Amerika

Politics is the science of a few smarter people making memes to manipulate dumb hordes.

The politicians know it; they must treat their audience condescendingly because their audience only likes what is easy to perceive, which not coincidentally is also that which is so dumbed-down it can only be presented scornfully. The best memes make people feel smart for repeating them, even as they oversimplify important issues.

Let’s look at how propaganda works:

Always the political instrument of moneyed elites, and a retrograde societal force, the GOP today is more negatively impactful than ever.

So… only one of the two parties is a political instrument of the elites, even though both accept donations, especially from those with lots of cash? And we’re supposed to assume everything this party does is bad, yet it’s still around after all these years? Unlikely.

Wherever you look, a large corporation is controlling some aspect of your life, even possibly owning your genetics. And if you’re curious about those laws, they were endorsed by large corporations as well.

We all love to have someone to blame. But the problem here is that corporations depend on us to buy their products; whatever we buy, they’ll sell, and if they can make it cheaper and charge more, they will.

Even more, nothing in “democracy” says that those with money will not be able to influence politicians — or your fellow citizens. In fact, it’s part of their “freedom,” just like you have freedom.

Now, if you feel you’re a slave to the majority who always vote thoughtlessly, that’s another issue — but the problem isn’t a lack of democracy or large corporations.

In fact, democracy of both political and economic sorts — you can vote for whatever you desire, and you can buy whatever you want to buy — is how we get to a condition where corporations are quite powerful. They are creations of our laws and purchasing desires.

We’d be doing just fine, if it weren’t for the stupid Republicans/Democrats wrecking everything we do!

Maybe we need to pretend we’re playing chess, and not look at the move that showed us we were losing, but at the moves before it. If Republicans and/or Democrats keep shuttling between extremes, with one group un-doing what the others did, maybe the problem isn’t the groups themselves, but the system that supports this?

Even more, how can a country that is fundamentally divided stand? Nations form when people stand together for an idea; they dissolve when people each go their own direction, and “game the system” for their own personal gain. The former is an organized nation, the latter more resembles the kleptocratic oligarchies we see in failed developing states.

The poor got to be poor because they were oppressed. They’re just like you and me, but someone held them back and kept them down.

This is the ultimate and biggest lie of our time: we are all the same. Like interchangeable parts, like products taken from a shelf, we’re all the same! It makes us easy to control or at least, for us to visualize ourselves: an identical army of robots, with the same soul and intentions, except each is different based on what they buy and how they arrange it on their persons.

To a moron, that sounds like paradise. To someone more experienced in the world (and smarter) it sounds like hell: a destruction of the ability to have change, to be better than what came before, and as a result to force us all to upgrade our behavior.

But what the underconfident or low self-esteem individual — this often coincides with a sneaking suspicion of their own vast incompetence — really fears is that idea. Someone might get ahead. Someone might have something they don’t. Someone might be out there living a life they cannot.

Instead of looking toward the positive, and realizing that they may be able to have a better life if they direct their attention toward that end, like all angry simians they instead work to tear down the person who did rise above. As they get craftier and smarter, they do this through an industrial process whereby we’re all equal, and anyone who dares not be equal invokes the wrath of the entire herd.

This is the curse of the modern time, and what explains its failure.