The Road to Hell

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It’s becoming clearer every day that our governments and leaders have no intention to promote a livable world or even one with a destination of eventual equitability. No, the goal is clearly to promote the interests of the few and to use the vast swath of humanity in much the way a parasite would utilize its host. This has likely always been the case with modern governments, but even now, a few nations seem to realize that there has to be some form of quid pro quo between their leaders and the masses. Sadly, however, in the US and Great Britain in particular, there has been a callous disregard for even the most basic well-being of their populations. The question is, how did we get to such a place?

It’s clear that barring wholesale psychopathy, the average person wants certain things out of life: community, love, and a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day without living in fear for basic necessities. Things get weird when people are brought up in a dysfunctional family or in this case, a dysfunctional society. We know what having abusive parents does to a person: they resort to unhealthy coping techniques and begin to see the world in a less than clear manner. They may begin to blame all the wrong people for their hardships (because it is difficult sometimes to place the blame where it belongs, but those terrible feelings have to land somewhere)–they may begin to feel that they have no ability to change the course of events, and in truth, they may not as things stand. You can leave a dysfunctional family as an adult, but when you are a dependent child that’s not really how it works. I’d say the majority of us are stuck in the child-like dependency of the governments that form our overarching surrogate parents. How many of us have the ability to survive outside of the system? I’d say none of us—even the most stalwart “prepper” has to obtain supplies and such from within the system, so I think it makes sense to consider, as distasteful as it sounds, that we are in a vulnerable situation much like a child in an abusive family in terms of our own governments. We may squabble over who is worse, mom or dad –mom emotionally traumatizes and gaslights us (Biden) and dad outright beats us (Trump) but the end result is a shell-shocked individual, working and dying in the Empire, not having a slight notion of what is possible in terms of human happiness, creativity and innovation because we are all in abused family mode.

One way that this situation has come to pass has been the reliance on taking the inner clean and decent motivations of citizens and turning them on their head to achieve what the ruling elite desire. By this I mean, again, most people, barring maniacs, have an innate sense of fairness and a desire to not harm others. We get into the insanity when people are pitted against each other, as if you took 50 hungry toddlers and put them in a gladiator pen to fight over goldfish crackers and juice boxes. We are set up to behave as we do.

The obvious manipulation going on now would be how most decent people feel disgust and horror at the Nazi extermination of primarily Jewish peoples (of course with other groups as well not to be forgotten simply because their numbers were less like the Romani, gay, disabled etc.) during the holocaust. But that very distinctly decent motivation to honor those losses and to never see horror like that again has been weaponized to protect a settler colonial project that many Jewish people oppose. Up is down, right is left. The one has nothing to do with the other when viewed with clarity. The leaders take a grain of goodness and use your decency against you. When facts are muddled and people don’t have time to parse out the details of what truly happened in the history of the situation, the leaders that want to protect their military industrial profit schemes will use your decency against you and confuse you into supporting the clear evil in a situation.

Another example of warping good intention, albeit a very different circumstance over tricking people into backing genocide would be the push in the mid to late 1900’s  promoting autonomy and equality of women in the US. Most (of course not all) have agreed that women deserve to be in the workplace, to have fiscal autonomy along with a whole host of rights that men have enjoyed. But those clear and decent motivations have turned into a situation where women have the “right” to work up to going into labor and often return to their employment in a postpartum time frame shorter than what is allowed for dogs and cats before they can have their offspring adopted out. So if you call out the heartlessness of this, you get branded with people who believe women should not have the right to be in the workplace in a similar manner to men. Basically a desire for equal rights has turned into a ploy to extract the most production out of a human in a cruel fashion, not allowing for reproductive decency. The push is to make women have more children without their consent and to make them work without any mandated paid time off. It’s pretty sickening when you think about it. Again, it took the decent intentions (equal rights) and perverted it to something that only benefits those who look to maintain an increased productivity in the workplace. If men and women fight with each other, negating each other’s humanity, so much the better–the heat is off the government when people act like that. So now it takes two in a household to stay afloat (if that’s even possible) and never mind how many households only have one parent—all this with no adequate safety nets in place. We started with a good intention and it was warped into something cruel and probably very detrimental to the infant’s sense of well-being (and mind you, I think both the parents, if both are involved, should get mandated and paid time off during this important time when trust and other psychological health underpinnings are being formed). It’s a form of abuse for all involved, I’d say.

Again, two very different situations, not making an equivalence between genocide and working up to 40 weeks during pregnancy……but I am simply pointing out the psychological manipulations we are experiencing on every level. Take a decent and noble idea or belief and somehow connect it to a situation that is inherently not the same thing. They gather the support from the empathetic and decent primary notion and pervert it to an elite-only benefit belief system secondary. Leaders tell their citizens what they want them to believe and use inherent traits of goodness and fairness against them until the population is so confused that they will feel the need to dig in deeper when confronted with the cognitive dissonance that comes from cheerleading inhumanity.

Truly this is not unlike the psychological manipulations an abusive family puts its kids through. It’s clearly no wonder that we have so much of the population, confused and open to charlatans who operate in a cult-like fashion. We behave as children because we are left in a state of dependency and fear.

But here’s the thing: we aren’t children and our numbers are incredibly vast. Abusers get away with their behavior until the veil is lifted and a critical mass is achieved. I think those who have experience with narcissists especially know about “the switch” that flips in your mind when the true nature of another is realized. Not only do you recognize the psychopathy in the narcissistic individual, but you notice it much more readily than most in others who exhibit the same traits. It’s as if you’ve been inoculated against bullshit.

This is clearly what we have to strive towards—that is, a clear-eyed survey of reality. The fact that so many young people have recognized the truth of the current genocide gives hope that the mask is slipping. Not only do we have to fight with all our ability against the current war and misery machine the US is promulgating, but we also need to be aware of the manipulation of our good intentions into something clearly different and only advantageous to the parasitic elite. These are the people who would blow up the world for additional wealth today. In short, we need to grow up and stop believing toxic abusers, small and large, because in truth, we are the only adults in the room.

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