- The Media
A few people, however, will retain the strength to emerge from the slave class, and - particularly given the communications opportunities of the Internet - may start broadcasting their message to a wider audience - in which case, it's important to pull the emergency backup attack switch called the "mainstream media."
How do you create slave on slave violence through the mainstream media?
Again, subtlety and trust in the inevitability of human psychology is the key.
First of all, you must never directly censor and control the media, or its inhabitants may rebel against your authority, and reveal your naked aggression. Once the knowledge of slavery becomes inescapable, society inevitably and immediately changes - and hiding this knowledge is the entire art and science of human ownership.
Thus you need to create a slow and increasing economic dependence in the media, rather than arresting and imprisoning its members.
You do this by making reporters more and more dependent upon information from the government. It is much, much cheaper to simply rewrite a governmental press release than it is to spend weeks or months going undercover, interviewing subjects, verifying sources, and exposing yourself to legal complications in order to break a story outside the normal channels of communication.
Furthermore, as State power grows, more and more people become more and more interested in what the government says and does, since they are investors or business people whose fortunes rise and fall on the whims of the ruling class.
This process can be a little risky at first, but you only need a decade or two in order for it to become almost universal and irreversible.
Remember - it takes a pretty empty person to rewrite government press releases for a living, and fairly delusionary managers to pretend that they are not the mere amplifiers of the whispers of power. Once these managers assume their positions, they will inevitably reject any energetic truth seekers, and instinctively seek out and employ other empty rewriters of State edicts. The collective delusion that they're still producing "news" becomes progressively stronger, to the point where they will rail against and attack anyone who actually tries to publish something that is true, particularly if it threatens the government contacts who supply their disinformation.
Access to government thus becomes the foundation of any media organization - therefore no fundamental criticisms of government can be produced. You can criticize a tax, but not taxation itself. You can criticize a party, but not the State. You can criticize a vote, but not voting.
As usual, it is both depressing and exciting to see the tiny price that people are willing to sell themselves for - their name in print, a meager expense account, a few parties, and they are yours.
The physical abuse required to keep the sheep in line is doled out by the police - the verbal abuse is doled out by the media.
The media has been trained to attack anyone who questions the foundations of violent power. The equation is really very simple - so simple that it is always overlooked. If a man says that coercive wealth transfers - theft, in the vernacular - are wrong, then the media instantly attacks him for not caring about whoever is receiving the stolen money.
For instance, if a man questions the morality and practicality of the welfare state, he will be immediately attacked for not caring about the poor. If he argues against government schools, then he clearly hates the fact that children get educated. If he defends free-trade, he is an immoral advocate for bloodsucking corporations; if he criticizes military budgets, he is a cowardly appeaser who wishes to surrender Fort Knox to Al Qaeda; if he holds people morally accountable for their actions, he is punishing them for their past mistakes and "playing the blame game"; if he refuses to forgive unrepentant wrongdoers, he is nursing a grudge and so on.
If he argues that adult relationships are voluntary, then he is viciously anti-community; if he says that abuse should not be tolerated in relationships, then he is an intolerant absolutist bent on destroying all relationships...
This list can go on and on and on - and Lord knows it does, every day - but you get the point.
The wonderful thing is that you won't ever have to tell the media to do this - it just happens of its own accord, because people who are expert verbal abusers always rise to the top of the media pyramid, because they are so useful to those of us in power, so we always give them access and exclusivity.
You only need a few verbal abusers in charge, and everyone else will fall in line, because anyone who tries to stand up against them will be immediately smacked down, and will face the horrifying spectacle of watching all of their colleagues either take cowardly steps back, or joining in the verbal assaults.
(I should probably have mentioned that priests - the best verbal abusers in history - left the church for socialism and the media, which is why the media tends to be so left-wing.)
The reason the media performs this service for us is very simple - we own their livelihoods through licensing, legal regulation and access to information. If we decide to cut anyone off, his career is over. If anyone displeases us, we can threaten to pull the license of the entire organization, because the rules are so Byzantine that we can nail someone for something at any time - much like tax code, it is a form of soft totalitarianism that we have perfected over the generations.
The purpose of regulation is to control through rational anxiety rather than dictatorial terror. Prior dictatorships would shoot people, arrest and imprison them arbitrarily - this controlled people's bodies very effectively, but destroyed their entrepreneurial energies and motivations.
It is far more effective to regulate and license and tax - and this is true for all industries - because potential dissidents then face their own foggy walls of vague anxiety - in which they will not face arrest and imprisonment, but rather lengthy legal complications, which they may eventually win, but which will drain much of the joy out of living while they go on, month after month, year after year.
This is true for public-sector unions as well - we don't make it illegal for a manager to fire a unionized employee, because that would expose the system for the economic joke that it is - we just make it really, really lengthy and complicated and emotionally draining and confrontational and exhausting - that is the true perfection of soft totalitarianism. People will surrender to anxiety and still vaguely feel free - if you terrorize them directly, they tend to just collapse intellectually and emotionally.
If the media were directly owned by the government, the propaganda would be clear; the indirect "ownership" of licensing and access to information is far more effective and powerful, because it maintains the veneer of independence and critical thinking.
This form of indirect ownership is the essence of modern democratic tax farming.
It is a central truism of human nature that people always attack what they avoid - if a reporter imagines that he is some sort of freethinking iconoclast, he is in complete denial about the reality of his enslavement. This denial always manifests itself in hysterical attacks against anyone who dares to point it out, or who is actually a freethinker.
To sum up - if we attack the slaves, we lose - if the slaves attack each other, which is so easy to orchestrate - we win, at least for a time.
- Children: The Greatest Resource
When we say that human beings are the greatest resource, it's important to be precise about what we mean.
Human beings are naturally born with two characteristics - the first is a resistance to arbitrary authority, and the second is a natural susceptibility to obeying universal ethics.
Anyone who doubts the first characteristic has never tried to parent a two-year-old, and anyone who doubts the second has never triggered or experienced moral guilt.
Domesticating the human animal does not mean that everyone needs to turn out the same - in fact, it would be quite a disaster for us if they did.
To most efficiently control the human farm, you need a majority of broken, self-attacking, insecure, shallow, vain and ambitious sheep, forever consumed by inconsequentialities like weight, abs and celebrities - and a minority of volatile, angry and dominant sheepdogs, which you can dress up in either a green or a blue costume, and use to threaten and manage the herd.
Ruling classes have always had to separate children from their parents, otherwise it is almost impossible to substitute weird abstractions like "the state" or "a god" for the parent-child bond. Human children, like ducklings, will bond with whatever person or institution raises them, which is why we always need to get children - hopefully as young as possible - to bond with the State through government daycare and... "education" I guess is the closest word.
In the distant past, rulers made the error of forcibly removing children from their parents, which exposed their enslavement, and so destroyed their motivation. In the late Middle Ages, children were farmed out to wet-nurses, destroying the parent-child bond. In more recent times, the boarding school system separated children from their parents, destroying empathy and creating wonderfully brutal administrators and enforcers for a variety of European empires. (See: George Orwell.)
In our constant quest to perfect human ownership, we have found a far better way to break these family bonds, and substitute allegiance to ourselves, in the form of patriotism and/or religiosity.
It's one of those beautiful win-win situations that come along so rarely - first, we raised taxes to the point where it became very difficult to maintain a reasonable lifestyle if one parent stayed home with the children. We also funded feminist groups to the tune of billions of dollars - one of the greatest investments we ever made - to encourage women to abandon their children and enter the workforce.
Not only did this help break the parent-child bond, but it also moved women's labor from nontaxable to taxable - a delightful coincidence of self-interest and practicality for us!
With both parents working, all we had to do was create a few scares about the quality of child care, allowing us to move in to control and regulate that industry, remaking it to serve us best.
In some countries, like the United States, children are effectively removed from parental care by the state within a few weeks or months after birth - in other countries, parents receive direct subsidies to stay at home, which is quite funny when you think about it (and there is precious little room for humor in much of this). We take money by force from the parents, keep a large portion for ourselves, use another portion to run up debts that their children will somehow have to pay off - and then dribble a few pennies down to the mother, who then feels that we are somehow doing her a great favor by allowing her to stay at home!
It is a delicious irony that everyone remains so totally blind to reality that they run to us to protect their children from all kinds of harm, while we are the ones selling off their children's future through national debts! It really is like hiring a thief to guard your property, and the amazing thing is that this is all so completely obvious, and never, ever spoken about!
Sometimes, it would be tempting to feel bad about ruling people, but really, they are so incredibly stupid that it seems almost helpful.
Parenting has generally improved over the centuries, which also poses a grave threat to us, because if children are raised without aggression, they will both immediately see, and never accept, the reality of human ownership.
As parenting has improved, it has become more important for us to intervene earlier and earlier. In the 19th century, it was okay to wait until the tax kittens were five or six before we started propagandizing them in government schools. However, as parenting has improved - particularly in the post-Second World War period, we have had to start intervening earlier and earlier, which is why we try and get at kids so soon after birth now.
When kids were raised fairly well in the post-war period, it produced the disasters of the rebellious 1960s, which almost finished us, and so we began funding radical feminism, controlling teachers more and snatching the kids earlier and earlier to fix all that.
So - we need some parents to create the sheep, and other parents to create the wolves, or the sociopaths who can be relied upon to attack whoever we point to. These sociopaths can be divided into those who guard the ruling class (the police and soldiers and prison guards and so on) - and the criminals that we always wave around to frighten people into running back to our "protection."
Again, the amount of doublethink required to maintain the delusion that the ruling class is not invested in crime - when even by our rules, we are all criminals - is really quite astounding! Governments control almost the entire environment of the poor, from public housing to food stamps to welfare checks to public schools - and it is this environment that produces the majority of criminals! For instance, governments require that children spend about 15,000 hours being educated in state schools, and yet when they emerge from this massive investment as illiterate and violent criminals, no one ever takes us to task!
Never, ever underestimate the degree to which people will scatter themselves into a deep fog in order to avoid seeing the basic realities of their own cages.
The strongest lock on the prison is always avoidance, not force.
- Never-Never Land
Imagine a world in which almost all children were raised peacefully - there would be no criminals, no police, no soldiers, no politicians (or others with a bottomless lust for power) - no bullying in the workplace, no white-collar predations on the general wealth, no assault, no rape, no murder, no theft, no drug abuse, no smoking, no alcoholism, no eating disorders, no pedophilia, far fewer mental and physical health issues, very little divorce, promiscuity or infidelity - since all of these dysfunctions can be directly traced back to early childhood traumas.
What need would such a world have for rulers?
That is the world we can never allow to come into existence.
Anything we can do to traumatize children serves the hierarchical violence of our power.
Getting kids into daycare is a great start, since daycare makes children continually ill, exposes them to the wild aggressions of dozens of other children, destroys the one-on-one time that children need for bonding and emotional maturity. Daycare kids remain insecure, unbonded with a consistent caregiver (since teacher turnover is so high), and end up inevitably placing more emphasis on peer relationships than they do on adult caregiver relationships - including their parents.
These peer relationships among kids inevitably devolve to the lowest common denominator, with bullies and manipulators and the physically attractive rising to the top, and the sensitive and intelligent and empathetic hiding under tables. Children quickly perceive that adult attention is almost always negative - in other words that they themselves are negative - serving only to increase the stress of their caregivers. Due to the shortage of time and resources, conflicts between children are rarely resolved in a just manner, but merely with separation and mutual punishment, which breaks the child's natural desire for integrity and virtue, and places all the power in the fists of those empty and dangerous children who do not fear retribution.
When the stressed-out parent comes to pick up the child from daycare, the child feels further devalued, knowing that he is just another source of aggravation for his parent ("Just get in the car!"). The practical necessities of child raising are then compressed into a very short and taxing time, which no one really enjoys. Parents are short-tempered and impatient, children are stressed and unhappy, and then the whole thing starts all over again when the alarm bells go off the next morning.
Children have to feel herded and controlled by impatient adult caregivers long before we get a hold of them in schools, otherwise our whole system will fall apart.
Children have to feel that they are inconvenient impositions on all-powerful authorities long before they become adults - or even schoolchildren - otherwise we will have no control over them.
Children have to feel grateful for whatever crumbs of attention and consideration fall their way, and learn to live on very little, otherwise they will never grow up with the desperate hunger that can only be filled by conformity, patriotism, sports addictions, religions and other superstitions.
We plant children; we grow power.
(p)art IV https://vriendenplek.nl/read-blog/770_the-handbook-of-human-ownership-4.html
A few people, however, will retain the strength to emerge from the slave class, and - particularly given the communications opportunities of the Internet - may start broadcasting their message to a wider audience - in which case, it's important to pull the emergency backup attack switch called the "mainstream media."
How do you create slave on slave violence through the mainstream media?
Again, subtlety and trust in the inevitability of human psychology is the key.
First of all, you must never directly censor and control the media, or its inhabitants may rebel against your authority, and reveal your naked aggression. Once the knowledge of slavery becomes inescapable, society inevitably and immediately changes - and hiding this knowledge is the entire art and science of human ownership.
Thus you need to create a slow and increasing economic dependence in the media, rather than arresting and imprisoning its members.
You do this by making reporters more and more dependent upon information from the government. It is much, much cheaper to simply rewrite a governmental press release than it is to spend weeks or months going undercover, interviewing subjects, verifying sources, and exposing yourself to legal complications in order to break a story outside the normal channels of communication.
Furthermore, as State power grows, more and more people become more and more interested in what the government says and does, since they are investors or business people whose fortunes rise and fall on the whims of the ruling class.
This process can be a little risky at first, but you only need a decade or two in order for it to become almost universal and irreversible.
Remember - it takes a pretty empty person to rewrite government press releases for a living, and fairly delusionary managers to pretend that they are not the mere amplifiers of the whispers of power. Once these managers assume their positions, they will inevitably reject any energetic truth seekers, and instinctively seek out and employ other empty rewriters of State edicts. The collective delusion that they're still producing "news" becomes progressively stronger, to the point where they will rail against and attack anyone who actually tries to publish something that is true, particularly if it threatens the government contacts who supply their disinformation.
Access to government thus becomes the foundation of any media organization - therefore no fundamental criticisms of government can be produced. You can criticize a tax, but not taxation itself. You can criticize a party, but not the State. You can criticize a vote, but not voting.
As usual, it is both depressing and exciting to see the tiny price that people are willing to sell themselves for - their name in print, a meager expense account, a few parties, and they are yours.
The physical abuse required to keep the sheep in line is doled out by the police - the verbal abuse is doled out by the media.
The media has been trained to attack anyone who questions the foundations of violent power. The equation is really very simple - so simple that it is always overlooked. If a man says that coercive wealth transfers - theft, in the vernacular - are wrong, then the media instantly attacks him for not caring about whoever is receiving the stolen money.
For instance, if a man questions the morality and practicality of the welfare state, he will be immediately attacked for not caring about the poor. If he argues against government schools, then he clearly hates the fact that children get educated. If he defends free-trade, he is an immoral advocate for bloodsucking corporations; if he criticizes military budgets, he is a cowardly appeaser who wishes to surrender Fort Knox to Al Qaeda; if he holds people morally accountable for their actions, he is punishing them for their past mistakes and "playing the blame game"; if he refuses to forgive unrepentant wrongdoers, he is nursing a grudge and so on.
If he argues that adult relationships are voluntary, then he is viciously anti-community; if he says that abuse should not be tolerated in relationships, then he is an intolerant absolutist bent on destroying all relationships...
This list can go on and on and on - and Lord knows it does, every day - but you get the point.
The wonderful thing is that you won't ever have to tell the media to do this - it just happens of its own accord, because people who are expert verbal abusers always rise to the top of the media pyramid, because they are so useful to those of us in power, so we always give them access and exclusivity.
You only need a few verbal abusers in charge, and everyone else will fall in line, because anyone who tries to stand up against them will be immediately smacked down, and will face the horrifying spectacle of watching all of their colleagues either take cowardly steps back, or joining in the verbal assaults.
(I should probably have mentioned that priests - the best verbal abusers in history - left the church for socialism and the media, which is why the media tends to be so left-wing.)
The reason the media performs this service for us is very simple - we own their livelihoods through licensing, legal regulation and access to information. If we decide to cut anyone off, his career is over. If anyone displeases us, we can threaten to pull the license of the entire organization, because the rules are so Byzantine that we can nail someone for something at any time - much like tax code, it is a form of soft totalitarianism that we have perfected over the generations.
The purpose of regulation is to control through rational anxiety rather than dictatorial terror. Prior dictatorships would shoot people, arrest and imprison them arbitrarily - this controlled people's bodies very effectively, but destroyed their entrepreneurial energies and motivations.
It is far more effective to regulate and license and tax - and this is true for all industries - because potential dissidents then face their own foggy walls of vague anxiety - in which they will not face arrest and imprisonment, but rather lengthy legal complications, which they may eventually win, but which will drain much of the joy out of living while they go on, month after month, year after year.
This is true for public-sector unions as well - we don't make it illegal for a manager to fire a unionized employee, because that would expose the system for the economic joke that it is - we just make it really, really lengthy and complicated and emotionally draining and confrontational and exhausting - that is the true perfection of soft totalitarianism. People will surrender to anxiety and still vaguely feel free - if you terrorize them directly, they tend to just collapse intellectually and emotionally.
If the media were directly owned by the government, the propaganda would be clear; the indirect "ownership" of licensing and access to information is far more effective and powerful, because it maintains the veneer of independence and critical thinking.
This form of indirect ownership is the essence of modern democratic tax farming.
It is a central truism of human nature that people always attack what they avoid - if a reporter imagines that he is some sort of freethinking iconoclast, he is in complete denial about the reality of his enslavement. This denial always manifests itself in hysterical attacks against anyone who dares to point it out, or who is actually a freethinker.
To sum up - if we attack the slaves, we lose - if the slaves attack each other, which is so easy to orchestrate - we win, at least for a time.
- Children: The Greatest Resource
When we say that human beings are the greatest resource, it's important to be precise about what we mean.
Human beings are naturally born with two characteristics - the first is a resistance to arbitrary authority, and the second is a natural susceptibility to obeying universal ethics.
Anyone who doubts the first characteristic has never tried to parent a two-year-old, and anyone who doubts the second has never triggered or experienced moral guilt.
Domesticating the human animal does not mean that everyone needs to turn out the same - in fact, it would be quite a disaster for us if they did.
To most efficiently control the human farm, you need a majority of broken, self-attacking, insecure, shallow, vain and ambitious sheep, forever consumed by inconsequentialities like weight, abs and celebrities - and a minority of volatile, angry and dominant sheepdogs, which you can dress up in either a green or a blue costume, and use to threaten and manage the herd.
Ruling classes have always had to separate children from their parents, otherwise it is almost impossible to substitute weird abstractions like "the state" or "a god" for the parent-child bond. Human children, like ducklings, will bond with whatever person or institution raises them, which is why we always need to get children - hopefully as young as possible - to bond with the State through government daycare and... "education" I guess is the closest word.
In the distant past, rulers made the error of forcibly removing children from their parents, which exposed their enslavement, and so destroyed their motivation. In the late Middle Ages, children were farmed out to wet-nurses, destroying the parent-child bond. In more recent times, the boarding school system separated children from their parents, destroying empathy and creating wonderfully brutal administrators and enforcers for a variety of European empires. (See: George Orwell.)
In our constant quest to perfect human ownership, we have found a far better way to break these family bonds, and substitute allegiance to ourselves, in the form of patriotism and/or religiosity.
It's one of those beautiful win-win situations that come along so rarely - first, we raised taxes to the point where it became very difficult to maintain a reasonable lifestyle if one parent stayed home with the children. We also funded feminist groups to the tune of billions of dollars - one of the greatest investments we ever made - to encourage women to abandon their children and enter the workforce.
Not only did this help break the parent-child bond, but it also moved women's labor from nontaxable to taxable - a delightful coincidence of self-interest and practicality for us!
With both parents working, all we had to do was create a few scares about the quality of child care, allowing us to move in to control and regulate that industry, remaking it to serve us best.
In some countries, like the United States, children are effectively removed from parental care by the state within a few weeks or months after birth - in other countries, parents receive direct subsidies to stay at home, which is quite funny when you think about it (and there is precious little room for humor in much of this). We take money by force from the parents, keep a large portion for ourselves, use another portion to run up debts that their children will somehow have to pay off - and then dribble a few pennies down to the mother, who then feels that we are somehow doing her a great favor by allowing her to stay at home!
It is a delicious irony that everyone remains so totally blind to reality that they run to us to protect their children from all kinds of harm, while we are the ones selling off their children's future through national debts! It really is like hiring a thief to guard your property, and the amazing thing is that this is all so completely obvious, and never, ever spoken about!
Sometimes, it would be tempting to feel bad about ruling people, but really, they are so incredibly stupid that it seems almost helpful.
Parenting has generally improved over the centuries, which also poses a grave threat to us, because if children are raised without aggression, they will both immediately see, and never accept, the reality of human ownership.
As parenting has improved, it has become more important for us to intervene earlier and earlier. In the 19th century, it was okay to wait until the tax kittens were five or six before we started propagandizing them in government schools. However, as parenting has improved - particularly in the post-Second World War period, we have had to start intervening earlier and earlier, which is why we try and get at kids so soon after birth now.
When kids were raised fairly well in the post-war period, it produced the disasters of the rebellious 1960s, which almost finished us, and so we began funding radical feminism, controlling teachers more and snatching the kids earlier and earlier to fix all that.
So - we need some parents to create the sheep, and other parents to create the wolves, or the sociopaths who can be relied upon to attack whoever we point to. These sociopaths can be divided into those who guard the ruling class (the police and soldiers and prison guards and so on) - and the criminals that we always wave around to frighten people into running back to our "protection."
Again, the amount of doublethink required to maintain the delusion that the ruling class is not invested in crime - when even by our rules, we are all criminals - is really quite astounding! Governments control almost the entire environment of the poor, from public housing to food stamps to welfare checks to public schools - and it is this environment that produces the majority of criminals! For instance, governments require that children spend about 15,000 hours being educated in state schools, and yet when they emerge from this massive investment as illiterate and violent criminals, no one ever takes us to task!
Never, ever underestimate the degree to which people will scatter themselves into a deep fog in order to avoid seeing the basic realities of their own cages.
The strongest lock on the prison is always avoidance, not force.
- Never-Never Land
Imagine a world in which almost all children were raised peacefully - there would be no criminals, no police, no soldiers, no politicians (or others with a bottomless lust for power) - no bullying in the workplace, no white-collar predations on the general wealth, no assault, no rape, no murder, no theft, no drug abuse, no smoking, no alcoholism, no eating disorders, no pedophilia, far fewer mental and physical health issues, very little divorce, promiscuity or infidelity - since all of these dysfunctions can be directly traced back to early childhood traumas.
What need would such a world have for rulers?
That is the world we can never allow to come into existence.
Anything we can do to traumatize children serves the hierarchical violence of our power.
Getting kids into daycare is a great start, since daycare makes children continually ill, exposes them to the wild aggressions of dozens of other children, destroys the one-on-one time that children need for bonding and emotional maturity. Daycare kids remain insecure, unbonded with a consistent caregiver (since teacher turnover is so high), and end up inevitably placing more emphasis on peer relationships than they do on adult caregiver relationships - including their parents.
These peer relationships among kids inevitably devolve to the lowest common denominator, with bullies and manipulators and the physically attractive rising to the top, and the sensitive and intelligent and empathetic hiding under tables. Children quickly perceive that adult attention is almost always negative - in other words that they themselves are negative - serving only to increase the stress of their caregivers. Due to the shortage of time and resources, conflicts between children are rarely resolved in a just manner, but merely with separation and mutual punishment, which breaks the child's natural desire for integrity and virtue, and places all the power in the fists of those empty and dangerous children who do not fear retribution.
When the stressed-out parent comes to pick up the child from daycare, the child feels further devalued, knowing that he is just another source of aggravation for his parent ("Just get in the car!"). The practical necessities of child raising are then compressed into a very short and taxing time, which no one really enjoys. Parents are short-tempered and impatient, children are stressed and unhappy, and then the whole thing starts all over again when the alarm bells go off the next morning.
Children have to feel herded and controlled by impatient adult caregivers long before we get a hold of them in schools, otherwise our whole system will fall apart.
Children have to feel that they are inconvenient impositions on all-powerful authorities long before they become adults - or even schoolchildren - otherwise we will have no control over them.
Children have to feel grateful for whatever crumbs of attention and consideration fall their way, and learn to live on very little, otherwise they will never grow up with the desperate hunger that can only be filled by conformity, patriotism, sports addictions, religions and other superstitions.
We plant children; we grow power.
(p)art IV https://vriendenplek.nl/read-blog/770_the-handbook-of-human-ownership-4.html
