Breaking Free from Subservience

Which leads one to recognise that different cultures have different perspectives on the same basic problems and different ways of dealing with them. So let us be wary of a “European Union” that tries to bring about a standardised European super state in which all countries involved are expected to conform to the same (largely financial) goals. It doesn’t work. But that doesn’t mean that those at the top end of the power pyramid aren’t determined to make it work; just as ‘The United States of America’ is projected as a unified entity ruled by a caring President, when just under the surface a very different reality is easily visible. The ‘United’ States and the European ‘Union’ are covert tools for the acquisition of power for those at the top of the pyramid. They are global trading blocks that operate as cartels for big business and corporate enrichment while maintaining a veneer of cultural cosmopolitanism and commonality.

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A significant percentage of the populations of each country that comprise the EU and of each state that comprises the United States, are conditioned by the corporate- and government-financed media enterprises that control the content of what appears on their TV screens, newspapers and journals. In England, for example, people spend an average of four hours a day in front of their TV screens. I don’t have a statistic for Poland or America, but walking through a Polish countryside village at night, in house after house one sees a flickering light in an otherwise dark room. Every one of those flickers represents an electronic message engaging directly with the human neocortex. It is a message with a very specific design, frequency and purpose, and, unfortunately, it is not one of benevolent intent for the evolution of human intelligence. Poles, Englishmen and women, Americans, French, Germans, Swedes and all citizens of this planet who are judged to be going about their daily lives in countries with ‘higher standards of living’ are recipients of a virtual reality world which has been designed to keep them ‘entertained’ but not ‘informed’.

There is a big difference between these two states. The TV casts a spell over the watcher; a spell which lulls us into a surprisingly defenceless state in which the message and image being broadcast is largely absorbed into the unconscious. This is why the television is such a popular medium for advertisers. It works. There must be millions of completely trashy products that few people would ever purchase if it wasn’t for the fact that they ‘saw them on the telly’. Bland, boring  chemically enriched foods that wobble along food processing conveyor belts in neon-lit sanitized factories are transformed into glittering examples of vibrant good health once advertisers are employed to ‘brand’ them for the mass market.

A pasteurised, homogenised and stabilised  factory farmed semi-soft cheese in a plastic tub and with no discernible natural taste – bursts out of the TV screen as “Nature’s Dream from the pure pastures of the Polish highlands – low fat, fresh and nourishing – the perfect healthy snack for the caring housewife!” And there’s the cow, the wild flower meadow, the jolly farmer; and there’s the beaming contented housewife dipping her spoon into the milky tub. Pure disinformation from beginning to end; but the imagery has transferred itself at a HZ frequency carefully chosen to to mimic the natural frequency range of the human brain, lodging itself in the neocortex without the viewer having to exercise any particular concentration or effort. When repeated over and over again, this form of hidden persuasion becomes a highly effective tool in the hands of the hidden persuaders.

Consider for a moment the fact that in the UK 80% of all household foods are purchased in supermarkets and that a high percentage of consumers have no background knowledge of how these foods are produced, processed or packaged. Most, in urbanised Britain, have probably never even put their hands in the soil. Many will never have seen a live cow. This means that ‘power of suggestion’ is a critical factor in determining the act of purchase. The advertisement becomes the reality. There is no other reference point to ground the purchaser’s opinion and no experience to hold onto as a guide to just what this product actually is or what effect it might have on the digestive system – or even what its worth.

Now consider the fact that those who control the mainstream media are fully aware of this power  they have at their disposal. We can then begin to understand how an entire society can be targeted with the propaganda package deemed most effective in the maintenance of subservience, obedience and conformity – three conditions essential to the success of top-down power management and mass consumerism. To keep the wheels of capitalism properly oiled, the majority of the population need to be kept stupid. Once the majority of citizens in any one country have been suitably conditioned to and by their consumer addiction, then it is possible for the leaders of those countries to steal their money, go to war, cut their welfare payments, increase their taxes and generally rob the working man and woman to increase their private wealth. All this and more – and yet it somehow fails to incite a popular revolution. Why not?

For many years I have struggled to understand just how it is possible that so many people remain so unquestioning about the nature of the forces that control their lives. How so many people can so easily be dispossessed of their critical faculties and be led down almost any road which is dished out to them by the ever more sophisticated power of the multimedia propaganda machine. How accurately Aldous Huxley and George Orwell foresaw the dangers ahead back in the 1940s and 50s, and the coming of an ‘obedient’ and ‘standardised’ society that would be manipulated by the forces of darkness. Well, here it is. Manifesting itself in North America and Europe today.

Mind control can take many forms, but should be seen for what it is: a covert weapon of mass destruction. Not an instant physical killer of millions like the nuclear warhead or the neutron bomb, but a slow killer of the spirit and intellect which works, in advertising’s case, by continuously suffusing the brain with junk status entertainment and mind-bending corporate promotions. When received by those who uncritically accept this package as bona fide information and entertainment, it can act like a virus on both mental and physical health, turning once sentient beings into  automatons in just one or two decades. These are the 21st century tools of oppression of ‘civilised’ countries. Governments, far from seeking to outlaw such tools, more often than not fall into line with their corporate sponsors and make full use of them to maintain their power. Electorates have to be kept in a state of dumbed down, uncritical unawareness, otherwise the whole circus might come off the rails and the financial millions would stop flowing into the hands of perverse profiteers.

So, whether we are in England or Poland or America, or anywhere else on this planet, there is a pressing need to break free from subservience to our ‘modern democracies’. A term that is used as a veneer to try to impose the will of the elite, while singularly failing to respond to people’s real needs and deeper longings. In the country of my birth, breaking free also will require breaking ‘the spell of the past’  which hangs over the country like a heavy mist. Because England is a country that has lived under the flag of ‘glorious empire builder’ its population is historically conditioned to accepting a role of ‘ruling over’ other peoples and nations. But now we have to have the courage to admit that the version of history taught to us in our schools bears little resemblance to the reality of what happened on the ground. All the blood, destruction, rape, carnage and theft that goes with foreign conquest has been carefully expunged from school text books and most scholarly works on the history of the British Empire. The ghost of the Empire still haunts our collective psyches and is played upon by the dominant state control system. It is used to further enforce the acceptability of a class and money divided society, something which remains such an enduring and divisive part of the British way of life.

Conversely, in Poland, the need is to break free from the still lingering affects of generations of occupation by foreign invaders. The Polish psyche, not unlike the British, is also burdened by its past; but unlike the British, it is a past coloured by being ‘ruled-over’. The result is that Poles find it hard to believe in themselves – whereas the British, in their hubris, find it hard not to believe in themselves! In my observation, a certain homogeneity of citizenship still holds together in Poland, and this is no doubt due, at least in part, to the common bond developed in adversity over so long a period. Whereas in England our ‘never occupied’ country is more fragmented, and we have to come to terms with the karmic retribution of a modern mass migration onto our island shores, much of which comes from countries England once ruled over, or colluded with, for her colonial enrichment.

I dwell on the psychological and historical conditions of these two countries because it is a necessary precondition of our emancipation as individuals to realistically come to terms with our nation’s past and thereby to know where we are coming from. We cannot break out of the subservient condition which is so exploited by the corporate political elite, without first understanding where such subservience is coming from and to what degree we remain conditioned by our education, our families and the government-supported corporate cartel.

All psychological weaknesses and fears which fail to be addressed and ultimately overcome, will be played upon by the dominant powers of our era and will cause us to remain slavishly reliant on the trappings of their corporatist consumerist doctrines. Governments, corporations and the mainstream media, working in tandem, will continue to successfully hold sway over the majority of humanity until a critical mass of individuals wake up to this reality and decide to act in order to take back control of their destinies.

There are some welcome signs that this may be happening. However, we will need to take a very pragmatic approach if genuine progress is to be made so we do not end up taking purely superficial actions in the name of making greater change. I suggest a shopping list of practical actions we can each individually set in motion in our daily lives to deliberately counteract the power exerted by the money machine.

• Move your money out of the big banks and put it into ethical investment banking institutions. 
• Start growing your own food or buying locally and from sources committed to ecological and animal welfare conscious farming practices. 
• Keep away from the television. Remember, the majority of programmes simply offer an excuse to escape from the need to bring about positive change: in other words to do nothing. 
• Research issues of importance via the Internet and avoid the mainstream press whose key stories are heavily controlled by their corporate masters. 
• Get involved in positive actions of resistance and change. 
• Give yourself a period of time during each day to be quiet and reflective so as to reawaken your sleeping spirituality. 

A further source of suggestions can be found in my book Changing Course for Life – Local Solutions to Global Problems.

We must wake ourselves up – and remain awake; otherwise we will remain slaves and will be personally complicit in continuing to support the destruction of all those values that underpin the health and welfare of our planet and its inhabitants. The time for sitting on the fence has passed.