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Saturday, April 11, 2015

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My-View-From-Heaven--Mountain-View










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5 comments:

Anarchist said...

Isn't it amazing what ignorance thanks to a systemically broken public education system can lead to?

People stop asking questions why they wind up in the streets or with low pay, no benefits and unpaid overtime jobs whilst the ones directing the capitalist system in the background, the multinational corporations and their bribed talking heads make a killing at their expense. If the propaganda were true, then the only one to blame are the people themselves, for they are not "flexible", intelligent or dedicated enough and therefore the "market forces", those divine entities that have to be sacrificed to in order to avoid punishment, have decided to shun them.

Market fundamentalism and its effects are not by chance very similar to their religious counterparts in that they seek alternative explanations for phenomena that are taboo within the mainstream discourse. Quite amazingly and coincidentally, of course, these psychic idiots depicted on your photo profit from the desperate seeking answers and keep the exploitative system going, because their non-explanations help cover up the real issue. Their solution is not to inform people and organise resistance, but instead to deliver idiotic reasonings from the dark ages as a means to make a living themselves.

Ultimately, the purpose of of any action within capitalism is, well to generate capital. Pretending to provide a tool for social betterment is but a propaganda ploy, a glittering generality thought to make people warm and fuzzy inside, when in reality it's just an attempt at selling a good story line. It's not accidental that psychic idiots insist on power and privilege, because they are fine with the systemic exploitation inherent in the US-Empire, it's how their "seminars" work. Adoration, uncritical praise and self-deluding people conned by the self-assured appearance of their masters.

If people stop asking the right questions, recognising cause and effect and reject non-explanations, then the society is totally screwed up - or working as designed, depending on whether you belong to the 99.999% or 0.001% of the population.

Linh Dinh said...

Hi Anarchist,

Magical explanations and hopes abound in this mad culture. What you see here is an offering for the mostly wealthy citizens of Mountain View. The people who live here tend to have high paying jobs, nice cars and large houses, but these perks can't prevent them from growing old, feeling empty or losing loved ones, hence their needs for mediums, psychics and "spiritual" musicians. While wealthy Californians dream of transcending physical limits, the state itself is hitting physical walls, with its dwindling water supplies an omen that this superficial paradise will revert back to desert.


Linh

Anarchist said...

Hi Linh,

Here where I live (Europe), "spiritual" and "psych(ot)ic" entrepreneurs have two audiences:

1. The desperate ones, often on unemployment benefits and looking for a solution that doesn't require recognition of inconvenient truths - just the recognition of a saviour (code word for "authority")

2. The affluent ones who manage and direct staff, are obedient to authorities and are highly susceptible to state propaganda.

Both groups highly benefit from excremental reasonings more based on wishful thinking and "exceptionalism" (-> discover the "psych(ot)ic" in you), but in actuality none of these provide actual explanations for their inner void. They do not address the problem of how to relearn social behaviour within a group of equal minded people.

If they were truthful, they would tell their "clients" that the reason they feel unsatisfied is because they don't count as human beings, but human resources. They are not individuals in control of their live but objects hunting goals set by a powerful elite with the sole purpose of making profit. You'll never get to hear that cut throat competition and stepping on other people's faces are an unavoidable fact of life, but a conscious choice. Humans are not naturally beasts ripping each other apart - they are conditioned to it within hierarchical structures. There is plenty of evidence in the fields of anthropology and social psychology that points to this direction.

Hierarchies lead to failing societies whilst those based on equality and social well-being of the group fare far more better. I'm thinking of hunter-gatherer societies or even high cultures like the Iroquois in your corner of the world. Further there were functional societies of that kind in Spain before the Civil War (the anarcho-syndicalists) and right after WWII in both Northern Italy and Greece - before they were wiped out by reactionary forces kindly directed and sponsored by the US-Empire to ensure that profits flow into the right direction.

But we are not supposed to know about these things ;-).

Ian Keenan said...

There have been anarchists that are also interested in yoga and meditation, like John Cage and Rene Daumal.

Trade unionism can also be aligned with state propaganda, as the large US unions are, and this is part of its own banalization. We tend to overlook this banalization, or sympathize with it, less than the banalization of yoga and meditation, even though both banalizations have an inherent function to their practitioners once they into existence and because the thematic separation that can be made propagandistically between yoga and meditation and the repression of the material world is more discernible to us.

Ian Keenan said...

meant to say ".. they come into existence.."