Asking the experts of today to
solve the world’s problems is like asking the priests of the volcano god how to
end the drought. All they will tell you to do is sacrifice a virgin, it’s all
they know. Today’s experts are little different, there are just more of them.
Ask them what their solutions are, and they will tell you to bomb it, privatize
it or medicate it.
Everyone in a position of power in
a corrupt system is de facto corrupt himself. In bowing to a corrupt authority,
they have surrendered their conscience, have proven themselves unable to choose
between right and wrong. They cannot save us, they can only hurt us. We must
help ourselves, there is no other power we can turn to.
Those in power, those whose job it is to inform the public,
are more herders of opinion than people interested in expanding our understanding
of the circumstances we now face. Their job is to limit the view of those who
must toil for the present system in the same way horses are blinkered to
prevent them being distracted from the task demanded of them.
And in blinkering others, they blinker themselves. Intent on
their task, they are so focused on it that they lose sight of their larger
obligation to humanity. Not constricted themselves, they yet become even more
myopic than those they blinker because, as it is said, none are so blind as
those who refuse to see.
An object in motion tends to stay in motion. A rock rolling
downhill not only continues to roll downhill, it picks up speed as it does. Media
that is more concerned with directing thought than it is opening new paradigms and
providing greater context for its viewers will not merely maintain the status
quo but will continue to narrow the window through which the world is shown.
This has been occurring for decades now, though it has happened just slowly
enough that we somehow have not become aware of it. The imperfections of the
human mind are many, and the study of how those imperfections can be exploited
has been well funded. Kind and decent human beings can be manipulated into
supporting the most inhuman of systems if they are led to believe that the “experts”
know more than they. Research the Milgram
experiments if you have any doubt.
There are two ways thought can travel: outward and inward.
We can expand our understanding of the world we live in by permitting ourselves
to hold more than one possibility, one paradigm at a time. By not demanding
hard and simplistic answers we can drift off into seeing facts and events from
multiple perspectives. This requires a degree of faith, a relative absence of
fear. In this way we can acquire a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding
of the world and our place in it.
But fear is a barrier that bounces such understanding back
upon ourselves. The media has erected a curtain of fear that causes us to seek
simple answers in order to deal with immediate threats that may or not be real.
The media would have you believe that ISIS, fascists, Russia, Iran, North
Korea, and people of the party opposite yours are right outside the door. The
crisis is perpetual, though ever-shifting, and in such a situation, you have
little recourse but to trust those who have been kind enough to alert you to
the threat. They have to run the media this way, it’s good for business.
Once your thoughts and perceptions begin to peer inward,
once you begin to discard possibilities and embrace simplistic solutions, the
lens through which you see the world continues to shrink. And like the teeth of
a predator, the tools of the media are designed to grab hold of you and
constantly direct you towards its awaiting maw. You sit transfixed, staring
with fear and incomprehension at the world outside which is actually the world
inside the media’s constricted narrative.
It is worth reminding yourself that the media is not your
friend. What they do they do for money. There are ample examples easily found
on the internet where those who are in the know admit as much. The CEO of CBS
himself said of Donald Trump’s presidential run, “It might not be good for
America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Are these the sort of people you want
guiding you, guiding your nation? Are these the sort of people in whose hands
you want to place your emotional and spiritual well-being? The future of the
planet?
They do what they do for money. They do what they do for
self-enrichment. Oh, I know, the mantra of the day is that the free enterprise
system that rewards individual greed ends up being the ultimate delivery system
for all that is good for us. It is repeated to us constantly until we accept it
uncritically, indeed unthinkingly. And who is it delivering that message to us
night and day? The media, a conglomeration of corporations that not only seek
profit for themselves but seek a cultural milieu that justifies such
profiteering for themselves and their sponsors.
The result is ultra hi-def television that nonetheless
offers us only black and white broadcasting, the contrast level turned so high
that there is little to no gray area. The definition our televisions are
capable of is nothing short of miraculous, and yet so little detail is ever provided.
Instead, instances of violence are looped continuously and the narrative that
accompanies the video must play to the beat.
In short, the media is a Frankenstein monster created by
powerful corporate interests and faithfully obedient to the Military Industrial
Complex, the more direct weapon of those same corporate interests. It has a
job, and it is not to inform you. It has a mission statement, and it is not the
search for truth. It has an obligation to someone, and it is not the viewer. Unless
you truly believe you live in a free society, you must know this is true.
You do know it is true. On some level you are unable to
accept the lie. In your calmer moments, those moments where the media is not
busily herding ideas that have strayed too far from the official narrative the
way a sheepdog herds the flock, you have admitted as much. But then the powers
that be find some new unsavory business to attend to and the media is put into
motion once again in order to justify some great evil, such as destroying the
environment or bombing nations that have done nothing to us. Then the fear sets
in and you cling to the narrative the media spins the way Harlow’s lab monkeys clung
to their cloth mothers.
It's time to step away from the artificial zone of comfort
the media has constructed for us. Not only is it a trap but it is one that
crushes us once we are inside it.
It will seem like madness at first, because you have been
conditioned your whole life to think within the box. Those paths to death and
destruction are the only ones we’ve been shown, and you’ve been corrected every
time you’ve strayed too far from them. But one only has to look honestly at the
ever-shrinking mindset that the authorities present to realize they offer no
hope to humanity. They offer death, fear, environmental destruction. Their hope
for the future is a technology bereft of all morality or humanity, Their hope
is that perhaps we can export a few fortunate ones to some new planet to begin again
this dysfunctional system. Hope for tomorrow is just another product or
viewpoint they’re trying to sell, not a guiding principle.
We’re on our own. Humanity must evolve or perish. The system
that exists today, the one all the authorities and institutions promote in
order to advance themselves, is a death cult hell-bent on wasting Earth’s
precious resources to make weapons in order to blow up more of Earth’s precious
resources. Where are the voices in government, in business, or the media that
decry the insanity? They are not merely silent, they are loudly crying for
more.
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