The Deep Ones and the Madness of Crowds
March 28th, 2008This thing, this situation we all face, cannot be changed by mass protests, gradual applications of pressure or any legislative process. Realize the fact that WE HAVE ALREADY LOST. Say it with me, “We have already lost.” Everyone reading this site knows it, whether you want to admit it or not. We all know that the actors in control are in a position to take this thing to its logical conclusion, which is the enslavement of the remaining population of the planet. After you get over the fear, these concepts become liberating, actually. Start making a plan.
The more you keep grasping for glimmers of hope within the political system, the worse off you will be.
Realize that, while there’s no out of the Matrix, you can hack the thing in innovative, interesting and efficient ways. Politics, though, is a prison inside the Matrix. It’s a honeypot designed to trap your consciousness. There’s nothing useful or even interesting about politics. It’s a mechanism of formalized, legalized graft. Why look to it to improve the situation?
Turn your back on politics and take responsibility for your own life. Set your own priorities. Plan. Execute.
For the rest of the victims, there’s always the next election and another black eye.
Via: Rigorous Intuition:
All through the Bush years, scores of non-Republicans have anticipated the brutal full-flowering of traditional dictatorship with all the trappings: martial law, mass internment and the cancellation of elections. Through much of the Clinton years, many non-Democrats looked for the same. It didn’t come (though some are still waiting). It’s as if they’ve not only expected the worst, but sought it, to put them out of their misery. But the worst exceeds their expectations, and their misery is to be protracted indefinitely.
The Kennedys and King, the October Surprise and Mena, anthrax and Wellstone, Gore and Kerry, Florida and Ohio: you might think that would be enough to make most Democrats say You know what? This isn’t working out. But elections are paced like the Olympics, and in another four years the Jamaican bobsledders may really have a shot. Hey, anything’s possible. And so long as people believe that, and that anything means everything they want, the cycle repeats and self-perpetuates.
The great assassinations of the Sixties were decapitation strikes, never intended to kill the host or to extinguish hope. It’s only the hopeless who are dangerous. Hope must be encouraged, because you don’t need to do anything to have it, and it keeps the prey from becoming wise to its own nature and seeking extraction from the cycle. Hope makes it possible to write and believe such things as “Al Gore will save the planet but Barack Obama will save this country.” Hope that the system works, even if it is just a digestive system.
Restrained predation upon the Democratic Party may be at an advanced stage of domestication, but it also mimics molecular endosymbiosis with the injection of alien organelles in the form of the Trojan horse DLC to which, of all the contenders, both Clinton and Obama are closest in tactics and ideology. Funny how that happened.
And how did that happen? I think there’s an institutional instinct at work, in the Deep Context, that maintains the insectival social engine of power. Does Obama know his role? That may be irrelevant, because the volition and cognition of the individuals who form the living manifestation of the system may be grossly overstated. They have given themselves to the system, the system has groomed them and raised them above all others, and they instinctively know what the system requires.
Is it hopeless? Thank Christ, yes, so get used to it. There’s a liberation to hopelessness, in knowing what can’t be done (or more typically, politically, be done for you), which I personally find preferable to another four years of huffing one’s own jenkem. There’s no salvation within the political cycle of death and rebirth, consumption and excretion – jellies eat and shit through the same simple hole, which could also be a reasonably sophisticated media analysis – and to hope for such a savior is to be the doomed hero of Lovecraft’s fiction.
Yes, I’m Familiar with Derrick Jensen: Beyond Hope
this comes at a peculiar time for me.
one short comment by numerian at the agonist on ‘american exceptionalism’ led me to hours of reading off the pages listed in just the first google list proffered up in searching that phrase.
after all that, to come here and see this, strikes a resonant chord.
chalmers johnson, whose trilogy of books i haven’t read yet but hope to, said we must dismantle our empire. that struck me as true and obvious and unlikely. in one of the last pages i read from that google list, Obama was spoken of with regards to american exceptionalism, and i learned (only now!) he too said we must expend our military.
zinn, chomsky, all ‘the usual suspects’ have i quoted in my file as related to all that, and indeed i quote chomsky’s bit about We Own The World on my site’s front page. michael collins wrote a great piece (on The Money Party) on the agonist and for me, a rantpost by tim gatto on american presumptiousness was a corollary to it (no matter any critical failings). so i have this file accruing tonight, and why? politics? freedom? history and philosophy? when most free, i’m almost actually useful and communally beneficial. when arrested, i’m pretty useless. sounded good, huh? put another way: a matter of sanity and health?
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but yeah, just whiffreading this post -i’ve yet to even dive into this post -it does so strike a sympathetic chord at this peculiarly particular moment.
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frankly, i was trying to disengage from public discourse a bit to write fiction again, another What If. alien intervention, power intoxication, any and all my memes, themes and dreams addressed in near cartoony illustrations and such to apply myself in a project of distraction that may divert from all these details while wallowing in fantasy that doesn’t evade the whole. discourse is fine, but i’m contributing nothing really but maintaining the agitation…
if and when i’ve something worth sharing, i’ll relay the url. i go now to dive into this piece.
Best article I’ve read here in a while. Thanks!
hokay, here tis.
center of the universe
on american exceptionalism
(thanks to nudge by Agonista Numerian)
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/cotu.htm
links to selected scans from Senator William J. Fulbright’s 1972-74 book, The Crippled Giant included at end. i came across this old book recently and it floored me with all it’s current relevency. all that we are suffering through now was warned about then in all the particulars. i don’t doubt that cheap paperback copies might be had for a song. i recommend it to all.
(i commented out the youtube of the NY police beatins, btw.)