By the time…
By the time we add in the complications and machinations of media it is damn impossible to know what is going on.
Some call it Marketing 3.0….
How do we keep from being fooled by perception? We must begin by understanding how weak perception is at providing us with enough dis-ambiguous clues to figure out what is going on. We are always just this close to being an Australian bug that's tricked into mating with a nubbly, brown beer bottle. Even direct perception takes place within such narrow bandwidths and at best provides a simulation of just enough for us to get by – survive. When it comes to what we perceive via media; especially at this point when media is completely tied to the justifications of a bankrupt world-view; the only thing that we can go on is that most likely we are being fed disinformation.
Information. Just as something is losing all viability it gets a name, a catchword. Peace, Ecology…. And now information. The Information Age is the time when the idea of information: that we don't need understanding if we have enough facts; is fetishized and then played. It is taken on face value as important and then it is manipulated, because that's what Players do.
These players don't have to add-up to some single and vast conspiracy. Actually, the conspiracy-meme is one of the basic tools of media manipulation. Go back to Project Blue Book. What's most significant is not the plot of this story; but how an entire process of marginalization and the control of expression was pioneered. Once a version of normality can be manufactured and disseminated it is then enforced by the practices of marginalization we find at work with UFOs. The table is tilted so far that we fight to cling to the edge of normality and are so afraid of being thought of as abnormal that we refuse to see any gradations in any critique of that normalcy. There are conformers and there are kooks. Which do you want to be?
Not much need for strong-arm measures once this process has gotten well under way. They're just there to mop-up. And to provide a theater of terror parading before our eyes all the dangers and risks of being taken for a kook.
The propaganda machine pioneered by Goebbels and his boss in the thirties became the chief spoils of war in the late forties. This was the foundation, when coupled with industrial Freudian-ism – by way of Freud's daughter and son-in-law – for Madison Avenue and the great Age of Consumerism. Now that the system all that built and supported is reeling from shocks on all sides the still powerful and even more dangerous remnants of its heirs are turning to this home-grown American twist.
And this system, and remember that a system is not a cabal of action-hero-movie-villains. A system is what we perceive as a pattern within a matrix of activity that is beyond comprehension – same as any other perception no matter how pristine. So what we perceive as this system can never be fully understood. Certainly can never be known. And chasing after those kinds of impossible certainties only leads us into madness.
This system has layered so many intertwined and interacting levels of the Kook Gambit on what we receive as information that the best heuristic advice to work with is to not accept anything we're told – certainly by anyone who is paying for the opportunity to inform us. The twist is that we can't do this reflexively since those on the leading edges of this game-playing have taken meta-fuckery to new heights. Layers of manufactured irony and phony sincerity have infiltrated every aspect of what we find wherever we look.
We've had to accept that the biosphere is hopelessly polluted and that our cultures are bankrupt in the face of our Enormity. This is just one more aspect of this general collapse. This is how our culture has been corrupted. These are the toxins we have to confront.
The worse part of it is if we have to fall through all the same stages of denial, anger, and futility as we become aware of these predicaments as we have for the rest. Can we just add this to the load we already carry and get on with it?
Egotism is a reaction to severe trauma. Manipulators are addicted to playing the game. The power of the game is in its ability to hold people in its thrall. We can be fighting very hard to uncover the lies of the manipulators and still be as completely co-opted by the game as they are. The only way to dissolve its power is to abandon it.
Just like in Conimbriga. Just like in all the cities and countrysides suffering the horrors of actual physical collapse around us. Citizens suffering collapse must either abandon the old culture and its binds or perish in the rubble. For those of us living in pockets where the realities of physical collapse have not yet reached us the only thing we have that they don't is the opportunity to choose to leave before utter precarity demands it.
Every agenda-driven source of information is corrupt.
Heuristic #n:
Something is hazardous to you in direct proportion to how much money was spent to get you to believe it.
Everyone of us who has been influenced by this Juggernaut over the last half-century or more has been contaminated by this corruption. The way this shows itself is most easily described as the baggage of received opinion that we take to calling our role, our persona, our self. So long as we have not broken through these binds by practicing Proprioception, and other things, we are at the mercy of these manipulations. Until we can integrate our individual shadows we will continue to be destined to face them out there. So long as we continue to believe that power and volition can defeat these mechanisms we will only help compound misery and spread suffering.
If we begin to see how in our own heart-of-hearts we are complicit then we can begin to see how those we hate – and every faction of fighters in the world is driven by hatred, everything else is just a self-justification – those we hate are also acting blindly.
David Bohm's image of the paralyzed woman hitting herself in the darkness is not just a way to see how we are each affected by a lack of Proprioception. We can expand this image. Duplicate her and then duplicate them, again and again until the number of people acting out of fear in the darkness has reached our nearly ten billion. When we strike out against those who have struck us we only add to the foment. We do nothing to slow or stop the chain-reaction. This does not imply an ideological non-violence. What we do in self-defense; so long as we are ready to face the consequences in accepting responsibility, rejecting self-justification, and embracing the load of our grief; is, or might be, necessary.
This conditional acceptance that we have no easy mantle of justification at any point, including the point of self-defense is a key to the insights tickling at the edge of visibility. But it cannot be understood properly so long as we see this, or anything, as an admonition to act a certain way. The only admonition is to "Pay Attention!" Only by dismantling our current so-called-selves can we find what it is to act in compassion. What happens then is not structured by the constraints we take for granted. It is built upon our abandonment of idea. An abandonment of the entire notion that we direct action and know the result.
If we look at these statements from the perspective of the Kook Squad they are insane. Mechanisms click into gear and this particular bit of information is subsumed into the category of deviant. The system rushes to heal itself. And, in so doing it adds another layer of corruption and destruction to our lot. Metastasis is good for the tumor.
Navigating in a fog is a particular and trying discipline. It does no good to rail at the fog or curse the lack of visibility. Still, amazing feats, especially so to those unaware of what is possible, are done every day. and here we're talking about navigating, not following animated glowing dots on some radar-screen. The foundation of navigating in a fog is found in how we learn to attune our awareness. How we recognize that we are prone to fill gaps in our perceptions with follies arising from our fears. On this foundation much is possible. Without it?
