'The thought of Karl Marx continues to resonate throughout the world and is never more prominent than in the use of the propaganda term “capitalism” by both advocates and opponents of economic freedom. The opposition to “capitalism” by the Occupy movements show that Marxist thought has penetrated deeply into global economic culture. -- In the analysis of the American economist and social philosopher Henry George, the surplus from production is ground rent. Suppose in some geographic region, the average product of labor is greater than the wage paid to workers. The existence of that surplus at that location makes the location valuable, and so entrepreneurs will bid up what they pay to be located there. They will keep bidding up the rent until the rent has soaked up all the surplus. Generally, what economists call the “producer surplus” is really land rent, and since landowners produce nothing, they are non-producers, and the surplus is better called the “non-producer surplus.” -- Hence Marx is right that economists have fetishes. Most economists have made a fetish out of the producer surplus, imagining that it goes to the better producers rather than to non-productive landowners. This is what Mason Gaffney has called the “corruption of economics.” -- Karl Marx recognized that land rents grow not just out of soil but also from society. But rather than conclude logically that this rent should belong to society, Marx made a fetish out of labor and thought that the surplus is part of the economic wage. Marx did not understand that this surplus should be paid by the land title holder for the use of land, in order to have efficient economic calculation. The rent is an implicit reality apart from any explicit payments by tenants to landlords or no explicit payments by owner-occupants. If that rent is not explicitly paid, not only does the landowner take what comes from society and nature, but the rent generates land value that becomes an object of speculation that creates the boom and bust sequence.'

"...there is a strong social condemnation of men standing up for themselves, they're supposed to stand up for other people, but not for themselves..." "...there is no socially or instinctively ingrained taboo against attacking men, there never has been. In fact, the absorption of violence and hostility is a man's natural place in the scheme of things. These perceptions are what lead people to try to justify a woman beating a man in public by assuming he must have done something to deserve it. Men are dangerous, women are harmless. Men are the appropriate targets of violence and men act while women are acted upon. So when feminism fights for women – even when its representatives are actively attacking and doing harm to men in order to do that – most people see those attacks as harmless and reactive rather than active, attacks aimed at a group whose natural role is to absorb them. It's the desperate desires that exists in most of us [who were raised by abusive mothers, girls and boys both] to recharacterize all female action – especially hostility and violence – as reactive, that left society wide open to the snake oil of patriarchy theory..." -- Sugar and spice and all things nice!

When I hear the term "new aesthetic", I reach for my gun.

'When you look at the compare good and evil optimists, you realize that both believe in change and the idea of "progress." The optimistic evil, when they really get going, tend to put everybody who disagrees with their idea of progress into concentration camps. The optimistic good pursue a softer version of the same strategy: they seek out like-minded people with whom they can achieve positive resonance, and avoid people or thoughts they label "negative," a label they apply to any kind of non-scripted dissent. When they pursue action around fundamentally ugly realities, they still look for "heart-warming" and "inspirational." They are fundamentally what Barbara Ehrenreich has labeled "Bright-Sided" people. Whether or not the realize it, they put people they disagree with on the sidelines in cultural concentration camps where their voices are drowned out by positive cheerleading. This is a "tyranny of the vocal minority" consequence, since the optimistic-good (both Right and Left varieties) are so vocal in singing the same tune. Voices of dissent do not harmonize as well. There is a certain merit to this heuristic. Serious change requires collective action, motivation and energy. Negative thoughts and people do drain this energy. But the heuristic gets dangerous when it turns into an unchecked, runaway sort of self-reinforcing positivism.'

"...it's very easy for people to look at society as a whole as a mirror of the family, with the government as mum and dad, and with corporations or bosses as elder siblings, who have significant influence but no direct kind of power in the way that parents do. If we don't know how our own family experience has shaped our beliefs then we really are susceptible to these kinds of ideologies." http://youtu.be/KoGvVxh0iP8

'The reality of corporations, the abuses of history, and how to truly break free of propaganda.' -- “We all see society through the matrix called ‘the family’. Mummy is a Democrat and Daddy is a Republican. But where do ‘corporations’ fit into this matrix? ... ”

"People who are in control of a particular ideology, and have people entrapped within that ideology, are very much into protecting their investments – and growing their investments. The dividends are enormous when you propagandize someone. You can't reason people into religion; you have to indoctrinate the children. The more irrational the doctrine, the more it is corrupt and undermines the minds of children. It has to attack the helpless. Ideology is an old sick lion: it can't hunt the healthy, it can only hunt the weak and the vulnerable, and that means children, always and forever. You let children discover religion on their own. You don't teach children conclusions; you teach them how to think, not what to think."

"Politics is all about getting unmet needs met through the state. And the unmet needs are childhood needs. What people are really trying to do when they want political solutions is they are trying to avoid the pain of dealing with what was missing in their childhoods."

'...the [2+2=5] continues to promote the psychological perspective of victimhood. The cost of this perspective is dear. Feelings of powerlessness, of helplessness, and of personal impotence are psychologically devastating. Such feelings are prescriptions for depression, anxiety, and misery, and they undermine a sense of personal agency and efficacy – the sense that you have the ability to make things happen in your life. Though the leaders of the [2+2=5] enjoy the benefits of making important things happen, their world view has the effect of instilling this sense of victimhood in its followers – with one exception: by participating in the overwhelming movement of historical and social forces in which those on the [2+2=5] believe, you get to be a member of a powerful group. By being part of the movement of the [2+2=5], you get to feel the power of history, the power of natural forces sweeping you and your cohorts to the vanguard of the new world order – or so you think.'

'...people first become hypervigilant and paranoid as catacholamine imbalances and serotonin depletion lead them to expect attack, then engage in sacrificial restaging rituals that are usually both sadistic – inflicting the trauma upon others – and masochistic – destroying your own wealth and even sacrificing your own lives. The result is a feeling of relief that we have survived the apocalypse in our heads plus a feeling of triumph produced by the manic opioid surge. Thus our early traumas become wired into separate emotional memory module and become projected onto the historical stage in such a manner that they appear to be happening to the group rather than being internal, creating group-fantasies so intense and compelling that they take on a life of their own, a life that is imagined as happening in a dissociated sphere called "society." These group-fantasies are dissociated and seem to have a life of their own, a life we term "social" or "political" or "religious."'

'...a tyrant will abuse his power in a destructive way as long as he either encounters no resistance at all or is able to nip that resistance in the bud. ...the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it as long as one denies the suffering it involved. As a rule, beaten, tormented, and humiliated children who have never received support from a helping witness later develop a high degree of tolerance for the cruelties inflicted by parent figures and a striking indifference to the sufferings borne by children exposed to cruel treatment. The last thing they wish to be told is that they themselves once belonged to the same group. Indifference is a way of preserving them from opening their eyes to reality. In this way they become advocates of evil...'

'Children who are given love, respect, understanding, kindness, and warmth will naturally develop different characteristics from those who experience neglect, contempt, violence or abuse, and never have anyone they can turn to for kindness and affection. Such absence of trust and love is a common denominator in the formative years of all the dictators I have studied. The result is that these children will tend to glorify the violence inflicted upon them and later to take advantage of every possible opportunity to exercise such violence... Children learn by imitation. Their bodies do not learn what we try to instill in them by words but what they have experienced physically. Battered, injured children will learn to batter and injure others; sheltered, respected children will learn to respect and protect those weaker than themselves. Children have nothing else to go on but their own experiences. Evil exists. But it is not something that some people are born with.'

'The horrors of terrorist violence are something we can all watch on our television screens; the horrors in which children grow up are very rarely shown in the media. Thus, most people are not informed about the main source of hatred. They speculate about political, religious, economic or cultural reasons but the speculations are turning in darkness because the true reason must remain obscured: the suppression and subsequent denial of early rage that often ends up in hatred with an endless number of ideologies. Hatred is hatred and rage is rage, all over the world and at any time the same... They are always the fruits of very strong emotions, reactions to injuries to their dignity endured in childhood, normal reactions of the body that were not allowed to express themselves in a safe way. Nobody comes to the world with the wish to destroy. Every newborn, independently from the culture, religion or ethnic origins needs to love, be loved, protected, and respected.'

"If you unconsciously resent the unjust and exploitative authority of your parents, and you project that onto the capitalist, you will not escape brutal authority – in fact, you will only intensify it. And that intensification takes the form of the State. If you are a slave, you can't escape. Involuntaryism leads to vengeance, to anger, to rage, to fantasies of destruction. Where we are not free to choose we become slaves to hatred. If you are not free to choose your companions then displacement, distortions, rippled subterfuges in rational thought, abandonment of empiricism, retreat into rank delusion – is inevitable. Because everything that you will believe when you don't have choice will be a mask for that lack of choice ... a mask to justify abandoning choice. If you fundamentally reject choice, you cannot have as your ideal a voluntary system. If you reject voluntaryism in your personal relations, you cannot sustain voluntaryism as an ideal in your ideology."

"What is it that goes on in somebody's life that would lend them to be more susceptible to Marxism? There is a strangely stale and dead relationship that is always depicted in Marxism where there is a factory owner, a bunch of workers – and nobody else throughout the entire economic landscape. There is also within the Marxist class analysis not much room for [the idea of social mobility amongst the classes]. The capitalists can't fall and the workers can't rise. It's all frozen in time. Why [would Marxists] accept that there's no competition for workers between capitalists unless they are [unconsciously] mistaking the employer/employee relationship for the parent/child relationship? [There is no social mobility within a family.] Children are children and parents are parents. The family is communism; the family is socialistic. From each according to their ability to each according to their needs... That is the definition of the parent/child relationship."

The "Sheeple" as a poison container for parental/sibling trauma: "If you come up with an ideology that is fundamentally impossible for, and opposed to, reality and human nature and the necessities of our biological development... why would you set up something like Anarcho-Communism? which not only is it impossible in the world but you can't even do it in your own life—at least you can do Anarcho-Capitalism/voluntary association and peaceful relations in your own life—but you can't do no property in your own life... So I think that is a way of doing 'I'm too good for this world,' where you set up this ideology of 'virtue' that is more about pomposity and hatred than it is about the desire to motivate others to be good. You set up this standard of 'virtue' which is impossible and distasteful and weird for people—and then what happens is, you get to be angry at them for not [reaching] your lofty 'moral' standards and so you get to vent all your disgust onto the world."

"Parental/sibling trauma has to go somewhere. The more it goes into the state, the less it needs to go into religion, which is why marxists were virulently anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-democratic/existing quasi- monarchical governments within Europe in the 19th century. They had given up on God and therefore all of their projections [went] out of God and into the state/corporations – which is why marxists are so virulently anti-capitalist, because the capitalist is the elder sibling and the state is the parent. That's why they focus so much of their rage onto the capitalist because the capitalist is the intermediate power, [the elder sibling who has] more power than the worker [(the younger siblings)] but less power than the state. But they can't focus on the evils of the state because if they focus on the evils of the state, they have no solution because their solution is an ultimate state."

"On the other hand, you would then assume that people who were not religious but also drawn to the same [family abuse] paradigm... that because they don't have God or Satan to project their family/sibling abuses into, they would be far more ferocious about the existing state and existing corporations. So if you're an atheist or agnostic or skeptic or rationalist or non-fundamentalist – then you don't have the big bag of God – therefore your projections have to go somewhere else. Which explains why the more secular, humanistic/left-wing/marxist cadres within society tend to be so virulently anti-corporate and anti- existing state." -- Continues...

"So the more religious [people] are, the more they will tend to be free-market and less afraid of corporations because corporations don't have the projection of sibling abuse... However, Satan and God has all the projections. In the same way, to some degree, it would explain why more religious people tend to be less statist because – in the modern world, the modern libertarian paradigm – they have God into which they place all of their parental projections and therefore they can look upon the state as a thing itself rather than a big bag of emotional projection. So [religious people] can criticize the state because they're not unconsciously criticizing their parents. But if you criticize God, they get very angry and offended because then you are criticizing their parents. If you say God is not virtuous, they hear: my parents are not virtuous on an unconscious level. But because they don't project that onto the state, they can criticize the state very heavily."

"All unprocessed trauma must find a route somewhere, and if it does not find it's route in the truth, then it will find its route in mythology: the mythology of nationalism, of racism, of collectivism, of religion, of superstition, and so on. If trauma is not processed it will find substitutes in mythology. If that is the case – and sibling abuse is the last great unprocessed trauma of society – then this theory is able to explain some interesting set of phenomenon that occur within the realm of libertarianism -to- marxism. -- So Satan is a stand-in for the elder sibling; God is a stand-in for the parent. Corporations are a stand-in for the elder sibling; the state is a stand-in for parents. If that is true then we would expect... that those who are more religious would tend to be less critical of corporations. Why? Because they have the big receptacle, the big black bag of Satan to project all of their sibling trauma into." -- Continues...

"The temptation is to blame the younger sibling as if everything is equal. In this way, the republicans blame the poor for being poor; blame the blacks for being in ghettos; blame women for making less money; and so on. And then the younger siblings say they need the state to protect them from rapacious corporations and polluters and so on – when, of course, the government produces the corporations and polices and regulates them already – so if corporations are doing evil and the government is far more powerful than the corporations and regulates the corporations, then clearly it is not the corporations that are at fault – it is the government that is at fault since it has all the power. But it's far easier to blame the elder siblings and excuse the parents than it is to place the blame for evil within the family where it properly belongs, which is with the parents."

"And we see this repeated over and over in human thought. So when things go bad for government, the statists blame the corporations or they blame the party in power – they can never blame the [state (the parents), or the] principle of coercion which is the foundation of statism. And when things go bad in the world, religious people can't blame God because that would be to question virtue of God and foundation of their propaganda. [So they] invent someone else to blame, and in religion it's all sibling blame. So the elder sibling is Satan and the younger sibling is humanity. Blame the victim is absolutely essential for destructive families and for statism and religion. -- And what about the elder siblings? Certain punitive forms of libertarianism or republicanism which blame the victim are the elder sibling's and/or parent's response to the vulnerability of the younger siblings when they are hurt, ([usually] as a result of the actions of the parent or elder sibling)." -- Continues...

"...given that infanticide was so common throughout history, children who displeased their parents would very often be abandoned or killed. This is why the taboo has remained so powerful into the modern world. Questioning the virtue of parents arouses live and death anxiety for a lot of people. When you have a fantasy of virtue in a situation of evil, the only way that you can maintain the fantasy of virtue is for there to be a stand-in which explains the evil. So in general, whenever you have an absolute power, a non-power, and an intermediate power; parents, younger siblings, elder siblings – the youngest sibling, in order to preserve the illusion of the virtue of the parents, is going to pretend that the evil he's experiencing is coming from the middle power, the elder sibling, and that he must appeal to the parent in order to protect himself... But the reality is that the parents create the abuses of the elder sibling by being abusive themselves. And this is why it doesn't work."

'The scientific evidence underlying the near-universal resistance to reason and evidence. If you want to change the world, you first must understand the unconscious barriers to thinking.' -- '"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Western said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaledoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then get massively enforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

'Communism, Nazism, Zionism, Socialism. What all these "isms" have in common is that those promoting them seek to use THE POWER OF THE STATE to compel obedience to whatever point of view is being pushed. Therefore it is the use of aggressive STATE FORCE that makes an "ism" objectionable, not its mere presence or even its belief structure. A Nazi-follower, bereft of Germany's powerful state-run apparatus, is not much of a threat. It is the STATE that makes the difference. All ideologies, once animated by government, can be equally reprehensible over time. ...we tend to think the biggest "danger to the world" is regulatory democracy... Of course regulatory democracy has been created and cultivated by the power elite. So if you want to direct your fire at the most precise target, you would want to "hate" a system in which a few unfathomably wealthy families seek global control and use government to get it. The state is the facilitator. The ideology is merely the justification.'

Gisted -- It's important to understand what occurs emotionally for people when you bring first principles into the conversation. You are unravelling their fantasy and so they go through a semi-psychotic episode. Their delusions are all of their relationships: with their family, with their church, with their government, with their friends – and with the truth, with virtue. And so we have to be gentle. Being injected with the drug called philosophy turns everyone around you into a monster who will attack you for questioning their bigotry with threats of punishment and withdrawals of affection – particularly so with children. And that is a terrifying existence. But the fundamental horror is, you look into the mirror and you see a monster: you see that you have taken as beauty your symmetry with other monsters, that you have taken as integrity your dissemination and infliction of vile moral lies on others. And that is something people don't want to experience.

'The evolution toward a civilization increasingly dominated by technology and the power structure serving technology, the manifesto argues, cannot be reversed on its own, because "technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom," and because "while technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable." Because human beings must conform to the machine it has given rise to a social infrastructure dedicated to modifying behavior. -- From the humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied that there was no hope. Gen Ed had created at Harvard a culture of despair. This culture was not confined to Harvard—it was part of a more generalized phenomenon among intellectuals all over the Western world. [I]deologically inspired violence has become increasingly commonplace...'

'...it is most interesting to watch the flailing of the power elite as they seek an ideology of sufficient ideological rigor to combat the growing phenomenon of free-market thinking. This is the secret conversation that rages—unspoken and unpublicized—throughout the world today. There are too few of the elite and too many of everyone else. It is absolutely necessary that the elite purvey an ideology that the ruled can consent to. But today the elite in aggregate seems perplexed and even increasingly desperate. Every new free-market thinker degrades the ability of the elite to frighten and intimidate the masses into believing that society will descend into anarchy if a Tony Blair or Bill Clinton is not available to steady the ship of state. Seen from this point of view, conservative thought is a kind of last-chance ideology, an intellectual pseudo-discipline ... [for] it is a moral and intellectual contradiction to be anti-state and pro-war.'

'Another outside factor not often remembered these days was the impact of the political prosecutions that broke out at intervals in 20th century America. Belonging to a group that was, or was merely accused of being, a front for a proscribed political movement too often had serious social, economic, and legal consequences during those outbreaks, and the gyrations of American cultural politics made it impossible to define much of any ground as safe. [Socialist, communist, fascist witchhunts and accusations.] -- That’s one of the factors that helped drive the anxious conformity and social detachment of the 1950s; the perceived risks of belonging to anything outside of work, and maybe a recreational association or two, were simply too high for many people.'

'Paranoid Characteropathy: Paranoid individuals are similar to psychopaths in that they are incapable of feeling self-doubt, or of seriously questioning their beliefs. While cultured and logical people tend to avoid paranoid individuals because of their vulgar and violent language, paranoids have a remarkable capacity for enslaving less critical minds. Among those susceptible are young people, the psychologically deficient, and those who have been victimized by pathological egotists. For example, those reared by characteropaths will have some degree of psychological damage preventing them from critically analyzing the paranoid’s ideology and false logic. Such a victim finds himself agreeing with a skewed worldview, and any disagreement is limited to minor points. This pattern of thinking affirms that the skewed premises and corresponding paranoid ideology are ‘correct’ even though they may be seriously flawed.'

'In the ponerogenic process of the pathocratic phenomenon, characteropathic individuals adopt ideologies created by doctrinaire, often schizoidal people, recast them into an active propaganda form, and disseminate it with pathological egotism and paranoid intolerance for any philosophies which may differ from their own. They also inspire further transformation of this ideology into its pathological counterpart. Something which had a doctrinaire character and circulated in numerically limited groups is now activated at societal level... -- It also appears that this process tends to intensify with time; initial activities are undertaken by persons with milder characteropathic features, who are easily able to hide their aberrations from others. Paranoid individuals thereupon become principally active. Toward the end of the process, an individual with frontal characteropathy and the highest degree of pathological egotism can easily take over leadership.'

Comment: JoeTFriday: 'The slave master's dream: Convince the slaves that it is the intangibles like the master's smile and the preacher's promise that constitute the real values in life. Now the state will take over where the slave master left off after being so rudely interrupted by Enlightenment thought. Get used to postmodern subjectivism as the ruling paradigm. There's a world of intangible wealth out there for your enjoyment. The state will use the TANGIBLE goods in your best interest, thank you very much.' -- Reply comment: vidyo555: 'RIGHT ON'

'1983, Bezmenov explains his background, some of his training, and exactly how Soviet propaganda is spread in other countries in order to subvert their teachers, politicians, and other policy makers to a mindset receptive to the Soviet ideology. He also explains in detail the goal of Soviet propaganda as total subversion of another country and the 4 step formula for achieving this goal: #DEMORALIZATION #DESTABILIZATION #CRISIS #NORMALIZATON'

'“They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.” -- Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong. -- “It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgement than knowledge.”'

'"Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm." - Donella Meadows' -- 'Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance can be deceiving; and, matters accepted as factual realities all our life may in fact not stand the test of simple logic... This is a reality we all have to live with and do our best to deal with honestly and openly. It´s one of the great challenges in life. It requires a flexible mind and mindset. And at times, it requires your admitting to be wrong. -- We are all molded by the information kit we are fed as we grow up and as we grow old. And, unless we actively take the effort and find the energy to question all the commonly shared "truisms", the spoon-fed "facts" of others, the things that "everyone knows" and that all take for granted, we are easy prey for those in possession of the means for mass propaganda.'

'...a bit of bad logic has been faithfully repeated by intellectuals seeking power: the belief, as sincere as it is silly, that if you have the right ideas, you are by definition smarter than the system you are trying to control. That's Weishaupt's Fallacy. -- Systems theory was a victim of the same fallacy. Very few of the newborn institutions in the systems movement were self-funding, most of them subsisted on government grants, and thus were in the awkward position of depending on the social structures they hoped to overturn. That those structures could respond homeostatically to oppose their efforts might, one would think, be obvious to people who were used to the strange loops and unintended consequences that pervade complex systems. Read books by many of the would-be global managers of the 1970s and you can very nearly count on being bowled over by the scent of intellectual arrogance. -- Unfortunately [systems theory] might have made the transition ahead of us less difficult.'

'The fall of the Tower of Babel is where the [2+2=5] first made their appearance.' -- 'When all the old control methods the [2+2=5] have used against the people no longer work and there are too many people that have woken up and will no longer do as they are told, that means that people will stop giving the [2+2=5] their energy and faith. When people stop giving the [2+2=5] their energy and direct their energy towards themselves and others, then it will be inevitable that the [2+2=5] will start losing everything, they will lose their money, they will lose their claims over all the land they have taken over the centuries and they wil lose their power over the people. The [2+2=5] doesn't have any power, they just have the power that their subjects give to them, when the people stop giving their energy and power to the [2+2=5], then that means that the [2+2=5] has no power. It's that simple. The [2+2=5] know their game is almost up, and they are going for broke.'

'It is telling that the works of the eighteenth-century doom-mongering demographer Thomas Malthus are more popular today than ever before. Malthus is back at the centre of public discussion. The whole hierarchical notion of inequality, and most importantly the whole notion of limits, which Malthus so forcefully promoted, is palpable in public debate today. It is best summed up by the widespread idea that having too many babies is a bad thing, that we should slap a ‘carbon tax’ on children, and that one can demonstrate one’s maturity and sense of responsibility by not procreating because human beings are polluters with huge carbon footprints. That ideology is very important and is underlined by a quasi-religious, almost medieval idea that ‘we are getting what we deserve’.' -- DANGER -- '...we don’t simply want things to be sustainable - we want things to move forward, to progress, to develop. ...what is really lacking today is some kind of progress-related, progressive ideology...'

'Tired of trying to be a prophet, avatar or visionary but can't get anyone to blindly follow you? Have you always wanted to know how to manipulate people in the name of any deity, religion or philosophy you want to hide behind so you can advance your OWN agenda of nakedly abusing power? Look no further!'

'To control society and to move people from point A to point B, one need only find a spokesperson for a certain argument and position that spokesperson as an authority. That person becomes Goalpost One. Another person or spokesperson can then be positioned on the other side of the argument as Goalpost B. Argument A and B are now in the position to be used as a way of manipulating a given social discussion. If one wishes, for instance, to promote IDEA C, one merely needs to promote the arguments of Goalpost One (about IDEA C) more effectively than the Arguments of Goalpost Two. This methodology results in a slippage of Goalpost Two's position. Thus both Goalpost One and Goalpost Two advance downfield toward Goalpost One's position. Eventually Goalpost Two occupies Goalpost One's position. The "anti" argument now occupies the pro (IDEA C) position. In this manner whole social conversations are shifted....'

'Marx never calls ideology ‘false consciousness’. Indeed, he never calls anything ‘false consciousness’, a phrase that does not occur in his work. ...Marx identifies ideology with cognitive distortion in the specific sense of the concealment of social contradictions. ...Marx should be credited with an understanding of ideology as necessarily involving what is cognitively defective or deficient, in being illusory, deceptive, partial, distorted or at any rate failing in some way to present a veridical picture of the social world. ...a systematic, internally coherent, imaginative construction that lacks any rational foundations.' -- Engels: "Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process."'

"When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun."

On ideology: completes Rumsfield's epistomological genus with the idea that ideology manifests itself in those unknown knowns that contrive to create new known knowns to disguise the knowability of unknowability; that in our increasingly cynical culture, ideology provides for us each an other onto which we can project heldfast beliefs that make an alibi our own lack of belief but in the naive belief that the other doesn't also believe in a likewise projection; and that in a politically-correct, self-censorious culture, ideology has become the inventor of ever new forms of prohibition whose public acknowledgement of such is more strictly prohibited than that which was subject to the prohibition. -- Ends on a nice thought about google's motto of doing no evil being a forewarned apology for certain evil yet to be done.

Video interview: On the obscenity of transparent doublethink and negative liberty. (Beware the toe-deep economic theorizing.)

'One cannot really designate the issues that confront us today as "political", using the ordinary names of political ideologies because pathological deviants operate behind a complete mask, by deception and other psychological tricks which they practice with great cunning. If we think or believe that any political group that has such and such a name is heterogeneous with regard to its true nature, we will not be able to identify the causes and properties of the disease. Any ideology will be used to cloak the pathological qualities from the minds of both experts and ordinary people. So, trying to refer to this or that as "left" or "right" or "center" or "socialist", "democratic," "communist," "democrat" or "republican," and so on, will never help us to understand the pathological self-reproduction and its expansionist external influences. No movement will ever succeed that does not factor psychopathy and ponerology into its considerations'

'When the most intelligent people over-ride the social intelligence systems and apply generic, abstract and systematic reasoning of the kind which is enhanced among higher IQ people, they are ignoring an ‘expert system’ in favour of a non-expert system. -- ...random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.'

'The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. -- It's not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods.'

'It’s much easier and much more convincing when others tell us who we are and what we are like and even what we seem to enjoy than for us to know ourselves directly—our self-knowledge is too distorted by wishes, secret shame, denial, grandiosity, modesty, and a variety of other expectations we are always in the process of juggling. -- we can’t opt out of the ways in which our pleasures are imbricated with class snobbery. Class identity seems to be one of enabling conditions for experiencing many, many forms of pleasure (if not all of them)—the pleasure of belonging, of excluding, of knowing where you are and what you might become, the pleasure of winning.'

'Attitudes to risk: Each worldview directs attention to certain risks, which present particular threats to their way of organizing society. #Individualists fear risks that would limit the market and constrain their ability to trade freely. For example, war. #Egalitarians use the threat of catastrophic risks to generate solidarity. For example, global warming. #Hierarchists fear risks that would upset the ranking of people. For example, crime and social deviance #Fatalists don't see the point in fearing any risks - it's not like they can do anything about them. -- Cultural Theory may help us understand a risk controversy, but it does not give clear guidance on how to resolve it. The most we can say is that all four worldviews should have input, because each of them sees a piece of the puzzle.' -- (See 2x2 matrix)

'The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found. "The Fed has a lock on the economics world," says Joshua Rosner, a Wall Street analyst who correctly called the meltdown. "There is no room for other views, which I guess is why economists got it so wrong." One critical way the Fed exerts control on academic economists is through its relationships with the field's gatekeepers. For instance, at the Journal of Monetary Economics, a must-publish venue for rising economists, more than half of the editorial board members are currently on the Fed payroll – and the rest have been in the past.' -- Useful idiots are useful

'Online, the action is the tracing of trends and our own statistically determined significance. Twittering, and then seeing what sort of response it provokes, etc. We are never at a loss for an opportunity to try to garner attention, and these efforts are archived, deepening our potential self, even if it is all noise. The internet has given us means to sell ourselves the way products have long been sold to us, and we’ve embraced them, adopting advertising measuring tools as markers of moral value. ...we manage our public meaning like a brand manager, and perfect the art of culture monitoring—meta consumption of media. We begin to consume the buzz about buzz, or pure buzz, with no concern with what it’s about, only whether we can exploit it for self-promotion. ...nanostories, not suprisingly, preserve the status quo, reinforcing our own vanity and self-centeredness along with the market as timeless, unquestionable norm.'

'“On Wall Street,” writes Ho, “‘smartness’ means more than individual intelligence; it conveys a naturalised and generic sense of ‘impressiveness,’ of elite, pinnacle status and expertise, which is used to signify, even prove, investment bankers’ worthiness as advisers to corporate America and leaders of the global financial markets.” Sheer cognitive capacity is only part of it, for smartness also involves “being impeccably and smartly dressed” and possessing “quickness, aggressiveness, and vigour” in the “continued aggressive striving to perpetuate [one’s] elite status.” Doubtless the people creating formulas for new financial products could appreciate the mathematical brilliance of Stephen Hawking, but he might lack the flair, adrenalin and cupidity to count as really “smart”. -- Wall Street’s decisions are smart because smart people made them – and necessary, since no other player in the economy is really capable of judging otherwise.'

'My two favorite quotes from the article: "The Attention Economy is (mostly) a sorry excuse for a (predictable, rational) economy." I have been waiting for so long for someone to agree with me on this one. While I get the theory and used to subscribe to the attention ideology, at this point I don't understand how it's any different. Quote number two is under the heading "the model is what matters" and says, "Our meta-analyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing the chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem more relevant and vital than the content of culture itself." That one made my head spin a little. It's so true. As a culture we've become more obsessed with understanding how things spread than the things themselves. The model itself is the content. (Or, as McLuhan would say, the medium is the message.)'

'Let them eat Facebook profiles. -- We won’t put a price tag on ourselves or our friends or our pleasures, but Facebook will happily do that behind our backs, in economic exchanges that don’t include us. ...we have become the stuff being exchanged, both in what we are and what we do online. ...no matter how much we might love attention, we can’t use it to meet our basic needs. Ultimately, we all have to participate in the cash economy. -- In order to reclaim the fruits of our labor and stop working on the digital plantation, we may be forced to become self-consciously mercenary about what heretofore we have been content to share out of a spirit of convivial sociality. We will need to start viewing our social behavior as our intellectual property, our various selves as proprietary content to which we retain the broadcasting rights and which we have no intention of licensing for reuse without our express written consent.' -- Awesome reveal of 'free'

'I tend to take it for granted that brands of products function only to help individuals brand themselves, to allow them to project certain traits along the lines described in the previous paragraph. (For producers, brands allow for the elaboration of differences between competitors’ commodities where there are more or less materially indistinguishable.) But Red Moscow suggests that brands could be contrived to close off avenues for the development of a superficial self. Nationalist brands would enlist users into helping complete the ideological project of the state, not the self—a state that may not allow for an autonomous self. Such brands would demonstrate conformity and obedience in a much more direct way than our brands.. Consumerism is soft coercion in that sense; it allows for a space where conformity can comfortably coexist with rebellion—the revolution is reduced to continually turning over one’s personal affect within a game whose rules are thereby protected from change.'

'"Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world.” In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its “spread the wealth” mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal. Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college. Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective. Instead, these disciplines ram home the idea that troubled behavior can be fixed through expensive socialist programs that, coincidentally, provide employment opportunities for graduates of the social sciences.'

'Curtis: I'll tell you what I think about the neo-conservatives. In a way, I admire them for nostalgic reasons. They are the last revolutionaries - and some of them actually came out of a Trotskyite revolutionary tradition. They are making an awesome attempt to remake and reshape the world, much as Trotsky tried to do in the Russian Revolution, using military power. It's amazing. It has an epic-ness to it. I feel nostalgic for it, in the face of a managerial politics that just seem to want to tweak and adjust its policies to those of the focus groups and the soccer moms. -- ...when it becomes obvious that a lot of this is a constructed fantasy, based often on idealism and not necessarily on conspiracy, there will be a growing public distrust about the very nature of how reality is described to them. ...the neoconservatives have taken us into a philosophical quagmire, which is, "How do you describe reality, how do you make sense of the world? How do you construct it?"'

'The Hackers’ Conference of 1984 was only one moment in the wedding of the libertarian idealism of the counterculture to the inventions and inventors of computing technology, but it was an important one. Over the next fifteen years, its attendees would play major roles in shaping both the computer industry and the press’s coverage of that industry. In the Hackers’ Conference, we see that it is not hackers alone who bring together countercultural ideals and computer-based work; rather, it is hackers acting in concert with cultural entrepreneurs such as Stewart Brand and journalists such as John Markoff. In this sense, we can see that the hip, entrepreneurial hacker who would become so visible in the 1990s was not so much a hippie in his own right as the representative of a cultural category cobbled together by counterculturalists and technologists working in collaboration.'

'Most journalists have run out of knowing what's going on in the world. And they have embraced this idea of media democracy as a way to disguise that fact. I'm deeply suspicious of it. The whole reason why journalism was invented in the first place is that we have the time, the money, and the power of the organisation to go places, push through doors, find things out, bring it back, and tell you it and allow you to make up your mind about it. ...those who are the promoters of the internet, the boosters, the people who put forward the utopian dream of the internet, and those who basically run silicon valley, are arch individualists, they portray the internet as a playground where every individual can invent their own identity, and it's a new form of democracy without hierarchies of power.' -- On the paradox of the booster dependence on datamining: -- 'it's a completely contradictory view of what human beings are, how they behave, to what these boosters actually portray the internet as.'

"...voting is about boosting our own self-esteem—we vote as a way to express what we would like to be affiliated with, not what we have decided about the matter at hand. If we have no comprehension of the matter at hand, so much the better; our ability to vote our ego becomes that much easier to countenance. Democracy is all well and good, but it seems to be evoked at times to justify and glorify something altogether different, when uninformed people are invited to rate the performance of those whose work they aren’t that qualified to evaluate. Such surveys, popularized by shows like American Idol, end up having the function of negating the idea that objective standards are relevant, and promote the idea that status and popularity are always trustworthy proxies for quality. This shifts the responsibility for perpetuating status-quo inequities onto ordinary people, making it seem the natural order of things and an expression of the people’s choice."

'Parker: To some degree, South Park has a simple formula that came from the very first episode... There was Jesus on this side and there was Santa on this side, there’s Christianity here and there’s Christmas commercialism here, and they’re duking it out. And there are these four boys in the middle going, “Dude, chill out.” It’s really what Team America is as well: taking an extremist on this side and an extremist on that side. Michael Moore being an extremist is just as bad, you know, as Donald Rumsfeld. It’s like they’re the same person. It takes a fourth-grade kid to go, “You both remind me of each other.” The show is saying that there is a middle ground, that most of us actually live in this middle ground, and that all you extremists are the ones who have the microphones because you’re the most interesting to listen to, but actually this group isn’t evil, that group isn’t evil, and there’s something to be worked out here.'

Doublethink: "holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind, and accepting both of them." ...a Party member who needs to "revise" his own memories to conform with the Party's latest revision of history will necessarily know that he is playing tricks with reality, "but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Using this technique, the Party can stay in power indefinitely—"for the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes... The prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity." -- Unread.

'It is from simulation that virtual games emerged, broke loose only to be reintegrated into the assemblages of world capital, as a means of inducing the "flexible personality" demanded by digital work, war and markets. As this hacker innovation was captured by the game factory, it has continued to generate surplus know-how that escapes complete capture in the commodity form. Some commentators see such "autoludic" activity as automatically empowering and democratizing. We, however, insist on what Paolo Virno terms "the ambivalence of the multitude." We ask of digital play what Félix Guattari asked of collective humanity: "how can it find a compass by which to reorient itself?" His response, by "remaking social practices," was grounded in a reading of transformations already underway. To speak of games of multitude is to assert that the possibilities of virtual play exceed its imperial manifestations, and the desires of many gamers surpass marketers' caricatures of them.'

"[Thomas Kuhn, in his famous book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'] argued that different paradigms are not attempts to answer the same questions, differing in their level of accuracy, but attempts to answer entirely different questions – or, to put it another way, they are models that highlight different features of a complex reality, and cannot be reduced to one another. -- The industrial paradigm can only interpret running out of one resource as a call to begin exploiting some even richer one. If there is no richer one, and even the poorer ones are rapidly being depleted as well, what then? From within the industrial paradigm, that question cannot even be formulated; the assumption that there is always some new and better resource to be had is hardwired into the ways of thinking that the industrial paradigm makes inevitable. Thus a change of paradigms is necessary."

"... the cultures best suited to the deindustrial age will have to embrace an attitude toward nature differing sharply from scientism: an attitude that starts from humility rather than hubris... Ecosophy isn’t a science, any more than scientism is, nor is it a religion – though ecological religion is likely to be significant in the deindustrial age, whether it borrows existing religious forms or evolves new ones of its own. Rather, ecosophy is a worldview and value system that gives meaning to ecology and ecotechnics, and makes sense of human life not in terms of some imagined conquest of nature, but of our species’ dependence and participation in the wider circle of the biosphere."

"The long economic expansion of the industrial age has fostered the massive growth of what old-fashioned Marxists used to call a rentier class – a class whose money makes money for them. Even among people who work for a living, the idea of joining the rentier class on retirement, and living comfortably off investments, has become very popular in recent years. The problem, of course, is that the age of industrial expansion is over; it was made possible in the first place only by exponentially increasing the use of fossil fuels and other natural resources; like all exponential growth curves, it faced an inevitable collision with the limits of its environment – and that collision is happening around us right now. We are thus entering a period of prolonged economic contraction – not a recession, or even a depression, but a change in the fundamental dynamic of the economy."

'“The problem is today that when you have chaos and disorder people lose their cognitive mapping. So it is an open struggle as to whose interpretation will win,” he says. “Never forget that this is how Hitler won.” -- What particularly intrigues Žižek is how films that seemingly resist the prevailing ideology, such as Titanic ["It is not a love story. It is vampiric, egotistic exploitation."], often serve to strengthen it. It was a similar story, he suggests, in communist times when people who told seemingly subversive jokes only succeeded in spreading cynicism and indifference... Although people may claim not to believe in the political system, their inert cynicism only validates that system. This is all explained, according to Žižek, by Marx’s theory of “commodity fetishism”, the idea that the way we behave in society is determined by objective market forces rather than subjective beliefs. “The importance is in what you do, not in what you think. I love this dialectical reversal.”'

"Unpopular ideas require euphemisms, and these euphemisms wear out over time. From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense. Hence, politically dominant elites don’t see themselves as acting ideologically and react with hostility when ideological labels are pinned on them. Ideology is only useful for an insurgent group of outsiders, seeking a coherent basis for a claim to displace the existing elite. [Initial] users of [the euphemism] rapidly [drop] it, once they [get] into power.'

*The Classics* -- John Maynard Keynes on useful idiots: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." (Oh, the irony.) -- Ben Bernanke (Holder of a PhD in How To Create A Great Depression) on the Fed-created Great Depression of the 1930s: "You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again." (NEVAR FORGET) -- Alan Greenspan on a career built of doublethink: "I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well." (Got Gold, Mr Greenspan? http://bit.ly/77ifu) -- Paul Krugman (useful idiot par excellence) on nobel-prized-prat keynesist fundamentalism: "This is really fairly shameful, that we should be wasting precious months as a profession retracing debates that were settled 70 years ago." (Meaning: 'The logic of spending your way out of debt is irrefutable!') -- Listen to these numbskulls at your peril

'More than any other people I have met, Americans fear loss of uniqueness. Yet you and I are not unique in the least. Despite the American yada yada about individualism, you are not special. Nor am I. Just because we come from the manufacturer equipped with individual consciousness, does not make us the center of any unique world, private or public, material, intellectual or spiritual. The fact is, you will seldom if ever make any significant material or lifestyle choices of your own in your entire life. If you don't buy that house, someone else will. If you don't marry him, someone else will. If you don't become a psychologist, lawyer or a telemarketer, someone else will. We are all replaceable parts in the machinery of a capitalist economy. "Oh but we have unique feelings and emotions that are important," we say. Yet I venture to say that none of us will ever feel an emotion that someone long dead has not felt, or some as yet unborn person will not feel.' -- *gulps a gritty red pill*

"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time. -- Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large."

"understanding the assumptions that underlie simulation is a key element of political power. People who understand the distortions imposed by simulations are in a position to call for more direct economic and political feedback, new kinds of representation, more channels of information. They demand greater transparency in their simulations (particularly the ones we use to make real-life decisions) make their underlying models more accessible. We come to written text with centuries-long habits of readership. At the very least, we have learned to begin with the journalist's traditional questions: Who wrote these words, what is their message, why were they written, how are they situated in time and place, politically and socially? A central goal for computer education must now be to teach students to interrogate simulations in much the same spirit. The specific questions may be different but the intent is the same: to develop habits or readership appropriate to a culture of simulation."

"Human Farms" -- Red pills don't taste nice.

"For some advocates of computers in education, programming encourages children to think like epistemologists and psychologists because it raised questions about procedural thinking and encouraged reflection on one's own style of learning. In my own research I found that for some people, understanding how a computer worked supported the belief that you could understand how other things worked as well–in the social as well as in the technical world. The transparent understanding of a computer could become a metaphor for political empowerment. What dominates [now] is simulation and presentation as its own powerful idea. the computing that children are most immersed in has moved from programming and the aesthetic of the algorithm to software that socialises users into the culture of simulation."

"[World of Warcraft is a] detailed simulacrum of a process of “becoming a success”. The game offers its players a capitalist fairytale, in which anyone who works hard and strives enough can rise through the ranks of society and acquire great wealth. Moreover, beyond simply representing capitalism as good, World of Warcraft serves as a tool to educate its players in a range of behaviors and skills specific to the situation of conducting business in an economy controlled by corporations... the game is training a generation of good corporate citizens not only to consume well and to pay their dues, but also to climb the corporate ladder, to lead projects, to achieve sales goals, to earn and save, to work hard for better possessions, to play the markets, to win respect from their peers and their customers, to direct and encourage and cajole their underlings to outperform, to become better employees and perhaps, eventually, effective future CEOs."

'In Wannado Ciy no one is unemployed. The choice of profession is free and the middle class is intact. Outsourcing doesn’t exist. Wannado City presents itself as a city without any ideology. As in real America, different ethnic groups mix in the workplace. ‘In Kids We Trust’ is the motto in the courtroom. Children’s heads, not presidents, adorn the bank notes. Only the American flag next to the judge, as well as a picture of George W Bush in the courtroom testify to everyday life. Officially the children are here for fun – child labour is frowned upon. “We call it real play, not working,” says the press spokesperson.' -- Work = Shopping = Citizenship. Grim.

'Facing media-fuelled consumer-driven ridicule by their kids, many parents can't face their responsibilities... The universe conjured up [by kids marketing] is one of "kids rule", in which children are "empowered into an adult-free space".'

'"...the main emotion behind most people's politics was hope..." That sentiment has now been replaced, he argued, by indignation. "People are more interested in bearing witness to their personal moral righteousness" than in engaging in open-minded debate.'

"Now computers master us, leveraging our data to fit us into modeled interactions, exercising tremendous power through selective disclosure, and offering us freedom through a participation process that is essentially repressive."

'The Radical History of Football'