Alphabet subsidiary Google subsidiary YouTube had a pleasing downage this morning, affecting millions of disaffected in karmic response to such antics as insulting this non-user like so:
And amidst a world where neurologists from Yale Medical School are rather poetically linking Restless legs syndrome to suicidal tendency. As though self-control leads us away from where we need to be.
Charles Lane has written a curious thing charging the pressures of conformity and what he deems ‘double consciousness‘ as resulting in too many people today choosing to remain quiet, rather than speak their minds. Essentially, he believes that so many persons feel left out by the mainstream of culture that they find themselves stuck in a self-defensive position, fearing the day the greater masses should ever take note of what makes them different. A peoples unable to edit their own reality will never be able to govern themselves. That’s the whole idea, I’d bet. Focus on false divides til vertigo sets in too emphatically to be of any use repairing actual divides. Bombard the shopper with multi-colored sights and multi-layered smells and subliminal muzak so the sensory overload causes them to forget why they’re in the store and they end up buying that much more unneeded or unwanted junk, either out of habit or to appear purposeful. A direct democracy, particularly a participatory democracy, cannot come to pass for a society bred and programmed to require marketing and promotions to tell them what to think or feel, even about themselves. The masses have permitted themselves to become too gullible, mistaking the standardization of thought and feeling for ingenuity.
Or worse, the gaudiness of thought as celebratory.
The wealthiest feudalists proactively seek to prolong their holdings, reported to the unwashed as anything other than a chance to stand in lines longer and longer. Maybe in a hundred more years the commoners can buy cheap knockoff versions of immortality, empowering them to work the factories for an additional 50 years of nothing. Corporate media can groundlessly announce millions of job openings in the same stroke as accusing unknown illegal brown-skins of stealing jobs, and the public accepts these words as anything other than a punch to the kidneys. Because they are too stupid to notice the condescension, the placating of the absolute worst, most unhelpful personalities. The National Retail Federation is forecasting that this year, consumers in the USA will spend half a billion dollars on Halloween costumes for their pets. Imagine if that money were to instead go to college debt. Or clothing the destitute in time for the harsh winter the Farmers Almanac is predicting. Or fixing the also nationwide plight of still-extant issues with poisoned public drinking water. There is such a thing as disposable income, and then there is such a thing as robbing Peter to pay Paul, and then there is such a thing as manifest idiocy. This society shames victims astronomically more than customers, who are ultimately responsible for more societal ills than they’ll ever grant themselves the quiet time to actually acknowledge.
Maybe personalizing fate mistakes consumption for creation.
A real democracy would mean your vote is just as important as that of a crackpipe-eater. Everyone knows this on some level, which is why no modern civilization will ever truly host anything approximating a functional democracy. And most troubling is that as above, so below, meaning that this applies every bit as much to the individual level, within that of our own particular psyches. Bad decision-making fundamentally should be learned from, but never prized, which is so much more systemically prevalent than mere reality television. There’s no rationalizing the status quo of anything. Societal norms serve no purpose greater than guidelines for what not to do.
When people are completely powerless before themselves, granting them positions of authority only translates to projecting that powerlessness, enforcing it on strangers no better and no worse. And giving the most self-centered, the ones incapable of individual or societal progress unless using and abusing others, positions of extreme power, is hereby the new definition for insanity. There is no societal emphasis towards self-construction, not from the state or the church or big business because they one and all need for you to maintain permanent voids. Just products to bury all the problems of ourselves and our world far, far underneath.
I will never stop believing that anyone who is not anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, is only striving to please their personal troubles. The follower of whichever endorsed path dousing himself in petrol, more mindless than selfless.