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Compared with other life-forms on this planet, the human has little physical strength or build-in weaponry. Yet it has dominion of the Earth. The power of man lies in his ability to acquire, process and exchange information. This information mainly comprises a mental map of the locality in which he lives, plus a 'cerebral database' of information on each member of his social group or community. It is this information which empowers him to form relationships with his peers. Relationships, in turn, empower him to co-ordinate and direct his relatively little physical strength to overwhelming advantage. To the human being, information is power.
In an egalitarian society, this would equip all to live happily ever after. But sadly, some individuals succumbed to that basest of human forces - greed. They wanted control. And the only way to gain control of others is to starve them of information, while holding on to it oneself. In other words - to monopolise information about one's geographic, social and economic environments.
The monopolisation of information has been the foundation of power and oppression throughout history. The recipe was simple: isolate individuals from each other, confiscate their land, force them to move to find work and their needs of life, divide the generations of families, divide communities into mutually isolated families, and above all, keep each and all ignorant of the broader geographic, social and economic picture.
Natural curiosity, which is part of the make-up of the human mind, must sooner or later within any social group give rise to a system of mass education. This results in knowledge being exchanged between contemporaries and being passed on to the next generation. It puts all knowledge into the minds of the people. Uncontrolled, it presents a serious threat to those who would seek to dominate and control society.
The antidote is specialisation. Knowledge is divided into subjects. Any given individual is then encouraged only to study a narrow set of subjects which are semantically adjacent to each other. Nobody must stray far outside his area of specialisation. If he does, each area of study must be mutually isolated. He must gain no clear path of knowledge to connect them. Modern education is thus a conveyor belt for specialists whose knowledge equips them for little else but to perform their intended function as high-technology cogs within their capitalist master's corporate enterprise.
This was evinced well in a corporate information technology project on which I worked. It was a permanent gripe among the different individuals and teams that nobody ever had a clear picture of what the whole thing was about. In my formative naivety, I thought this was a result of bad management or operational oversight. I set out to solve the problem. I unilaterally researched and wrote an overview of the project. I was quickly sidelined and shortly found myself 'strongly encouraged to leave'. It was only years later, in the wisdom of hindsight, that I realised that an overview of what was being built was something which the powers-that-be definitely did not want in the hands of the project teams. Split among separate project teams, the proprietary system knowledge was safe. No person or team had a sufficiently broad view to be able to leave and set up in competition. Nobody had sufficient knowledge to be able to gain control. That is the way they wanted it.
Unfortunately for the capitalist, this freeing and educating of the masses has enabled the masses to think. This has led them to consider their lot in life. It has opened their eyes to the disparity between their lot in life and that of the capitalist elite and other historically privileged social classes.
The result has been the emergence of a political force called socialism. This has empowered the dispossessed many to assemble and organise themselves into a unified force against those few who possess the economic resources necessary for transforming one's labour into one's needs of life. It is a force which until recent times threatened to destroy capitalism. So the capitalist had to find a way to contain and destroy it.
The power of modern transport and telecommunications technology has enabled the masses to maintain their advanced state of self-organisation and hence their political power. This has made it impossible for them to be brought back under the economic yoke of bondage under which they once miserably existed - at least not openly. It had to be done covertly.
The easiest and most effective way to prevent your slave from escaping is to create within his mind the false illusion that he is already free. This is how the capitalist has managed to de-fuse the power of socialism and re-enslave the dispossessed as his poor and willing workers. So the dispossessed worker is a slave but believes he is free. He believes a lie.
It is easy to see through a barefaced lie. The dispossessed masses could not be deceived with barefaced lies. It is far more difficult to see through a carefully orchestrated mixture of lies and truth. The taste of goodness is hard to discern while eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. To hide truth, it is necessary to mix it with lies. But this cannot be done easily. It requires much creativity. It demands a broad base of many exacting skills. These must be organised to work in harmony as a single gigantic machine.
To create this illusion of freedom within the mass-mind, the capitalist has therefore built a vast propaganda machine. It employs the latest and best of mass-media communications technology and expertise. To build and operate this machine requires a vast amount of capital. For the socialist to unmask the falseness of the illusion also requires the use of mass-educational and communications resources. This likewise requires a vast amount of capital. But whereas the capitalist has capital, an assembly of socialists - however large - has only what can be spared out of the minimal wages its members receive from their capitalist master.
The capitalist's propaganda and mass-communications machine is thus destined to be far larger, more powerful and ultimately more effective than anything within the reach of socialist causes. Assisted by expertise and technology which only it can afford, capitalism - no matter how false and deceitful its message may be - is bound to be the winner of the battle for the mass-mind of the people within any nation-state in which it holds sway. Lack of resources renders socialism a lost cause.
Having created the illusion of freedom within the public mind, it is vital to protect it from what could easily destroy it. And that potential destroyer is a thing called truth. Should the truth ever break through to the minds of the dispossessed, it would destroy the illusion which holds them in subjection. The capitalist elite - through their puppet governments - must therefore ensure that no means ever acquires existence through which the truth could be subversively channelled to the public mind.
To do this, the capitalist state must maintain a complete monopoly on the:
Giving away information about yourself in effect grants the recipient a certain increased amount of power over you. It is not something people do willingly or to just anybody. Market researchers can request information from you. However, you do not have to give it, and you do not have to tell them the truth. Only government can force people to give up any and all types of information about themselves. Only government has a mandate to acquire any and all true and accurate information about the individual.
Furthermore, governments do not actually need to ask the individual concerned for the information they require on him. They can just take it from whoever has it. They can collect information from a diversity of sources, be they official, commercial or social. They can bring together pieces of information, which on their own are trivial, but which when combined build a complete dossier on the person concerned. Governments even gather information covertly. They listen in to telephone conversations and intercept mail. They have clusters of supercomputers at government communications centres trawling the world's data highways for politically or commercially sensitive key words and saving the files which contain them for later human examination. They thus pass on commercially advantageous information on foreign competitors to their capitalist paymasters.
Until the 1990s, the resources required to store and organise socially significant quantities of information on individuals were affordable only by governments and corporations. But the personal computer changed all that. Now the lone individual has the means to build vast databases from which he can gain a statistical overview of industries, market sectors, economies, societies, nations, blocs and alliances - and thereby reveal the hidden agendas of governments and their capitalist puppeteers. The individual now possesses information. Consequently, the individual now has power.
The government's answer to this sudden demise of their monopoly on data storage is the Data Protection Act. This forbids every individual to store, on a computer, information on other individuals unless he is registered under the Act. Registration is expensive. It is above what an average individual can afford, and is way beyond the means of anybody on state welfare like myself. Government exempted itself from the Act. It has firmly placed the monopoly to hold social, economic and political information back in the hands of government, allowing large capitalist corporations to register as holders of commercial and financial information relevant to their businesses.
The most important thing which had to be done to protect the illusion of freedom in the public mind was to control the means by which information is disseminated. Any thinking person who might stumble upon the truth had to be prevented from gaining access to the public mind. His 'friends, Britons and countrymen' had to be prevented from 'lending him their ears'. An effective barrier had to be built.
Within an anthropological community, free speech has a natural and direct channel. One is in close physical and social proximity to any and all of one's neighbours. If one has something socially significant to say, then one can 'preach' in the city gate, and any who wish to hear can come and listen. Capitalism's answer to this came by default. Industrial capitalism destroyed the anthropological community by requiring the dispossessed to gravitate into cities to be near its factories and offices. Individuals found themselves away from their natural peers and cut off from their elders. They became isolated in labyrinthine housing estates with no centres of gathering other than the local supermarket car park. One could no longer air one's view at the city gate. It wasn't there any more. In any case, nobody would listen. They wouldn't know who you were. The barrier to peer to peer and peer to community communication was thus established and held firmly in place.
Then along came radio. People could speak and others could listen - at a distance, in the sanctuary of their private rooms. But the government soon put a stop to that. It passed a Telecommunications Act. Until the 1990s (or may be a bit earlier), only the BBC was allowed to broadcast at all. Radio amateurs were allowed to transmit and receive. But they were subject to Draconian restrictions regarding what they could and could not talk about. There was no such thing as citizens band radio until the government was eventually forced to give in under international pressure. People were even restricted as to what they were allowed to listen to! Even now, all that deregulation has achieved is a vast increasing number of commercial stations all pumping out the same puerile programming.
Intellectual access to the public mind is even today available only through two broadcasting organisations - the BBC and Channel 4. Any ordinary person can make themselves heard through these leviathans of broadcasting only if the establishment concerned approves of their being heard and the content of what they want to say. These are no channels of free speech - not, that is, unless you are rich, famous and conventional.
The same is true of the other mass-media. The entire national press is politically driven and opinionated. It is a prime instrument of the powers-that-be for controlling the public mind and upholding its illusion of freedom within the bonds of slavery. It prints only what it - and its masters - want the public to read. The book industry also will only give voice to what it perceives to be acceptable to its market. It is there to make a profit. Hence it publishes only what the majority is likely to buy. Even the scientific press will not publish what does not conform to current thinking in each given subject. You never see any anti-capitalist economic theories aired in the respected financial journals. You never see creationist views expressed in any of the mainstream journals of science.
The right to freedom of speech is effective only for the rich. For the poor, free speech is part of the illusion. The only channel of political expression available to the common man is through his so-called democratic prerogative. But this too is false.
The illusion of individual freedom which the capitalist propaganda machine projects into the popular mind goes under the name of 'democracy'. The supposed safety of this so-called 'government of the people by the people' is captured well in a popular quotation which paraphrases something like...
You can fool most of the people some of the timeBut the sad truth is, you don't need to. All you have to do to get your way is to fool more than half of the people at election time. And this happens no more than once every 4 or 5 years (depending on which so-called Western democracy you live in). With their invincible mass-media propaganda machine, the capitalist elite minority has no trouble fooling at least 50% of the common people during the brief run-up to each election.
You can fool some of the people most of the time
You may fool most of the people most of the time
But you can't fool all of the people all of the time
Democracy is government of the people by the people. It demands and requires a morally educated population. It can be fair and equitable only when each person is equally informed and adept in matters affecting society, and votes on every issue according to what, in clear conscience, he judges to be best for the common good.
The reality, however, is that most people are not experts in matters affecting society, and each in fact votes according to what he perceives will best fulfil his own personal self interest. It is government of the people by a selfish majority who, rather than judge issues responsibly, simply follow like sheep the elitist political opinion vomited upon them daily by the great spin-machine. The result is that, in order to provide the selfish majority with the slightest betterment, any minority can, by default, end up suffering undeserved misery.
An example of this is the savings limit penalty imposed upon the poor. It is seen as saving public money, which is in turn seen as a prelude to reducing tax for the majority taxpayer. But such selfishness always takes a short-term view. In fact, the savings limit penalty locks the poor into poverty by preventing them from accumulating the means of getting themselves off welfare dependency back into economic self-sufficiency. The taxpayer thus ends up supporting them forever. Selfishness is counterproductive in the long run.
In any case, in modern capitalist so-called 'democracies', the ordinary citizen is not even permitted to vote on specific issues. His only 'democratic' prerogative is to vote for whichever of two or three political personalities he wishes to represent him and his interests within a ridiculously small assembly of individuals who will vote on specific issues on his behalf. If the one he voted for does not get elected, then his interests are represented in that assembly by one whose views are probably the very opposite of his own. Therefore, as an individual, he is not truly represented.
Furthermore, the person who represents him is invariably from a minority upper/middle class of elite-educated lawyers. Their incomes, life-styles and social connections isolate them culturally and economically from most of those they govern. They have no common context of life experiences against which to understand the lot of the poor and unemployed. This is true even of those who may have hailed from working class origins. They as individuals are no longer immersed in a working class context. It no longer impinges upon their daily lives. All the intricate daily ramifications of its hardships and constraints rapidly evaporate from their memories.
Yet they have the omnipotent power to enact laws which affect exclusively the poor and unemployed. An example is the savings limit penalty mentioned previously. Those who enacted it have no experience of its effects and ramifications upon the life of somebody like me. They simply have no mental context within which to model its effects upon the lives of those upon whom it is forcibly imposed.
This is not democracy. At best it serves majority self-interest; at worst, it is the idle admiration of a political celebrity. Despite this, the capitalist elite has always managed to sell it as 'true democracy' in which the dispossessed individual is convinced that he has freedom, control, opportunity and property. Thus from the misery of his suburban existence, the labourer becomes so convinced of his freedom that he vigorously defends and - where opportunity presents itself - practices the principles and policies of those who enslave him.
Western 'representative' democracy is not true democracy. It is simply a mechanism for expediting majority self interest. It is a Tyranny of The Majority. Since the mind of this majority is shaped by the mass-media propaganda machine of an elite minority, it is really a Tyranny of The Elite. It is their means of subjugating the masses. This is no different from the ancient feudalism from which this 'democracy' supposedly freed us.
Democracy can work. But for it to do so, two conditions must be met.
The field of influence of the true democratic process cannot therefore extend beyond the bounds of the natural anthropological community. Inter-community affairs must be governed by a different protocol.