You Only Need To Cage A Bird If It Knows That It Can Fly

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 One point I keep trying to drive home here in as many ways as I can is that this is the dystopia we were warned about. The main difference between this mind-controlled dystopia and the fictional dystopias in novels like 1984 is that in 1984 people knew they weren’t living in a free society, whereas in this dystopia the people believe they are free.

In Orwell’s dystopia people knew they weren’t free and had to use doublethink to stay out of trouble with their rulers. In this dystopia people have no idea how pervasively they’re being dominated by their rulers; they think they came up with their ideas, worldview and political positions on their own, when in reality those belief systems were constructed inside their skulls by a profoundly sophisticated propaganda machine without their even knowing it.

All mainstream and semi-mainstream political factions are owned and operated by the powerful, and propaganda is used to get the public subscribing to them to advance the interests of the powerful. Because the overwhelming majority of us have been manipulated into espousing one of these power-serving belief systems (they give you multiple choices depending on your ideological disposition), the more overtly totalitarian measures described by dystopian novelists are unnecessary. You only need to cage a bird if it knows that it can fly.

But make no mistake: our society is no more free than those in the dark futures imagined by storytellers. If our minds are not free, then we are not free. If we’re being successfully manipulated into thinking, speaking, acting, voting, working and consuming in accordance with the wishes of the powerful, then we’re just as locked down as we would be if we had chains around our necks. Collectively we could not be any more aligned with the will of the powerful than we already are, even if our brains were replaced with computer chips.

There is no more need for dystopian fiction, because the dystopia has already arrived. It’s here. In fact, dystopian fiction is actually destructive because it causes people to imagine that dystopia is a threat that exists somewhere off in the future instead of right here and now all around us.

We don’t need dystopian fiction for the same reason we wouldn’t need imaginary swords-and-sorcery fantasy novels if we we lived in a world of wizards and dragons. People living in dystopian societies do not need dystopian fiction, they need dystopian facts. Dystopian journalism. Dystopian documentaries. Dystopian polemics. We just need true information and reality-based ideas to counter the lies and manipulation we’re inundated with from day to day.

We cannot be free until we have used the power of our numbers to shrug off the control of our dystopian overlords, and we’ll never do that as long as a critical majority of us are unable to see how profoundly unfree we really are. There’s no escaping the mind control matrix of imperial propaganda until you can see the lines of code it is made of.

Our most important task then, at this point in history, is to keep pointing out those lines of code for as many people as possible, in as many ways as we can think of. The one advantage to this type of dystopia is that our rulers need to maintain their nice-guy free society image in order to preserve the illusion that we are free, so they can’t just come out and start imprisoning everyone who spotlights the myriad ways we are enslaved by lies and propaganda. They’ll never grant us a major mainstream platform on which to do this, but we can operate within the margins, waking up one person at a time to the reality of what’s going on.

So go around spreading the truth. Fighting the propaganda. Weakening public trust in the mass media and the political constructs it manufactures consent for. Highlighting the depravity and murderousness of the empire. Use any and all media and forums you find to be effective. 

Everything you do on this front makes a difference, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. The propaganda machine is the linchpin of their power. It’s what holds the empire together. Without the ability to manipulate the public at mass scale, our rulers cannot rule.

Once people are no longer buying into power-serving narratives, we will gain the ability to begin working toward the creation of a truth-based society that works for everyone. But this will never happen as long as we are being successfully manipulated into believing that this model for human civilization is acceptable and serves our interests. The very first step is un-jacking our brains from the propaganda matrix.

Mixed media piece I did while nervously awaiting the resolution of the latest Assange hearing:

Text:

If Gaza taught me anything, it’s taught me what war crimes really look like. War crimes are cruel power abuses where soldiers with bombs and guns prey on babies and moms and grandpas and shop owners. War crimes are not abstract to me anymore. War crimes are brutal. War crimes are flesh-from-bones. War crimes are kids crying in the freezing rain because they can’t find any family. War crimes are snipers picking off patients through hospital windows. War crimes are moms starving to death very slowly under a grave of rubble because no one can rescue them. War crimes are little girls with blown-out eyes from being run over by a tank while she slept in her bed.

And who showed us all this? Journalists. Journalists documenting war crimes.

If the US succeeds in extraditing Assange today, they will set a precedent that any journalist anywhere in the world can be snatched up and taken to the US and locked away for the rest of their lives just for embarrassing the US with evidence of their war crimes.

So I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been pacing around like a nervous Pervis through this latest extradition hearing. So I thought I’d do another painting of Assange, but this time in the blue press helmet made famous by those other courageous journalists from Palestine.

Free Palestine. Free Assange. Free the world.