I recently had a friend ask why I am talking about propaganda instead of giving more direct insights about sustainability. The reason, as regular readers of the blog will already know, is simple; our modern world is a result of how we live destructively to the planet because of the narratives we have been conditioned with that create our worldviews and associated belief structures. It all goes back a long time, and in more recent times, corporate systems have accelerated the problems of ecological destruction using propaganda to sell us ideas and beliefs that for most people go without any critical thinking about the assumptions taken for granted. I know because I used to be one. I was always skeptical and wanted to know the scientific mechanisms behind technology and rationale behind the cultural stories I too took for granted. What changed for me was getting into the history of everything. While I seriously questioned religious dogma at age 16, I didn’t really delve into cultural dogma until my twenties, and was shocked to find that Napoleon’s comment, “history is but an agreed upon fiction” was all too close to the real truth. I’ve always loved mysteries that science couldn’t explain, and there are a lot of them, and it always bothered me that scientists wouldn’t even entertain things that were not in the mainstream.
In a nutshell, the science we take for granted with our technology had its origins in the world of Alchemy and spiritual mystery philosophies. After the medieval Renaissance, Cartesian thinking sidelined the spiritual aspects giving us a materialistic focus, resulting in most of humanity seeing the natural world as nothing more than something to be used and manipulated for its own benefit. Knowledge is power and has been controlled through the use of institutions, and now corporate systems to weave a complex story of reality that we think is the only one that matters. The important aspect of all story is that as a whole we do not question its assumptions and presuppositions. In essence, we accept what we are told as absolute. While heresy was first used to name people who disagreed with religious dogma, it is also now used on anyone who questions the materialistic worldview driven by science and economics. Some examples, which I keep really simple for emphasis.
Darwin is revered (not just in biology) as the man who revealed the initial mechanisms of evolution (we forget that Alfred Wallace also came up with natural selection at the same time). He was somewhat right, but even he had his reservations. Darwin believed that traits already existed within the organism and natural selection helped those with useful traits adapt to changing ecological conditions. Earlier than Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed that traits evolved during the organism’s lifetime. But as we now realize, the study of genetics showed that all inherited traits were passed on through genes, which Darwinians believe are unaffected by outside world and change is by chance. The emergence of epigenetics now shows how genes respond to environmental stresses that induce genetic mechanisms to influence genetic changes as Lamarck suggested could happen. Neither Darwin-Wallace or Lamarck got it fully right but note how little we hear about epigenetics while our educational systems still fervently still push Darwinian dogma as absolute.
Early economics was simple and simply involved the buying and selling of goods. In an attempt to explain growing economic complexities from colonialism, Adam Smith discussed classical economic theory: The fundamental principle being that the economy is self‐regulating because of the self-interest between the parties involved in a transaction and the scrutiny of the community in which the transaction occurred, such that everyone benefitted from the transaction. Note how neo-classical and modern economics dismisses the community and places everything on self-interest, even making it ethical to serve the interests of investors only at the expense of everything else.
Allopathic medicine is for most people the only way to manage health, and relies primarily on pharmaceutical drugs, radiation or surgery. Alternative medicine, such as Osteopathy is largely ignored because it believes that diseases are due chiefly to loss of structural integrity which can be restored by manipulation of the parts supplemented by therapeutic measures as needed. Homeopathy is a medicine that believes natural substances, prepared in a special way and used most often in very small amounts, can restore health. Both these alternatives are highly nutrition based, something that allopathic medicine merely mentions in passing as necessary but incidental to drugs as options of choice to cure disease. My parents instilled in me the benefits of a good diet and as a kid it was easier than today to have a good diet – it was mostly all organic and localized. Medicines were well tested and not that complex, with a drug for every ill as seems the case today. The I learned the story of medicine and my perspectives changed.
Until the 1950’s medicine evolved slowly with new drugs coming along slowly. The alternatives were poo-pooed, especially in Europe where I grew up. Then I learned how that John D Rockefeller, king of the Robber Barons in the USA, had set up allopathic medicine to benefit his profits from oil (one of my first posts, Health – Sickcare 1 {January 2018}). Not only did he advocate pharmaceutics, he helped set up national allopathic Medical Associations and allopathic medical schools while following a scorched earth publicity campaign against Osteopathy and Homeopathy practitioners that continues to this day. Curiously, he had his own private osteopath for use with his own health.
After the second world war, the ‘Green Revolution’ was promoted as the Agricultural-tech-business solution to food production and management (see earlier post, Economics and Energetics of farming 2 – a reality check on food production energetics {July 2018}). Go back far enough and Rockefeller’s name (along with many other uber-rich of the twentieth century) is found to use oil and the chemical industry to run our world for its own profit returns (the same chemical companies that produce our drugs). It was at this time that ecological problems started to grow exponentially giving us the myriad ecological and health problems we enjoy today.
Then throw into all of that the numerous wars and conflicts continually occurring around the planet, that no one wants but we keep getting caught up within, and you should start to see something that is imposed on us and not by us. We are under a continuous barrage of propaganda and indoctrination to keep our thinking in line with what the hierarchical mainstream narrative wants us to believe. And they do a great job because most of humanity goes along with them, and with it the never-ending messaging of anxiety, fear, want, scarcity, separation, uncertainty, and believing we can only identify with those with which we agree.
As I stated at the start of my last post, “Propaganda works best when those who are being exposed are confident that they are acting on their own free will” Joseph Goebbels. We have this illusion that we are free. “When we speak of anything as ‘free,’ our meaning is not definite unless we can say what it is free from” Bertrand Russell. How easy is to live outside the current system driven by big corporate entities controlling everyone, including our governments? “It is clear that the most elementary condition, if thought is to be free, is the absence of legal penalties for the expression of opinions. No great country has yet reached to this level, although most of them think they have” Bertrand Russell – and he said this in 1922 when expressing everyone’s right to freedom of thought without any penalty. Russell talked about ‘Free Thought and Official Propaganda’ and the importance of unrestricted freedom of expression in society. He among many others, emphasized the problem of the state and political class interfering with free thinking by the use of educational control, fines for speaking out, economic leverage, and distortion of evidence to sanction ‘heretics.’
What happens to us may be out of our control, but how we experience the world is our personal responsibility. Our job is to see the world through empathy, compassion and love – it is really who we all are. We have a crisis of empathy that creates anxiety, fear, scarcity, and separation from each other and the natural world. Differences are good and encouraged, but first we have to break out of the mindset that keeps us trapped. If we do not change the way we live with each other it won’t matter how ‘green’ we act, how ‘green’ we make the technology, or how efficient we become, because our destructive and self-motivated mindset will make us pawns for manipulation by the powers that be that want to control us. Our only solution at this point is to work on both our individual and collective sovereignty and find a way to live peacefully without control from hierarchies that want us to remain slaves to the system they have created over the past millennia. We must create our own new world order that creates a world that serves all of life. And to do that we have to be willing to say enough is enough!!
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