Wednesday, September 26, 2007

We Don't Need No Thought Control

There is no need for mind control to be centrally enforced. It is enforced by all of you. When someone deviates from the acceptable norms of society at any age he is ridiculed, ostracized and kept on the outside until he agrees to conform, comply and adapt.

This simple fact, while apparent to children, becomes lost to us as we age. Is it simple pack behavior? Conformity is safe, deviance is dangerous, or is it culturally imposed? It must be the latter because so much of our behavior seems to be in direct contradiction to our needs and wants.

Without being conditioned to do so would we spend the vast majority of our waking lives engaged in activity that yields nothing? Forty hours a week for forty years, or maybe it's fifty for fifty now. In an advanced technological world it seems that there should be more art and leisure time for everyone. Yet as the system stands a small percentage of the population controls a large proportion of the planet's resources while the remaining masses eke out an existence by spending all their time working, commuting, sleeping and eating to recharge for more work. Simple common sense is all that is necessary to determine the fundamental flaw in such a system.

When I am working I eat only because it is uncomfortable to work while hungry. I do not enjoy my food or savor it other than to briefly taste it as I hurriedly chew and swallow and anticipate returning to work with a feeling of guilt that I am leeching productivity by even taking the short time to eat.

I know the absurdity of such guilt, I know on a philosophical level that it should not exist but it does, I have been successfully programmed to maintain the machine and deprogramming myself looms before me as a lifelong endeavor.

Much of what passes for editorializing and political commentary can be boiled down to thought control. We have an entire class of people whose role it is to call the attention of the population to those who dare to deviate from the accepted norms of world culture. In the Midwestern part of the United States where I am those norms include an unspoken belief that the United States government and large corporations have the right to impose their will on any part of the world they choose. Any leader from another country who questions this status quo is vilified by the corporate media and made to appear insane and dangerous.

The same treatment is reserved for domestic trouble makers. One cannot question the inherent goodness of teh United States without arousing the suspicion of one's fellow Americans. The common understanding of patriotism has evolved into something akin to religious belief. Those who are patriotic follow blindly and do not question the decisions of those leaders whom a fundamentally flawed electoral process has put in power.

When I was kid my dad used to joke about the Soviet elections having only one candidate on the ballot. I wonder how much different it is to have two instead of one. Realistically there are always only two presidential candidates with any hope of winning. The process by which those two are chosen is completely alienated from the average voter. You and I have absolutely no say in who those two are going to be. The party machinery on each side selects and promotes those candidates who will eventually be "chosen" by the electorate.

I think often of a bumper sticker I saw recently that said "if voting worked it would be illegal". This is true for more than just political elections. All systems of power, religious, business, political, military have ways to maintain the status quo. Our political system will never be fundamentally different if the existing mechanism of voting and party politics is used.

Perhaps the alternative would be worse.

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