“They’re profiting from your worry”
– Andrew Bird, Bloodless
To read prior installments: Here for Part I. And Part II here.
In this series of essays I put forward a simple premise – We live under a system of dominance that is not conducive to peace and social harmony.
Our current society is running off values installed long ago from a legacy domination system that has distinct agendas that have not changed much since Greco-Roman times in western social hierarchies. Social hierarchies must do certain things to maintain and expand their power, like formulate a reward and punishment system and have a means for enforcing rules usually through a military force of some nature which has access to sufficient resources to support them, since in order to hold control over others they must create an imbalance of social power.
Without leverage over people, that weird dude behind a podium ranting about how we need to gather all the young people together and have them travel thousands of miles of way with guns and bombs to bring democracy to a place we’ve never heard of would seem like a lunatic to everyone.
But inundate their senses with your messaging and have a brute squad enforce policies and suddenly you’re no longer a lunatic, rather you’re a dignitary with an important sounding title. The once skeptical masses are obediently listening now that the illusion of authority has been normalized.
These systems of dominance wear a mask of civility but what actually plays out is a system that’s hyper-competitive and violently aggressive to those who stand in the way of what oligarchies desire. They are not interested in peace, community, love, wisdom, understanding…no to all that.
They want more for the sake of more. That’s all.
And until we get that there are serious negative implications for a society that’s run in this manner then the patterns will remain the same; their war games will continue.
So to continue on with the primary elements that make social harmony impossible in western society…
Peace Inhibitor No. 2: The Normalization of Gross Inequality
“The white man(western civilization) knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.”
― Sitting Bull
Imagine two monkeys, a cage, and a grape. That might sound like a lead in for a disturbing viral video but it’s an interesting bit of research, albeit performed with a soupçon of cruelty to animals (what’s science without a little cruelty?). In an experiment they found that when one monkey was given a grape and the other not it would induce anger in the less fortunate. They also found it doesn’t matter what species you apply this to, if you give one preference over another then social disharmony is sure to follow.
Turns out inequality pisses off just about every species. Anecdotally, I live with cats who also exhibit the same behavior when they see the other getting more attention. And if you have kids at home try giving one of them a fancy new gizmo for no reason while ignoring their sibling then sit back and watch the arguments and resentments that follow.
The reason the feeling is so offensive probably has some jealousy in the mix, but beyond that I think inequality brings about a feeling of inferiority that’s rather unpleasant. And conversely when you’re the recipient of more over others you begin to feel like you’re more worthy than the other even when you may sympathize with the plight of the have nots.
And dear readers, we can also see how it pissed off Ferris Bueller when his sister Jeanie got a car and he just got a computer. So that’s some pretty solid evidence right there.
The anger that arises out of being treated differently is felt viscerally. Reward and punishment treatment, also known as B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, tends to message a conditionality in a relationship that has a subtext of an underlying manipulation. Whether people consciously acknowledge it or not, when you only are nice to someone when they obey all your demands it doesn’t feel like an authentic relationship is present. It feels like naked self serving manipulation, and all creatures seem to get perturbed when they figure out they are being exploited.
When contrived inequality is applied in a top down social hierarchy on a global scale it has an effect of obliterating trust between people as jealousies emerge and resentments grow against an iniquitous system. Once trust has been nuked individualism becomes rampant, paranoia becomes an epidemic, and authentic community bonds are shattered.
Social hierarchy, which I discussed in part II of this series, itself creates discord but also creates inequality to maintain its power through a system of payouts for loyalty. Whatever labels are used to describe top down social hierarchies there are similar methods employed for holding power and manufacturing inequality which are justified through a bevy of unique rationalizations. Over the ages in western civilization the respective powers that be have all had their own narratives for why those in power must have so much more while the people largely remain poor, for example:
Kings: “I deserve more than you because of my noble blood.” (Oh, and did you happen to notice my army of knights that I reward to convince people of my nobility?)
Capitalists: “I deserve more than you because I made money the old fashion way, I had foreign labor work for close to nothing due to currency exchange rates while also screwing domestic labor.” (Oh, and don’t pay too close attention to how this money was accumulated because I just used the power installed in money to manipulate the system by lobbying politicians in my favor and hid behind a system of violence and oppression to make my fortune.)
Dictators: “I deserve more than you because I said so.” (Oh, and if you disagree my thugs will murder you in your sleep.)
“Democratic” Nation States: “I deserve more than you because you voted for me in a contrived election process under a system that was instantiated through force, so you want me to have more, you know, so I can serve you better. (Oh, and did you see my pretty array of nukes? My intelligence agencies? My mass incarceration system?)
Theocrats: “I deserve more than you because a deity wanted it that way.” (Oh, and only I have a direct line to god, you just piously follow, give me your stuff, and have absolute faith in my words. If you disagree just talk to all my followers who I’ve convinced to do any horrible thing I want in the name of god.)
Behind all inequality is some form of gangsterism along with scapegoating an out-group to create a divide and conquer mentality. Inequality drives anger throughout the population, anger which is often misdirected by power to areas that benefit them. And just like the monkey not receiving a grape, we all know inside when we’re getting a raw deal even though we might not be able to quite articulate it or figure out what is actually responsible.
While pointing out the problems manifest in inequality I do not mean to imply that equality can somehow be enforced, even if one tried genuinely in some authoritarian manner they’d likely fail to achieve anything close to it. Every time power based in social hierarchy intercedes it creates a string of consequences both desired and undesired. Advantages given for one group mean disadvantages for another, and because social hierarchies are also primarily self interested they will give advantages only to those that potentially can make the hierarchy more powerful.
Regardless, animosities foment when one is given an advantage and those with an advantage will fight to keep that advantage long after it served its stated purpose. Many times the best thing established social power can do is to get out of the way, as it’s their policies that have allowed for such massive imbalances in power to amass in the first place.
However you can make the social system work in fairer ways by altering the way we relate to each other. It’s not about making competition more fair, but rather doing away with imposed competition because it’s unnecessary and was created in the first place to bake inequality into the system so a small minority can wield the most leverage.
Inequality as a Strategy for Holding Power
Things are the way they are for good reasons. Power wants things that contribute to their agendas where they sell the people on the idea that what’s good for the social hierarchy is also good for them. And sure, those high up in the hierarchy will benefit far far far far far far far more than the average worker bee, but wouldn’t you rather have a Nintendo than not have a Nintendo while they steal the majority of your time on this earth frittering away in do-nothing labor?
Labor under modern hierarchy most always benefits something that feeds into the neoliberal capitalist structure and ultimately nation states and central banking institutions.
Social power sits on the people like a gravity well which insures through its monetary systems, rules, and customs that the product of most everything the people do and the resources of the land they live on will orbit around established power structures while they consume and parse out rewards for acts of great servility.
In America, the often touted richest country in the world, 73% of its people die in significant debt. What can be inferred by this debt is that most people are forever slaves to the cult of money whether they like it or not.
This can’t just be dismissed as a segment of people not working hard enough, or are undereducated, or any of the litany of excuses fed to us by power or its apologists for why things are like they are. The system was never meant to work in a humanitarian manner. Rather it’s simply built to best suit the needs of ever expanding empire and has its needs prioritized above all others including its own citizens, which in reality are merely human assets for the empire to utilize for the accumulation of power.
There’s not enough wages offered to the lower and middle classes that can keep people out of debt. If corporations who are flush with cash saw a profit in hiring more people and paying more they’d do it. But there are more people than there are middle class jobs. Otherwise everyone would have a middle class life and poverty wouldn’t be a thing, not just financial poverty, but poverty of time.
Not enough profits are shared from the upper class to prevent mass debt or poverty and there never has been a time where that was any different. A large number of people will always be on the bottom and a small group of insiders on top who wield inordinate amounts of power and wealth by ruling through manipulation, guile, and brute force.
Monetary systems are a trap to keep you forever working and then after a lifetime of labor most people somehow still owe the rich even more. It’s funny these days hearing people talk about “toxic” work environments because capitalism itself is a toxic work environment. Or really any system of quid pro quo exchange that involves trying to create leverage over another.
This social construct to which we are rigidly anchored is little more than an open air prison for humans that seduces us with ornate semantics and clever little Orwellian twists in meaning. A system of inequality that forces people into subservience by making them desperate. I’d call that kind of manipulation pretty toxic. As this old quote by Arthur Young from 1771 highlights:
“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious… they must be (like all mankind) in poverty, or they will not work“
– Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Tour Through England, 1771
As the Arthur Young quote above speaks to, in order to get people to do all the things you need for a central power to operate you have to take the basics away and make them desperate enough to perpetually work for what once was free. What makes this quote truly special is its age. People have understood the game for a long time and the game continues now. Those who stand to benefit from controlling the lives of others from great distances knew then what the score was, just as some know now.
A system that relies on coerced labor also simultaneously creates conditions for the normalization of authoritarianism where as a society you are ceding to the notion that some far off centralized power knows what’s best for your life and how you should be spending it. There’s also a built in zeitgeist of superiority when one group of people believes it’s their right to tell another group how they should live.
A culture of lying to get ahead is prominent and spreads rampantly as people compete for jobs they then begin to lie with every compulsory action obeyed for money. To get the jobs people don’t want in the first place just about everyone embellishes their resumes, and when we don’t even want the job it’s a lie to pretend we do. Once landing the job people will often act in ways according to what their employer demands. They will take to lying with glued on smiles, pretending to be content, when there is actually a gloomy feeling on the inside. Or maybe they’ll lie in a sales pitch. Or lie via proxy by being part of a team who was led by someone hiding a giant lie. Or lie because the job does nothing but tell half truths, like say any job in the legal system.
Some may even like facets of coerced labor, but there’s other parts that are always extraneous, burdensome, and that’s often due directly to complying to how a centralized socioeconomic system wants things to be. Sometimes jobs have us doing things we don’t feel are the right thing to do, but people more often than not do them anyway because of the financial consequences of refusing to comply.
And when money is needed to live, people often don’t care what terrible lie they are feeding into, if a paycheck is coming then they lie and ignore, further stoking individualism.
Do we collectively hold the truth in such low regard? And what kind of community or society can thrive on a construct that is instructing us all to be liars?
I know only one, a top down social hierarchy with a might makes right policy.
This social structure creates a mindset that makes us crazy with cognitive dissonance and therein also makes us easily manipulated. Vulnerabilities are tapped into that rulers have long known can surreptitiously drive reactivity in humans. In a reactive state the people’s resolve becomes pliable just like people with a domination mindset desire.
Awakening From the Embedded Lies of Inequality
The idea of shock doctrine involves subjecting the masses to a curated shock, then playing the role of savior when they become desperate. Now you’ve got them in a mental jiu jitsu hold. Lies can be built upon lies and things become very hazy for the masses when they start basing their opinions upon what the leaders manipulating them are saying.
Since strong social bonds are obstacles to controlling people they are not prioritized in our civilization, however what is denied to us also constitute the major components of building trust, real community, and lasting peace. So in lieu of those silly things we’ve placed absolute trust in money and the authority that backs it. Money which has a power of making people desperate and subservient exists in a culture that claims to be free. What a ridiculous canard we’ve been sold. The constitution and Declaration of Independence amount to a sales pitch that’s a bait and switch.
Whether each successive generation who takes the reins of power realizes it or not they are taking part in a long refined tradition of the dark art of self-serving systemic manipulation executed with a high degree of craftsmanship. Artisans of exploitation constructed to satiate egos that are never satiated; egos rationalized at every moment which those in control will go as far as calling justice.
Sure, an argument could be made that the masses are benefitting in some ways from the status quo, but oligarchs are taking credit for what the people are forced to do and dismissing that there’s an underlying inescapable coercion taking place. Many can sense they could live better lives if they could be free to self organize at local levels. Potentially forming a web of communities in open cooperation and a direct participatory democracy. A voluntary system. One that fosters peace instead of division. One where large scale poverty isn’t fated by a centralized con game referred to as a monetary system.
It may take time and effort to make new ways of living viable, and many emotional thresholds that must be overcome as well, however difficult as change may be, we’ve seen what this way of life consistently produces. A pyramid scheme.
And in a society where the people aren’t all indoctrinated with western ideas of divisive competition at the outset then maybe a whole different culture could emerge that would need far less governing because the reason and rationale for committing crimes wouldn’t make much sense.
There’s a part IV to this series in the works, so check in from time to time if you’re interested in reading what will likely be the last installment.
Again, you can find the prior essays – Here for Part I. And Part II here.
Thanks for reading.
