Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.
As Michael Parenti once put it:
“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”
Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.
I don’t believe this crap for a second - they can afford all the security they need to protect themselves. I think this is an attempt at manipulation to keep us at bay for a while until we cool off & resume living like before this happened, so they can continue doing what they’ve been doing all the while knowing that they shouldn’t push much further for now.
Let’s face it - human attention spans are short, and in three months or so this will be pushed back in most people’s minds as they continue dealing with their day-to-day struggles. This messaging is designed to make us feel “heard” so we wait to see what happens rather than risk our lives on taking further action, but after a while nothing will have changed & it’ll all be the same as before.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of Luigies there are. And I think this probably has woke a lot of them up.
This is the real answer. The rich know it’s just like school shootings. One can trigger several in a short period and they’re terrified of that.
They’re not worried only about stochastic terrorism. They’re also worried that we’ll become an organized & militant labor movement and gain some political power. Or worse still, that we’ll seize the means of production and depose them.
I don’t believe this crap for a second
Which crap don’t you believe?
This messaging is designed to make us feel “heard”
Whose messaging? Michael Parenti’s? Caitlin Johnstone’s? Peter Thiel’s? Piers Morgan’s?
after a while nothing will have changed & it’ll all be the same as before.
As I’ve already said elsewhere in this post, one difference will be that the expansion of the security state/police state will be accelerated.
Having been both military and security, I will tell you that while military, my position was MUCH harder for me to ignore. As security, I could easily say “fuck this, it isnt worth it.” In the military, the job (in ones head) is the security of the nation and the people around you. As security, you’re more likely to have a family, and at some point you’re like “I wanna see my family again, $20/hr isn’t worth not seeing my kid again”. As security, you’re essentially a mercenary. You have no ideological points for it, it’s just a check. Security almost never has a situation where it becomes “this issue is something worth dying for”. That’s simply absurd. Even if I’m making $50/hr for Jeff bezos, there’s an amount of discontent that I’m not willing to deal with just for his safety, and that’s before you consider your own personal opinions/ideals/objections. Historically speaking, buying security is iffy at best.
Remember two things:
- Their security are working class, no matter how you slice it. They only way you can avoid them turning on you/abandoning you is if they have undying loyalty to you. And that is very rare and very hard to maintain.
- Capitalism is inherently unsustainable. So collapse can only be delayed, not avoided. Eventually, the plethora of self-defeating aspects of Capitalism will become more than any of the elite can suppress or mitigate. Hopefully labor is ready at that point to rise up and take back what has been stolen, and recreate the institutions as a socialist structure, owned and controlled by the workers.
