Caitlin Johnstone

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

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The Julian Assange extradition appeal hearing concluded on Wednesday, with no date yet set for a verdict. The entire thing was plagued by media access issues, which has been a constant in every Assange court hearing in every courtroom I can remember. This is a historic case and they’re given months of notice to prepare, and yet the errors persist and always fall on the side of limiting transparency. At a certain point you have to rule out incompetence and assume it’s deliberate.

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It’s wild to think we could be close to seeing Assange whisked away and disappeared from public view for the rest of his life because he committed the crime of good journalism.

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Keep in mind when you read that the US is attempting to jail a journalist for exposing war crimes, that because of Gaza you actually now know what war crimes look like in real life. War crimes are the absolute worst of crimes where the most powerful prey on the most vulnerable. We absolutely must be able to expose them.

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Israeli media are now reporting that ten hostages were killed as a result of Israeli attacks on buildings where the IDF knew hostages were located. Israel supporters can go ahead and stop babbling about hostages when trying to justify the attack on Gaza. It’s never been about saving hostages.

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Israel-Palestine isn’t complicated, you just support colonialism and genocide.

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The US-centralized empire is currently backing a literal genocide and deliberating whether it should begin extraditing and incarcerating foreign journalists for reporting on its war crimes, while continuing to condescendingly wag its finger at the global south over human rights.

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Australia is now doubling its fleet of warships in a buildup aimed at China. I write about the US war machine so much because it’s the most destructive force on this planet by far and it’s harmful to humanity as a whole, but I’ve also got a personal stake in it as an Australian: I oppose our being used as a pawn in Washington’s future war with China.

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The US and Israel are doing everything they can to instigate a wider war in the middle east while leaders in Iran and Hezbollah do everything they can to avoid one. It’s so glaringly, blatantly obvious which side is the aggressor here.

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Once you decide a drastic geopolitical agenda MUST be forced through no matter what you have to do or who you have to kill, you’re guaranteed a lot of bloodshed. That’s what we’re seeing with the agendas of both US planetary hegemony and the maintenance of a Jewish ethnostate.

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The trick is to be a collectivist about the collective and an individualist about yourself as an individual.

Billions of humans cannot exist on this planet without very extensive planning and coordination; it’s way too many large mammals introduced way too quickly to the biosphere to do otherwise. So we need to think collectively about ourselves as a group, and organize accordingly. There’s no getting around it, and failure to accept this is a sign of intellectual and/or emotional immaturity.

But with regard to your own thoughts, your own worldview, your own understanding of the world and your place in it, you must be fiercely individual. Humanity is in a state of mass delusion and confusion, and if you go along with the group — ANY group — in your thinking and understanding, you will surely be led astray. Some groups are far more lucid than others, but they’re all comprised of highly fallible human beings at a point in spacetime when humans are extremely prone to error, and mass-scale psychological manipulation operations by the powerful are further muddying the waters. You’ve got to stand on your own two feet and take full responsibility for your understanding and perspective on all matters, even if/especially when it means standing alone against the crowd.

In other words we must take responsibility for our own minds, but we also have a responsibility toward the wellbeing of humankind as a whole. These two points don’t conflict in the slightest, and are actually kind of obvious if you think about it.

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One thing a lot of people miss about the rising authoritarianism in our society is that such measures are not being rolled out with the goal of constructing a new dystopia that will look wildly different from what we see today, but to lock our current dystopia into place.

Many skeptically-minded individuals look at emerging trends like rising internet censorship, the push to eliminate online anonymity, the war on critical journalism, digital currencies, increasingly sophisticated surveillance, facial ID, artificial intelligence and the normalization of robots in the police force, and they imagine these things will be used to create some kind of pseudo-communist dystopia where human behavior is forced by tyrannical overlords to look wildly different from the way our current civilization looks.

This misconception is based on the erroneous assumption that the powerful are not already getting everything they want from normal human beings, when they absolutely are.

Think about it: why would the people who currently rule over our society want something different from the system upon which their rule is premised? It would be like a king arbitrarily deciding “You know what? Let’s abolish the monarchy and replace it with something completely different, like an oligarchic theocracy or anarchist collective.” They’d be acting against their own power interests.

We’re already working, consuming and voting in perfect alignment with the interests of the powerful, and for the most part we’re thinking and speaking as the powerful want us to as well. This is because our education and media systems have successfully trained us to act in ways our rulers want us to act.

So authoritarian measures aren’t being quietly implemented with the goal of changing our current systems, but as a prophylactic measure in case we ever decide we’re fed up with the exploitative and oppressive nature of those systems and want to start revolting. They’re not preparing to change the nature of the prison or the way it’s being run, they’re just bolstering the locks on the doors.

If you’re in prison, which is more significant for you in your personal life: the fact that you’re in prison, or the fact that they’re improving the locks on the prison’s doors? For most people the issue of more immediate concern would be the fact that they are in prison. The fact that they are not free.

And this is what the prison looks like. Our rulers have already achieved what they were trying to achieve. This mind-controlled dystopia where everyone thinks, speaks, acts, votes, works and consumes in accordance with the interests of the rich and powerful is everything the rich and powerful could possibly want from us.

Some dissident-minded people miss this because they are sympathetic to the values of capitalism, and they have been trained to believe that freedom looks like being free to choose what you will consume and which exploitative capitalist you want to have your labor extracted by, and how you will spend your “free time” when your labor is not being exploited. They therefore imagine that this current dystopia is what freedom looks like, and that the powerful are plotting to inflict some future alien dystopia upon them that looks more collectivist and communismy.

This is simply not the case. This civilization is saturated in mass-scale psychological manipulation geared toward tricking us into believing that this is what we want, that we built this horrifying dystopia ourselves, that it serves our interests, and that this is what freedom looks like — but we only believe such things because we were trained to believe them. That is the doctrine of the dystopian capitalist empire we live under, and all the information systems in our society are slanted toward tricking us into thinking it’s the truth. The delusion that dystopia would be experientially different from what we are currently experiencing is itself part of the propaganda prison.

This is not what freedom looks like. Humanity could be so, so much more than this, and it should be. We should not be locked into these abusive competition-based models wherein nations compete with other nations, political factions compete with other political factions, scientists compete with other scientists, workers compete with other workers. We should not be clawing our way to the front of the rat race and stepping on the heads of our brothers and sisters trying to scramble to the top, we should be collaborating together for the common good of all humankind, and for the good of this planet’s biosphere upon which we depend for survival.

Right now the only thing stopping us from having a healthy and harmonious world where nobody’s left out and everyone has enough is the fact that skillful manipulators have slyly constructed this competition-based dystopian prison around us without our noticing. The sooner we start noticing, the sooner we can start plotting our escape. And the sooner the better, because the prison’s security systems are only getting tougher and tougher to break through.

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