Thus far, books written by poor, self-employed, independent-minded authors have little influence on our society. But immense influence is exerted by the words published by our education, entertainment and news industries – industries controlled by wealthy elites who use the media to make you think you are living in a good world.
Despite the fact that they [government spy agencies] continually pump out fairy tales – about 9-11, WMDs, Benghazi, the death of bin Laden, ISIS, Syria, and most recently the claim that Russia hacked U.S. elections – this group of sacred cow spy agencies insists that they must be believed above all?
“‘Putin’s Not on Our Team’: Obama Worried Americans Trust Russia More Than U.S. Govt,” SHTFPlan.com
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Introducing the Fiction of Civilization
Before civilization, men and women lived without fictions about the world they lived in.… Well, that’s a lie. Our prehistoric ancestors were much more connected to Nature, yet they were also immersed in lies about the origins of Earth and its plants and animals. They did not recognize that their myths were lies because they enjoyed their myths. We, on the other hand, have ‘scientific’ explanations of the origins of the universe and everything in it, and we value these myths even though they are boring and useless to us.
Our greatest myth is that we inhabit a good or civilized world. Every civilization has people who defend and praise it because they profit from it while the majority sees no benefits. The ruling minority uses propaganda and religion to deceive everyone about life in their world. From its origin, literacy was a tool employed by the ruling class to spread lies about civilization and life generally, and these lies were designed to give people the false pride,hope and fear they need to remain patient and submissive.
Nowadays, literacy is rampant. A vast web of deceptive literature is being developed and expanded to keep people ignorant. This web includes books, textbooks, newspapers, magazines, laws, radio, television, film, and videos. In the developed world, people are completely immersed in a centrally-controlled media and all its lies and fictions.
Literacy is not the only tool with which reality has been falsified. Science and engineering is complementing the falsification process. We now live in a world of fake flowers, fake homes, fake health and fake happiness. Everyone is working to make everything shallow, illusory and fake.
The puppet masters, the shadow casters, the rulers of the world – the authors of the world – they profit from making everything fake and false. And, I was astounded to learn that their false world includes all the elements found in popular fiction: staged and fake conflicts, fake heroes, fake villains, fake scenery, fake rewards and even fake happy endings.
The Evil Authors of Conflict
Like authors of fiction, the authors of the world always hide their personal feelings and thoughts from the public, hide behind narrators or spokespersons and other members of the media. And, like novelists, our politicians and similar ‘authors’ of the world strive to make everyone believe their stories, their promises, their excuses and their fakeries.
For success, a good novel must have conflict. Without conflict, authors cannot generate hope and fear, the two drugs which hook readers. The authors of the world also profit by creating conflicts and problems such as poverty, pollution, disease and war.
How effective are the authors of the world at creating conflict? Poverty is widespread and growing because the authors of the world profit by making others poor.
Recently, Ben Bernanke and Milton Friedman admitted that the Fed caused the 1929 stock market crash that turned a recession into the Great Depression. You can be sure they created it intentionally, for profit.
In military and intelligence circles, violent conflicts are planned in secret meetings by people who are positioned to profit from war. Any war America participates in is a war it probably secretly started or fueled, and is a war it certainly intends to profit from.
The authors of the financial world created the 2008 financial crash by intentionally selling sub-prime mortgages to people who could not pay their mortgages. When the disaster occurred, the authors of disaster profited by demanding government financial support for them and their banks.
The authors of the world do not care if people die in their manufactured conflicts and disasters. They treat people like lifeless and disposable characters.
The authors of our lives profit from disaster. Wars keep citizens from understanding that their real enemies are their own rulers, and perpetual wars keep the multibillion dollar military industry rich. Finally, wars were used as an excuse to introduce income taxes that were never cancelled with war stopped. Similarly, useless and dangerous medicines keep the pharmaceutical industry rolling in money. In the insurance industry, the more problems exist the more the industry profits. The more money the real estate and construction industries make. The faster our electronic devices are outdated, the …
Without conflicts, problems and disasters, civilization cannot make anyone rich. In fact, capitalism is a system that pits people against one another, creates a state of perpetual economic conflict that makes a few rich, many poor, and encourages the poor to blame themselves for their poverty.
The authors of the world always want more wealth because the wealth they pursue is false wealth.
The authors of the world want us to think they are heroes, angels, geniuses and philanthropists so that they can stay in power, and, in some cases, because their egos need boosting. They are so far removed from a state of mental health that even if we showed paradise to them, they would probably hate it, fear it, or be unable to understand and enjoy it.
Unreliable Narrators
The authors of the world are totalitarian rulers. Like the totalitarian authors of fiction, they hide behind narrators, behind messengers, behind the media. They shape our understanding of the world by dictating the contents of national curricula and by dictating editorial and advertising policies, and by directing the movie, television and publishing industries, and by managing how search engines direct the public’s attention.
The mainstream media narrates the lies of the authors of the world. The mainstream media includes most of our smiling news and entertainment professionals and most of our wonderful educational and political professionals. They parrot the fictions dictated to them by the authors of the world. Narrators cannot think independently; they are the creations or voices of their authors. Educators, reporters, politicians and entertainers do not even realize that their job is to prop and promote the fictions that enrich their rulers, employers and ultimately their authors.
The mainstream narrators create our fictional world by using the following tactics:
- Oversimplification: the media reduces the complex and infinite chain of causes and effects, blames one immediate cause, usually a convenient cause that does not implicate the reader, narrator and the ‘author.’ Thus, we blame terrorism on radical Islam and ignore the evidence that authors are secretly creating conflict behind the scenes and that anyone can be radicalized by poverty and oppression. Oversimplification always leads to black and white thinking about good and evil. If a man is arrested for domestic violence, journalists do not investigate the many causes for his insanity because their masters do not want readers to understand that economic stresses and cultural bankruptcy are complex causes of crime. They do not want these causes discussed because economic stress and cultural bankruptcy are the twin pillars of their profits.
- Emotionalism: by simplifying tragic events, our narrators prevent thinking and encourage emotional responses that suit the authors of the world. Simplistic thinking means not-thinking, which leads to strong emotional responses that prevent rational behaviors.
- De-emphasis: if a story could elicit moral outrage against the authors of the world, the mainstream media de-emphasizes the story with a bland, objective and unemotional report. Potentiallydangerous stories can also be placed in the back pages and kept short. Anything that might implicatethe authors in criminal and inhumane practices can be smothered with tranquilizing viewpoints and distracting stories about other people.
- Omission: blatant censorship means we do not read stories or see movies about central banking crimes, about the weaponization of financial tools (see “Financial Imperialists Attack Russia,” by Paul Craig Roberts), or movies about the power of masonic and satanic cults on our leaders and celebrities (Eyes Wide Shut is a rare exception that cost writer and director Stanley Kubric his life), about the horrible consequences of the wars our taxes fund, about the two US reporters who were imprisoned for daring to report on protests against an oil pipeline, and so on.
- Falsification: faked news stories are common. The story about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction is a well-known example. After fake news stories are published, the truth is only admitted by the media if the evidence becomes too obvious. See this, this and this.
- Desensitization: if it bleeds, it leads. Violence sells movie tickets, video games, books and tickets to sporting events, and it sells newspapers unless the violence implicates our government or one of our transnational corporations.The media treat violence in war as sacred and violence by petty criminals and non-allied governments as evil. We are also being desensitized to poverty and disease, not because the media feeds us endless images of poverty and disease but because the media teaches us that our civilization is wonderful and poverty must be blamed on a few poor people or on politicians while disease must be blamed on genetics or on bad lifestyle choices. Civilization and its authors are always innocent.
- Sexualization: The media distracts the public by exploiting sexiness and sex – even though both sexiness and sex are dying from rising levels of stress, rising obesity rates, rising ill health, and a culture that views human beings as possessions and showpieces. Sexual dis-orientation is a consequence of our sick culture. The media, rather than warning against the destruction of healthy heterosexuality, tells the public that alternative sexualities are good rather than ultimately unsustainable symptoms of serious problems.
Why can’t we rely on reporters, teachers, entertainers, and politicians? To answer this question, simply examine the authors who control these narrators:
1a. The government guarantees that education will not teach children to be critical of any government policies. The narrative imbibed by students is that governments rarely if ever do harm and governments have an unspoken right to exist and to exert power.
1b. Corporations are acquiring control of education and its contents by directly funding research, by offering grants, by offering co-op work for students, by writing textbooks, and by advertising and selling products inside schools. The corporate bias prevents students from understanding how corporations impoverish the world and destroy the living environment.
2a. Corporations control the news industry by simply paying for advertising. To avoid losing advertisers, news outlets avoid reporting stories about corporate crime and corruption.
2b. The government controls the news media because the media rely on the government to provide journalists with stories about wars abroad and other foreign events.To make matters worse, as news outlets slash their budgets, the media increasingly rely on what the government tells them and is increasingly unwilling to ask critical questions. The movie industry is controlled by military agencies and corporations that provide directors with access to military hardware. Unless the movie industry presents war in a positive light, it loses access to the military’s weapons. Thirdly, the news industry has been infiltrated by both military and intelligence agencies and agents (CNN). These are some of the reasons that the anti-war movement is never presented in a positive light, and this is why the media communicates zero criticisms of our weapons exports, our war budget and our use of weapons to do ‘good’.
3. The news and entertainment media are controlled by ever fewer owners. Sometimes the owners are billionaires who want to control what people think and say. Most English-speaking media outlets are owned by fewer than a dozen author-dictator-billionaires about whom the media will never narrate a significant truth.
Fake Heroes
Who are our heroes? Before civilization arrived, our ancestors had no need for heroes and saviors. They rarely prayed to animal spirits and dead ancestors. After civilization arrived, our need for heroes increased because civilization is brutal. One trick of the ruling class was to persuade the conquered and submissive masses that their rulers are their saviors.
Egyptian rulers were among the earliest to claim hero status. The crux of the Egyptian deception was the pharaoh. State propaganda claimed that the pharaoh could “keep his people safe, dispense justice, ensure the adequate rising of the Nile, [and] care for the continued existence of those in the beyond” (Andre Dollinger). This lie appealed to the masses because without it, spending their lives in the service of the pharaoh would feel hopeless and degrading. The lie that the pharaoh was the people’s hero was used to keep Egyptians submissive, poor, and miserable.
All classical empires have used variations of the Egyptian fake hero. The Emperor of China, or Son of Heaven, claimed he was responsible for the security and prosperity of his people.
Slowly, the ruling classes of the world shifted from relying entirely on brute force for dominance to relying on both force and deception. This development always coincided with the arrival of literacy, for literacy gives the ruling class power to centralize communication and stop dialogue. Thanks to paper and ink, and now thanks to electronics, the lies of a few ruling liars can spread into space and time, brainwashing and indoctrinating hundreds of millions.
In ancient India, rather than instituting the worship of a human pharaoh, or emperor, or other fake but living hero, the ruling class instituted a religion in which gods and monks are the fake heroes. Any poor man who struggled in life was encouraged to be ‘heroic’ and join a Hindu monastery where he wouldn’t be a threat to social stability. Buddhism introduced an imaginary human being named Buddha, a man who became a godlike hero by conquering desire and issuing rules meant to preserve the social order.
Literacy and hero-worship spread to Christian Europe. The rulers of Byzantium and Rome dictated religious texts whose stories, prayers and instructions were narrated by priests to most of Europe. The difference between the Hindu-Buddhist and Christian model of brainwashing is mostly one of predatory intensity. The Christian ruling class developed a ‘hero’ who is more seductive than Egyptian and Asian ones: he saves humans during his life on Earth, suffers pain and execution for his followers, and maintains a ‘loving presence’ on Earth. Fiction can hardly be more seductive.
And, more than any other religious institution before it, the Catholic Church itself became a fake hero. The Pope even claims to be the embodiment of Jesus Christ on Earth.
As the Catholic Church declined, republican and especially democratic governments rose and claimed hero status. They pretended to care about a growing middle class and about the poor. But democratic governments are democratic in name only. They are always controlled by wealthy elites who tell the masses that a centralized ‘democratic’ government can represent their interests and be their hero. Now, millions of people are dependent on government welfare and healthcare programs, so they are actually convinced that governments are good instead of evil. Such people never contemplate the fact that during the 250 years of its existence, America’s promise of equality has never been fulfilled – not in any sense except the fact that now traditional slavery is history and the new slavery embraces everyone equally – or almost equally. Meanwhile, with each passing year, wealth inequality increases.
During the past 50 years, America’s political heroes have become even faker. A short list of actor-politicians includes Clint Eastwood, a former mayor; Arnold Schwarzenegger, a former governor of California; Ronald Reagan, the former president of the U.S.; and now President Donald Trump, an accomplished reality show actor whose fine acting ability was noted by film director Oliver Stone. Indeed, just recently Russia’s President Putin commented that President Trump is a very different person in private. And Putin is not an exception; he had a career in the spy world – a world where lying and pretending are the rule, which means that he is well qualified to lead Russia’s democracy. And Canada’s current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau majored in theater arts. Canadians should hardly be surprised that the promises Justin during his election campaign were scripted and quickly ‘forgotten.’
Our fake political heroes are constantly promising to save people from misery, but generally speaking their policies only serve to promote economies that destroy mental and physical health, destroy our environment and widen the income gap between the rich and the poor.
Beyond religion and politics, the modern world is full of fake heroes.
The medical industry is constantly inventing fake heroes. Each new drug and medical procedure is a miracle and a savior, yet non-communicable diseases continue to multiply, and deadly communicable diseases are threatening to return.People believe our heroic, so-called scientists will discover cures and solutions, but they only create larger problems. In fact, the death rate in the U.S. goes down when its doctors go on strike.
Our corporations are constantly producing heroic products – products they say will save us from stress, toil and boredom, but their products achieve the opposite. The automobile, for example, vastly increased the death rate caused by traveling, vastly increased debts, and vastly increased stress for pedestrians.
Obviously, history has demonstrated that no heroes will ever come to improve civilization; civilization is designed to create disasters and conflict. Yet people continue to believe in and celebrate imaginary religious, political, scientific, medical, military and other heroes.
Of course, every-day heroes rescue people from fires, floods, famine, debts and sickness, and such heroes can lessen our general misery. But no hero is powerful enough to eliminate war, poverty and disease. And the little improvement we occasionally muster depend on social movements, not on individual heroes. As activist and historian Howard Zinn noted, positive change does not stem from politicians but from people demanding change from their leaders. Well, perhaps that was true in the good old days. I live in a different world. The door of dialogue has been shut, and the revolutionary impulse has been tamed by a vast network of prisons, by medicine-prescribing doctors and by the mind-numbing media.
We cannot rely on the old civil-rights model of heroism. Organized protests and petition writing has barely slowed our descent into Hell. Depending on others to be heroic is convenient and foolish. In capitalist democracies, fools never seem to tire of electing leaders to be their heroes and make capitalism profitable for everyone. All too often, the elect fake heroes, I mean they elect liars. We are now so deeply mired in fakery that even humanitarian and civil rights groups are secretly funded by and controlled by greedy, megalomaniacal capitalists.
Fortunately, heroism and revolution are still possible. Individuals can take heroic actions by simply reducing their dependency on money, by improving their diets, by being more active, by rejecting modern medicine, by eliminating or reducing their dependency on electricity, by creating communities, by disinvesting from consumerism, and by reducing their tax payments.
Fake Villains
Civilization has always created enemies. Native people are its original enemies. It takes their land and resources even though at first encounter native peoples are typically welcoming and generous to foreigners. To consider them enemies of progress is to indulge in fiction.
Originally, native ‘villains’ rebelled and genuinely threatened the civilizations that threatened them. From ancient Greece to pre-prohibition America, native peoples have waged armed rebellions and, similarly, slaves organized violent revolts. But natives and slaves are never the real villains; they are always the victims.
Armed rebellions persisted throughout the Middle Age and into the modern age. But once the most developed states evolved into nuclear states with welfare, prisons and schools for everyone, then armed rebellions stopped. This was a victory. However, the state still needed enemies, or villains, because without them, the police and military industries have no excuse to exist and profit. So, they invented villains. The U.S. provoked war, secretly funded its future enemies, and later even staged attacks against itself in Cuba, Vietnam, New York (9-11), and so on. This practice of staging or faking enemy aggressions has a long history. A list of false flags can be perused this.
Now, in its ravenous quest for villains, the state arms proxy armies and mercenary groups and sometimes fights them, or claims to fight them (ISIS, etc.). No scheme is to evil if it keeps the war industry alive and helps establish global dominance and profits. During the 20th century, U.S. elites secretly sold military hardware and knowledge to countries that the media portrayed as villainous. Thus, during WWII, it openly armed Britain and secretly armed Germany and perhaps even the U.S.S.R. In the end, Russia deserves most of the credit for stopping the Nazi regime, but the masters of deception in the U.S. proudly claim that they saved Europe from the evil Nazis and Communists, even though they turned Europe into a cemetery, profited from their deeds and – thanks to WWII – they became to world’s sole superpower and economic super-predator.
Before WWII, Japan’s flourished – like a disease – as it colonized its neighbors. The U.S. saw it as a rival, it desired war and secretly provoked Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor. This provided an excuse to destroy the evil Japanese. When Russia became too powerful after WWII, it was dragged into a war with Islamic-Afghani tribes secretly armed by the U.S. When Iran refused to cooperate with U.S. interests, the U.S. created an enemy for it in Iraq. When Iraq’s leader, Sadam Hussein, rightly refused to cooperate with U.S. and Western European corporate interests, he was turned into an enemy and crushed. Ditto for Ghaddafi in Libya.
The need for fake villains extends far beyond the police and military industrial complex. In the West, people enjoy a veritable buffet of fake villains: sports teams, tv-movie villains, devils, weeds, Jews, witches, Muslims, communists, anarchists, terrorists, homosexuals, republicans, democrats, measles, and so on. None of these enemies pose a real threat to humanity, but our authors encourage us to fear imaginary threats because this prevents us from recognizing the real enemy, ourselves, and we shall always be our own enemies until we learn to live in loving harmony with our Nature and Neighbors.
Rather than pursuing harmony with Nature, nowadays, our most brilliant scientific minds are in laboratories inventing diseases. People who seek unlimited power and profits want us to be sicker than we already are. Another form of medical fakery is the popular custom of misdiagnosing diseases. Now we have a million diseases that describe symptoms rather than the common, underlying disease: Civilization Insanity. This monstrous disease conquers the Earth using the Four Weapons of a Horrible Life and Death: Stress, Poor Nutrition, Chemical Toxins and Radiation (too much or too little sunlight, and too much exposure to nuclear radiation, x-rays, radio-waves, WiFi-waves, etc.).
Rather than pursuing harmony with their neighbors, our most brilliant pre-crime policing minds are busy instigating and arranging evil for profit and power. Police even aid and abet the drug smuggling gangs they call the enemies of peace, and rather than arresting the state’s criminal leadership and all the corporate thugs who are leading humanity down the road of slavery and death, they arrest the people who do the least damage: illegal immigrants, marijuana users, parking violators and petty thieves.
Now, even our revolutions are fake. Foreign agents are secretly paid by tax free corporate foundations linked to Wall Street to start revolutions in countries that do not serve American interests. Domestically, secret agents also encourage and provoke otherwise peaceful activists to act violently so that the police have an excuse for crushing them.
Civilization wasn’t always so secretive and deceptive. In the beginning, power belonged to the masters of violent conflict. They only deceived themselves. Gradually, as the authors of the world became literate and developed a media apparatus, they learned to deceive and to create complicated forms of fake-democracy founded on fake election choices, empty promises, cool propaganda, impenetrable legislation and other deceptive communications.
The definition of a villain is constantly evolving. Christian brutes called native peoples godless heathens; now foreign governments are called regimes or communists and foreign leaders are called tyrants, despots, violators of human rights and threats to world peace.
Who are the real armed and dangerous villains? Why are the targets of fake terrorist attacks never Israel, Riyadh, Washington, Wall Street, the City of London, Westminster Palace, corporate headquarters and government buildings in general? (note: the Pentagon was largely vacant during the 9/11 attack, and the ATF’s offices in the Oklahoma city building were conveniently empty when the bombing occurred). When a foreign nation’s government buildings are attacked, as happened in Iran in June 2017 and in Argentina in 1994, the nation in question is one that refuses to cooperate with the puppet masters of our globalized theater of greed and cruelty.
Not coincidentally, the same pattern of villain-creation exists in our even more deadly medical and food industries. The real villains – the men in charge of these industries – either do not want to admit or do not even understand that they are responsible for creating unhealthy, sick and prematurely dead people. Instead of being self-critical, they continually blame some new boogeyman like cholesterol, carbs, calories, fructose, cannabis and genetics. And, not satisfied with their perpetually failing war on disease, the worst actors in the medical industry are not averse to creating villains – I mean diseases – with deliberately addictive, toxic and/or infectious vaccines and other drugs.
In conclusion, wherever the real villains profit from fighting fake villains, fake villains and conflicts will be manufactured. This occurs most prominently in the medical and military fields, but also in education, politics and even in economics. Today’s fake villain is the bully who was never loved at home; tomorrow’s fake villain is the sluggish economy, or Chinese currency manipulators. The media has villainized supreme actor President Donald Trump by focusing on imaginary and petty offenses while it ignores his true villainy as war-mongering puppet of banks and corporations. Trump’s diction, costume and face are unique, but his role is typical of presidents in the Grand Washington Theater.
Fake Scenery
Every dramatic performance has its fake scenery for ‘atmosphere’ and ‘mood.’ Modern artists are not interested in real scenery, certainly not in interacting with Nature in a manner that promotes mutual health. For the modern artist, the civilized artist, Nature is decoration, a visual and auditory ornament that has almost no connection to human life.
Civilization is the dramatic performance in which we are immersed. Civilizations are constantly creating fake, unnatural and unhealthy scenes and sceneries. The earliest civilizations invested enormous energy in building lifeless structures from raw stone and cut rock that people thought could connect them to gods and spirits. The megalithic sceneries they created continue to be ogled by tourists and praised by anthropologists and other worshippers of stones and superstitions.
Modern civilization is superficially different. Our belief that prayer and personal rituals can connect us with gods has freed our daily energy for creating an economy that produces a different kind of fake scenery, a scenery designed not to foster imaginary contact between humans and spirits, but a scenery designed to produce false wealth for a ruling class.
The megapolis culture is so ugly that it demands ornamentation. The ancient Romans and Greeks loved their monumental stone architecture, but they needed perfumes and incense, and they needed their windowless walls, floors and ceilings covered with pictures of Nature and anthropomorphic gods and biomorphic spirits. Now we are constantly looking away from the ugliness of our cities, their sewers, prisons, factories, slaughterhouses, hospitals, ghettos, dental offices, tax offices, retirement homes and so on. We prefer to look at bouquets, photographs, voice recordings, television shows, movies, computer games, video-calls, and so on. We view our fake world through the fakery of images. We live in the temple of Shadow and Image, two steps removed from Nature and Life.
We love our cities because we do not know how unhealthy they are for us and Nature. Forests are destroyed, huge mines and quarries are dug, enormous volumes of plastics and other toxins are processed and fossil fuels are burned and so on and on. Inside our buildings, humans live like robots living in virtual worlds. But we still long for something more, so we create the illusion of life with indoor plants, paintings of wild landscapes, pets, wildlife and splashes of color. And, to reinforce the illusion of a healthy environment, we surround our buildings with ornamental trees and lawns.
How lifeless are our cities? They need constant infusions of life from rural and foreign lands. Our cities are biological deserts populated with rats and sick beings whose minds and bodies do not function well. Lifeless engines and automobiles move bodies to and fro. Cables and wires deliver electric energy to citizens who press buttons. Leaders, teachers, specialists and computer software programs do our thinking for us. And yet, most people believe that cities have more life in them than pristine Nature.
Modern cities are gigantic Potemkin villages whose sole purpose is to create the dramatic illusion that life is fine and civilization is healthy. In the earliest cities, that illusion was quite easy to maintain; now, it is crumbling. In the biggest cities on Earth, pollution levels are so extreme that people struggle to breathe and rarely see blue sky. But, instead of choosing to fix their problems, people in the most polluted cities immigrate to ‘cleaner’ cities, the CAUSE cities found in Canada, Australia, the U.S. and Europe.
What is a clean city? A clean city isn’t necessarily healthier. City streets full of ‘dirty’ cows and cow dung might ruin fresh water supplies, but as a fuel cow dung is relatively clean. And dirty cities and homes covered in dust and bacteria keep our immune systems functioning and healthy. Processed and packaged foods probably contain no fungi or bacteria, but it isn’t very life-supporting either.
We are so brainwashed that we could look at a dead blue lake and a field of green corn growing on nearly dead soil and think we are looking at a healthy environment.
But even the cleanest cities do not satisfy us. Citizens of CAUSE cities frequently long to leave their stressful urban environments and escape to a rural or natural scene, even to a ‘beautiful’ tropical resort that, unfortunately, is just as unsustainable as any city. Disney resorts or ‘parks’ are arguably the greatest fake sceneries on the planet.
CAUSE cities are more scenic and cleaner than Third World cities because their environmental pollution regulations are stricter, but CAUSE cities rely on affordable imports from countries whose imports are affordable because they are heavy polluters. The scenic CAUSE nations are simply outsourcing their labor and pollution – at least non-military related manufacturing-based pollution. What immigrants don’t understand is that the scenic CAUSE nations produce the most garbage per person, and CAUSE nations produce and consume the most toxic foods and medicines. CAUSE nations might look good, but they are the leading cause of world-wide natural scenery destruction, they also lead the world in unsightly obesity and non-communicable diseases, and behind all their alluring sexiness, they suffer from crashing fertility rates, crashing birth rates and, I suppose if they could measure it, they would even find crashing love rates.
Fake Wealth
Real wealth is the goal of humanity. Real wealth is the happiness and health that does not turn into misery before death; but for this wealth to exist, we also need the land, climate, leisure, food, community, children, shelters and culture that produce it.
But presently real wealth is being destroyed and replaced by fake wealth.
Presently, billions of human beings live with land poverty and no longer know what good land is. We used to walk relatively free on the Earth; now most of the land belongs to the state and the ultra-wealthy; the middle class owns tiny lots of land; the billions of poor have just enough to slave and die on.
Presently, hundreds of millions of people – most of them in CAUSE nations – are living with fake climate wealth and real climate poverty. They need clothes to be warm during the day, and they need heated and air conditioned homes to feel comfortable during the day, and they need store-bought vitamin D and imported fruit during the winter.
Presently, people in rich nations are inundated with fake food or foods that belong to other animals and cannot optimize human health: meat, dairy and grains are false foods of the first category; in the middle category I place highly processed foods; in the third false food category I place laboratory-produced chemicals and genetically modified garbage (gmG). To make matters worse, most of our farming happens on soil depleted of essential minerals and micro-organisms, so the industry has found ways to produce big, fat, unhealthy (mineral and nutrition deficient) food. We pay for empty calories and worse, we pay for poison.
We are so poor, we don’t have access to what our ancestors enjoyed in abundance without cost: fresh air and fresh water. In the developed world, we pay for toxic, fluoridated, chlorinated and demineralized water (The Flouride Deception, Christopher Bryson; The Case against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There, Paul Connett & James Beck; Fluoride: Drinking Ourselves to Death, Barry Groves).
We have sacrificed Nature’s true wealth for the false wealth of technology. Cars are icons of wealth, but they indebt us, crush us (fatally, a million lives per year), poison us, and make us fat and unhealthy.
Our homes are popular objects of wealth, but they are built at great cost to the environment (Construction’s Impact on the Environment, Sourceable.net), and banks use them to enslave us with mortgages, a word from the Old French meaning death (mort) pledge (gage), so it is a promise unto death. Mortgages were always intended to keep people slaving for banks until death. Moreover, modern homes poison and endanger us (“Indoor Air Facts no.4, Sick Building Syndrome,” EPA). Modern home ownership destroys our health and our finances, therefore a home makes us poor.
We think husbands and wives make us wealthy, meaning happy and healthy, but statistics and personal observation reveal that the average marriage produces a paltry happiness, much stress, very few orgasms for women and inferior ones for men. Actually, our spouses are not married to us; they are married to their jobs, electronic gadgets, cars, stores, and their ‘image’ of themselves.
Women in particular and people generally lack mental and emotional wealth. Their fragile happiness is too easily broken by jokes and insults. In other words, they have fragile ideas about themselves. Whether they are obese, unenergetic, bossy, or obsessively clean, whatever their physical or mental disorder, they usually deny it, defend it, ignore it, and refuse to recognize and correct it. Many people imagine that they are sexy, smart, friendly or chic – even though they have no good evidence for any such claims. In other words, the self-images that people value so highly are a form of fake wealth.
The image of the ideal man varies according to culture, but it is always deceptive or false. American society has promoted the idealized image of a muscular, clean shaven, large-jawed, man with enormous genitals. Such men are treated as if they represented sexual wealth, but these features have little to do with our ability to produce happiness or pleasure. In fact, regarding the clean-shaven feature, I have a pet theory that our beards exist to stimulate women’s skin, especially around the neck and shoulders. If this is true, the clean-shaven man is an impoverished man.
Women’s real sexual wealth has also been ruined by a culture that makes people unfit for sex, both physically and mentally. But the media persuades us that sexiness still exists. It flaunts women with big breasts, curvy buttocks, long legs and red lips as if these features produce sexual satisfaction. Foolish men obsess over these features and hunt for trophy wives, while foolish women use everything from clothing to surgery to make their bodies match this image so that they can ensnare the hunters.
Even modern children have become objects of false wealth. Many children are idealized by parents who could not recognize a good child if they met one. Not only are we deluded about our children, but our culture takes our children away from us; it turns our children into their children – the children of government-trained educators and the media in general. Modernity has turned the biological parent into a prison guard, slave driver, chauffeur and secret Santa Claus. The educational and entertaining role of the parent has been outsourced to teachers, coaches, televisions, doctors and daycare facilitators. In short, our children are not half as good as we like to think, and they certainly are not ours.
How poor is the modern citizen? Ironically, in nations reputed to be the wealthiest, people are burdened with the greatest debts on Earth. Adults, students, governments and small businesses are living in debt, close to bankruptcy, close to being homeless and hungry. In the U.S., the average working adult needs to save 100% of two years’ of income to pay all their personal debts. And, to pay the U.S. governments’ debts, workers would need to save 100% of two more years of income.
Ironically, the myth of wealth is nowhere more evident than in the U.S., the allegedly wealthiest nation on Earth, a nation that – paradoxically – is also crippled with disease, debt, violence, depression and other consequences of progress. Michael Parenti’s observation that capitalist civilizations always makes the few rich by making the many poor applies to all economic and political systems. In theory, communist nations reduce the extremes of wealth and poverty creation, but they do not replace the religion of false wealth creation with a culture that knows how to produce real wealth.
Money is the ultimate fake wealth (“Bank Admits: Money Is Fake, Fictional, Not Real,” Clinton Kirby). Banking elites create money, or rather credit, from nothing and loan it to us as if it were real. They even command us to return their fake wealth with interest payments earned through real work. And the more money they print from nothing and shove into the economy, the deeper we go into debt and the more we destroy the real wealth on our planet.
The Myth of Progress and the Happy Ending
The myth of progress is crucial to keeping people pacified and apathetic. Lets look at some of the problems with this alluring myth:
- Scientists claim that prehistoric people had shorter life spans. Early humans had radically different diets from us, so their hair, bone and tooth composition at the age of 70 could resemble ours at the age of 30. Rather than assume that they died young, at about 30, I assume that they lived healthier and longer than we do. Moreover, the most developed nations have already reached peak life-spans. American lifespans are beginning to shrink (“White Americans Are Dying Younger as Drug and Alcohol Abuse Rises,” Sabrina Tavernise) and the rest of the developed world will soon follow suit. More importantly, over the past few millennia, leisure, or free time, has steadily disappeared. Now you can live until you’re 65, but, unless you’re unemployed, you won’t have time (“For US Workers, Vacation Is Vanishing,” Mark Ames).
- The quality of life is steadily decreasing. Now our teenagers and preteens commit suicide, billions use prescription and non-prescription drugs to alleviate stress and illness, young children wield guns in war zones, and billions of people live in poor health, prisons and loneliness. Why aren’t these shocking facts thoroughly studied in schools or reported daily on the evening news? What are we afraid of?
- Civilization cannot ‘progress’ without giving us progressively more unsatisfying jobs and more toxic and addictive goods and services. The happiness provided by an expensive yacht is miniscule compared to the happiness provided by a happy child or lover. A life spent in luxurious homes and vehicles is less fulfilling than a life spent in a humble, healthy environment.
- With few exceptions, false wealth inequality is progressing everywhere while real wealth is vanishing (“The Super Rich Are out of Sight,” Michael Parenti; “Central Banks as Engines of Income Inequality and Financial Crisis,” Jack Rasmus; Foreclosing the Future: The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction, Bruce Rich).
- Unlike billions of religious people living today, our pre-civilized ancestors were not obsessed about earning a trip to a better world after they die; they usually enjoyed life, so they did not talk or write about going to better worlds.
Who is happy enough to forego the imaginary happy endings offered by our religions? Who is happy enough to laugh at the culture that pursues weekends and vacations as happy endings to endless misery? Who is happy enough to laugh at the happy endings provided by authors of fiction, the entertainment industry and the gambling and sports industries? Even the purchase of a new piece of clothing can be a sort of happy ending for hard work. But none of these little happy endings provides genuine happiness.
Conclusion: The Demise of State and Corporate Funded Myth-Making and the Rise of “Folk Media”
When metropolitan civilizations were still small, the tribes of the uncivilized majority did not beg to join them; in fact, they shuddered, fought and avoided them as long as possible. Most have been swallowed up by the relentless spread of civilization. And, amazingly, the propaganda of the ruling class has nearly everyone believing that civilization is a blessing, and that the more developed the civilization, the better.
Although our education, entertainment and information industries are still dominated by corporate and government status quo voices, their monopoly is being challenged with some success by the rise of alternative or folk media. Parents are turning to home-schooling and the de-education movement. People are also leaving the mainstream news and entertainment media matrix and preferring alternative or folk media. MSM journalists are mutinying and joining independent and even foreign media outlets such as Telesurtv, Al Jazeera and Russia Today (RT). Moreover, whistleblowers and anonymous leakers continue the fight against propaganda, and folk educators are publishing videos and books that challenge mainstream propaganda.
The internet is crucial. Others have observed that as the printing press helped Protestantism break the publishing monopoly of the Catholic Church, so the internet is helping folk media destroy the publishing monopoly of the Capitalist Empire.
Alternative, independent, viewer-funded media are “folk media.” Their values are identical to the ones identified in folklore composed by people living in Eurasian and North African civilizations.
Folk media protests against all manifestations of state and corporate oppression, and this includes war, censorship, taxation, pollution, and poverty. But folk media does more than protest. As my recent purchase of Ecovillage: 1001 ways to heal the planet demonstrates, folk media also celebrates the birth of a better world, a world that will revive the wisdom of our ancestors and, wherever possible, refine that wisdom.
Here are a few examples of news and education related folk media: globalresearch.ca, thebureauinvestigates.com, corbettreport.com. newsbud.com, disobedientmedia.com, therealnews.org, itccs.org, naturalnews.com, pressfortruth.com, theantimedia.com, commondreams.org, counterpunch.org, honestreporting.com, and inforwars.com.
Do I have too much faith in the internet? The printing press and the Protestant Reformation did not destroy the Catholic Church; in fact, in many ways they made life worse and more fearful.
The first printing presses were controlled by the ruling elites, so they spelled ruin for folklore and folk wisdom. Now the ruling elites are trying to use the internet to spread corporate and state propaganda for the benefit of the Capitalist Church. Governments in China and Russia are already censoring the internet, just as in the U.S., corporations like Facebook, Google and Youtube are working to censor the internet for the U.S. government and themselves. But none of this should worry us. The knowledge we need can easily be remembered without the internet, without even books. Communication technologies can speed the spread of vital knowledge, but mouths and ears can do the job.
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