I don’t think there is some kind of subtle, secret, covert brainwashing scheme going on, but I do think there is a blatant, in-your-face, inescapably overt brainwashing scheme going on in nearly every aspect of our personal and public lives. We’ve been brainwashed into agreeing not on the details, but on the broad strokes that make up our current paradigm. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that patriarchy, with all the violence and bloodthirsty quench for control and domination that comes with it, and its most enigmatic modern day manifestation, the corporate-government alliance known as capitalism, are natural and have always been so. Regardless of the current manifestation or fad, ‘government is normal’ is the most important message the paradigmatic powers have a collective invested interest in spreading and maintaining.
We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that the state is the only viable alternative for organizing ourselves as human beings. The state, whether it be a town, city, county, province, territory, state, nation or alliance of any thereof, government in general, despite any and all efforts to the contrary by good-hearted people lost in the meaninglessness of its bureaucracies, has only ever served the interest of the propertied elite. That is its very function and the reason for which patriarchy invented the entire notion of political control through the state with all of its auxiliary functions. In a political atmosphere as suffocated as ours is in the United States of America, to suggest something like a viable third party is more often than not ludicrous, yet alone the possibility that our entire system of representation is fundamentally flawed due to its own inherent self-interest: no matter what ills it includes, no matter how skewed the benefits are, no matter how many die or are forgotten, no matter any circumstances whatsoever, we will not explore different possibilities for organizing ourselves. We just continue voting and being disappointed and voting and being disappointed, because it is normal.
We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that the ills that come with government are natural, part of the negotiation. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that a perfect world is not possible, that this is the best we can do. A perfect world may be unlikely, but we can do so much better that it might as well be called perfect from our perspective. We sell ourselves short when we allow ourselves to be convinced that as humans we are not capable of deciding for ourselves how to live with each other and how to take care of each other, that as humans only certain members of the species are capable of making those big decisions about things like housing, food production and distribution, public services and all those other complicated issues (which are actually done or carried out by us, it’s worth pointing out, not by the propertied elite) that have a direct impact on the quality of our lives – and the profits of others – that as humans our natural state of affairs is to be governed by the smartest amongst us and to let them make those decisions, that as humans our natural state of affairs is to accept what the governors hand down (albeit with frequent whining), to make do with what there is, often resulting in fighting amongst ourselves for, essentially, the table scraps. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that someone must always be in control, in power, and that others must always be under their control and power. The amount of citizen participation differs from system of government to system of government, but none allows so much participation as to actually question the system itself or the general arrangement of governed and governors. Ultimately, every system of power is inherently interested only in its own continued survival and domination. Taking care of subjects, from the dawn of government to today, has only ever been a public relations scheme to help secure the argument for government’s existence.
