Control vs Influence

I don’t think the human mind is ever easily controlled, but it is very easy to influence.

Influence works better than straightforward control anyway, and the more pervasive the influence, the better. At some point down the line, it becomes almost impossible to find the source of any one influence gripping the human mind. It’s already everywhere, in what we nonchalantly call the ‘mainstream’.

See, mainstream was associated early on with words like ‘common, normal, average, majority’, all of those not hinting at the best, but positive nonetheless. Once the association is firmly created, once a bridge in the mind is built that will invariably link ‘mainstream’ to positive connotations, then the next phase can occur whereby negative, even obscene mores* will be added under the mainstream umbrella... And... Ta-Da! Because the negative or obscene mores are linked to mainstream, it becomes synonymous to ‘common, normal, average, majority’. Though the mores are in no way intrinsically ethical, moral or just in essence, they are believed to be so because the mind falls for the illusion created by that earlier bridge. Think of a really huge garbage can, and how easy it gets once you’ve built that giant lid on top that opens at will to throw x amount of rubbish in. That’s pretty much the state in which the modern human mind is right now.

So, really, who wants control of the mind when you can just influence it? It takes some time, but it’s worth the trouble, because once a trend of influence is let loose, it becomes that rolling snowball that just get bigger and bigger, worse and worse, and nobody knows after a while where exactly it sprung from.

Not so long ago, societies were all about repression. People were held on a moral leash at least in terms of appearance. You had to be religious, or else what would the neighbours say? You could get kicked out of your community if you didn’t at least appear to comply with the moral standards. So you got married and never got caught cheating on your spouse. Religion played a great role in repressing people, telling them what is right and what isn’t, and it was often frustrating because as a person you simply couldn’t give in to every fancy you may have had.

Then came ‘liberation’, along with the era of consumerism spawned by capitalism. Suddenly, we were all equals at least in theory and the sky was the limit. Religion was kicked in the butt because, really, we have a right to do whatever we want and who needs a moral leash anyway?

Right.

Because doing what we want without any moral scale to base our actions on really is way better than complete oppression... At least outright oppression of the mind doesn’t destroy the essence of what makes us who we are as human beings. It triggers rebellion and a drive to set higher goals for ourselves. It makes you less complacent, and want to spend your oppressed life aspiring to something better. Something like, I don't know... true freedom?...

But we already know that physical freedom is impossible as it is linked to the laws of nature and gravity itself. So we would in fact aspire to reach true freedom of the mind while our bodies suffered the consequences of complete oppression.

Right now, it’s the opposite trend. Our physical selves are given as much freedom as humanly possible under the natural laws.
And that’s what we mistake for true freedom?...

Yes. That is exactly what the majority of us think when we speak of freedom. Yet our minds have never been more enslaved and influenced, but it’s okay, we’ll tell ourselves, because our bodies are free enough.

Again. That is not true freedom. That is a lie worse than illusions themselves because we kneel before it as though it were the most precious thing on Earth. We might as well take out our eyeballs with a spoon and look the part fully since we’re already blind within.

* Mores (Lat. Mos) = Traditions, every day habits

Ira, Irae for Anger

I can’t believe what I’ve just heard on the news... I’m so shell-shocked and angered I almost wish I hadn’t moved from my bed to walk to the living room and switch the TV on. It was Channel 4 news and some guy was talking in front of a projected image of a graph about the latest UN recommendations from that rotten Copenhagen meeting. My mouth opened in utter surprise, perhaps it was dismay, as I listened to what was being said. ‘Climate change’, the biggest fallacy of our times, was being used as an excuse to push the ugly agenda on population number control - read population curbing, here. The summit’s forecast? In a few years, the 6 billions of us will shoot up to 10.5 billions, and guess what, that’s bad for the climate.

One of the main recommendations? I quote: “Educating women to curb climate change”. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Some guy invited on the news program was talking about the need to start volunteering to only have one child - Hello, China. Well, girls, hang onto your ovaries tightly...

Apparently women are the ones who need to be educated so they will have less kids. It’s a shame they forgot to propose mass neutering of the male population, that would seem like a quicker fix for dear climate change since the majority of women at least in the developing world are still under the thumb of their husbands who are the ones to pick them from the cot to marry them - if they’re lucky not to end up on the meat rack of the rape/ sex exploitation business - and... guess what? They want kids.

Of course, I don’t care about who gets the nip as it is utterly irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. The real issue isn’t about who is asked to get educated (but I needed to express the depth of my anger and contempt for such an obvious patriarchal world government, as always), it is about the wave of horrendous control coming our way from all sides. Just as they dropped that bombshell on the news, they swiftly moved on to discuss upcoming elections in Britain. How sweet. Let’s talk about Labour and Tories, as though the two parties weren’t really about the same thing fundamentally. As if either could bring anything different than what their identical agenda from ‘above’ dictates. As if the ‘politicians’ reciting speeches they don’t even write themselves were really in power of anything but their own fat, corrupted wallets.

Mark my word, first they placed a few issues here and there, like climate change. They revamped it so it looked serious enough to get sheep - oops, sorry, I meant to say people - worried. ‘Don’t use plastic bags, it hurts the planet’, ‘use three bins to recycle everything’, ‘don’t take a bath, take a shower to save water’, ‘don’t eat meat, cattle is bad for the climate’... They used to say things like “think about your grand-children’s future”, but wait - what grand-children? The invisible ones? I don’t see how we’ll need to worry about it once we’re no longer allowed to reproduce.
Then, they start talking about ‘volunteering’... Volunteering to sterilize yourself, volunteering to get abortions (it’s good business for them, they can even recycle aborted embryos and experiment on them - for free)...

Now, let’s sit back and watch what happens next. If ‘volunteering’ doesn’t produce results, they can always impose it on us - hello again, China. After all, they did just that with the Lisbon Treaty, first with Britain, then Ireland (everyone understands the Irish people made a mistake when they first said NO; they really meant YES, right?). But wait - China is one of the big players these days. Forget that there is no democracy or freedom of expression in that country - if you look around closely enough, you’ll realise there is no such thing as a democracy here, either, except we were told time and time again that there was, and like wishful thinking, we all kind of bought it at face value. Ah, the beauty of conditioning.

I have to say I’m more than a little miffed no one ever dared propose less drastic solutions first to that so-called climate change business (ohhh, it is a business, and a lucrative one, but not for us).



Like, I don’t know... I’ll take a silly example: say a ship laden with passengers, food, water, furniture and bricks was beginning to sink in the middle of an ocean. What would common sense dictate we get rid of first? Would anyone really decide people should be thrown overboard first to ease the weight? Common sense would tell a person to throw away the bricks, then the furniture, then the food, then the water. Then you’d lock hands with fellow passengers, pray, and hope you can make it to the shore swimming, or something - or maybe enough time would have passed for another ship to pick you up.

In the case of so-called climate change, I’m left absolutely astounded that people should be the first ones to go (in the sense that we should first stop having 'so many' kids), when cars, planes, fuming factories and all that technology are all nicely kept untouched. Nah, they’ll tell you, stop having so many kids, that’s the real solution - leave the cars alone. Don’t even think about it, just do as we say. We know best. We are the experts, you’re just a drop in the ocean, you know nothing, mate.

By the way, I love the word ‘expert’. Apparently, you can become an ‘expert’ after 10 years of studying a particular subject. Can I claim to be an expert in smelling BS since I’ve been smelling and studying it at school compulsorily for almost two decades? Or does it only really work one way - the corrupt way?



And finally... I kind of miss hearing about global warming in the news every day. What happened to that term, eh? Now it’s all about climate change, but who can spot the not-so-subtle shift, here? There was too much noise within scientific circles, or debate, as to whether it was global warming or cooling, so instead the media was told to go for the blanket term: climate change. See, that way, you can’t accuse anyone of lying - EVER. I mean, doesn’t the weather change all the time, but more importantly, doesn’t climate shift a little over the years naturally?



I don’t know... Maybe some time soon they’ll announce that what really happened to the dinosaurs was that they were all so big that all their farting led to the ice age. If I say that, no one will take me seriously, but if a team of ‘experts’ backed by governments went on the telly to say: “Dinosaurs were so big and there were so many of them that their gas emission became too much to handle, leading to global cooling”, then I wonder how many would simply take it for truth.

Thoughts

I have a test this week in Ethics, which is a poor excuse for a module, if you ask me ( it only lasted 4 weeks). We’re spoon-fed half-baked theories we must accept as moral because it is the PC thing to do and then we have to answer stupid questions to show how well we can play the PC game.

It’s a heavy week in terms of assignments and tests, but I still found the time to read a whole little book last night... No... Not a classic, I’m afraid, but a cheap, laughable romance that inspired the True Blood series on TV.
See, reading it was alright. The writing world has this unique capacity for boundless limits in terms of shock-value, dissent, mainstream or ideals. It’s a funny, quite violent and lusty kind of cheap series, but it is in no way as gross or perverted as it presents itself on screen, because the written word gives you some kind of control over the images that are created in your mind - which a TV or cinema screen does not.
The only scar I’m left with is the familiar, exacerbated daydreaming state in which I slip for a few days following a read. I can then move on to the next read.


There can be no question as to the effect 2D depiction of events has on the human mind and its psychological workings. Perhaps I should call it the psycho-pathological effects of modern leisure.

The power of the screen is immense and under-estimated only because we are used to its effects on us already and can no longer distinguish the potent influence it yields.

There is at least one universal truth in this world and it is that governments, just like the majority of westernized people, do not give you anything for free. Ever. Yet, here they are encouraging you to get a better quality picture for your TV. They’ll put the price down on that commodity just so the poorest can afford HD at some point soon, so they can have better viewing. At the same time, the price of bread has shot up to three times what it was a mere couple of years ago. At the same time, the bread we buy is no longer the quality it used to be, and there is simply no way of knowing truly what it is made of. And that’s only bread, here, as an example.

Our fridge at home is pretty much empty most of the time, not because we can’t afford to buy food, but because we simply have no clue what to eat anymore. On Sunday, right after I’d popped by a friend's house to retrieve my notebook, I went shopping at Morrison’s and felt like buying some fish. The choice was dire so I settled for some salmon steak. It looked nice enough under the plastic cover, pink and healthy, just as any piece of salmon would. It definitely looked the part, whatever it really was.


I mean, I’m sure it used to be a ‘real’ salmon, but what the poor piece of fish won’t tell you even if it lived, is that it comes from intensive farming and was filled with hormones from the start, without forgetting the random toxins and chemicals added to the mix. Once the fish was cooked, I cut up tiny pieces for my cat to eat. He barely touched it, my fish-lover cat.
He had started to go crazy smelling the fish cooking in the oven, though, and was impatiently pestering us for food. Imagine my puzzled look when I finally gave him what he wanted only to watch him sniff the stuff and walk away. If a cat could ever sneer a snort, I guess that’s what mine would have done.


Can a cat be naturally more astute when it comes to survival instincts? I ate my share, but he certainly did not.

Of course, the horrendous ‘beauty’ in this is that eating the garbage we actually pay to have is unlikely to kill you on the spot. Of course it won’t. It might not even show any side effects.
The thing is... Even if our bodies really worked just as well as recycling bins, I would have hoped that we, humans, had more esteem for our kind. Apparently, we don’t.


I guess I’ll say it myself: “The European Union is kind of sinister.”
Tim had said that in passing and we barely brushed the significance of that gut feeling. Yet, what is the EU but one piece of a bigger jigsaw? It’s a nanny state hiding behind the safety blanket of human rights . The ‘nanny’ is more likely to turn out to be a previously convicted rapist masquerading as a social worker to be close to its victim. We are, by the way, the children of the state, whatever age we might be. We don’t own or know ourselves, or aren’t supposed to; we don’t know what’s good for us; we don’t know the difference between right and wrong; we couldn’t survive on our own. The state ‘knows’ all those things for us best. What makes up the state? Men just as fallible as the poor sod next door, except those in power have connections and money to become untouchable.

Here lies the dilemma: man needs society to an extent. Society becomes crucial to pass on knowledge and harbour development, and without some form of society, even a simple group of people, mankind would most likely wither to a pulp. It is equally detrimental, if not homicidal, to imprison man under the thumb of corrupted chiefs.

I’m worried, yet at the same time I’m not. How could that be? Well, we’ve been there before, we’ve faced that kind of crossroads before, truly. I know what can’t be stopped: the slow rise of a tiny portion of people who will become the power’s best pest. Rebels whose weapons comprise a pen, a brush or a voice. For every rebel killed, another rises in his place, as surely as the sun sets down to be born again the next day. In that sense, truth seekers have already won the battle on the bigger scale. In the end, who needs superheroes when we have the mind?

I don’t know how or when we got to the stage where we surrendered our lives to be ruled and governed by corporations, but the fact remains that we have. It’s hard to picture it in our heads, and it’s even harder to picture the gross significance of that fact. First, how does one picture in his mind what bears no face? In some countries, like England, a company becomes an individual entity before law, just like a Jane Doe or John Smith, yet the company is no single person but a conglomeration of so many people running it that it becomes a faceless entity in reality.
A company, however, is to the corporation what the chihuahua is to the German Shepherd or rottweiler. These faceless entities are what now rules the world. For every ‘famous’ face or brand, there is a corporation behind. Fact.

Another Midnight Day

Looks like it’s set to rain all day... The cover of grey clouds is weighing on the city.

I don’t know why I’m surprised anymore when I stumble across stuff on the internet. Like, I don’t know, learning that rice has been genetically modified with human genes (2007 Daily Mail article). It’s not like I’d never heard of GM food, is it?... I just never imagined they would go so far as adding HUMAN genes to food. The sorcerers behind that - I mean scientists... - like to say they’ve discovered a way to cure children’s basic diseases in third world countries by adding stuff in the rice. Shame they don’t bother ensuring clean water first in those countries... But if they did just that, they would be sorting out the source of most diseases, so where would the profit be?




There had been talks before of how they could now add vitamins, even vaccines straight into your tomatoes, I’ll have you know. Where does it stop? Can you even hope to escape the current dictat?

Where is the so-called freedom when you can’t even choose what you put in your mouth?

What are we but human recycling bins in the end?

It seems that all is well as long as there is no immediate effect to link their mojo to sickness. The trouble with such insane tempering with nature itself is the long TERM effects, but when you are surrounded by chemicals, there is little hope of finding the root cause of disease caused by the tempering.

Funny how it’s always the same kind of disorders that prevails in western societies, eh? More and more children are born with eczema or will develop the condition, and the number of women suffering from hormonal imbalance that can link to infertility keeps growing. Perhaps mum is right after all, when she jokingly says that we were the dinosaurs. Aren’t we changing into freaks of nature, after all?

The deadly cocktail of food tempering coupled with whatever they put in those vaccines...
It wasn’t enough to inject cattle with hormones... No... Not enough. Not bad enough, not enough profit.


How dare I even protest? Look, they’d say; look what we gave to you, ungrateful little sod! Look at the pretty city, the supermarkets and leisure we’ve created for you! All that comfort... Your ancestors were either enslaved or they lived in shacks, starving. Now look! Look! How dare you even question that today’s way of life isn’t better?

I can’t watch programs on slaughter houses. I can’t watch, let alone think too much about the line of cattle going for the kill one after the other because it reminds me of our humanity, except they made the landscape prettier for us to an extent. They break sheep’s legs when the beasts refuse to comply and move up along the chain that leads them to their death, but they can’t do that with humans - not in such an obvious fashion. So they break our legs, and they eventually break our necks through illusions, because all that really separates us from cattle is the ability to reason. The latter forces our butchers to be a little craftier when it comes to placing us on the line that will lead us to death. All for what?

ALL FOR WHAT? I don’t know anymore... Is it really all for profit? Is money that big a deal, to the point of turning people into pure evil? Where does the poison come from? Who brought it to us? Such a waste... A waste of life. The real genocide is that of the mind. Once you’ve killed the spirit, I can’t see what’s left to save.

Life is wasted, flushed down the drain, but most people understand only things like ‘waste of time’, or ‘waste of money’, or ‘waste of energy’... What does it mean when you say ‘waste of life’, huh? It is, once again, the total sum of all that is humanly wasted. My own life, and probably yours, is a distorted version of what it ought to have been... At this point I wouldn’t know how else to put it. Look beyond the veil of illusions and the comfort that numbs the mind.

Poisoned on one side, told how special we are on the other... If that’s not perversion at its extreme, I don’t know what is. It serves its purpose, though. We end up utterly baffled, confused. "But look at what they gave us on that side, look at how they try to save lives, how they try to perfect our comfort - they even gave us HD tv, mate... Surely they can’t be hurting us from the other side. It doesn’t make sense."

There, my point exactly: it doesn’t make sense. That’s the goal.

The nihilist society

Things have to get worse before they get better... It’s hard to see how much worse things can get on all levels. We’ve got to the stage where we no longer have any idea what it is we put in our mouth, but we carry on mindlessly courtesy of adaptation and, well, conditioning.

Take my case, for instance. I was born when supermarket giants were already the norm, just as banks, credit cards and the media were. I never stopped to wonder about the voices that came out from the radio or television sat in mum’s living room because I was born and grew up surrounded by these machines from the start. I took them for granted, as a normal occurrence of life. It’s hard to question what seems to always have been there. It’s even harder when the general consensus dictates that it is a good thing.

Isn’t it a shock to the system when you suddenly learn that what you always took for granted and safe turns out to be reckless and life-threatening, maybe to the point of being in fact evil? At this point, I no longer long for an escape into a fantasy world - it almost feels as though I’ve begun to drown in some dystopia. As Cara would have thought: “Of all the fantasies I’d longed to escape into, this one was not one of them.”

Everything is distorted, twisted according to some agenda, and though it appears almost impossible to spell out exactly what is going on, one thing emerges clear as a diluted, mid-summer blue sky: all that is done is done for profit.

Science is no longer a potential wonder for mankind, it is a weapon. You read of genetic manipulations under the guise of ‘human interest’. Where does one draw the line? The scary thing is that a majority in power, and even within scientific circles, don’t believe that any line should be drawn - ever. Why draw a line, they would smirk, when all a line does is limit you. So you hear of mice being grown a human ear on their backs and the justification for such gross barbary is simple: to further scientific and medical advances in the hope of 'saving' more human lives.


In one corner, you have pro-life folks storming against individuals who choose to abort their foetus or embryo. In another corner, you have a bunch of scientists planning to use embryos for experiments. Science has become another blanket word and anything goes under its guise. To live. To survive. To remain in this world for as long as possible. That excuse is enough to carry out the most perverse of actions.

Sure, on an individual level, one could not be blamed for wanting to live or survive... It is part of an instinct as old as the Earth itself - that of survival. But... No, we are not supposed to live forever, and no, we are not supposed to get our own way every time, and no we are not supposed to justify the means for an end. In every trauma, every terrible event or set of circumstances that befall us, there is something for the person to learn from - to grow. It doesn’t mean it won’t be hard, almost destructive at times, but it is the only way to grow as human beings.

Childhood is about learning boundaries, hence the constant breaching of such boundaries. Adults are meant to guide and teach, and make sure whatever boundary is breached, it isn’t one that is too horrendous or destructive. The aim would be that through the experiment of breaching boundaries and learning from early, basic experiences, one would reach the adult stage of life with at least a rough idea of which boundaries need to be respected. The rest of existence is spent refining such notions. In other words, we then spend the rest of our lives getting to understand better the ethical and moral side of existence as human beings with the unique ability to think and reason. Well, that’s what ought to be the case. Instead, we see adult life being squandered in futility where materiality and greed become the only purpose for mankind.

In the end, capitalism and consumerism are direct tenets of a nihilist society.
Greed leads to corruption; consumerism leads to want, which leads to greed, which eventually leads to corruption. Here is the pattern that defines what we call a capitalistic society. Profit becomes the beating heart of the system and under its umbrella greed, corruption, consumerism and wants are like arteries departing from it.

There is no such thing as a selfish trait or gene, it is a nurtured, grossly distorted consequence from all the above through conditioning and the need to adapt to survive.
Profit and its pulsing arteries such as greed, consumerism and corruption lead nowhere but to a nihilist conclusion. The process by which it destroys itself is akin to a cancer eating at a body from within. Everything else slowly withers and perishes until only the umbrella and its departing arteries remain, and when that happens, all else is destroyed, and even the umbrella begins to dissolve to nothingness to give way for chaos.