Caitlin Johnstone:
If
you live in one of the so-called free democracies of the western world,
the worst mistake you can make is to buy into the hype. To believe you
are a free individual in a nation that respects and protects your
freedom and individuality.
Whenever I broach this subject I always
get a deluge of objections along the lines of, “Well I’d much rather
live where I live than under an authoritarian regime like in Iran or
China! You would never be allowed to criticize your rulers the way you
do if you lived in one of those places!”
And I always want to ask
them, what do you think drove you to make that objection? Why are you
falling all over yourself to defend your country and the people who rule
over you, while condemning foreign countries that your own government
happens to dislike? Could it be because that’s how you’ve been trained
to behave from a young and impressionable age, and that your objection
is arising from the same place as a cult member’s objections to
criticisms of their cult?
Because that’s ultimately what holds
power structures together in the US-aligned nations of the global north:
indoctrination. The same thing used to program religious extremists and
cult members. The only difference is that rather than scripture and
religious leaders, the means of indoctrination is school, mainstream
media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation.
Without
mass-scale indoctrination into power-serving narratives about nation,
government and world, the power structures which rule over us would
immediately collapse. People would cease voluntarily behaving in ways
that benefit those power structures, cease acknowledging their
government as a legitimate authority, cease pretending elections are
real procedures for determining their government’s actions, cease
believing they’re receiving truthful information from the mass
indoctrination media, and use the power of their numbers to organize in
ways which benefit the many rather than an elite few.
This is what people are defending when they object to being told they don’t live in
a free society. The objection is itself the product of the reality
they are denying.
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