Going Boldly Beyond the Pale: POTUS, Balkanization, Polarization, & Atomization, Identity Politics Inner & Outer
by
Jasun
A little birdie told me that Trump is talking of closing the borders around the crumbling Empire to keep the Barbarians at bay. But the real barbarians are inside the Tower, and always have been; so what’s the end game here?
Create proxy armies like ISIS and resource-plundering “wars” like Gulf 1 & 2, and one thing you can be sure of is a steady influx of refugees fleeing the war-torn territories and seeking sanctuary in the lands of plenty where the bombs issued from. Destabilization is the name of the game, and geopolitics is as much a game of dominoes as of chess. Undermine one tectonic plate and you undermine them all. As above so below, as within so without; every action has an equal and corresponding reaction.
I once wrote (as far back as 1990) that “The bid to union is a bid to war.” I am not sure how I meant it at the tender age of twenty-three, but now I would say that, if this is true, it is true partially because, when you try and force peoples, nations, and worldviews together that are to some degree incompatible, the result is that they will clash and fly apart with the same force with which they have been forced to “get along.” This is also why, to reduce it to a gnomic soundbite, tolerance = tyranny: because even the
idea of tolerance contains within it the seed of force. It is, simply put, no substitute for love or understanding.
What I perceive, in my naïve, apolitical, and politically under-informed/over-insulated gonzo fashion, is this: that the “balkanization” or atomization of the US was always part of the long-term goal and now we are seeing just exactly how and why. That bombing the shit out of countries and routing out their indigenous inhabitants wasn’t just a way to plunder the resources; it was also a way to ensure a flood of immigrants and refugees to destabilize one’s
own territory, and so pave the way for a plundering of one’s
own resources. The nature of the barbaric instinct to plunder is not to stop plundering until every last resource has been gobbled up and turned into personal gain. A cancer is perhaps too tidy and obvious a metaphor here; but even so, the parallels between geopolitics and biology are too striking to be ignored. There are principals being applied here that go so far beyond the run-of-the-mill conspiracy theories (even, or especially, the wildest and most grandiose of them) that they belong to a different order of epistemology altogether.
Because these principals are largely unknown (or at least overlooked), the apparent complexity of social engineering is deceptive. Decay might appear to be
massively complex to someone dependent on biological descriptions of molecular processes to understand it, compared say to someone who owns an apple tree and sees fruit fall to the ground and rot all the time, and who just sort of
groks the process. Likewise with culture, micro and macro.
The wo-men behind the women and men behind the POTUS-beyond-the-Pale (the Boogeyman under the democratic bed at this dark hour)
do understand these principals, and how to apply them. They know that, if you want to atomize a society, one way to accelerate that process is to close the borders and increase the
internal pressure first. There are probably countless different models (and historical examples) that reveal the logic in this. The one that comes to mind for me is Girardian: keep out the external enemy–the “other” that unifies the community against it–and you have only internal enemies to worry about.
These be liminal times, and liminality = polarization, polarization = internal lack of cohesion = the need for scapegoats. It is not quite as simple as 1, 2, 3; but it’s a fair bit easier to understand than algebra.
We could easily have foreseen that the polarization process that began (visibly) with the Trump vs. Hilary Election Theater could only continue to escalate if Trump won. Now that he has, and now he has assumed the throne, having the POTUS actually
do some of the unthinkable things he promised to do, and/or that his detractors warned us he
woulddo, will naturally increase the polarization pressure still further.
Never mind that what’s being revealed here is simply that geopolitics is as geopolitics does. Or that, if Trump is pushing some radial and scary policies, it is not because Trump is the POTUS but, rather, because it was
time for these policies to be pushed and Trump was selected as the man for the job (the job of figurehead I mean). When you need a real villain for the grand showdown, you find an A-lister; you don’t go to the stock villains for the job.
But then, if people were able to see this, the polarization/atomization/balkanization plan would not be moving forward as planned. They–our social engineers–will not release the big guns until they have the enemy in sight and it is too late for the enemy to turn back. Long-term think tank planners of this sort don’t plan to roll out the UFO disclosure project (say) until they know (because they can
see) that people are already sufficiently hysterical to be
demonstrably believing things that have
no basis in political or social reality. Only then is time, now that there’s nothing being left to chance or to those pesky human variables, to lay down the trump cards.
People are
already seeing demons in their neighbors eyes. They are already hearing hatred and ignorance in every casual remark, etc., etc.–whatever the hot button is in any given moment of social interaction/polarization, it is increasingly guaranteed to get pushed. We, the people, are being played like a street organ. If sloppy NLP amateurs and opportunists like Trump (or Derren Brown) are as good as they are at what they do, just imagine how good the
real,behind-the-scenes perception managers must be at this point. We can
try to imagine, but we will fail. We will fail because our imagination is the first thing to have been hijacked, co-opted, and redirected towards the ends of keeping us in the dark of our own internal civil war-state of emergency. In a weird way, all this IS the product of our imagination. We are so close now to becoming our own prison guards that the illusion of freedom and democracy is barely necessary anymore.
This is not a good time to be living in the US; that much is clear. Or anywhere. and yet, it is a grand time to be alive. The adversary
is our initiator. why? Because he is just like us. He is the neighbor we cannot let ourselves see, and to know him is to fear him. But also to love him.
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[Nick Bryant bit, edited out because it seemed a bit trivial juxtaposed with this other stuff. Seek it in the comments section.]
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The other thing I wanted to blog about was
Seen & Not Seen.
A lot of people who read this blog do so because they find my take on “social engineering” compelling, novel, even uplifting. They are interested in understanding how both the world “out there” and our perceptions “in here” are being manipulated to create a kind of cognitive, gender-neutral prison for us to waste away and die inside. Most of you readers probably haven’t read
Seen & Not Seen. You may be under the mistaken apprehension that it doesn’t have much to do with social control, etc., seeing as how it’s a memoir about movies. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Writing
Seen & Not Seen was a major part of how I reached a place of lived, experiential understanding about social and cultural engineering, and how it works. I think it has particular value to people who read this blog for that reason. It’s not a book of theories or essays about movies. Much more than
Matrix Warrior was (because it shows rather than tells), it’s a handbook for cultural deprogramming.
A lot of people want to try and understand conspiracy, social control, and psychological or spiritual liberation, but they want to do so from a distance. They want to get there by studying maps and following narratives that
seem to cover the territory extensively, by viewing it from a distance. But it’s the very scale of these interpretations that makes them so limited, and even distorted. They are so general they become meaningless, like trying to tell what sort of fruit tree is in your garden by looking at a map of the state (not Google Earth) instead of going out your back door. The smudge of green on that map
at best tells you there
might be a tree there. Why not just go and see? (The answer is we might find
a lot of rotting fruit to clear up.)
To understand these social, political, and spiritual realities by getting to grips with the big picture only helps with one thing: to pique our interest. But what’s relevant isn’t
the thing that interests us (JFK, UFOS, 9/11, Crowley, Strieber, Kubrick; synchronicities, psychedelics, Yoga, whatever); what’s relevant is
the interest itself: where did it come from, how did it get there, and
why is it here? If we follow our interest inward, rather than outward, we may start to see that the real evidence for these dark agendas and programs of social control is not outside but
inside us.
We are the evidence we are seeking.
Seen & Not Seen is a self-examination that slowly and incrementally reveals the depth, subtlety, and reach of social and cultural indoctrination and of our own perceptual imprisonment, spiritual bondage, or whatever we want to call it, the thing that prevents us from living fully satisfying lives. It follows clearly recognizable effects (my own beliefs and behaviors in the present) back to clearly identifiable causes (movies and other cultural props in the past). I guess if I had called it
A Conspiracy Theorist’s Primer, more people would be reading it. But that wouldn’t have been honest, especially since I didn’t quite realize what it was until well after I’d published it.
The more people I talk with about the reality of social engineering, the more I hear and feel their struggle to understand the scope of it and can sense how they
feel it is true and yet can’t really believe it, the more I realize that, out of all the things I have written so far,
Seen & Not Seen is probably the best place for them to start.
How’s that for altruistic self-promotion?
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Lastly, I will now try to tie all these disparate points or half-points together and address a question made by a recent commenter at this blog, one about facing up to “alternative facts” in this “post-truth” world of “fake news”-warnings from the Ministry of Truth.
Identity politics. All forms of violence are quests for identity. What’s to become of our identities as the community/world (the other) that provides us a matrix for self-awareness and self-perception to emerge from becomes too large and complex for us to think about, see clearly, or relate to? What happens, in part, is withdrawal from the other/the outside and contraction into an ever-more internally-directed gaze. This is not a gaze that sees but a gaze that wants above all
not to see, anything at all. This kind of looking inward is really a looking
away from and sensory systems shutdown. (Hence it is symbolized, literally, by hordes of people gazing at their "I-phone.")
The thing we are trying not to see is reality. This new-old form of contracted, solipsist, super-narcissistic identity is primarily geared towards
not facing facts, and the best way to
never have to face facts again is to make up one’s own set of facts and present them to the world as equally valid as any other competing facts, “out there.”
He who controls the narrative in this way controls identity. And he (or
ze) who controls identity, controls the narrative.
To create a narrative in which every last one of us “gets” to create the narrated identity-self we want for ourselves is, somewhat paradoxically, the perfect way for the collective identity of “State” to maintain control over that narrative indefinably and the individuals that subscribe to it.
People who are encouraged to create their own “sacred space” dream worlds and enter into them will: a) pose no threat to the dominant power structures, because in the end they won’t even be aware they exist; b) be less and less willing or able to refer to others (reality check), or to have any meaningful connection, at all, to other human beings.
In such an atomized state-world-state, the other is valued less and less as an
other, and more and more as the required reinforcement for one’s own fact-trumping-feelings. Over time, we each become isolate individuals for whom the rest of the world is necessary only
as an audience to applaud, approve, and uphold our narrated identities. The other supports us in our make-believe fantasy of perfected self-narrative, not by engaging with it but, on the contrary, by not looking at it too closely and only responding to our
telegraphed desire to have it validated. The other exists exclusively to click “like,” and move on (since they are only concerned about being validated back and must give as many “likes” as they can to increase their own social currency).
In a world in which a human being can self-identify as something they are demonstrably, biologically
not (as a different sex, age, race, species, maybe as not even existing at all), and can then expect, even demand, complete and unquestioning affirmation of that belief, not as
if it were a fact but
as a fact, there is now a complete free-for-all. Observation becomes irrelevant as interpretation becomes supreme. Nothing is true, because everything is now permitted.
We have created a world in which we can be anything we imagine ourselves to be, while simultaneously stripping the imagination of any real power or meaning. People with no power to imagine or innovate can only do one thing: imitate. It is both a recipe for total control and for total disaster. Perhaps it is a recipe for controlled disaster?
One thing is for sure, false ceremony masters are now everywhere, and they can make any claims they want with little fear of being questioned. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” becomes “There
is no man behind the curtain! (Fake news!)” If you think you see a man behind that curtain, you obviously don't know what a man is, or a curtain, so get your mind right, and look again. Keep looking until you no longer see whatever it was that offended thine eye, otherwise you will be answerable to the identity police and risk have both eyes plucked out and, in the time it takes to say “No place like home,” cast all the way beyond the pale.
In slightly more realistic terms, you will find yourself on the side of the deplorables, without ever quite knowing how you got there. You may find yourself, with hands bound tightly, staring up at a terrifying structure construction, a tower of doom, filled with clucking chickens and trembling bunnies. You may even start to see, with growing horror, an empty compartment in that wicker tower, the size and shape of a human being, built just for you.
for normal people i'm too innocent..
