By Caitlin Johnstone
September 13, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- You’re not jaded;
everything really is just as phony and vapid as
it looks.
I say this because if you are reading this
it’s likely the result of a personal quest for
truth which has led to a gradual peeling away of
the lies our society is made of. Your eyes
probably found this text because you’re the sort
of person who’s been trying to make sense of the
world in a sea of propaganda and deception,
which often results in a growing disgust not
just with the power structures which oppress and
tyrannize humanity, but with our entire
civilization.
This experience is very common for people
like yourself, and it’s very common because it
arises from a clear perception of reality. From
the very beginning human civilization has been
built around serving the interests of the
powerful, from religion to philosophy to the
arts to law. As the world has gotten smaller and
it’s become possible to artificially manufacture
culture with mass-distributed media, this has
only become more the case.
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That’s why the more you learn about the
world, the more fake and stupid our civilization
looks. It’s because it is fake and
stupid. Our news, our entertainment, our jobs,
our legal systems, our political systems, our
education systems, our financial, monetary,
economic and commercial systems; the way our
entire civilization is structured and organized
has nothing to do with what’s true and good and
everything to do with keeping human organisms
compliantly turning the gears of capitalism and
empire.
Mainstream culture is one giant psyop geared
toward keeping people fueling the oppression
machine. Not because of some grand conspiracy
(though
there’s plenty of that too), but because the
manufacturers of culture have a vested interest
in preserving our unwholesome status quo. The
media are owned by plutocrats who
have an interest in making sure everything
they’re putting out sustains the imperial status
quo upon which their kingdoms are built. The
Pentagon has more
influence over Hollywood than people like
you or I ever will.
Things get elevated to mainstream levels of
attention and influence by the people with the
wealth and power to elevate them, and they’re
always going to elevate things which serve their
interests by manufacturing consent for the
status quo their wealth and power are premised
upon, not things which harm their interests like
material that expands class consciousness or
highlights the depravity of the US-centralized
empire.
So mainstream culture presents a fraudulent
image of reality. It’s written into the code of
everything that’s mass produced — not just in
Prager University lectures on the evils of
socialism or propagandistic news stories about
weapons of mass destruction, but in sitcoms, in
advertisements, in clothing brands, in pop
music, in textbooks, in trends. When it’s not
constant messaging that capitalism is totally
working and the world is ordered in a more or
less sane and truth-based way, it’s
manipulations designed to
shape our values and measures of self-worth
to make us into better gear-turners.
If you’re noticing this ubiquitous
fraudulence, it’s not because you’re becoming
distant from the rest of society, it’s because
you’re becoming more intimate with it. You’re
getting in real close, so close you can see the
nuts and bolts of it, see how the sausage is
made.
So if this is happening to you, don’t worry.
You’re not turning into some kind of jaded
hipster who’s too cool for what everyone else is
into, you’re just seeing the bullshit for what
it is. Sure a rejection of mainstream culture
can just be pure ego-driven “look at me I’m so
special” crap, but it’s also what happens when
you sincerely move in for a closer look at the
mass-scale psychological fabric of human
civilization.
This is what Terence McKenna was talking
about when he said “The cost of sanity in this
society is a certain level of alienation.” And
it’s what Jiddu Krishnamurti was pointing at
when he said “It is no measure of health to be
well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” A
lucid perception of reality today will
necessarily be accompanied by the ever-present
smell of bullshit.
And that’s not your fault. It’s not your
fault that you were born into this world where
so much of everything is fake and stupid. So be
gentle with yourself in your sense of
alienation. And take comfort in knowing that
others see what you’re seeing too.
But mainly learn to take comfort in the fact
that, just underneath the logos and screens and
suburbs and Hollywood actors pretending to be
people, reality is roaring. There’s a whole
world of wonder and authenticity shining
ferociously from just beneath the surface. It’s
just got nothing to do with the artificial
culture that’s been mass-produced by the
powerful and funneled into our minds.
Underneath all the social engineering and
power-serving control mechanisms, there’s a
whole life of raw terrestriality that is much,
much older and much, much stronger than the lies
of the machine. You can see it crackling
everywhere, even in the densest parts of the
matrix.
You can see it in the sky. You can see it in
the bushes and the pigeons. But you can also see
it in the bus billboards and skyscrapers, in the
flashing signs and blaring screens. And you can
see it in the giant-brained bipedal primates
you’re surrounded by each day, hiding just
behind the dance of imperial fraudulence in
their heads. You can see it even in those who
are most asleep at the wheel, the most enslaved
to the mind viruses of the machine, if you look.
Once you learn to see it, you can observe nature
winking at you even from inside the most
rage-faced pundits and most self-absorbed social
natterers. It’s there.
In reality this sense of alienation is just
an awkward transition phase between buying into
the imperial dreamworld and a deep, deep
intimacy with humanity as it really is beneath
all the obnoxious programming. Beyond the
revulsion at the phony facepuppets, something
ancient, authentic, and exuberant is dancing.
And it is more real and more true than our
disgust with this civilization.
Look closer and you see the fraudulence. Look
even closer and you see what’s real. Your sense
of alienation is entirely valid and based in
truth, but we’re not meant to stay there. Truth
beckons us forward. Truth is beckoning us all
forward. And these mind cages they have built
for us aren’t real enough to hold us in for much
longer.
Caitlin's articles are entirely
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Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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