The Red Pill. Caitlin Johnstone. Nov. 30, 2018.
“To those three soldiers who got killed in Afghanistan the other day,” said Ian. “They died fightin’ for our freedom.”
“Freedom isn’t free,” Bill solemnly declared as the men raised their glasses and drank.
“That’s bullshit,” Steve mumbled into his glass.
“Aww, come on,” said Bill.
“Alright, see this is why I don’t buy rounds for you pricks no more,” said Ian.
“I mean why are they still there?” said Steve. “Look, Ian, I appreciate you buying us drinks, but it’s fucking bullshit that those guys are even there. They’re not fighting for our freedom, and neither are our boys in Iraq or in Syria or anywhere else.”
“Man, shut up,” said Ian.
“Hey, you set him off,” laughed Ed. “Buckle up."
“The whole thing’s bullshit. It’s got nothing to do with freedom, it’s about controlling resources and strategic locations. Poppy production went through the roof since we sent our boys to Afghanistan, and Iraq was switched back to the petrodollar right after we invaded. In 2000 Saddam took Iraq off the petrodollar and started selling oil in euros, then we invaded and right afterward they switch back to selling it in dollars like all the other OPEC nations. I’m talking like, weeks afterward. A few men got real rich off the blood of our troops. Real rich. You guys want a red pill, read a little book called War Is a Racket by General Smedley Butler. It’s almost a hundred years old and it’s just as true today.”
“Man I hate this conspiracy theory shit,” said Ian.
“Ain’t no fuckin’ theory man, it’s just a fact,” said Greg.
“Just do a little research. We are being played. You think that bullshit they tell you on TV is real? The whole thing’s fake and they’re barely even hiding it.”
“Well even their excuse for going to Afghanistan was 9/11, and that was a total false flag,” said Ed.
“Ah shit, here we go,” Bill said, rolling his eyes.
“It was!” Ed exclaimed. “You can learn this shit on Youtube in an hour or two. Just look up Building 7 of the World Trade Center. Research what kindsa physics would have to happen for those buildings to fall like that and tell me you still believe that shit. Do you know what the odds are of a newly trained pilot pulling off the kinda strike they say hit the Pentagon? It’s impossible, and that’s why there’s no video or forensic evidence of it, cuz it was a goddamn missile. The whole thing was an inside job in collaboration with Mossad and the Saudis. 9/11, that’s the real red pill.”
“I think JFK is the real red pill,” said Greg. “This country’s been run by the CIA since 1963, ever since they staged a coup and pinned it on Oswald. That’s when everything started getting real fucked up. The official story is so fulla holes you could drive a flatbed through it. They’ve been lying to us about what happened in Dallas for 55 years, and they’re still lying.”
“Man you guys are way further down the rabbit hole than me,” laughed Steve. “I don’t know about that stuff.”
“Maybe the real red pill is that our whole world is nothing like what it appears to be?” said Old Pete, who’d been listening silently from a few bar stools down. “Not our country, not our government, not our culture, not even ourselves in a sense. Maybe the real red pill is that all of society is an imaginary conceptual overlay we’ve all placed in our minds over top of a bunch of hairless apes wandering around the surface of the earth making small mouth noises and stuffing food into their bellies. And maybe all the government, laws, social rules, economy, religion, beliefs, labels, names, the lines which separate nations, and all of human culture is just stuff we made up and all agreed to pretend is true, connected by made-up linguistic models comprised of nothing but small mouth noises we’ve all agreed to pretend mean certain things.”
“Maybe even our very selves are illusory, in the sense that they’re not at all what they appear to be. Have you ever looked at the thing that you think of as yourself? Really, truly, critically looked at it? Hardly anyone has, which is weird, because the entirety of anyone’s mental process revolves around the assumption that there is a solid, tangible thing that can be found which could be called a ‘me’ or an ‘I’. And maybe if you take a deep and sincere look within, you’ll find no evidence of any such entity. You’ll find thoughts, feelings, sensory impressions, but nobody actually experiences a self; it’s just a bunch of appearances firing off inside the skull of bipedal primate that is molecularly inseparable from its surroundings, which are in turn molecularly inseparable from the universe. And maybe you’ll come to realize that what we think of as a person is actually an impersonal ongoing process like a waterfall or a campfire; it’s a happening, a verb, being witnessed by an impersonal consciousness of unknowable origin. The solid ‘thing’ called a self exists only as a mental story.
“And maybe that’s actually where it all gets fucked up: everything is mental stories, from ourselves to our societal dynamics to the highest echelons of government and power, and we’re not perceiving any of it correctly. We believe we are a separate self which stands apart from the churning tumult of the universe’s atoms, and we dedicate our lives to protecting that illusory self from the outside world, a world which itself also exists mostly as story. Without our crude conceptual overlay, the world is experienced as nothing but a bunch of plants and animals moving around consuming food, reproducing, and experiencing the natural joy of being, but then we add a bunch of stories on top of the human animal about authority, relationships, jobs, goals, expectations, approval, enemies, ideas about getting life wrong versus getting it right, and all this stress and fear enters into the equation.
“And maybe that stress and fear can be manipulated by the more clever primates, the ones who understand that society is made of mental stories, and they can use that stress and fear to get the other primates toiling at awful jobs to avoid starvation, consenting to societal models which require endless violence and the rapid destruction of the ecosystem, consenting to slavery and degradation because most of those primates haven’t taken the real red pill: that it’s all stories that everyone has agreed to pretend are true, and they can collectively choose to stop pretending those stories are true and create new stories whenever they want to. They can create different stories about where power resides and how it operates, how resources are distributed, how much labor is actually necessary, and if they want they can do so in a way which benefits everyone on earth. They can turn this world into a paradise, and the only thing stopping them is a few clever primates who’ve figured out how to control the stories that are told using mass media and government manipulation.”
There was silence.
“Pete, you always make everything awkward,” chuckled the bartender. “Hey y’all want a real red pill? You gotta check out this guy David Icke. Do you guys know anything about reptilians?”
Assorted Thoughts On Politics, Humanity, And The World. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 11, 2018.
The problem isn’t just that we are ruled by tyrants, it’s that our minds are full of propaganda and cultural mind viruses which cause us to consent to it.
Russophobia and an uncritical emphasis on Trump has been used to scaremonger an annoyingly large percentage of American progressives from focusing on wanting change to focusing on wanting things to go back to how they used to be. Wanting things to go back to how they used to be is wanting the conditions which created Trump.
Patriotism is like the blue pill in The Matrix. You take it and you get to feel good about your country, but you don’t get to know the truth about it.
If everyone suddenly deeply understood on a gut level exactly how horrific war is, all military actions the US and its allies are currently engaged in would be forced to end due to popular revolt.
Under-discussed: secretive government agencies provide support to Silicon Valley corporations, support which they could easily have threatened to give to those corporations’ competitors instead if certain agreements weren’t made.
Anyone who says Russia is about to invade Ukraine or the Baltic states is either lying or ignorant. A nation with an economy the size of Spain which has been gutting its military budget is not gearing up for World War Three.
Russia’s military personality is a lot like the personality of the stereotypical Russian military veteran: stoic and reserved when left unprovoked, but willing and able to put you in a wheelchair if you invade his personal space. It should be treated accordingly.
People who don’t believe that these idiotic escalations against Russia can lead to nuclear war have simply compartmentalized away from fully considering all the possibilities. They have done this out of intellectual cowardice.
Democratic government can indeed be a tool of the people to implement the will of the public in allocating resources and making sure everyone is taken care of.
Such a system would work infinitely better than allowing the fate of the people to be determined by an elite class of sociopathic plutocrats. The problem is that governments are not democratic and do not move in accordance with the will of the people, and until they do, such a system is impossible.
The absence of government is also a viable path, if humanity transcends its malignant unconscious patterning. To believe anarchism can work is to have faith in the possibility of this transcendence.
To believe capitalism is the best possible system is to believe that the best possible system naturally elevates the most greedy, the most underhanded, and those most willing to do anything to get ahead, up to and including stripping our planet bare.
Humanity will keep repeating the same unconscious patterns until it either wakes up or destroys itself.
Humanity’s collective spiritual awakening will mirror the process of individual spiritual awakening. Things will begin moving into consciousness, we’ll become aware of the underlying forces behind our suffering, and as they become conscious we can undo them and consciously replace them with processes which benefit us.
What’s been happening in France shows what can occur when those in power lose control of the narrative. A cross-ideological people’s uprising is the absolute worst nightmare scenario of the ruling class; avoiding such a thing is the very reason so much energy goes into tight narrative control via plutocratic media and political manipulation.
Your rulers have never been afraid of the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans or the terrorists. The only thing they have ever feared is you. Specifically, they’ve been afraid of you and your countrymen ceasing to believe the authorized narratives, shrugging off the old mechanisms of oppression and control by sheer force of numbers without firing a shot, and creating a new world together.
Whoever has the gold makes the rules, but whoever controls the narrative determines who gets the gold.
Anyone who tries to control your narrative about yourself is trying to control you.
Nobody is entitled to bully or shame you out of your right to come to your own understanding of the world, in your own thoughts, using your own research, accepting no authoritative claims on faith no matter how confidently they are asserted. You are infinitely more qualified to come to your own understanding of what’s going on than anyone else is qualified to do it for you, and it is your sovereign right as a human being to vocalize that understanding.
Personal, political, and societal problems all ultimately boil down to sovereignty. Becoming conscious of all the myriad ways we extend beyond our own sovereign boundaries and intrude into the sovereignty of others, be they personal, ideological, national, or ecosystemic, is the path toward creating a utopia wherein we can all collaborate with each other and with our environment in the interests of the greater good.
What’s coming up in a mere generation or so is one of three possibilities: total freedom, total slavery, or total annihilation. Sorry centrists, there is no incremental option. The confluence of AI, automation, and an increasingly paranoid and controlling elite class means that we are likely to be subjected to more surveillance, more manipulation, more work for less pay as jobs disappear along with safety nets, if we don’t destroy ourselves altogether. Or, we change our consciousness
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