It’s About The System, Not The Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

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If the working class had as much class solidarity as the ruling class has there never would’ve been a ruling class.

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Stealing someone’s labor is worse than stealing their property, because it’s theft of their life; you can replace property if you want, but you can’t replace hours of life. And rigging the system so people need to work longer hours in order to survive is this form of theft at mass scale.

Right now it’s ass backwards: people have to spend their lives away from their loved ones in pointless jobs, and if you tell the cop your employer stole hours from you he’ll just shrug while if your employer tells the cop you stole a company iPad you’ll be hauled off in chains.

This would all be a lot less confusing if we said people get paid by the Life Unit instead of by the hour, because it makes it much clearer what you’re actually trading. “You want a unit of my life for seven dollar bills and a quarter? Fuck you.”

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Six months into Biden’s presidency it’s definitely not okay to be a grown adult and still believe Trump was a uniquely monstrous president.

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Biden may be stopping all progress and breaking most of his campaign promises, but he did also campaign on bringing back the Obama years so in that sense he kept all his campaign promises.

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Focusing on individuals instead of the system creates the illusion that if you replaced the individuals you could fix the problems with the system. The individuals are symptoms of the disease.

This is true whether you’re talking about oligarchy or the official elected government. Leave the systems in place and get rid of Jeff Bezos and another greedy plutocrat will just move into his niche. Get rid of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and you’ll just get different Democrats killing progress in the senate. It’s fine to criticize them, but it’s not about them. You criticize them to draw attention to the systems.

Sociopaths will keep getting elevated to the top as long as there are systems in place which elevate sociopaths. Right now wealth and political power go to whoever’s willing to do anything to get to the top and step on anyone in their way. That’s what actually needs to change.

Really the people just need to find a way to seize power and create systems which work for everyone instead of rewarding greed, sociopathy and corruption. But they’ll never do that by working within the current systems, because those systems are designed to do the exact opposite.

Sure Biden is shit. That’s what happens in a system which elevates shit. That’s why his predecessor was shit, and why his replacement will be shit. Without that system Biden would just be some creepy asshole in an assisted living facility who all the caregivers try to avoid.

But also it’s never actually about Biden; it’s about a system wherein mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit, and where war, ecocide, exploitation and corruption happen to be profitable. As long as that’s the case it will just be endless assholes ruling our world until they get us all killed.

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1. Be a government
2. Do evil things
3. Make it illegal to report those evil things
4. Sentence anyone who does to draconian prison terms as a deterrent
5. Keep the public from knowing what you’re doing
6. Force them to guess
7. Label this guessing “conspiracy theory”
8. Censor them

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For every whistleblower you make an example of you prevent a thousand others.

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Republicans live in such an awesome world. There’s a war on white men, powerful anarchists rule the streets, the president is a Marxist, and US officials are being taken out by communist microwave beams.

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Feds definitely knew about the Capitol raid in advance and definitely let it happen yet you’re meant to believe the only reason rioters didn’t lynch Nancy Pelosi and take over the US government is because their diabolical plot was thwarted at the last minute.

Imagine if the memesters who went to Area 51 in 2019 actually got in (because military forces opened the doors for them), wandered around for a bit and then left, and then this was hailed as worse than 9/11 and used to advance authoritarian agendas and legal precedents… and people believed it.

It would have been exactly note-for-note identical to what happened with January 6th. The one and only difference is that there was no ideological angle on the Area 51 memesters.

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As a kid I certainly never imagined that I’d end up spending such a significant portion of my adult life arguing with strangers who think the government should be allowed to do extremely evil things in secret.

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Still shits me how we all know our governments and institutions lie to us all the time about important things but when people are distrustful of those institutions they get treated like they belong in a straight jacket. Sure this distrust can manifest in ways that are not well-informed or truth-based, but expecting all rank-and-file members of the public who work full time to have a perfectly erudite understanding of every situation is absurd. The distrust is reasonable and it’s not their fault.

If people distrust their government and institutions, the blame rests exclusively on the shoulders of the government and institutions who created that distrust in the first place. You can’t create distrust and act like people are crazy for distrusting you. That’s not a thing.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/its-about-the-system-not-the-individuals