In Chapter One (here) I discussed how the outspoken and non conformist generation of the 60’s and 70’s has morphed into something so completely foreign to its basic beliefs that it does not recognize itself as the embodiment of all that was wrong with that period in history. I then talked about natural human cycles as part of the explanation for our present day insanity and how we willingly participate in our own enslavement.

Now it’s time to pick up on the thought I dropped earlier about how our emotional animal responses are influenced as much by biochemical reactions as by our social and physical environment. While I’ve written several articles and comments regarding the process and methodology of propaganda, mythology and social control systems, something I’ve not discussed much to this point is a subject that is so abhorrent to American mythology that it’s immediately rejected by the control system and its tools and puppets as impossible and even treasonous to discuss.

Conditioned minds tend to projectile vomit back up information that is deemed unpalatable and inconsistent with its implanted meme, a sure sign the truth is hitting pretty close to home. What I’m talking about is the legal and illegal drugging of Americans by the government, with plenty of help from private and corporate enablers and profiteers. This type of abuse has a long and storied past not only here in America, but throughout the world.

Even after decades of public and not so public disclosures of government, military and intelligence service(s) involvement in the importation and distribution of illegal drugs into America (as well as Canada and parts of South America and Europe) there is still massive public and governmental denial that this has and is still going on. The ranks of the three citizen armies of the brain dead, hopelessly naive or ideologically blinded are skillfully leveraged by governmental and private parties to figuratively and literally pull the wool over our eyes when it comes to the vilest and most abhorrent acts perpetrated against American citizens by American citizens.

A careful and in-depth reading of (alternative) world history over thousands of years illustrates a long and ugly account of governments, kings, pharaohs, religious orders etc. poisoning and drugging its own citizens, guest and migrant workers, domestic and governmental slaves (including but not limited to wage, sex and debt slaves) with drugs and alcohol, and recently materialism and consumerism, in order to maintain control and suppress rebellion and dissent.

Even our sanitized history books talk about importing and supplying opium to Chinese Coolies, although the textbooks are careful to point to private business and/or individuals as the perpetrators of these ugly deeds, never specifically mentioning that government agents were often involved from the start. The pertinent question to ask is this; what is different between then and now other than our arrogant belief that somehow we are different from those lesser human beings from the past.

Which, by the way, is another mind control device skillfully used to obscure and placate. We are constantly told that nearly everything in the past is backwards and unusable, but everything present or coming in the future is much better and more desirable. “Oh…we don’t do that anymore so there is no sense studying history for clues to what’s going on today. There’s nothing to see back there, so move along now. Let’s hurry to the future folks, for out there lay our salvation and prosperity.”

Of course you’ll find little to no mention in the widely disseminated ‘history’ books of the 50 plus year record of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), its successor the CIA, or military involvement in the experimental drugging (think Frank Olson for example) and later mass drugging of America through illegal drug importation and distribution. This was and is still carried out through direct and indirect participation by these and other governmental agencies, including the relatively recent addition of the DEA.

There have been numerous MSM stories over the years, many of which have since been corroborated by several independent sources, of governmental, military and intelligence service planes crashing with tons of drugs on board. Unofficially, official America leadership is up to its nose (pun most definitely intended) in high value high volume drug running, importation and distribution. Period. Full stop. End of sentence and paragraph.

In addition there are endless reports, some even briefly appearing in the MSM, of high level official and ‘unofficial’ government involvement with so called drug kingpins and organized crime heads. While no doubt some of this is the result of official corruption (the ever popular lone corrupt official is a popular explanatory meme for the occasionally embarrassing public disclosure) there is also evidence that some of these activities are orchestrated and blessed from above as unofficial but still promoted government (and corporate) policy.   

The illegal drugging of America by ‘official’ America is being carried out with implied covert and overt assistance to private parties, corporations and individuals both foreign and domestic. The outsourcing and privatization of America doesn’t end at street sweeping, prison keeping and war mongering. Stated as simply as possible, our government is the illegal drug pusher extraordinaire if for no other reason than the massive and consistent cash infusions it provides for the global Ponzi machine, all money that governmental and private parties are not publically accountable for and thus made to order for black box operations, kick backs, slush funds and campaign contributions.

And it’s easy to understand why any government would prefer its citizens to be comfortably numb. Please understand that I’m not saying all illegal drugs are handled by these entities. Not by a long shot. They don’t need to control it all in order to accomplish their goal of the destruction of the social fabric to just enough of a degree as to thoroughly distract and demoralize average Jane and Joe. Plus it all makes a wonderful public works project to boot. Consider all the clerks, guards, judges, prison staff, police, coast guard and supporting cast that are needed to keep the war on drugs going. For a supposedly free nation, it is remarkable that we have the highest prison population in the developed world.

What’s really amazing to me is that much of the primary evidence I’ve found of government involvement in drug running and distribution can be found in the printed mainstream media………though it’s often placed on page 37 or buried somewhere as filler in the sports or entertainment section. And rarely is it picked up by other news organizations and widely distributed, almost as if the MSM has its own policy of Omerta or code of silence. It’s published once or twice so it can be claimed the “public” was informed, then quickly ignored and forgotten.

There are exceptions to this stealth disclosure, with the occasional front page story or series exposing one drug scandal or another. Gary Webb’s 1996 “Dark Alliance” series published in the San Jose Mercury News in which Webb exposed the Iran-Contra affair’s ugly underbelly of CIA and Reagan Administration enabling of the Contra importation and sale of (crack) cocaine into the LA area for the express purpose of using the profits to purchase weapons to support their revolution.

But even in this case the rest of the MSM quickly organized a campaign to refute and discredit both Webb and the Mercury News. This eventually resulted in a partial retraction and disavowal by the Mercury News and of Gary Webb being sacked/let go/voluntary quit. The code of MSM silence lives and those who break it are quickly beaten to professional death…….or worse. Webb eventually published a blockbuster book on the subject that was also pretty much ignored by the MSM when it wasn’t being harshly criticized.

When one pushes past the fact that the Reagan administration was enabling the direct circumvention of a Congressional ban on weapons sales and financial assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras, one suddenly realizes that our government was directly involved in the illegal drugging of America. And this is just one example of what can only be described as deliberate foreign and domestic policy that transcends administrations and Congressional critters. Don’t take my word for it, do your own homework and recognize reality for what it is.

Of course up to this point my discussion has only covered the illegal drug side of the comfortably numb equation, which from a big picture point of view is peanuts (measured by quantity and/or dollars) compared to the officially sanctioned legal corporate drug pushing designed to drug America into obedient oblivion. We all understand that the business of America is business. And second only to the military/industrial/financial complex, business in America is healthcare which consumes 18 to 21% of annual GDP. More importantly each year pharmaceuticals consume a greater portion of the total healthcare bill, rising from 25% in 1995 to well over 46% in 2009, the last year in which I’ve seen figures.

Similar to just about every other US government ‘regulatory’ agency these days, there exists a huge conflict of interest within the Food and Drug Administration, with one side of the beast tasked with promoting the very industry the other side is supposed to be regulating. Judging by the fact that on a per capita basis health care in America is more expensive than just about anywhere else in the world, I would say the industry side of the equation is winning and Big Pharma leads the corporate profit parade.

But more to the point of this article, one third of Americans (including our children) are living their daily lives under the influence of a variety of antidepressants, anti anxiety and/or narcotic pain killers. Think about that for a moment. One third of the US population is sedated or has their mental and emotional disposition artificially altered or elevated in order to make it through the work or indoctrination (aka school) week, with particular emphasis on work.

Around 15% of us are taking prescribed pain medications and the pharmaceutical industry estimates up to half of us are abusing our pain meds. In addition, 10% of the population is considered alcoholic and another 20% are abusing alcohol. Then there are all those other so called ‘safe’ drugs, with the majority of the population drinking coffee, soda etc. or doing shots of “5 Hour Energy” and other freely available stimulants. And this doesn’t even take into consideration the one hundred and fifty six pounds of processed sugar each of us consumes per year.

While it wouldn’t be fair to add these percentages together to arrive at a total because of overlap, recognizing that many of us are either ‘professionally’ prescribed or self medicating with several ‘drugs’ at once just makes the problem that much bigger. The end result is that, seen as a whole, we are a self medicating zombie population that can barely get out of bed in the morning without drug assistance, let alone retain the capacity to think independently and critically about what is in our own best interest. Alas, this is just what the powers that be want. Not zonked out so much that you can’t work, but zonked out just enough that you really don’t (want to) care.

Do I even dare mention the most widely distributed drug of them all, our beloved comfort food, which has slowly fed nearly a third of the US population into the meat grinder of obsessive compulsive obesity? As we are collectively force feed a steady diet of government sponsored fear mongering, who is really surprised when we take refuge in a double quarter pounder with cheese, super large fries and enough soda to sponge bathe a family of four? When the point comes where major television networks run prime time TV programs about weight loss as entertainment, how can our personal obesity problem be seen as anything other than a national obsession? Freud would have a field day if he were alive today.

BTW the implied double entendre found in NBC’s popular TV program “The Biggest Loser” teases the mind. Which one is the bigger loser, the contestant struggling to lose 100 lbs of congealed Big Macs or the viewers, 50% of whom are obese or moderately/severely overweight and most likely munching on empty calories as they cheer on their favorite contestant? The conditioning meme is obvious. When we view others who are (relatively) worse than us we have a tendency to normalize our own dysfunction, thus removing the urgency to recognize our own self destructive behavior. Hey, I’m not as bad as that guy.

Instead of Waldo, let’s see how many overweight people we can find in this Woodstock photo from 1969. Then pull up some random crowd shot of the average college campus or mall food court for a comparison.

Americans love to forgive and forget, particular when we’re forgetting our own transgressions. So what’s next on the menu, late night liposuction with Leno? Why struggle through all those deep knee bends, stomach crunches and treadmill miles when you can carve up your loved one like a Thanksgiving turkey using your favorite electric knife and a spinal tap? Like a bloody car crash at a busy intersection, we just can’t help but watch in morbid fascination as we act out our own insanity.

Of course, self medicating ourselves in our quest to be comfortably numb isn’t restricted to food, drugs or alcohol. There’s a world class selection of navel gazing diversions and obsessions available at the click of an alternative reality mouse and a onetime swipe of our (national) credit card. No more need for trips to the local arcade, movie theater or DVD rental store. The world lay at our feet and is manipulated at our command. Entertain me now for I am master of my domain…..when I can actually find it under the rolls of fat.

We play Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) aka World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy or enter crack berry nirvana via Blackberry, Droid, Vortex or iPhone. Don’t forget to sign up for maximum obsession mobility via Wi-Fi, WiMAX and Max-iPads. Let’s see, I’ll take one from column A and two from column B. And just in case you didn’t notice it, the subliminal programming is becoming glaringly obvious. It’s no accident that the top two MMORPG games use the words Warfare and Fantasy.

And let’s not forget the grand daddy of them all, the brainwashing and predictive programming opiate of the masses available to everyone as early as birth and without a RX prescription. All hail the all American God called television via High Definition 3D LCD surround sound immersive technology. It’s better than being there in person, thus reducing the live crowd to nothing more than paying extras, there for our entertainment as sound effects and a colorful background.

There have been numerous books written about the drugging of America so I won’t waste any more of the readers’ time discussing the specifics. And I do understand that Americans have long had a love affair with booze (and drugs for that matter) with many of the founding fathers bemoaning the evils of rampant public drunkenness and the social ills that come with it. But only the seriously self deluded would try to convince themselves that things are no worse than they were 200 years ago, if for no other reason than the drug, financial and war making toys are infinitely more destructive.

So while the self medicating phenomenon isn’t exactly new to America, the selection, potency and wide scale availability of the mind altering methods, chemical or otherwise, is new. Combine this onslaught with the psychological and propaganda operations conducted by the government and the mesmerizing and distracting of America via the mass media, then sprinkle in the distorted views of body, family and nation promoted by corporate America, and I feel safe in saying we live in a comfortably numb Insane Asylum. Where’s Jack Nicholson to break us out when we need him? Pass the Thorazine please.

Two of the most fascinating words in the English language are manipulation and seduction. While the term seduction is most often used when discussing sexual escapades and dalliances, there is an implied usage when people talk about being financially, politically or socially manipulated aka being victimized. For the most part we Americans have become expert professional non-responsible victims. We use the excuse of being a victim, or of having been victimized, to avoid any responsibility for our own lives and actions. Even corporations claim the victim high ground. Somehow we are all above the scrum and just in charge of our portion of the zero sum game.

A constant theme of mine here on Zero Hedge is personal responsibility for one’s actions and/or in-actions. I endlessly beat this drum because even among the Hedge regulars I hear many of the same excuses used by the general population to explain away prior inaction and decisions that have led us to this point. A particular favorite seems to be that we have no control or that we were/are manipulated or that people are acting against our wishes….so what can we do.

Over and over I read comments about how we (the collective ‘we’ is used to share the non responsibility) are not responsible for cleaning up this mess but rather they are, meaning someone else who is presumably in charge and with the authority to do so. I hear how someone, anyone, should do something about this mess or that I’m only responsible for my own interests…..which are usually very narrowly drawn to avoid responsibility except for those things the speaker wants or needs.  

All these thoughts inevitably lead back to my theme of being comfortably numb. Because there is something that goes so far beyond that fuzzy not-quite-with-it feeling one gets from mood altering drugs, alcohol and pain killers and firmly into the one super drug that is shared by all. I am, of course, talking about that wonderfully powerful drug called denial, of which we all have an endless supply produced on site. Bottoms up boys and girls!

Cognitive Dissonance

08-02-2011

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered why so many of ‘my’ generation, the so-called flower child social change community activist generation of the 60’s and 70’s, could have gone from long haired socially minded anti establishment ‘power to the people’ egalitarians to become guardians and enablers of the Ponzi universe as well as the most oppressive and manipulative power structure since……well, since I don’t know when. Even more damning and humiliating, how did we become a pulsating mass of self centered navel gazing mentally and physically obese obsessive compulsive useless shoppers who demand endless stimulation and entertainment?

And please don’t tell me that the social change activists and so-called malcontents of my generation were a small minority who have all since slipped away into gray bearded obscurity of menial professions and social conformity, because it just ain’t true. Many were the best and brightest of my generation and after leaving college, grad school and military service, nearly all took their diploma’s and/or military experience and blended into mainstream America where they’ve spent the last 30 to 40 plus years climbing the corporate and governmental ladder of professional success. In effect many have become exactly what they despised as young adults. It really does seem that what doesn’t kill you will overwhelm and absorb you. And that resistance is futile.

?

 

H/t Images by WilliamBanzai7 @ #0000ff;">http://williambanzai7.blogspot.com/

Upon graduation my button down banker uncle informed me (after closely examining my pony tail and beard) that it’s perfectly fine, healthy even, to strike out against the establishment when you’re an idealistic young adult. It’s all part of the rebellious youth phase we go through as we try to find our social sea legs. But what struck me as remarkable was his attitude towards what he termed the natural social order. He declared that if you are not part of the establishment by the time you’re 30, you’re just another one of life’s losers. He assured me no one ever built anything of substance or even made permanent changes while looking in from the outside.

He made a good point for essentially he was saying that if I really wanted to change the system I needed to do so from within. And it certainly didn’t hurt to be paid well while remaking the world. If nothing else (he helpfully reminded me) for the sake of my new wife and the bun in the oven I needed to conform to the system in order to survive in a world controlled by that very same system. Now that I was no longer shielded from the ‘real’ world by school I had real world obligations and responsibilities. Of course, once inside, a corrupt system almost always corrupts those who wish to make substantial changes along with those who just want to go with the flow. Talk about revenge of the status quo.

May I suggest we all pull out some college yearbooks from around 1965 to 1980 and spend a little time plugging some names into our favorite search engines? What we will find is a mixture of gray haired corporate, financial and governmental powers-that-be (along with an even larger class of junior underlings) that, while many weren’t necessarily all free love flower children, many were at one time involved in political, civil and environmental activism or as vocal war protestors.

My generation, a generation that shocked the world with its vocal and visible denunciations of American empire building and military conquest, is now right in the thick of things when it comes to abuse of Imperial power and manipulation of his or her fellow man. This metamorphosis so contradicts what my generation claimed to embody within their very souls that one is tempted to disbelieve these are the very same men and women. Such self delusions may calm the mind, but it just doesn’t ring true.

Are these men and women sell-outs, traitors to their beliefs, or are they just realists who are surviving like everyone else? Though I suppose we should redefine ‘surviving’. Is the act of gaming the system and our fellow man for our own benefit ‘surviving’, or is it total capitulation to avarice and pleasure via Borg like assimilation? I’ve been lectured by several of my old classmates over the years regarding our youth of naïve and innocent idealistic fantasies. A common theme thrust into my face is how hard they have worked to build this or that enterprise or profession. It’s pretty obvious they’ve been practicing their righteous indignation in front of the mirror for many years.

The point never was and still isn’t how hard they worked, but what they worked for and who gets screwed by all that hard work in their self described dog eat dog global game. Many of my old classmates regal me with stories of all the good their work has done…..conveniently pushing aside many of society’s ills as bigger social or governmental problems not of their making. I’m often told they don’t make the rules, they just play the game. Nearly every single one feels they are (relatively) pure of heart and mind and they can prove it with their cancelled checks to charity. When I ask if their business and political activities are creating the very social problems they are donating money to fix, they quickly change the subject or find someone else to talk to.

Slightly off topic, for an interesting twist on this overall theme, may I suggest the reader rent the German language film “Edukators” with English sub-titles? In the movie three young modern day activists, one hopelessly indebted, are educating society to its mindless consumerism when they bump headlong into an old time radical that is now thoroughly assimilated into our corrupt materialistic world. The result isn’t pretty for everyone involved and it illustrates how the material seduction of the idealist was and is a worldwide phenomenon. At least we aren’t alone in our abomination.

It’s all too easy to say it’s just a few bad apples that are responsible for this mess we’re in. Sadly nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the rot comes from nearly all the apples in the barrel including my own. The assimilated have become the quiet and complicit enablers of our own destruction, the supporting cast of characters in the biggest reality game show in history. The silent and silently assimilated majority now work in senior and junior positions within academia, think tanks, federal, state and municipal government, the mighty military machine itself and the hated CIA/NSA/DIA ‘intelligence’ services. And of course they run the corporate power structures that are the supporting foundation of all this abusive insanity.

There is simply no explaining this away as a few bad apples in the barrel. Something went horribly wrong and I’ve wanted to know how and why for a while now, almost as if by knowing I can more readily accept the fact that those brothers and sisters with whom I marched with many decades ago are now my spiritual, intellectual and financial mortal enemies.

 

H/t Images by WilliamBanzai7 @ #0000ff;">http://williambanzai7.blogspot.com/

This question has been haunting me for at least the last 10 years and it was one of the primary reasons I began looking within for answers. I’ve always assumed that the basic impulse that drives us to become what we are as individuals and as a society must live within all of us. Since each of us is not completely unique, but rather we share the same impulses and collective consciousness as everyone else with only the proportions mixed differently, it stands to reason we should begin within. This inner journey takes us down spiritual, religious and scientific paths in what is obviously an endless lesson in the workings of humanity and the human mind.

Of particular interest to me are the disciplines of psychology and philosophy. A basic working assumption I’ve held has been that since we are all biochemical creatures occupied by a consciousness, our emotional animal responses are influenced as much by biochemical reactions as by our social and physical environment. I’ll get back to this thought in Chapter Two.

Obviously this isn’t new territory I’m traveling since these basic questions have occupied man for thousands of years. And there is no doubt that history is replete with examples of generations going off the deep end and wrecking havoc on their country, region and even the world. In fact there appears to be an eighty year cycle of several generations each that endlessly repeats when mapping out these mega events. And it seems to me that each time this occurs there’s a divergence in the collective conscious mind.

A global insanity seems to take over the collective mind with cyclical regularity, with a small fraction of the population moving towards a greater than ‘normal’ abuse of power and the remaining much larger portion taking the other side of the abuser-abused relationship by moving towards a needy greedy passivity. However, this time it appears that with the help of major pharmacological and technological advances the effect has been magnified and leveraged exponentially.

While each cycle has its own rise and subsequent fall, the repeating 80 year cycles are also growing within what appears to be a larger mother cycle. After a while we begin to recognize that there are cycles within larger cycles within even larger cycles and it can be seen in the work of the recently deceased Benoit Mandlebrot. This makes sense when you understand that nature is nothing more than endless cyclical activity with small and large changes working their way through the system over vast swaths of time.

I’ve long thought there is a tie in between the syncing of multiple long and short cycles and the year 2012. No I’m not talking about the end of the world, but more along the lines of the rogue ocean wave syncing phenomenon. It does appear many forces are peaking together over the next few years, an awareness of which seems to be deeply embedded within the collective consciousness. This phenomenon has also been widely recognized by the alternative research community long before the 2012 end of the world fear memes were implanted into the collective consciousness by the pubic myth controlling mainstream media.

There are so many natural and scientific lines of (d)evolution, so-called progress and (I)maturation that are all peaking at or near this date, that mere coincidence or social hysteria should be ruled out as sufficient reason to ignore or even stop any personal investigation into this phenomenon. It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature and even worse to ignore her. I highly recommend you read “The Fourth Turning” by William Straus and Neil Howe if you wish to pursue this thought even deeper.

The problem one runs into when researching anything these days is the degree of sterilization that has been burned into the so-called history textbooks, aka the widely distributed and generally accepted version of world events called ‘history’. The old saying about history being a series of lies generally agreed upon rings true once you get off the beaten path and burrow into the astonishingly large selection of alternative information sources available to the inquisitive, many of which are serious works of scholar. Just be aware that some alternative sources are no doubt planted or seeded with disinformation to further confuse the issue and derail the casual researcher.

Finding a deeper truth is not easy and most certainly won’t be handed to you or me on a Silver platter, so act accordingly. Remain skeptical, but always keep an open mind. Just because something doesn’t mesh with our world view doesn’t make it incorrect. The more certain we are of something, the greater the likelihood there is an error in our thinking. This occurs because our absolute certainty effectively closes our mind to everything other than what will confirm our belief. This is a subtle cognitive process that works in the background without us being consciously aware of it unless we wish to be. Constant vigilance is required to counteract this bias, requiring us to eat humble pie on a regular basis.

The massive cognitive dissonance the average American experiences when reading revelations contrary to their conditioning assures the powers-that-be that the straying lambs will quickly return to suckle from mother’s propaganda teat. This is by design. The purpose of disinformation is to sow confusion and to demoralize, which in turns promotes emotional and psychological tension and infantile responses. We tend to return to mother, or in this case Big Brother, when we are frightened, confused or hurt.

While intellectually we might object to this description, in practice we almost always travel down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid to the lower levels of (perceived) personal safety when we deny or ignore our innate authority and responsibility to our self. Those who do not have the courage to look within and know themselves are susceptible to easy manipulation. Big Brother is here because ultimately both collectively and individually we want him to be here, regardless of whether this is a conditioned response or not.

 

Some may not agree with this assessment. I respond by asking the reader to explain to me why so many people, including many here on Zero Hedge, are calling for someone, anyone, to stop the banking Ponzi as well as the governmental and corporate corruption? What about you and me? Is it not our responsibility to safeguard our own personal and community interests and doesn’t this systemic corruption endanger us? Why are we calling for an external authority to exert control over these rogue entities when you and I are the ultimate authorities of our body and mind? What exactly is our obligation here?

It seems we have declared our responsibility to be little more than to point fingers and to be the righteously indignant victim calling for truth, freedom and justice to be handed down from higher authorities. The biggest roadblock to understanding what has happened in the past and what’s occurring today is our own willing participation in normalcy bias and preconceived notions of what truth is and what is a lie….starting with the lie that we’re all just helpless innocent victims. The fact that most people believe they aren’t responsible in the least for the mess we are in is our biggest bias and the primary roadblock to affecting change.

It’s easy to say we aren’t influenced by our early childhood and young adult training and conditioning and another matter entirely to clear the mind of the ingrained beliefs that have not only sustained us for decades, but which bind us to those around us, be they family, friends or abusers. We are conditioned human animals and for the most part we don’t like to stray too far from the comforting herd. Tragically this flaw is consistently and effectively used against us by those who wish to control. And it is our denial of this that binds us to the false promises, which in turn keep us bound to our personalized hamster wheels.

Since the Ponzi’s masters and their methods are already so thoroughly examined and documented here on Zero Hedge I would rather spend most of my time exploring the passive and compliant masses for a greater understanding into why, rather than who or how. An innocuous comment on a WilliamBanzai7 post back in December of 2010 got me thinking about not seeing the forest from the trees while also reminding me of a classic song by Pink Floyd called “Comfortably Numb”.

For thousands of years kings, religious leaders and governments large and small have employed psychological and propaganda operations against their own people. This is a given and only the brain dead, hopelessly naive or ideologically blinded cannot see this as a fact. Sadly the ranks of these three cognitive armies are bulging with new recruits as the fear meme is infiltrated ever deeper into the collective consciousness.

As we begin to recognize we’ve been duped and our options are rapidly being extinguished, we will begin to fight among ourselves rather than combine to fight our common enemy. This self directed deception also serves to give us a handy reason to avoid looking within for our own culpability. The distracting rallying cry is often “It’s them, not me, who are the problem.” For us passive observers (enablers) the hope (intent) is that enough chaos and civil disorder is created during this upheaval that the central government collapses under the burden of maintaining social order, thus allowing us to keep our own hands clean.

That’s the myth at least, the pipe dream if you will. That the weak shall rise up and inherit the Earth, a myth which if not outright believed by the masses is the fall back false hope that enables our inaction as we await our savior and salvation. The sad and inescapable conclusion I keep coming to is that as long as the powers-that-are can keep the masses distracted, fearful and (increasingly over the past 70 years of the present suicidal cycle) comfortably numb, little to nothing will be done to change the status quo that the powers that be are not implementing themselves.

It seems this is the only way to get us to fight and kill each other in anything other than single numbers. The really efficient mass murderers must be trained by central governments (formerly known as kings and religious leaders) to do their bidding in the same way Flipper was trained to ‘act’ for the cameras. Actually they treated Flipper better. The vast majority of us simply won’t strike out at unknown human beings and kill on command without first being desensitized and then reprogrammed in order to silence, at least temporarily, the risk adverse and empathetic spiritual soul within.

We have been trained, conditioned more accurately, like lab rats from birth to seek the softer easier way, the path of least resistance and the road very well travelled……all classic signs of a herding animal. I have come to see this as conditioned into us from birth by the master’s social control systems as well as passed on from generation to generation for thousands of years. Mental, emotional and intellectual slave’s teaching fellow slaves how to be good little productive slaves. This helps explain why we must be stripped of our individuality and ego and then rebuilt and retrained to operate as a cohesive military fighting unit in order to walk directly into danger and fight for those who enslave us.

 

Even when this has been successfully accomplished and we become efficient killing machines, being shelled and shot at causes psychological damage, which in the modern era of state sponsored mass murder is diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder. Contrary to the popular myth that man is a violent animal I contend that a relatively few men and women manipulate and coerce you and I into becoming violent animals either through outright physical oppression (aka slavery) or through social conditioning, training and propaganda. Widespread use of the carrot and stick helps the process along. To those who point to ‘evidence’ of violence over the last several hundred, even thousands of years, I point out that this conditioning has been going on for a very long time.

But with the introduction of designer drugs and expert psychological manipulation, combined with nonstop propaganda via the idiot box and a captured news media, never before have so few been able to control so many so completely. Scroll back up and carefully examine Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid with this thought in mind. The belief that man is naturally violent is a myth perpetuated by the controlling government(s) to serve its purpose and swallowed by a public looking to justify and rationalize our own willing and apathetic participation in the killing machine. Fear is a very poor long term motivator unless you’re trying to perpetuate violence among the slaves as a control mechanism.

At this point in our devolution into collective madness we are more than willing to internalize as the truth any information we are conditioned to be in agreement with no matter how ridiculous or categorically inconsistent with common sense or established fact it might be. This is the central tenant of denial, the desire to believe what we wish to believe without critical review or vetting.

Therefore, by controlling the overall meme that determines what is true and false and then feeding people information that confirms what they’ve been conditioned to believe, we for the most part are willing to be led by the nose wherever our masters take us. We are played as puppets and yet we believe that most (if not all) of our thoughts and decisions are made as independent entities and not as part of a managed and manipulated collective.

The fact that we can decide to leave for work at 6:53 AM or 7:10 AM, thus retaining the illusion of freedom of choice, means little when we must be at work no later than 8:00 AM. We engage in this psychological sleight of hand to feed and sooth our ego in order to deny our captivity and we are deliberately encouraged to do so by our owners. From the master’s point of view, the only thing better than kept slaves are slaves who keep themselves.

Our ego has been so thoroughly flattered since birth by delusions of freedom, truth, justice and the American way, along with visions of our magnificent benevolence to the world, that we would never tolerate, never mind entertain, the idea that we are herded like sheep and cattle to our thinking, feeding and reproduction pens. At this point in the collective farce the only difference between the USSR of the 1970’s and 80’s and America of 2011 is that the Russian people knew they were being lied to, used and abused.

And while they openly drowned this ugly realization in alcohol, they also developed alternative markets and barter system that proved useful when the system later collapsed. We however remain spellbound by the magician while also self medicating; only we tell ourselves we do so for different reasons such as depression or anxiety. What no one wishes to discuss is that our depression is the warning sign that something is terribly wrong. Sadly, given half a chance, denial marches on using whatever means available.

In Chapter Two I will begin to expand upon the physical means by which we are kept comfortably numb as well as our role in our own pacification and enslavement.

Cognitive Dissonance

08-01-2011

All Parts of this series can be found here: Perception, Inception and the Trojan Horse Meme

Comfort is Found Within Our Conditioning

While I most certainly hope it is not the case I suspect that I lost many of my classically trained empirically minded readers by the second or third paragraph of Chapter One. I don’t say this in a derogatory manner at all for in many respects I was and still am cut from the same bolt of cloth. And if I were reading this essay fifteen years ago I would probably shut down as well for I was a man of data, facts and science and to me this would all be seen as just nonsensical foolishness. By my late twenties I had discarded all the fantasy and fiction I mentioned in Chapter One as childish toys no longer needed or wanted.

As with so many other men and women I began to shake myself awake as part of what is often called the mid-life crisis, that time when so many begin to reassess all they have done and where they are going. For the vast majority this existential crisis is relatively short lived. And once the self doubt and reflection is washed from the system, the mind hardens and narrows even more than before. Once cleansed of any lingering non conforming thoughts that couldn’t be ignored or dismissed, they finish their career and retire in a blaze of corporate glory comfortably sated in their self induced numbness. After all, who the hell wants to be a rebel at fifty or sixty when retirement is just around the corner? That’s a young man’s game.

There is great emotional and intellectual comfort to be found within the highly trained and conditioned mind. Everything has a place and there’s a place for everything except for the few outliers that can usually be trashed as aberrant thought or even one offs. What I didn’t see at the time and only later began to grasp is that while I knew many scientifically proven facts, in reality I didn’t know much at all. I realized all the really important and interesting questions were still to be answered and that each conclusion was as unique as a person’s fingerprint.

The illusion of scientific, moral and intellectual certainty that had sustained me for several decades was ultimately not liberating at all. Instead it was a wonderfully constructed and quite convincing thought meme erected in honor of the false God of empirical thinking. As I began to pull back layer upon layer of the onion I was emotionally and egoically crushed to learn that the more I thought I knew the less I really understood about anything of real consequence. While I might be able to describe to you how my cell phone functioned I was unable to explain to you who I was and why I was here.

Just as important I came to appreciate that it was the pursuit of these questions that would be the source of my future growth rather than the answers themselves. What I had always believed was true freedom derived from the ability to examine everything through the lens of logic and scientific method was instead a mental straitjacket. What I considered to be a factual view of my world was actually a belief system supported by official supporting documents and authenticated certificates of proof. The more specialized I became the more narrowly I saw the world and the bigger the burden became of defending my belief system. Every outlier I came across was a danger to the whole and as such must quickly be qualified, quantified or derisively dismissed.

The seduction and denial begins in believing that we don’t do precisely what we have done. Having become second nature after decades of training, we are in a constant state of weighting and judgment, always sorting, collating or categorizing most everything even if just on the subconscious level. We are taught from birth that there is always correct and incorrect, true and false, approved and unapproved, black and white. And while we may intellectually claim we understand that the world is full of gray, emotionally we still collect those ‘things’ which confirm our consensus reality belief system and reject those that don’t.

This is a built in bias that works silently in the background and is part of the control system that keeps us safely confined within our perceived reality box. However if confronted as I now do with the reader, many will strenuously assert this isn’t so, that we fairly examine any new piece of information that enters our field of vision. But of course when an outlier comes floating by we use our established and cherished standards and processes to measure and validate what is real and what is not. In so many ways we use circular logic to confirm that which we already believe to be true.

When examining others it seems self evident that the more committed we are to a particular persuasion, belief or dogma the more likely we are to defend that belief as if we were defending our very life. And in so many ways we would be for our perception and belief determines how we view and live life. Yet we are mostly blind to this process within ourselves and we rarely see the belief system of “science” or of the “scientific method” as a similarly rigid or embedded point of view.

We assure all those around us that only the truth prevails in science. But always we apply the same tools already ‘proven’ to be ‘true’ to information that is nonconforming or suspect. Thus the measuring stick designed only to measure that which is already conforming to the accepted standard successfully rejects those that do not.

Any change of view or perception that does enter the control system must clear impossibly high hurdles. And even then the change doesn’t gain widespread acceptance until the old guard is long dead and buried. For a discipline that supposedly accepts proof that meets certain standards, why is it that long held beliefs and customs are jealously defended which just so happen to deny entry to change? Maybe it isn’t science itself that is the problem here, but rather the practitioner of science that is the malfunctioning component? In other words it is the application of the scientific process that is distorted, thus producing distorted results.

The Journey, Not the Destination

When explaining this to others I often employ a thought picture to describe what is happening. As I grew older and my worldview and belief system became ever more complicated and interwoven it began to feel as if I were carrying around an eighty pound bag of ready mix concrete. While I could manage the load I needed to maintain a firm and constant grip which eventually eliminated any flexibility and adaptability I originally started with. This is one of the reasons why real breakthrough ideas spring from young minds not yet conditioned to know what they want to do or what they just did was impossible. Soon enough I became wedded to a white elephant in ways that were never really obvious to me because I was in the middle of what I had come to accept as normal.

My box was not a box, but instead my entire world. This in turn ignited a severe case of normalcy bias well beyond anything I could imagine. So while I didn’t necessarily see it as a burden at the time it most certainly was. In effect I was so busy treading water that I was rarely making headway. And the more belief weight I took on the more burdensome the load became. I was now controlled by my own belief system and not the other way around. And because this is considered a normal and natural part of everyday life and something everyone else deals with, it was just the way things were. This is modern day life we are told, no more or less.

When I realized I was on a treadmill going nowhere fast it quickly became obvious that a change in perspective was desperately needed. Instead of defending my belief system at every port of entry, why couldn’t I simply suspend belief (an entirely different concept than suspending disbelief in order to enjoy a fictional book, TV show or movie) and allow these nonconforming ideas and concepts to simply exist without vetting or qualification?

This meant that everything had a ‘right’ to exist in my reality without affirmation, confirmation or rejection. If it didn’t fit my current belief system there was no longer a need to apply the only two choices I ever really afforded things like this in the past, to reject it or accept it. Instead I could simply see it as interesting or curious and place it on a back shelf in my mind ready at a moment’s notice to be pulled down for further examination and assimilation.

This is more important than might be obvious at first glance. While we may reassure ourselves that anything we reject (or accept) can and will be reexamined if new information is presented (or if we reassess old information) in practice once something is ‘disbelieved’ there is very little incentive to reassess our position. We simply give little to no credence to things that have already been dismissed as impossible or improbable. And the reason we ‘disbelieved’ it in the first place was because it was impossible or improbable. We ‘proved’ that, right?

The flexibility we claim we will apply to new or additional information is a deceptive conceit we afford ourselves in order to maintain the comfort of hard and fast rules of belief, which in turn maintains our narrow perception of reality. This is the circular logic I was talking about earlier. The parts confirm the whole which confirm the parts which confirm the whole. That’s not to say that we don’t nibble away at the outer edges of our belief system because clearly we do.

But the very fact that we do accept minor changes enables us to believe that we could and would do the same with major sections of our belief system, when in practice nothing could be further from the truth. We are encouraged to think outside the box, but not too far. We are taught that in order to build a diverse and healthy social order we must be tolerant of alternative memes and beliefs. This is a fiction we practice only on the surface because in order to protect our belief system we must do exactly the opposite. The proof is the polarized and divisive world we live in. We are conditioned to recognize differences and to draw clear boundaries to affirm our narrow perception of reality, not to seek out similarities and to approach others with empathy and loving care.

And this conditioning is deliberate in order to maintain the status quo of the consensus reality which in turn is controlled by the powerful. We so easily believe that powerful people work towards maintaining their power yet we find it nearly impossible to believe that the thought meme control system would be designed to enable precisely what those in power most desire. And make no mistake about it; controlling thought is the ultimate power. This is why major social change can only occur when a new and energized generation takes the helm and begins to control the prevailing meme. This is also why entire nations and regions of the world can careen off the rails for a generation or two when group think takes control of the collective. It works both ways.

Shock Therapy

If usually takes a shocking slap to the face, often in the form of acute physical illness, loss of loved ones or severe financial hardship, to force us to reassess the basic underpinnings of our beliefs. But even then the bias is towards regaining ‘normalcy’ rather than exploring new concepts or ‘realities’. It takes great courage to break from the herd mentality and blaze new trails when we have been conditioned to believe there are monsters under the bed. It’s even more difficult to go it alone when our world has just been shattered and the conditioned tendency is to seek comfort, not more emotional pain.

However, great freedom and release comes from rejecting the confining parameters of dogmatic groupthink and belief. No longer do I need to haul around huge sacks of concrete mix while defending each meme intrusion as if it might be my last. In the same manner one would hold a butterfly, meaning gently with little to no force applied, if my belief system can’t accommodate an outlier or aberrant concept I can simply release that portion of my belief system that is acting as a roadblock and allow it to drift while I examine the new information. If the butterfly returns that’s all well and good. If it does not, that’s good as well because I’m not dependent upon the new belief just as I’m no longer dependent upon the old.

Actually if we are to practice this on a daily basis, to continue to use the term belief would be a misnomer because little remains that is fixed and immovable. I now make a conscious effort to avoid using terms such as “I believe” or “I know” because those words symbolize rigid thinking.  There’s an old saying when trying to break ingrained habits. Fake it until you change it. By modifying my language usage I am trying to rewire my brain, the first step to exploring alternative realities.

This is not to say that I must outright reject or abandon my old belief system. Only that it no longer controls me by demanding that I use it and only it as the Gold standard by which I determine what is true or not. I can still drive my car, love my spouse and walk the dog. Only now, when something floats into my field of vision, I no longer must make judgments of fact, truth or reality and I can simply accept it for what it appears to be at the moment.

The outlier can no longer threaten me or even help me for that matter. Value or moral judgments are useless in this context because reality is no longer being measured by rigid standards, but rather is simply allowed to exist. It just is as it is at that moment. This small perspective change becomes a giant leap for our mind because now that we are no longer defensive in our approach, creativity and originality can come rushing to the surface. I no longer perceive the world solely through someone else’s definition of reality.

What I have just described is exactly how an infant or young child’s mind interacts with the world around her. There is no right or wrong, no true or false, no real or not real. There is simply what ‘is’ at that moment. Instead of saying “no, this can’t be real” or “yes, I believe this is true” the infant or very young child just sees and experiences. It is no more or less than what it is at that moment.

After exploring the new object (aka a new reality) the very young mind simply files it away as interesting or not and moves on to the next. She doesn’t categorize it (at least not yet) except in the simplest of terms such as tasty, colorful or fun. The child does not apply moral or value judgments in the manner we understand these terms to mean or how we use them to confirm or affirm our consensus reality.

We forget that very young children have very few innate fears and that most of their early fear perceptions are learned from fear memes their parents or guardians are conditioned to believe are real. While I would never argue that (at least in this consensus realty) some fear is not helpful in promoting longevity and health, most of the fear we experience on a daily basis is artificially induced for control purposes only and we willingly and for the most part unquestioningly go along for the ride.

In a very real sense the only thing we have to fear is ourselves because we are the ‘real’ boogie men in our lives. No one ‘makes’ me happy, sad, glad or afraid. The word ‘make’ in relation to any emotion is mostly a thought meme designed to encourage us to abandon responsibility for our own emotional sovereignty and independence. When we outsource responsibility for our emotional wellbeing we give our consent to be controlled. This is an integral component of the abuser and abused bonding, the symbiotic and codependent relationship with our abusers that I constantly discuss.

Breaking Free

If we are going to (once again) become sovereign entities and autonomous individuals we must begin the process by thinking and perceiving as one who is sovereign. A slave or captured mind does not see the world through his or her own eyes, but rather through those of the master. In every way imaginable the slave’s world revolves around the reality dictated by his (perceived) ultimate authority. The master creates the slave’s reality and thought memes, essentially his perception of reality, through the deep implantation or inception of programming memes which are then reinforced through conditioning and psychological and/or physical abuse.

Consider how ‘free’ and sovereign individuals who are captured and enslaved need to be ‘broken’ before they are considered to be usable or saleable. The external body is brutalized and nearly all sense of his or her former ‘reality’ is forcibly stripped from them physically, mentally and emotionally. Only then can the new thought meme (that of helplessness and dependency upon external control systems) be successfully implanted. The military follows a similar practice with new recruits. Break down the present reality, then program in a new one. The physical and mental shock to the system prepares the newly turned soil for the meme seeding.

This is the underlying premise behind Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, an important read not only if we wish to understand what’s going on globally, but also locally within our mind. Our conceit, our enabling self deception, is that while we all recognize to some extent or another the effectiveness of this type of conditioning upon others, we fail to appreciate (for obvious reasons) how it is used upon us via the drip method of social conditioning and assimilation.

We all wish to point to evil doers manipulating the masses into unspeakable acts. Believing this sooths the ego and massages the mind which in turn allows us to believe that it’s all them and not me, thus absolving us from responsibility for our own (in) actions. While the master might physically control the whip, it is we compliant slaves who are the primary control system and by extension the remote hand on the whip.

We stifle dissent amongst ourselves for fear that by not doing so we will attract the whip, while at the same time by default we consent to being slaves because we do not raise objection nor do we dissent. In a similar manner we teach and train our own children the rules of slave hood before handing them over to the state, all the while following the rules and learning all the new thought meme tricks which we then dutifully teach our children.

Since our captured minds are already immersed within a world not of our own making, but rather one we have adapted to and adopted as our own, how do we break free from a prison when we cannot see the walls and barbed wire? In order for the slave or captured mind to (re)gain his freedom and sovereignty some fundamental understandings must be proactively germinated.

First and foremost we must recognize that our condition is not natural or normal and that we are not free, but can be free if we so wish. We must begin to accept that our world is not constructed as we perceive it to be, that our reality is distorted and manipulated. While the reader can easily see the slave is obviously a slave, can the reader see his or her own slavery? In order to do so we must deliberately and consciously push against every boundary we have been trained to believe is immovable and unchangeable.

This is the most difficult step of the entire process to internalize because we have always been a slave and being a slave is all we have ever know. There is nothing in our world other than that which already exists in our captured mind. This is our box and we have but one yardstick with which we measure our world. Because our mind and by extension our body is trapped within the box the only chance we ever have of seeing outside is to treat that which we formerly believed to be impossible with the same validity we now reserve solely for what has already been proven to us to be real. Question everything and accept nothing at face value, especially things we have always accepted because it has always been that way. It is not about changing the yardstick; it is about expanding it exponentially.

There Is No Spoon

We must suspend our confining and self confirming beliefs, even if at first we can only sustain this for a few moments, and train our minds eye to move beyond our self imposed limits by declaring that there are no limits and then acting as if it is so because it is so. In essence we make ‘real’ anything we completely and without reservation believe is ‘real’. By extension we delegitimize, dematerialize or make ‘not real’ anything which we seriously question as not valid or real. In my view this is the message behind that wonderful scene from “The Matrix” with the boy and the spoon. “Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.There is no spoon. Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

The perceived impossibility of bending the spoon with just our mind is an illustration of our conditioned blindness to anything other than what we ‘know’ to be true. It is we who must bend our minds to perceive alternative realities. It is useless to try to achieve the ‘impossible’ and bend the current perceived reality into a form we wish to see. The consensus reality in its present form will only redirect our energy back against us. There is no winning in this present reality because we are only offered tools that will fail.

Do not fight the overwhelming river current of the present perceived reality, for this is impossible. Instead withdraw your consent to participate within the present consensus reality while at the same time opening your range and sensitivity of perception to alternatives. In essence we must improve and expand our depth perception of reality.

Ultimately it is a failure of our imagination that is the barrier to our freedom because the captured and conditioned mind does not perceive as real that which it believes is impossible or improbable. This is why we must suspend our beliefs for it is our belief system that defines the limits of our reality, not matter or science or our masters. It is the very definition of futile insanity to continuously use the same measuring stick to measure the same box and expect to perceive a different reality. Our masters control our mind and the body dutifully follows, thus for all intents and purposes perception is reality. This cycle must be broken.

Once started down the road to autonomous individuality and the sovereign individual, all concepts, beliefs and truths must be examined and reexamined in this new light. Everything that we believe we know must be washed and filtered with the absolute certainty that at this point we know only what a captured mind knows. As discussed in prior chapters, we cannot see outside of the box if we are unable to perceive the box itself. But this ‘limit’ is just an illusion when we understand that it only applies to the captured mind.

This illusion of limits is foisted upon us by the consensus reality in order to confirm the limited consensus reality. We are conditioned to believe that we must know nearly everything before beginning our journey. But this is only true if the only purpose for being on the road is to arrive at the destination, an outcome we do not wish to achieve nor could we achieve at this point. All we need to know is that everything we believe we know must now be viewed as suspect. We are in essence creating a new reality by questioning every aspect of the old one. We don’t need to know where we are going in order to go forward at this point.

While disorienting at first this will quickly pass so long as we recognize that we don’t need to change everything at once, only those items that must be changed to enable the next step. It’s OK to continue to live within the fundamental premises of the current consensus reality in order to maintain our balance as long as we accept and understand that it is all someone else’s reality and that it all must eventually be reexamined. To thy own self be true is the ultimate goal for if we fully participate in the master’s reality, we are the master’s slave. The danger here is one of denial, of convincing ourselves we are only resting in the present consensus reality when in fact we are still fully immersed with no real intention of ever leaving.

Ordering of Priorities

Secondly while we must concede that at times we may have limited physical control over our body, particularly if we live within a police or debt state, our captured mind must begin to recognize that our sovereign mind is ours alone to command and control and only when we surrender it do we concede our sovereignty.

When we have (re)established sovereignty of our inner conscious being, of our mind and inner self, only then can we begin to command our body and external being. There is no way around this ordering of priorities, no shortcut to nirvana. I understand that this ordering can be extremely frustrating because we want change now. But in order to navigate our way to sovereignty we must be in control of our mind and our perceived reality.

For example, when sweeping around a corner on a motorcycle, we must look as far ahead around the corner as possible, not directly in front of us. When we look far ahead, when we focus on where we wish to go, not where we are, our body and the motorcycle follow smoothly and under control. By the same token, if we focus our attention on a spot just in front of the motorcycle, this results in unsteady operation, constant over correction and a greater chance of disaster. An experienced motorcyclist knows you should look to where you want to go.

This is also the case when driving a car quickly on a twisting road though it is much more pronounced on a motorcycle because the bike responds to our slightest body movements. Our mind is even more intimately connected to our body, thus if we wish to regain our inner sovereignty we must have a clear understanding of where we are going and be able to see far down the road if we are to successfully navigate our body through the coming insanity. Looking to where we wish to go expands our awareness and perception while gaining perspective and diminishing distractions.

The control system and the insanity are trying to do just the opposite to force us to see only the here and now directly in front of our nose. Returning to the motorcyclist one last time, an inexperienced rider is often plagued by something called target fixation. If a rider sees a pot hole in his path and continues to stare at the hole, despite his sincere desire to avoid the hole he will hit it every time. The body flows to where the eye is looking and the mind is fixed. The control system teaches us to be target fixated, to become so immersed in the consensus reality that we can see nothing else. This is why we must command our mind and soul before we can hope to direct the body.

We have been conditioned to believe that we have no control over our reality, that it already exists in a completed form all around us and that we are just pawns on the chessboard of life. The captured mind and the slave mentality is more than willing to accept that our reality is preformed and that our only job is to cope, not create. We are kept so busy exploring our mental confinement and its physical prison walls, often through school, work, television, entertainment and politics which all combine to make up our perceived reality as proven by the scientific, legal and governmental process, that we fail to understand that this control system process is precisely what defines our reality, not what our reality actually is.

The scientific process, law, governmental regulation and all the other associated instructions and procedures defining our daily life are simply methods and techniques used to describe our consensus reality. It is not reality itself in the same way that a picture of the person is not the person itself, but simply a visual description of the person.

Unlawful Justice summed up this concept nicely in the comment section of Chapter Three when he said “We must always remember that symbols and what [they] stand for are not the same thing. The flag is not the country; the uniform is not the person, the crucifix, the Star of David; the actor is not the character portrayed; the medal is not the courage; the college degree is not the skill or knowledge.”

If however we have been taught and conditioned to believe that the flag is the country or the picture is the ‘real’ person, we will then form that unquestioned belief into reality by our actions. We make real what we believe or perceive to be real in both the figurative and physical sense. This is an insidious confusion deliberately propagated to shift awareness from the limitless reality within to the fatally limited false illusion externally imposed.

Our consensus reality is simply a belief system cultivated through all aspects of the slave control system. Like rats in a maze, we spend our waking days in conditioned response mode similar to an athlete’s muscle memory. Get up, eat, go to work, eat, come home, eat, watch the indoctrination box and eat, then go to bed. This is all repeated endlessly with weekends reserved so we can shop and spend money to drown our abject misery. The only way to escape the present consensus reality is to withdraw our consent for and of the present consensus reality, a reality that is only ‘real’ precisely because it commands a consensus among the captured minds.

Sadly our consent often comes in the form of deciding to do nothing and surrendering to the river’s current, a current which in turn is nothing more than the consensus belief or herd mentality. The most important concept regarding consensus belief which we all wish to ignore is that a decision to do nothing is often the most destructive decision to ourselves that we could ever make because by doing so we surrender both our will and consent at the same time. Our apathy and indifference are the chains that bind us to our master. We willingly consent to be slaves, an idea that is viciously refuted by those who wish to avoid all responsibility for their present enslavement.

Finally, in order to avoid taking nothing more than the first step, then becoming hopelessly locked in an endless cycle of one move forward and the next one back, we must make a daily commitment to ourselves first to act on a daily basis, then to accept baby steps as the definition of progress. In this essay I am describing a lifelong pursuit, not a weekend retreat or week long workshop. We must manage both our expectations and our denial if real progress over longer periods of time is to be realized.

This statement alone will be entirely unsatisfactory to the vast majority of readers who clamor for change now, for quantifiable results we can feel good about and revel in. To this I ask a simple question. Have you ever wondered why after thousands of years of resistance, revolution, renaissance and renewal that we stand today at the peak of a consensus reality insanity, that we are repeating yet again the same mistakes all over again? External change is never permanent when the inner self remains abandoned, a fundamental truth that is always lost and forgotten once the belly is full and the mind calmed.

It is the fundamental intent behind our actions that ultimately determines our success or failure, not just the effort involved. If we simply wish to change our status in the pecking order of the present consensus reality or we want our pain to be relived in order to return to the familiar numbness of oblivion, then we are doomed from the start. As well, if we feel compelled to ‘save’ others from the escalating insanity without first focusing on ourselves, even if it is only our family we are trying to save, then we are acting for all the wrong reasons and we will fail miserably. Ask someone who is recovering from a severe addiction and has been stable for many years. Chances are they will tell you it was only when they dropped all pretenses and excuses and concentrated on themselves did they make any progress.  

Our present consensus reality is coming apart, dematerializing before our very eyes because it is being delegitimized by way of an escalating loss of faith and belief by the masses. This in turn will compel the control system and those in power to ramp up their ultimately self destructive fear and control memes and physical oppression in the same manner a drowning man will flail and grasp at anything, including his rescuer.

All illusions and denials, particularly deeply held ones that are widely shared, die a hard and ugly death not because the next chapter is so difficult to accept, but because the old chapter is so painful to let go. It doesn’t need to be this way, at least on an individual level.

This is why we must save ourselves first. Nothing else we do matters if we join the others in the agonizing death throes of our dying false reality. As long as we believe that what’s dying is real and thus worth saving, we will never let go and we will be pulled under with it. The only path forward is inward. Find yourself. Only then will you be able to find the others.

Cognitive Dissonance

05-12-2011