None But Ourselves Can Free Our MindsDavid DeGraw Since reading that, I have dedicated my life to coming ever closer to getting a glimpse of the universal order, and of our part in it. After years of research and analysis, Ive come to hard-fought, battle-tested conclusions that Ive been sharing with people to great effect, and will share with you now. This will not be for the faint of heart. It will hit hard and we dont have much time, so lets get right down to it. At this point, if you spend much time researching power politics or the distribution of wealth, resources and basic necessities, it seems evident and undeniable, dare I say, common sense, that we, in fact, live in a neo-feudal society built on debt and mental slavery. That may sound like over-the-top rhetoric, and it obviously sounds extreme to propagandized and conditioned minds, and yes, it is extreme. However, it is the unfortunate reality of the present situation. The facts are there for the rational and unbiased mind to absorb and comprehend. If you take a few minutes of your time and read this through, it will easily be proven. We will look at how the system works, and then, hopefully, we will begin the process of evolving society together, as grandiose as that may sound. I: Unprecedented Wealth For the past 35 years, with technological advancements, there has been an explosion in production and profits, in wealth creation. That unprecedented increase in wealth, as many of you know, has gone to the top economic 1%. Most of it, the lions share of it, went to not even the top economic 1%, but to the top one-hundredth of one percent, to the modern day aristocracy. Let that sink in for a moment 50 TRILLION DOLLAR$. Most people cannot even comprehend how much $1 trillion is, let alone $50 trillion. One trillion is equal to 1000 billion, or $1,000,000,000,000.00. Only one-tenth of one percent of the population makes one million dollars a year, and, again, most of that wealth is in the top one-hundredth of one percent. To show how consolidated the wealth is, even in the upper most portion of the top one percentile, the richest 400 people have as much wealth as 185 million Americans combined; thats only 400 people with as much wealth as 60% of the entire US population. Before continuing, let me defuse the reactionary propagandized minds instinctive response. This is not about demonizing people just because they have money. There are many people who are using their wealth and resources to improve the human condition. Its important to understand that the focus here is not on the people who have a mere $10 million or so in wealth. When discussing the modern day aristocracy, the main focus is on the pathological, shortsighted and greed-addicted forces that are doing much more to limit human potential than enhance it. Broadly speaking, the aristocracy is composed of governments, political parties, policy groups, think tanks, intel factions, private military companies, large global corporations, banks and media empires. Included in that are mega-wealthy billionaires and CEOs who have unprecedented control of wealth and resources. For example, the Business Roundtable, the people who run the 147 inter-connected corporations who control half of the world economy. However, the ultimate point here is to show people that there is presently more than enough wealth and capabilities to solve societal problems. We can truly evolve society in unprecedented fashion. At this point, there is an overwhelming majority of the population, even a majority of the mega-wealthy, who realize that our present systems are obsolete, unsustainable and unstable. We dont need to spend our finite time and energy fighting with each other. We already have a critical mass of aware citizens, we just need to inspire and organize them to build the cultural and political will. Once we do that, we will be an unstoppable force. Lets get back to that 50 trillion number, because we have had an entire generation of mind-blowing wealth creation that has been systematically withheld from the population. $50,000,000,000,000.00 Can you comprehend how much money $50 trillion is? Just to give a little context, we can end world hunger and provide clean drinking water to everyone on the planet for an estimated $40 billion. Again, one trillion is one thousand billion, and we are talking about $50 trillion. Imagine what could be done with that amount of wealth. Imagine the implications, the possibilities. Imagine how we could evolve society, to the benefit of everyone, with modern technology and just a fraction of that staggering amount of wealth. The average American cannot comprehend how much wealth there is because there is no frame of reference, no comparison of scale or historical precedent. If Americans had an understanding of how much wealth is being kept from them and the possibilities of what we could do with that wealth, we would have a full-blown societal evolution right now. The cost of production dropped dramatically and efficiency of distribution skyrocketed. Housing, food, health and education costs should have plummeted dramatically. However, most basic necessities now come at a much higher price, and people are forced to take on increasing levels of debt to keep up. As most people are aware, student debt, consumer debt, medical debt and household debt have reached all-time record highs. As an old wise person once said, There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt. We live in a neo-feudal system of debt slavery. The indentured servant is now the indebted consumer. When you understand the wealth at hand, you begin to grasp the crime against humanity that is afoot. We live in the richest, most technologically advanced society humanity has ever known. Yet, here we are, in the 21st century, with an all-time record number of Americans living in poverty. Crime Against Humanity How healthy is a society when 400 people have as much wealth as 185 million of their neighbors combined? What kind of a system produces a result like that? As famed social psychologist John Dewey said, There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes. Now that you are beginning to grasp the wealth at hand, and the possibilities of how that wealth can be used to evolve society, lets take a look at how we got into this situation and how exactly it is that they got away with hoarding so much wealth. To paraphrase a man who fought against the aristocracy, The depravity and amount of suffering required for the accumulation of such a staggering magnitude of wealth, in the hands of a few, is kept out of the picture, out of the mass media, and it is not easy to make people see or understand this. Especially when you have an all-encompassing mainstream media propaganda system. III: Mental Slavery Conditioned Consciousness To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 246 BC The mainstream media is the most effective weapon of mass oppression humanity has ever known. Since the early 1900s and World War I, a massive propaganda system has been in place. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is all well documented. Research Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, Ivy Lee, George Creel and the Committee on Public Information for starters. In fact, you dont even need a conspiracy theory; you just need a basic understanding of propaganda, social psychology and behaviorism more on that later. The bottom line, as Dewey once said, We live exposed to the greatest flood of mass suggestion humanity has ever experienced. Speaking from personal experience, having been born and raised inside this propaganda system, and still obviously living inside it, I have come to realize that even the most independent minded among us vastly underestimates how mentally conditioned we all are. Most people are no more consciously aware of this mental domination then they are aware of gravity. Its like the air we breathe. For two obvious examples, lets start with television consumption and advertising. The average American watches more than five hours of TV a day, every single day of their life. American children view more than 40,000 ads per year, every single year of their life. Think about that. Thats intensive mental domination administered on a daily basis, from the cradle to the grave. Ultimately, as Phil Merikle summed it up, Its what advertisers have known all along: if we just keep the exposure rate up, people will be influenced. Repetition, its all about repetition. Repetitive messages fill our mental atmosphere. To paraphrase Philip Lesley in Managing the Human Climate, When a message appears all around you, you tend to accept it and take it for granted. You find yourself surrounded by it and your subconscious mind absorbs and becomes immersed in the climate of repetitive ideas. They form the origins of your thoughts. Its where your desires, opinions and perspectives are born. To spin a McLuhan riff, the mainstream mass media is the software on which our minds run; its our operating system. Its an extension of our nervous system. Repetitive mainstream propaganda creates a belief system, popular reference points, symbols, archetypes, mental patterns, a mindset and groupthink, all based on repetition and groupthink is a highly contagious infectious disease. Its hard to escape groupthink. As with freedom and democracy, you must be ever vigilant to avoid the tyranny of groupthink and cultural conditioning. As Walter Lippmann said, In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world, we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture. To remix a quote from Dostoevsky, Leave people alone without mass media and they will be lost and confused. They will not know what to support, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. Malcolm X said it best, The medias the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and thats power. Because they control the minds of the masses. The mainstream media keeps everyone isolated inside a false reality, a pseudo mental environment. People are trapped in a bubble of status quo supporting reality, in a bubble of whats good for shortsighted, short-term corporate interests. Peoples consciousness and awareness gets conditioned and contracted, they become isolated and detached from wider reality. People are born and raised inside mass media created illusions. As Eduardo Galeano put it, The majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated and of power to the weak. As Harold Lasswell said in 1927, The new antidote to willfulness is propaganda. If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver. If it will not love, honor, and obey, it must not expect to escape seduction. Now, lets sharpen our focus a bit and look from a more practical perspective. IV: The Spectrum of Thinkable Thought The mainstream press does not cover the most vital social, economic and political issues. The more important something is, the less they report on it. If mentioned at all, its mentioned in passing, with little, if any, in-depth reporting, discussion and debate on it. Its censorship by omission and bullshit on repetition. As Noam Chomsky observed, this is how propaganda and social control posing as freedom and democracy works: The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that theres freethinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. To paraphrase Alex Carey, they create the spectrum of thinkable thought. They set the terms of debate, to determine the kinds of questions that will dominate public consciousness, peoples thoughts. They set the political agenda in ways that are favorable to shortsighted corporate interests. The debate is never about the curtailment of the manipulative power of entrenched global corporations. Imagine wall-to-wall 24/7 news coverage of the trillions of dollars in fraudulent activity that got us into this mess. Imagine in-depth coverage of the corruption of our political process through a system of bribery that makes the mafia look like amateurs. What about the staggering consolidation of wealth? Imagine if the media kept discussing how a small percentage of the population has 50 trillion dollars, then they started debating how we could use just a fraction of that money to solve problems, create solutions and evolve society. What if they reported on all the wealth and resources that a small number of corporations control, then debated how that wealth and those resources could be redeployed to get us onto a sustainable and thriving path? When you understand what is possible, you see how truly corrupt, shortsighted, ignorant and obsolete our system of rule is. You then realize that our mainstream media system is pure propaganda. When you see the reality that they dont tell you about, it becomes all too clear. If you were to just look at what they dont tell you, you would see. Mainstream media is the most effective weapon of mass oppression humanity has ever known. Its hard to break free, when you are always told you are free. As Huxley put it in Brave New World Revisited, The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that they are a victim. To them, the walls of their prison are invisible, and they believe they are free. You cant break free until you see the walls. The whips and chains have evolved into TVs and radios. As William Blum said, Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to dictatorships. If television was around in the 1770s, we would still be living under British rule. In the land of propaganda, tyranny is democracy. Its enlightened despotism. When it comes to oppression, its all cyclical yet evolutionary. Most people live in a mental cage now, they toil on mentally conditioned plantations. People reading this may try to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. We must always be conscious of the reactionary propagandized mind and the army of paid off propagandists who uphold this system of mental domination. Conspiracy theory is the ultimate label to trigger dismissal without causing people to think about the content and substance of the message. When it comes to the reactionary propagandized mind, their impulsive, instinctive dismissal further demonstrates how well they have been indoctrinated and conditioned. Once again, you dont need a conspiracy theory to understand the system of mental conditioning; you just need to have a basic understanding of propaganda, social psychology and behaviorism. Modern indoctrinated intelligentsia have been produced like products off an assembly line. In The Genesis of the Technocratic Elite, Zoran Vidakovic breaks down how the assembly line of indoctrination works: Selection, education, and specific indoctrination of technical and administrative cadres are carried out first in metropolitan educational and research factories and their branches in dependent societies, under the wing of the superficially independent foundations which sustain the international projects of technical aid, and then within the personnel policy of the transnational corporations that raise people from the local environments to responsible managerial and technical functions in their internationally located branches, or that in other ways subordinate and direct the modernized industrial entrepreneurs, agrarian reformers, functionaries, and leading intellectuals from the ministries and banks, universities, and public information, cultural, and scientific institutions. The essential effect of this great factory for the almost assembly line production of dependent and emasculated technocratic elites is that the material position, status, and professional success of the members of these groups imperatively depends on their conformity to the ideology of dependence and the interiorization of the intellectual, political, and ideological characteristics of this social type programmed in metropolitan laboratories for the technological, social, and cultural transformation of developing countries. The ideology of total repression unites with the ideology of technological and cultural dependency and assimilation; in this union repression gains strength as the condition of the entire dependent economic growth, technological progress, and modernization of society, as a circle of insurmountable dependency on the import of prefabricated knowledge and technical and consumerist models is closed up by the ambitions of the protagonists of authoritarian rule. We live in a Skinner box. Its classic behavioral modification (b-mod) within a token economy. We have an outdated system of incentives; you incentivize and reward certain behavior, and you punish or withdraw basic necessities for other behavior. Its behaviorism 101. Give people a paycheck to have certain opinions, to do certain things. You can see it everywhere, in almost all professions, not just the media. If you think a certain way, if you do certain things, you will be awarded with a paycheck. If you dont, you lose your paycheck. Or, as Thomas Paine said in Rights of Man, Those who do not participate in this enacting do not get fed. People get paid a lot of money to spew bullshit talking point propaganda on a daily basis. The truth of the matter: if you propagate the message of tyrants, and if you are good at it, you can become rich and famous. Thats what primitive self-obsessed ego-driven careerists do. They are the ultimate pawns of empire. They enrich themselves by riding the coattails of conquerors. As W.E.H. Lecky once said, The simple fact of applying certain penalties to the profession of particular opinions, and rewards to the profession of opposite opinions, while it will make many hypocrites, it will also make many converts. Our Skinner box society, our token economy is run by the modern day aristocracy through a system of enlightened despotism. You either bow down and play by their rules or you lose access to basic necessities. Its the root of modern monetary enslavement debt and wage slavery. The fact of the matter, the truth of the matter: we are not supposed to be freethinking participatory citizens involved in the decision-making processes that guide our lives and determine our fate. We are mentally conditioned to be spectators, mindless reactionary consumers and wage slaves. Propaganda is today a greater danger to mankind than any of the other more grandly advertised threats hanging over the human race. Propaganda ruins not only democratic ideas but also democratic behavior the foundation of democracy, the very quality without which it cannot exist. Propaganda destroys its very foundations. It creates a man who is suited to a totalitarian society. A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself of the style of democratic life, understanding of others he is a totalitarian man with democratic convictions, but those convictions do not change his behavior in the least. Such contradiction is in no way felt by the individual for whom democracy has become a myth and a set of democratic imperatives, merely stimuli that activate conditioned reflexives. The word democracy, having become a simple incitation, no longer has anything to do with democratic behavior. And the citizen can repeat indefinitely the sacred formulas of democracy while acting like a storm trooper. That is as accurate a depiction of the average modern American as I have ever come across. In the same book, Ellul went on to explain the inherent danger of our two-party system and the general apathy Americans have toward politics: The conflicting propaganda of opposing parties is essentially what leads to political abstention. But this is not the abstention of the free spirit which asserts itself; it is the result of resignation, the external symptom of a series of inhibitions. Such a man has not decided to abstain; under diverse pressures, subjected to shocks and distortions, he can no longer (even if he wanted to) perform a political act. What is even more serious is that this inhibition not only is political, but also progressively takes over the whole of his being and leads to a general attitude of surrender. At the same time, this crystallization closes his mind to all new ideas. The individual now has a set of prejudices and beliefs. His entire personality now revolves around those elements. Every new idea will therefore be troublesome to his entire being. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Guy DeBord summed up the primary function of the mainstream media, For what is communicated are orders; and with perfect harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them. For an even deeper understanding on how propaganda works, lets return to Ellul: Governmental propaganda suggests that public opinion demand this or that decision; it provokes the will of a people, who spontaneously say nothing. But, once evoked, formed, and crystallized on a point, that will becomes the peoples will. The government really acts on its own, it just gives the impression of obeying public opinion, after having first built that public opinion. The point is to make the masses demand of the government what the government has already decided to do. They amputate the argument and replace it with engineered consensus. As Robert Lynd wrote in Democracy In Reverse, They operate actually to confirm the citizens false sense of security in totaling up what the majority think The false sense of the publics being boss that they encourage operates to narcotize public awareness of the seriousness of problems and of the drastic social changes many contemporary situations require. In 1935, Malcolm Willey explained, An individual may be moved to action through repetition, as, for example, in advertising; but his action is made more certain if he is made to realize that thousands, even millions, of others are thinking and feeling as he himself does. Herein lies the importance of the contemporary communication network; it not only carries its symbols to the individual, it also impresses upon him a sense of numbers. James Madison also realized this when he wrote Public Opinion, The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained, and the less difficult to be counterfeited. That was written in 1791, when the US population was only about five million people. In 1901, Gabriel Tarde wrote, Newspapers have transformed unified in space and diversified in time the conversations of individuals, even those who do not read papers but who, talking to those who do, are forced to follow the groove of their borrowed thoughts. One pen suffices to set off a million tongues. Bertrand Russell also hit at the root in Free Thought and Official Propaganda, when he said, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power. In Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, Alex Carey summed it all up in this one sentence: That this simple regime of thought-control should prove to have been so triumphant, with so little public resistance, must be put down to its persistent, repetitive orchestration. For all the discussion and focus on political and economic policy, what we really need to do on the individual level, first and foremost, is transcend conditioned consciousness. Once we do that, positive political and economic policy will be the natural byproduct and inevitable result. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it Sooner or later youre going to realize, just as I did, that theres a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path. Im trying to free your mind But I can only show you the door. Youre the one that has to walk through it. The Matrix In revisiting the reactionary propagandized mind, when you confront a member of the consumer cult and expose their mental conditioning processes, the false reality and illusions that people are trapped in, they will instinctively dismiss or attack you. People will bite your hand when you try to remove the mental leash from their neck. In The Evolving Self, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains further, To prevent its annihilation, the ego forces us to be constantly on the watch for anything that might threaten the symbols on which it relies for identity. Our view of the world becomes polarized into good and bad things that support the image, and those that threaten it. This is also how the third Mayan veil works. In this case, your media created cultural programming; it distorts reality to make it congruent with conditioned views. Anything that deviates from the conditioned norm is ridiculed and instantly, instinctively dismissed before critical thinking skills are activated. The repetitious conditioning process leads to an amputation of critical thinking faculties. That which people are not familiar with becomes odd, evil and damaging to their mental construct, to their thought patterns, to their fabricated self-image. For instance, we tend to look for anything that confirms our pre-existing beliefs while ignoring anything that goes against them. This is how confirmation bias works, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell: If people are offered a fact which goes against their instincts or their cultural programming, they will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, they are offered something which falls in accordance to their cultural programming, in accordance to their conditioning, they will accept it, even on the slightest evidence. Having been bred within this all-pervasive propaganda system, I understand the disbelief people feel. When our conditioned belief system is called into question and comes crashing down, it is a hard pill to swallow. No one wants to believe that they have been manipulated or taken advantage of. This will stir up an instinctive dismissal, a powerful emotional response. We are creatures of habit, and it is much easier, over the short-term, to just stay on a path of denial and ignorance. Hear no evil. See no evil. The task upon us is to consciously counter conditioned consciousness. The most difficult and important prerequisite to freedom is the ability to see past all of your culturally programmed biases. It takes great personal inner-strength and determination to achieve this; you will inevitably have to face many facts that will go against your programmed, conditioned beliefs. If one can endure this, one will eventually come to experience true freedom. However, even if one is strong enough to have an awareness of their conditioning, it is another level to confront and transcend it. As Nietzsche said, Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage for that which they really know. Are you brave enough to see? Do you want to change it? To take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality [is] not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply ones analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise. As long as some specialized class is in position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves, but the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elite should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival. Most Americans are aware of the fact that we are on a disastrous path. However, many of us feel powerless to change things. These feelings are only a result of our conditioning and induced delusion. We have become so propagandized that many of us do not realize the significant position that we are in. We are not poor people trapped in a third world existence. We are a mass of people who have the power to evolve society and change the course of history. It is stunning to hear all these people, so many people saying that they cant do anything about it. Far too many people think that we cant create change; that is why we dont. Why do you think that we cant change the world? How did you come to that conclusion? Who taught you to believe that? The overwhelming majority feels powerless to create political change. If they would just realize that they are the overwhelming majority, they would no longer feel this way. As Ellul said, Only when he realizes his delusion will he experience the beginning of genuine freedom in the act of realization itself be it only from the effort to stand back and look squarely at the phenomenon and reduce it to raw fact. Thanks to the Internet, to the cyberspace underground railroad, people are now freeing their minds from conditioning and entrenched power censors. The Internet is to our generation what pamphlets were to our forefathers generation during the first American Revolution. People are going to the Internet to find out all the information that the corporate mainstream media is not letting people know about. As a result, we now have a critical mass of informed and outraged citizens who are also using the Internet to organize. They are now transcending conditioned consciousness and expanding their awareness on a scale unprecedented in human history. A new empowering collective consciousness, built on self-sufficient and aware individuals, is quickly evolving. As William Adams Brown said, We are developing a social conscience, and situations which would have been accepted a generation ago as a matter of course are felt as an intolerable scandal. John Dewey continues, Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage. Today, it signifies liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are at hand. The inevitable demise of our current neo-feudal system was summed up by George Orwell when he said, For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. If you are still wondering if we can truly create change, consider this simple truth from Strobe Talbott, All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary. Our government was created in the time of the horse and wagon. It took days or weeks to deliver one handwritten message across state lines. Today, we have instantaneous worldwide communication and an unprecedented amount of wealth in the most technologically advanced society. The masses are now connected and aware. Its time to evolve our obsolete system. You know it, and so does everyone else who pays attention. We will soon have new ways of living that will make our modern age like look the Stone Age. People are throwing off their mental shackles and realizing their potential. A new renaissance and age of enlightenment has begun. Another world is happening. Humanity is rising. Enough writing from the Underground. Its time to contrive to be born, to transform our world. We are building a decentralized global network of self-sustaining community incubators designed to maximize the transformative energy around us and facilitate the evolution of society. If you want to join us in this effort, enlist here. linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 