Covid-19: The Edge of the Narrative Matrix, Caitlin Johnstone, A Sense of Place Magazine, 24 March, 2020.
Powerful people will work to advance authoritarian agendas which they have no intention of reversing during this pandemic. They are working on it right now. This is not a possibility, this is a certainty.
if your government is pushing the suspension of civil liberties before coming up with a healthcare plan or providing you with financial security in an unprecedented economic crisis, then their desire to suspend civil liberties has nothing to do with fighting the pandemic.
Missing the cute, innocent days of early 2020 when our biggest concern was just that the continent of Australia would burn to ashes and Trump would start a full-scale war with Iran?
Everyone’s been primed by years of popular post-apocalyptic movies/shows, as well as a growing sense of dread and a general intuition that something’s gotta give soon. Please stay calm and let your better nature win out, humans. We can use this opportunity to transcend ourselves.
The political/media class is largely responsible for its own inability to get the public to take this pandemic seriously. You can’t constantly lie to people about important issues their entire lives and then expect them to suddenly trust you.
The primary reason people are so vulnerable to propaganda is that hardly anyone clearly sees just how much human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative. There’s a night and day difference between reality and the stories minds tell about reality. Manipulators exploit this.
Most people assume that the mental stories in their heads are an accurate reflection of what’s happening outside their skull, and it just isn’t. Manipulators know they can just feed people stories, narratives, about what’s happening and they’ll accept those narratives as reality.
Manipulators know they can trade a bunch of convincing words in exchange for all sorts of real valuables: sex, deals, loyalty, votes, political power. Humanity’s deluded relationship with narrative means you can get real, concrete treasures in exchange for pure illusion.
Most of the things which consume your attention are pure narrative constructs: religion, philosophy, culture, politics, the economy, even what you take to be your very self. But few ever take the time to sift these narratives apart from reality, so we’re hackable by manipulators.
The difference between what’s happening and what the babbling mind says is happening could not possibly be more different. Until our species evolves a new relationship with mental narrative which allows a real relationship with the real world, we’ll keep moving toward extinction.
Journalism is a crime.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Oh, you have another Official Bad Guy of the Day, America? It’s the Chinese government today, is it? We’re meant to hate China? Very cool.
So have you you stopped circling the globe with military bases and mass murdering human beings all over the world, America?
No?
Then stop asking me to care about China.
If COVID-19 were a nation, that nation would enact domestic policies which kill the most vulnerable members of its population. Then it would spread this to the rest of the world by inflicting endless war and sanctions on other countries, killing the most vulnerable people there.
Starvation sanctions do the same thing the coronavirus does: kill the most vulnerable members of the population. A population with both experiences these effects squared. The Trump administration owns every single one of the COVID-19 deaths in Iran.
When I was five, I had a friend who would “be the judge” to whatever game we were playing and whenever I started to win, she would judge that I was actually not winning. I stopped playing with her.
If you object to people calling Chelsea Manning by her preferred pronouns more than you object to the things that have been done to her, you have wasted all of your time on this planet.
If we lived in a truly healthy, sane world, and then it suddenly began acting like the normal status quo of this current world, our collective shock and horror would dwarf the reaction we’re having to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because we’ve normalized so many vastly worse horrors.
America shouldn’t be in the Middle East at all, much less Iraq, and the US government is solely responsible for every American soldier who dies there.
Some days I just can’t write. I have plenty to say, I know all the things I want to write about, I’ve done all the research and prepared all my links, but I just can’t get the words flowing. It’s what I imagine erectile dysfunction feels like.
Doubt anyone remembers this but there was once a time when people expressing socialist or antiwar views were referred to as “pinkos” and “moonbats” instead of “Kremlin agents” and “Russian bots”.
Truth is Russian in an empire of lies.
Whenever there’s an economic downturn I always get my hopes up that maybe this is the one where people go “Hey wait a minute, this whole ‘economy’ thing is made up! We can just make up something different instead!”
I am optimistic that we’ll be okay because I know that humanity has untapped potential in areas within ourselves that we’ve barely even begun discussing, much less researching. The manipulators only understand thoughts and language, and there’s so much more to us than that.
We have the potential to break our conditioning patterns, which is huge because our conditioning patterns are what brought us to this point. Every species eventually hits a point where it either evolves or dies, and I already see signs of mass scale unpatterning. We can make it.
Long-established patterns are now being disrupted on a mass scale, creating lots of space to form new ones. Where there used to be a solid brick wall, there are now many gaps with plenty of space to shine light through. Make sure you take advantage of this, clear-eyed rebels.
This story was originally published by Caitlin Johnstone and is reproduced here with her kind permission.
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