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.

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 FacebookTwitterSoundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fiPatreon 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

Liked it? Take a second to support Caitlin Johnstone on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

54 responses to “We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”

  1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-why-do-so-many-still-buy-narrative/5757636

    Hello You-all,

    Please watch this insightful interview with a Belgium psychologist/statistician [has consulted with international attorney Reiner Fuellmich].

    If you do not have time for the entire piece [1:15 hours] then start at 35 minutes. It is what I consider the most important part of the discussion–a way out of what Mattis Desmet calls “Mass-formation” and what Vaclav Havel [former president of Czechoslovakia] called the “Collective Normalization”.

  2. Caitlin,
    As usual you are thought-provoking even if I do not agree with you.
    I’m going to cut-and-paste from your essay here: “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.”

    I came to a similar conclusion fifty-odd years ago, and have been ranting on, and I hope improving my argument, ever since. I’m going to set it out briefly here. I won’t be surprised if you delete it.
    A lot of conservative people in the West put a great deal of faith in the principle of division of labour, as set out (vividly explained) in Adam Smith’s book, usually referred to as “The Wealth of Nations.” What he wrote is, I think, true as far as it goes, but I think he politely ignored the fact that there are other ways of getting what you want from other people than by free exchange.
    You can also get what you want from other people by force, or by tricking them somehow. I suggest that the people who use force and the people who use deception always team up to form governments. They rule the people who live by honest exchange.
    I realise that it is more complicated than that. You can seize land, and thereafter live perfectly honestly by selling the fruits of the land and employing people to work it for you. There is a certain integration at the top between the people who live honestly and the people who live dishonestly. But I think the principle remains.
    Governments always are and necessarily must be made up of teams of people who live by force, and teams of people who live by deception. They will incorporate representatives of the honest people who live by honest trade as necessary. It is usually much more necessary in a small state that relies a lot on foreign trade than it is in a vast empire that lives largely on its own resources, and can go out and steal anything it really needs from elsewhere – such as crude oil today.

    I suggest that that is what people need to see. We have all been taught in one way or another that the people in charge are there for our benefit. It may be true that a certain amount of administration is necessary if people are to live together, but that doesn’t change the nature of the body that does the administering. Because we can be forced and we can be deceived, people who live by force and deception are always going to rule us. They could get away with less if we knew that.

    I suggest that one reason for the progress that has been made in the West over the last few hundred years has been a weakness among those who live by deception. At the start of that period, the people who lived successfully by deception were exclusively Christian priests. For whatever reason (and I suggest Martin Luther had a lot to do with it), they lost their ability to convince the public, and the use of reason and research grew up. What has happened now is that a new priesthood is trying to impose a new orthodoxy. This orthodoxy is imposed in the name of education. In other words, education is the new State religion of the West. I suppose you could also call it “information,” because the priesthood very obviously includes the mass media of communication along with the official education systems. I follow C. S. Lewis, the English religious writer, in thinking that the real way any social structure works is never exactly in accordance with the apparent structure. Major news organisations, including Internet companies, work in close harmony with the government. Even those like Fox News that pretend to present a different point of view are tied in by their connections with the banking system.
    As a long-term writer of letters to newspapers, I know that censorship is real, even if they pretend it isn’t there. Some points of view may not be expressed in a reasonable way: they are only ever presented if they are put forward by inexperienced people who can easily be ridiculed.
    Just one more point: a lot of people think that democracy means that we have somehow given our consent to the things that are done to us. I suggest that democracy may have some validity in some circumstances, but that in general, in a stable society, it works as one of the means of deception that the priesthood use, exactly to make us think that we are part of it. In a stable society, many people grow up and live their entire lives in the same circles, and learn very little outside of what the people around them believe. This makes them easy prey for the people who are paid and trained to deceive them.

  3. Propaganda science, in the hands of the wealth and power that wield it, has obliterated any reasonable hint of hope for a mass uprising of common folk in the common interest. Those who are waiting for a political movement to arise and force rational change through the power of the masses should silence their yada yada and sit with reality for a time. Sit quietly in the midst of this psychotic circus and listen without fear or denial, and you will hear indeed the chanting of the fervent crowds… and the whoosh of crematoria being lit. What passed for a left in the west clung to its schisms and its sects and its 19th century take on modern history for about 150 years too long.
    To put it bluntly, that shit is over.
    You have neighbors who need your extra. Start behaving like a human being. It is your only hope, and mine.

    1. Precisely. Thank you Hodgicus.

    2. Indoctrinated and infantile
      We swallow every insane lie
      As denial, blind hope and optimism
      Hold up walls that are our prison

      Data stats, who needs all that?
      They’re just a bunch of useless facts
      That only make me feel uneasy
      A little sick, a little queasy

      Its the migrants, no, it’s the Jews
      So many scapegoats, now which to choose?
      And don’t forget the Neo-Marxists
      Hiding at home in your bread baskets

      Now I haven’t studied history
      Or any political economy,
      Don’t know shit about psychology
      Or the development of society
      I haven’t studied anything at all
      No diplomas hang upon the wall
      But I know all that there is to know
      Because Jordan Peterson told me so
      Now I’m registered with Jobster
      Looking for work as a lobster

      Hold on tight, we’re going down
      Slavish fools to knaves and clowns
      No ,money left for the sick and poor
      Its all been spent on endless war
      And edumacation who needs that
      When its all downloadable on an app?

      Faster than the world’s revolving
      Humanity is fast devolving
      While good old Donald is no ones hero
      Why, he’s a fiddler just like Nero
      Can’t believe it’s come to this
      My god we’re bloody idiots

  4. When we finally awaken to the pretty obvious fact that we are all specific examples of Life’s Presence, and that Life constitutes an entirety of being (of which we are individually and collectively part)…
    Things will start making a lot more sense to us.

  5. Says what it says.

    “This is the first time in history that the ineffectiveness of a medicine is being blamed on those who haven’t taken it.” …Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA.

  6. Fidel Castro, talking sane, rational sense on Capitalism, Consumerism and the Environment (if the link doesn’t work or gets deleted, just put into the search on Youtube (it’s only 2m37s long):

    1. Well, I think perhaps the Big Oil is supportive of the Depopulation agenda, because it will make the oil reserves last longer (and therefore oil corporations). Maybe selective depopulation, like kill off all the communists and their sympathizers.

  7. The link below provides some points to ponder. If we do not develop a collective consciousness, the fall of one empire will be replaced by a rise of another.
    https://www.history.com/news/8-reasons-why-rome-fell
    1. Invasions by Barbarian tribes (presently known as the Border Crisis)
    2. Economic troubles and overreliance on slave labor (the collapsing Roman Empire had inflation and labor shortage too!)
    3. The rise of the Eastern Empire (sounds like China, especially in their partnership with Russia)
    4. Overexpansion and military overspending (the US military budget – every year, and we do not know about the state of our infrastructure since we had to stay home for 2 years)
    5. Government corruption and political instability (US Presidents are set to change every year, almost like Romans going thru 20 rulers in the last 75 years)
    6. The arrival of the Huns and the migration of the Barbarian tribes (the Climate change related migration is already happening and will accelerate the next 50 years)
    7. Christianity and the loss of traditional values (perhaps another religion will rise, like Buddhism)
    8. Weakening of the Roman legions (Pentagon hires contractors to fight their undeclared wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere)

    I am sure there will be new developments this time around, but we already checked out all of the 8 reasons why the Roman Empire fell.

    1. LOL, I meant the Presidential elections every 4 years, not every year.

  8. Well… we’ll have to perish as individuals then… which we’ll do anyway on a personal level since we were born alone and will die alone but even on a social level, if the scamdemic has taught us anything, it’s that there will never be a collective awakening as long as people can be manipulated through fear and there’s no instant satori that would rid the collective of fear. Doesn’t exist. Getting rid of fear is a very long process, going through meditation that most people will never want to undertake because each hour spent in meditation is an hour during which you can’t watch football. It was enough to tell people they had to get a jab to save themselves from a disease that had killed very few of them (0.03% the first year), mostly very old (82 on average), for half of them to jump gleefully on the bandwagon and go for the scalps of the other half. Newton’s third law (“for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”) radically dismisses the notion that a united collective can ever exist. Besides, as Heraclitus pointed out, “all things come into being through the conflict of opposites” that the Chinese call yin and yang. There’s no escaping that. For every Cesar, there’s a Pompey, for every Danton, a Robespierre, for every Stalin, a Trotsky, for every Mao, a Chou-en Lai. Even in democracies, it’s a kind of miracle that all over the world, for decades, people have been voting for two different camps permanently at each other’s throat and sometimes the victory only depends on a few decimals! Even Marx, who based his analysis on the fact that workers in the industrial society could be brought to develop a class consciousness said it wouldn’t be an awakening but an achievement. It would have to be “earned”. The proletariat’s class consciousness would be the result of a permanent struggle to understand the “concrete totality” of the historical process. He admitted that the “lumpenproletariat” made of “vagabonds, discharged soldiers and jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel-keepers, prostitutes, rag-pickers and beggars” living in slums and permanently after a buck no matter how it’s obtained, would never grow a class consciousness. He called them “the dangerous class” whose parasitic ways of life prepared them for becoming bribed agents of the ruling class, “watchdogs of capitalism”. As this cynical “bourgeois” says in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, “we’ll always find half of the poor to bludgeon the other half”. However, there’s a funny hand at work here that Lao Tzu called “wuwei” and others the wind of history and that always restores the balance between yin and yang. As Gandhi once said “remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always…” According to Heraclitus again, “the world is nothing but a great desire to live and a great dissatisfaction with living”. That’s the problem :o)

  9. Kaitlin my Dear,
    You need a better horse to ride.
    Our misconceptions about reality are disturbing and worthy of comment, but they pale in comparison to the nefarious purposes of the global elite who have fostered them over the centuries.
    ” A lot of rope and a lot of trees “.

  10. Dear Cailtlin,
    if you ever start to crowdfund the “Reverse Batman” movie, please make sure to let us know, i would love to see that. Woould probably need another name, like PunchUpMan and also he could start beating the crap out of highranking military and dragging western terrorists (SpecialOps) to an international court situated in Africa or Asia.
    Seriously – that idea MUST make the screen.

  11. As an aside, Tony Blair has been rewarded for his war crimes, become a member of the Order of the Garter, and will now be known as Sir Tony.
    ‘Blair becomes ‘Sir Tony’ and joins top royal order’

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59841419

    1. Blair, Bush and Howard all deserve a ‘hood’.
      The one they slip over the heads of those on the gallows.
      Mass murderers, all of them.
      Along with a ship load of others.

  12. My vote’s on the latter.
    Too little.
    Too late.
    Too gullible.
    Too stupefied by LED screens.

  13. I get the feeling we need a mass scale cure for Stockholm Syndrome.

  14. Collectivism starts with working class solidarity. That’s why I promote getting vaccinated and wearing a mask, it protects the working class from the stupid.

    1. Ah the ignorance rises again. Follow the Sheeple to the jabbing station to get your dose too.
      you are a troll John Knox and yes just doing what IU suspect is your PAID day job.

      1. “If you wanted to depopulate a significant portion of the world, and to do it in a way that wouldn’t require destruction of the environment with nuclear weapons, or poisoning everyone with anthrax or something, and you wanted plausible deniability, whilst you had a multi-year infectious disease crisis; I don’t think you could come up with a better plan than what seems to be in front of me. I can’t say that’s what they’re going to do, but I cannot think of a benign explanation for why they are doing it.”
        Michael Yeadon (April 2021)

        Dr Michael Yeadon is an Allergy & Respiratory Therapeutic Area expert with 23 years in the pharmaceutical industry, including as Chief Science Officer for Pfizer

        https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Michael_Yeadon

        1. This is all about depopulation. Starvation, vaccine deaths which will occur over many years, war etc. Its all about a mass culling of the herd. People just too blind to see what is happening.

          1. On the contrary, collectivism is about feeding people and keeping them healthy. Socialists have been saying this over and over all through the pandemic.

      2. I got mine at a VA hospital. War veterans everywhere, but not a sheep in sight.

        1. You think so John? Look again.

          1. I did, when I got my second vaccine against covid. Still saw war veterans everywhere, but there wasn’t a sheep in sight.

            1. A Sheep does not know it is a sheep.

              1. Said every human sheep ever.

    2. This site has been Infiltrated again. Bware this troll.

        1. He’s not clever or eloquent enough to be a troll Oz.
          He’s just always done what his mummy, daddy, teachers, priest, friends, newsreaders and Fakebook have told him to do.
          No questions asked.
          It’s a lot easier that way.

          1. Johnny: John Knox once wrote he was a reservist, an army guy. This kind of dudes are trained to obey whatever orders come from above and kick ass down the road to enforce them on the little guy. What do you expect ? :o)

      1. The trolls are Johnny and Pascal. They want you to die rather than to take rational precautions against a deadly disease.

        1. “Want you to die…” I’m asking you…
          How the thought that anybody can take you seriously even ever crosses your hallucinating mind is an absolute wonder!

        2. Rational Precautions? A never before used technological chemical concoction not properly trialed and fully tested that resulted in death for all, repeat all lab animals in trials against a disease that 99-97% WILL survive assuming they get it. No evidence in All Cause Mortality these last two years for almost any country studied suggesting a dealy illness is killing people.
          I will take my rational precautions against stupidity and mob panic everytime over what looks to me to have nothing to do with preserving my health.

  15. If we look back at our collective history and recall which individuals and movements were able to bring down the rule of a whole empire, then in the most recent memory it is Mahatma Gandhi in India.
    Here in the US an organization called Pace e Bene (PaceeBene.org) is teaching Nonviolence, Community Building, Organizing, and Resistance.
    I often think about these matters and so far I have not found the answer that is more true for me than Nonviolence.

  16. Caitlin, we’re seeing and saying so very much the same things that I want to send you a copy of my most recent book “The Choice” (you can check it out on Amazon), which attempts to present the deeper spiritual realities of this extraordinary moment in a comprehensible manner. I’ve been tearing out what’s left of my hair trying to find a way to do that and I’m totally hitting a brick wall.

    My email is attached; if this piques your interest shoot me a snail address and I’ll fire off a copy. Go well, Peter Childs

    1. Peter. Looked at Amazon and Amazon.com.au and nothing came up under title or author name.
      Better post an ISBN

  17. Here, in NYC, we’re being Hochul’d into intentionally infecting kids, as vectors to harvest more folks’ homes, jobs, equities, small businesses and indenture us re-re-reinfected chronic PASC victims into virtual share-cropping (5 days off to die or fuck-up your circulatory, lungs, kidney or CNS. Then back to WORK. No testing!!! So, poor mostly “minority” uninsured folks. Like Biden’s Polio Party…

    https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/more-great-news-sars-cov-2-is-only-a-few-mutations-away-from-being-pan-resistant-to-all-known-current-antibodies

    https://www.postalley.org/2021/08/30/long-covid-slow-disaster-in-the-making/

    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/during-a-covid-19-surge-crisis-standards-of-care-involve-excruciating-choices-and-impossible-ethical-decisions-for-hospital-staff.html#comment-3656832

    https://gothamist.com/news/1-million-test-kits-headed-nyc-schools-educators-wonder-about-january-3rd-return#comment-5669472136

    1. That’s the least of our worries.

      1. A matter of perspective. Write back, after you’re forced into reinfection and we’ll exchange notes, presuming you survive and I can still remember any of this? OR (since this has been LOTS worse, than D614G in March of 2020) some prodigiously more virulent strain mutates in the interim and none of our leaders is the least interested in using this last chance to lock-down & stop this thing, like a bunch of countries as diverse as Vietnam, NZ & Singapore did, until dead-eyed, drooling Randian kleptocrats reinfected them all? Words are cheap.

        1. Perhaps the ALL CAUSE MORTALITY government stats tell a better story than all the BS on the mainstream media and bought and paid for executive politicians.
          Can anyone come up with true scientific evidence as to HOW a supposedly 5% unV’d can infect the other 95% who are supposed to be protected.
          Epidemiologists etc., have known for over 100+ years that epidemics fade with more infectious though much less effective illness in time. They even new around 1900 about the very rare ‘Gain of Function’ that could also naturally occur and were attempting to replicate this G of F process in labs.
          Politely I suggest Belitsari if you are saying that the un-V;d are the risk then I think you need to do some serious medical homework. .

          1. There’s next to no evidence “that epidemics fade with more infectious though much less effective illness in time.” Over 99% of all species that once existed have gone extinct; are you positive none did so at the hands of pathogens?

            1. i beg your pardon but it is an axiom of science that viruses fade naturally., something known and accepted over 12o years ago. Go do some homework. More importantly you are making claims so support them with evidence.

              1. That is NOT an axiom of science. No way. It is an assumption made by some, but by no means all, scientists, with very little evidence.

                1. Yeah, you’re RIGHT! I sure wish that folks’ Panglossy fantasies were true. But Science is not the same as sophistry, wish-think tropes, große Lüge or social networking advocacy solutions firm cherry-picked BS agitprop, written by, for and solely from the perspective of rich ofay Creative Class, in hiding up in Poconos “vacation cottages” as we ALL have Omicron and their portfolios jump another 120%.

                  https://projects.thecity.nyc/2020_03_covid-19-tracker/

                  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8274825/

  18. Caitllin’s wise words as always. Give a thought to this though,

    Centralized government in very few controlling hands? Tick
    Financial control in very few centralized large entities? Tick
    News Media in very few controlling hands? Tick
    Communications in Control of very few? Tick

    Starting to sound like a Communist country? WRONG. This IS Australia NOW.

    No country has had a truly Communist System at least not inn modern times. Its theory only until you look at what mechanisms can make Communist governing groups possible and then compare that to Australian reality (and elsewhere) and HEY PRESTO – We live in a Communist like Socio-Political and Economic system.

  19. Frankly, I’m more interested in hearing what’s going on in Australia–events there are so gripping. I just read that protestors set the Old Parliament House on fire. I also read a summary of what appears to be an exceptional piece on vaccine mandates behind The Australian’s paywall: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/vaccine-mandates-set-us-on-path-towards-segregation-and-despotism/news-story/4e708abfa1c62544355bb1575ab9848d
    I’d love to have your take on all of this.

    1. Me too. They are in the trenches.

      1. Australians aer deep in the shit for two fundamental reasons IMHO. One is the appalling reality that a huge majority of the population are so disinterested in politics, unknowing as to Law and the Legal System (two different things) and totally indoctrinated into the Medical Model of health care and Germ Theory of Disease now coupled to an almost complete inability to discriminate between opinion and fact, that they are the poster example of Sheeple – the unthinking. I have worked with Sheep and some of them are smarter and more awake. Two, is that the governing systems and agencies of government and public service are effectively ALL corporate or subsidiary registered business units of corporations the premium levels of which are all foreign controlled traded shareholder corporations (try US-SEC corporate search for capitalised COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA or any of the State Governments).
        A large population of unthinking robots in a vice like totalitarian private foreign controlled grip, with no independent (also corporate) judiciary, does not make good ground on which to mount any push-back let alone a turnaround. It will and is happening though.

    2. Here’s the article minus the paywall:
      ‘Vaccine mandates set us on path towards segregation and despotism’
      https://archive.ph/mp6D4

      1. Brilliant! Thank you.

        1. You can read and get a link like that for lots of paywalled articles by going to https://archive.ph/ and pasting in the URL (the http etc or www etc thingy).

          1. Extremely helpful, thank you very much.

Leave a Reply to peter Cancel reply

Trending