by forum member James

Day in and day out, we are oppressed. In the simplest, most petty, but direct ways. We are told where to go, why to go there, and what we will get if we do. More importantly, and more subtly, we are taunted with what will happen if we do not go where we are told to. If we are late, if we give the wrong change or the drawer is short, there may be consequences. We may lose the very thing that ties us down: A Job. A job is the sole requirement for survival. It is the very definition of work. Painting is not work. Sculpting is not work. Cooking is not work. These things are only considered work if you are given currency in exchange for the products. And, if a sustained income is the only means for survival, there is no way out.

We, the oppressed, are participants in a system of exchange that functions without regard to our individual or communal needs and interests. We are forced to labor in tedium as a wage-slave. Only if we take this abuse quietly and efficiently are we rewarded with currency to exchange for property=life. The workplace only provides jobs and services in as far as the owners themselves can benefit, because the primary measure of the worth of this institution is profit: the amount of money gained compared to the amount spent. Businesses are not responsible to the communities in which they function. They hire and fire out of necessity in regards to profit. And so as employees we are tasked to use timers and move calls quickly not for reasons of our own, but to increase efficiency; to better fill the pockets of our bosses; to hope for a raise, or just to stay alive. There is no real personal moral obligation to the task at hand. Only fear of starvation or a growing greed pushes us to ‘succeed.’ Forced to exist and function within this system of arbitrary imperatives, our own values begin to take a backseat to the necessity of employment. It forces us to be greedy ourselves; to sell out our coworkers, make up lies about them, cut corners and cover it up, to create a facade of productivity. Because the only way out is up. Up the ladder growing ever more greedy as we attempt to climb to the top; to become a boss. To perpetuate slavery. This is the ‘nature of the beast.’

We, the oppressed, that stand behind a cash register waiting to expedite the next manufactured need. We, the oppressed, that sweat over a vat of hot oil to be compensated in pittance while we poison our neighbors. We, the oppressed who exchange our empty earnings backed by nothing, thus perpetuating our slavery, must make a choice. We must choose to shrug and sigh and, complicit, capitulate. Or, deny the system what it needs: participation. For our participation in our own slavery permits everyone to be enslaved. Workers in China who leap to their deaths from the very roofs of the factories in which they work, to end the misery that is their lively-hood. Women, and children making shirts and shoes for you and your friends. Women who are paid literally pennies for their work. Families that are removed from their land by military force, left to starve, so that we can grow more corn. This is the crux on which our apparent ‘conveniences’ lie, because comparatively our lives are bliss. The cheap prices of cell phones, computers, clothing, food; all things we take for granted, are sustained only by oppression. Beguiled by marketings schemes, that socially engineer our next ‘need’ there appears to be no real logical alternative to this oppression. Just cash in that next meager pay check.

Our minds are trained to omit creativity, criticism, and choice. Different is dysfunction. Our individualities are researched, classified, categorized, and then packaged to fit; sold to us at the cost of utmost societal detriment. For our culture has become an amalgamation of tropes, which we patronize endlessly, and reorganize and re-associate as invention. The arts are professionalized, institutionalized, and locked away until we acquiesce our individual expression to their rubric of acceptance. With a culture devoid of life or evolution, we are creatively stagnant. In the mire of cut-and-paste graphic design, billboard slogans, product placement, innuendo, forced controversy, and what ever other blatant tools employed by the Status-Quo Marketing-Machine to keep us fed and fat and quiet, we have become identity-vague. All full of fear and doubt, we cover ourselves in this picture-puzzle culture; immerse ourselves in it’s success stories, the absurd lives of it’s selfless heroes, it’s images of a sick and unattainable body-image, and then regurgitate this teen drama as it becomes social norm.

What are we to do as individuals living within this broken society? How will our actions have any influence? I am only I, and you, you. Yet, together you and I are we, and we can make our own norms within our own interactions. We can define our own words existence language history community. We can invite others to join us in this reconstruction of a better world in the shell of the old. Together we don’t have to fear isolation; we will function as dysfunction in society. We will be weird queer freaks radical upsetting impressive alien, but not for long. Soon, there will be nothing left to measure our weirdness against. Soon, we will be free, and ourselves.

There is more to what you do than you think. Your mind is your own, if only you choose to take it back. And, it is only the responsibility of every aware individual to make a choice to live or die think or only act against the oppression that we live and breathe everyday.

Change what you do. Stop watching television. Buy less. Read more. Think quietly, and pay attention. Don’t hesitate to protest. Do not fear open social conflict. Instead, approach it critically and calmly. Listen to those you oppose, and tell them why you oppose them. Know the ones you love, and love everyone.

Reorganize. Start small, and start an awareness group with friends. Talk about what to do what you hate what you love where you live and who lives there and what they do and love and hate. Talk to your neighbors for no reason. Get to know who other people are and thereby who you are. Grow tomatoes and give them to your neighbors and friends. Get them to grow something, and then trade your tomatoes for their cucumbers. Or combine them and make a salad. Start a band even if you don’t know how to sing or play an instrument. Perform in public places without a permit.

Know where you are, and go where you want to.

We must work together to a create social structure that can function and exist autonomously without currency coercion or capitulation. We must not ask for a ‘redistribution’ of what it is that our oppression hinges on. It is our task to build something new. Otherwise, we only work to perpetuate what we already have

Discuss here

by forum member benthere

by forum member gmOney

There are a number of tactics that I have noticed being used by politicians, pundits, reporters, on youtube, etc. that I find become common on both side of any particular argument in order to manipulate people. We all need to acknowledge that we have become the victims as well as the perpetrators of such propaganda, even if we haven’t realized it.

The very reason that we have come down to political divisions at all in the first place is, I think, in large part due to such manipulations; another major reason being that people just have different priorities for their lives that suit their “life’s path” -whatever they are hear to learn.

The long and the short of it is that for whatever reason you just had the blind luck of being born to a certain set of people and as a child grow up, for the most part, accept their world view more or less as your own. You may do some self-examination, and make some amendments to what your parents believed, but very rarely do people completely break away in their way of thinking. I have done a lot of soul searching and philosophical examination, and I really try hard to see things from other people’s perspective, but there are some things… I just wonder how it’s possible for a thinking, caring person to think in certain ways or how that could possibly serve whatever they are trying to learn in their life or how they could possibly come to certain conclusions given the facts. Often times it comes down to who’s facts, who’s truths, who’s words are you to trust, and a lot of times, liberal or conservative it comes down to personal loyalty.
A lot of people say, “wake up, do the research yourself”, “don’t trust anybody else’s truth/facts but your own” etc. but in reality not everybody has the time to do that all the time.

The reality is, you have to trust somebody sometime. People spend lifetimes investigating what really happened, they write books about it, it’s a full time profession -but can we trust them?

I mean that’s what we have newspapers, and reporters for. But they don’t often do the work, they just repeat what they are told without the follow up, sometimes because they are not being paid to do that, sometimes it’s because they have an agenda, and sometimes they are just lazy.
What disturbs me is the amount of money that is paid to spin stories or comments or points of view. They (whomever they are) literaly pay groups of people to sit in a room and discuss, “how are we going to sell [this] to the people.” It seems crazy to me, for example, that people don’t see that fossil fuels, atomic energy and the automobile are destructive technologies that are to costly, in terms of our future, to be continued when there are viable alternatives now. That’s how successful the media has been in twisting the truth.

There are a number of ways that are used to deflect what is going on and distort, manipulate or otherwise change the subject. Some of the most base are ‘attacking the man’ i.e. character assassination (you’ve seen this with Bill Clinton and now Herman Cain) guilt by association (‘the occupiers are nothing but rapist, lawbreakers and drug addicts or they are all for Ron Paul) or otherwise sidestep the issue by not even making a counter argument.
What I often see just as much besides exaggeration and mere falsehood is: lying by omission (often used along side character assassination: the Democrats did this, the Republicans did that when they are both guilty of the same thing) using straw-man arguments (using exaggerated versions of the other guys claims to make there arguments seem to have less merit) or by making arguments that outright deflect the argument by not addressing it directly, changing the subject, otherwise known as a “red herring”. Another one I’ve seen used a lot is making the fact look like they support your position when they don’t, i.e. ascribing meaning where there is none: it is a form of creative lying.

I am addressing this issue in part because of a couple of books I walked by in the bookstore today that vigorously employ these methods and so I’ve just been thinking about it, but also because I’ve seen these manipulative tactics used at GA meetings, on FB and even in this forum.
So if you are one of these people that change the subject to not address the concerns or arguments presented or “lie creatively” stop it! We know who you are, and we know what you are doing. You are not fooling anyone -except maybe yourself.

Discuss here