We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

Everyone who’s freaking out about wokeness and identity politics can relax. Liberals are 100 percent certain to get bored with that schtick and forget all about it without having helped a single member of any minority or marginalized group. Ask the immigrants and the kids in cages.

❖

Anyone to the left of Ted Cruz is a communist. Anyone who opposes US imperialism loves and supports the governments it targets. Anyone who defends Palestinians hates Jews. Move the Overton window far enough toward your side of the debate and you can spin even the slightest hint of disagreement with you as dangerous extremism.

❖

People who spend their time freaking out about communism are hilarious. Even if you believe communism is always necessarily evil, if you live in the western empire you’re so far from experiencing communism it makes more sense to spend your time fretting about shark attacks or being struck by lightning. If you’re reading this odds are you live in an English-speaking nation. If you live in an English-speaking nation your government is so very, very, very far from espousing communism that it would make more sense for you to spend your time worrying about being eaten by lions.

Even if you believe everything the TV tells you about communism, the simple economic realities of your nation and the mountains of violent force keeping it in place mean that of all the many, many existential threats you can worry about, communism should rank near dead last.

❖

Reverse Batman: A working class ninja spends his nights beating up kleptocratic billionaires whose thievery has created the socioeconomic injustice that’s destroying his city.

❖

It's good that Beijing is finally leaning hard on this obvious and unassailable argument that the US handed China on a golden platter. https://t.co/lgn3xfDX9X

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 30, 2021

❖

Balanced commentary in the west does not mean criticizing all governments. Balanced commentary in the west would be correcting the wild imbalance in our current media environment by focusing on criticizing the most powerful and deadly governments who barely receive any criticism.

❖

The powerful are able to manipulate humanity collectively to such an extent that our compliance now has us staring down the barrel of extinction on multiple fronts. No individual can stop them. They won’t be stopped until the people begin thinking and organizing collectively too.

Which is of course why all collectivist movement is stomped out with whatever degree of violence is necessary. Our rulers are not even the slightest bit worried about us as individuals, but they are absolutely terrified of the idea of having to face us as a unified collective.

If individualism ever had an argument to begin with, it certainly hasn’t got one anymore. Humanity’s collective behavior is now so powerful that it can literally end our world. The only thing we can control now is whether that collective behavior is pointed toward health or destruction.

Oh you just want the government to leave you alone and let you go about your business as an individual, do you? Well guess what blossom? Even if you went off grid and lived a truly independent life, the ways the powerful are organizing the collective will still get you killed by nuclear war or environmental destruction. Even if you support a radically individualist status quo like voluntaryism or minarchism, you’re never going to get a chance at creating that status quo without mass-scale collective organization against the current status quo. An “anarchist” who dismisses mass collective organization is just a LARPer.

The need to begin thinking and organizing collectively has shown up at your doorstep. The luxury of thinking of yourself as an individual is no longer yours. Unhealthy mass-scale human behavior will destroy us all if we cannot make the changes necessary to turn it toward health.

We will either rise as a collective or perish as individuals. All other options have been taken off the table.

❖

Humans are not rational animals. That’s clearly evident in our behavior at mass scale and as individuals. We are driven by our conditioning. If any kind of “free will” can be said to exist at all, it’s only to the extent that we choose to bring consciousness to that conditioning.

❖

The only obstacle to the creation of paradise on earth is the limits of human perception. Our inability to see what’s happening behind the veils of government secrecy. Behind the distortions of propaganda. Behind the illusory nature of the ego. We just need to find a way to see.

Seeing is all that’s required. If enough people could clearly see what’s going on in their world, in their government, and in themselves, the shift into healthy and harmonious functioning would immediately change from seemingly impossible to self-evidently inevitable.

____________________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/01/02/well-either-rise-as-a-collective-or-perish-as-individuals-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/