I will likely have more to say later, but for now I want to point to the mindset inherent in the commodification of objects, the mass production of identical objects. You can go to Walmart and get this t-shirt or that t-shirt, but you can’t get one that is custom. If you want something truly unique, go to a Flea Market and get one airbrushed on the spot. Go to an individual.
I think there is this latent idea bred into Americans from birth that ideas can and should be like manufactured objects. You pick this one or that one, but you never fashion your own. You take what is out there, and make it your own. You buy it. You buy into it. You consume it, make it a part of your ideational furniture.
In order, therefore, to make everyone a fucking idiot, all you have to do is create Pattern 1 and Pattern 2, and tell people they have to choose. You can have any kind of politics you want, as long as it is either Democrat–as expressed by what Democrat leaders are saying–or Republican, as expressed by what Republican Party leaders are saying. Anything else is ridiculous. Those products do not exist. They will not be made for you. You have to make your own.
Trump is unique. He is his own creation. And he does not fit either pattern at all. His danger to the System is precisely that his very possibility–that someone outside the System could come to exist inside the System–calls into question what were very tidy lines, what was an easily manipulable system.
Do you really think the Power Elite CARE who is in power, between owned Republicans and owned Democrats? If they put one of the Republicans in power, like George W. Bush, they get credibility for “national security”, and thus are able to push through a program of Orwellian surveillance, which is what happened.
If they get a Barack Obama, they get to expand drastically the power of the government, and teach people to depend on the State. Either way they win. If they fight wars against foreign enemies, they own the arms companies. If they fight “poverty” or “racism” or “injustice”, they own the companies that get the contracts.
You can’t pick a “Pret a porter” idea off the shelf and credibly present yourself as someone who is doing any thinking at all. And this applies to esoteric or off-beat, or uncommon ideas like Anarchism or Communism. This is just going to a boutique store which sells hard to fine items. You are still buying off the shelf. You are still buying, and buying into, someone else’s ideas.
This idea, that you should be discouraged, functionally, practically, from thinking for yourself, is the root idea of totalitarianism. This idea has entered our cultural world through Consumerism, through the replication of the consumer ethos in all parts of our lives.
Brown University, I think it was, recently conducted then suppressed a study seeming to show that many kids nowadays who decide they are “trans” were in reality manipulated by social media. They weren’t “born that way”. They were not even bred into it. They saw something on the shelf they decided to try on for a time, perhaps to buy, and certainly to rent, prepackaged.
I can see how transgenderism could easily be seen as bucking the conformity all around us. But it, too, is conformity, merely to different ideas. Punks dressed like punks. They were readily recognizable as such. “Rebels” dress like rebels.
It is very hard to think for yourself. It is hard to think at all.
But it is made exponentially harder when you operate from a subliminal suggestion that all the important ideas, all the best ideas, all the accurate perceptions, will be arrayed on a shelf for you, in a line for you, like so many willing prostitutes at a brothel, and that your only job is to choose from among them.
None of us being God, there is always something even our best minds have missed. Always remember this.