Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Deviation Is Evil


"America: Proud of our ignorant conformity"


We've all but abandoned our self-driven, self-motivated, self-determined, self-interests and the pursuit thereof. We've given up our freedom and independence. Long ago we handed it all over to government or business to take care of for us on the supposed premise that they could do it much better than we could. They wanted us to believe that was the case, and we did believe.

They promoted the idea that letting corporations take care of making and selling whatever we needed would lead us to more leisure time; convenience was the big seller. Along with that idea came lots of black and white television of middle class lifestyles depicting lots of happy people with less than tragic troubles who indeed had plenty of leisure time and plenty of prosperity to boot. America was supposed to look at those images and listen to their discourse and deeply soak it in.

Think of the ideal couples sold to America back in the 50's and 60's. Rob and Laura Petrie depicting and appealing to the working educated class, white collars with careers and career ambitions. The blue collar families started hitting the airwaves in the 70's with Archie Bunker, Laverne and Shirley, Sanford and Son and they were depicted as uneducated and just plain stupid. None the less, there was something for everyone. Ozzie and Harriet, the Cleavers, Andy Griffith, Lassie, and even the Jetsons and the Flintstones spoke to Americans at the emotional level depicting completely unnatural, too perfect lifestyle models to contemplate and of course, most important, to emulate.

No one who ever watched those programs plus literally hundreds of others based on this false contrivance of the perfect family, ever suspected for a moment that what was happening to them and to the entire country amounted to nothing less than hard core brainwashing.

The image of the 50's mother is still unforgettable. A lady wearing a dress, hose and high heels, with her hair perfectly coifed, no doubt at her local beauty salon; wearing an apron and more than likely standing in her kitchen. She might be holding a tray of freshly baked brownies. She might be cooking dinner. She might be doting on her children or greeting her husband at the door when he comes home from work. The image of this subservient house slave preaching good manners and leaving all the serious stuff to her husband to think about was deeply ground into the self image of the vast majority of American females of the time. They all wanted to look like those tall, cool beauties with the perfectly kept homes and the well behaved children and the troubles that amounted to squat. No swearing and no pants wearing, and nothing more complicated on her mind than recipes, cleaning and laundry.

Even Mrs. Robinson on the Jupiter 2 was still doing the laundry and the cooking. These images were supposed to be held far into the future and that future role playing image was burned into our minds as well.

The image of the 50's father is just as unforgettable. A man wearing a suit minus the jacket, which in its place would be a variation of some form of sweater. He had a pipe in his teeth. He had a dog that brought him his slippers and his newspaper. He counseled his children and corrected them with utmost gentility and patience. This father image was so low key and easy going nothing ever ruffled him. When one of the boys got busted for some minor transgression, father's face becoming serious was all the drama it took to get the point across that little Bubba screwed up. It made it perfectly clear what a thin line there is between being a perfect person in a perfect family and becoming a total loser and screw up. There's literally no wiggle room and no room at all for variations or bringing anything new, unique or real to the table.

The image of 50's teenagers will be permanently branded into our collective consciousness. Even today the 50's kid drones are still the idea of perfection in the eyes of officialdom and authority and that includes parents. They were utterly naive, obedient to a "T", and believed anything an adult would ever tell them. They were well behaved, very well mannered, did their homework on time, got straight A's at school, and grew up knowing what they wanted to do for a living. They were gung ho about going to college to become an employable hunk of flesh to benefit and profit some employer who would not have to invest a dime or a minute in on-the-job training, or funding the specialized educations their corporations required to attain their goals. These kids all but marched directly to drone-hood, proud of being the most conformist, the least original, the least thinking, the least troublesome, the most "perfect" of perfect images, right off everyone's TV sets. They paid to train themselves for their future slavery. They happily sold their labor so that others would profit off it. In this they embraced their truest identity, or at least the one depicted to them as the ultimate in uprightness, perfection and achievement.

Nobody seemed to notice the entire country becoming TV families, but there it was anyway. And as all of that came to be, so did the commodification of our lives. They showed us convertible cars and everybody wanted convertible cars. They showed women the latest fashions and women flocked to buy the latest fashions. If some movie star was wearing it, they wanted it too.

When they showed us hoola hoops and Slinkys we all got hoola hoops and Slinkys. When they showed us the Beach Boys we all went surfing. When they showed us the phony, watered down psychedelic 60's, we thought of the Brady Bunch and perceived Janis Joplin and Jimmi Hendrix as trouble making, dangerous, sex crazed, drug addicted hell spawn with no respect for the law. Those nonconformists scared us. They just did not fit in with the Partridge Family paradigm. TV was very much responsible for forming our value system, our self imagery, our definitions of success and failure, our perceptions of ourselves and others, and instilling us with unquestioning trust for authority. It also installed boundaries in our minds between what's okay and what's not okay, which boils down to nothing more complicated than the desired social construct of the social engineers vs. real people who didn't give a crap what they wanted. Only one of those things is the good thing. The other borders on sheer evil. If you're afraid of nonconformity they've got your ass wrapped up real tight.

In short, pretty much everything we think and see around us and do is based not on reality or truth or following our true nature or on freedom or democracy or any such things. It's all crap. It's all based on appearances, on copy catting the social models we're drowned in endless images and sounds of. We know all that crap far better than we know ourselves or each other. In fact, any sign of being real and not fitting into the crap paradigm is something we know is to be rejected or denied, even when it's perfectly clear its true. Truth doesn't matter anymore. Upholding the crap is what matters most of all.

No one in those phony TV families ever had an unmarried pregnancy or got cancer or was raped or robbed or having an affair. All of that stuff, reality, was off the table. It was all about being cocooned in your perfect little home with all of the modern appliances and everyone playing out their roles just like on TV.

Of course that didn't work out very well in real life and it never could. Real life has nothing to do with TV families who aren't even real families but just actors being paid hefty salaries to portray their squeaky clean characters and model them for us.

Unfortunately a lot of families didn't fit the bill. They didn't fit the mold at all, and there was fallout. I can't help but wonder how many perfectly good little boys ended up being whipped or thrown in jail, branded trouble makers and hoodlums for the crime of not performing the expected role of the perfect little TV boy properly. How many little girls were criticized for not being lady like enough, or not having the proper figure or posture or hair. The fact is, these model images crammed down the throats of a nation disguised as entertainment have done more damage than as yet we even fully realize.

Our own true beings have become totally unacceptable and are guaranteed to be rejected outright to whatever extent they do not fit the expected molds which frankly, we have had very thoroughly dramatized and play acted out reaching every income level, race, gender, job, and social activity. We all "know" just by looking at someone what their "place" and role in society is supposed to be. We don't like it at all when someone does not conform or exists outside the predefined boundaries we've come to very clearly expect. That did not happen by accident. The odds of it being a naturally occurring phenomenon are beyond my math skills to calculate. There's just no way it could happen on its own. It took decades of nonstop social engineering on all those millions of TV sets and people sitting in front of them day after day, year after year, absorbing every teeny little detail, subconsciously as well as consciously.

It made corporations richer than God. It retarded and detoured the growth and direction of a nation by retarding and detouring the growth of every individual who bought into sitting in front of those television screens each night.

Americans used to sew their own clothes, build their own homes, grow their own food, butcher their own livestock, live on their own land and when they did those things they enjoyed true independence. They created their own communities and knew better than to trust politicians. In fact you can read stories of people running officials off their land at the end of a shot gun, and they'd have shot those officials for trespassing and it would have been perfectly legal. Americans were entitled to be boss on their own property and to take care of whatever came up by themselves.

By the 1980's few women were still sewing their families clothes. Fewer still were stay at home mom's who spent hours cooking for their families and keeping their houses sparkling clean. Americans had to buy every single thing they needed or wanted, and they wanted everything they saw on their TV sets. Believing they were buying the good life and happiness, they were in fact becoming slaves to a system that now has more power over our lives than anything or anyone should ever be allowed to have. We are forced to exist at the whims of those who provide us with what we need to survive. Independence is off the table, it's no longer an option. And the generations who knew how to make do for themselves are almost completely gone. We won't even have living memory to give us the expert instruction we'd need to walk away from this nightmare and get back to running our own lives and calling every last shot in them. It won't be much longer now before no one even relates to the idea of that kind of independence. The idea of it will be repulsive to people who are totally conditioned to eat food that is mass manufactured and microwaved, and wear clothing that is mass manufactured in a sea of conformity, doing jobs where others are always in charge and in control and must be obeyed. We have been conditioned like white rats in cages, drinking from the water spout hanging on the side of the cage, and eating from the food dish that magically fills itself. We have no idea where our food comes from. We don't even really understand what food is. We only care that we like it and that it's there and we don't care too much at all about where it comes from or what's in it. We already don't remember that food rots very quickly and no bread is still fresh after ten days. We think it's normal for cut fruit to not oxidize for days or for produce to sit in the refrigerator for weeks and still look like it did when we brought it home.

We're totally losing touch with reality and all memory of what reality actually is. Worse, we don't seem to care. Artificiality is reality. The more the better. The better you do it the better you are as a human being. Take the drugs they tell you to take because they are good and they know these things and you do not.

The government also stepped in to pick up pretty much all the rest of what people can do as independent beings who don't take crap off anyone, including delusional power hungry politicians and greedy bankers. Americans actually used to tar and feather lying cheats and con artists. They shot dangerous criminals and protected themselves and their families without hesitation or apology. It was expected and normal. No one else was going to do it for them. It was their job to be self sufficient and they did it.

Not so anymore. Just think of the litany of cop shows, detective shows, FBI shows, crime investigation shows. We've seen funny cops, serious cops, young cops, old cops, New York cops, California cops and cops from everywhere else from Hawaii to Florida. Some were hip, some were hard guys, but they were all brave and true and above reproach. There was no such thing as a thug cop or a drug dealing cop or a rapist cop, at least not on TV. Nor did we see or hear of these things in the papers or on the TV news. It was as if the artificial world of too perfect people on TV was supposed to be the real world that we all live in.

To a scary extent it's true that's what we believe. Americans know little to nothing about plain old ordinary reality, human nature, nutrition, self-reliance, classic educations, or many things that people in other countries never lost sight of. Americans know literally nothing about the world beyond our borders, nor do we seem to care all that much. We've been sold the idea that we're number one, we're the good guys, nobody does it better than we do and far be it for reality or the rest of the world to pop our little bubbles. We won't hear of it. We can't hear it. We can look right at it and still not see it. That's how powerful our mind conditioning is. We really believe the bullshit we've been fed and reared on. Why else would we take our children to McDonalds or let them drink brown liquid called Coca Cola? Those things are disgusting if you've never been brainwashed and propagandized to believe they're wonderful and fun and great to let your children have.

The cop shows, judge and lawyer shows, have all depicted people we can trust and believe in. The result is that we simply extend trust unearned, and staunchly defend the wrong doing of officialdom telling ourselves there must be a good reason and we just don't know the facts. It's too hard to break free of thousands of hours of propaganda telling us that all officialdom is made up of good guys who protect our lives and support our troops and love our flags and help little old ladies across the street. We can't fathom that the fantasies portrayed on our TV sets have nothing whatsoever to do with reality or the real world or with real life or even with being a real human being.

Today we are no longer allowed to take the law into our own hands. We don't even want our guns anymore, we say they're dangerous. They scare us. We believe only cops and trained professionals should have the guns. It's very dangerous and naive, and very stupid. There is no such thing as needing that specific training and indoctrination to legitimately own and use weapons for self defense and defending our families and neighborhoods. Yet more and more we feel much more comfortable leaving it all up to officialdom.

We don't know where our tax dollars go and we don't really care. We believe they're being used for things we expect them to be used for and we never check. We don't check what officialdom tells us. It seems almost anyone calling themselves an expert or an official is someone we're all too happy to bow down to and take at face value. We've devolved into childlike thinking. And just like Ozzie and Harriet, we don't believe that nasty ugly things ever happen. Until they do happen.

It strikes such deep fear into our childlike minds that we can't handle it. We run away from imperfect people. We work brilliantly hard at perfecting our exterior persona. We want to portray the ideal citizen of the decade, whatever form that may take. We want to convince employers and friends alike that we're what we're supposed to be. We're fully indoctrinated. We fully accept that indoctrination. We reject anything inside us to the contrary of that given image. We even hate ourselves when we don't live up to the ingrained expectations of society.

This is why we look the other way when we see the disfigured vet home from the war. This is why we don't complain that we see no coffins on the news even though thousands of our men and women are dying abroad from bombs and bullets. This is why we automatically go blind when our government acts like a corrupt and raging Mafia. We tell ourselves they're stupid or uninformed, but it never, ever occurs to us that what we're seeing is exactly what's there.

The indivisible union of government, corporation, and media have worked long and hard to achieve just that. An independent thinking nation, unimpressed and disinterested in what authority, power and wealth have in mind would make it so much harder for them to get what they want when they want it and to the extent they want it. And they wanted it all.

The government wants an obedient, gung ho communist populace and it got it by selling us images of good guys in positions of authority and patriotic war movies and by glamorizing military "service". Never did they split the pertinent fine hairs or discuss the difference between what's right and what's wrong. Total obedience was the path to nobility. Nor has there ever been a suggestion that there are other ways to serve your country that have nothing at all to do with enlisting in the military, or with anything concerning the government at all. Because of that the natural altruism of youth does not believe there is any other outlet than the military to do good things for others, and never a more painful oxymoron could ever exist.

Corporations want rabid, uncomplaining consumers obsessed with the latest model of everything. They wanted a public caught up in rapture consumption, buying their way to heaven on earth. They've pinpointed and humiliated every part of the human body to sell us solutions in the form of their myriad products to keep us feeling good about ourselves. Everything from arm pit sweat to graying hair has been successfully turned to something to feel ashamed of and to turn to store bought solutions to spare ourselves the indignity of. They wanted us believing that home made doesn't hold a candle to mass produced, and they wanted us so deeply sucked into their names and their logos that they staged Coke and Pepsi wars to make us take sides. They got us wearing T-shirts and hats with cigarette logos on them, turning us into walking advertisements for their product lines and they did this by inventing and promoting the idea of "cool", telling us we wanted it and that we could buy it and join the party. The party is where the fun is. Outside of the commodified world there is nothing. Only losers would tread there. Only oddballs and freaks wouldn't want to buy their way to happiness. And they got what they wanted.

They also wanted a nation of willing labor to make and distribute and sell their product lines, and they did that by asserting that "working for a living" was the only possible way to be a decent, upright human being. We're trained to start thinking about working for a living in kindergarten. No one ever suggested doing it your own way or coming up with a better paradigm. No one encouraged self-sufficiency or autonomy or creating a successful niche that was not a proper fitting slave unit to corporate domination and control. And once you got a job you could be further ranked in credibility and decency based on how much you were paid to do that job. By the same token, doing something but not being paid for it made it not count. It wasn't real. It had no value without a monetary value. Indeed, according to the powers that run our lives, nothing has value beyond a dollar value. And isn't it interesting that in truth and in fact a dollar has no value at all?

It's not that we don't know these things. The truth is not hidden, nor can it be erased. It can however be ignored and forgotten, and we're well on our way to achieving that dubious goal. Our quest is to ignore and deny all that is real and true, and to fervently uphold the forward march to anti-nature, anti-humanity science and compassionate eugenics of those who just can't make the grade. Those who cannot and will not ever be able to fit the paradigm of the predefined "way things and people are supposed to be". We're heading full steam into a future of global conformity based on the lie of compassionate one world government. Like them, we will believe we are doing the right thing and the best thing as we tear our own humanity off in sheaths and separate ourselves from anything and everything that doesn't qualify as okay like we are.

It's always been this way. Every culture in every country has its own version of righteous conformity. There are many true believers who follow the status quo, and many nonbelievers who follow it too. Every culture punishes its nonconforming members, and every populace is easy to convince that nonconformists are the enemy.

This is what happens when we shut off our brains and close our eyes and let somebody else do our thinking and our feeling for us. We cease to exist as unique beings, self empowered to see and think and feel for ourselves and to participate in creating a world we want to live in. We give all that up for convenience and the illusion of security and righteousness and "doing it right", without ever thinking through what "right" means or whose idea of "right" we're taking on. In essence "we" cease to exist, becoming nothing more than the extensions of the will of unknown others. Performing robotically, automatically, unthinkingly. We're afraid of and offended by anyone who sees things differently and cannot even conceive that what they see has any merit. They're just automatically wrong.

This is where we find ourselves today and it's no wonder there's incalculable human fallout. Humans weren't meant to live this way. We are born free. We do feel our own feelings and are designed to think our own thoughts. We don't need to be joiners of anything. We're supposed to size things up for ourselves and decide to go along or not go along based on our own personal criteria. But today even that's been taken from us in the guise of elected officials whose game plan obviously has nothing to do with what we want or need. Still they pass laws to enable themselves to take our money and our lives in staggering numbers and we never catch on that we're only pawns in someone else's game.

In my not so humble opinion, the new "cool" has to be being intelligent. To self-educate, be wicked smart and know things, and not be a drone. Shrugging off the preforms of society to every extent you can. Making it on your own, your own way, in spite of the demands of everyone around you to conform. The irony is that it's hard to get the word out when the mass media we shun so much is the means to accomplish that. I'm afraid that as long as mass media remains in the total control of the powers that be, the new "cool" will only happen to those who figure it out for themselves. As long as that's the case, deviance will continue to be evil and ignorant conformity will carry the day.

7 comments:

  1. "Cool" has always been intelligent, non-conformist and self-assured; even in the mass media parodies. Of course, they've tried to water it all down into stupid, criminal, boasting.

    Everyone I know, respects and even idolizes the hippy-esque, compassionate, analytical person, labeling them cool beyond the superficial poser "cool". I think it all comes down to how we interact with the young people we know - if we can demonstrate to them that conformity and TVthink is bland and "square", then creativity, weirdness, and fun will the obvious alternative.

    I do this with the young people I know, it's very subtle, but they get it I think. When we walk down the street, we cut across lawns and parking lots, when we eat lunch, sometimes it's a game to use your fingers and have a picnic in some random place - the point is to demonstrate the fun and power of laughing and not-giving-a-fuck.

    Just my opinion, but these are small examples of proving the efficacy of real interaction and boundary dissolving that might be helpful.

    Also, distracting the little ones from the fucking TV when they get all zombie-like is a good one. Play a game. Go outside. Tickle. Anything to break the spell. Again, IMHO.

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  2. leaf,

    I couldn't agree more. Well said.

    Ang

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  3. Anonymous5:22 PM

    First of all, props to leaf for doing your part to teach children the things you are teaching them, that's awesome.

    Secondly, Ang, all of your posts resonate with me and I am doing what I can, in small parts, to try to inform those around me. But this post in particular, really hit me pretty hard. And, with your permission, I'd like to repost it on my MySpace blog. Let me know, in the meantime, thanks for your insight into so many current real issues that affect us all.

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  4. saltman,

    Thank you for your comment, and you're absolutely welcome to repost this entry, or any other entry. Thanks for asking first just because it's neat knowing you want to repost it, but it's not necessary to ask. It's there in the hope it will be passed around and shared. I do appreciate you.

    Ang

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  5. Anonymous6:05 PM

    Thanks Ang, I'll be sure to provide credit to you as well as a link to your website for any of your blogs that I repost.

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  6. Anonymous5:54 PM

    Reposted here (by me) with full liberty. Excellent job. ~Survival Acres~

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  7. Survival Acres,

    Thank you very much. Hooah! I think I know how you feel about reaching all new heights of disgust. It becomes so offensive that it requires increasingly demanding amounts of grit and patience to continue looking at it all. But the choice is either to stay tuned or to tune out and live in a private Idaho and the latter is the nature of the problem already.

    Ang

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