White Pill Amidst The Darkness
"A Hidden Beauty In Our Shared Reality During The Darkest Times"
It’s virtually impossible at the time of my writing this to be optimistic. Our material conditions have never been worse, and western governments seem to have absolutely no plan whatsoever for remedying them. Your country is currently actively supporting a genocide overseas, and your cries seem to fall on propagandized ears. The very fabric of society appears to be falling apart, and the future looks rather bleak - with everything from a looming future world war, to a complete civilizational collapse, to potentially look forward to. All that being said, I write this with a newfound optimism. The events that have transpired within our lifetimes appear to have finally culminated in the hearts and minds of the masses, and the jury is in: the establishment is losing its grip on them.
The Folly In Going All-In
I hear a lot of talk amongst my peers of our so-called leaders “overplaying their hand” lately in terms of how they’re handling recent events, from the pandemic to foreign affairs and even how they’re trying to manage the expectations of ordinary citizens. There’s a lot of theories as to what specifically is going on here, but as I can only speak for myself, I can only share mine, and my theory is that this is far more simple than others may have suggested it is. Simply put, the rich and powerful provided society with a very helpful lesson on the dangers of hubris. As a more recent example, take how the corporate press and your elected officials are treating the ongoing horrors over in Palestine - they’re using the exact same propaganda tactics that we’ve seen countless times before, with not a care in the world about whether or not people will connect the dots, having been duped countless times before. Essentially, the play is always the same: “We have to do this thing that you would otherwise oppose because of this evil force over here.”
This might work, if an entire civilization didn’t watch this exact play unfold time and time again - remember the war in Iraq? I’ve argued many times that capitalism rewards the most disordered and narcissistic among us, which is important in understanding the apparent contempt that our leaders have for us. They think so little of you and I that they not only hope, but expect that we can have the wool pulled over our eyes once again with the exact same manipulations that we previously awakened to years after they were employed.
Oops, There’s A Cat In This Bag
The hubris I’m speaking of appears to be our leaders’ potential undoing, as well. Our younger generations are not only pushing back, they’re shoving. The establishment has lost the trust of its subjects, and it’s quite likely that this won’t be regained any time soon. Virtually every single narrative that the powerful must run in order to maintain their dominance is being challenged by ordinary, everyday people - and it’s becoming painfully clear that nobody at the top expected this to actually happen. You can see their panic in the frantic, inconsistent reactions through elected officials and the media companies they own whenever there’s significant dissent regarding one event or another. Icarus, without Daedalus there to warn him, flew straight to the sun in his ascent, and fell from grace, so to speak.
This isn’t just the politically educated, either. Every single day, I speak to ordinary, normal people who openly speak about their mistrust of their leaders and their faithlessness concerning the system we’re all muddling under. The lack of trust in our governing bodies has amplified to the extent that there’s a collective eyerolling whenever a new narrative’s handed down, and I do believe that this period in history will be viewed looking back as a major turning point in how our society moved past the broken way of doing things that we’re stuck in.
They Know There’s No Turning Back, Now
Make no mistake, our rulers know that we’re not buying what they’re selling any longer, they just don’t have any recourse. Not any recourse that is really thought out to any significant degree, that is. After all, the propaganda worked before, so why wouldn’t it continue to work? They’ve gotten away with murder (and worse) for decades, and the masses not only allowed it, but they cheered it on. What the elites among us hoped for was for the their machinations to persist throughout the ages as a means of controlling us all, and for those machinations to never, ever be challenged on the level that they are right now. Yes, I know there’s a lot of fear surrounding what they could do to combat this widescale dissent - all we need to do is glimpse the passage of time to understand what was done in the past to curb such civil unrest, and that’s where this fear comes from.
Many I talk to speak of this underlying unease, like everyone’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, as if there’s some lurking great tragedy on the horizon that everyone’s expecting. What I truly think this is, is a collective unconscious fear of what our leaders are going to do to us, due to the levels of disobedience and unrest they’re observing from the once-compliant masses. If I’m correct in my hypothesis, there’s obviously validity in these concerns, but we must remember one simple fact that many appear to be missing: our leaders need us. They need our labor, and they need our purchasing power, or the corporations they exist to serve will crumble to dust, and even if corporations automate every single job on Earth, they still need people with resources to trade with.
As such, on some level, our compliance will always be required. They will never have the resources to force us into obeying as a whole. America alone has over 300 million people - no amount of police, drones, weird robot flamethrower dogs or any other dystopian nightmare the elite cook up will ever be able to handle that amount of people.
Simply put, if we all just drop the rakes and brooms, they’re fucked.
Who’s Going To Save Us, Though?
We are. We have to. There is no superhero figure who is going to swoop in and put in the work to change the course we’re on, because anyone with significant power living under this system benefits from it directly. Thankfully, the masses are waking up to this illusion as well, having seen countless “savior” figures do absolutely nothing but impede any possible alterations to the status quo. We are learning, in unison, that this is our future, and as such, the burden of changing it rests on all of our shoulders, alone. The only other option is to persist in the doomed world that the rich and powerful have created for us, and if that is the case, then we deserve any dystopic horrors they have planned for us.
1000% Our only hope. Show some grit and back up any notion of an American spirit.