Author: Philo

human

The Truth

“The Leader lies.  That’s what he does.  The problem is not his lying but our lack of realizing that his lying is the solution not the problem.”

The Advisor paused, confused.

“Think about it.  The liar says what is untrue, knowing the truth.  But the leader.  No, the leader isn’t lying; he’s saying what he believes to be true.  To him it is true.”

The Advisor sipped his coffee and was silent.  He had learned to listen closely to The Assistant.

“The leader is a narcissist.  He’s a psychopathic liar, right?!”

“Right.”

“Well, what I’m saying is that the leader doesn’t know any of this.  He ‘knows’ he’s telling the truth.  He believes everything he says.  This is a weapon.  This is a gun to be used.  The Leader is delusional, yes, but he doesn’t think he’s delusional.  Hell, the thought never crosses his mind that he is lying.  To him there is no delusion.  It’s just us.  He lies blatantly and without reference to the Truth because to him what he is saying is true.”

The Ruse

First things first.  The system needed to be dismantled but the illusion of legality needed to be maintained.  The mask had been taken off but the illusion needed to stay.  A naked emperor was no good.  The populace needed to say that he was not naked.

“That’s the secret.” The Advisor continued.  “Law, oddly enough becomes tradition the very thing it is based upon.”  He continued.

The more intelligent minions realized that law, if void of trust, is meaningless and so somehow law needed to be both destroyed and maintained.  The less intelligent of the minions were the larger of his problems.  If they weren’t espousing idiocy they were acting like idiots.

“These morons cannot continue blabbering shit!” he yelled.  “They are undermining everything and making us all look like fucking morons.”

“Just calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!  This is a problem.”  The Advisor was pacing the room.

“No.  It isn’t” The Assistant calming continued.  “Think about it.  The American public has the attention span of a fly.  Give them drama and spectacle and keep the spotlight off the places we don’t want attention.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?!”  The Advisor retorted.

“What I’m talking about is that these idiots, and they are idiots, give us time.  They give us shelter.  While everyone is up in arms about meaningless shit, we get things done.  I’m not going to beat around the bush here.”

The advisor had stopped pacing and was starting to listen.

The Game

The election had been a joke, a 1.3-billion-dollar joke.  During the last few days of the farcical show The Leader had danced on stage and rambled about personal vindictiveness and paranoia.  There was no sense to any of it.  He knew that he was going to “win”.  He knew that he was just biding time.  The billionaires had told him this and so when he simply ran out of things to say he bided his time in public as a flabbergasted public looked on.

Some of his minions were worried.  The Leader was not.

“Sir!”  they would say.  “You have to have an agenda.  You have to something, at least pretend…”

“I tell the truth and my followers want the truth.”  He would interject.

“I tell them the truth.  And you know what they want to know?!”

The Leader paused.

“Um, yessir.  What do they want to know?  The truth?”

The Leader smirked.  He could smell the fear and confusion.

“Yeessss.”  He said slowly.

“They want to know that they are right.  They want to know that they will be vindicated.  I know what they want.  They want to win.  The problem is that everybody thinks this is serious.  It’s a rigged game.  Not just this, but the system.  And so you have to know how to play the system.  And you have to know how to play people.  I am the best at both.  I am a master.  So don’t come and tell me what I need to do.  I’ll tell you what I need to do!”

The minion stood silently.  Then, The Leader laughed.

“It’s a game.  It’s a game!”

The minion was confused.

“It’s all just a game.”

The Spectacle

The mind falls prey to the trinkets and baubles that amaze babes in cradles; the spectacle begins.  Hungry for knowledge, driven by curiosity, desiring understanding, a black box of entertainment must be given to them instead.  It must contain nonsensical ideologies wrapped in tradition and empty answers concealed in thinly vailed hatred of “the other”.  The box must have ready-made games to keep these babes in arms occupied.

The hypnotized must be made to believe that these things, these ideas are important but we know that they are not.  They are arbitrary.  And technology will help.  It used to be that propaganda was important, but now propaganda is ready-made and drips into the minds of everyone; everyone must “keep up” and be “in-the-know”.

We can let technology do for us what in times of want took mass amount of rhetoric and upheaval.  And to those few that complain, that point out the spectacle that we have created we can ask: “Where would we be without it?!  Hasn’t it given us progress?  Hasn’t it made us happy!?”

But there is no room for doubters in this world of make-believe.  Let them scream, I say!  They will scream to deaf ears because we will live in a spectacle of life created by us.  We can smile as those doubters scream.  We can smile because those that walk away do so without their minds.  I know this because they have sold them to us.

Remember One Thing

“You need to remember one thing.”

“And what’s that?!”  The Leader asked lackadaisically.

“There’s always a weakest link and that link will define us in the end.  And the fact is these people, these weakest links, never think that it is them.  They are certain they are progressive and understand the circumstances.  They don’t.  They are looking for solutions but we are looking for answers to a specific question.  What they don’t understand is that solutions are easy, answers are not.  These elites’ solutions are based on the promise of good, virtue.  We have to promise victimhood.  We have to point out conniving, scheming, evil, these elites are.  We have to remind these followers of ours how the weak hold the strong down.  What those who are looking for solutions don’t realize is that it is ego and arrogance not thoughtful analysis that wins the day.  We have that on our side.”

The Advisor and the New Politic

“This shit doesn’t matter.  It’s a game but it’s a game that we have to win.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking that religion just pumps out stupidity.  Yes!  The masses are stupidly religious, but they don’t matter.  They don’t have any say.  They, and always remember this, don’t have money.  They’ll do what these, who are these…”

“The FOF.”  The Leader answered, “They love me.  I know they do.  They love me almost as much as their god.”

“Yea, OK…the FOF.” The advisor interrupted.

He went on.

“It matters what they believe because what they believe will create and shape what we say and how we do what we will do.  Our fates, not just theirs, are determined by them and not us.  We’ll speak but we will have to believe what we say.  This is imperative.  We have to be dogmatic because otherwise they’ll start thinking for themselves.  Remember, we’re talking about a bunch of morons.  These people only matter because they matter to us.

Don’t think of this as being false.  Think of it as being necessary.  We have to test, test the limits if there are even any.  It’s important to realize that we live in a perpetual situation between conversation and violence.  We have to make sure that the conversation is about violence.  Remember, there are only three things that the public understands: guns, god, and greed.  And we have to represent all three.  Otherwise, well we all know the ‘otherwise’.”

The Recipe

The recipe for dismantling the system was simple.

1) Create your base: cut up entertainment, misinformation, lack of education, apathy, tribal motivation, selfishness and pour these into the public.  Add technology and stir.

2) Let it simmer.

3) Take your laisse faire capitalism, some pure greed and oligarchic tendencies and marinate them into a concentrated mixture of deregulation. 

4) Boil down political corruption and kleptocratic lobbyists and mix this with unadulterated religious fanaticism until the mixture begins to darken.

5) Take your public and mix it with your mixture of deregulation and technology until the public is soft and subtle, adding uncontrolled technology as the mixture heats up.

6) Afterwards add more of the religious fanaticism and technology as well as ignorance to taste.

7) Cook these ingredients down.

8) Add kleptocratic billionaires and the mixture simmer.  Options also include world dictators, authoritarianism and fascism for a spicier recipe. 

Serve with environmental catastrophes and atomic sauce.

Guns, God, and Greed: From Chp. 2: God’s Children

The Leader sat and listened to religious and voting statistics, how the religious of the country needed a strong-man leader, how the government had stood in the way of God’s work, of the FOF, and how, if he followed their plan, he could bring about a new world order, one not tainted by heathen-ideas or ‘progressive’ thought.  He sat and for once he listened.  While the delegates from the FOF rambled he thought about God.  He didn’t understand there God.  He was their god, if they knew it or not.

Like guns, god is the ultimate fear and the answer, the salve to the fact of life that most do not want to face: we die.  But god is more than that.  Much like a gun, god mirrors that arrogance of mankind; god is an excuse and a hiding place; god is the ultimate ideal and as such an answer to all things.

God is not only the best of mankind but the ideal of all ideals, both virtuous and despicable.  God is an old idea created by even older sages and philosophers.  God is set and defined in thousands of ways, each according to the inventor.  God ‘wants’, god ‘demands’, god ‘will punish’.  God can do many things but one thing in particular that god lacks is empathy.  You cannot have empathy with a gun in your hand.  But you can feign empathy with god.

We can create a god and god is the best we can do.  It is not wonder that we spend the greater part of our time killing one another and even the planet we live on.  God is indeed the best that mankind is capable of and we are proud of our God.

In one sense these people were no different than him.  It seemed to him that they wanted the same thing: to get rich.  On the other hand, he didn’t hide it and they did.  All of their talk about “God and Jesus” was, to him, just a ruse to justify their greed.  The only difference was that he didn’t lie about it.  In fact, he had four of the richest men in the world in his cabinet.

Guns, God, and Greed: From Chp. 2: The Plan

The Leader opened the large black, plastic binder and flipped through page after page of print.

“We know it’s a lot and so we also have a synopsis.”

The man nodded and one his assistants handed The Leader a small, white book.  The Leader put the burdensome binder down and opened the book.  On the first page was the title “DAY 1” and under the title were bullet-pointed orders.

“This synopsis has a one year, day by day, plan that if implemented can bring this country back to its original glory and greatness.  Sir, this country has a manifest destiny to be the great country that it once was but we must act swiftly and succinctly in order to undermine the powers that have been working tirelessly against our destiny; your destiny, sir.”

The room was silent and the leader lay the book in his lap.  He looked around at the faces staring at him.

“Well…” he began.

No one said anything.

“I know what’s in it for you.  But…” he paused, “what’s in it for me?

Guns, God, Greed: From Chapter 2: God’s Plan

He hated sitting through the meetings with these bible-thumpers, not because they didn’t adore him, they did.  He had bought some of their adoration.  But because he couldn’t trust them.  He couldn’t trust them because these people really believed what they said.  For this reason they were dangerous to him as The Leader.  He accepted them out of necessity.  They were a business deal.  They didn’t seem to understand that he didn’t answer to them, but he did.  It was this that bothered him so much.  And so, as they rambled on he acted interested.

“Sir.  It is truly a sign that the end-times are here, and I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.  Sir you are in the service of God and Jesus Christ himself.  We have worked hard in a world which is dead-set against the Lord’s followers.  And now it will all change.  The wicked shall weep, sir, and the Lord’s children will reap their righteous place in heaven.  All because of you, sir, all because of you…”

The Leader sat soaking in the diatribes against modern society.  He heard them but he didn’t listen to them.  He found them pathetic and they didn’t seem to notice.  This irritated him further.  One after another leader spoke.  The Catholics were worried about the abortion issue.  The protestants were angry at the secularization of society.  The Foundation for Our Father leaders, though, they had a plan.  He was interested.

“Sir.  We are from The Foundation for Our Father or ‘FOF’ for short.”  The well-dressed, oddly calm man handed The Leader a large folder.  It was very neat and organized.

“We at FOF have watched as this country has been overrun with secular ideologies and…let’s say ‘those without Christ’.  And we have watched as our founding father’s intentions have been infested with so-called progressive thought that has no other intention but to undermine this country’s founding religion, Christianity.  Sir, this country is sliding into an immoral, pluralistic ethic that has been weakening the very pillars of our democracy. Sir, what I’m trying to say is, that we have a plan that we have spent the past nine years working on and we believe we can win our country back.  But we need your help.”