Everything I do, I do it for you - Bryan Adams

Look at me Damien, it’s all for you - From the horror classic “The Omen”, where the nanny and disciple of the son of Satan hangs herself in his honor.

Isn’t that us hanging from that rope? The above scene illustrates perfectly the relationship between the ruling elite and everyone else. If you are, say, a miner or a poor third-world union organizer, this death is often literal. For the rest of us, whether we end up pushing paper or pushing a plow, we experience a slow spiritual death from our relationship with this Beast. It’s all for you Damien.

He first comes to us when we’re children. From the first hum, glow and flicker of the television, he moves inside us. The most skillful of pedophiles he never leaves a trace. The violated aren’t even aware that something unholy has taken place. The very first thing he steals from us is our innate creativity and ability to think for ourselves. With constant bombardment of spectacular images on our minds we start to prefer the simulation of life to our own lives. This works perfectly for the maintenance of his world, for our servitude. To survive the emptiness of daily life in his empire we need the digital morphine of television and the television made manifest in the physical world and culture. It’s the gadgets, glimmering lights, constant sexual stimulus, fetish of violence and the manufactured worship of authority. Spectacle.

However, his first visit is just the beginning, the foundation of his lifelong grip on our necks. It’s just mild conditioning. Before we can serve our Dark Lord properly we must have any trace of our wild, free, animal selves beaten out of us. We need to be industrialized.

The Tedium Is the Message: School

Pledge Allegiance kiddies, your about to have your spirits broken.

Single file walking, asking to use the bathroom, bells to trigger a new activity pattern and the introduction of absolute hierarchy are beaten into us, not to develop our creativity, wisdom and self actualization but instead it is to instill in us uniformity, conformity, measurability and most importantly, predictability. This behavior modification is to build perfect consumer/workers to be guided and manipulated for life. It is to prepare us for a life of rules, monotony and being over-worked coupled with crushing dead time. To spend a lifetime doing things we don’t really want to do, serving an entity that we can’t see and can never reach. It’s to live an entire life and never experience being alive. Free creatures could never accept such conditions. That’s why we are pushed through this machine.

We’ve got spirit yes we do.

Though most children “adjust”, move through the machine and serve HIM to the best of their ability (while heavily medicated often times), others resist: the ones that maybe spent “too much” time with Nature, have already seen too much reality to believe the myths or were shielded from the glowing happy-box. In any detention/suspension program, in any school, we find Revolutionaries of everyday life: the creative minds, the smart-ass that mocks the system, the artist with a class chip on her shoulder, the teenager that plays “hooky” to explore in the woods and make-out with his girlfriend, the kid that has already experienced so much coercive violence that he won’t accept one more “authority” figure in his life and the kid that has already been made insane and just has nothing left to lose.

These are the children to be discarded, excluded and destroyed as a sacrifice and a precaution for HIM. They’re to be publicly humiliated and made an example of, to show the good kiddies what happens when you act on your “bad thoughts”.

What is offered is a story of great men that built a paradise for us, protect us from evil and know what is best. We are offered “school spirit” and “support the team” which will later mutate into “my country, right or wrong”, “love it or leave it” and “support the troops”.

Most importantly school is where we get HIS warning: “If you don’t learn to fit into my machine, you are doomed”. School is where the noose is first placed around our necks. Not too tight at first, but his hot breath moans softly to our ears: “I dare you to slip”.

To Protect and to Serve: Work

“I AM A GOOD WORKER. I WORK HARD AND PLAY BY THE RULES. IN MY FREE TIME, I WATCH PROGRAMMING.”

Pause

Imagine your daily life. Whatever you do day to day, imagine that someone waived a magic wand and every one of these items vanished from your life: TV, Ipod, radio, alcohol, magazines, movies, gossip, billboards etc. That image in your head is your real life. Do you like what you see?

Now picture this: Every person in the United States on any given night staring at a television. Now picture all of the televisions vanishing and everyone continuing to stare into the void. This image is our real lives. Talk about a captive audience. If you listen closely you can hear Stalin roll in his grave with hideous envy.

Resume

Our wages are not just rent for our labor energy, but also increments of our time living. We are all going to die and essentially every moment working is a moment of our incredibly short lives extinguished. And like twenty dollar whores, we sell ourselves to HIM so cheaply.

Our wages are then returned to him and not just through taxes and basic essentials. Because we don’t exist in our real lives we must create the simulation of life in the space around us. We need the gadgets, fashion, home décor and “attitude” of the spectacle.

Does your apartment look like Chandler’s or Monica’s?

I’m thinking about getting my hair done like the bassist of Fall Out Boy.

If our personal lives ever start to collapse, this is usually when we finally figure out that we are not “all in this together”. When we get laid off, sick, into an accident, make a catastrophic business decision or we’re just abandoned somehow, there is not a safety net, but instead the noose waiting to catch us.

We go along with all of this because we have been conditioned to identify HIS interests as our own. Whether we are good producers in the work-force, cops or soldiers, we kill ourselves to serve and protect “our” interests: HIS. We working people keep HIS empire financed, cops protect him from us and soldiers protect and expand his “interests” everywhere. The whole world is under occupation.*

The Power of People Compels HIM

HIS power comes from the same place as money created by the Federal Reserve: from nothingness. It comes from our own belief in HIS authority. It comes from the hole remaining in our hearts from the manufactured shame, guilt and self-doubt of HIS system. We are powerless because we feel powerless. We feel ashamed because we don’t measure up to FATHER’S standards. We can never be the people of the Spectacle. The whole structure holds in place because we believe HIM when he tells us, “this is how it has to be, there is no other way and this is for your own good”. If we ever woke up we would simply find a man…with guns.

Conflict Resolution

Damien is in every one of our lives and homes. Nobody wants to face him or even acknowledge his presence in every heart beat of our lives. To acknowledge him we would have to make choices and we would have to act. And every choice is a difficult and terrifying one. Neutrality in this case isn’t neutral because even inaction determines how we are going to live our lives.

Dealing face to face with this Beast right in your home you could:

A. Let him take over your home and cower in the basement living on his scraps and whatever charity he offers when he sees fit or is simply bored.
B. Learn to negotiate with him, which will probably yield results such as he gets to eat your children’s puppy in exchange for you getting to hold the remote (appropriate).

Or…knock him on his ass and kick him the fuck out of your house. Out of our lives, out of our minds, out of our hearts, off of the planet.

Maxwell Black

A Moving Train