Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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The main reason more people don’t just go all in with opposing the US empire and rejecting all its propaganda about enemy states is because they can’t handle working through the heavy cognitive dissonance which comes with recognizing that everything you’ve been taught is a lie.
Most people recognize to some extent that the US and its allies do bad things, but those who take it all the way into a clear understanding that this power structure is responsible for most of our world’s ills are a small minority in the west. Even the relatively awake ones will try to cling on to this or that imperial propaganda narrative about nations like China, North Korea, Iran and/or Russia. Most try to at least keep a foot in the door of their imperial indoctrination, so they don’t have to experience the psychological discomfort of letting it close completely.
But that’s where the truth is. Coming to a lucid understanding of the world necessarily means abandoning all untruths for truth on every level. If you can work up the courage to really do this, the entire mainstream western worldview gets flushed right down the toilet.
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Israel is a bad country full of bad people. They are not bad because of their religion, they are bad because they live in a genocidal apartheid state whose existence depends on indoctrinating its people into seeing genocide and apartheid as good. It’s the system.
It’s always the system. Western countries are full of shitty people with shitty beliefs who do shitty things to each other all the time. This isn’t because westerners are inherently shitty, nor because humans are inherently shitty. It’s because here in the western empire we live under capitalism, which encourages selfish behavior and cutthroat competition against each other, and because we are indoctrinated into accepting the tyrannical white supremacist propaganda of western imperialism.
Nobody is inherently bad. We are all the products of our conditioning, and the systems under which we live play a large role in shaping our conditioning. That’s what mass media propaganda and the indoctrination of western schooling are: streamlined systems for determining what our conditioning will be. These systems can have as much of an effect on our view of the world as other forms of conditioning like trauma.
The powerful understand that humans are an easily conditioned animal, and so vast resources are poured into determining what our conditioning shall be. As soon as we are old enough to start learning about the world our minds are trained to shape us into good cogs in the imperial machine. Good employees and gear-turners for capitalism. Good soldiers and police officers. Good citizens who would never do anything to inconvenience our rulers.
We are funneled through carefully crafted factories of conditioning by the malignant systems under which we live. As long as those malignant systems exist they will keep churning out malignant people, and goodness will struggle to find any purchase. This is true whether you are talking about capitalism, imperialism, or Zionism.
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I’m the least religious person I know but some westerners are getting so obnoxious about Islam and Muslims that I sometimes think about converting, just to piss them off.
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Had a medical incident in my family the other day. It’s funny what a reminder of human mortality can do to dispel all the little resentments and dramas that can build up between loved ones over the years and cause all the old grievances to be seen for the insignificant mind fluff that they are.
And right now I feel sorrowful that it so often takes a major health scare or accident to remind us of this. We all know we’re all going to die, but we let the small stuff come between us anyway. We let the little quibbles in our heads stop us from touching hands and experiencing intimacy with each other during our fleeting time on this beautiful planet.
In the play Waiting for Godot, Beckett writes that our mothers “give birth astride of a grave,” and it’s just so true.
“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more,” the character Pozzo laments.
The line resonates because that really is what the human experience feels like. We get a short time here, and then we’re gone.
How bizarre is it, then, that we still find time to hate each other? That we still have time for grudges and resentment? That our mothers give birth astride of a grave, and we punch and kick each other on the way down?
Bukowski said, “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
It’s about the weirdest thing you could possibly imagine.
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