Thread by @caitoz

Electoral Politics Use The Same Containment Strategies As Alzheimer's Facilities

A good dementia care facility redirects residents away from the exit doors using distraction and friendly chatter. The oligarchic empire redirects its prisoners the same way.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/electoral-po…

In a high-quality dementia care facility, confused residents who are at risk of unsafe wandering are skillfully redirected away from exit doors by staff members who are trained to provide them with the illusion of freedom while still keeping them in the safety of the care home.

If you've ever visited a loved one in a locked dementia care facility, especially near sunset, you know how agitated the people who live there can become. The impulse to wander and pace is very common, and they'll often demand to leave the facility at once so they can go home.

The fancier facilities won't even have locked doors that are immediately noticeable, with (as weather and daylight permit) the doors left unlocked to a large, enclosed garden area full of circular walkways which eventually guide a wandering resident back indoors.

This way staff don't even need to worry about a resident who decides they want to leave, they can just say "Sure thing Mister Smith! Door's right there!" knowing he'll just wander around for a bit and come back in.

Anyway, that's how electoral politics works.

They are not told "No Mister Smith, you are the property of the oligarchic empire." They are instead told by the skillful manipulators of the political/media class, "Ah yes Mister Smith, you can have everything you want! Just vote for the Democratic Party right over there!"

Meanwhile the actual exit from the abusive system is kept carefully hidden. A lot of dementia care facilities will disguise their exits by painting them to look like murals or bookshelves, like this:

That's where fighting the propaganda machine is hidden. That's where direct action is hidden. That's where a critical mass of people waking up from the manipulations and using the power of their numbers to directly force real change is hidden.

Care homes are a good and necessary thing for protecting victims of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia who can't be kept safe at home, whereas the system in which we all find ourselves is abusive and malignant to its core. But the psychological principle is the same:

That's all electoral politics is. That's all the Democratic Party is. That's all we were seeing when Americans shook the earth with BLM protests last year while the entire establishment told them "I hear you, I agree with you" without ever actually making any changes.

It's a locked facility we are forbidden from leaving with a bunch of staff members pretending to want what we want.

But the fact that the managers of empire go to such lengths to avoid a direct confrontation with us means that they desperately want to avoid that confrontation. We are not an elderly dementia patient, we are the many. They are the few.

If we can ever collectively stop falling for the redirections to the circular pathways and stand and face our oppressors, they do not stand a chance. And they know it.

They cannot arrest us all. They cannot kill us all. All they can do is keep us confused and distracted, and hope we don't remember our true power. That's all this is.