Happy 2020: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Our entire society is mentally ill. What our mentally ill society labels “mental illness” is actually just a small slice of the broader mental illness spectrum — those who are impaired in their ability to participate in the consensus mass delusions shared by the rest of society.

 

by Caitlin Johnstone--2020-01-02

 

Start over in the new year. Also, start over at any other time during the rest of the year, whenever you want, as often as you like. Time is an illusion anyway.

 

 

 

I cannot assure you that things will get better in the ’20s. I can’t assure you that they’ll get worse, either. What I can absolutely guarantee is that things are going to keep getting weirder and weirder. At this point in time the only reliable pattern is the disintegration of patterns.

 

The mainstream worldview isn’t mainstream because it is more fact-based, logical, or makes better arguments than other potential worldviews, it’s mainstream because vast fortunes are poured into keeping it mainstream.

 

“Why do those people hate us?”

“We destroyed their country.”

“We should leave the Middle East then.”

“We can’t”

“Why not?”

“Israel.”

“What about it?”

“Those other countries hate it.”

“Why?”

“It destroyed the country it was built on top of.”

“Well maybe we and Israel should leave, then?”

“Nazi.”

 

The empire’s overall strategy toward Iran seems to be to crowd the area with an increasingly intrusive military presence, then react disproportionately in “self defense” when anything happens. It’s like an older sibling’s “I’m not touching you” car ride teasing, but with an entire region.

 

Not hearing any urgent concerns about that horrible horrifying epidemic of antisemitism that was pervading the Labour Party anymore. I guess they all stopped being antisemites all of a sudden.

 

“You defend Assad!” No I don’t, idiot. I attack the US-centralized empire for pouring billions and billions of dollars into actual terrorist groups in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. I don’t play defense, I play offense.

 

I’m still tripping on how the latest WikiLeaks drops are getting literally zero mainstream media coverage, and yet people on the internet still get mad at me for writing about them. Even one indie blogger talking about these authentic documents is unacceptable to some people.

 

Everyone involved in getting the OPCW leaks out did the right thing but the MSM. The inspectors did the right thing, the whistleblowers did the right thing, WikiLeaks did the right thing… then the media refused to report it and gave control of the narrative to fucking Bellingcat. The facts are right there online right now, staring us all right in the face, but because coverage is being suppressed and the conversation controlled, I have people in my social media notifications at this very moment regurgitating old establishment Syria narratives as gospel truth.

 

Imagine living in Nazi Germany and only ever talking about Jim Crow laws in the American south. That’s what it’s like when people who live in the US-centralized empire focus on the alleged misdeeds of non-aligned nations.

 

Our entire society is mentally ill. What our mentally ill society labels “mental illness” is actually just a small slice of the broader mental illness spectrum — those who are impaired in their ability to participate in the consensus mass delusions shared by the rest of society.

 

Sometimes I can only stop and stare slack-jawed at all the extreme hate and vitriol that gets directed at anti-imperialists online. I mean, you’ll get called all sorts of names, get called evil and a monster, for advocating peace. PEACE! Really shows you the power of propaganda.

 

Mentally mute the narrative soundtrack about Obama changing things after Bush and Trump presenting a radical deviation from all US norms, and what you see is a government continuing along pretty much the exact same trajectory with only cosmetic changes between administrations. World minus narrative is night-and-day different from world plus narrative.

 

Wars aren’t good vs evil; usually they’re geostrategic agenda vs geostrategic agenda. But Hollywood always portrays war as good vs evil, which is why empire apologists always bleat “You’re saying Dictator X is a Good Guy!” whenever you oppose interventionism in X targeted nation. Without that conditioning by professional storytellers, it would never occur to us to try and find the “good guys” in the chaos of a military conflict. We’re trained to think there must be a Good Guy and a Bad Guy, and that if a side isn’t one then they’re the other.

 

Capitalism is literally a game. It’s based on completely made-up rules with a completely made-up points system just like any other game. The only difference between this game and the others is this one gets taken so seriously that losing can kill you in real life.

 

Arguably the only people who actually truly understand the highly unscientific and completely made-up field of economics are those who manipulate the economy for their own benefit. And they only understand it because they’re the ones authoring its self-fulfilling prophecies.

 

Sometimes it’s funny to think about how humanity fought two world wars for basically no reason. World War 2 sprung directly from the effects of World War 1, and hardly anybody can give a coherent explanation for why World War 1 happened. Certainly nobody can justify why World War 1 was necessary. Our species fought two world wars (or arguably one world war with a long intermission to grow more troops) for no justifiable reason at all.

 

Keep paying close attention to Syria. I know they’re saying “Assad won” and there’s a lot of other stuff going on in the world, but the battle for narrative control over Syria is hotter than ever and we’re going to see even more information emerge to discredit the imperial press.

 

“I hope those folks in Hong Kong and Iran obtain democracy like we westerners have. Lemme log off this search engine algorithmically stacked toward billionaire CIA-tied media and ponder whether I want Donald Trump or Joe Biden to continue the wars and oligarchic exploitation.”

 

It can be fun to debate political and ideological solutions to humanity’s problems. Also, it’s worth noting that every one of those problems would disappear very quickly if we all just stopped taking our own mental chatter so seriously.