(ALAN WATT BLURB (i.e. Educational Talk):
"MEDIEVAL FEUDAL COLLECTIVE
THE DILEMMA OF INDIVIDUALISM IN STORMY SEAS."
July 27, 2007
Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt – July 27, 2007 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)
Hi folks. I'm Alan Watt and this is cuttingthroughthematrix.com and alanwattsentientsentinel.eu on July 27th, 2007 and boy, the time is flying by.
All over Canada and the States and parts of Europe, we've been having the odd weather that had to happen to match the global warming scam that's going on. We’ve had flooding in different parts of Europe. Flooding in some parts of Quebec with incessant rains and everyone of course is meant to talk about it, because the media's all talking about it and Al Gore is "Goring" on about it, because that's his job. That's what he was groomed to do. Al Gore, the man from the big oil companies, who is related to some very famous people from the past involved in world management. We are being shown what the effects are supposed to be of global warming. The evenings have been pretty cool. In fact, in July, just this month, I and other people have had to use the wood stove at night, which is a first for me. I have used it in the past and maybe once every five years you put on the wood stove into the beginning of July for the first few mornings only, just to get the chill off the air.
However, this is new because we have to get trained through gradualism that “my God the sky is falling.” The sky is falling, and in a sense they're right, since the aircraft can be seen spraying you and the stuff falls down everyday to cause this global warming, plus the HAARP is being used to create electromagnetic pulses throughout the atmosphere, which is all part of the same phenomena. It's a science and sciences are used to dominate us in pretty well every sphere of our lives today. That's what I'm going to talk about is the sphere of our lives and what reality is. Reality is projected to us, what we accept as normal. How the technique of the dialectical process is also built in naturally, in fact, in a sense to everything that happens in our lives personally and even nationally and internationally. For every effect or force, there's an equal and opposite effect or force. Something we experience all the time but never figure out what it is. It’s a law of nature.
Right into the Middle Ages we find that the average person, the majority of people really in a feudal system. A feudal system with its kings, queens, nobility, aristocracy, its learned class who taught the aristocracies and ran the system, as bureaucracies run them today, all work together to keep their system in place – a system where the bulk of the populace was illiterate. They worked the land primarily and supplied men for the armies for the kings to go off and conquer; and the world was run by this invisible deity, a God. That's all they were told about: An all-pervasive, all-seeing deity that knew all, knew your thoughts and could stop you from going to a heaven. A heaven is a haven. A haven is where ships come in to ride out the storm. The infantile fantasy that you give to people who live in rather hellish conditions, it makes life seem a bit easier to think you're going to get a reward somewhere, where all your trials are over.
With the feudal system, most people had a sense of insignificance, smallest in the great scheme of things, which they couldn't understand; it was so big and huge. It was beyond their control; and that's the estrangement that comes when you're up against seemingly massive powerful forces. It wasn't until the Protestant Revolution came along—and it was a revolution in more ways that just a religious revolution. It took the form of religion because religion had been the primary backing factor to keep the old structure in place, intact. It gave credence to the nobility for their acts because “it was God's will,” and it would justify what they did with their wars and their pillage and so on. The Protestant Revolution was a revolution in a Hegelian sense, as everything is on the go long ago before Hegel came along to put it into a new term. The ancients knew this as well, because a thesis always brings in a natural antithesis, which brings to a synthesis, and the synthesis becomes the new thesis; and it's an ongoing process. Some people refer to this as progress.
Today we live in a different system because at the top they understand this perfectly well. It's taught to select few people in high positions. They bring in professors to teach them this kind of stuff, therefore they try and grab the new synthesis, which will become the thesis, and direct it. They then understand the antithesis will arise, so they create it first and control it. That's why they give you all sides and manipulate you through a particular planned agenda.
However, getting back to the revolutions: The Protestant Revolution was a reaction against this old system which suppressed individuality. It wasn't until a small middle class had gradually gained in numbers and in importance that they led the Protestant Revolution, partly because the old feudal system wasn't set up to handle them, to let them into power. Therefore, they created their own opening through revolution. That there was Rosicrucian involvement, there's no doubt, but the time was ripe to cast off which seemed to be an oppressive form. It was oppressive to the middle classes, the peasant classes. The majority of the public in Europe only knew what the religions gave them. That was their education, an education given every Sunday and they'd go home and talk about it because most of them couldn't read. They had no access to histories, no access to anything outside their little world.
Revolutions in past times were led primarily by middle classes, sometimes financed by big capitalist interests who were using those middle classes to fight other competition. In the feudal system, the craftsmen had their guilds. Freemasons are found of talking about their myths of how they were founded and they're all taught the same myths basically; and they are myths. There's a modicum of truth in that the craft guilds and all the tradesmen, which all towns and city towns and city-states lived on, were little monopolies. They kept wages up. They kept prices up. They worked with each other as a brotherhood. Even in London, they had to pass laws at one point because the fishery guilds had jacked up the prices so much that the ordinary people couldn't afford the fish. They were rigging prices through agreements with each other.
After the Crusades, you'll find big money came into the European countries, a lot of it from the bootie, the loot that they'd purged in the Middle East. Some of these guilds became powerful monopolies that then went into the business of creating and giving out capital money—money lending. We all know, at least those who've studied a little bit of history about the goldsmiths, how they started off the system of lending out their gold, which was generally out there somewhere; and then they found out they could give out notes instead to represent the gold that was deposited in their vaults. They found that at no time was all the money deposited in all the vaults ever asked for at the same time. Today they call it a run on the banks, and therefore they could print up more and more paper notes than they held in gold—old tricks. Tricks that were actually used long, long before in much older civilizations.
However, with these revolutions and the Lutheran Revolution there was also a revolution or a reaction against the old system of feudalism, where people were basically fixed in society. There's no upward mobility. There's no real individuality as such. Everyone belonged to their group. The world is very simple, very simple because all you knew was religion. The plays that you saw were called "morality plays," all based on the old biblical stories to keep you in line. To make you understand what was right and wrong, and you would think it was for your deity. It was actually for the system.
When revolutions break out, there's always a counter reaction from the existing system that we end up with wars between the old system of Catholicism, backing a feudal system of nobility and aristocracies and a fixed way of life, against the new upcoming system of a bigger middle class, with its teachings which were spreading down into lower classes of an odd idea of individual salvation. Individual contact with a deity, as opposed to this old all-seeing eye type deity that was very remote and had no personal contact really, an individual who was therefore insignificant. Everyone felt insignificant in the great scheme of things. It was a great mystery.
The Protestant Revolution brought with it this feeling of distinct individuality; and out of that came their synthesis of a new system based on what they called the Protestant "work ethic," which took it to the extreme of greed and accumulation; and that really was the first setting up of the "me-type" society: I and me and mine. There's always a reaction you see to all revolutions, which they call progress, partly to free a person and always ends up you're back in chains in another form that you didn't foresee. However, there are people who understand this science and they certainly do know it's going to happen and occur.
The trade guilds, some of them amalgamated and became capitalistic lenders, big profiteers, very powerful, and sometimes famous people in history were at the heads of them. They became monopolistic; and in this new system, there was nothing written where an individual could not hold incredible power, money and wealth over countries or whole nations or groups of them. It wasn't long before these captains of money, capital and investing, after having skirmishes and outright wars with each other at times with private armies, amalgamated and formed their higher clubs; and that's what we still have today. That's what runs the show. Those captains of commerce, again with the Hegelian dialectical process, became a synthesis, which starts at the beginning a new thesis because they have a reaction against them setting in; and now they are the old system like the old feudal system was. They are holding on to their system with an incredible ruthlessness and with the ownership of rather advanced sciences. What we're seeing today is their agenda being fulfilled of domination before they lose it; and that's what all the hype and terror is all about of this fascist type elite. Very old families going way back down through to the guilds and even beyond of money lenders, commerce and completely monopolistic values, where they have gained ownership of vast areas of the world with its mineral resources, mining, oil et cetera.
This push for individual freedom and individual rights leads to its own Hegelian dialectic, because there were so many conflicting people with conflicting views, conflicting opinions or needs that they end up forming combines to gain more power; and then the combine, their rules and regulations set down over time and once again the individual is submerged into a large group, ever expanding. We saw this with the emergence of capitalists who had begun this. Pirates were a lot of them. Many of the remains did go back to the pirate days, the buccaneers, as they looted and plundered and used the secret societies to back them, because they had to keep secrecy to be respectable as to how they had been gaining their wealth.
We see the people that at one time had been in the peasant classes who were pushed into an Industrial Era by these same capitalists, who promised them freedoms and crowded them into these thrown up industrial cities, who lived in squalor and cramped conditions and worked 16 hours per day at machines. They had a very short life expectancy. Out of that came people who preached another kind of freedom: freedom for the low-level individual, natural rights, natural freedoms. Yet, to gain it they become minions in large groups and gain power. Power to even blackmail other people by withholding the produce, often to people's detriment, because you could withhold food, coal, or whatever else; and yet it was easy to see both points of view.
Everything brings about a dialectical problem, which will form a synthesis. The synthesis is just the rock-like formation that solidified end product which will try and hold on to its power; and then from that, breaks off a new group who wants to go further. The old group will always retaliate to try and hold on to what it thinks is "normal," ongoing down through time, right to the present time; which brings us to the problem of what is individuality?
It's one thing to be free in your mind. It's another to think you are free in your mind and in your life, but if you breakdown what the average person does and what they belong to, even just by birth, is it really individuality? Everything around you, from the messages on billboards, to your education, to parental expectations, to class expectations, to peer expectations, is all to do with conformity. The old joke of "be different, wear jeans" is true. If you look at the youngsters, especially those that think they're rebelling by whatever new fashion they're given, they never stop to think who gave them the fashion to rebel with, because they don't invent it themselves any more than the rap star invented baggy pants with crotches at the knees. What they're really showing is they want to conform to a particular group with pre-made standards and uniform. Uniformity is conformity.
In this age of group power, group-think, a movement that started for good reasons towards the end of the Industrial Era to give power to the individual through the group demands. We find eventually that the group becomes taken over by the higher psychopaths who know how to manipulate large crowds of people. That's a talent they have. It’s only a step from there to becoming children under this leader, because we never really shake off the Big Daddy symbol we have in our minds. A symbol that at one time had some kind of deity there at the head. We're always in trouble when we put a human being there instead.
Every culture fosters conformity; and what is conformity when you think you're free, apart from just the dress and codes of behavior? You're taught from a very early age to suppress spontaneous feelings. Spontaneous feelings and expressions of them are part of the development of a real genuine individual, yet it's quite natural for the parents to suppress it. Some of the behavior of children has to be suppressed to give everyone peace, including other children, but there are other expressions of children which are put down on because of the group-think mentality: The rules of the group, or the religion, or all the other things which support that particular group.
Another thing which will destroy spontaneity and creativity is education, because education is authorized from the top as to what education will be. What it will be will be a form of reinforcing and maintaining the system, the group and the culture. More importantly, it will support an elite who sit on the high boards of all these organizations and decide what the format is and what will be taught – what will be and what will not be. When feelings in children are suppressed, mainly you have feelings of hostility, just like a parent's avoidance, and you'll hear that. “Don't act like that in front of so-and-so. He or she is a good person,” but the child instinctively withdraws from the person. They don't like something in them, which they generally can't express why. They sense something. All children will have frustrations.
We’ve all had them living in a world which is full of rules and regulations, dos and don'ts, expectations of behavior, conduct and even a form of work, which is homework, and all this kind of stuff all tied together. Therefore, the child is told they have to give in. They have to yield to demands—demands that are placed upon them. They become rebellious to an extent, show it in different ways, sometimes harmless. What they're trying to do really is to rebel against the powerlessness that they feel in a society which they don't understand. That's why religion was always used to reinforce the education by giving them all the rules, regulations and reasons why things were as they were, very simplistically. At one time it worked. Today with science rearing up as a substitute for religion, it's hard to use it any more to give the rules—not that all the rules are wrong.
Why is this necessity to conform pushed and promoted, even demanded?
Children are taught that feelings are not really his own or her own, such as: to like someone; to like certain people and to be friendly to them, not to criticize them; to put on a smile. You're teaching them to be fake to begin with. Smile at so-and-so and then that's augmently run with social pressure in their life. If you don't smile at someone, even if they don't smile back at the checkout counter person who's saying, "Have a nice day," "have a nice day" like a robot, these are social niceties you might say, but it's expectations as well. If you don't smile back then you're antisocial. You're classed right away. You know this person who's smiling at you is being fake when they're doing it and they don't mean anything; and they don't really even care who you are. You're just an object walking past the checkout counter, one of many, but if you don't act in a pleasing manner, you're antisocial. We're taught to always put on a show to act to serve an economic system, which boils down to our own survival ultimately by putting on a show and acting so that we can sell ourselves to employers. We sell our services if you're self-employed and it's all fake.
It's actually worse when you race up the ladder. If you're in the bottom working class, they don't really care if you're sullen, slow, or withdrawn, as long as they can get you to work; and they give you a trial period anyway. However, if you're selling yourself, it's a different story. You have to be pleasing and to show off being cheerful. You're supposed to turn off the smile and turn on the smile like a light switch, which is unnatural. Everyone today is acting their little part out in a society which they don't really understand; and because they can't understand it, because they have frustrations within them, they have expectations of what the society has taught them to expect and they’ve been thwarted—they want to blame someone else, preferably a group. Most people are group thinkers and they identify with a group, a culture, a people, a race, or a religion. Therefore, they want someone else to blame for all their problems. "If it wasn't for this group, we'd be living in utopia." It's the oldest thing in the book; and it's not all lies.
There's no doubt about it that in nationalism, strong ethnic groups that identify with each other certainly do try and generally are used by very clever people at the top to try and dominate others. This is again an age-old thing, so there are always modicums of truth here and there of competitive groups down through history. They certainly do nasty things to each other. It's only an extension of a couple living together who shouldn't be together, who do nasty things to each other as well, and blame each other for all their wrongs and ills in their life.
If we can't get over the basic one (the smaller version), how on earth could you think you could possibly overcome the larger version of nations and peoples warring with each other for dominance? That's why in ancient times they always had the symbols of the fascia and the symbols of a supposed archenemy. One represented the dominant elite and the power structure and the money structure, the commercial structure. The other one represented supposedly the people together, united, working for themselves, the dialectic process, the opposites. However, when another one becomes dominant it's a horror show for everyone involved, including those on the same side eventually. That again is human nature.
When emotions are stifled, you lack spontaneity in life and that's what we see around us. We see expected norms, the smiling grin which other species of animals have as well. It's a sign of no threat basically, or appeasement or ready to appease. We’ve been taught to go back to simple animalistic traits rather than express ourselves. To be an emotional person has become synonymous with being unsound or unbalanced. This weakens the individual. It flattens the personality. It flattens the conversations within people. Therefore, they're left to trivia—acceptable trivia which doesn't threaten anyone. However, if emotions are suppressed, like anything which is suppressed, it will come out in other ways. It comes out in our societies in a thousand ways; and that's why you have all these cheap and gaudy sentimental songs, which express things which people crave and they cannot express in their real lives. The whole industry goes overboard with it to the -nth degree and the same with movies. The wish fulfillment of that which is starved as expressed in movie form in intense, condensed ways because people are emotionally starved in their personal lives. Not just to receive emotion but to give it out. It's taboo. The more scientific the culture becomes, the more taboo this dominant need of the elite to suppress these emotions in the people becomes as well. We're becoming the Borg, you see.
The ancients in Greece had various plays they put on called tragedies. Tragedies dealt with the experiences of everyone: of the joy of youth, the joy of having friends. The joy of so many things or even having a family or offspring in watching them grow up and participating in their lives, but they also dealt with death. Different cultures deal with death in different ways. When there's a higher form of individual right or freedom in a society, they will behave differently towards death than people who are still in the group-think mentality. In Greece, they put all of the emphasis on living, the big puzzle—life and death. They put all the emphasis on life itself and gave expression to life, to live it to the full, that death was just a strange shadowy place where the shades would gather and not do much at all, just stand around; so they didn't go into it in any great detail.
Egyptians were different. They had pharaohs and the elite of Egypt had the power of a god on earth. Their word was law. Their command was carried out without hesitation on anything. They were god on earth, and therefore they had a belief in the indestructibility of the human body of a god, therefore they tried to preserve those same bodies to last forever and ever after death through embalming processes. They never really came to terms with something beyond.
Judaism faced it differently again. They accepted the idea of the destruction of individual life and they gave it a vision: A state of happiness and justice, which would be reached by future offspring. That was really as far as it ever went.
Christianity, because of its commercial based system, rode the back of an empire from its beginning in Constantine—the commercial system of a government structure; and therefore it was highly suppressed. Life was supposed to be partly miserable, and quite often, a lot, miserable, where they gave you a heaven or a utopia to be in and your trials would be over; so they would comfort people by promises of some kind of nice life after death, your reward.
Here we are today in the post-religious society where science became God, constantly telling us of these new theories, which contract generally their older theories or even yesterday's theory. Regardless, like all gods you want total control and obeyance; and you see that through laws getting passed because of supposed findings within science that affect our health and other things; yet, our era of this scientific age, people deny death all together. You might think that's a funny statement to make, but it's a fact because we don't have an early education into a theology. We have nothing except the hard sciences—sciences which dehumanize the people. They've told us we're just flukes of nature. We watch them reengineer people through inoculations, even though the evidence is piling up and has been into mountains of evidence that there's something nefarious behind these inoculations and that is a fact to that. There's no doubt whatsoever. In other words, it's not all unintentional, these side effects.
However, people deny death today and because of that, they're neurotic about it. They can't talk about it, but they show their neurosis in many, many ways. Death and suffering that comes to certain people, sometimes all people at certain times, at least the suffering part. Old death always comes. It used to be one of the strongest incentives for life itself. You were pro-life because of those things. It was a cohesive force for people to come together in times of trouble. Without the negative side of things, you can't appreciate the positive side of things. Therefore, if you deny the negative, you will not enjoy the positive, either. You won't get to the positive side. You'll always be searching and try to fill something by other means. It's like eating a cheap chocolate when you've had a really expensive one, and regardless of how much people try to deny the whole problem of death, their ideas are rising now inside in spite of the suppression.
It's the reason for the flatness of the experiences in most peoples' lives. It's a fear sitting behind everything, which won't go away. We show that in the western world, this tremendous fear of death by the incredible amount of money people lavish on funerals, as though it's some kind of payoff. A tribute to appease something, but apart from making morticians incredibly wealthy and given a place to cry to all the mourners where they can at least express something, albeit they’re guarded and they feel a bit ashamed and embarrassed in doing so in our society. We lavish so much money on funerals. It's incredible. That's the reason why the New Age was promoted to fill that gap and also to alter the people to a higher agenda of which they know nothing. It's actually to train them all into a new society by a dominant elite who understand the things I'm talking about tonight.
They have the scientists involved, historians, the philosophers and they foresee a time when they will be unable to manage their tidy world and they’re to bring down the populations drastically; and they gave these captains of industry that have been here for a long time. These same captains that destroyed the old system. The same descendants of them have decided to bring us into the next system, where all of the problems of society will be taken care of, because they plan to eradicate the problem of individualism and sentient thought within the masses. That is utopia for them—absence of all opposition to their agenda; and it's a cruel agenda because science must be cruel. It's its nature when it’s given itself the status of all powerful religion you'll always have incredible cruelty, because eventually they demand laws passed on everything that they facet or what they see is their system, this intellectual elite.
No matter how crazy the law is, or crazy their theory is for passing the law, it's done anyway. We saw this to an extent within the Soviet Union with various laws that were passed there that seemed absolutely ludicrous. Yet now, the same laws are being passed here by the same totalitarian mindset. Totalitarian mindsets don't really care what flag they wear above their heads. It doesn't matter really to them as long as it's a huge group thing of the dominant minority at the top and they're all in agreement.
Psychiatry was used for a good purpose at the beginning, at least to de-mythologize a lot of the taboos and the restraints that created problems within people that manifested into various kinds of neurosis. Then, as always, when they get power and they become more acceptable, they start to become dogmatic and they themselves become conformists. The pioneers are gone and those who take over are conformists. They're not creative people within themselves. Those who take over will always conform and they will then dis-label people as infantile or neurotic and stick them on people with a label who don't conform with conventional pattern of what they claim is a normal individual.
How can you use standardization on people when we're all supposedly different? What is normal?
Normal is conformist. If we take the normal people of the communist era in a Soviet Russia, they're different from the normal people of the post-Soviet Russia. Culture is given to the people and stamped and approved from above, in all ages and periods. It's the same in the western world, exactly the same in the western world. A dominant minority approves and makes sure that you get your downloading through movies and television of an ideal of your world, which doesn’t exist, and you're supposed to conform to that ideal. All fiction to do with your home, the police and law, the legal system and even health and hospital dramas are all propaganda to give you a false impression of what they're all really about, so that you will conform and obey.
Beginning with day one at school, you're taught to conform. Original thinking is taboo. It isn't until certain people with certain qualities useful to the dominant minority show their special abilities that they're pulled out of the mainstream schooling, often bypassing university and brought up to a higher position and given knowledge not even given to professors at universities. They’re brought into the weapons industry, to the sciences that are really beyond in physics or weaponry, for advanced flying craft, for viral and bacterial warfare purposes, and all the things that we're not suppose to know about; because psychically we’d collapse if we knew how horrible was the machinery piled above our heads and held by a small dominant minority.
There are three levels of science. Professorship down is for the mainstream, including the professor. He doesn't know either. Some of them do catch on later in life as they move in the circles, but the brighter ones, the ones who have qualities. Not necessarily better people by human standards, but in fact, generally they're not. They often have psychopathic traits. They're pulled out of college or university where they're spotted, bypassed and put up there to work in the real sciences; because the dominant minority have gone so far into preparation of maintaining themselves for what they hope is forever, but they cannot ever divulge to the public this Sword of Damocles which they hold over our heads.
As I say, the flattening of emotion in our society is just conformity. Anyone showing other traits would be instantly diagnosed and labeled and snapped into a little observation chamber where they'll be readjusted to get back into this normal society. A normal society where people are floundering, they're falling apart. Their families are falling apart because this is the end of that era for families. Really, it’s already happened before we were born, because relationships now are dysfunctional, where following patterns which worked before for a certain period appeared when they had different standards and moralities and beliefs. All of that has been taken from the people, but they're still trying to emulate that which went before. You see the fallout everywhere because the system we're in is incredibly cruel. This whole commercial exploitive system is intensely cruel. It's a predatory system where everyone is taught to be a predator on everyone else; and if you're very good at it, you're called successful, a go-getter.
Today we have fewer and fewer people who can integrate completely their personality; and that was something which was stressed even in ancient times when things were not so quite stressful for longer periods. There was less exploitation. There was less psychological warfare put upon people; and yes, even your daily download of advertising in the media is part of psychological warfare. It's intended to make you terribly unhappy with what you have. In fact, they know you're unhappy because of this system which is controlling you. Therefore, they give you fake false substitutes, placebos, very expensive ones, which promise to make you very happy and fulfilled.
We're exploited from cradle to grave in this system and this is called normal today. In ancient times, "know thyself" was a fundamental command that aimed at strength and happiness within, because that's the only place it can possibly exist. It's not from ‘out there’ or from some product that's made. It's from within and it's the same with your social relations. You don't pair up with a partner because that partner is going to make you happy. That's a western concept that came along with the whole idea of commercialization and exploitation. You have to be happy within yourself, and hopefully your partner is too, for anything deeper to grow.
We're kept in the dark in this system by a mammoth which is our overlord. A mammoth of very powerful families, dynasties with incredible wealth coming out of a capitalistic system, very old, where they monopolized and monopolized until they own most of the globe; in their system’s standards, that is. However, with a stroke of a pen, another system could eradicate that right to dominate the whole planet or to own all of its resources. The answers are rather simple, and that's why we have all these governments and experts constantly telling us it's too complicated for our simple little minds to understand. That's so far from the truth. That's the big trick because the problems in life are very simple to see and the solutions are very simple to see. The doing of them could take some effort, especially with yourself.
When Bertrand Russell and others talked about creating a world where people would not be able to think for themselves – they would have to rely on experts that they believe, they would have to rely on experts to make very important choices and decisions in their lives for them – he meant it and they all meant it. They tell us that the problems are so complex only specialists can understand them, and we are too limited in our fields of understanding. This is to discourage us from trusting our own capacity to think about those problems that really matter, to make us distrust ourselves. It creates a feeling of being helplessly caught in a chaotic mass of data. We're supposed to wait with pathetic patience until the specialists have found out what to do and where to go; and of course we won't understand their strange decision, because it will be bizarre to us, generally, because it's for a different reason than the one they're telling you.
We become cynical in the system we live in because we suspect we're being fooled all the time; and because of that, we've become cynical with each other. This is meant to paralyze the ability to think for yourselves. It was discussed in higher circles a long time ago that they would do this (and used these techniques to do so) and we've been born into this system where we're taught not to trust ourselves. People are addicted to television talk-shows and they don’t realize the superstars that they're presented with are just actors and a whole team of staff put that one-hour show together. It's also meant to bring you what you think is your conclusion on a particular topic. It's also meant to show you how big and complex and scary this world is, and how insignificant you are. The same return the clock going back to the Medieval days, when you were just a little creation in the great scheme of things which was beyond your understanding, and you left everything to the priests and the aristocracies, nobilities, kings and queens. It's the same thing.
It took a long time for at least the chance of individuality to be taken by people. For the average individual, it took a lot of suffering and many revolutions to bring us to this stage. The elite who are still in charge because it's their system and money (a monied system) and that's the perverse fact about it, you see. You can't alter something if you're using the same basic problem. It will always manifest itself in either side of the dialectic.
People today are trying to escape from individualism and go back; and hence you see the rise of massive groups, generally funded by the same boys that run the system. It's much easier to control millions of people under a single leader that they supply you with, than it is to get right to each individual person independently—very old trick. Create the group. Put your man in. Now you can control all the minds of the people with less effort. It's more efficient that way. People are joining groups of all kinds looking for answers. I always tell people: For every decision you come to in this life, there's a group out there ready-made for you to join, as being purpose made for you in fact, and it will guide you along what you want to believe in or think or work towards. You'll be used like a willing fool and you'll never know what's really behind it.
It is no coincidence that the greatest philanthropists for non-governmental organizations, the same ones that are demanding laws to take all your rights away regarding land, homes, and other aspects of your living. It's no accident they’re all funded by the same rich people of the world who run and own the resources of the world, and actually are taking over more and more of them, as they use their NGO groups on the other side to push for laws to be passed, telling us that the average person is too irresponsible to be in charge of something as important as a little piece of land. We're too ignorant, you see. It takes specialists to do that, so they say.
Always beware of those who are well funded and claim to be there to free you and speak for you, because if you give authority to them, you'll see the same repetitions that other large groups have seen in history. The utopia turns into a horror show, even for those followers who helped bring it about. Individuality is something to be sought after and to be worked on. It takes a deep understanding of the past, but more importantly, it takes a deeper understanding of yourself. When you learn not to compare yourself with others, when you don't have a neurotic breakdown, when you're not dressing the same as your neighbors or looking the same or conforming in the same ways—then you're doing well. You're either an individual or you're a conformist.
People confuse fads with individuality. Intellectuals are the greatest ones for fads, where someone comes out with a new technique of writing or skill or poetry; and before you know it, there's a plethora of them out there; and they all join a group and talk beautiful and wondrous words to each other, until it ends up being abstract verbiage as they try to impress each other with their wit and their intellect. Fads are simply another way of another bunch creating a new conformity for themselves. As we try to escape from the prison walls, we tend to build new ones right away because we're used to them.
The closest thing in the past to a true individual was once again the anarchist. Not the anarchist that went around tossing bombs all over the place, but anarchy in its true meaning meant an individual who didn't conform to anyone's standards. He didn't tread on anyone's toes, either. He simply would walk around and listen to what was being said. Agree or disagree, not be allowed to be bullied into agreeing. He would take the worthwhile. Discard the nonsense and go his own way. That was initially the real meaning of it. This is an archy that we live in. You see this is archy from the old religion. The old promise of the deity was as long as the sun shown, then these laws would be fixed and the people would live. The sun travels in an arch across the sky from our point of view. That was the Ark of the Covenant, of course. The Covenant being yes, you will have cloudy days and you want sunny. You'll have your downs but you'll have your sunny ones too; and that's the most you could hope for from life. Anything against that system was anarchy, you see.
Those who would not conform and buckle under and do as they were told, simply because it was custom to do what we're told, was called an anarchist. It later became a form of rebellion and it attached itself to other movements. We are social creatures. We're gregarious. We like to interact. Our problem is really can we still interact and retain complete individuality or freedom of our own thoughts? You'll find that people, even friends, they turn on you if you give out too many contradictory opinions from that which is quietly solidifying in themselves as a group. They become group thinkers without realizing it. It's a scary thing when you realize that most people have to convince you of their side of an argument; and not only convince you, but win you over to it.
I have no problem in understanding and agreeing to disagree and leave it at that without falling out over it, but you'll find that most people will fallout over it because they want you simply to think as they think or believe as they believe. We find that all the time in our interpersonal relationships; and that's our big dilemma, apart from a dominant elite that's given us their system of money, commerce and successful predation. We also have a problem with our own individuality. Can we handle it or not? That's the big question mark right how.
Many people will love complete and utter dictatorial socialism because they can't handle individuality. They want to remain Peter Pan's forever in perpetual childhood and play. Only a fool would do that because if you don't grow up, you won't know the real world and you won't know the nasty monsters above you, all their plans to manipulate you or do worse things. Children aren't told the truth; and the choice to not know the truth is that. It's a choice. When you see the eyes glaze over when you're telling something of importance to someone for their own survival sake and the sake of others, they're making the choice right there to be a Peter Pan or to risk knowing, which means you risk acting on it. It also risks discarding all the comfort zones, albeit fake as they are, the society has given them to believe in.
That's it for tonight. Have a good weekend. From Hamish and myself, it's good night, and may your god or your gods go with you.
"Whose Garden Was This?" by Tom Paxton
Whose garden was this?
It must have been lovely.
Did it have flowers? I've seen pictures of flowers,
And I'd love to have smelled one.
Whose river was this?
You say it ran freely?
Blue was its color?
I've seen blue in some pictures,
And I'd love to have been there.
Ah, tell me again I need to know:
The forest had trees, the meadows were green,
The oceans were blue and birds really flew,
Can you swear that was true?
Whose grey sky was this?
Or was it a blue one?
Nights there were breezes?
I've heard records of breezes,
And you tell me you've felt one?
Ah, tell me again I need to know:
The forest had trees, the meadows were green,
The oceans were blue and birds really flew,
Can you swear that was true?
Whose garden was this?
It must have been lovely.
Did it have flowers?
I've seen pictures of flowers,
And I'd love to have smelled one.
(Transcribed by Linda)