A voice penetrating the void of consumerist minds.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Human beings acquire most of their knowledge second hand, especially in the socalled civilised part of the world. Parents, teachers and lectorers transfer bits of cultural standards and habits to the growing up, bosses and experts appearing in the media dominate in shaping the opinion of adults about the rest of the world.
Most education institution focus on nourishing crystallized intelligence, and neglect fluid intelligence. Students become living databases for an endless pool of factual information. The lack of encouragement of acquiring problem solving skills leads to an intellectual dependency on persons of authority.
But who knows how to distinguish a person of authority from an impostor? Does authority exists in an Einsteinian universe of relativity, where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics render certainty into mere probability?
Advances in technology seem to indicate the existence of some experts, which have sufficient authority in their field to evolve it further. Although technology contributed to the raise of the living standard, it endangers and destroys the environment and human lives when deployed in wars.
Persons of authority exist, but not all work on the side of good vs the evil of the week. And unless they received media training or qualify as media whore, experts rather spend their time with more important things than sound biting the hungry press.
Identifying an impostor requires common sense, background research and time. If you assume a 50% chance that a person of authority follows his own or his interest groups agenda, you can exercise to filter inputs to your mind instead of committing media hearsay as fact to memory.
However, chasing disinformation does not lead to find useful information. Everyone got stuck in the same trap: righteous experts, those who just claim expertise, those who dont give a damn and the information recipients.
Some aspects of our society hardly ever get questioned or thoroughly analysed. Most citizens assume that the government (at least in a democracy) will not harm, hurt or even kill their people. But hardly anyone discusses whether government is necessary at all.
The links between government and the global monetary systems miss the spot light as well. Consider money as a way of trading energy, and you might understand that the current system is designed to accumulate most of this energy in the hands of the chosen few that run the central banks.
The global monetary system acts as backbone for a parasitic caste of bureaucrats, who can survive drastic changes in national leadership with ease. Bureausites care primarily about the maintenance of their unjustified privileged position and establish therefore a variety of networks.
The next posting will continue to unveil the bad habits of trusting governments and the global monetary system.
Most, if not all people live in the Matrix, their self-constructed version of reality. Everyone choses some of the abundantly available building blocks and uses them to model the physical reality.
According to core-knowledge theories, human brains have the innate capability to learn about physics, numbers and language. Even before children can speak, they display surprise when shown impossible events.
Experiments help children to find out about basic rules of physics, such as gravity and motion. Pushing an object over the edge on a table lets it drop down, and depending on the material of the object it produces specific sounds when it hits the ground.
Just like scientists, children use repetition to validate their ideas about the physical world. When a child has understood a principle, using and applying this principle can become a habit.
The majority of behavioural patterns of adults consists of habits, after a reconditioning in school that transformed the experimental character of spontaneous learning into a monotonous repetition of abstract concepts and factoids.
Most education systems neglect creative and constructive aspects of learning in favour of analytical and logical skills. Social and emotional competence do not belong to the curriculum, the chemical industry fills the void with a variety of drugs to suppress the resulting symptoms.
The indigenous people of Australia provide a good example for a culture without written language. They used stories to perpetuate their culture, and iconic images as densely coded representation of the involved characters.
Stories distinguish human beings from other animals. Stories explained history, skills, social conventions and the metaphysical realm, and helped defining in- and out-groups. Stories provide the glue for any society.
Old people served for a long time as primary story teller. Written language reduced the variation of story elements, bereaving the story teller of the opportunity to adapt the story to his audience while allowing more interpretation.
Media has taken over as primary provider of public myths. Movies, news, documentaries, soaps, talk shows and advertising offer a plethora of stories to weave a common consumer reality.
The immediacy, intimacy and interactivity of storytelling turns into the passive consumption of ideas and concepts. The world seen through the eyes of the media appears inconsistent and contradictory.
The contradictions serve several purposes. They reflect the diversity of opinions and offer easy points of identification. Validation of facts does not belong to the skill set or attitude of average media consumers, who happily trust any presented expert.
The internet increases the number of experts, and the amount of contradictory information. The process of finding a place within society morphs from picking a story line to assembling a range of individually chosen life style options and opinions, depending on the socio economic status.
Constructing and maintaining their life style keeps some but not all people busy, distracted and polarised. This allows myths to enter the public mind, pure repetition does the job. Plausibility checks of presented stories rarely happens, what we hear often enough remains as fact in our minds.
Intellectual laziness leads to a world view that reflects more the virtual world of the media than the physical world surrounding us. Integrating incoherent pieces of knowledge into the mind becomes a habit, repetition wins against reason.
Some but not all people imagine to possess factual knowledge about the world while they have just acquired a random collection of story elements derived from not necessarily trustworthy sources.
Meanwhile, experts try to maintain the myth of the trustworthiness of experts.
In 1946, when the memory of the horrors of fascism was still fresh, the British Encyclopedia produced this informative film explain the slippery path from democracy to despotism. To find signs of despotism, one has to go beyond noble words and phrases, ie. propaganda.
The film suggests using specific scales to identify sign of despotism: The respect, power, economic distribution and information scales. The respect scale measures how equally different strata of society are respected, the power scale measures the effective distribution of power within society.
Imbalanced economic distribution (quite typical in western democracies) is a stepping stone towards despotism. The chances for despotism increase as well with a concentration of media and the freedom of speech. Certainly, the concentration of media ownership has increased dramatically since 1946, and parts of anti-terror legislation (eg Australia Sedition laws) directly attack freedom of speech.
The chosen examples seem a bit old-fashioned, the mechanism have adapted over time. The general ideas using this scales seems good, though. See for yourself how you would rate your country.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The simple truth about the totalitarian character of all form of government hides behind the veil of complication. Governments that call themselves democratic have devised simple and efficient methods to preselect potential actors in their arena. Ostensibly, bureaucracy runs the country while politicians decide about the framework for economy and the citizens.
Legislation became so detailed that hardly anyone interested could grasp all of it, no matter how much one has to oblige to these written laws. This allows an easy way to prosecute dissenters or other unwanted persons. More importantly, it limits the public's attention on politics, which happily trusts politicians instead of questioning their legitimacy.
Democracy means for many just the ability for free and independent voting. Citizens don't bring up topics into the public sphere, they merely need to choose sides on the talking points brought up in the media, just like in a game of sport, pick your team.
Sex and violence remain the focus of attention more than politics, and the media supplies the required weapons of mass distraction aplenty. Trivia captures minds, keeps them busy and engaged to prevent explorations of the mind itself.
Music works more efficient in providing tidbits of stories to create individual identity and to understand the rules of the surrounding society. Themes in popular music often focuses on relationships, and perpetuates prevailing gender stereotypes. Meanwhile, music and the related fashion industry cater for the identity shoppers.
Music does not only supplement the consumerist identity, it also provides a group identity. Singing as a choir in a church or sport arena unites people, and the herd instincts get reinforced. The domesticated human sings in tune, walks in line, accepts the majority opinions provided by experts, votes and cares mostly about panem et circenses.
The combination of the suggested easy access to sexuality by consumption of the right kind of products, fashion stressing sexual attributes and a repressive sex moral within the society produce feelings of guilt, confusion and desire. Boobs or a tight bum turn into carrots on a stick that lead susceptible individuals on a windy path of personal dramas.
These personal dramas follow the schemata of song lyrics, soap operas, books and movies. The embedded memes provide a variety of templates, suited for the local or even for the global community.
Of course, this doesn't affect all people, yet I wouldn't give numeric estimates unless I tried to sample this phenomemon scientifically. However, the weapons of mass distraction weave the matrix which in turn molds the reality of malleable masses.
The meme of the happy coexistence of diverging ideas, a prerequisite for any democratic system, needs to knock loudly on the door to our society.
“I think a lot of people would be really disturbed by what’s happening. People have this rose-coloured view of Australia as a democratic country. But we are seeing measures which have more in common with the Stasi or a police state. University is a time when people traditionally question things and open up and learn about the world. That spirit of inquiry is now under threat.”
These are the words of the President of Sydney University's Student Representive Council (SRC), Angus McFarland. His SRC fellow David Jones was approached by the police to spy on his socialist activists comrades.
There's quite some socialism activism in Melbourne as well, and many are annoyed hearing and reading about the socialist world revolution. However, a closer look unveils a very non-threatening crowd. It is hard to imagine that Sydney's socialists pose more of a threat than our own.
This raises some questions. Why does the government want to prevent activism? Who is the spy among the Melbourne socialists, or is there none? Is it illegal in this country to be against consumerism, conformism and neo-liberalism?
Who much freedom is left in a country that puts you in jail for dissent?
Total: 3628 victims of terror, less than 4,000 people were killed by terror in the western world in this century.
According to the Food and Agriculture Administration of the UN, more than 25,000 people starve daily. The daily loss of life due to our economic system is five times higher than the death toll due to terror in the last six years.
About 2,000 to 2,500 people annually committed suicide in Australia in this millenium.
According to the Lancet study, 655,000 people were killed in Iraq from March 2003 to June 2006. Assuming a similar rate of killing for the period from July 2006 until now brings the number up to 850,000 (conservatively). The estimate of about 150,000 to 250,000 during six years of war in a country with more than 30 million population seems very conservative, however, as both areas are still war zones just estimates are possible.
The use of Depleted Uranium and daisy cutters bombs increases civilian casualties even without actual fights, intoxicates former arable land and turns farming into a deadly adventure. The website Afghanistan after Democracy gives you an idea of the mutations caused by DU (warning: very graphic images).
Although the US rulez "war on terror" killing game is far from over, it is virtually impossible to catch up for the terrorists.
Terrorists: 4,000 Governments: 1,100,000 Corporatism (death by starvation): 60,000,000 (all estimates for 21st century)
I consider myself in first place as an Earthian. The winner in this cruel game are corporative interests fostered by governments, the loser is humanity.
And all of that because of the myth of scarcity. In the height of the cold war, 1983, Richard Buckminster Fuller, the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century stated:
In 1970 it could, for the first time, be engineeringly demonstrated that, applying the most advanced know-how to the conservation and use of the world's resources, we can, within ten years of from-killigry-to-livingry reoriented world production, have all humanity enjoying a sustainably higher standard of living than any humans have ever heretofore experienced. It could be further demonstrated that we can do this while simultaneously phasing out all further Earthians' use of fossil fuels and atomic energy.
Bucky Fuller, Grunch of Giants (emphasis not in the original)
Sunday, August 26, 2007
A decent tyranny needs an evil family, willing keep the power in their hands, no matter what happens. Fidel gave his power to his brother Raoul Castro, Saddam Husseyn would have made one of his sons the next leader, and feudalism used inherited leadership systematically.
It comes as a bit of a surprise that in the US a single family got hold of the presidency twice. Yet, this will for power stems from the grandfather of the current US president, Prescott Bush.
Prescott Bush married into a wealthy family, which provided him with the job to organise financial support for Nazi Germany. At the end of the second world war he was found guilty of supporting the enemy, but was not penalised. The money earned in this nefarious activities built the basis for the wealth of the Bush family.
Prescott Bush's support for the Nazis was just consequential. A BBC documentary followed the traces of an attempt to assassinate Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. There are very familiar names among the conspirators that planned to turn the US into a fascist country like Germany.
GWB has created enough Presidential Orders and Directives to declare himself as a dictator (in case of a national emergency, which is anything the president defines as such). He cannot be reelected, but he might simply cancel the elections.
The reason could be a terror attack, this time certainly done by terrorists from Iran, maybe even nuclear or chemical, in a place like LA or San Francisco. While the inevitable nuclear retaliation annihilates Iran, going to vote is uncertainly impossible. I hope I'm wrong.
I just wonder whether you still think democracy is healthy in the US when the next elections get cancelled, or another country gets attacked.
Feds Train Clergy To "Quell Dissent" During Martial Law
Saturday, August 25, 2007
I realised that quite a lot of the Australian people are caught in a kind of hypnosis - with the keyword "terror" used to sell the abolition of civil rights. Yet, once you forget your fear for a short while and dare dealing with the topic "terror" in depth, with analysis instead of the fear-mongering offered by main stream media, you might be able change your attitude, and your habitual reaction the next time somebody tries to sell you fear.
The video is a snippet of the (imho) excellent BBC documentary The power of nightmares, which was shown earlier this year on SBS. With a broadband connection you might watch this on Google video, if you missed it on SBS, and not scared about the brainwashing a BBC documentary might give you.
Nobody told the Germans that they were living in a fascist state while it happened. I encountered while travelling the globe that this 12 dark years of German history still dominate the opinion about Germany and Germans. Hitler is better known than Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Heine. I met more admirers of the Gröfaz (Grösster Führer aller Zeiten / Greatest leader of all times) outside Germany than inside. (That doesn't mean that there's no Nazis in Germany, just that people don't share there racist opinion as easily as elsewhere.)
Nobody told the Germans in East Germany that they were living in a totalitarian state (which was called "German Democratic Republic" (GDR) and had compulsory voting). However, in Nazi Germany there were people like Schindler, who didn't need historians to tell them that something is utterly wrong with the proceedings of their government, but hadn't lost their empathy for other human beings and endangered their life by acting against the "law", and weren't brainwashed by governmental propaganda.
No government ever spread the word that they wanted to screw their population as good as they could, though historians have no problem digging up examples when this happened. Nowadays, we are conditioned to believe in "experts", and unless experts have more airtime to state that something is wrong in the state of Denmark, we dare not to compare the current situation with what we could have learned in history.
Nazi Germany and the GDR used their secret services to suppress democracy, dissent and governmental criticism. Secrecy due to "national security" was the cornerstone of their tyranny, and empowered the Gestapo and Stasi to arbitrarily detain people. Probably that causes me to get suspicious when I hear Philip Ruddock talking, who thinks it's okay that people don't get presented any evidence when they are charged for major offenses. Or to keep them in prison without charges. Or to accept the jurisdiction of fascist courts under the Military Commissions Act.
Another cornerstone was surveillance. Without the support of IBM, the census required to determine the arian or jewish origin, would have been hardly sufficient to kill millions of innocent people. Providing unique identification, which is nowadays done by fingerprinting, DNA sampling or similar biometric means, helped the Nazis to identify their targets.
East Germany, however, wasn't as rampant as Nazi Germany to kill opposition. "Just" those who wanted to leave the country were killed by automatic killing machines or vigilant guards. East Germany didn't have the technology to trace anyone by their DNA, that's why their secret service collected sweat samples of each and every citizen to chase dogs on them when necessary.
My parents fled East Germany, when my dad rejected to pay the union fees. Flyers were distributed in the area they were living, claiming my dad was a traitor to the working class for asking what the unions did for him.
I'm happy that my parents didn't wait 30 years for the Berlin Wall to come down, but fled before this dreadful thing was build. Fighting the system in East Germany was virtually impossible. It didn't kill you (unless you encountered vigilant border patrols or killing machines), but it thoroughly destroyed your chances to participate in society.
My dad (may his soul have a pleasant life after death) didn't wait until historians analysed the mechanisms that created the unjust society that emerged in East Germany after the war, but interpreted the disparity between government propaganda and everyday experience in a rational way.
However, fleeing your home country is no longer an option. Even people from Iraq and Afghanistan are send home, no matter what dreadful fate is waiting for them. What has changed is the opportunity to access information and to organise resistance against ostensibly "democratic" governments.
I think that democracy is something worth trying. I might know what makes me happy, but I'm simply not sufficiently arrogant to state I would know what makes "everyone" happy. Unfortunately, I haven't encountered too many politicians in socalled "democratic" societies that share this point of view. In Australia the politician know exactly what makes indigenous people happy, they just couldn't get their message through sufficiently.
Democracy needs participation, and most advances for the life of "common people", like universal suffrage (for non-property owners, women, native people) has been achieved by direct action. The greek model of democracy just allowed property owning males to vote, females are just allowed to vote since New Zealand introduced it about 120 years ago, less than half a century ago Aborigines were allowed to vote in Australia.
(West) Germany has a longer history of universal suffrage than the US or Australia, yet the legalized feudalism in the US is used as an impeccable example for "democracy". (Does anyone remember Rosa Parks?)
We, the people, have been withdrawn from power or influence for most of the time in history. Germany was happy to have exchanged monarchy for democracy after WW I, yet it just took 15 years, less than a generation, to convert democracy into fascism.
We, the people, have been subdued to unjust governments for most of history, yet my fellow students take democracy for granted, and ridicule those who engage in activism.
We, the people, are now asked to give away the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, the rule of law and the right to strike. All of this for the phony "war on terror", which poses a lesser threat than to be killed by lightning.
Enjoy your unsubstantiated fear, or choose to think for yourself.
I took my pick. And I don't mind if you shout out loud: "Godwin's law!". History has repeated itself over and over again, and if you think "political correctness" prevents this, dream on. It is so comforting to forget that a nominal democracy (like in Germany after WW I) smoothly slid into fascism, and to assume that a nominal democracy is inherently safe from fascism.
(In Australia, Faheem Lodhi is imprisoned for a "thought crime" for 20 years. Lodhi was convicted on the basis of alleged future intentions. No actual plans for a terrorist act were uncovered.)
I don't want to convert you into any political camp, as I'm not adhering to anything that deserves this name. I'm more than happy to meet anyone who dares to think for themselves. Dissent is the essence of democracy, which prevents proselytizing. I'd just like to encourage you, if you have more than two brain cells, to assess for yourself whether "terrorism" is a big enough problem to give away the basis for any democratic system.
