Author: Philo

human

Pride

It was strange to watch a traffic accident.  Everything seemed to slow down.  It was the same with the slow death of our country.  It started with a quiet ritual, a pageantry of sorts, as if nothing had changed.  But it had changed and everyone knew it.

Those that supported this change radiated with spite and revenge in their eyes, or with subtle hope-for-what-I-can’t-comprehend.  Others saw the coming change as one might watch a large asteroid hurdling towards earth: with awe and disbelief; aware that something had not started as much as it has ended.

There was a desire to protect just as there was a desire to explain to the blind what color was or to the deaf what music was.  And so we stood back and hoped there was something left when the atrocity was over, which it always and inevitably would be.  But we all knew one thing:  Human idiocy was only overshadowed by the pride we had in being so.

The Other

What the advisor understood was that there needed to be an ‘other’.  There  always needed to be an ‘other’.  And if there wasn’t an ‘other’ one needed to be invented.  Law, he understood, would be accepted by their followers and would control those that weren’t.  At the end of the day it was all pomp and circumstance but it worked.

“Remember the motto: guns, god, and greed.” The Assistant had reminded everyone at the daily meeting that morning. “Those are the things that sell!  Those are the things that our people want!”

The advisor knew he was right and at the same time knew because he was right he needed to be watched.  But this was a different thought altogether and so he neatly filed it in the back of his mind.

“If you sell those things you can own the fucking world!”  The Advisor had chimed in.  The assistant smiled silently.

Fake News

It was a funny thing, watching people complain about the spectacle that they had created.  There were all the little jabs and the inanity of it all.  One side would whoop and holler, cheering and churning them on while the other side would be appalled and protest.  The protests were most entertaining to the cabinet, those that were the creators of the spectacle.  The were entertaining because they actually took themselves seriously.  The Leader would send troops to “break up unrest” and he smiled.  Even that was spectacle.

But now even that wasn’t necessary.  There were certain statements that would work.

“The enemies of our great nation…” The Leader would begin and whatever he said wouldn’t matter as long as he included these statements.

Don’t believe that the vermin will…there will be ‘tax breaks’.  They just want to steal from your hard-earned wages!” 

There it was, the phrase, the statement, the secret of the spectacle.  Other little gems like “traitors”, “liberals” and any number of things would be used as long as they kept the spectacle going.  People liked the spectacle.  Everything was entertainment.  It was all about the spectacle and nothing else.  It amazed him that it was so easy.  The assistant had been right.

“Just make shit up!”  the assistant had said, “The make shit up on the fly and smoke the hive and watch it rumble and while you do steal the honey.”

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.