Impervious To Suffering
Can I be so bold as to say I may have figured something out? It is probably something all of you already know, as I can be a bit slow on the uptake. I keep hearing from the sheep-types that they really don’t care if we lose all of our freedoms. They don’t care about losing privacy because they don’t have anything to hide, they don’t care about losing free speech because people should be punished for saying bad and/or dangerous things (and they have nothing to say that would be considered bad and/or dangerous).
They have no fear of the government getting too much control because there will never be a reason the government would want or need to control them.
They don’t fear communism or fascism primarily because they don’t know what those two ideologies clearly mean, and besides, that would never happen in a free society—which they are ready to give up anyway.
Of course, to all of us shrew-types, we practically lose our cookies thinking about living in a society where basic freedoms have been stripped away, or where the government, or any other authority, has power over our movements, our money, and our fundamental existence.
When we hear someone say, “I don’t care how much control the authorities have, I have nothing to hide, and I do nothing wrong, therefore it is not something to worry about for me,” we blow a gasket.
Don’t they know?
Don’t they know that when the control over the masses surely does take effect it won’t matter a tinker’s damn if they “have nothing to hide” or “don’t do anything bad.” Oppression comes in many flavours, and its primary purpose is not to punish wrongdoing, but rather to keep people, in a very general way, compliant and under control.
Control sets the tone of the behaviour of a society. A good example of this came about during the Canadian Trucker’s Convoy. People who donated to that cause ran the risk of having their bank accounts frozen. (I was one that this happened to.) Was donating to a “cause” such as the Trucker’s Convoy a “bad thing”—was it against the law, was it criminal? In a free society, protesting (peacefully) and standing up against any sort of injustice an individual finds abhorrent is one of our fundamental rights as citizens of a free country.
However, punishing people who do something the government does not approve of sets a bar that indicates what is acceptable and what is not. People seeing friends and family being punished for contributing to a cause such as the truckers convoy, will categorize their activity as the activity of “a bad person”—whereas before the punishment was laid upon them (the freezing of their bank accounts) these same people would have had no trouble wearing a pussy hat and marching against Donald Trump.
They find what the government did (freezing accounts) as “reasonable” and they tell themselves that whoever contributed was a “bad person” and deserves to be reprimanded.
There is no better word for this than indoctrination: people are being taught what is right and wrong, and being taught what the punishment is for being wrong. It is much like training a dog, but not with positive reinforcement (although there is a lot of that going on as well) but with negative reinforcement.
Needless to say this negative punishment starts out mildly. And this is the thing I figured out—people don’t know yet what the real punishment is going to be for wrongdoing, and for straying away from the desires of the agenda. They have never experienced real suffering at the hands of their captives, so they don’t know what is in store for them. None of them have lived in North Korea, or Soviet Russia, or Nazi Germany, or Mao’s China. None of them know what it means to live a life in any of these environments where you don’t have to be a criminal to be seriously persecuted and physically punished for just being.
1 comment:
Most Americans in 1963 could still think clearly. They were very aware of the dangers both foreign and domestic. My father stated the greatest threat to our civil liberties came from unaccountable liberal federal judges. Starting with the Warren court proved him 100% correct. The destructive bilge began in an undeclared war in Korea. A war placed under the auspices of the United Nations instead of the Congress violating the constitution. Followed by federal courts usurping the Bill of Rights throughout the 1950's and early 60's interfering with the daily lives of Americans in particular education of children and eroding religious values. The handwriting on the wall demonstrably appeared with the revelation of the military industrial complex, Bay of Pigs fiasco, construction of the Berlin Wall, creation of MACV intensifying the Vietnam War, stock market crash, removal of prayer from public schools, Cuban Missile crisis and an avalanche of crime with sorceries overwhelming young people. Concerned Americans began to speak out but were shouted down, labeled as racial bigots, religious intolerants, right-wing extremists and homophobes in later years. It began with a drip in Korea and now a raging torrent racing to extinguish the middle class thereby ending the greatest nation the world has ever seen.
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