The Individual vs. the Goo

“The people” is a convenient term for “every individual.” This has been lost in translation. It has been garbled, distorted, just as the proprietor of an old-fashioned carnival shell game distorts the audience’s perception with sleight of hand.

Are “the people” one group? Well, that’s the ultimate Globalist formulation.

However, from the point of view of the free individual, things are upside down. It is his power that is primary, not the monolithic corporate State’s. From his point of view, what does the social landscape look like? It looks like: the obsession to organize.

I’m not talking about organizations that are actually streamlined to produce something of value. I’m talking about organizations that plan more organization of life.

If you want to spend a disturbing afternoon, read through (and try to fathom) the bewildering blizzard of sub-organizations that make up the European Union. I did. And I emerged with a new definition of insanity. OTO. The Obsession to Organize. OTO speaks of a bottomless fear that somewhere, someone might be living free.

The journey to greater individual power is about: erasing the separate internal compartments of energy the person himself has over-organized.

Current technological civilization depends on fixed structures and forms and methods and systems. In certain respects, it succeeds brilliantly. But the effect is a very strong tendency to view reality through compartmentalized lenses.

People tend to think their own power is either a delusion or some sort of abstraction that’s never really experienced. So when the subject is broached, it goes nowhere. It fizzles out. It garners shrugs and looks of confusion. Power? Are you talking about the ability to lift weights?

And therefore, the whole notion of freedom makes a very small impression, because without power, what’s the message of freedom? A person can choose vanilla or chocolate? He can watch Law&Order or CSI? He can buy a Buick or a Honda? He can take a trip to Yosemite or Disney World? He can pack a lunch or eat out at a restaurant? He can ask for a raise or apply for a better job with another company? That’s it? He can swim in his pool or work out at the gym? He can take Prozac, or Paxil, or Zoloft?

Mostly, as the years roll by, he opts for more cynicism and tries to become a “smarter realist.” And that is how he closes the book on his life.

Or, if he is attracted to self-improvement, it’s a matter of choosing between clichés. Which cliché sounds better? Which cliché seems to offer more hope for less effort? Which cliché will connect him to people who accept the same cliché?

Every which way power can be discredited or misunderstood … people will discredit it and misunderstand it.

And then all psychological and physiological and mental and physical and emotional and perceptual and hormonal processes undergo a major shift, in order to accommodate to a reality, a space in which the individual has virtually no power at all.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this one: “power = greed.” Mountains of propaganda are heaped on people to convince them that having individual power to make something happen is the same as committing crimes against humanity.

Globalism = collectivism = Glob-consciousness. We’re all one Glob. We exist in that great Cheese Melt.

Even the radical Left of the 1960s, who rioted at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, because they believed the nominee, Hubert Humphrey, and his allies wouldn’t stop the war in Vietnam … even that radical force on the Left eventually gave in and morphed into romantic sentimentalists who came to love the State under Obama.

Sooner or later, it comes down to the question: does the individual conceive of himself as an individual, or as part of The Group?

Shall the individual discover how much power and freedom and imagination he actually has, or shall he cut off that process of discovery at the knees, in order to join a group whose aims are diluted and foreshortened versions of consciousness and freedom?

The individual answers these questions overtly, with great consideration, or the questions answer and diminish him through wretched default.

There are people who want their own minds to look exactly like the world. They want their minds to look like photographs of the world. This is what they strive for. The idea that they could invent something is so terrifying they opt instead for the world as it is.

This is what amused the surrealists. They started turning things upside down and inside out. They were reacting to humans who had made themselves into robots. Into robot cameras.

The Surveillance State is a robot camera. It captures everything, based on the premise that what isn’t Normal is dangerous.

The cartels of the world become the cartels of the mind.

At the outbreak of World War 2, the Council on Foreign Relations began making plans for the post-war world. The question it posed was this: could America exist as a self-sufficient nation, or would it have to go outside its borders for vital resources? Predictably, the answer was: imperial empire. The US would not only need to obtain natural resources abroad, it would have to embark on endless conquest to assure continued access.

The CFR, of course, wasn’t just some think tank. It was connected to the highest levels of US government, through the State Department. A front for Rockefeller interests, it actually stood above the government.

Behind all its machinations was the presumption that planned societies were the future of the planet. Not open societies. Through wars, clandestine operations, legislation, treaties, manipulation of nations’ debt, control of banks and money supplies, countries could be turned into “managed units.” Increasingly, the populations of countries would be regulated and directed and held in thrall to the State.

And the individual? He would go the way of other extinct species.

For several decades, the pseudo-discipline called “social science” had been turning out reams of studies and reports on tribes, societal groupings, and so-called classes of people. Groups.

Deeply embedded in the social sciences were psychological warfare specialists who, after World War 2, emerged with a new academic status and new field of study: mass communications. Their objective? The broadcasting of messages that would, in accordance with political goals, provoke hostility or pacified acceptance in the masses.

Hostility channeled into support of new wars; acceptance of greater domestic government control.

Nowhere in these formulas was the individual protected. He was considered a wild card, a loose cannon, and he needed to be demeaned, made an outsider, and characterized as a criminal who opposed the needs of the collective.

Collective = robot minds welded into one mind.

As the years and decades passed, this notion of the collective and its requirements, in a “humane civilization,” expanded. Never mind that out of view, the rich were getting richer and poor were getting poorer. That fact was downplayed, and the cover story — ”share and care” — took center stage.

On every level of society, people were urged to think of themselves as part of a greater group. The individual and his hopes, his unique dreams, his desires and energies, his determination and will power … all these were portrayed as relics of an unworkable and deluded past.

In many cases, lone pioneers who were innovating in directions that could, in fact, benefit all of humanity, were absorbed into the one body of the collective, heralded as humane … and then dumped on the side of the road with their inventions and forgotten.

In the planned society, no one rises above the mass, except those men who run and operate and propagandize the mass.

In order to affect the illusion of individual success, as a kind of safety valve for the yearnings of millions of people, the cult of celebrity emerged. But even there, extraordinary tales of rise and then precipitous fall, glory and then humiliation, were and are presented as cautionary melodramas.

This could happen to you. You would be exposed. You would suffer the consequences. Let others take the fall. Keep your mind blank. Do nothing unusual. Shorten your attention span. Disable your own mental machinery. Then you’ll never be tempted to stand out from the mass.

The onrush of technocracy gears its wild promises to genetic manipulation, brain-machine interfaces, and other automatic downloads assuring “greater life.” No effort required. Plug in, and ascend to new heights.

Freedom? Independence? Old flickering dreams vicariously viewed on a screen. Individual greatness, imagination, creative power? A sunken galleon loaded with treasure that, upon closer investigation, was never there to begin with.

The Plan is all that is important. The plan involves universal surveillance, in order to map the lives of billions of people, move by move, in order to design systems of control within which those billions live, day to day.

But the worst outcome of all is: the individual cannot even conceive of his own life and future in large terms. The individual responds to tighter and control with a shrug, as if to say, “What difference does it make?”

He has bought the collectivist package. His own uniqueness and inner resources are submerged under layers of passive acceptance of the consensus.

And make no mistake about it, this consensus reality, for all its exaltation of the group, is not heraldic in any sense. The propagandized veneer covers a cynical exploitation of every man, woman, and child.

Strapped by an amnesia about his own freedom and what it can truly mean, the individual opts for a place in the collective gloom. He may grumble and complain, but he fits in. He can’t remember another possibility.

Every enterprise in which he finds himself turns out to be a pale copy of the real thing. The deep energies and power and desire for freedom remain untapped.

Yet a struggle continues to live. It lives in the hidden places of every individual who wants out, who wants to come back to himself, who wants to stride out on a stage.

Freedom and power again. The shattering of amnesia. In this stolen world. The extinct individual returns. Petty little hungers and obsessions become great hungers.

Dominoes of the collective begin to fall. The whole stinking structure collapses, a wing here and a wing there, and the robots open their eyes and turn off their cameras.

The vast sticky web called “the people” begins to disintegrate in roaring cities and in the mind.

A new instructive message appears on billboards and screens: “Normal = crazy.”

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at No More Fake News or Outside The Reality Machine.