The other day I was given an article to read that's being passed around my school. The author is unknown, but I loved the articles, so I figured I'd put them up. I did NOT write these. But it's about time someone did.
A Walk Through Commie High
By: The Yellow Flashlight
This being my first article I will flat out tell you, I HATE the way our prison called Central High is run. Much like our government, the school is gilded, sparkling with a shine of goodness, giving freedoms, liberties. Yet in reality, these "freedoms" are just the same fences moved back an inch.
I can't help but think as I look at the way this school is run, that the "good ol' boys" in charge are trying to make everyone into one type of people. People without opinions. Mindless people who do whatever they are told without questions. This kind of people is easily controlled. Therefore, those whom do not fit the "good ol' boy" stereotype (or do not appear to fit it) are watched closely while the ones who do look good are on their way to Alcatraz. Yes, some people who look good are that way, but many who pose to be good are, in model of the school, simply covered with a thin layer of gold. Rattled with problems underneath.
I can clearly prove my point in that these "not-so-good", though many are nice and good, are pushed down easily. Ex. One: One guy wears a cross, the other a pentagram. Both of these are that person's religious symbol, yet one is a symbol shared by more people thus accepted while the other is deemed offensive. Ex. 2: A seemingly "good ol' boy" (only because he dresses sort of like one) dyes his hair the color of a dirty q-tip. Another person dyes his/her hair blue. Both colors are unnatural hair colors yet more people dye their hair dirty q-tip color than blue so it is legal. That is bullshit to say the least. If such "good" people run the school they would see that favoritism based on religion or dress is completely absurd.
All of these rules here to "better society" only make it weaker. What if the government has lied?(which it has). Would we know about it? I say we wouldn't because organizations like school have made us into a mindless people. Why do you think the American public is getting dumber as I write this? Could these idiotic rules be the reason our great country is able to take away, slowly but surely, our fist amendment rights? Society wants us to put everyone into easy to see boxes-Punks hate this, Christians act this way, Preps are all mean. Why do we insist on burning books rather than read them; hate people before we get to know them? If we let rules, the government, and society as a whole ruin the way we are without fighting or, in the least, finding a happy medium, we will become like the people of the U.S.S.R. A people without personal rights. Brainwashed. I, for one, refuse to let this happen without telling others what is going on. That is the reason I am writing in this paper, for if I change even only one opinion, that is one more person that can help me fight back.
The System Works
By: Ran Prieur
A couple weeks ago in Montreal, an old man fell on the subway tracks and a young woman jumped down and pulled him to safety seconds before the oncoming train would have killed him; the transit authority condemned the woman for violating the rule against going on the tracks. America's military and intelligence agencies seem to have had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and let them happen, or at the very least they were guilty of spectacular incompetence; after the attacks, these institutions were not investigated, but made more secret and given greater powers. American airports began tedious and intrusive searches of ordinary flyers, confiscating harmless items like tweezers and nail files; but when testing of security systems continued to show that skilled people could get bombs and guns through, this testing was restricted. Is this insane? Is it stupid? Incompetent? Irrational? Should we be shocked? Confused? No! It all makes perfect sense, and we shouldn't be any more surprised than if we were on a battlefield and the other side shot at us. The system is quite sane, quite intelligent, and knows exactly what it's doing. We are just stubbornly refusing to understand it. "The system," the global net of governments, corporations, technologies, beliefs, and habits in which we are all more or less trapped, presents itself as a collaboration of decent and sensible people trying to do what's best and not always succeeding. The system accepts mind dissenters who lamely complain that it's run by idiots, or lazy people, or greedy people, making mistakes or doing crimes, and that if it weren't for this "human nature" the whole setup would work fine.
The system does not accept the idea I'm suggesting here: That real human nature is extremely malleable and wants to be intelligent and good, but that it has been twisted into its present unnatural shape for sinister purposes. That greed and stupidity are more effects of our situation than causes of it. That powerful people who know each other and conspire in secret to get more powerful are only the surface of a deeper phenomenon. That what we think of as normal human society is, from its very foundation, an evil collective consciousness, a giant brain made up of people, like our brains are made of neurons that have no view of the action of the whole. And that it is evil because of its motive. What the system does, rationally, sanely, skillfully, predictably, relentlessly, is concentrate power: take power and awareness away from every living thing and give power to artificial central "authority," and increase the strength, the perfection, the depth and breadth of central detached authority's knowledge and control.
Why are we in a system that behaves this way? How did it get started? What is its deeper meaning, or what are its unseen relations? These are metaphysical questions with answers I can barely guess at. All I'm trying to do here is help people get out of indignant denial and calmly face the horrifying truth of the system in action.
Look back at the example I began with. The system doesn't care if an old man dies. But if it can get people to put obedience to a rule ahead of their natural instinct to care for each other, even if it means allowing a horrible death, then it has won a great victory. Multiply this by a few million: War and genocide are not what we get when the system fails, but when it is most successful.
The system doesn't care if airplanes crash and buildings collapse -- in face it wants airplanes to crash and buildings to collapse if that will get it what it really wants: for people to consent to degrading searches, to go along with ridiculous rules, to deny their inner strength and vision so they can respect and obey people with titles or uniforms, which mark them as the channels of still "higher" powers.
From the system's perspective, the "zero tolerance" fad in schools is not to prevent violence, but to train people to follow rules even when they seem totally insane, to obediently suspend, expel, or arrest harmless kids for bread knives or chocolate guns.
The "war on drugs" is not to stop people from selling or using addictive substances, but, by criminalizing very common behaviors, to sort the population into the obedient and the disobedient, to put the disobedient in a lower class (prison laborers, convicted felons who can't vote or get a good job), to make these two classes hate, fear, or resent each other, and to make the obedient be even more obedient our of fear of falling into the criminal class.
The medical system is not to heal or prevent sickness and injury, but to divert attention from the causes of sickness and injury, to suppress cheap effective treatments, to steer people into treatments that require more money and thus more obedience to the larger system, and in the best case to get people to submit to extremely painful and expensive treatments that kill more often than they cure, just because it's what they're supposed to do. The tax system is not to collect money for the government, but to get people to consent to give money to a central authority, and also to get them to fill their minds with a vast and complicated system of rules.
Environmental regulations are not to save the earth (which is still being steadily murdered) but to use the earth to make people support and obey regulations. Of course we need to stop cutting down forests and damming rivers, but the point is how the system channels this need to feed itself, getting millions of liberals to emotionally sympathize with unforgiving exercises of state violence against loggers and farmers.
If the system can feel excitement, it's really excited about ecology, even more than about terrorism. The closer the earth gets to dying, the more people will go along with any draconian use of authority to save it. If the system can dream, maybe it dreams of a global green party ecocracy, where people are jailed for eating meat or not recycling. Of course, the earth will have to be prevented from recovering, kept constantly in crisis to keep people in furious fearful obedience.
There are non-authoritarian bottom-up ways to save the earth, to heal sickness, to get out of patterns of addiction and exploitation and violence. But the system will tell us that these ways are naïve or irresponsible or dangerous, and it will try to head them off or overrun them by copying their goals or surface appearances onto its own structures, to keep those structures standing on top of us.
I'm thinking of the hippie and punk movements, where raw bursts of freedom were channeled into styles and frozen into status systems. I'm thinking of thisist or thatist intellectual movements, where wild thoughts are herded into theories and chained into abstruse books of ideas about ideas. I'm thinking of populist movements and near-revolutions, where people are fighting to be free of their rulers and owners, but are bought off with new rights and regulations, for which they are dependent on the system, and through which the system becomes just barely tolerable so it can keep going.
I'm even thinking of full-on revolutions, which disprove the common belief that our oppressors are simply "bad" elite people or "bad" varieties of central management. Many revolutions have killed the former rulers and toppled what passed for the system, and after every one a new corrupt elite and a new oppressive system fell into place.
Into place in what? Like seeing the bottom of a stream in the water patterns on top, we can see something deeper lurking beneath the patterns of history. What is it? Here's another opening for occult thinking, but I'm going to stay with psychology: Authoritarian societal patterns come from authoritarian emotional patterns, from the habit of identifying with the controlling side in any conflict, pavement over weeds, police over outlaws, conquerors over natives, management over workers over slackers; from the habit of imagining "self" against "other" and defining your "self" as your bank balance and social status more than your feelings, your authority more than your friendships, your religion or country or local sports team more than your own body. These habits keep the system going through the most extreme revolutions, and the system keeps these habits going in every generation through parents and teachers quite rationally making kids compatible with the only world they know. We're stuck in a horrible loop. How can we get out?
We get out one little step at a time, but first we have to understand "out," and want to get out, and believe it's possible. The system tells us that falling to the system is good: It's good for a "failed" artist, with a small local audience, to become a "successful" artist whose works are duplicated for millions of strangers through industrial technology to enrich corporations. It's good for a fringe idea, learned with excitement by free explorers, to become a dominant idea forcibly taught to bored inmates of schools. It's good for an enhanced sense of right and wrong to become a new law, enforced by the threat of violent punishment by police and prisons. It's good, as you get older, to own more expensive stuff requiring more reserved behavior, to adjust your tastes so you're easier to bother and harder to satisfy.
Or, even when this path is not good, it's supposed to be inevitable. A capitalist version of this doctrine is "What doesn't grow dies." But it's not true! There are shops and pubs in Europe that have stayed tiny for centuries while proud corporations have bloated and collapsed. Increasing in scale and detachment and centralization and dominance is not the path of survival, but the path of prolonged suicide, and we don't have to follow it.
It's not quite that simple. We were all born and raised on a runaway train; we can't get off and survive, and we can't stop it from crashing. But a lot of us can survive the crash and learn why and how to stay off the next rain. Our bad path has good paths within it. There are people who stay radical their whole lives, or even get more and more outside the system. And there are strong competing systems everywhere that we don't even recognize as systems because they're non-authoritarian: gift economies invisible to the taking economy, networks of friends linked by empathy not exploitation, goal-less leader-less movements riding aliveness wherever it takes them, and the whole infinite system, which we patronize as "nature," in which our exalted history is only a little aberration.
Does the forest have a king or a class of experts or a list of rules deciding which plant can grow where? No! They all work it out amongst themselves, and the result is a billion times more complex than our tinker-toy corporations and governments. It's a vain projection for us to speak of "laws" of nature -- I think nature has agreements and understandings. And our civilization is not killing the earth for human good or evolution, or out of greed or clumsiness or ignorance. It's killing the earth out of jealousy, because it knows the earth has a better system. Wait and see.
