The latest news reports include the Robocall scandal and the teacher's strike in BC. The other day I watched a documentary about the pornography that pervades the media and how it affects our sexuality and how young people who don't even know what sex is are becoming brainwashed to believe they must look like porn stars in order to be 'normal'.
When I was a teen I was compelled to be 'in'. That was in the sixties. The call seemed to be so authoritative that I could not see how my 'programming' was inspired by the corporate media. It took another decade before I was able to look back and see how I, and all my peers, were influenced by the notion that those images presented to us hourly through mainstream entertainments were examples of what we could be if we work at it. And it was another fifty years later where I was able to see how my need for approval has kept me in a state of prime availability to suggestion no matter how many defenses I put up.
Sure I can question everything and anything and I remind myself to do so whenever I read something that raises my temperature, however I am also aware of how my world is becoming, either through awareness or maturity, further and further removed from reality.
Reading 1984 so many years ago I thought Orwell was predicting that every household would have a television screen where we would be watched by Big Brother, but now I see he could have meant that our inner minds were already pre-wired for manipulation.
Millions of dollars, no billions and trillions of dollars, are spent to invade our most private thoughts and desires, and to offer immediate relief. Sugar, alcohol, drugs, sex, money and power are the addictions that keep us sucking on the shiny metal tit of Capitalism. We are no longer human because we have been genetically modified through persuasion and propaganda. We are not homo sapien as much as we are consumer (meaning 'squanderer' in its middle-English origin).
The ruling systems, from the early Catholic church to imperialism keep us shopping for the next best ideology that frames and guides our future. Ways of letting us believe we are choosing, we are in control, when in fact our consent is manufactured.
Even Jesus was killed during the Crusades when His message was co-opted to support patriarchy, military might and imperialism. Since then we have sacrificed our young on the bloody battlefields in the name of honour, which we were led to believe we could win. But the only winners were the industrialists and the arms dealers. Personal survival meant traumatization and the interruption of our most intimate relationships. That is how it was then and how it is today.
When societies, through intelligence, insight and cooperation, become more socially just, more civil, where power is shared more equally, suddenly a new war is paraded as a new necessity. Innocents are swooped from their epistemic homes to slaughtering fields where they learn how to rid themselves of sensitivity and tenderness and focus on the task to kill or be killed.
Prior to the Witch hunts, to the First World War and the Second World War, women were participating and demanding their dignified place in society. Prior to Vietnam African Americans were demanding civil rights. Prior to the Gulf wars, women were demanding more social power in the work place. War is the device that sacks civil society, and returns the masses to the brutality of strategic ritualized violence.
Now that the Occupy movement has aroused the people to the injustice of the current system, there is another war on the horizon - with Iran. But the victims will not just be the Iranian regime. As with all wars, whether military, economic, political or class - YOU are the victim. Your social systems, your health care, your libraries, your universities, your courts of law and your neighbours will be sacrificed so that the most powerful can play their nihilistic games of power.
