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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2023-284
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
Ukraine:
Palestine:
Empire:
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Other issues:
Empire:
The Beezle:
Use as open (not related to Ukraine or Palestine) thread …
Posted by: juliania | Nov 28 2023 1:34 utc | 87
It’s because, I think, earlier there was a certain regard for the public taste itself. The stories had to be gripping; the actors had to act. They don’t any more. And sure there was a ‘sell’ going on, because movies had to make money. That, I think, was the main sell – had to be ‘art’ involved.
So, seemed a ‘separate ball games’ sort of scenario: before we had oligarchs (I mean REAL oligarchs who more than dabbled in politics and told politicians where they owed their allegiance rather than vice versa), we had those two fields of operation. One for the marketers and one for the entertainment sellers. Propaganda during wartime, sure, but that was not the sinister market it has become now; movies had to be about something, and a lot of that was also anti-war, because that sold, or anticorporate even, before corporations became gods.
It really was a different time.
Have been reading a series of substack essays from which the Preface article begins with:
“The prolonged absence of any free exchange of information within a country opens up a gulf of incomprehension between whole groups of the population, between millions and millions. We simply cease to be a single people, for we speak, indeed, different languages.”
– Alexander Solzhnetizyn, The Gulag Archipelago
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” – John Milton
“Again, the devil took him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me.” – Matthew 4:8-9
This world has a sickness to it. Bad people prosper and good people suffer. The basic incentive structures of reality is predatory and malevolent: all life survives by consuming other life; even something as simple as a plant is alive and struggles for survival. Reproductive fitness favors those who achieve mastery of others via cunning and strength, i.e. taking other people’s resources using force or trickery. This can take many forms, but in the modern era it usually involves psychological manipulation via media, government, or education for the benefit of elites. As Donald Hoffman argues in “The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes”, humans are evolved to maximize their reproductive chances, which has little to do with the pursuit of truth; indeed, focusing on truth as an end goal lowers these chances. And as Thomas Ligotti concludes in “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”, “If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.”
The harshness of reality is difficult for most people to accept; a cold, dark, uncaring universe is depressing and often results in either suicidal ideation or becoming a sociopath to take advantage of the weak. Religion serves as a mollifying force to keep people sedated and compliant, but it also creates the conditions necessary for the “social contract”, allowing people to interact without brutal winner-take-all warfare.
Those sensitive to the fundamental nature of reality have it harder than regular people, who outsource their critical thinking facilities to society and the media; removing the burden of independent thought makes it easier for them to get through life (the positive side of this approach). These regular people, derided in dark corners of the internet as “non playable characters” (“NPC”, a video game term) think in narrowly proscribed lines as dictated by society and are effectively a form a cattle who are exploited by the elites (the negative side of this approach). Thinkers who feel a pull to understand the world have cognitive dissonance surrounding society’s rules, norms and programming; and for those thinking more deeply, about the suffering nature of reality itself. Labeled as “dissidents”, these free thinkers are unusual, rare, and set apart from the masses of gray, unthinking NPCs that populate the world.
As Oswald Spengler argues in The Decline of the West: “A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the world which was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but rather discovers within himself. It is himself over again: his being expressed in words; the meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so far as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life are identical.” For these few, the pursuit is truth is something they pursue as an end goal in and of itself, whether due to ideals, impulse, belief in God, or otherwise, without expectation of material or status rewards.
This essay is a tribute to such free thinkers.
…….
This essay also serves as a critique of those NPCs who have been fooled throughout history (and continue to be fooled) by falling victim to the elite’s propaganda against their own interests, and it also serves as an attack on society’s sociopathic rulers who hide in the shadows, issuing secret orders behind the curtain without the public’s knowledge or consent. Per J.R.R. Tolkein, “The true equation is ‘democracy’ equals government by world financiers. The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or what is most important of all, the banker of the backer. Enthroned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understood of the people.”
I emboldened the Tolkein quote because few associate him with political opinion, and yet clearly he had an informed one. Moreover what he said about a century ago applies equally today.
I think the modern oligarchs you reference are like the front men, glorified Secretaries, but are not the ‘backer of the backer’ or ‘the banker of the backer’. All is occluded.
Which leads back to the first quote from Solzhenitsyn which is, I think, partly what you are lamenting yourself:
“The prolonged absence of any free exchange of information within a country opens up a gulf of incomprehension between whole groups of the population, between millions and millions. We simply cease to be a single people, for we speak, indeed, different languages.” Alexander Solzhnetizyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Posted by: Scorpion | Nov 28 2023 16:02 utc | 103
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