Entertainment, Mainstream Narratives, Elections and subtle body conditioning.

We need not so much a system, as a series or a web of mature, functional and nurturing relationships across families, communities and societies. Instead what we have is bullying and entertainment.

Entertainment.

Entertainment! It's ONLY entertainment!

How often have I heard this term applied to mainstream 'moving images, noise and verbiage' offered up for the fatigued consumer to relax to, to enjoy, to be 'moved' by thrilling images, to be enthralled by amazing CGI effects!

Apocalypse Now! "It's ONLY entertainment!"

Avatar! "It's ONLY entertainment!"

The Lord of The Rings! "It's ONLY entertainment!"

And even then some people will read more into these media than the authors intended. I know this from my own song-writing, and am often amazed at what audience members will read into or take out of a song, how rich that content is that I did not intend.

Apocalypse Now! "It exposes the brutality of war!"

Avatar! "It's a parable for our times!"

The Lord of The Rings! "It's about the power of the little guy!"

No, it's not. Just about that. That's the seduction, the nectar. And the point of the flower is the pollen......

Yes, what you know as entertainment has elements of that ... enjoyment... in it, though that is not the point of it all - it has to make some profit, that's a given, so it has to entertain to do that and yet it also has a function within the Power system we are living in. And that function is the point of it all...

If you read what is offered as mainstream popular entertainment the way I do (and I agree that we all have different ways to read the media and narratives we consume) they are a subtle way of saying Violence for Good is OK and the System we live is as good as it gets, barring incremental cosmetic improvements. 

Take a GOOD look at That all too common sequence of boy meets girl in the midst of some violent narrative of good vs evil, with a love scene in the middle of the extreme violence... a psychopathic switch on/off, a sweet turn-on that actually is also a turn-on for GOOD violence.. it's as nasty as it is obvious to me, and of course when this is pointed out most people do get it, though in my experience most also reject it to the extent they wish to hang on to their hit, their entertainment - what they don't get is the way in which the unobserved visceral cascades of hormones are conditioning the consumer into the psychopathic socially and Institutionally approved stand point.

And that conditioning is the KEY message, because it also underpins the States monopoly on organised violence, because the State is always benign. Or so we are told to believe, even if the evidence is patchy. God is good. Onward Christian Soldiers! etc etc etc...

For me, simply being, simply breathing and sensing my own body is pure entertainment.

Taking a dump and feeling the fullness of how my body works, that's entertaining. Watching a genuinely proficient musician/dancer/skate boarder - that's entertainment. Working my garden is very much entertaining. Seeing my children make mistakes and grow, that's entertaining.

Playing music and watching a good musician, that's entertainment...

I also understand that adage, "different strokes for different folks", and cannot deny that some people are entertained by what is offered up as mainstream consumer entertainment.

However, whilst watching movies such as THE HUNGER GAMES and LORD OF THE RINGS and JAMES BOND and BATMAN and THE MATRIX etc and observing how the body reacts to the sequential violence in these movies, I have noticed the hormone cascades, the muscular tensions, the non-thought patterns alongside the obvious and subliminal messages. These are quite different in tone and character to the cascades I experience when I am truly entertained.

I do not call this latter experience  'entertainment'....

It's entrainment rather than entertainment.

The primary narrative within mainstream movies, fiction and News Media is towards a socialised normalisation by vicarious exposure, through the use of a powerful experiential medium, to the prevailing adverse pathological psychology of force and power.

It's required for that subtle indoctrination into the various falsified justifications for POWER over others to be used AGAINST others for 'good'. It's a sop for unresolved rage and anger that so many people grow up with a result of being bullied at School, in Churches, Synagogues and Mosques, at University and at Work. It's a dead end that leads nowhere nurturing.

So yes, if we want and deserve a world where violence is accepted as long as it is for the 'good', where slapping and spanking children is a parents 'right', where the death penalty is a States 'right', where poverty is considered a problem of the 'poor' rather than a logical outcome of the hoarding of resources, where the sequestering of wealth is considered a 'good thing' for the Economy, let's call the subtle conditionings of Institutional Power Society entertainment.

Noam Chomksy, in an interview with Shira Hadad in 2005 points out that a similar dynamic applies to elections in the USA, the UK and in practically ALL States that hold elections.

"Because elections are carefully contrived so that they are like selling toothpaste. In fact, they’re run by the same people who sell toothpaste.

I mean when you turn on an ad on television, you don’t expect to get any information. You expect deception. That’s the point.

Only economists talk about markets. Business can’t tolerate markets. They don’t want markets in which informed consumers make rational choices.

What they want is deluded consumers who will make irrational choices. That’s what hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising are spent on. You don’t get any information about the product.

But what happens when the same industry sells candidates?

Exactly the same thing. I mean, about 10 percent of the crop of voters knew what the stand of the candidates was on issues.

What they knew is the delusionary imagery that was created.

So Bush is created to be an ordinary guy with his sleeves rolled up and you could have a drink with him in a bar.

My guess is he’s taught to make those mispronunciations and grammatical errors; I doubt that he talked like that at Yale.

He’s probably taught that way so that ‘them liberal intellectuals’ would make fun of him and then they can say, oh yeah, he’s an ordinary guy just like you, going off to his ranch. That makes him about as realistic as the next ad you could see on television for a lifestyle report."

The narrative exists to sell an image, and becoming acculturated to that image is essential in maintaining one's compliance with the System of Power and it's directions and instructions.

It's also true that as this becomes clear to more and more people that less and less people vote, not out of apathy.... not voting is a form of direct action, of civil disobedience as people refuse to participate in the charade. Not voting exposes the charade, and that is why Power hates the non-voter.

Imagine if no-one voted bar the membership of the parties?

And with every 'spring', every televised 'revolution', every mass movement outside the given political show, we see too that the pattern of the insertion of professional violence has become a standard counter revolutionary tactic of destabilisation. Once the violence starts, the discussions cease and we all have to run for cover.

Snipers paid to murder protesters and police in the Ukraine. Mujahadeen funded by USA and Saudi regime, in Afghanistan in the 80s. The insertion of the IRA into the Civil Rights portest movement in Northern Ireland,in spite of being rejected by Civil Rights Movement leaderships. Agent Provocateurs and undercover policemen and women inserted into grass roots Climate Change protest groups.

Anyone who has genuine grounds for protest and a well qualified argument to support it, is seen as a direct threat to Power, and must be undermined. Even if the aims of the protest would bring benefits to Society as a whole it mus be undermined; we are allowed to protest, and we are actively barred from changing the status quo.

Which is basically immature, dysfunctional and nasty, nasty behaviour. Dishonesty with petty cash is immature. Fleecing expenses is immature. It's amoral to be an adult and to refuse maturity.

Like I wrote above : "We need not so much a system, as a series or a web of mature, functional and nurturing relationships across families, communities and societies. Instead what we have is bullying and entertainment."







Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Irish Priests, Abuse and Society

Another report from the slow snail of Justice and Governance in Ireland regarding the vast swathe of crimes against children perpetrated by the people within the Institutions set up by State and Church for the 'care' of children has just been published. The BBC reported this here

I left a comment which formed the basis for this piece. I do not know if it will be published.

I spent my childhood in Irish Catholic Boarding Schools, from age five and a half to seventeen, and as a ward of court, was in custody of my relatives. Who were less than empathetic. Let it be know that abuse occurred in peoples homes too, and that much of that activity has been covered up. Thus as a child there was no-one for me to turn to talk to about my experiences.

I grew up believing those experiences, and my shame, were normal. I believed my low self-esteem was my own fault, that I was evil, a sinner and at heart a disgusting, filthy and ugly person, even though I could pass myself off as reasonably affable.

My life has been pretty much ruled  and dominated by those experiences and how I 'adapted' to them, how I internalised the values of those who abused me, and took on the image they protected on to me as my own identity.

Years and years of unhappiness, dysfunction, insecurity and a nameless rage (for which, for a long I time no target - and that meant I turned the rage upon myself and those close to me) have dogged my life.

I have struggled as best I can to heal, this for myself, and to understand, to fully comprehend  the dynamics of abuse operating at such a huge scale, such that it might be classed a societal problem, because the problem is tractable, because the cycles can be broken, and because this should never happen to any child,  and because the resolution of which is essential to the future of all human beings.

There is no higher calling on Earth today.

It is the FACT of  the intentional and systematic  climate pollution of our children’s psyches through conditioning processes that is a taboo subject for mainstream society and the ‘greens’ and other movements for change must now address this issue, openly. Vigorously.

Failure to do so will be catastrophic for all of us.

Because abuse is always about POWER. Abuse is always about control. Abusers 'condition' those they abuse to accept the abuse as 'normal'. To maintain that control.

There is a long historical record in writing, of the processes of conditioning, under the guise of education, or child-rearing, or training, that go back millennia, writings that informed the philosophies of dominance that are the basis of this society. The cycles of abuse go deep.

I am encouraged that the issue is being looked at, today, and in my own lifetime, and not least by the victims and their families, and empathetic researchers. Much research in these areas has been undertaken, and much is known, far more than is in practice through state sponsored projects, such as education, health , culture and ‘spreading democracy’.

I am less encouraged by Government action on these issues. Slow, unwilling to respond to victims with the speed with which they responded to the abusers, in this case, The Christian Churches. That they defend the likes of leaders who start wars should come as no surprise.  That our Government opposes fiercely any attempts by ordinary folk to arraign war criminals is typical.

There are more incidents beyond the abuse of children, that litter our society, that are tied up in how a society treats children.

The philosophy a society has in this regard must be examined for any false or corrosive assumptions. Conditioning must be acknowledged as a corrosive force.  And ceased.

And that is the only path which I as a survivor deem plausible if we as a society are to honour all children, for all time. It is time, well past time actually, to clean up our collective and centralised acts.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

Expectations of every child

Compulsory State Education exposed ........

The fundamentals of State Control and the true agenda of Compulsory State Education (schooling) are revealed by the following quotations

Charles Pierce, the eminence grise behind William James and John Dewey, architects of Compulsory State Education in the USA wrote :

“Let the will of the state act, then, instead of the will of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young, having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated or expressed.

Let all possible cause of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehension. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard … unusual opinions with hatred and horror. Then, let all men who reject the established belief be terrified into silence….

Let a list of opinions be drawn up to which no man of the least independence of thought can assent, and let the faithful be required to accept all these propositions in order to segregate them as radically as possible from the influence of the rest of the world.”

Woodrow Wilson speaking to an audience of businessmen in New York City in 1909 :

“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

This is the technology of modern management ……this is the doctrine which drove William James in “Principles of Psychology” (1890), to assign habit-training, not intellectual development, the place of honour in schooling :

“Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, it’s most precious conservative agent. It alone is what … saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor … it alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive (jobs) from being deserted. It holds the miner in his darkness. It keeps different strata of society from mixing.”

All of us who attended state schooling have been exposed to and conditioned to accept the imposed and limited ideas that are taught through that education, reinforced through the media and that underpin the success of marketing.

This is the core technology of psychological state control upon which the likes of Tony Blair, David Cameron and the leaders of Indusrty et al depend upon.

Of course they retain that other oh-so familiar stick, that of poverty, physical violence or imprisonment to curtail those few who escape this conditioning. That’s what the War Against Terror and the consistent attack on civil liberties is all about.

Reminding you and I that ‘we are either with us or against us”. And that there are penalties for non-compliance. You will be excluded!

With thanks to John Taylor Gatto, in whose most recent book, "Weapons of Mass Instruction", I found these and other quotes and resources.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

Gattos book, "An Underground History of American Education" is published on-line at his website. In it he researched the international project to establish Compulsory State Education, from it's roots in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to the 21st Century.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe