the biggest obstacle to real freedom is believing we already have it


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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why anti-racism will fail (Thandeka)

image credit: screenshot from page on UUA website, archived*


a copy-paste of the closing paragraph from the file in the document reader below:

Third, Organize.  Build coalitions using your new vocabulary and your new commitment to empathize and work with other UU congregations and other liberal religious groups who are also tired of race-talk separated from talk about class issues.  I believe that we have the power to transform America because of who we are:  We are Middle-America.  Transform this group and you transform the country because we are the majority.  All we need is the moral courage to practice what we preach.  And we will generate this moral courage through love.

at the root of “race talk [and] class issues” and just about everything else that plagues humanity and the planet are the two inseparables, hierarchy and power*

it is up to each and all of us to confront hierarchies – structures of power – “with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love”
see source, archived*


20220826T0314Z*
*a link; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer; see also the about post and the archives of miscellany, notrehta, or fw posts

“After months of internal deliberation and offering online glimpses of their project, the team chosen to suggest revisions to the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Article II – the defining statements of the faith’s values, inspirations, and reasons for being – brought its work to the 2022 General Assembly in June.…

“The commission faces a January 2023 deadline to present recommendations to the UUA Board of Trustees. In June 2023, the General Assembly is expected to vote on proposed Article II changes. If a simple majority of delegates votes the proposal down, the process ends there. If a majority approves the proposal, it will go before the GA again in 2024 for a final vote. To be adopted, the final proposed changes will need a two-thirds majority vote.…

“Some 200 UU congregations and organizations, nearly a fifth of the worldwide total, have already adopted an Eighth Principle.”

source: UU World, July 2022*

2022-10-06 …

added introductory matter above the document reader

article ii site:uua.org (!?)

see also article about Article II, archived*

“all institutions are demonic, including the church” / Chris Hedges (!?)

Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil structures of power and evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love (!?)

power: enabled by consent, disabled by dissent

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, a powerful enabler of power, is not power itself but an effect of power

power cares about power and nothing else: not people, not the planet

power, like gravity, pervades our world, and as with gravity, although we can’t see it, we notice its effects

power is the force that – thanks to the powerful and other enablers – shapes almost everything we care about

power manifests as – and cannot exist without – hierarchy: hierarchies of enablers

power gives more power to those in its hierarchies who play their part well: it promotes them

power takes away power from those who fail to play their part: it demotes them or sidelines them

power grows stronger when we believe stories about ourselves and, spellbound, each play our part like robots

power helps a few people amass or inherit great wealth, and this makes them powerful enablers

power makes the powerful crave even more power: the love of power is an insatiable desire

power concentrates on and is concentrated by hiding from most of us what is really happening

power does untold harm to people and the planet, and gets away with it by manufacturing consent


power decides what happens and decides what people think about what happens: “the narrative”

power won’t quit until we begin to understand it and share that understanding

power is in the mind: once enough of us make a point of understanding power, it can no longer hurt us

…

Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
—Aldous Huxley, 1958

power continues to plague us with “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”

power, as a social disease left unchecked, is terminal

power has many symptoms: selfishness, individualism, poverty, racism, militarism, vanity, overconsumption …

power at present looks set to destroy us and almost everything we care about unless we begin to understand it


2021-11-08T17:17−08* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: November 8, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*

image credit: Caitlin Johnstone, in a satirical piece, archived*

power … is the force that shapes almost everything (!*) / (Jonathan Cook)
hierarchy: hierarchies of enablers / hierarchies of wealth, status, and power* / (David Graeber, David Wengrow)
spellbound*
a few people amass or inherit great wealth*
the love of power is an insatiable desire / Bertrand Russell (!?, !*)
what people think about what happens* / (Caitlin Johnstone)
understanding power (!*)
“Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy … run the show as they see fit.” —Aldous Huxley, 1958 (!*)
“war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”* / (David Graeber, David Wengrow)
/ the hallmark of hierarchy: indifference to the fate of those at lower levels – unless that threatens the status quo

“The well off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.* *

symptoms: selfishness, individualism, poverty, racism, militarism, …
(/
MLK’s three evils – poverty, racism, and militarism (!?) – are symptoms;
power is the disease, and the cause of the disease is ignorance,
where the ignorance meant is of things as they really are (!*) (Jacob Needleman)
/ Chomsky – October 2021 – on manufactured ignorance, among other things:
/)

###

it’s up to us, who think we can’t, to confront powers and structures of evil (!?) by getting together and getting it together
“to make the power structure … say yes when they may be desirous to say no”:

video clip from 1968*

see also: Martin Luther King, Jr. / site:nobelprize.org ! (!?) :: The quest for peace and justice* / Nobel Lecture, December 1964

on power (Jonathan Cook)

Power is the force that shapes almost everything about our lives and our deaths. There is no more important issue. Understanding power and overcoming it through that understanding is the only path to liberation we can take as individuals, as societies and as a species.

Which is why it should be simply astonishing that no one in the media, supposedly a free marketplace of ideas, ever directly addresses matters of power – beyond the shadow play of party politics and celebrity scandals.

And yet, of course, this lack of interest in analyzing and understanding power is not surprising at all. Because the corporate media is the key tool – or seen another way, the central expression – of power.

Very obviously power’s main concern is the ability to conceal itself. Its exposure as power weakens it, by definition. Once exposed, power faces questions about its legitimacy, its methods, its purposes. Power does not want to be seen, it does not want to be confined, it does not want to be held accountable. It wants absolute freedom to reproduce itself, and ideally to amass more power.

That is why true power makes itself as invisible and as inscrutable as it can. Like a mushroom, power can grow only in darkness. That is why it is the hardest thing to write about in ways that are intelligible to those under its spell, which is most of us, most of the time.*


2021-10-13T16:20−07* / at the about* post – at bit.ly/dateposted – anyone can link to this post from its date: October 13, 2021
*a link – or not; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the archive*

emphasis (bolding) added to the excerpt above
understanding power (!*) / search on author’s website
understanding power (!*) / search on this website
understanding power (!gb) / search on Google Books
understanding power (!a) / search on Amazon

read a copy of the tweeted article on archive.today*

on the hubris of the immensely rich (or powerful)

John Major, right, in 1996, John Naughton, centre, observing: “The amazing thing about Major, though, is that he didn’t go crazy (unlike Thatcher before him and Blair afterwards). In fact he remained a perfectly normal person. On the day after his 1997 defeat, for example, he went off to watch cricket at the Oval.”

John Naughton:
I have a theory about this hubris. Great wealth does strange things to people — and to those around them. It’s a combination of aphrodisiac and reality-distortion field. Immensely rich (or powerful) people think they are rich (or powerful) because they’re very special. And the people around them think that if someone is immensely rich or powerful they must be smart. And so there’s a kind of positive feedback loop that intensifies with time.

That’s bad enough when the wealthy are middle-aged. But when the money arrives at a point when the recipient is barely out of short trousers — as, for example, with some of the Silicon Valley crowd, then not only do they think they’re geniuses, but so too do those around them, not to mention the journalists who fawn upon them. Live like that for a while and you go bananas.

That’s why political leaders go crazy after a while. They’re surrounded by people who admire them, or look as if they do.

I once had an interesting demonstration of this. …*


20210304T0928−08*
*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer / … and maybe browse or search the post archive*

power: breaking the spell

“The rich man in his castle, the poor man …" —Cecil Frances Alexander, All Things Bright and Beautiful*

all we know is stories,
and we are under the spell
of stories we believe

the story of power we are led to believe
is that some people are innately powerful
or powerful by right, the rest of us not

some people understand power and use it,
and the rest of us don’t; that’s the truth

people who use power get what they want
by having the rest of us give it them,
spellbound as we are by what we believe

to break the spell, no one need do more
than need be done to simply be and let be
with choiceless awareness

“Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”
—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958*

“Understanding power and overcoming it through that understanding is the only path to liberation we can take as individuals, as societies, and as a species.”
—Jonathan Cook, 2020*

four insatiable desires: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power / Bertrand Russell*

“Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates.”
—Bertrand Russell, 1950 Nobel Lecture, archived*


*a link; see a note on notes and links; see also a disclaimer

choiceless awareness (!*) / on this site

choiceless awareness (!*) / on another site




four insatiable desires: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power


“acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power” (!g)

Acquisitiveness – the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods – is a motive which, … although it is the mainspring of the capitalist system, is by no means the most powerful of the motives that survive the conquest of hunger. Rivalry is a much stronger motive. … Vanity is a motive of immense potency. … Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates. … Alcibiades … Napoleon … Such men, however, are not quite pure examples, since they also derive immense satisfaction from vanity. The purest type is that of the eminence grise – the power behind the throne that never appears in public, and merely hugs itself with the secret thought: «How little these puppets know who is pulling the strings.» Baron Holstein, who controlled the foreign policy of the German Empire from 1890 to 1906, illustrates this type to perfection. He lived in a slum; he never appeared in society; he avoided meeting the Emperor, except on one single occasion when the Emperor’s importunity could not be resisted; he refused all invitations to Court functions, on the ground that he possessed no court dress. He had acquired secrets which enabled him to blackmail the Chancellor and many of the Kaiser’s intimates. He used the power of blackmail, not to acquire wealth, or fame, or any other obvious advantage, but merely to compel the adoption of the foreign policy he preferred.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/russell/lecture/
!gi Tenniel: “Dropping the Pilot” / March 1890 cartoon on the forced resignation of Otto von Bismarck (!?)

Jonathan Cook, a British-Israeli journalist and former Guardian employee who now works freelance, makes the point Bertrand Russell made 70 years ago: visible power is vulnerable, invisible power is not.

“As I pointed out in my previous post, the establishment’s power derives from its invisibility. Scrutiny is kryptonite to power.” —Jonathan Cook, here

“Understanding power and overcoming it through that understanding is the only path to liberation we can take as individuals, as societies, and as a species.” —Jonathan Cook, here

*an asterisk here shows that the about post links to this post