The War Against Ourselves
There are actually people and professions whose entire purpose in life is to make us hate ourselves -- and in that way, exploit our feelings of worthlessness, powerlessness, and despair in becoming our “leaders” and “spokespersons” -- because we are too unworthy to think, talk and act for ourselves.
That is the familiar manipulations and techniques of the con-artists of the world -- whose entire rationale and reason for doing anything, is for the money, as the end-all and be-all of all human activity. As long as they can enrich themselves, that is all they need to know -- and whether they have to lie, cheat and steal to obtain their ends, justifies any means.
Their philosophical and moral arguments for behaving as they do, is the convincing argument that that is what everybody else does -- and so they quote studies and polls that support their claims -- while ignoring, suppressing and editing information that doesn’t support their biased point of view. Yet these people have no problem regarding themselves as highly respectable and objective people -- obviously not knowing what those terms mean, but liking the sounds of those words and the effects they produce on others.
Such people are not unique in the annals of history and literature -- but are the major subjects of the great works. They allow their ambition, their greed, their need for control and power, to distort and destroy whatever values they would otherwise be generously endowed with except for their maddeningly insatiable need for "more." In this age of unprecedented affluence, ever greater illusions and deceptions are necessary to convince us this is not so -- so some demagogue can rise exploiting that which is not true.
It may be heard that $100,000 a year is the new poverty level -- and that’s why their members need more, because it is the middle and upper middle class who are being hurt the most in the present economy. Of course, nothing is supposed to make sense; it is only to be believed -- because it has been claimed, and repeated by every other medium and publication so as to seem to be the conventional wisdom of these times. “Yes, the person making two or three times the median income, is the worst off in society. Those who have less, are used to having nothing.”
The newspapers, school teachers, university professors, lobbying professionals will be the first to jump on that bandwagon because they will be those claiming such injustice and entitlements -- at the cost of the truth. “Objective,” is their trademark claim in this world. Everybody else, are not entitled to the privileges they alone should have -- and will ally themselves with those who support their claims for these special rights -- they claim are guaranteed them alone in the constitution of the greater society.
They alone should be guaranteed the right to speak -- and to determine what is proper for everyone else to say and believe.
posted by Mike Hu @ 12:50 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
All propaganda (disinformation) campaigns are the undermining of our confidence in believing what our common senses tell us is true -- in favor of the perception a few demagogues demand we believe is true. Those are the authoritarian personalities that dominated the 20th century as an imperfect ideal of what a successful person ought to be -- ambitious, dominating, ruthless in getting to the top, and then fending off all others to enjoy that same quality of life also.
The well known parable of this, is the bucket crabs that keep pulling each other back so none can escape a gruesome fate. Such individuals are conditioned to believe that the only way they could win, was for everybody else to lose -- and if everybody else were to win, it meant that they had lost.
Their thinking was shaped in an earlier time and harsher conditions in which it was widely believed that in order for anybody to rise, it was necessary that others be pushed down. So the struggle for supremacy was always this brutal struggle for a few to dominate everybody else, as a demonstration of their moral and intellectual superiority -- of which the truly moral and intelligent, have no need of proving and maintaining a permanent designation and status.
The weak and incompetent know that the only ones strong enough to defeat their enemies are these individuals turned against themselves. They go to great lengths to do so -- recruiting the arguments of experts, polls, studies, everything but the self-evident truth, which they disparage, demean, deride. Those are the typical tactics of the mass media -- the great propaganda machine of the 20th century.
It is kind of amusing to see the old mainstream media eroding in confidence daily -- the victims of their own success. Permanent dominance is difficult to maintain. Most will try rather than evolve, change, take it to the next level. In fact, the strategies they will adopt, will make it impossible for them to do so --demanding that everything else change to suit them. That is the world view they propagate -- that everybody must change to suit them! Those are the shrill voices of a dying way of life.
The weakness of the Demagogic Party’s strategy these days, is that their program consists entirely of undermining the confidence of others -- rather than having a positive strategy of their own. So in hindsight, they offer what they would have done -- in the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, the Iraqi liberation, etc. -- with perfect hindsight!
That’s like regarding oneself as a billionaire, or just brilliant, if one made all the right moves in the stock market on any given day. Theoretically, it is possible -- but highly unlikely. Yet if all one’s so-called wisdom is of this sort, than the sky is the limit in proclaiming one’s own genius -- but again, actual results will be somewhat less.
But that does not discourage the many advice-peddlers oblivious to any real world consequences from pronouncing their judgments daily from their editorial desks -- as though they had something of value to contribute. Such people really need to leave their desks and get out into the world and write about something they really know about -- rather than faking it just because they were successfully rewarded and reinforced for doing so when they went to school learning all they know -- and then stopped learning anything else thereafter.
Human betterment is not the exclusive province of science and technology -- but belongs to all of society and culture. By far, the greatest potential for human improvement is simply making better personal choices -- rather than human engineering by a few for all.
The great advance is the spread of the thinking that people can improve their own lives -- and not merely have it improved for them by a few people who claim to know better or more than everyone else. That's how societies get into trouble -- by letting a few (oligarchs) make the decisions for all.
That's the troubling thing about these technocratic visions for future societies. It's invariably designed by a few to create everybody else and the world in their own image -- as the ideal, with them permanently ensconced at the top.
Probably the most dangerous trend in society is the movement of wisdom out of the hands of individuals into those of a few master controllers. That's what I look for in these media reports: Is their information empowering or disempowering?
Doers one feel more confident and competent to live and manage his own life or is this merely a commercial or public service announcement to convince us we can't live our own lives, make our own decisions, improve ourselves -- without their miracle aids?
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