This guy used the power of narrative control ...

It's a simple concept, really: who tells the story first, and gets that story accepted as truth first, determines what everybody then and later regards as the Truth.

The guy up there, Paul Joseph Goebbels, had the trick down pat. The key, of course, was that, as Nazi Propaganda Minister, he controlled the Reich's media - hence, the first story that got told widely and "officially," which thereafter established what was perceived as Truth.

Except, of course, among his rival Muscular Humanitarians, in London, Washington, and eventually Moscow; they spun their own lies to cocoon Goebbels'. And then they won that often-overlooked prerogative of military victory, the right to write their own history, and have their self-serving lies and omissions regarded ever after as incontrovertible truth.

What everybody knows.

(And if you're wondering, the Allies' lies mostly consisted of covering or explaining away their own follies and outright crimes, such as their genocidal terror-bombing - their term - of civilian populations. Oh, and the fact that Stalin and Mao, Allies in good standing both, were far greater mass murderers even than Hitler. They also, ironically, tend to make Hitler look like less of a blundering incompetent than he was, as well as the likes of Churchill, Montgomery, and MacArthur, in order to magnify their own success.)

And so it goes since: what NBC or the NYT claim in their headlines defines The Truth. Those who question it are occupants of The Fringe, loony "revisionists" and "conspiracy theorists," and not to be taken seriously. Even when they have a preponderance of fact on their side.

Especially then.

Sometimes, of course, the official Guardians of Truth are forced to admit they, well, didn't tell it. Although for instance there are still morons and sociopaths - like Leon Panetta - who claim Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, for instance.

What Goebbels is known for is the technique called the Big Lie. To me that's a subset of narrative control. Obviously, he needed to be able to tell his lies, of whatever size, widely. More to the point, he was able to confer the all-important imprimatur of The Official Story, since he was The Authorities. He even, as you see up there, had a spiffy uniform to prove his Official Status.

In our country many do in fact take the lies of the President or his designated mouthpieces as Revealed Truth. But the usual purveyors of Official Truth are the State/Corporate Complex-run media - what some call MSM or mainstream media.

Over on his Facebook feed, my freedom-movement friend L. Reichard White raised the question, "What's the the most effective way to lie?" He was angling for another principle espoused by old Paul Joseph up there: "Don't tell them, then it will not exist."

True enough - and to my mind, again, an example of narrative control. Indeed, over on his own website, the Nexialist News Network, his masthead logo says, "An unchallenged lie becomes an unquestioned truth." Which I'd call a succinct summation of the principle of the power of narrative - with the added proviso that the story accepted as Official Truth becomes very difficult indeed to challenge.

The key takeaway: if you control the narrative - the initial story that's widely told and accepted - you control what everyone knows is true. For generations if not forever.

And it is exceedingly hard for mere evidence to overturn that righteous certainty.

We'll come back to this; it strikes me as a Big, Important Thing.

I'll leave you with one final sting: the history of History is that it's always been written to serve rich and powerful patrons.

Enjoying counterinsurgency in Wardak, Afghanistan

The real - and only - question those who want to live in freedom should ask is:

What use has a free people for "counterinsurgency" of any sort?

The answer, of course, is none.

Counterinsurgency is meant to keep slaves enslaved. That's the point, regardless of how it's carried out. Or marketed, for that matter.

The first and foremost reason for the US government's continuing - and ever-expanding - global aggression is simply: wealth transfer. It's primarily a means of looting the serfs for the aggrandizement of the proprietors of the Government/Corporate Complex. Which is of course the main purpose of almost everything government does.

But I see a secondary purpose: perfecting techniques of subjugation in order to bring the war home in the most horrifically literal terms.

The War on Terra is meant as a dress rehearsal for the overriding goal of the United States' oligarchy: pounding the American people into utter and unbreakable subservience.

Fortunately, their attempts worldwide - from disarming Haitians to establishing Western hegemony in Afghanistan - have consistently been failures which would be entirely hilarious if not for their terrible cost in human lives and suffering as well as resources.

The oligarchy has in fact lost. The millennia-long fraud of external governance is ending. But the transition from pyramidal slave-state to free society will not be easy, or far from painless.

The takeaway: if you support counterinsurgency, you support its eventual application to you. The current order's collapse isn't only inevitable, it's well-advanced. But is that a reason to make it easier for the oligarchy to burn you alive in your car with a Hellfire missile before its fall?

But without a start ... we're finished.

I'm not talking about jobs going away. Or not just that. Because of course they are, and they're going to go faster.

(Just a side note: all those economists and pundits you see or read talking about "recovery"" aren't idiots. They're paid liars. Specifically, they're being paid to keep us cattle headed peaceably down the chutes to our dates with a hook and a sharp knife.)

No. What's going away is the entire concept of jobs, as traditionally thought of and constructed. And what's more, it needs to.

We need a new model to replace the old, dying ways. And I need you to help me figure out what it is. What they are, because one size never fits all. And then put all those new models into action. Soon.

I'm reading Cory Doctorow's Makers. I shouldn't be, evidently; it got me worked up so I had to come try to relieve some of the emotional/mental pressure when I should be sleeping.

(This is why I call this blog Tragic Waste. I need sleep. I have things to do - such as my real writing, which also pays, and more importantly is my avocation. But apparently I need to do this too. It's apparaently a vice I cannot yet control.)

I'm at a point that really set me off - obviously, I guess. I'm not going to go off and try to describe what's happening, here. The point is, either Doctorow or his characters aren't getting it (based on various evidence, I suspect his characters.) They're basically trying to build a decentralized base - with the same old massive hierarchy pyramid still standing on top of it. And that just won't work.

The thing is, centralization is going away. It's breaking down and going away. It's been kept shuffling along for years, a zombified corpse, animated by habit, ignorant and complaisant media, and animated by the awful energy of inflation. And now parts are falling off the thing and it's done.

Hierarchical bureaucracy is breaking down. Partly it's being out-competed by distributed systems of creation. Partly it's an ancient illusion that's coming to pieces before our eyes, like a mirror shattering in slow but accelerating motion.

We're losing centralized authority, centralized power provision, centralized medical care, centralized defense - centralized employment. The Government/Corporate Complex is crashing down. The proprietors are torn between cashing out and heading for their high-tech bunkers and imagining that wizard DARPA technology will miraculously save their wastrel, incompetent fat asses and force the slaves to stay on the plantation.

Your job is going away.

But here's the thing: people will still have needs. Obviously. Food, shelter, water, power, entertainment. People will still have the means to provide those things. Crops will continue to grow whether Archer Daniels Midland tells them to or not. Nails will fasten wood, machine tools will cut metal.

The means of producing wealth - to fill those needs - will continue to exist. What we need to do is start finding our own ways to produce it - to provide for ourselves the only way it's possible: by providing for others. To provide for others the only way that's possible: by providing for ourselves.

Here's the trick: we need to learn to do it without the permission of our employers. Without the paycheck. Without the benefits. Without a boss. To do it for ourselves and one another.

What we need to do is figure out how to make the transition - from the managed, centralized economy to the true marketplace. Like, now.

What I envision is a world of free agents - of independent contractors - artisans, individually and in small groups - producing, exchanging with one another, coming together to cooperate on greater projects, splitting apart to recombine or seek separate paths, ceaselessly, flowingly. Without needing The Pyramid, if you get my drift. Without needing that hierarchy to tell us what to do, how to do it, why we can't change, why we shouldn't be  so selfish as to desire to benefit from the fruits of our labors.

But how do we get there?

The process is going to be organic. It has to be. It cannot be imposed - that's what's breaking apart, that imposed order, like a cement block pierced by a million tiny rootlets. But we need to start cultivating the process. And in a hell of a hurry, yes.

It shouldn't be that hard, should it?

Here's the problem: I don't know how. I've been thinking about it, agonizing over it, off and on for about fifteen years. And I haven't come up with a neat solution yet. Maybe there is no "neat" solution.

But there is a solution. There always is.

Rather, there are myriad solutions. Infinite solutions.

But I can't see them. I remain too limited.

So ... I'm crowdsourcing the problem. Crowdsourcing freedom.  Real freedom: the freedom to live, and choose, and create, and exchange, and share, and grow. What the real economy has always been about.

I believe the real economy - the real free market, not the government and plutocrat-managed shell-game that's been masquerading under the name for a century or more - inevitably will reassert itself. I believe it inevitably is. But we are in for hard times. Soon. If you'd like to survive them, would like your loved ones to survive them, you need to start figuring out what part you can play. And what parts the rest of us can play: it'll be a joint effort.

Please share your ideas. With me. With each other. Then start doing something. Don't just talk or write or make comments on blogs. Do.

Help?

So why do organizations tend to lie so predictably with their "votes of confidence"? I suspect it's because truth is so toxic to hierarchies - specifically, to survival within the hierarchical power structure (which of course occasionally intersects with actual, you know, survival) that those with the skills to grab and hold power lie by reflex. I'm not kidding. Nor am I being hyperbolic. For once, agreed.

I'm inclined, in turn, at least to hypothesize that the reflex of lying within hierarchies - the necessity of lying within hierarchies - derives in turn from the simple truth of Hagbard Celine's Second Law: that communication occurs only between equals. Celine's Laws, like the memorable Hagbard himself, can be found in Roberts Shea and Anton Wilsons' marvelous Illuminatus! Trilogy. Which, though published in 1975, remains more pertinent than dated today. The truth of the Law can be seen from examination of what we laughingly call the real world.

If you've been in a subordinate relationship - Goddess love you if you've escaped that fate, and what's the air like on your planet? - whether in a job, school, or just to your parents, you early-on learned better than to tell the truth to those with the power to punish you, yes? For superiors, it can be dangerous to let the lesser life forms know the truth; hiding or otherwise manipulating the truth is crucial the default modern management tool of FUD; and truth, as information, is a valuable commodity, and not to be wasted on the lower orders. It's important for us to realize that for all the very real derelictions, vices and crimes alike, of the Government/Corporate Complex, a lot of the problems they cause us (not to mention themselves) spring from their nature as hierarchies.

Much of what we blame bureaucracy for (and it deserves much blame, to state the painfully obvious) actually arises from the nature of hierarchy. Meditate upon that, kiddies. Roll it around your tongue and reckon whether and how true it is.

But they do want to puff up public excitement, so an increasingly poor proletariat will be excited enough to willingly ship them billions to pursue their hobby. And keep them from having to try to get jobs at McDonalds.

It's a tough task, entailing as it does trying to convince breadwinners to make the choice which child to starve on behalf of notional Science  - in a politically-managed economy that right now is working hard to squeeze still more blood out of their stones with a slew of new taxes and regulations designed, like all the other ones, to make the powerful rich richer.

Thus this balancing act.

Is there life on Titan? Or Mars? I have no idea. What I do know is that what we are told depends completely on the political (and economic) interests of those who do the telling.

Like always.

We have no reason to believe we know what really goes on in our world, much less on others. We may even be ignorant of basic laws of physics - or "know" things that're wrong. That's the whole reason there's such a thing as classified information.

Not pictured: choice or change.

Isn't it clear Barack Obama is the most conservative president ever? Or at least for a long time?

Bush expanded the size, cost, scope, and of course the power of government more than any president for decades, more than any non-wartime president ever. He signed into law about two-thirds of the national-health package formerly known as HillaryCare. Regulations and government spending exploded. He ended his administration by floating a colossal spending-orgy bailout bill - which was dwarfed by the real bailout, the ten-plus billion dollars cranked out by the Fed to boost the economy.

And no president has ever worshiped the power of government to do good more fervently in word (leaving aside a few obligatory mumbles about "small government") or deed. Bush promised to remake the world in America's image by killing everybody who opposed democracy. Even by voting.

What's more liberal than that? Doesn't progressivism mean forcing people to think and speak they way you want them to, for their own good?

Obama promised more war on the campaign trail - and selected a Secretary of State who ran furthest to the right on foreign policy of any candidate, including shrill war-loving harpy Sarah Palin. And they've delivered the goods: the war in Iraq continues (just without anyone reporting on it anymore); the Afghan War has been extended to war on US ally Pakistan, and is now being expanded. The US has increased its military bridgehead in South America, and now, of course, is rolling out the same lies used to sell the aggression against Iraq to peddle Obama's promised war with Iran - all while expanding the US offense budget more than Bush proposed.

At home he's reduced transparency in government, absolved telcoms of illegally helping the US spy on Americans, continued the cover-up of torture, and is almost certain to extend the expiring provisions of the ironically-named PATRIOT Act. Which after all started life under Bill Clinton as HR 666 (and what's more conservative than perpetuating Democratic misdeeds?)  And finally he's shipped trillions of more dollars, mostly via the Fed, to the very rich.

What's more conservative than that? Isn't conservativism all about forcing people to think and speak they way you want them to, for their own good?

Isn't it really clear that there's no functional difference among candidates? That no one will ever be allowed into a position where it's possible for them to be elected unless they agree to further the agenda of the Almighty State (and serve the interests of those who run it for their own profit) ? That the US ruling class figured out a very long time ago that the best way to rig an election is to do it before it ever takes place?

Remember, folks - the power of government to do good stands on two legs, and two legs only: murder and inflation. What government does is milk the many to enrich the few. Murder and inflation are how they do it.

Feel free to guess how I'd fill in the blank above.

The most effective means of transferring wealth from the productive classes to the plutocrats is inflation. Government is now dealing with the inevitable consequences of long-term inflation. Of course, the only thing they can do about it is what the US is in fact doing: inflate more.

All the bad behavior by Wall Street, the banks, and the other usual suspects was subsidized, hence encouraged, by the US government, whose partners in crime they were. (The US is massively subsidizing such behavior again, under the guise of "stimulus," i.e. direct transfer payments to the rich.)

How much of this is "capitalism" is a matter of semantics. I'm inclined to agree with Kevin Carson's "free-market anti-capitalism" formulation myself.

The collapse certainly has nothing to do with the markets being "too free." They've been manipulated every step of the way. Meanwhile it was the hard money and real free market types (not the neocons and their conjoined equally-evil twins, the neoliberals, passing off their mercantilism-warmed-over as "free markets) who predicted the meltdown all along.

Mainstream economists, who cheer-led the inflationary bubble and predicted it would expand forever, now tout the Bush/Obama Rich-Only Recovery as "green shoots." One wonders how much of this is innocent stupidity, and how much is paid.

The above is a slightly-edited version of a comment I dropped on John Robb's excellent Global Guerrillas blog. Robb is a most insightful and incisive writer on the continuing collapse of centralization. He really is a good guy, convinced he's doing good work - although he seems sadly unable to recognize that what he's really doing is struggling desperately to preserve centralized power for the ruling class by somehow incorporating decentralization into top-down hierarchy.

Fortunately for us all, that's self-contradictory, and thus can't work for any length of time (indeed in the longer term it hastens the very thing it's intended to forestall.) Unfortunately, by adopting some of his suggestions our rulers could inflict substantial additional harm on us. So it's fortunate they won't listen to him.

Ultimately, Robb makes the same mistake as everyone who uses "we" when they mean the United States: he thinks that means all of us, but it really means those who operate the government for their own private interests. Which is everyone involved in running it.

Postscript: if he's bothered reading any of the several comments I've left on his blog, Mr. Robb probably thinks I'm a total lunatic and dangerous. As a nameless North Vietnamese colonel allegedly said to Colonel Harry Summers, "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant."

That's not the narrative we're taught, of course. Nor what most of us believe. Even "libertarians" and other believers in the real free market tend to accept that progressive taxation is meant to ensure more equal outcomes ... when the truth is the very opposite.

Why? Habit. Time to break it.

The simple singular fact of politics is that anything government does, it does for the primary purpose of increasing the wealth and power of its proprietors. Who, by the way, are never "the people" at large - the very fact democracy is designed to hide.

What "everything" means here is everything. If taxes are raised - and if taxes are lowered. If regulations are imposed - or abolished. All of these actions, apparently contradictory as they are, represent at the most the temporary ascendancy of one or another faction of the ruling class.

More usually, it's a shell game: mountains of paper designed to do nothing but hide business as usual. If it's not meant to cover another ruling class grab at power and wealth.

Here is the Big Truth, that I'll repeat over and over - a million times, if need to - until it actually enters your awareness:

The only purpose of government is to centralize benefit and socialize cost.

Anything else is a lie.

The new administration has already bettered its predecessor by expanding the illegal (and unwinnable) war in Afghanistan to an illegal, unwinnable war on Pakistan, a US ally.  Now, after a ritual display of phony reluctance to mollify world opinion, plus those four or five US leftists who haven't turned into Limbaugh-like werewolves thirsting for the blood of swarthy foreigners with the inauguration of a Democratic-brand president,  the US is caving into Israeli demands which include  "massive new sanctions against the Iranian government."

This is likely a major step toward the US attack on Iran that's been hanging fire for years, awaiting the proper pretext to launch.

Meanwhile the US is looking to increase its military presence in Colombia. Aside from embroiling the US in yet another civil war, which US interference will inevitably make worse - look how well US drug-war "assistance" to Mexico has panned out - look for the bigger Colombian footprint to provide a launch-point for indirect, and eventually direct, military action against Venezuela.