Misery as a commodity, or how advertisers & psychologists & the man immiserated us into submission
Another hint at what I've been thinking all along..
snips:
The subject has been officially smothered, or even demonized, by authority since it was first openly broached in the '60s. However, those running the industrial government complex learned a few things, too, in the process. Particularly about the efficacy of dope. Being authoritarian and capitalist, they of course preferred downers over the mind-expanding drugs. And ever since then, corporately produced biochemicals, tranqs, mind-numbing antidepressants and the like have been successfully used privately on individuals to squelch the psychic anguish produced in the Darwinian workhouse America has become.
But who'd have guessed it would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored "mental heath system?" And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members.
Whether the final American collapse takes four years or 40 years is anybody's guess. But it's gonna take a passel of behavioral-management experts, whether in psychological institutions, university research centers, or on Madison Avenue, to keep the lid on this puppy when she blows. But the fact is that even if 50 million Americans exploded tomorrow, they would have "snapped" alone, particulated and atomized in a very large and spread out country, and ultimately be administered treatment or institutionalized as "individuals." Of course, if they if they were more concentrated, which would put them in a situation to act in unison, then god help 'em, because they would then be a national-security problem -- the last thing you want to be in a security state.
Unfortunately, Americans get laughed off the map for being overly human these days, dubbed emotional wimps, part of the Kumbaya crowd, unrealistic utopians … and if you are sincerely human enough, you get your ass kicked by the system. To be so makes us the bane of the super-rational, technological, production-driven society we have come to be.
We got there partly through our weakness, shallow greed and mindless consent, but more so by the orchestrated world machinery benefiting powerful elites, both corporate, governmental and financial (is there a difference?), which have always been among us, although never in such strength.
snips:
The subject has been officially smothered, or even demonized, by authority since it was first openly broached in the '60s. However, those running the industrial government complex learned a few things, too, in the process. Particularly about the efficacy of dope. Being authoritarian and capitalist, they of course preferred downers over the mind-expanding drugs. And ever since then, corporately produced biochemicals, tranqs, mind-numbing antidepressants and the like have been successfully used privately on individuals to squelch the psychic anguish produced in the Darwinian workhouse America has become.
But who'd have guessed it would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored "mental heath system?" And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members.
Whether the final American collapse takes four years or 40 years is anybody's guess. But it's gonna take a passel of behavioral-management experts, whether in psychological institutions, university research centers, or on Madison Avenue, to keep the lid on this puppy when she blows. But the fact is that even if 50 million Americans exploded tomorrow, they would have "snapped" alone, particulated and atomized in a very large and spread out country, and ultimately be administered treatment or institutionalized as "individuals." Of course, if they if they were more concentrated, which would put them in a situation to act in unison, then god help 'em, because they would then be a national-security problem -- the last thing you want to be in a security state.
Unfortunately, Americans get laughed off the map for being overly human these days, dubbed emotional wimps, part of the Kumbaya crowd, unrealistic utopians … and if you are sincerely human enough, you get your ass kicked by the system. To be so makes us the bane of the super-rational, technological, production-driven society we have come to be.
We got there partly through our weakness, shallow greed and mindless consent, but more so by the orchestrated world machinery benefiting powerful elites, both corporate, governmental and financial (is there a difference?), which have always been among us, although never in such strength.