Dacia Iluministă

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” –Guy Debord

“…a pseudo-world apart…where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life…” –Guy Debord

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” –Guy Debord

The 1968 French uprisings were almost entirely the product of the promptings of the Situationist International. It was their platform and political perspective that formed the ideological core of the protests. Quotations from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle were painted on walls, put on posters and distributed in pamphlets. The Last Bling King by Mike Hockney is heavily influenced by SI themes. Indeed, several members of the Illuminati assisted the SI in Paris in 1968. The French President, Charles de Gaulle, acknowledged that: “This explosion was provoked by groups in revolt against modern consumer and technical society, whether it be the communism of the East or the capitalism of the West.”

Isn’t the fundamental problem of 1968 exactly that of today, but on an even bigger scale? The Situationist theory of the spectacle and the spectacular society is heavily indebted to Marx. In the spectacular society, everything is turned into a commodity to be sold for profit. People themselves are commodities being bought and sold all the time, just as they buy and sell.

Are you in demand (seller’s market) or are you ten-a-penny (buyer’s market)? Our world is nothing but a marketplace where a price is attached to everything; one that rarely reflects the authentic value of anything (“He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”). Each of our attributes, whether it be intelligence, good looks, creativity, empathy, diplomacy, hard work, loyalty, is given a price. Ugly people have nothing to sell in the beauty market while a model can become a multi-millionaire from selling her looks. That’s how brutal and reductive our world is. God help you if you have nothing to sell: you are well and truly fucked. You will get the shittiest jobs and you will know that you can be replaced at the drop of a hat. You have no choices.

This capitalist world generates incredible alienation. To be reduced to a mere commodity can’t be anything other than dehumanizing. How can you give of your best if you are treated as an object? As Marx observed in Das Kapital, capitalism doesn’t care about whether anything is useful, whether it’s socially productive or raises the quality of humanity. It has no interest in such issues at all. It is concerned only with what profit can be derived from a product or service. A product or service that degrades the whole of humanity but makes its provider fabulously wealthy is perfect capitalism. It is not, however, perfect for raising the quality of humankind. Capitalism is rarely anything other than an assault on the quality of people. Quality would be of interest to a capitalist only if he could make money from it, not because it’s an intrinsic good. Should not governments be solely preoccupied with improving the people? A capitalist government couldn’t care less. Capitalist governments trumpet the doctrine of “negative liberty” – leaving people alone to get on with their lives as they see fit, within the law. “Life” in such a State mostly consists of shopping. That’s the primary function of the citizen – to shop. The shopper feels good because he gets a temporary high from any purchase, and he thinks he is free because he has many objects from which to choose.

A proper government should always be engaged in “positive liberty” i.e. in maximising human potential through active policy of the State and constant intervention in people’s lives. No one is left to rot. No one is ignored. The State is always showing an interest in you and encouraging you to move upwards and onwards. The positive liberty State is dialectical – aiming for an omega point of perfection. The negative liberty State, on the contrary, is interested only in the perfection of the rich i.e. providing the perfect lives for the privileged elite of society. Here, the State leaves ordinary people alone because it has no interest in raising them up. Quite the reverse. If all of the people attained much higher quality, they would be a direct threat to the elite.

The last thing the elite want is to have their position challenged, so they have selected a system and a doctrine that ensures that can never happen. Negative liberty inevitably gives rise to a two-tier society of the elite and everyone else. A positive liberty society wants to eliminate the elite because everyone ought to be of high quality and the concept of the elite should therefore no longer have meaning. “Elite” only makes sense in societies of huge gulfs between people.

In capitalism, the price of a commodity often has no connection at all with its intrinsic value. Some cheap garbage can be sold for a fortune if the garbage is manufactured by a big, prestigious brand name. In other words, a completely nebulous entity – the value of a brand – is used to create an enormous price hike for a product that is no different from a much cheaper one made by a non-brand name. You are paying a huge premium for the logo. Why are people so obsessed with logos? It’s because of status. Thus we see that even status can be turned into a commodity.

A high status person is, so the logic goes, someone who wears high quality designer brands. A whole new marketplace is created in intangibles – in snobbery, in imagined quality.

The fairy-tale emperor – stark naked in his new set of “clothes” – was the ultimate victim of the brand. The tailors who conned him swore he was getting the best suit of clothes ever, the ultimate brand. When he paraded through the streets, everyone else agreed that this was the best designer wear they had ever seen and cheered loudly. It took a little boy to puncture the insanity by pointing out that the emperor was in fact stark naked. THERE WERE NO CLOTHES AT ALL – NO BRAND WHATEVER.

“Brand” inhabits that strange world between the emperor receiving gasps of adulation from the crowd and howls of derision when the truth dawns. A brand can be destroyed in an instant and become valueless. The Tiger Woods brand was more or less wiped out thanks to one notorious event involving a car, a fire hydrant and a wife with a golf club.

The nebulous world of brand value is all about the imaginary, not the real qualities of the brand. People would have paid a fortune to have a suit like the emperor’s – even though there was in fact no suit at all. While the delusion prevailed that the emperor had the best suit of clothes ever, everyone wanted a suit just like his. The spectacular society inhabits that same imaginary fantasy space, that hyper-reality where truth, authenticity, reality and actuality count for nothing.

The elite are the absolute controllers of the fantasy sphere. And it must be emphasized that in that space there are never any little boys who point out the truth. The balloon is never punctured.

People go on believing absolute bullshit. Naturally, religion also inhabits this fantasy space where the truth never penetrates. Reason is the Devil’s whore, right? It’s as unwelcome as truthful little boys. The spectacular society seeks at all times to radically falsify reality, to create an imaginary space in which perceived status is everything. In this fantasy space, everyone is drawn into status wars, and the elite have all the biggest and best weapons. They outgun everyone. Yet all it would take to destroy their entire edifice would be one honest little boy.

In the UK, no one is EVER allowed to interrogate the head of State. Is that not astounding? Why should the head of state be unaccountable to the people of the State? Because everyone, especially the Queen and her advisers, knows that the fantasy space she inhabits and from which she draws all of her power, would be destroyed when she was unable to answer some simple question, some hostile probing of her qualifications to be head of state; when some commoner treated her with contempt; when she was exposed as an unintelligent nobody propped up by pure illusion, just like the emperor’s imaginary clothes.

The English Queen is the perfect symbol of the spectacular society and the control of the people by the elite through imaginary means i.e. the manipulation of fantasy, illusion, delusion, deception, camouflage, hyper-reality and spectacle. Consider the incredible pomp and circumstance, the phenomenal spectacle of the “Royal Wedding”. All of the resources of the State were devoted to creating a total fantasy to be beamed around the world to create an entirely imaginary depiction of the UK. Reality came along a few months later in the shape of violent riots. That’s what the UK is really like, not the preposterous, fake and phoney image projected by the “Royal family” and their sycophants.

The Wizard of Oz is another supreme symbol of the spectacular society. A man is able to project an image of total power to the world, yet behind the curtain he is feeble, pathetic and weak. His power is sustained purely by illusion. Thus it is with the elite. They could be overthrown at any time if the people woke up and saw past the illusion, if they heard the little boy laughing at the naked emperor.

Imagine if the whole congregation had laughed at the Royal Wedding and mocked the royal couple. That would have destroyed the English monarchy. That’s all it takes. That’s how thin the dividing line is between the Old World Order and the New. We could start creating a perfect world tomorrow if we escaped from the spectacular fantasy of the elite, their dream world Matrix that no one wants to leave.

Capitalism, according to Marx, leads to reification (which means regarding something abstract as a material thing, as a physical object; and depersonalising a human being by treating him as an object). In particular, the work a person does is the reification of that person i.e. he is turned into a collection of the objects he produces. If they are of low value then so is he. If they are assigned a high value then he is a commodity in high demand. In the marketplace of capitalism, everyone becomes a thing, a reification, to which a price can be attached. When compensation is being handed out after some disaster like 9/11, an actual price is placed on individuals according to what sort of job they had, what salary they were earning and what prospects they had. In other words, accountants can actually itemize everything about you and put a price on it, rather than regarding you as inherently priceless.

Capitalism is nothing but a system for making people into things. And once a person is a thing, it’s easy to treat them badly. After all, they’re just objects. Slaves were notoriously regarded as things, possessions, and chattels – but so are we all in a capitalist society based on pricing everything. In a notorious case involving a British slave ship, several slaves on an overcrowded ship were thrown overboard so that a lucrative insurance claim could be lodged for the loss of the “cargo”.

Everyone in a capitalist society lives in a condition of existential bad faith where they refuse to be free and remain objectified and sedated. People develop a false consciousness, manufactured for them by the propaganda of the elite. In the UK, not a single person should have anything but hatred for the Queen, and yet many millions think she is the best thing about the country. In other words, they have been perfectly brainwashed and they see something that is supremely hostile to their interests as being good for them. When the system can hand people Hemlock and convince them that its nectar, the system has got it made. It has become invulnerable.

The Spectacular Society is a gigantic brainwashing machine that creates a false consciousness in all those under its spell. It can convince everyone that the naked emperor has the finest suit of clothes in history. Once you have achieved that, there is nothing the people won’t swallow. Look at the Islamic religion. Once you accept that the Angel Gabriel appeared to an illiterate Arab and dictated the Word of God to him, is there anything Mohammed says that you won’t believe? If you reject even ONE word, you are no longer a Muslim. It’s all or nothing. Similarly, a Christian must believe that the God of the Universe was born in a stable to a 14-year-old Jewish “virgin”.

Once you’ve bought into that, why would you doubt a single thing about Christianity? It’s not as if inherently improbable assertions cause you any pause for thought, is it? The Jews think that God spoke to Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai, gave him the Ten Commandments and revealed the Torah to him. If you regard that as true, you are logically compelled to regard every word as true because why would you doubt any of it after you’ve agreed with the infinitely farfetched opening premise? Are you going to believe one set of preposterous claims but not another? How would you distinguish between them given that they’re all preposterous? Once you’ve signed up for insanity, is there any exit from the madhouse? Yet, ironically, Jews have no difficulty seeing through the nonsense of Christianity and Islam, the Muslims see exactly how idiotic Judaism and Christianity are, and the Christians think Judaism has been replaced by Christianity and that Mohammed is a devil burning in hell.

The Spectacular Society gets people to believe the most preposterous garbage such as “freedom and democracy”, “banks are good”, “capitalism can’t be bettered”; “the elite deserve all of their wealth and power”; “the British Queen and the American President are good people serving their nations” …and so on…an incredible litany of lies.

The Spectacular Society involves a perfect storm of brainwashing. The power of narrative is mediated by images rendered with technological perfection – the more real than real. The most beautiful people in the world are used to sell hyperreal dreams. The spectators are presented with perfection, and what could be more captivating, more addictive than that? Even better, video games now give spectators the opportunity to adopt a perfect avatar and place themselves in the middle of a fantasy world where they can be the hero. No wonder gamers can lose themselves for days on end. They have placed themselves inside hyper-reality. Nowhere is more seductive.

Nowhere offers more thrills. The trouble is that the spectator who inhabits reality is alienated from the avatar who lives in hyper-reality. All ordinary people are alienated from the perfection presented in the Spectacle. Only the elite are having perfect lives consistent with the Spectacle.

Everyone else is being conned by the Spectacle. And that, of course, is its primary purpose. The Society of the Spectacle can be thought of as a secret society devoted to spreading the propaganda of the elite. They are the ones who designed the Wizard of Oz’s scary face and booming voice (and hid the real thing behind a curtain). They are the ones who made the emperor seem fully clothed even though he was naked (the little boy who laughed at the emperor was just a fairy-tale!); every day we see naked people – the leaders of the world – and yet somehow we ignore their nakedness. We think they have legitimate power and that it’s right that they should rule us.

In the Society of the Spectacle, representations of the world are everywhere. The world itself becomes a representation. It is no longer lived. It is passively observed via screens. And what appears on screens is edited and airbrushed. You never see reality. Most art that succeeds in the modern world is right wing, which is why it attracts rich capitalist patrons and buyers. The lie is often put forward that art is left wing and subversive. In which case, why is it bought by extremely rich figures of the establishment? Would these patrons buy anything that mocked the Jews or Israel or Jesus or Mohammed or the Queen or the American government or the Yankee dollar?

There is no real art in the 21st century. Art is controlled by gatekeepers and patrons of the establishment. There is no radical art, no truthful art. Gallery owners would never display genuinely controversial art. As for the SI, they rejected all art that wasn’t political. They saw that the establishment was seeking to create art that offered no critique of the powers-that-be. Reactionaries seek to infiltrate and neuter any activity that challenges them. They have rendered art sterilize, banal, and degraded, and ensured that it can be safely integrated into the establishment’s propaganda machine.

Revolution is never openly discussed in the media. No one is allowed to call for an uprising against the elite. In fact, you can be arrested for using Facebook to suggest a riot, even if it never actually occurs. In the UK, people have been jailed for “virtual crimes”. George Orwell’s prediction in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that people would be arrested for “thought crimes” has now actually happened. What’s for sure is that the authorities are beginning to panic. Their towers of power are starting to crumble. Capitalism’s main product now is alienation – and that spells capitalism’s downfall.

The elite are no longer trusted or believed. They are no longer even regarded as competent. Their authority has vanished, so it’s only a question of time before capitalism dies. The Soviet Union staggered on for a little while after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in truth it was dead as soon as the first bricks were hammered free. Similarly, capitalism died went Lehman Brothers went down. Now the world is looking for a doctor with the guts to “call it” – to pronounce the death of the terminally ill patient who has stopped breathing and is showing no brain activity.

When the computer age began, people were promised a “leisure age”. What happened to it? Why has modern technology not resulted in vastly more free time for people? Why are so many people still engaged in stunningly dull jobs? In fact, what they are actually engaged in is a fraudulent economy. Most people don’t work in any serious sense. What they do is spend many hours AT WORK but few hours actually working. Most people are hopelessly inefficient and bored. If they managed to work authentically for even three hours a day that would be quite an achievement. Most people are skilled at pretending to work. In the Soviet Union, the usual joke was: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” In the capitalist West, the joke is: “They pay us for pretending to work.” All that matters is that money circulates throughout the economy and that people can buy things. The West is based on consumption economics and the economy grows as long as consumption grows. If consumption falters, recession looms. What kind of economy is based on such a ridiculous and inherently unstable model?

In the Star Trek vision of the future, there’s no money at all. All basic problems have been addressed technologically. Everyone can get on with leading a high quality life. Shouldn’t we trying to build just such a future rather than buying a new iPhone and iPad every year to prevent the consumption economy from collapsing?

Why isn’t the world heading towards a Star Trek future? It’s precisely because there’s no rich capitalist elite in Star Trek i.e. the people who currently rule our world have no role in the future. They don’t want the future to come to pass – because then they’d be out of a job and out of power. We are led by people who are obstructing the future because the future is hostile to their interests. The elite want only one thing – for the gap between them and everyone else to be so wide it can never be bridged. They want to go back to the feudal world where the workers knew their place and never challenged the elite. Privilege is simply a new form of hereditary rule. The medieval nobility had “blue” blood, and today’s moneyed aristocracy have the green blood of the dollar.

CAPITALISM – DO NOT RESUSCITATE. NILL BY MOUTH.
__________

Dada:

One of the spiritual precursors of Punk Rock was the Dada anti-art movement that flourished between 1916 and 1922, and of which several Illuminati artists were members. It sought to oppose mainstream art in every way and rejected aesthetics, form, meaning, polite sensibilities and conventionality. It celebrated ugliness, absurdity, offensiveness, surrealism, nihilism and vulgarity. Its aim was to subvert and destroy the bourgeois institutions that had led the world to the slaughterhouse of WWI. It was surely time to reject the culture and aesthetics that had brought the world to that abattoir of the endless trenches. How do you respond to the insane orgy of mass homicide except by trashing everything that the old society stood for, by spitting in its face? One critic declared, “Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man.”

Dada is sometimes identified as the birthplace of postmodernism with its emphasis on cynicism, distrust, skepticism, irony, satire, and mockery of the all grand traditions. The Nazis regarded Dada and its offshoots as degenerate and Jewish, reflecting all that was corrupt and perverted about the modern world. Dada artists characterised their movement as “a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the post-war economic and moral crisis, a saviour, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path… a systematic work of destruction and demoralization… In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege.”

Is not sacrilege a worthy response to two World Wars? And is sacrilege not the right response for the economic catastrophe the super rich bankers have brought down on our world? WHERE IS THE REVOLUTION? Where is the uprising? Where is the anger? Flashes of anger appeared in the UK during the riots, but where is the sustained HATE for the ruling class? Why hasn’t their card been well and truly marked? They have failed. Now they must be removed from power. They are quick enough to fire any ordinary worker for poor performance. So why aren’t they being fired for destroying the global economy?
__________

The Cabaret Voltaire:

The Dada movement is often identified with the Cabaret Voltaire nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland, where all sorts of anarchic events were held. Poetry, dance, music, recitations, readings of manifestos, and experimental art were all on the agenda. In WWI, Switzerland was a neutral country and many artists and freethinkers fled there. The Cabaret Voltaire became a place where the madness of the war was exposed. Exhibitions and performances at the club were often brutal, chaotic and insane as they attempted to capture and reflect the madness and horrors of war.

Look at the bars and clubs of today, preoccupied with making people drink as much as possible to boost the profits of the capitalist owners. Did you know that bar owners deliberately ramp up the sound levels because people drink much faster when they can’t hold meaningful conversations with their friends because of the noise?

Where is the creativity in bars and clubs? They are sterile meat-markets geared up for moronic drunkenness. In the UK, endless bars are filled with endless cretins screaming their heads off and throwing up after drinking twenty pints of beer and numerous shorts, chasers and shooters. In the UK, this is what is regarded as a “top” night out.

It ought to be compulsory for all bars and clubs to have intellectual and cultural content. How can you ever improve the quality of the human race just by pouring alcohol down people’s throats?

We need more Cabaret Voltaires and fewer corporate bars.
__________

The Situationist International:

DADA WAS AN INFLUENCE on the Situationist International (SI), an avant-garde revolutionary group founded in 1957 which played a prominent part in the French protests and strikes of 1968. The May 1968 general strike, where unions, students and radicals made common cause, brought the French economy to a halt and sent shock waves throughout the world. For a moment, it seemed that France might launch a new revolutionary phase in world history.

The SI movement’s main text was The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord, one of the key theoreticians of the SI. Debord’s central thesis was that capitalist society had created a fake reality in order to conceal its rotten, toxic core that degraded the whole human race. The media, the advertising industry, Hollywood, Disneyland – these were the primary players in the construction of a fantasy land, a world of endless spectacle, a hyperreality. Now people are trapped inside a phoney reality in which all truth and authenticity have dissolved.

The Situationists were so-called because they thought they could break the spell of the fake spectacular society by constructing “situations” – subversive, radical actions of an artistic or political nature in which the participants become conscious and authentic once more, aware of the possibilities and energy of real life. Debord grandly described a “situation” as: “a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.”

The aim of the Situationist International was to construct revolutionary situations that would shock the masses into a realisation of their predicament. Stunts, pranks, events, happenings, art shocks, flash mobs, street theatre, demonstrations, protests – all were valid to wake up the people. Jean-Paul Sartre had previously described a situation in a play as that which breaks the spectator’s passivity towards the spectacle. For the SI, the situation broke the consumer’s passive acceptance of the spectacle. It shattered the illusion, pulled back the curtain, made the people confront the lie and rediscover reality.

The Situationists created the new field of psychogeography, defined as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”

Psychogeography will be one of the pillars of the New World Order. The environment is critical to the healthy development of consciousness. The elite are raised in the most enviable environments where the exquisite landscapes and luxury buildings they inhabit and enjoy tell them unambiguously that they are special, marked out for grand futures, better than others, superior, destined for great things. The great schools and colleges of the world are never ugly old dumps in hideous urban ghettos.

Most people in the world have to live in psychogeographical nightmares. Ugly, violent, stupid, overcrowded, deprived environments generate brutish people. What could be more certain? All ugly environments must be destroyed. If somewhere isn’t good enough for the elite, it’s not good enough for anyone and must be demolished. All environments must be made exquisite and they will then produce exquisite people. The New World Order must bring about a much more beautiful world. The best designers, architects, engineers, psychologists and sociologists must work together to create wondrous environments that provide sustenance for the soul. Another SI tactic was labelled détournement by Debord and “involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle” i.e. it fights fire with fire. It subverts the “truth” of an entity by re-contextualizing it to expose the flaws that are deliberately disguised by the elite as part of their propaganda war. The aim is to mock, satirise, undermine and ridicule the elite, to show that the emperor is completely naked. If it is relentlessly deployed against the elite, détournement shatters their ability to sustain the illusion they have weaved to fool the people.

Détournement means “rerouting, diversion, hijacking” in French. The English word detournement is derived from it and means reusing elements of the mainstream media to produce a subversive message. English words such as “turnabout” or “derailment” reflect the meaning of détournement. The idea is to use the weapons of the elite against them, to turn the weapons around, to derail their propaganda machine before it can do any damage.

“Culture jamming” is a similar tactic deployed by anti-consumerist movements to sabotage mainstream media messages, corporate advertising and cultural institutions. Culture jamming is a form of “subvertising” – advertising that subverts rather than promotes, using such tactics as altering corporate logos to convey the precise opposite meaning of the one intended by the corporation. So, for example Nike’s logo of “Just do it”, with a tick, could have been replaced during the London riots with “Just steal it”, with an even bigger tick. Subvertising is all about spoofing, parodying and satirising the absurd propaganda of the elite.

In a healthy State, it should be mandatory for all mainstream ads to be accompanied by subvertising – then the advertisers will have to start being much more truthful to avoid being relentlessly mocked. Advertising would thus be turned into a dialectical industry. When your idea of something is radically shifted from one of fawning obedience to the elite to one of revolutionary rage, your world is changed forever. Once you no longer buy into the myth of the English Queen, for example, it becomes impossible for you to understand how there can be such a thing as a monarch in the 21st century, with human beings being referred to as her “subjects” and being expected to withdraw from her presence by walking backwards because it would be infamous for a “commoner” to turn their back on royalty.

Imagine the degree of false consciousness that has been built into the people of the UK to make them have anything but supreme contempt for the Queen. The Queen’s greatest supporters are the ruling elite on the one hand, and the most stupid members of the working class on the other. Badly educated, brainwashed people are always fanatical supporters of tyrants and mad religions.

The Sex Pistols, in all of their “offensive”, anti-establishment, punk clothes, signed their record contract in front of the gates of Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s luxury residence. Their explosive song “God Save the Queen (and her fascist regime)” was released in 1977, the year of the Queen’s silver Jubilee (25 years since her accession to the throne). This was a perfect work of détournement – taking the title of the national anthem and making it the ultimate protest song against the elite. The song reached number 1 in the charts but was in fact omitted and replaced by a blank space in the chart list – because the music industry and the BBC refused to offend the Queen. The song was banned and never heard in the mainstream media despite being No. 1. The elite always seek to ban the most potent challenges to their power. Can anyone imagine any contemporary band being banned? It’s unthinkable. Bands of today are all anodyne, shiny capitalist cheerleaders with nothing to say. We need a return to real music, the music of the Revolution. We need a new incarnation of Punk, which was in turn a new incarnation of the Situationist International and Dada. Revolution must break out on all fronts and a cultural revolution must accompany a political revolution.

The opposite of détournement is “recuperation”. This is the process by which subversion is reclaimed by the mainstream, repackaged as a commodity and sold to wannabe subversives. The perfect example is the famous poster of Che Guevara. Here we find the image of an arch-enemy of capitalism being packaged for sale by capitalists. Thus revolution is tamed – it’s just another commodity. Profit can be made even from subversion.

The manipulators of the Spectacle have proved adept at maintaining social control by embracing the challenges to their control and neutralising them via commodification and recuperation. If a capitalist can make money out of the image of Che Guevara, he won’t hesitate to do so. He has no expectation that those that buy the poster will read about Guevara and adopt his political stance and tactics. He assumes, and he’s invariably right, that the Guevara poster is just a phase a young person goes through and implies a rebellion against parental authority rather than against the State itself. Soon enough, the young person moves on to other posters – of superheroes, pin-ups, celebrities, Lord of the Rings, or whatever. Che would be spinning in his grave. Recuperation is equivalent to capitalist sublimation. Something dangerous is intercepted, remoulded, defused and incorporated within mainstream society as something safe, sanitised and profitable. It no longer poses any threat.

In the past, religion was a primary promoter of spectacle. Consider the astounding Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe; St. Peter’s Square in Rome; the elections of new popes when the College of Cardinals assembles in all its glory; the hysteria over holy relics; the dream of Jerusalem and the Holy land that inspired the Crusaders. Everything to do with the Catholic religion remains spectacular to this day. Islam tries to put on a spectacular show at Mecca. Even the unspectacular Protestants have tried to create super churches, huge choirs, faith healing shows, speaking in tongues and so on.

We have lived under the Illusory Principle of the Spectacle for too long. It’s time for the Reality Principle to be restored.
__________

The Profit Principle:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas….The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” –Marx

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or, at least neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” –Adam Smith

What is the primary aim of the ruling elite? It is to control EVERYTHING. To control what you buy, what you think, how you think, whom you vote for, whom you dream about, whom you admire, whom you think are the rightful rulers, what gods you believe in, what heaven and what hell.

They can pull it off because they control all of the levers of power. They control the education system. They control the economy, the government, religion, the media, art, business, the police, the army, the intelligence services. Their gatekeepers control the books that get published, the movies that are made, the material that appears on the news, the TV shows that get commissioned.

This is all embraced by the concept of THE ESTABLISHMENT. They control the system of privilege that ensures the top jobs are permanently allocated to only those who come from within the system. They have succeeded in creating a permanent hegemony, an elite of dynastic families – a new aristocracy – that will go on and on. Even better, they have worked out how to commercialise every aspect of life, to make PROFIT from everything. Consider Facebook. It’s ostensibly a free service and yet Mark Zuckerberg is a multi-billionaire.

The people on Facebook don’t realize that they themselves are the commodity Zuckerberg is selling. Facebook’s subscribers have turned themselves into a product that capitalists can sell. Every time you update your page, make a comment, or post a picture, what you are actually doing is investing more and more in this capitalist product. The more heavily invested you are, the more time you spend on there – so capitalist advertisers know exactly where you will be. And because all of your information is on there, they know exactly what you’re interested in and what you’re likely to buy. The intelligence services also know exactly who you are. The police can monitor you. Future employers can vet you. You have offered up your whole life to your capitalist controllers, and you did it for free, and indeed you were eager to do it. You even had a smile on your face. No one forced you to do anything. You turned yourself into perfect fodder for the capitalist machine.

Because that’s what the capitalist machine has designed you for – to engage in precisely this type of activity where you become an actual product in the capitalist system – a commodity to be bought and sold like everything else. Your actual life – as presented by you yourself on Facebook – is now a capitalist profit centre. It’s not you who makes any money out of it, of course. You sell yourself for nothing. That’s how cheap you are, how gullible. You’re a slave and you don’t even know it. You have been objectified and commodified. You are someone’s “bottom line”.

The capitalist system knows who you are, what you are, where you are, what you like, what you want, what presses your buttons – and you handed it all to them on a plate for nothing because they gave you an easy tool for socially interacting with others. That’s how easy it is to deceive the world, to manipulate it, to turn unwitting people into profit centres for billionaires. Facebook is the perfect example of how capitalism can take a need – for online companionship – and turn it into a pillar of the capitalist infrastructure. Capitalism can profit from anything. It can sell anything, including you – and, moreover, get you to do all the hard work and data entry for free in your “spare” time.

At work, you spend your time making money for a rich capitalist. When you’re not at work, you’re still making money for a rich capitalist. The only time you’re not making a capitalist rich is when you’re asleep. In all your conscious hours, rich capitalists are giving thanks for your existence because you are making them loads of money. And the richer they get, the less chance in life you have. You did it to yourself. No one twisted your arm. That’s the genius of capitalism. Only one thing can overcome the establishment – REVOLUTION. But who will revolt? People love capitalism too much. They’re hardwired into it.

When you turn yourself into a capitalist object, when you give yourself for free so that someone else can sell you, and you don’t even realise it – then you’re in serious trouble. “By means of the spectacle, the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise.” –Guy Debord

The elite always pretend to speak for the whole when in fact they are speaking only for themselves. They have identified their own interests as those of everyone. In their minds, they think that the relentless pursuit of their own agenda is beneficial for all.

What do the elite offer? The chance to sit in square boxes (houses), staring at a variety of bright, colourful screens – flat screen TVs, touchscreen iPhones, iPads, iPods, Xboxes, PlayStations. At all times, we are presented with opportunities to buy objects. We are also presented with endless narratives about wonderfully exciting lives lived by glamorous, beautiful people who deliver a stream of perfectly scripted lines.

But where has our actual life gone? We are alienated from reality. We are isolated, disempowered, lonely, unfulfilled, surrounded by images and tales of perfection, but acutely aware of our own imperfection. We see the perfect lives of the celebrities and the super-rich and we live vicariously through them. They certainly don’t live vicariously through us. This is an asymmetric arrangement. We worship them, and they have contempt for us (though they dutifully proclaim their love of their “fans”). We crave new narratives, new images, new visions of perfection. We’re addicted to this bright, sharp hyper-realty, and the greater our addiction the worse our withdrawal symptoms. We can’t escape.

Everywhere, we are absorbed by the Spectacle. We crave it. We want it bigger, better, shinier, in higher definition, 3D, 4D, 6D, surround sound, with enticing scents included. The Spectacle is all-consuming. Once you’ve enjoyed the spectacle, you can’t live without it. It’s the perfect Matrix.

Capitalism keeps delivering better spectacles that glue us to our seats, passively consuming everything they sell us. But where are our lives? Where did they go? On our headstones, they will engrave the inscription: “He watched every spectacle we offered, but his own life was no spectacle. He did nothing. He achieved nothing. He just spectated.”

Most people are spectators. Life passes them by. They watch others living and wish it could be them. Yet they do nothing to make it them. Instead, they worship celebrities. Who is alive these days other than celebrities and the rich?

The world is just as they planned it. They are the living and we are the dead, or rather the undead. We are the zombies in the shopping malls keeping the rich rich. We never challenge them. We do everything they say, everything they want. They are the wolves and we are the dogs they have tamed. All we want is a biscuit and a spectacle to look at.

It has been said that Debord’s aim was “to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images”. Are we not all in thrall to the spectacle? What is Hollywood if not an industry dedicated to creating bigger and better spectacles? Do Hollywood movies get smarter? Do the plots become more intelligent? Is there better characterisation, more psychological depth, and enhanced realism? Or do explosions get louder and brighter, car chases longer, dialogue less plausible, actors more and more ridiculously pretty and perfectly honed (and infinitely less credible as real people in the real world). We get high definition. We get 3D. We get “sniffaround”. Always, the spectacle grows and at exactly the same time the quality, plausibility and quality of the content shrinks. That’s the spectacular equation.

We need much less spectacle and much more reality. We need to start living authentic lives again.
__________

The Perfect Citizen – According to the Elite:

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” –Adam Smith

First of all, the citizen shouldn’t really think of himself as that at all, but as a subject (in the manner of the people of the UK being the subjects of a Queen). He should recognise a rightful, divinely mandated higher authority (the elite) and never seek to challenge them. He should subject himself to their will at all times.

The perfect capitalist subject should be loaded with debt, hence terrified of losing his job, hence docile and compliant at work, never disobeying his inept and corrupt managers. He should be exhausted after work, hence unable to cause any trouble. He should sit in front of an assortment of bright screens, living in a fantasy world that presents no challenge to the elite. He should not read books since an educated subject will only cause trouble. He should have his credit card ready at all time, to make purchases. He should derive intense pleasure from buying objects. At the weekends, he should go to shopping malls and every type of consumer outlet where he can spend even more money. He should be preoccupied with consumerism and have zero spiritual yearnings, except as regards those institutional systems of approved religious control such as Christianity.

The capitalist elite want you to be someone obsessed with consumption, with consumer objects and services, with passivity in the face of stories and images presented to you by the capitalist elite on screen (all of which you pay for).

Everything you do should be making money for a capitalist somewhere. You have no other legitimate function than to make the rich richer by buying their goods and services. You should be tame, timid and docile. You should support law and order and never challenge your managers and leaders. You should accept your lot in life and be glad.

George Orwell wrote, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” And that’s all that the elite want from you – that you should exist as a consumerist automaton, not that you should be a living human being who refuses to accept their system.

Are you a perfect capitalist citizen? If you are, isn’t it time to WAKE UP?! Isn’t it time to say, “I REFUSE.” No more will you do the bidding of the capitalist elite. No more will you comply with their system of privilege that penalises you and makes you a second-class citizen. If you accept being on the bottom tier of a two-tier society then you truly are a loser.
__________

What a Fucked-up World:

A volunteer for the American Peace Corps told an astonishingly revealing story. He was working in a remote village and had a first-aid box. A village boy stood on a broken coke bottle and went to the volunteer for help. The volunteer gently removed the bottle, cleaned the wound, applied antiseptic and bandaged it. He asked the boy to return the next day to check that everything was OK. The boy duly returned, and everything was healing nicely. The boy had also brought two friends with him who had cuts on their arms and legs. The volunteer patched them up. Next day, ten adults arrived for treatment. By the end of the week, fifty people were in a queue for treatment. The volunteer’s medical supplies were almost exhausted. The village elder summoned him. “You’re causing me many problems,” he said. “People all around the area have heard of you and are coming here for treatment. But my village has no food and shelter for them. There could be big trouble. I want you to go away for several weeks. When you come back, never treat anyone again.”

And that’s what the volunteer did. He later reflected that if he hadn’t treated the first boy, he would probably have died of blood poisoning. He didn’t reflect on all those who subsequently died for lack of treatment. Doesn’t this sum up the world? Even helping people can cause problems. Giving a little help is futile. You should give TOTAL help or not bother at all. Tokenism is a disaster.
__________

Too Big to Fail?:

“If you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, the bank has a problem.” –Robert Maxwell

Robert Maxwell was a notoriously corrupt Jewish businessman and media mogul in Britain who committed suicide when his crimes started to catch up with him. Banks have adopted his modus operandi. If a small bank has a liquidity problem, it could go out of business. If an enormous bank has a liquidity problem, it must be bailed out by the taxpayers to stop the whole economy collapsing.

The question is this – why would any sane government allow banks to get so big that their failure constitutes an economic catastrophe? Cui bono? Did the elite deliberately engineer such a situation so that they would have complete control over the economy? OF COURSE THEY DID! None of them will be committing suicide. They have the government exactly where they want it.
__________

4/5