Listen to a reading of this article:
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If you’ve publicly challenged the official narratives of the western political/media class about any major issue, you’ve probably noticed that people can get pretty upset about it.
Like, actually upset. Not mildly annoyed like you might get at someone who is saying something that is obviously false and stupid, but burning hot emotional like you’d get if you heard someone insulting your loved one. Or like someone insulting you personally.
That’s the most surprising thing, when you first start speaking about this stuff. Not that people don’t believe you or don’t agree with you; that’s to be expected when every screen in their lives is telling them one thing and you’re telling them something else. But that people actually get deeply emotionally invested in it.
That’s your first clue that there’s something else going on beneath the surface apart from what you’re being presented with. You’re not just arguing about Ukraine or China or Syria or whatever, you’re touching on a psychological third rail that’s being ferociously protected.
Many of the people you’ll run into online or in person who defend imperial narratives from your criticisms aren’t doing so because they believe the US-centralized empire is awesome and great, they’re doing so because it’s much more comfortable than confronting the possibility that their entire worldview is made of lies.
You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you https://t.co/XwFjK9EOyl pic.twitter.com/QRSalVfuKK
— The Oatmeal (@Oatmeal) May 2, 2017
There’s a great comic by The Oatmeal which explains the psychological defense mechanisms humans have in place to protect their worldview from information that could destabilize it. Because of our tendency to select for cognitive ease over cognitive challenge in order to conserve mental energy, we tend to be heavily biased against consciously helping new worldview-disrupting information get past those psychological defense mechanisms.
And it doesn’t get more worldview-disrupting than questioning mainstream consensus reality. Because on the other side of that investigation is the realization that pretty much everything you’ve been trained to believe about your society, your nation, your government and your world, is a lie.
This is often what people are really pushing back against when they get upset at someone who is being critical of official empire narratives. It’s not actually super important to them that everyone believe the correct things about their government or someone else’s government, it’s super important to them that the world as they know it not come to a crashing halt.
Because that’s what it is, as far as their experience and perception is concerned. A lucid seeing that their entire worldview is based on lies would feel like the end of their world, because in their experience it would be the end of the world they know.
Having your entire understanding of the world and how it works torn asunder is a kind of a death, because it’s the end of your secure knowing of what’s real. In a sense it’s the end of you, too. It’s the end of the person you were. It’s all illusory of course, but that’s the way it feels.
If you ask someone to consider the possibility that they’re being lied to in some way about Ukraine, for example, you’re not just asking them to unravel one small belief about one specific conflict. You’re asking them to ask questions that open up other questions, the answers to which could very easily end up unravelling their entire understanding of their whole world.
Think about it. If you consider the possibility that the news media and their government are lying about Ukraine, you must necessarily consider the possibility that they’re lying about other things, too. And if they’re lying about all that, it would mean you were taught lies in school, too. And if you’ve been consuming lies from the very beginning of your education, that means your entire understanding of how everything works is built on lies, which means your political ideology and many opinions you hold probably are, too.
If you really think about what this kind of confrontation means for the individual, is it any wonder that most people fight tooth and claw against the suggestion that they should even begin to enter that investigative rabbit hole?
I mean, think about how it was for you. If you’re reading this, odds are you went through the ordeal of worldview dissolution yourself at some point. Can you honestly say it was easy? Or entirely pleasant?
This is not easy to do. You cast aside the comforts of knowledge and understanding, and then after you’ve gone through that whole ordeal you’re still not out of the woods, because until you’ve gotten your bearings you can find yourself in a kind of epistemological no-man’s land where anything might be true. In that space people can get mixed up and latch onto new worldviews that are no more truth-based than the one they abandoned, like QAnon or fuzzbrained notions about Jews ruling the world. It’s not until you pass through the process of abandoning all the falsehoods and the process of learning what’s really true that you begin to regain any semblance of stability.
If you think that’s an easy thing to do, it’s probably because you haven’t gone through it yourself.
Can you really blame people for intuitively pushing away from that?
It’s actually much, much easier to go from being a die-hard Democrat to a die-hard Republican or vice-versa than it is to fully relinquish the mainstream consensus reality, because those partisan narratives both exist within the mainstream consensus reality. The entire conceptual infrastructure by which they exist is the same: a world where the US and its allies are acting in good faith against tyrannical regimes in nations like Russia and China, where capitalism is totally working, where democracy is real, and where you can turn on a TV news station and see someone saying something trustworthy about these things. You’re still playing the same game, you just switched teams.
To really see through all the lies is for the floor to fall out from the game altogether and for the roof to be ripped off the stadium. It’s to see the entire conceptual infrastructure upon which mainstream politics plays out crumble to dust, to see the lights switched on and the puppet theater reduced to atoms, leaving only the puppeteers waving their stupid toys and talking in silly voices.
Depending on how attached you are to the feeling of security your worldview gives you and how resistant you are to letting it go, really confronting the lies our society is woven from can be one of the most difficult things you ever do. It’s a long, deep process of untangling which, if followed all the way through, eventually leads to the dissolution of entire belief systems, and ultimately even entire identity structures. Followed all the way through, it can lead to the very end of who you take yourself to be and your experience of what you are.
So have patience if people don’t see what you see. They’re just afraid. They’re not there yet. An acorn is not a defective oak tree. An egg is not a defective chicken. We’re all waking up together, and some of us have had to be the first to lead the charge out of the darkness and into the light. This is just what it looks like as life on this planet moves toward increased levels of complexity and consciousness.
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86 responses to “People Who Defend Empire Narratives Are Really Just Defending Their Worldview From Destruction”
I became a very strict pacifist because of all of this. I believe (but not certain) it was Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt who did a study along similar lines. You need uncertainty to create the collective because if people do not trust the media or feel like they are being lied to, then the response is to gather together for security. This is interesting because if this is true, then the reason the governments tolerate authors such as yourself questioning the main stream news is to create the necessary uncertainty to keep the groups together. Social media does not create friends, it gathers people together with their views. If this is true, then focusing on friendship is a much different act than commenting on social media. Might want to try making friends in real life instead of worrying about what you think about my comments.
I’ve posted the Bo Burnham embedded video separately, in the hopes that entertainment will challenge some people to read this article (that I”m sharing immediately above the video) and reconsider their world view.
You are so fucking dumb your twitter posts about “benevolent” China prove it. You’re fine with a new master just as long as it isn’t the US. No wonder you suck up to the CCP so much in your writing. You’re a shill,and it’s worse if you aren’t getting paid for being a CCP suckass. Fuck you.China has historically put people like you against the wall first. You are the worlds dumbest bitch,and you know nothing about Chinese history.
I, also, see highly emotional zealots screaming at the top of their lungs, to mission others because they have seen the light of truth.
One asks, how do you “… learn what’s really true..” when “.. anything might be true ..”
“.. it’s not easy ..” – aha, no shit – intuition maybe?
“some of us have had to be the first to lead the charge out of the darkness and into the light.”
OK, now I understand – its the religion and priests thing
Anyway, I do agree with most of what you write Caitlin.
If you wonder what made us crazy hippies, it was this: we grew up and found out that everything the grown-ups had been telling us was lies.
Realize that we were in elementary school in the 1950s – McCarthy, remember? – during the time that little children were taught to salute the flag every morning at the beginning of the school day, and when they inserted the words “under god” into the pledge. (Yes, I can remember when those words weren’t part of the Pledge of Allegiance.)
Then we went to college. Then we were told (since we came of age) that “it wasn’t really like that.” Then there was the Vietnam War.
Then the sh*t hit the fan, as we put 2 & 2 together and realized it was all a pack of lies.
“Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Also, we were raised by men and women who were profoundly traumatized by the Depression and the insanely needless horror of a second great world war. Those naifs were so profoundly failed in both instances by leadership so incompetent or power-hungry that the word “evil” seems most apt. The heartbreakingly young faces that stare back at us in fading photos of the highly propagandized “greatest generation” are the images of innocents betrayed. And we their children grew up in the toxic shadow of the anguish and rage they were never allowed to feel let alone acknowledge. Today’s incredibly over-the-top level of endless fabrications about Vlad the Terrible and his demonic hordes builds on the spectacular lies about FDR’s “good war” that have so long replaced what actually happened.
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It strikes me looking at reruns of old sitcoms today like Leave It To Beaver that they are so much like the mannered comedies of the 1930s – it feels like people just wanted their lives to go back to some kind of normal, any kind, after all the horror they’d been through, and this indeed is why for a short while they were allowed prosperity as never before or since. And I must say that it is easier to come to terms with that generation now that they are passing into history, and are no longer here to constantly disappoint us with all their scars.
“So have patience if people don’t see what you see. They’re just afraid.”
Patience isn’t a virtue when their fear is causing you harm. I’m long past the point of caring what happens to these frightened little sheep. Their fear has relegated me to second class status. I can’t fly east to visit my aged mother without being “fully vaccinated” even though I have natural immunity. I can’t even leave the country, which at this point is my overwhelming desire now that we’re officially supporting Nazis.
To anticipate my detractors, I’m not overstating anything here. While you people cowered in fear and ignorance I was the guy hauling groceries to your supermarket so you could continue eating. You know, that big truck in the parking lot you, in your impatience, try to drive around while I’m backing up? Yeah, that was me. The guy that got sick, recovered with Ivermectin (a perfectly safe drug that you all thought was deadly poison) and who kept on working right up until you thought forcing me to vaccinate was a good idea and froze my bank account when I exercised my right to dissent.
I know, not all of you thought that way, but there were far too few of us to make a difference, and that’s still the case, judging by all the little blue and yellow flags I see. You know what? Fuck all of you, except the brave and the bold. You truly deserve what’s in store for you, and it’s only just getting started.
Beautiful, important article. Thank you. Let’s not underestimate the leap of waking up to reality.
I was one of the lucky ones–as a red diaper baby, I grew up always disbelieving the consensus view, so I never had to go through what others have.
Thanks so all of you who have made the difficult journey and joined the rest of us on the shores of REALITY!
*to
“Red diaper baby” – ?
As much as I’d like to “red-pill” some people, “You can’t be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”
I hope we meet someday in real life b/c this article explains the process very accurately of what it’s like to confront these truths while living in the US. Me personally it was a multi-year process. Would like to give you a giant hug someday and I’m not a hugging person, so good chance it will be super awkward. Still hope it happens:)
Great job!
“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.” — Bertholt Brecht
I began to question the mainstream fiction about the United States in 1963, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I was 15 years old at the time. I really started learning during the antiwar movement in the 1960s and the marches for civil rights that same decade. I first started reading Marx at the age of 19 in 1967. I have never again believed anything put forth in support of capitalism or the United States by the mainstream. I am now 73 and glad I started learning early. I know far too many grownups who still believe like naive teenagers. It is unpleasant to witness.
You sound like an example of exactly what Caitlin is talking about. You constructed a world view at an early age and have clung to it ever since. Did you ever take a step back and ask yourself why you believe the things you do? You espouse Marx, but have you looked at the results of following that particular dogma, or do you just step over the bodies while blaming others for not being true Marxists?
Do you actually bother to read what anybody said or are you just concerned with peddling your own prejudices? Carolyn is saying nothing of the sort. Do gow up sonny.
If they can stomach all the shit that’s gone down between WMD’s and the US allying with Ukrazis, I can’t imagine what it would take for facts to sink in.
Still working on the Kennedy assassination….
Bravo, Caitlin –
You are the “Mr. Rogers” of our time, for grownups (who are more likely to get the message if they’d spent some time in Fred’s neighborhood as kids). I’m continually amazed by the variety of ways you find to get through the cluttered maze of info/disinfo, fear/anger, and ego insecurity to keep offering the same simple, obvious, and fundamental invitation: “Won’t you be my neighbor?” And the “why?” is every bit as clear, simple, and important – we can no longer afford to take “no” for an answer.
If you have a truth based world view you don’t have to contort yourself into holding it. The more intelligence you have the easier it is to critically examine what you’re told, but anybody of any intelligence can be skeptical. Typing out loud here, but if you just define your world view as whatever the truth is (instead of the other way around) then you never have to worry about it being challenged. All you’re ever doing is sharpening your perception of it.
I like the simplicity and humility of your “typing out loud.” But what if our fundamental idea about truth, that it is objective, coherent, and discoverable by reason, is itself misguided? What if reality is far stranger than we can imagine? What if the biggest mistake in our worldview is broader and deeper than anything political, economic, or social? What if it’s metaphysical? And how might we sharpen our perception of THAT?
Put down the crack pipe for a start.
Said the woman with 50 acid trips in her resume.
I hear what Carolyn is saying, but maybe you’re talking about quantum mechanics, which I’ve read speculated may ultimately be literally unfathomable, in which case I suppose we won’t, but still whatever it is is what I think. Or would like to. OK, how about this- since ideas are abstract, the more precisely you define them the less valid they become, and thus the limit of knowability is the product of precision and abstraction. So smoke that.
An example of the kind of thing I’m talking about: https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/Stephen_Braude.pdf
Yeah … actually I was referencing quantum entanglement and drawing an analogy with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
It’s for “All The Marbles” now https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/for-all-the-marbles?s=w
“The Deep State is in a ‘do or die’ moment right now…”
”They, the elites or predator class, recognize that they are now locked into this. If they try to retreat, there is no retreat. People are waking up at such a rapid rate that they are in a moment where they are going to have to go for broke and try to impose the whole agenda and damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead or they are going to be in big trouble. They are going to be prosecuted. Right this moment, there are conversations in state attorney generals’ offices all across the country, and this is a problem. People are demanding prosecution..
Right now, the elites, or predator class, realize if they don’t move forward very quickly, they are going to lose everything. They could possibly end up facing true accountability. I think we are in a very dangerous situation now.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/deep-state-do-or-die-moment-alex-newman-warns-globalists-need-terrify-everyone
Globalists Are Taking Over the Food System — It’s Part of Their Plan to Control You (if you get to live)
The globalist takeover is coming at us from every possible angle. Whether we’re talking about biosecurity, finance, housing, healthcare, energy, transportation or food, all the changes we’re now seeing have one goal, and that is to force compliance with the globalists’ agenda.
The global food system, and protein sources, in particular, are currently under coordinated and intentional attacks to manufacture food shortages and famine.
The globalist elite intend to eliminate traditional farming and livestock and replace it with indoor-grown produce and lab-created protein alternatives that they own and control.
While the presence of hundreds of food brands gives the appearance of market competition, the reality is that the food industry is monopolized by fewer than a dozen companies, and all of them, in turn, are largely owned by BlackRock and Vanguard.
Eventually, your ability to buy food will be tied to your digital identity and social credit score.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/globalists-takeover-food-system-control-cola/?
It’s to “save the climate” from “global warming”:
https://climatesciencenews.com/2021-12-01-south-pole-records-its-coldest-six-months-stretch-arctic-sea-ice-volume-expands.html
Oops…
https://climatesciencenews.com/2022-05-30-global-freezing-arctic-ice-levels-30-year-high.html
Oops (bis)…
Gotta laugh… :o)
Yahoo Finance said Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are buying up the farmland.
They are suffering from moneypox!
Moneybox? :o)
Exactly! We identify with our worldview because our judgement is the best bet of our survival instinct. We base our decisions on our perception of the world and to admit this perception is wrong is like being at sea without a compass.
However, it all boils down to the old Delphic maxim “Gnothi seauton” (know thyself) according to XVIIIth century economist Adam Smith who wrote: “The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.”
Adam Smith also wrote: “The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.” That’s what propaganda thrives upon. It takes the eyeballs straight out of your eyes by building an alternative narrative, echoed by the media and most of the populace, that you eventually depend on to find your way around. In that narrative, establishment propaganda is reality and of course, everything that’s not establishment propaganda is… propaganda. QAnon propaganda (commie takeover etc.) if you’re on the blue side and BlueAnon propaganda (Russiagate etc.) if you’re on the other. Within of course the overarching “Russian disinformation” myth.
Rather unexpectedly, it helps if you’ve been brought up by parents bordering on schizophrenia because you learn as soon as you reach the age of reason – albeit at great emotional cost – to step aside from their worldview and build your own on more solid grounds by cross-checking everything. As Billie Holiday puts it, “Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that’s got his own” :o)
And the classics, that we learn at school, are a great help because they have a timeless assessment of human nature. For instance, Adam Smith again wrote: “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” Can’t say we haven’t been warned!
And also: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” And where does that “natural selfishness and rapacity” of the rich come from?
No mystery here: their alpha ego with its existential need for pissing contests, like the current competition for the biggest yacht among billionaires – even those who get seasick: “With the greater part of rich people”, Smith explains, “the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches”.
However, there’s an “invisible hand” at work in the market as “individual ambition serves the common good: it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
And when everything’s said and done, “what can be added to the happiness of a man who’s in good health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?”
Adam Smith also wrote: “The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.”
Nice quote.
Can you tell me where it is from.
I haven’t seen the attribution of that statement.
Thanks, if you can.
The hard part is many people who read all this, nodding emphatically and saying “Yes, Yes!” just as much have a worldview to defend. (Put your swords away, I didn’t say “all”)
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Integrating leftist-egalitarian; materialistic-business-achievement-driven; and moral-traditionalist views is the way forward. Integration and systems-thinking is the evolution beyond leftism. I think the author is doing integrative thinking more and more. I wonder if the readers will get it?
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Otherwise, either way you go is another fear-based worldview to defend. And as soon as one has that, psychopaths will always have a toehold to manipulate. For an example Caitlin has previously pointed out, notice how quickly many on the left become Randian Pro-business Libertarians so that Facebook, Twitter, etc can regulate hate speech and ‘disinformation.’
I’ll stick with Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, thanks. The “left” that knuckled under are not left at all. They never were. They were just pretend, like the DSA and Bernie Sanders. Phonies. Supporting the two-party dictatorship of the rich. Those of us who represent the REAL left never fell for that.
i have less respect for Sanders and the Squad than I do for Mancin, at least you know what he stands for. and I have no respect for Mancin.
I’d think a little harder before I hitched my wagon to a dilettante like Marx, not to mention a mass murderer like Lenin.
You really need to watch this film.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/TP0hNA4uicPs/
The most dangerous people in the world are those who possess the unwavering power of their convictions and will pursue them, no matter the cost to anyone else. Doubt never enters their minds, believing as they do, that they alone possess the ultimate truth. They are beyond reason, beyond any hope of redemption. All you can do is kill them before they kill you.
Calling Marx a ‘dilettante’ reveals your ignorance of the man’s contribution to philosophy and how deeply his theories of capitalism and socialism have changed the entire world: Russia’s 1918 Revolution changed everything. China switched to communism after Mao drove the Chiang Kai-Shek’s America supported nationalists off the mainland to Taiwan, where they remain to this day. Marx’s communism rapidly changed China into economic powerhouse it is today, as it did to Russia before. And you refer to Marx as a ‘dilettante’ 😀 😀 Maybe time to go back to your Sony Playstation, more your speed.
I would propose that people know. We were taught ‘the golden rule is he who has the gold, makes the rules’ at a young age. That’s why a majority of people don’t vote, they know. The political chattering class are speaking to themselves for the most part. Awakening has been a life long process. Have you met enlightened old folks who never nibbled a mushroom or read a Zen koan? Now, with existential threats looming, awakening is happening faster and it is not gentle, but most of the serfs have always known about gold and rules.
It certainly bugs the establishment that Albert Hoffman, who first synthesized LSD and psilocybin and experimented with it all his life lived to be a very happy and generally healthy 102 year old man :o)
More people need to drop acid and break the walls of their mental prisons. In that regard, I always thought that people who had “bad trips” were people who could not bear to have their consciousness altered. What they saw terrified them. I never had a bad trip and I tripped more than 50 times. Sometimes it was weird, but I was never afraid.
Beautiful day for a bicycle ride.
And then it is up to us to accept the fact that most of these people will NEVER get it. They would rather and will die before they could ever admit to themselves that their worldview is askew.
This is why it is so important for those of us who have made the leap to practice acceptance. It doesn’t mean we have to like what someone else is doing nor do we have to participate in it. But can we be accepting of it?
This is our challenge. If the length of words indicated their importance, “acceptance” should be the longest word in our dictionary.
For, if we cannot accept what someone else is doing, how can we expect others to be accepting of us?
“But what they’re doing is hurting us…”.
Is it? Is it actually harming you? Are they in your house, rifling your drawers and eating your cereal?
If so, then you may actually have a beef. Otherwise, practice acceptance, or you are doing the same with them as they are doing with you. And YOU still have more work to do.
I disagree with your terms of acceptance. We must not accept war. We must not accept violence. We must not accept racism, xenophobia, murderers, or capitalism. To accept those things is to perpetuate them. Think about that for a minute. All of the things I have just listed are hurting us every day. Capitalism chief among them. Passivity never raised a revolution and never will.
You don’t make other people’s choices and never will.
If you think that you can change things by opposing them, you will end up driving yourself mad, or you’ll just become mad and bitter.
All you can do is be aware of your choices.
You choose to participate. Or not.
Acceptance is not approval.
To do otherwise is to choose conflict.
And that’s what we already have.
Usually we can only give up lies when the truth looks more pleasing.
“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgments. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
~~Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook (1962)
“Question what a person knows for a fact, you get a shrug and a laugh. Question what someone is gritting their teeth to make believe, and murder sprouts black in the marrow of their bones.”
I wrote that on The Economist, back when they still had a Comments section, years ago. I was describing myself.
When speaking facts that contradict the cult dogma, be as wary as you are guileless, be as kind as you are truthful: “The enemy is challenging our worldview!” is the distillation of every slogan our masters have ever used to drive us to war and genocide.
Must watch for anyone interested in what’s going on along the Donbass front. Easily the best breakdown of the fighting in this war I’ve seen so far. Why this dropped like a thunderbolt into my YouTube feed is beyond me. It is pure objective analysis of the military situation by a Colonel in the Austrian Armed Forces, delivered in such a manner as to update civilian adults of all ages on the current realities.
And clearly Col. Markus Reisner has all the information required to perform this task, at his fingertips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpC1kXhW2Lw
Weird. Weird. Weird. The only video on the site in English. Someone in Europe has made the decision that people in the US, the UK, and elsewhere in non-German speaking Europe, that they need to wake up, perhaps? It’s time for them to stop listening to their retired generals who have been telling them that this incompetent Russian Army can be defeated with pickle jars and Molotov cocktails?
Part of the greater process of shifting popular sentiment toward a negiotiate peace? Sorry peeps, but total victory is no longer possible, for the simple reason our proxy forces are getting crushed?
Note: The Russian’s are allowing enemy men and material to flow into the battlespace via two bridges over the Dneiper. The only way this makes sense, at least to me, is the Russian General Staff wants to kill and or capture as much men and material as US/Nato/Ukraine is willing to send their way, so the more they send the better.
And I’ll make a prediction. If the Ukraine forces don’t surrender when the time comes, and it will come soon, but rather try to retreat and escape to Western Ukraine, those bridges will be dropped, and there will be a rabbit hunt … of some duration.
Thank you Caitlin for again putting just the right words together. This helps me to understand the world better. My process has lasted for over ten years. During the first years i was really confused all the time as i knew that so much is not right in our economy, climate, media, the way we see other parts of world. Although i read all the time books and articles and watched videos by chomsky, hudson, Blumenthal and so on, i could not put pieces together. More questions arose than i got answers. But then about five years ago, i begun to see the light and got some kind of ability to explain the world. For example how money is created, why africa is still poor, why usa can afford its military spending and so on. It was interesting to explain these matters to people who often willingly listened although rarely believed what i said. But usually nobody got angry.
Then came covid and now of course Ukraine. I know almost right away that things we are told are not honest. It was weird feeling to see the narrative forming so clearly. But the difference now was that i was not allowed to question the narrative and people were very hostile if i tried to explain my opinions.
For me this rabbit hole has been a very hard experience. I lost my belief to society and lost my will to participate to it. In fact i suffer from depression. I would love to get to know how you have coped with this and how do you motivate yourself to be part of all this and so on. Personally i hope this depression is part of my process and i will get better in the future and be able to be useful again.
Greetings from Finland, the newest part of Natostan
agree 100%. i wish i could unsee what i’ve seen, go back to being asleep….too late though i know. I’ve also often wondered how CJ does it. I’d love to sit and chat about it all with both you and her if i could. I still feel new to this all. i wish for more like-minded people….all my peeps are still believing the lies….
The Russians have been forced to pour unarmed toddlers into the fray, that’s how depleted their forces have become.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/X4m2cYOKmqSz/
You know I was thinking, if the Russian Army kidnapped 150,000 Urkaine children, which I believe is still a part of the Official Narrative at the moment (?)*, wouldn’t that put an tremendous strain on the overall logisitical operation, one that we know has proven incapable of providing it’s Army in the field with adequate food, fuel, ammunition, clothing, recreational down time n’ hot showers?
I mean proposing to move 150,000 non-combattants of any age or size, from Point A to what we might assume would be a fairly distant Point B, through a battlezone, to no military purpose, would come as quite the psychic shock to even the calmest and most steadfast quartermaster in military history.
It would burst his brain aneurysm on the spot is what would happen. And Q replied; “Say what?!,” and dropped dead
*Hard to tell these days. I did some quick back-of-the-envolope calculations on this just yesterday, and found that the average newly introduced Official Narrative lasts for 27 hours, 14 minutes, and 12 seconds, before it crashes and burns.
That’s not even half the issue. The truly terrifying thing is most folk don’t even care. Like when I said Obama was not a good guy to my dad, that he killed innocent people with drone strikes. My dad just shrugged and said he didn’t give a shit because brown people “over there” were all terrorists and that the more of them dead the better. Same with Yemen. Don’t give a shit. Steak for dinner. It’s not that it challenges their world view it’s that they don’t care to support another world view. Truth isn’t important. It’s about going along to get along. If the news man says X then X it is. Not because it’s true but because he said it and everyone else thinks so too because they all heard it as well.
The narrative that wins is the one that makes life the easiest.
As my daddy always says “you can’t change the world, best just get along and do what everyone else is doing.”
You’re describing my father also. Super frustrating, he’s not a dumb guy by any means (civil engineer) but he is just so apathetic it’s nuts. This is your, your kids, your grandkids world, I said, to no avail.
Yeah I wouldn’t call my dad dumb either. He has a good grasp of logic and made his way to the top of the pile in a large company but damn. Maybe it’s a boomer thing? Just absolutely numb. He was convinced (by the TV) that I’d be gasping to breathe in a hospital bed now. That in order to be a part of this society I needed to get injected thrice with an unknown toxin. He tossed me out of the house because I refused. None of those things came to pass but he doesn’t want to talk about.
It’s not a boomer thing. I am 73 and I began to learn the truth in 1963 with the assassination of JFK. In high school I learned that the Vietnam was was an imperialist war and marched against it. I marched for the civil rights of people of color because by then I knew that racial discrimination was wrong.
If your father is a boomer, he is the kind of person I never would have associated with back in the day. Ever.
But your antivax theory is also completely stupid. So you are just as susceptible to bullshit from right wing media as anyone you are attempting to discredit.
Ad hominem is the stock in trade of those who have no argument.
I’m 75 and I’m not a “boomer” either.
But I hope your comfortable belief about the safe and effective Covid vaccine has been challenged recently by the reports, which were previously suppressed, of the deaths and dangers caused by the mRNA vaccine, so that you can go through another realization that maybe, just maybe, what you are hearing from the authorities and the media is wrong.
Responding to your second comment here, because this site handles longer threads so poorly.
If your dad “made it to the top of the pile at a large company,” that’s how he learned to give a rat fug about anything but his comfort zone. If you think the Azov Battalion is fascist, you haven’t worked for Exxon.
There is no better training for the Fascist Cog lifestyle, or the dead head that comes with it, than a corporate job in a major company.
All true. That about nails it.
Dollyboy said: As my daddy always says “you can’t change the world, best just get along and do what everyone else is doing.”
Well, that works fine until it fails horribly every 80 years or so.
We’re there again.
Strong men make for good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times, strong men are then needed in bad times …. Or something like that.
The funny thing about Imagine, by John Lennon – one of the most popular songs ever – is that indirectly it’s about the dark forces that run and control the planet and, as such, prevent such a world and a higher universal consciousness from ever dawning and emerging.
No, not all of us. Some of us did that way back in our youth growing up in the counter culture explosion that was the 60s.
The generational counter culture explosion that was the 60s produced the presidency of Bill Clinton and his violation of promises to Russia not to move NATO one inch eastward.
And produced the US meddling in Russian elections that in turn produced the patsy Boris Yeltson Russian presidency.
Do many of the 60s cultural revolution recognize the warmongering nature of what they voted for?
Once the draft ended the electorate’s move to the right and the pro-war Democrat Party that began the Viet Nam bloodfest began again.
You obviously think we all supported Bill Clinton. Well, we didn’t. I was a member of the counterculture and I am one who never sold out for money. Trying to blame the likes of myself and those who never supported the capitalist system is an easy out for you, isn’t it? How old are you? 12?
Tell me why you think Clinton was worthless.
because he was a fucking right winger who tore up the already frayed social safety net, lied us into Kosovo, starved half a million kids in Iraq, fucked up on healthcare or more likely failed deliberately, I’m sure I will think of more reasons.
Thank You, sincerely, for bringing a sense of reality to this encounter.
“How old are you? 12?”
To ad hominem add self-righteous indignation.
Why are you even here? Is it to educate us? You clearly have all the answers.
How did we bring about the presidency of Bill Clinton? Please connect the dots for me, because I fail to see the connection.
And as far as “the warmongering nature of what we voted for,” *not voting* is part of the phrase “drop out.” We didn’t vote for any of this.
Or possibly you’re one of the younger generation who blames everything on “those old folks.” I laugh when I hear that, because that’s exactly what we said back in the day: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.”
Well, i agree with the onset and obviously it takes mental work, by which i mean actual, caloriesconsuming activity in the brain, to remove your self off the position of second-hand thought, which supplied you with an endless stream of opinions as opposed to actual, valuable points of view. Once you go that way, you have to learn, that the mental work needs to be done over and over again, as soon as you stop, you gradually drop back to the shallow waters of the intellectual waveriders. But once you learned to immediately disseminate every information, the lies become ever more obvious and you are surprised how easily you once swallowed those.
What i do not agree with is the idea, that there is only one possible destination for this particular travel. To be more precise, i doubt, that there is a destination at all and therefore i also doubt, that you already reached it. Which is a good thing, because otherwise you would be saying, that your mental development is already at an end and i don’t think it is, mine certainly isn’t.
I think you mean “dissect.” Disseminate means to spread an idea.
Indeed, i did. Saw it too late and there is no edit. But it is nice to know someone actually read what i wrote 🙂
Brilliantly elucidated. This process can take years, as in my case. And as you suggest, I don’t consider a person who resists this process to be flawed, just defensive in a perverse self-preservation. But the protective hard outer shell must first be cracked in order for the cotyledon of awareness to emerge. This you do with artful skill.
Caitlin finishes the above piece by saying:
.
We’re all waking up together, and some of us have had to be the first to lead the charge out of the darkness and into the light. This is just what it looks like as life on this planet moves toward increased levels of complexity and consciousness.
.
Yes, but the PTB are doing everything they can to take their respective populations back into the dark ages. And yes, it would blow most people’s minds if the PTB suddenly told them the truth, and how they – the PTB – have been lying to them about practically everything. As George Bush Snr put it:
.
“If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.”
With all due respect, I don’t place much trust in fact-checkers in general and Politifact in particular but they have a pretty good case here that it’s very unlikely Poppy Bush said that to White House correspondent Sarah McClendon (as the story goes) and there’s no trace of it in her archives either…
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/17/facebook-posts/george-hw-bush-didnt-say-if-americans-ever-found-o/
… contrary to Bill Casey saying to Reagan that the CIA’s mission would be complete when everything the American public believes is false, which has been confirmed by Reagan’s White House policy analyst Barbara Honegger who wrote that she heard it herself and told Sarah McClendon.
Yeah, but it had to cross his mind.
Manufactured truth is social extortion for the emotionally fragile and isolated, while inquiry has been captured by educated experts incapable of thought outside their own conditioning.
It’s almost a shame no one will care by the time they admit they’ve failed, because it’s always fun to watch authoritarians cry.
Extraordinary article. Thank you.
The song about the world is awesome!
Yes, your are spot on, Caitlin.
There is an easy to read book “The four agreements” that explains how your entire perception is imposed on you when you are little. It then goes on to explain how to free yourself from limiting beliefs. By Don Miguel Ruiz.
Apparently, we are light between the stars!
Caitlin you are so amazing and intelligent, I love your site and your articles.
There was a documentary last year called, “A glitch in the Matrix,” wherein they describe most people as bots, NPCs in gamer speak. Basically the theory is the people you are arguing with may just be artificial intelligence who have no consciousness.
I’m my experience I have found there are some people who cannot understand sarcasm, period. Looking back perhaps the program cannot understand how a literal statement could mean the opposite.
Haha, I got suspended on FB for responding to a Memorial Day celebration with “Celebrate drone-bombing brown people! Support your military-industrial complex!”
Flagged as “hate speech.”
Good Americans are not to see and think of such things.
Good old American Not-See-ism supported the Nazis in West Berlin after WWII.
Correct. And all of the stay-behind secret armies all over western Europe and other countries.
FB blocked my post of an article, asking to melt all guns, in the ” …Peaceful Sky” group, then took away my editing rights to that group so I could not make anymore posts, and that was a year or more ago. Do not want to think what their policies are right now, as I closed my FB account.
I did report Lockheed Martin’s and Raytheon’s pages to FB as “not corresponding to our community standards”, and they sent me a response back that I do not have to read these pages, even though they were showing me ads for those, so they do not miss out on ad revenue.
*&$%^#$ – trying to be impeccable with my words here.