Road sign: What I am trying to do here
The elephant in the room is how civilization really works. Naming it starts with understanding how we function emotionally and leveraging that. Let's get uncomfortable and real together.
I intend to help you understand the basics of what is happening in the world so that you can get right to productive action. I will do that by distilling and describing abstract mechanisms of how we individually function and how civilization functions.
I also intend to encourage cooperation between folks of different perspectives, because creating change depends on cooperating. When I drive, I make both right and left turns. I trust that you do, too. We all stop at stop signs and let others go through the intersection. We successfully honor each other and cooperate every day.
I understand that it is almost impossible to get a clear idea of what is happening in the world by using corporate news products and that browsing alternative news is too time-intensive for most of us to do regularly. It has been my fate to persistently observe and digest larger social and cultural patterns to save others from having to.
I became aware of the basic dishonesty of media and government almost 50 years ago, watching them team up on a brilliant, sincere, and caring man, Jimmy Carter. What I watched and understood was confirmed by a great journalist, Walter Karp, who compared how Carter and Reagan were treated. The honest one was constantly discredited and lied about, while the liar was constantly given credit for things he did not do.
Karp showed how Reagan was just a puppet. He didn’t actually decide anything or do much other than read speeches. This pattern continues today. A man who cannot find his own way to the bathroom is supposed to be our leader, and the woman who is supposed to be picking up the slack gives no indication of having done that, or of understanding how leading really works. The faces change, the teams switch from offense to defense, the workflow stays the same.
I am not advocating for the other guy. I am advocating for an urgent effort to consciously influence events on all levels and through all channels we have access to. We have been ruled by people behind the scenes our entire lives. We have passively accepted this. We are intimidated by what we do not understand: how civilization really works. We avoid things that make us uncomfortable: how little we know and how incompetent we are to affect events. These keep us from fulfilling our responsibility for creating a civilization we want. We must overcome our emotions. Now.
The bill for all this is due and it is horrendously high. Our lives are being foreclosed. We are all being evicted and composted. We need to understand how that is happening and shift gears into constructive action as if our lives depend on it, because they do.
Take a deep breath and sigh: I am proposing that we don’t need to know most details about politics, economics or other complex topics. Simple summaries are enough. They help us see the signs and make useful turns. Most of what needs to happen is interaction not information. Information gathering is comfortable and feels safe, but it does not connect us or achieve what we need to. Getting uncomfortable and real together is the remedy for where we are now and the road to where we need to go.
Knowing details does not magically empower us. It does not give us the power to convince others or get results. Most perception and behavior is emotional and is not affected by rational arguments. Learning how to use emotional know-how is a key to unlocking change. With that know-how, lifelong patterns of arguing and convincing end and more successful ones get ignited.
During the past three years I wrote two short books, The Trap and The Elephant, about how civilization works. The books are small because civilization is the same for both animals and people. Five simple strategies for hunting, herding, and ranching animals are at the core of what is done to us:
Define and direct. Scare and steer. Confuse and control. Feed for fidelity. No context/new context.
The books discuss how we function as emotional perceivers and actors, both alone and in groups. Understanding those workflows enables us to transcend most us-them conflicts, identify shared needs and goals, and use them as starting and end points for cooperating.
Large free samples of all my books are here. The full, short books are available for download at www.wizardofwords.xyz for $5 each. The 1000 page Civilization Undressed series, bringing the last 50 years into focus, is $20. Two pamphlets, The Germ War and The Green War, are free to download and print.
Wake up. Make decisions. Stay sane.
Kathryn: Thank you for the reflections. Temple Grandin. I recall watching a Ted Talk from her. It very much affected me. Basically, if I got it right, she discussed livestock chutes that made sure the livestock could not hear, smell, or see what was happening to those right ahead of them in line, so that they would not freak out or back out until their time had come. Then, and this is the clincher, they were not actually killed. They were captive-bolt stunned: Shot in the head with a special gun that does not release a bullet, just knocks out the victim by hitting them hard. They are then dissected while still alive, but stunned. All of this is done to keep the workflow frictionless and to prevent adrenalin from making the meat taste bad.
That is what is happening to us now: The CØV$D traumatization was the head shot. We are now like paralyzed cattle, being cut up by the globalist butchers and their local collaborators, too stunned to realize what is happening.
To keep going with your references: "the hideous public school system which was trying to deconstruct my children." I woke up to that in third and fourth grade. It was killing me. Fortunately, I was pulled out after that and put in a small school where I was rehumanized. I was already seeing my sensitive peers turning to self-harm and knew that many of them would not survive being teenagers in that system.
Part two of that for me was the book "Cinderella ate my daughter", (Peggy Orenstein) in which a mother talks about what Disney programming did to her kid (made her fantasize a generic identity, focus on the color pink, and perhaps become sexually compliant and compulsive). We are stalled out by school environments in which we never receive the interactions we need to mature completely, and thus desperately internalize cultural programming to learn how to behave and succeed. No accident that girls were given a mama "madonna" figure by culture to teach them how to be women, and the girls in the Disney Mickey Mouse Club programming track (Britney Spears, Christina Aguillera; later version Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana) grew up to be just like mama, and train millions more.
Part three for me came from a deep recapitulation of my childhood experience. I cover it in this year's book, The Elephant, the center of this post. I figured out how we are deliberately and methodically deprived of the things we need to graduate from childhood. It leaves us constantly stressed out about what to do, because after thousands of hours of being commanded to sit down, shut up, and do what the people around you are doing, we no longer know how to initiate successful action. We are forever waiting for an adult to come into the room and fix things (thus the completely unreasonable hopes for leadership from the shockingly dysfunctional puppets presented as leaders).
Part four: the deathcare system. Doctors are not immune to this. They are, after the military, the most programmed profession. They take mindless obedience to incredible extremes. Although scientifically trained, they are not really trained to be scientists, or to apply the scientific method to evaluating their own treatments and procedures. Most are completely incapable and fiercely avoidant of evaluating their own profession and asking the single, simple, most important question: Does doing my job really do the job I think I am doing? (producing health and providing care).
I cover all this in my book, The Elephant. It is not just one profession. It is every profession. It is systemic. We are programmed to be generic people having generic lives, obeying what we have unconsciously internalized: characters, scenes, relationships, and scripts provided by hypnotic, high-tech corporate culture. We become subsumed into playing out reruns. Our own personal life becomes like the presidential monument, only a distant mirage.
The part I am excited about is that the system is so simple. Once we recognize its pieces, we can see it everywhere, as you now do. And it is possible to point it out to the people around us, and together escape from the granite walled tourist circuit. South Dakota is waiting, and not just the images of dead presidents, also the incredible Crazy Horse monument nearby, our other existential opportunity as heroine activists who ignite ourselves and rally our people.
My 2001 visit to the presidential monument in South Dakota forced me to wake up about how we are being herded. The venue had been completely revamped since my first visit as a child in 1971. At that time, you could hike up to the base of the edifice. The crowds were now Shepherded into a series of connected granite-lined viewing areas, crowded with souvenir stores. It reminded me of how the famous animal behaviorist designed cattle chutes. The monument was a distant mirage.
Since then, I started cataloguing more ways the government directs the population. Another wake up call for me was the hideous public school system which was trying to deconstruct my children, the deathcare system , and so on.