It is said that history is written by the victors, but what’s interesting is that this is also true of the present story. Those who are winning the capitalism game get to set the narrative about what is currently happening in our world.
If you succeed in dominating the humans you share a planet with using our current socioeconomic systems of labor exploitation and resource extraction, then you get to buy up politicians, media outlets, online platforms and influence operations which allow you to determine the mainstream narratives about what’s going on in our world, in the same way the victorious armies of the past often had the power to shape the historical record in their favor.
The present is therefore written by the victors.
Those who’ve landed at the top of the heap have the power to circulate narratives which normalize the abusive system they benefit from, and to scare the public away from seeking to implement other systems of power distribution and resource allocation.
They have the power to shape public perception of world events, to reverse victim and perpetrator in their narratives about international conflicts, and to frame the western empire as a passive witness to the terrible things that are happening around the world rather than the primary driver of those horrors.
They have the power to determine which protest movements, mass atrocities and scandals receive widespread attention in our society, and which get conveniently overlooked.
They have the power to determine which political parties are taken seriously, and which parties are considered unrealistic vanity projects which steal votes from the viable candidates.
They have the power to make or break careers in media or politics, to choose which figures are elevated to celebrity status or marginalized to the fringes, and to fabricate antisemitism scandals out of thin air.
Power is the ability to control what happens. Absolute power is the ability to control what people THINK about what happens. Those who are winning the capitalism game are able to exert absolute power over our society.
The real source of power in our world is not money, nor resources, nor armies, nor weapons. The real source of power in our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.
Narrative is the only thing that determines what governments look like, how power works, how money operates, what laws there are, and why nations operate the way they do. They’re all completely made-up guidelines made of words which we have all collectively agreed to pretend are true. The only reason anything works the way it works is because enough of us believe the shared narratives saying it is so. It is our collective belief which gives those narratives their power.
That’s why our rulers pour so much energy into controlling the narrative. That’s what you’re seeing with all the news media consolidation, the centralization of internet activity into a handful of trillionaire apps, the aggressive artificial intelligence push, and the efforts to stomp out dissident speech throughout the western world. It’s because the powerful understand something most of us do not: that their power comes entirely from narrative.
They know that as soon as enough of us stop believing their narratives, we are free. We can decide to re-write the made-up rules of society whenever we choose to, and change everything about states, authority, money and labor which have allowed the plutocrats to live like kings at the expense of everyone else. We can stop playing the capitalism game they’ve been winning at any time, because the rules are completely made up, and we can just make up a different game.
As soon as enough people stop believing the stories of the dominant storytellers, we can use the power of our numbers to force the creation of a healthy world.
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