I don't normally publish my rants. By  definition they are an excess of emotion regardless of how truthful or logical they may be. If one cannot master his or her emotions,  ultimately one is a slave to them. 

On occasion I become frustrated and  choose to vent rather than let it stew inside. I have learned it is best  to let it all go, lest I be consumed by anger, resentment and righteous indignation.

For some reason I have decided to post this one. Don't ask me why because I could not answer logically. This  particular rant was so long I took pity upon the poor reader and broke it up into two parts. Below find part two with part one published a month ago.

Cognitive Dissonance

(Please note, in part one I explained the only inalienable right we have is to be curious, inquisitive, thoughtful and brutally honest with ourselves.)

The great post World War 2 economic expansion was achieved primarily through a massive increase in worker/slave productivity which, when combined with automation, new material and manufacturing processes and scientific breakthroughs exponentially increased the master’s profits. This is turn allowed the master to pass some of those profits back down the line to the workers/slaves, creating a virtuous circle of greater pay/remuneration, more consumer spending, greater master profits, greater pay etc.

We reached the end of that line more than 20 years ago, with average worker compensation flat since at least the mid 90’s when adjusted for the manager’s (read government) severely understated inflation. The reason the ‘freedom’ illusion didn’t begin to seriously unravel then and there was due principally to a massive expansion in consumer credit combined with ever decreasing interest rates. Borrow more, spend more and pay less interest on the borrowed funds. It works right up to the point where it no longer does.

In addition, the managing government began to massively expand its own borrowing during this same period of time to increase transfer payments to the lowest tiers of the slave population in order to appease them. Slave revolts are not desirable and make a mess of corporate profits and paternal hierarchies.

The ‘state’ also increased corporate transfer payments in the form of tax carve outs, governmental contracts and sweetheart deals, which in turn increased corporate profits. With the money flowing liberally, there was also an exponential increase in corruption up and down the money line. But just as long as the spice flows, relative peace reigns.

Essentially all parties, including the slave population, were eating the seed corn while burning the candle from both ends in order to kick the can down the road and buy a little more time. (That’s four idioms for the price of one.) Unfortunately the good times have now come to an end. There is simply not enough profitable milk left in the system to feed all parties clamoring for a nipple. Care to guess who gets pulled off a teat when this happens?

To quote Frank Zappa, “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

If you think about it, when President Trump speaks about “Making America Great Again”, he is approaching the ‘problem’ from a business point of view because that is what America Inc. is (as are all countries) a business first and foremost. And Trump is the expert in corporate bankruptcy and reorganization.

America’s balance sheet is way out of whack and cannot be salvaged. The masters understand this quite well and realize if they don’t make changes, painful as they may be for all parties involved, the end result will be slave revolt and rebellion. And while they are fairly confident they can successfully suppress and quell any revolt, their profit margins and investments will take a beating while doing so.

Either they offer up a half pound of bloody flesh and use it to negotiate painful and debilitating cuts and curbs, meaning they demand five pounds from the working class and ten pounds from everyone else. Or they have two pounds of flesh involuntarily hacked off, and then enter the negotiations in a weakened state and with less to barter from the start.

Trump is their emissary and chief negotiator, though I am quite sure Trump isn’t aware he’s being played. Trump’s initial ante is to cut governmental regulations and waste to increase……wait for it…..corporate profits which will then trickle down to the slave via a golden shower. Where have I heard this one before?

And it might actually work, at least well enough to continue the can kicking, if this were 1977 rather than 2017. But these days one man’s waste is another man’s corrupt income/revenue stream. While at first many will play nice and concede a little off the top in the interest of avoiding unwanted attention, positions will quickly harden when the realization washes over that this is just the beginning. Then it’s all hands on deck, damn the torpedoes.

In my mind this brings up two questions. Will the slave population tolerate a 30% to 50% (inflation adjusted) reduction in our standard of living spread out over the next 5-10 years? And will the upper class and lower level elites (notice I did not say masters) tolerate a similar (inflation adjusted) reduction in their overall ‘take’ from the system, be it from lower corporate profits and dividends, massive reductions in asset prices, reduced kickbacks, less sweetheart deals and a large reduction in graft and corruption?

I say 30% to 50% because when you take a closer look at the severely underfunded social contracts with the slave population (i.e. bankrupt Social Security, Medicare and public/private pension plans), sprinkle in massive consumer debt combined with a towering national debt that will never be repaid and it becomes glaringly obvious promises made will not be promises kept. Not by a long shot.

Someone is going to pay, or not be paid as the case may be. Either the shortfalls are covered by inflating away the purchasing power of the (wage or transfer) payments without an equal increase in the actual payments, or they cut the payments outright. Most likely a combination of the two, as well as other approaches, will be implemented.

But you can’t cut the slaves meager gruel with toilet water and still serve sizzling steak up at the main house. The only reason “We the Slaves” don’t revolt is we feel we have more to lose than to gain. While psychological operations and brute force can stem the tide for a while, if the masters move the already unbalanced equation to the point where we’ve got little or nothing left to lose, suddenly everyone has a problem.

But the funny thing about misery is it loves company. If the slave population can be convinced everyone is on the same weight loss program, even if it’s merely a promoted illusion, we will pull even harder on the oars to propel the Roman Galley up to ramming speed. But an illusion will not be sufficient to balance the books; therefore even the upper socioeconomic classes and elites will need a close shave if the gravy boat is to be refloated.

Trump’s election signals the start of a socioeconomic game of musical chairs. Initially the imbalance between available chairs and the number of chair seekers will be small and few will feel endangered. But after several rounds of culling, we will begin to intuitively understand we’re getting progressively closer to being eliminated and the stress levels and inner panic will skyrocket. This is when survival instinct kicks in for some (but not the majority, at least not yet) and any pretense towards civility goes out the window.

Each socioeconomic level will be engaged in its own ‘Game of Thrones Chairs’ and few will be spared the trial. If this ordeal were to last a few weeks or even several months, running away and bunkering might be a reasonably good strategy. Sadly I suspect the ‘rightsizing’ will not only be generational, but will last a full generation or more.

Hope, faith and belief will be the currency of choice and will be viciously exploited by those who not only know what the end game looks like, but who thoroughly understand the only rule is there are no rules. If there ever was a time the phrase “Better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission” were appropriate, it would be now.

I suspect ‘pay to be saved’ confidence games will run rampant in the back streets and alleys. Who doesn’t want the easy way out? After all, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. Those who bargain with themselves will bargain with anyone for anything with little thought given to how viable the prize actually is. The caged mind rarely wants to actually leave its prison, only to dream of escape while safely confined.

Unfortunately, the deeply conditioned mind of the enslaved is categorically incapable of grasping such extreme notions of survival, at least before the fact. The inured intellect trades in denial units, thus the last thing it wants is the truth disguised as the door to freedom. Relatively few may riot in impotent frustration, but they will just succeed in burning down their only remaining commerce and refuge.

To be perfectly frank, I don’t see a gradual wind down and redistribution happening with any semblance of order without first imposing great trial and tribulation. Meaning a common crisis must be manufactured out of whole cloth in order to reposition the chess pieces and clear the gross excesses from the social order. Of course, the youngest and oldest will suffer the most, but that’s par for the course and of little concern to the psychopath masters.

This is the primary purpose of large scale (world) war, be it physical, economic or psychological, to stress (meaning frighten) the subservient slave population into willingly giving up that which they already possess, or were promised, while demanding loyalty (patriotism/nationalism) to achieve social cohesiveness while suppressing dissent.

Remember, a spoon full of sugary nationalism makes the ugly police state medicine go down. Throw in a few beatings and a national wartime military draft to weed out the young trouble makers and the serfs soon settle down and get to work on quarter wages and half rations.

Works like magic every time.

Of course, the escalation won’t be spun for public consumption as what it really is. And those of us desperate enough to accept any ‘alternative facts’, rather than confront our own self enslavement, will gratefully accept at face value any and all reasons to believe precisely what we want to believe in order not to acknowledge ‘knowing’.

Never underestimate the lengths to which we will go to avoid the ugly uncomfortable ‘self’ exposing truth. Our collective and individual denial spans all social and economic classes, including the masters themselves. The games people play encompasses everyone. It’s just a matter of degree, not of practice.

I will not be so foolish as to claim there is a way out, meaning complete and utter escape from the plantation. Even the hardy early American settlers brought the plantation with them when they relocated to the ‘new’ world. And they most certainly were dependent to some degree upon re-supply from the homeland for goods they could not yet replicate or produce.

Ironically the harsh and barren living conditions of the new world demanded the settlers re-impose an authoritarian ruler for each outpost. Similar to the situation of a captain and crew at sea, there can only be one authority in each encampment and that authority must be absolute. Those escaping the old world for ideological reasons soon found themselves out of the frying pan and into the roaring fire. At least they had their religious freedom to give them comfort…and to validate and affirm the selected authoritarian.

One merely needs to read the unvarnished, and still unfolding, history of John Smith and the Jamestowne settlement to understand how it all works when reality meets ideology under harsh conditions and severe deprivation. Ultimately “We the People” will impose order upon “We the Slaves” by supporting the authoritarian, despite any misgivings or fear on our part. Better to have a little rather than the possibility of none, a slave mindset conditioned to accept someone’s reality rather than to attempt to create our own.

This doesn’t mean we cannot begin a process of withdrawing from the control system. But to do so we must first indentify, then set in motion, the process of severing the cognitive capture and co-dependency that binds us to the lies of thyself, which in turn ties us physically, emotionally, culturally and ideologically to the masters and their socioeconomic control system.

Practically speaking, the deeply conditioned and inured mind will nearly always default to the lesser of the perceived pains until it’s too late to change. Distorted proximity perception is the controlling meme through intentionally stunted impulse control. Meaning we are externally controlled by our artificially implanted fears, and most of our fears are false or grossly exaggerated.

A habituated ‘consumer’ (of every ‘thing’, including constantly checking our phone to feed our ‘need’ for self affirmation through social media) who navigates life with dysfunctional impulse control always succumbs to the need for immediate gratification. Many of us can no longer tolerate even the shortest period of emotional, psychological or physical pain. Our aversion to discomfort will nearly always default us to the path of pain avoidance, even if it is to our long term detriment to do so.

This behavior is often observed in obsessive compulsives, junkies and other severe drug users, alcoholics and various other ‘dependent’ persons. This observation should not be lost on the reader because I am essentially declaring most of the modern world’s population to be addled and addicted. As a recovering alcoholic of 27 years, I speak from experience when I say the face of the addiction, whether it’s drugs, alcohol, consumerism, food, sex, work, exercise or whatever, is just the symptom and not the cause.

The same impulse that lulls the lobster into death’s embrace as the water temperature rises beyond the point of survival is at work within the vast majority of our habituated minds. Nearly all of us will pull the door to our cage closed when we find it unexpectedly open. It is one thing to dream of freedom, another thing entirely too actually think and live freely. But to be free requires personal responsibility in all our actions and deeds. And we simply can’t have that now.

To truly be free, we must be solely responsible for our ‘self’, a truly frightening concept for the vast majority of the world’s population. And make no mistake about it; this isn’t exclusively a ‘western civilization’ problem. As ‘undeveloped’ countries (meaning their slave workforce) are indoctrinated into the consumer culture (meaning further enslaved and exploited) the mind consuming ‘consumer’ meme takes hold and devours from within.

The native Indians of North America called this self destructive raging consumption an illness or sickness. We all call it modern consumerism and view it as normal, natural and entirely reasonable; anything but what it truly is. This is the defining characteristic of any and all addictive behavior; the unwillingness to acknowledge and confront ourselves is the root cause of our addiction.

We must not acknowledge the actual cause of our illness, because then we are directly confronted with our powerlessness over our addiction. Since we rationalize away our aberrant behavior by declaring it normal (that’s just the way things are, what’s the problem anyway, everyone else is doing it) to disarm our excuse is to directly confront our insanity. Nobody wants that, thus the collective psychosis passes from generation to generation.

This way be demons, a comforting belief for the frightened minion and a mind meme constantly reinforced by every aspect of the system, including all other imprisoned souls. As the system becomes increasingly unstable, childish emotions and outbursts will run rampant because that is how a slave’s mind behaves.

One of the defining characteristics of long term addiction is that emotional growth and maturity stagnates……and eventually regresses. It is the denial path of least resistance and it will be followed to the bitter end. Emotions make good servants but poor masters, which is precisely why western civilization is increasingly populated by drama kings and queens. After all, one certainly can’t be expected to be rational when one is presently engaged in emotional excess.

Ever notice how people who always seem to be immersed in one (emotional) crisis after another constantly claim they aren’t responsible for their present situation, that it’s the fault of this or that or whatever? And they insist the drama which currently embroils them is completely unwanted. The ugly truth is, either consciously or subconsciously, they active seek and create these entanglements to avoid dealing with themselves and their own steaming pile of disabling neurosis.

On the other side of the coin is the deaf, dumb and blind, those who know nothing, see nothing and hear nothing but precisely what they wish. This is actually the preferred affliction of the middle class and above, since an educated mind is a terrible thing to waste on reasoning, critical thinking and abstract thought.

While much of the lower class revels in dark fatalism and the perceived inevitability of desperate times and destitute living, thus the preponderance of lower class crime perpetrated upon, and inflicted upon, fellow lower class dwellers, the middle and upper classes use their expanded intellect to rationalize and justify not only their complicity, but their full throated participation.

After all, it’s the American way of democracy and capitalism, two terms bastardized to the point they are worse than meaningless, but are actually now used as weapons of mass distraction and self destruction.

If you can’t beat them, join them. And if you’re going to join them, you might as well climb as close to the top as possible. Damn the beating stick, I’m grabbing for the carrot. When conditions are good and getting progressively better, it can be competently argued going with the tail wind is the correct play for the self and possibly even for the greater good.

But for a rapidly increasing portion of the resident population, the going is not good and the spiral down into the socioeconomic black abyss is accelerating. Those who insist the old rules and illusion be maintained will be handed empty promises and sugary memes to placate the thrashing mind desperate for its next fix. While the placebo effect will dull the initial pain of withdrawal, eventually the body and mind will demand full anesthetization.

The last thing an addict wants is to be assured the pain will eventually subside if only we stay the course and abstain from indulging, to grit our teeth, steel ourselves against the pain and work through the process of withdrawal. “We the Consumer” can’t handle the truth, that ultimately we are our ‘the’ enemy found deep within.

Cognitive Dissonance

06/04/2017

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