The other day, I was going about my daily routine and saw a local alternative rag with the obligatory leftie headline, “SLIDING INTO DICTATORSHIP.” I know this is supposed to be a daring attempt to speak up and to protest the direction our country is moving. But all I could think of when I saw it was that it was an advertisement.
What I mean by that is that it seemed almost more like it was an announcement, a simple statement of fact, rather than some kind of daring foray into the truth. In viral marketing, you determine covert methods to convince people to transmit your message at little or no cost to you. I can’t help but thinking that’s what so many of us are doing nowadays by endlessly hyping how bad the bad guys are. What better press could people in power have than for us to tell legends of their evil exploits and desires?
Maybe I’ve just become sublimely jaded and suspicious of everything though. But I feel like I exist in a media landscape where nothing is true and everything is permitted, where both artists and politicians tell lies for increasingly similar reasons. And I don’t know what to do with it. Do I shut my eyes to all of it? Do I hole up in my own little enclave, hunker down and wait for the wave to break over me?
How do we know anymore that the messages of protest we send any more are actually ours? Just like the US government has trained and funded its future enemies time and time again, how can we know for sure that the counter-culture so many of us cling to wasn’t created and managed to give them something to strive against on the home front? The fact is, we don’t know that. Or, if we listen to people like Lyndon LaRouche, the government definitely *did* do that. And here we are caught in the middle, here we are caught in a double bind that paralyzes critical faculties, replacing reason with infinite loops of paranoia. And the further I go down this road, the less clear things become, the less I’m able to know for sure. And the more I cling to my friends and my intuition and my fantasies. What is there even left to do?
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11 Comments
both artists and politicians tell lies for increasingly similar reasons
why do you think that? what are those reasons?
i guess i don’t really understand what this post is supposed to mean or be about. just general disillusionment with protest? but you seem to think that the protests against “them” (it’s not clear who you mean here) just play into “their” hands. what makes you believe that to be the case? the fact that political memes multiply in a similar way to viral marketing? does the similarity mean that there’s no important difference between these political memes and viral marketing?
Not sure. It’s just a growing feeling I have that says these lines of thinking are fruitless because they ultimately converge with the things we’re supposed to be opposing.
“Where is there even left to do?”
Not a thing. Just wait for the moment of enlightenment/gnosis/transcendence to come (or more proactively, MAKE it happen) and then all of these seeming double binds will disappear, or at least, you won’t be affected by them any longer. You’ll be in the world, but not of it. . .and you’ll finally have the ability to live life on your own terms.
Whether I make it happen or wait, I’m also starting to think that is an erroneous goal. Why should I want to be “in the world, not of it?” What’s to be gained from that? Aren’t I already living life on my own terms as it is? Why should I wait or shoot for that as a goal?
Tim, did you just get back from the Weathermen Paranoia-In?
Zeroth issue: The Situationists point out that mere mention of and even analysis of something essentially replicates it. E.g., “Red State Blue State.” It was bullshit, it is bullshit, but if I mention it, there it is again. There’s a reason Harpocrates, Silence, is a God. The Situ kids used subversion of images–”detourning”–as a means to make an end-run around this. E.g., a picture of a cop with the french phrase for “To shit in bed” under the cop’s image, or kid’s comic book characters discussing post-Marxist theory. But that was forty years ago: their techniques have been studied, analyzed, and co-opted, now you get Adbusters’s high production values and total crap, or some clever marketing. Even talking about it here…
First issue: To what extent are things engineered such that the opposition is made worthless? I don’t know. At times it seems intentional, at times it seems systematic, at times it seems like people are cashing in the interest on the system, at times it seems like the system was generated intentionally by people, at times it seems like the system was generated intentionally by nonhumans acting through human agents. Sometimes these nonhuman entities seem to be egregores made by people, sometimes they seem far more alien. So by turns and turns, yes. If you have a tiger on a leash, those circles round and round to mount it get scarier and scarier, but remember: “Blessed is the lion eaten by the man…” (Doc Thomas)
Second issue: I often feel like the only way to deal with this horror show is to pass over it in silence, like a Wittgensteinian. After all, “this world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” I recognize that this might seem like despair. It’s not. V. Vale recently talked w/ R.U. Sirius about the need for people to get an interior life, by which he meant, be comfortable with silence. Keeping your mouth shut, turining off the TV, and being in the quiet and the dark, alone. I know very few people who can manage this, let alone practice mantra or point of focus. I sometimes suspect an effort has been made to create these circumstances, as per issue 1; if a huge population needs constant frenetic energy, it creates circumstances of action without intention or analysis, like the activist movement in the US today. Harpocrates.
I recommend looking into Future Studies about this, and considering some of Ken Wilbers models (not his zen egomania): it’s a transpersonal vision that makes it much easier to build a future that doesn’t suck. I think that the “spiritual” is far more of a cybernetic practice with a utility then we sometimes understand in our regular, go-to-work get-food conscious. Consider that small doses of psilocybin or LSD have a dramatic effect on problem-solving or systems analysis when used for that… I don’t mean “we have a spiritual need,” I mean that exalted consciousness can aid daily function in so many ways. Imagine a cell that couldn’t properly lyse waste and couldn’t maintain osmotic balance, as opposed to one that can: see how that works. It just happens that on a human level we need to do and believe some strange things to do so.
Good point Tim. Truth be told, that’s simply what I’m doing with this life. I’ve come to terms with the fact that there are certain aspects of my life that I have absolutely no control over and that I just have to accept for now until I’m in a position of power to change them. And, unfortunately, I don’t feel I’ll have that power until I escape the Black Iron Prison, or whatever it is you want to call the collective consciousness on this planet that’s keeping us in a state of perpetual fear and apathy.
I view my life, indeed this entire world, as more or less a template. It has provided me with the experiences I need to recreate a better world for myself with ideal situations and circumstances once I have the authority to do so. Whether or not that day ever comes is besides the point, though, because my flights of fancy and my imaginings of a better, endlessly entertaining world helps me enjoy….or at the very least deal….with this one.
What if there’s no escaping it?
What if you already have the authority to do so, but are simply not asserting it?
Well, I know one sure-fire way of escaping it. Accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Personal Savior.
….
But seriously folks, that’s a good question. I always assumed you’d effortlessly escape it once you die, but then perhaps that’s wishful thinking. Who knows on how many levels of reality the Prison operates.
As for the authority question….that’s a valid point, one which I think about often. I actually DO think I have the ability to live life creatively instead of passively right now, but it’s a matter of choice and of willingness. The willingness to make the choice to live outside of the collective consciousness and from your own creative conscious is often relinquished due to either fear or laziness….and judging from my own life, it would almost entirely be the latter.
I wish everybody would stop trashing the collective consciousness. Without it, none of us would have the shared frame of reference which enables us to actually HAVE these conversations!
Oh, I’m by no means trashing the collective consciousness if used as a tool. But most of the time, we operate from it completely…..foregoing our own creative faculties in the process. The herd mentality is not who we are, we are “beautiful unique snowflakes” with the potential of doing absolutely anything we desire, but we’ve forgotten this because it isn’t obvious to us due to consensus.
It’s like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. He broke away from his flock of birds that were directed under a sort of group-mind and started thinking for himself, and in liberating himself from his clan, he discovers the freedom to do the miraculous.
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