There’s something intrinsically human about denial. We are, after all, probably one of the very few species on Earth conscious of death’s inevitability….and yet we push the reality away (neuroscientists say) 99.7% of the time for most of our lives.
If you can deny your own certain physical destruction, you can deny anything.
The other side of that debased coinage is the flight from reality. Since we came down from the trees, we have been munching, smoking, drinking and injecting stuff with pretty much the sole intention of altering reality. Wine buffs will drivel on about whether a wine is too green or lacks structure, but let’s desist from rationalisation – drink gets you pissed: Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Drink up thy Zider, drink up thy Zider/
For tonight we’ll merry be
Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun. Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine. She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie…..Cocaine. Doors of perception. Move on out to the other side. Tune in, turn on and drop out. Sometimes, we all need to be rendered legless without the pain of double amputation.
There is something in Homo sapiens that has the need to surrender to gullible belief in favour of painfully awkward reality. By far the biggest downside of that factory-fitted wiring is its open invitation to The Persuaders.
Vance Packard’s 1950s classic The Hidden Persuaders had one massive flaw: the book’s title was being applied to the advertising industry. There is nothing “hidden” about advertising: it appears during commercial breaks, in most countries it is heavily truth-regulated, and in consumer research, it regularly emerges as a form of engaging salesmanship.
The real hidden persuaders have been ‘trying it on’ since before the start of the century. Each con in turn has been just a little more outrageous – just a bit bigger – than the one before: you can be a democrat and an ideologue at the same time, you’re safer in the EU, Sadam has WOMD ready to go, save the banks or the sky will fall in, hacking phones was just over-enthusiastic journalism (and Jeremy Hunt did nothing wrong), he’s off message, only bad people voted for Brexit, this deal is true to the Referendum, the clock is ticking, Covid19 is a deadly pandemic, only the vulnerable will be vaccinated, if you’re anti-vax you should be sectioned, the care homes massacre was an innocent mistake, this vaccine doesn’t vaccinate but take it or you’ll kill Granny, experimental things are always safe, writing about side effects is anti-social, everything will be normal after July 19th but we’re going to renew the Law about demos anyway and there’ll be a Fourth Wave in the autumn.
I went into advertising just as it started to embrace the principle of all things psychological. I was lucky enough to be in at the beginning of focus groups – and horrified when I saw how senior bureaucrats and Ministers added their own spin to the results. Giving psy-op principles to the unprincipled…..what on earth could go wrong? It brought fame to Saatchi & Saatchi, and the Mad Handbag to power. And it landed us with Phoney Tony in 1997.
Over the last quarter century, we have seen an explosion in media, and the spectacular growth of the State’s ability to control it. Unscrupulous image benders, direct marketing scriptwriters and pr advisers mated with spin doctors, spooks and Sir Humphreys until they finally perfected the means of abolishing both the real provenance of “news” and common sense based on experience.
What made it a perfect storm of mendacity was the arrival of the Web – and the speed with which it crushed the business model of independent journalism. The age of “sponsored content” had arrived: the “old” media put on their short skirts and fishnet stockings, looking for business.
Everything is now Orwellian propaganda.
Look around you, and you’ll see it everywhere:
These cameras are here solely for your personal protection
It is an offence to give offence
If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear
Get the jab and protect the vulnerable
Stay home, save lives
Free Euros tickets with every jab
The tragedy within contemporary moving media is that their very low-brow content is in turn a distractive drug. On TV, Game Show formats offering the fantasy of being a millionaire so easily turn into cruel ridicule for the contestant who – when asked “Who killed JR in Dallas?” answers “Lee Harvey Oswald”. In the cinema-to-online sector, unreal cartoon violence (usually starring Tom Cruise) tries to tell us that bullets don’t really smash bodies to pieces. And now, of course, faked “news” videos of Chinese citizens lying “dead” in the streets compete with endlessly recycled Islamist set-ups in which Israelis massacre babies…while Mossad is pulling the same stunt on the other side of the tug-of-war.
“Cut – OK, that’s a take, print it”
We have now probably had three human generations of altered media reality. It’s also true to say that nobody alive today in the West can remember a time when there wasn’t growing certainty that, in the end, medicine will cure every disease and – who knows? – extend quality physical life to maybe 200 years or more.
That might seem obscenely ironic in the context of Covid19; but I’m no longer so sure.
The people pulling the strings behind this Great Reset (and even today, can we identify them?) I suspect have thought this through, and reached the following conclusions:
- Mass digital globalised media have removed the average Earthling further and further from the natural realities of 3D physicality
- Humanism and atheism have rejected the idea of non-physical, ethereal intelligence as the real ruler of the Universe
- Increasingly, electorates have to believe that experts are Gods – otherwise, there is no supreme power to protect them
- Medical experts are obviously trustworthy, and invisible virus thingies are out to get us
- Therefore, all anti-vaxxers are mad, and must be silenced…for they are a danger to themselves and others.
Religion, Marx asserted, is the opiate of the People. Organised religion (with its perverse Priesthoods) was indeed exploitative. But scientific spirituality – the acceptance of a higher intelligence – is (for me anyway) far more convincing than the rigid ideology of Richard Dawkins…who persists with the idea that e = MC2 is somehow random.
Ideology – the belief that we are fully in control – remains the most intractable cancer we face
As I wrote earlier, those pushing for the Reset have this thing taped. A Godless society fears death; medicine is a calling dedicated to putting off death; there are political bogeymen out there who want to do us to death; there are planet destroyers who don’t care about the death of our planet; there are white supremacists engaged in “domestic extremism”; there are aliens beyond our solar system who will wipe us out.
The megalomanic fearmongers can keep this witches’ brew boiling from now until Domesday.
They want but one thing: more and more and more power. One could argue that the genetic alterations they crave should instead be aimed at eradicating their psychiatric typology before they do any more harm. But such a goal is equally insouciant on the subject of what the unforeseen consequences might be.
We are not Gods or sorcerers. We’re nothing more than Mickey Mouse apprentices at best.
I’m not arguing for the re-establishment of religion and all its bigoted contradictions. I’m arguing for a different view of the future that opposes the Dystopians: one in which the great leaps forward will be in neuroscience, and metaphysics in both the sub-atomic zone and the greater Cosmos…not twisted Nazi revitalised visions of Transhuman Supermen.
Klaus Schwab and his ilk in both the geopolitical hegemony and surveillance communities may talk a good game as futuroligists, but in fact they are relics. Hitler too was a relic of Mitteleuropa antiSemitism, just as Stalin was a relic of simplistic Marxist dialectics, Blair was an undiscerning fan of Clintonite amoral spin, and Biden is the brain-damaged heir of Obama’s vacuous rhetoric.
All that said, the totalitarian determination of these diabolical forces now has a very real and present iron grip at the national political and multinational levels. The legislators in the US Congress and their equivalents across the Anglosphere are bought – and unwilling to grasp the depth of human crisis we face.
That’s why we’ve started UnderFire….a movement recognising that regional and local community blocking of these inhuman ideas is the only realistic defence we have left. The average citizen identifies more with what’s happening in South Dakota or Bavaria than they do with what’s going on in Ossetia, Brussels or Langley Virginia.
Local politics and community solidarity is more than a match for ideological fantasy. But there is a lot of ground to make up: the need going forward is for a gentle persuasion – as things inevitably get worse – of those whose understandable trust in authority has been betrayed by the forces of darkness.
If you want to become an agent/organiser for UnderFire, contact me on saulbollocks@protonmail.com
The Slog 