Thread by @caitoz

If The Rich Were Propagandizing Us, We'd Have Heard About It In The News

caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/if-the-rich-…

The primary obstacle in getting people to realize that they are being propagandized by our rulers is their unquestioned assumption that if there were a propaganda operation geared at manufacturing consent for the status quo, they'd have learned about it in the news or in school.

And, of course, they would not have, because both the plutocratic media and the modern schooling system are designed to indoctrinate people into accepting the status quo.

From the time we are children our minds are deliberately and systematically warped to psychologically align us with the interests of the ruling class, and then we are passed on to the news media to ensure that we are continually reshaped in real time throughout our adult lives.

A brainwashing institution is never going to teach you to be skeptical of their brainwashing.

This is the first and foremost reason why it's so difficult to get people to realize that they have been lied to about the world and the way it works. You're not just arguing against their perceptions, you're arguing against their means of perception itself.

You're arguing against the very system they have used since they were young to orient themselves to an understanding of truth and reality.

It's hard to get someone to see the flaws in their means of perception for the same reason you can't get someone to directly look at their own eye: you can't directly perceive the means by which you are perceiving.

So what can we do? How can we ever hope to awaken people to the fact that an ecocidal, omnicidal oligarchic empire is driving us toward disaster while singing us to sleep using propaganda lullabies?

Well, we can create glitches in the matrix.

As we would do if we were trapped in a collapsed tunnel, we start working on moving the loose rocks first. We help share truth with people who are close to our own level of understanding, who are on the cusp of awakening to how pervasively we've been lied to all our lives.

All positive change in human behavior is the result of an increase in awareness, whether you're talking about recovering from substance abuse, abandoning self-destructive patterns, ending racism and bigotry, or ending an oligarchic empire.

Once the underlying sources of an unwholesome behavior dynamic have been sufficiently perceived, there's a movement from dysfunction to health.

That's the only path to a healthy world: getting enough people to perceive enough truth with enough clarity. Until that happens real change is impossible. After that happens real change is inevitable.