaves'; the powers that be that want to justify a coercive pyramidal system will create their philosophies and ideologies that justify the creation of slaves because they themselves don't want to do the work but rather live off the sweat off the backs of others
I don't agree with that fully.
I do think there is an element of the New Age movement that is misleading people but it is when people are encouraged to idolise anything that alarm bells ring for me.
It is not about ignoring what is happening, it is about not fearing it, accepting that it is something that is happening and trying to create an alternative. Like you say, as opposed to a Durden-esque destruction of the status quo, which is using the same methods that created it, we could replace the banks (e.g. with credit unions) and they would be destroyed as a byproduct of our decision to do things differently.
The only difference is that we cannot battle the occult with materialism and this fight goes beyond the temporal as far as I can tell. So we do need to discover what the true nature of reality is and make that work for us because on the material level, we have been defeated. On the mental level, we are close to defeat. On the spiritual level, we haven't really been exposed to any direct attacks. Yes, religion has been bastardised for centuries but that lie has not been effectively replaced. I do predict that extra-terrestrial contact will contain a spiritual element and so it is before that day that people must wake up to their latent creative abilities or will be begin to be explicitly defeated on that aspect of our being too.
Extra-terrestrials will be idolised as spiritual gurus and we need to KNOW that is bullshit before the day comes.
Well now you are drifting into the realm of the abstract
That is inevitably where things must go, but as soon as you do you risk being branded 'crazy' or 'vague' or 'irrational' by those trapped in purely concrete thinking
It sounds like we agree....build alternatives through conscious awareness of what is going on...making a conscious choice to feed the better aspect of reality
We need to stop feeding the beast. We need to stop giving it our money, our votes and our psychic energy. I talk about these things but i don't give them my support in any way
The only way we can do what you say about understanding the nature of reality is to SPREAD AWARENESS so that we all figure out what that is
The el-ite are at an advantage as they have been hoarding secrets and sharing them around within their magickal orders. We need to find the secrets and share them which is what is happening on the internet
Before the internet most people didn't have a clue about a lot of this stuff
The powers that be always seek to infiltrate and hijack any potent movement by the people; they have been involved in the new age movement from the start. For this reason i would advise some caution on that front
Fromm was part of the frankfurt school but he broke with them and they carried out serious propaganda against him. His break with them was probably final when he criticised Marcuse about his misreading of Freud and his theorising in one dimensional man, Fromm actually wound up believing his one time friend was mentally ill and made a compelling case on that matter. There's no sense in which Fromm was aiming at a central plan economy.
I dont really believe in the sort of free agency you presume here, that does not mean that I dont believe in freedom or that free agency ought to be goals of society but I dont believe it exists, even potentially so, at present, it is much more so a case that one day maybe it will be. In order for that to come about there needs to be a proper appreciation of determinism rather than its denial.
Society does a great job of that already. How can dictators control entire nations when its obvious that the population out number them and their support? Its not all a question of power politics, usually this is only the case in a perfect storm crisis, the like of which doesnt happen but for seven generations or so (that's an aphorism rather than a factoid btw), philosophy and ideology matter but its more fundamental than that, there is a social unconsicous and social character the same as there are individual ones, in fact, as I've said, I think that the social character and social unconscious is ontologically a priori to any individual character and consciousness/unconscious.
Well now you are drifting into the realm of the abstract
That is inevitably where things must go, but as soon as you do you risk being branded 'crazy' or 'vague' or 'irrational' by those trapped in purely concrete thinking
Perhaps that is where I need to focus and those who are on the verge of understanding are my target audience.
If I am branded that then...so be it. Those with ears to hear will be able to regardless. I will have to do my work extra-well.
Absolutely. The bolded words are my ethos boiled down wonderfully.
Here is where I disagree again.
I don't believe that the powers that be DO understand reality.
They appear to be able to manipulate reality very effectively on the material level, perhaps having discovered the key to the mind-body connection.
However, they have done so on an egoic level only. Humans have more to them than ego alone and so DO have the upper hand there.
The same principles appear to apply but humanity needs to let go of the need for control, which stems from fear, not wrestle it from those who currently possess it.
But what is the motivation to not fear? How can we KNOW that we are safe? Well, I think that lies in redefining the human condition.
Not everyone will get it. That's okay, that is to be expected. It doesn't mean it isn't true.
I know I didn't!
This is something I am concerned about which is why any movement I imagine always has to be non-committal. It would provide the means but motivation would have to be up to the individual. There can be no consequences for not taking part, it has to be done through free will at all stages. Easier said than done, again. But I have ideas...
yes they all thought everyone else was crazy; their legacy is the massed drugging of the american people
They didn't say what they wanted to see...they were very reticent about that....all they did was criticse the current system...but they did so with the aim of bringing it down in order to replace it with a centrally planned economy as David Rockefeller has called for
You haven't made a case for determinism here you have only name checked it
There are many bodies for example the tavistock institute which i mentioned above that are consciously working towards the aim of controlling the mass of humanity. This is manipulation on a grand scale where choice is removed from people and replaced with an illusion of choice...in effect the bars of the prison become invisible bars
I have no problem in saying i think that should be discontinued
They manage largely because people are not bothered about societal power plays until life becomes uncomfortable
It is a minority of humanity that focus on it
The upside of this is that most of humanity are generally decent and just going about their business; the downside is that they are easily manipulated by the predators
The social consciousness is being controlled and suppressed
For example the public are sold consumerism by a handful of people who benefit financially from it but it is built on the need to make people feel constantly insecure so that they keep consuming. This leads to people feeling unhappy and unsatisfied and they then go to the doctor who instead of telling them that they feel unhappy because their consumer culture has robbed them of meaning and purpose and is making them feel constantly ill at ease, they give them some drugs to chemically cosh them. The handful of controllers also profit on the sales of the drugs
So society is not in alignment with human nature otherwise there wouldn't be a need for massed druggings or culturally ingrained self medication
That is a form of feedback that is ignored by the central controllers because that inconvenient truth doesn't match with how they want society to be (unqual to the extreme)
Be sure of your facts or the concrete brigade will jump down your throat
Even if you want to speak about abstractions the logic heavy people will always try to earth you in facts; if you have the facts you can show them that you are a potentially credible source of perspective
Personally i think it is about striking a balance between both hemispheres of the brain...being able to engage with both logic and abstraction; i think a narrow focus on one to the detriment of the other is to see the world in a narrow way
To feed the correct part of reality people need to be ble to see the lay of the land. For example a person brought up munching mcdonalds each day might not be consciously aware of the health implications of that and of the environmental implications of that. If someone tells them however this may upset them but if they can let go of that aspect of their behaviour then they may benefit from it
So once again conscious awareness plays a role
I'd be interested to hear more about your thoughts on this
Concerning the el-ites knowing more about the nature of reality i think they have access to cutting edge research, they have also stockpiled all of mans knowledge as well as torturing shamans for insight into the shamanic realms
The catholic church for example has been particularly good at hoarding knowledge and extracting knowledge form people whether by torture or confession
I believe that the el-ite are black magicians and that they are using occult technology against people that most people aren't even consciously aware of
They have though fallen into the abyss which is i think what you are talking about when you speak of the egoic path
They haven't let go....and as a result their emotional/ego baggage has ossified around them rooting them in their ego hell
Not everyone will get it. That's okay, that is to be expected. It doesn't mean it isn't true.
I know I didn't!
This is something I am concerned about which is why any movement I imagine always has to be non-committal. It would provide the means but motivation would have to be up to the individual. There can be no consequences for not taking part, it has to be done through free will at all stages. Easier said than done, again. But I have ideas...
Motivation for thinking outside the box is going to naturally arise out of the various crises emerging. As people lose faith in the current paradigm they will naturally begin to reasess things
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8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.
Young Americans–even more so than older Americans–appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.
How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?
1. Student-Loan Debt.
Large debt–and the fear it creates–is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.
Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.
2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.
In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”
Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909—1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).
3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.
Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.
The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”–in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action–is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school–its demand for compliance–teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.
4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.”
The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.
5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education–But Not Their Schooling–Seriously.
In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”
The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.
6. The Normalization of Surveillance.
The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?
7. Television.
In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV–regardless of the programming–is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).
Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.
8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.
American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.
These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.
Young Americans–even more so than older Americans–appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.
How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?
1. Student-Loan Debt.
Large debt–and the fear it creates–is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.
Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.
2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.
In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”
Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909—1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).
3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.
Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.
The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”–in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action–is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school–its demand for compliance–teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.
4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.”
The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.
5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education–But Not Their Schooling–Seriously.
In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”
The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.
6. The Normalization of Surveillance.
The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?
7. Television.
In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV–regardless of the programming–is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).
Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.
8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.
American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.
These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”
Although this video is old, from 2007, chemtrails remain a growing topic of interest for concerned citizens all over the world. I think it’s a great video to create more awareness on the topic, and let people know that within the past few years chemtrails have left the realm of ‘conspiracy theory’ to become a definite cause for concern. All who are concerned with our planet should definitely be made aware of this, geo-engineering is no joke and deserves our attention.
Rosalind Peterson (who you will see in the video) is the the President and Co-Founder of the Agriculture Defence Coalition (ADC). It was formed in 2006 to protect agriculture from a wide variety of experimental weather and atmospheric testing programs, in other words, geoengineering. She formally worked for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), with the Farm Service Agency dealing with agricultural crop loss. Prior to that, she was an agriculture technologist for the Mendocino County Department.
Again, geoengineering is no joke, most of these programs are backed by the CIA and NASA, who are supporting the National Academy of Sciences with regards to geoengineering projects.(1)(2) Geo-engineering projects are any attempt to alter the way the planet or its weather systems operate, and it’s been happening for a long time now.(3)(4)(5)(6) There are multiple patents with regards to geoengineering and climate manipulation, one of many techniques that’s been called into question is weather modification via chemical seeding. (7)(8) The weather was even modified in China for the 2008 Olympics.(9)(10)
Many of these programs, as mentioned in the video, receive no oversight from congress. Could this be because the department of defence is involved? Are these part of the ‘black budget,’ special access programs that Edward Snowden leaked not to long ago? (Read more about that here)
The list goes on and on, and it’s clear that Rosalind Peterson and others are well aware. This isn’t the first time the UN has been urged to freeze climate geo-engineering projects. (11)
The general consensus among geo-engineering advocates is that it might be a necessary tool to halt the damage caused by global warming. The concept of global warming itself isn’t even fully understood, and there is much controversy surrounding it. Here is a picture giving you the basic gist of it.
“One of the things that’s affected by climate change is agriculture, but some of what we are seeing is manmade, but manmade in a different way than what you may guess. Weather modification programs, experimental ones done by private companies, the US government, are underway and there are more than 50 operations underway across the United States. All of these impact agriculture because they change the microclimates needed for agriculture to survive. None of these programs are done with oversight. International corporations are modifying our weather all the time, and modifying it in ways that cover thousands and thousands of square miles. Most of it is chemically altered, so what happens is that we are putting ground based chemicals that are shot into the air that change and modify our weather.”
Watch the video to here to see what else she has to say.
[video=vimeo;87564470]http://vimeo.com/87564470#at=0[/video]
Sources:
http://www.agriculturedefensecoalition.org/content/about-rosalind-peterson
(1) http://phys.org/news/2013-07-cia-co-sponsoring-geoengineering-reversing-global.html
(2) http://www.businessinsider.com/cia-weather-control-with-geoengineering-2013-7
(3) http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss1/art24/
(4) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/314/5798/452.short
(5) http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-010-9961-z
(6) http://oxrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/2/322.short
(7) http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph
(8) http://www.changpuak.ch/electronics/downloads/US20050056705.pdf
(9) http://www.technologyreview.com/news/409794/weather-engineering-in-china/
(10) http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-18817945
(11) http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/21/us-geoengineering-idUSTRE69K18320101021
Rosalind Peterson (who you will see in the video) is the the President and Co-Founder of the Agriculture Defence Coalition (ADC). It was formed in 2006 to protect agriculture from a wide variety of experimental weather and atmospheric testing programs, in other words, geoengineering. She formally worked for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), with the Farm Service Agency dealing with agricultural crop loss. Prior to that, she was an agriculture technologist for the Mendocino County Department.
Many of these programs, as mentioned in the video, receive no oversight from congress. Could this be because the department of defence is involved? Are these part of the ‘black budget,’ special access programs that Edward Snowden leaked not to long ago? (Read more about that here)
The list goes on and on, and it’s clear that Rosalind Peterson and others are well aware. This isn’t the first time the UN has been urged to freeze climate geo-engineering projects. (11)
The general consensus among geo-engineering advocates is that it might be a necessary tool to halt the damage caused by global warming. The concept of global warming itself isn’t even fully understood, and there is much controversy surrounding it. Here is a picture giving you the basic gist of it.
“One of the things that’s affected by climate change is agriculture, but some of what we are seeing is manmade, but manmade in a different way than what you may guess. Weather modification programs, experimental ones done by private companies, the US government, are underway and there are more than 50 operations underway across the United States. All of these impact agriculture because they change the microclimates needed for agriculture to survive. None of these programs are done with oversight. International corporations are modifying our weather all the time, and modifying it in ways that cover thousands and thousands of square miles. Most of it is chemically altered, so what happens is that we are putting ground based chemicals that are shot into the air that change and modify our weather.”
Watch the video to here to see what else she has to say.
[video=vimeo;87564470]http://vimeo.com/87564470#at=0[/video]
Sources:
http://www.agriculturedefensecoalition.org/content/about-rosalind-peterson
(1) http://phys.org/news/2013-07-cia-co-sponsoring-geoengineering-reversing-global.html
(2) http://www.businessinsider.com/cia-weather-control-with-geoengineering-2013-7
(3) http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss1/art24/
(4) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/314/5798/452.short
(5) http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-010-9961-z
(6) http://oxrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/2/322.short
(7) http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph
(8) http://www.changpuak.ch/electronics/downloads/US20050056705.pdf
(9) http://www.technologyreview.com/news/409794/weather-engineering-in-china/
(10) http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-18817945
(11) http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/21/us-geoengineering-idUSTRE69K18320101021
Are you talking about Erich Fromm or the frankfurt school? Fromm was pretty clear about what he wanted to see in The Sane Society, I think he refered to it as communitarian libertarian socialism, and quoted British socialist GDH Cole at length, he also was very prescriptive in To Have or To Be? in which he discusses cultural and structural reforms, and in the post humanously published Art of Being he was pretty prescriptive about individual character and behaviour, that's available on audiobook and as an ebook and paperback so far as I know, in Art of Loving he was pretty prescriptive too. In fact Fromm was so prescriptive that a lot of readers have sought to suggest that they respect his description even if they dont agree with his prescriptions.
Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse may be a different story, they were much more reticient to appear to be marxist, socialist or anything like that, perhaps no surprise given the cold war climate in the US and that they were already refugees from what was once a liberal society and turned totalitarian under fascism/nazism, Fromm, in contrast, while he was being attacked as a turncoat, conservative and moralist by them all was publishing book like Marx's Theory of Man, attempting to clarify and popularise Marxism rather than being behind the door about it. He also had a pretty serious split with Marcuse, his one time friend, over Marcuse's reading of Freud and interpretations in Eros and Civilisation which suggested libertine hedonism was necessarily revolutionary, Fromm thought nothing of the sort and that it was a clue to Marcuse's failing mental or emotional stability, although he didnt even publically suggest so, despite Marcuse alledging he was mad.
Fromm did theorise about the pathology of normality and suggest there was an insane society and that health, corresponding to human nature, was elusive when success demanded conformity to pretty unnatural modes of behaviour and social expectations. I dont understand the difficulty you're having with that or the resistance you're showing to the ideas, perhaps its the associations you've made with the frankfurt school and critical theory, but I'd have thought it chimed perfectly with your own stated ideas that we live in a society engineered and maintained by psychopaths for their purposes, if that is the case is everyone a psychopath?
If there is manipulation of the kind you've suggested going on then surely determinism, conditioning and social control is possible for it to happen in the first place, which is it? Its either not possible, therefore not happening, or possible and happening. Determinism doesnt have to be complete or absolute in order for it to be plausible and rational, if you dont eat you starve, if you engage in other unnatural behaviours for long either they have their consequences too. I'm not going to construct an lengthy argument because I assume you have access to the same sources as me, either online or in books, you either believe it or not and that's fine.
Come of it, you cant do this whole stunt of attacking Erich Fromm and then composing responses to points which consist of his ideas from Heart of Man, Revolution of Hope, May Man Prevail, The Sane Society and Fear of Freedom.
My view is that the frankfurt school was being used as part of a wider hegelian dialectic approach of using both marxism and capitalism to beat the public into the new world order...a left, right combination if you like
The frankfurt school was concerned with playing a particular role in that equation; they sought to break down the current society as a step on the road to creating a new one
The new one which the backers of the frankfurt school wanted to see...and the backers i refer to are the big monied interests who assimilated the frankfurt school into the educational system (eg the rockefellers)....is a platonic society ruled by a handful of philosopher kings:
"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
David Rockefeller... Baden-Baden, Germany 1991
Its a group of bloodlines who have been controlling europe for a long time
They have spread their influence into the americas
Whats difficult to grasp here?
Come of it, you cant do this whole stunt of attacking Erich Fromm and then composing responses to points which consist of his ideas from Heart of Man, Revolution of Hope, May Man Prevail, The Sane Society and Fear of Freedom.
What matters is not the diagnosis but the solution
The frankfurt school were part of the conspiracy...their job was to help steer us towards a planned economy by destroying faith in the current system
I on the other hand do not want to see a system of centralised power i want to see power decentralised....but that doesn't mean that i don't want to see capitalism go....it will go....because the seeds of its own destruction are contained within it
So in one sense i share some goals with the illuminati just as i share some goals with libertarians...but the end game i wish for is different
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[MENTION=1871]muir[/MENTION]
I saw an ad for brand.com on television. Brand.com does 'business reputation management' where they manipulate search results so that negative things which are "not true" - pay attention to the quotations - will be bumped down and replaced by positive "money earning" results.
Oh sure. It's just for the things that are "not true". They'll be totally honest and leave alone the things that are true but happen to be inconvenient for them. Bullshit.
I think we're fucked.
I saw an ad for brand.com on television. Brand.com does 'business reputation management' where they manipulate search results so that negative things which are "not true" - pay attention to the quotations - will be bumped down and replaced by positive "money earning" results.
Oh sure. It's just for the things that are "not true". They'll be totally honest and leave alone the things that are true but happen to be inconvenient for them. Bullshit.
I think we're fucked.