13/08/2024
The Illusion of Choice
Mark Twain once said "If voting made any difference they would not let us do it." While funny, I think it contains a great truth. I think so because of the formidable concentration of power, whether in each country/state or globally, and now we largely function in corporatocracies. These are steep power hierarchies where the local citizen has very little choice and only the illusion of it through voting.
The oldest trick for limiting the power of the masses or the voter is divide and rule, which creates the illusion of choice. Divide and rule is so tricky and is so deeply rooted, after many centuries, that it is still very effective. We also have propaganda that is first rate and uses schooling and media. The hive mind is on its way, too, through brain implants, which might show you where all this is leading: absolute control over the masses. You can see the interest is there and the curtain has been pulled back to expose it.
I think we are on the precipice of the hive mind, fully prepped through mass media such that firmer control rather than liberation is on its way. You can see it clearly in binary and categorical thinking amongst the masses (everything is left or right, good or bad, communist or capitalist, true or false, Republican or Democrat), which is the surest sign of the success of propaganda, which seems so deep that the masses can be led by the nose with the illusion of choice for centuries. For example, hardly anyone steps out of the Democrat/Republican trap in the US. Issues and candidates are always presented from a stark right wing/left wing divide, by a media divided right or left, to reinforce the programmed thinking. It is a good guy/bad guy presentation through the media just as taught by the good guy/bad guy movie industry.
One can see in the US presidential elections the absolute success of the brainwashing into complete binary mode, which is not naturally human. The candidates are two wings on the same bird, I believe, and have long been, but people, even with a radical, ridiculous choice of candidates, cannot step outside the box and find an alternative. They are mentally blocked from doing that owing to programming, and seem not to know it when the real choice is singular: military-corporate-bureaucratic complex or military-corporate-bureaucratic complex.
To beat that deeply rooted brainwashing you would have to deprogram people in a major way. How? A meme will not do it. One would also have to decentralise power by bringing communities of a human scale (neighborhoods in cities) to work together at a community/local level. The corporatocracy knows that and appears to lock out any discussion of it. The only escape route I can see, is to build strong local cultures befitting ecosystems, but that is only happening to a very modest level, while land and resources are very much under corporate control, which is expanding rapidly. 'You will ultimately own nothing (and be happy?)'. Collapse is a possible outcome too (which leads us back to the local by catastrophe) because the corporatocracy is not ecological, even as it tries to be. The extreme concentration of power does not allow us to attend to thousands of habitats, leaving us more likely to exploit them and that ends, organically, in depopulation and collapse, and it even seems that some want to speed that up.
