The Systematic Theft of Individual Power
A meandering look at the burdens imposed on us by the control regime.
Historically, rituals regulated societies, in part by reducing ambiguous social information to binary signals. Roy Rappaport termed this regulative process the cybernetics of the holy. His cybernetics depend on particularly defined ultimate sacred postulates and cosmological axioms, which don't really exist in the modern world. Still, they're interesting to consider.
This article by Connor Wood considers initiation rites. Here's a quote:
Roy Rappaport believed that ritual was something like the action potential of human cultures. Namely, ritual is a digital processing system that takes the messy, unclear data of social life, transforms it into binary signals, and sends those nice clear signals into the world.
A good example is puberty rites and initiation ceremonies. ... In initiation rites, cultures take a continuous, analog physiological process and ritually transform it into a digital – that is, binary – shift in social roles. One day, you're a boy. The next day, you go out to the bush, suffer through an initiation rite, and BAM – you’re a man. ... The amount of noise in the signal of social life is reduced. Of course biologically nothing has changed, but socially your expectations about your role and how you're supposed to behave are irrevocably shifted. Out of a whole ton of vague, ambiguous biological information, an initiation rite distills a single, crisp social signal. Without a ritual acknowledgment of your transition, you might never be quite sure whether you’re a boy, whether you’re a man, whether you’re somewhere in between, or what you’re supposed to act like.
Noise, but no clear signal
In the US today, we tell ourselves and each other a wide variety of stories about ourselves and each other. Few things are sacred, and universal truths have long been cast aside in favor of endlessly subjective perspectives that border on the solipsistic. The upside of this is increasing acceptance of diversity. The downside is that our species' evolved ritual mechanisms for reducing social noise to meaningful signals no longer exist.
This has weird implications. In a sense, the absence of initiation rites has trapped many in perpetual adolescence. Society at large recognizes passage into adulthood only with an impersonal change in legal status. Yet we evolved over countless generations to expect something more visceral and personal and overall clear. Without this clarity, people flounder.
In this and other areas, there's plenty of noise, but no meaningful signal. And because society is heterogeneous, attempting to revive old rituals in society at large is a non-starter, since successful rituals are inherently bound to the unique cultures they regulate. Removing their cultural context makes the information they produce less meaningful.
Unlike societies throughout history, our society is not regulated by Rappaport's cybernetics of the holy. It is instead regulated by material power. Our control regime isn't beholden to its subjects in the same way a tribal chieftain's government is. It rules over us mechanically, with people, resources, and technologies.
In Rappaport's scheme, any leader's rule can be challenged on religious grounds by a prophetic movement that reinterprets an ultimate sacred postulate or cosmological axioms to recast the leader as unholy. This rebellion creates an alternative reality wherein the leadership group no longer has the support of the gods. It's essentially an attempt to reorganize the complex information system that governs the tribe.
I would argue that we're primed for this manner of political change in a similar way as we're primed for initiation rituals. Some tribal part of us believes that the control regime derives its power from us, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Voting systems are a great trick for convincing this part of us that we're participating in important governance rituals. But voting can't change the control regime. It can only change the personalities speaking for it in a given moment.
The Disappearance of Counterculture
There were once serious activist movements in the US. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the environmental movement all created meaningful change in their day. The civil rights movement brought us a list of societal reforms, including desegregation and the Civil Rights Act. The antiwar movement made public the abuses of the military-industrial complex, going so far as to break into an FBI office to bring evidence of COINTELPRO to light. The environmental movement gave rise to the EPA, as well as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
These are solid accomplishments, brought about by a counterculture that has long since disappeared. There were echoes of its anti-establishment spirit in the WTO protests of 1999, the Occupy Wall Street movement a decade later, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations more recently, but these groups accomplished relatively little. And today, there is no meaningful counterculture in the US.
Fifty years ago, a single person with a high school diploma could own a house, own a car, support a spouse, raise kids, and send those kids to college on the income from a single, working class job. Since then, wages have barely gone up while the cost of living has skyrocketed. This trend represents the wholesale theft of the economic power of individuals in our country. I don't think it's a coincidence that this theft of our economic power coincides with the disappearance of efficacious political counterculture.
As our economic power was being stolen, the powers that be began locking up far more people, and for far longer. So the death of American counterculture was accompanied by both economic decline and the rise of mass incarceration. Since 9/11, an emergent technological repression has been added to the more traditional repression of dissident voices by legal and economic means. Mass surveillance replaced privacy and government monitoring of activist groups intensified. These days, merely publishing true information can be a serious crime. Just ask Julian Assange.
The War on Drugs
The War on Drugs has always been a farce. On the supply side, government entities like the CIA have long protected drug traffickers and profited from the drug trade. At street level, prohibition has fed countless people to the incarceration industry, with the evidence against them sometimes falsified. The history of this subject is shocking. Some of it is unbelievable.
Consider this statement from 25-year veteran of the DEA Michael Levine:
The CIA and the Department of State were protecting more and more politically powerful drug traffickers around the world: the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan, the Bolivian cocaine cartels, the top levels of Mexican government, Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian drug dealers and politicians, and others. Media's duties, as I experienced firsthand, were twofold: first, to keep quiet about the gush of drugs that was allowed to flow unimpeded into the US; second, to divert the public's attention by shilling them into believing the drug war was legitimate by falsely presenting the few trickles we were permitted to indict as though they were major "victories," when in fact we were doing nothing more than getting rid of the inefficient competitors of CIA assets.
The CIA didn't just support trafficking, it fed drugs to unsuspecting victims with sometimes tragic results. When the CIA was experimenting on people in its MKULTRA program, it enlisted a former federal narcotics agent named George White to run Operation Midnight Climax. In a letter to his former employer reflecting on his career, White is quoted as saying, "It was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest." The full scope of MKULTRA is unknown as the CIA destroyed most of the program's records in the 1970s.
Statements by cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar's son suggest that the kingpin was working for the CIA all along. And way back in 1972 it came out that the military had been smuggling heroin into the US using the corpses of fallen soldiers. But the public didn't get a glimpse into the full scope of government drug trafficking until 1996, when Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series was published by the San Jose Mercury News.
A Glimpse into the Machine
Webb's reporting drew a straight line from the crack epidemic in California to CIA-backed militants in Nicaragua. Behind closed doors, according to The Intercept, the CIA saw the situation as a "nightmare." But they didn't have to do much damage control directly, as the mainstream press ferociously went after Webb's reporting. Here's a quote from the Intercept piece about it:
Thanks in part to what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as "a ground base of already productive relations with journalists," the CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter.
Once his reputation was destroyed, Gary Webb died. His death was reported as a suicide, which many people found fishy, because he'd been shot twice in the head. Government efforts to investigate Webb's claims all look like textbook cover-ups to me. Whether he took his own life or not, the powers that be were clearly allied against him.
Narco State
Using 9/11 as a pretext for invasion, the US government transformed Afghanistan from a place where heroin production was banned by the Taliban into a total narco state. Once this happened, the crack epidemic gave way to the opioid epidemic in the US, and I'm not sure that's a coincidence. Meanwhile, the drug war marches on.
As a matter of routine, police use drug test kits known to produce a high percentage of false positives to "prove" that criminal defendants possessed drugs. And law enforcement labs have been embroiled in major scandals when they've been found systematically falsifying evidence. A single case in Massachusetts involved the falsification of 23,000 tests which led to drug convictions. That might not be as bad as the FBI faking an entire branch of forensic science to secure convictions, but it's still pretty bad.
The War on Drugs is a racket designed in part to increase the price of drugs so intelligence agencies can fund black budget projects. Prohibition obviously doesn't work, as more people than ever before are dying of overdoses in the US. Portugal long ago decriminalized all drugs. According to The Guardian:
Portugal’s policy rests on three pillars: one, that there’s no such thing as a soft or hard drug, only healthy and unhealthy relationships with drugs; two, that an individual’s unhealthy relationship with drugs often conceals frayed relationships with loved ones, with the world around them, and with themselves; and three, that the eradication of all drugs is an impossible goal.
This policy has led to good public health outcomes, but I don't think it goes far enough. If the goal is to stop the murderous cartels and their government supporters, then legalizing all drugs should seriously be considered. Legalize the drugs and regulate the industries, forcing cartels to either turn legit or go out of business. In this respect, the legalization of cannabis in many states and decriminalization of psychedelic medicine in some jurisdictions are small steps in the right direction.
Medicated
In our nonsense world devoid of meaningful rituals, some turn to illegal drugs for psychological relief, but many others turn to legal drugs. Something like twenty percent of our population experiences a mental illness in a given year, with one in four of these cases considered serious mental illness. For all this illness, we're prescribed a staggering quantity of psychiatric drugs.
According to this website, "In 2020, more than 252 million prescriptions were prescribed for mental health conditions. ... The total cost spent on psychiatric medications was more than $15.6 trillion, lagging closely behind hormones or hormone modifiers (15.8. trillion)." That's a tremendous amount of money. For reference, if a country had a GDP of $15.6 trillion, it would be the third largest country on the planet.
I'd like to assume that most people are correctly medicated, yet the sheer size of the drug market creates powerful incentives for Big Pharma to encourage over-diagnosing illnesses and over-prescribing meds to treat those illnesses. If our society is indeed paying this much for our psych meds, and if so many of us are living with mental illness, that reflects poorly on our social ecology. We don't live in a society that prioritizes psychological wellness, and this increases our culture's baseline mental health burden.
Toxic Food
Bioengineering could benefit our species immensely. Instead, we're accidentally starting pandemics with bioweapons research. And we've contaminated much of our food supply with genetically engineered crops, with regulators consistently ignoring legitimate safety concerns. GMO foods may be causing widespread health problems on their own. But most genetic modifications are done to improve a plant's pesticide tolerance, so GMO crops sharply increase pesticide use. Have any illnesses become more prevalent since the mid-late 1990s, when GMO foods containing pesticide residues became commonplace?
US regulators have been fully captured by chemical companies and Big Food. Not every country is playing along. Countries that have banned GMOs include: France, Germany, Austria, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Poland, Denmark, Malta, Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Algeria, Madagascar, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Bhutan, Saudi Arabia, Belize, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. Despite US attempts to sabotage the process, Mexico is banning GMO corn by 2024 and looking at banning glyphosate as well.
From the Non GMO Project website:
Since the first genetically modified corn was released in 1996, another 243 distinct varieties of GMO corn have been created. In 2022, GMO corn made up an estimated 93% of the corn planted in the U.S., occupying more than 86 million acres. ... The most common traits engineered into genetically modified corn are herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Herbicide-tolerant (HT) corn is immune to weedkillers such as glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Farmers who grow HT corn can spray Roundup directly on their crops without harming the corn. HT crops have led to a 15-fold increase in herbicide use and contributed to the rise of herbicide-resistant weeds. Corn that is modified for insect resistance is known as "Bt corn," after the toxin Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt corn produces insecticide in every cell in the corn plant, poisoning insect pests that eat the corn. Because the insecticide is inside the cells, it can’t be washed away. More than 87% of corn grown in North America is genetically modified "stacked" trait varieties that carry both HT and Bt traits.
Once Upon a Time
Organic alternatives to chemical agriculture exist. All farming was organic, once upon a time. In theory, the whole world could switch to organic and we'd all be healthier for it. In practice, however, the situation is more complicated. Organic farming requires slightly more land for the same yields. Yield per acre can be increased with special growing techniques, but these are labor intensive.
On the surface, organic agriculture is more expensive. But the underlying costs of chemical agriculture may change this equation. Glyphosate, an herbicide that probably causes cancer, basically saturates the US. The overall healthcare costs resulting from chemical agriculture are immense. And from an ethical standpoint, it seems like we should maybe try following a path that doesn't make us sick.
In the environment, pesticide use has ushered in an insect apocalypse, which is problematic because ecosystems depend on insects. The financial cost of the insect apocalypse is impossible to calculate. And killing off important lifeforms seems ethically bankrupt. Maybe we should stop doing this.
Built upon a foundation of GMO crops and pesticides is a horrifying 'conventional' meat and dairy industry. Standard industry practices are so disturbing that anyone who sees them would be grossed out. Activists continually try to expose the public to these gross realities of factory farms, but special laws called ag-gag laws make it illegal for them to do so.
Personally, I have been eating organic for years, since first realizing that eating organic made cluster headaches less likely. For the same reason, I avoid many additives, preservatives, and processed foods in general. I do eat meat, but very selectively. Fortunately, my neighborhood accommodates this restricted diet.
Big Money
In the legacy economy, central bankers set benchmark interest rates to adjust the demand for credit in our debt-based system. New money is created as the principle amounts of loans while no new money is created to cover the interest on these loans, so there is never enough money in the system to repay all of the debts that are owed. This and predatory financial industry practices guarantee the artificial scarcity of money in most accessible parts of the economy. The unaccountable private companies that mediate this system keep the poor poor and articulate structural racism.
In a measurable sense, economic control is physical control, mediated by psychology. The theft of the economic power of the individual in recent decades appears even more grievous in this light. Practically speaking, money is a social resource that allows people to solve their problems and meet their needs. And because of the mind-body connection, our financial situations are literally programmed into our biology. Financial losses activate the part of the brain that processes fear and pain. Here's a quote from a Science Daily piece on this:
The researchers found surprising similarities between the response to financial losses and a system that they had previously identified for responding to pain, which they believe allows the brain to predict imminent harm and allow immediate defensive action to be taken. "Clearly, none of us want to lose money in the same way that none of us want to experience pain," says Dr Seymour. "It would make sense that the way that we learn to predict and hence avoid both of them should be linked." The reward and defensive systems relating to financial loss were very similar to motivational systems previously identified in rats, which suggests they have hijacked an evolutionarily old system connected to avoiding fear and pain.
Some of the ways this plays out are described in 'The symbolic power of money.' From the abstract:
Six studies tested relationships among reminders of money, social exclusion, and physical pain. Interpersonal rejection and physical pain caused desire for money to increase. Handling money (compared with handling paper) reduced distress over social exclusion and diminished the physical pain of immersion in hot water. Being reminded of having spent money, however, intensified both social distress and physical pain.
There's also evidence that lacking power impairs executive function and that poverty impedes cognitive function. So the science suggests that financial standing is programmed into our bodies, and that low financial standing gets in the way of thinking clearly. The Cognitive Burden of Poverty is well-documented.
The US government supports this legacy economy in part by requiring taxes to be paid in dollars. Even if most of us decided to adopt a different common currency, we would all still need to use dollars to meet our tax obligations. This aspect of the economy is an immovable object. The credit system isn't an immovable object. It could be discarded entirely and replaced with a decentralized network of blockchain solutions.
Politics
By 2019, half of US adults had at least one chronic health condition. By 2019, we were living contrary to our evolutionary design and eating toxic food while an unaccountable elite pulled our strings by economic means. We were decades into the War on Drugs and had long since given up on stopping the powers that be from waging new wars. And it was becoming clear that our politics were broken.
In 2016, DNC documents revealing Democratic Party corruption were apparently leaked to Wikileaks by DNC staffer Seth Rich and establishment media claimed without evidence that the leak was the product of a Russian hack. Here's some great audio of Seymour Hersh talking about that situation. In my opinion, that moment in time is when mainstream media completely went off of the rails.
Initially, major news outlets colluded with the Clinton campaign to undermine Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary election. After engineering public opinion to rig the primary, the media tried to stop the Trump machine and could not. When the election was over, things didn't go back to normal. They instead got weirder and weirder, particularly after the pandemic began.
Society's response to the pandemic was ridiculous, but it was also instructive, particularly in an economic sense. Globally, most of the money governments spent on economic stimulus went directly to billionaires. According to the Financial Times:
As the virus spread, central banks injected $9 trillion into economies worldwide, aiming to keep growth alive. Much of that stimulus went into financial markets, and from there into the net worth of the ultra-rich. The total wealth of billionaires worldwide rose by $5 trillion to $13 trillion in 12 months, the most dramatic surge ever registered on the annual list compiled by Forbes magazine.
This is sad yet unsurprising. Here in the US, a primary function of government over the last fifty years has been to take money from average people and give it to the already-wealthy. As Bernie Sanders wrote, "Over the past 47 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $50tn in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American society to the top 1%." This redistribution of wealth is ignored almost completely by mainstream discourse.
At the same time, the corporate world made a system-wide choice to engage in price gouging. Costs are increasing for everything because companies across the board are raising prices while enjoying record profits. A Guardian analysis last year shed light on the situation:
The analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings for 100 US corporations found net profits up by a median of 49%, and in one case by as much as 111,000%. Those increases came as companies saddled customers with higher prices and all but ten executed massive stock buyback programs or bumped dividends to enrich investors. ... Commerce department data [shows] corporate profits rose 35% during the last year and are at their highest level since 1950. Inflation, meanwhile, rose to 8.5% year over year in March.
A Better Path Forward
Our basic circumstances aren't ideal. We evolved to live in tribal societies regulated by religious rituals, yet find ourselves in a world regulated by impersonal institutions and market forces. Our instincts and ancestral memories about how to create change in our leadership structure don't map to the landscape of modern society.
The counterculture that emerged to challenge the powers that be in the 1960s was systematically attacked and eventually destroyed. This coincided with the theft of the average worker's relative earning power and the commencement of the War on Drugs. Then came the poisoning of the food supply with pesticides and the mass medication. The explosion of chronic illness and the massive upward redistribution of wealth. The insect apocalypse. On top of all of this, the pandemic brought us accelerated technological repression and media manipulation.
I have to believe that there's a reasonable path forward from here. On a policy level, I'd support universal healthcare and Universal Basic Income; an end to prohibition and the demilitarization of public safety; a total overhaul of the food system and a new military commitment to peace. None of these things are impossible, but they're all impossible at this time. We can't fight the power, but perhaps we can displace it.
Realistically, before we can meaningfully respond to the dystopia that's been foisted upon us by the control regime, we need to reclaim the economic power that was stolen from us. We face technological repression, but technological empowerment is also at our fingertips. Today, we share and coordinate as never before. Tomorrow, we'll be partnering with AI in all sorts of ways. In other words, all of the tools necessary to organize a new counterculture are accessible. A new counterculture could technically arise.
I think such a counterculture is already forming, not as a homogeneous mass, but as a network of smaller, specialized social networks. The shameless lying by officials and the media about covid drove many to question the official story and to seek out others of like mind. Right now, all of these people are finding each other.
Counterculture probably isn't the right word for the network that's emerging. Comprised largely of the alienated and the rudderless, this network isn't so much a movement as a wildly diverse crowd of people all separately trying to free themselves from the powers that be. My distant hope is that this will lead to the abandonment of legacy systems in favor of more equitable alternative systems.
More immediately, there seems to be great demand for sensemaking. These days, making sense of what's happening and what to do about is more than a full time job. It's an impossible task. At least, it can seem that way while enduring the baseline burden the control regime imposes upon us. If we can free ourselves from some of this burden, we'll have more energy to devote to sensemaking.
Importantly, sensemaking has a somatic dimension. Our physical bodies tell their own stories. Yet society is filled with people who can't feel their own bodies. Like, they don't even know how to listen to their biology, the same biology that mediates their connection to the ecologies they inhabit. This absence of awareness is largely manufactured for political and economic reasons in my opinion. But its origin is less important than the question of what to do about it.
These days, I think that one of the best things people can do to make sense of the world is to get fully into their bodies and listen to the messages that are waiting for them there. Oftentimes, what they'll find is information regarding the toxicity of things that they've been conditioned to consider normal. Common foods. Chemical perfumes. EM radiation hotspots. Modern construction materials that bleed formaldehyde and other poisons. This list could go on forever.
There are myriad paths society could take from here. Most of these are undesirable, some frighteningly so. Despite this, if our public discourse gets better at making sense of our situation and choices, more desirable paths should become apparent. This is the direction I think we should be heading in.
For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.