So how is the population kept coincidentally "divided into two ideologically opposed camps of equal size?" As Caitlin explains, the rich and powerful exploiters, "the worst people in the world," hereafter oppressors without scare quotes, control the communication media and through the media enjoy what Antonio Gramsci called "cultural hegemony." Using this "cultural hegemony," they convince some people that all individuals have unalienable rights including property rights, that a collective is the same as a person and must have all the rights of an individual person and that the power differential between powerful collectives and powerless individuals is totally fair because after all, collectives are people too. They call that capitalism. They convince other people it's OK if nobody has any property rights at all, that government can legitimately redistribute property and that redistribution should make material comforts (property) more equal, no matter how much or how little an individual works to produce those comforts. They call that socialism or communism depending on how close the distribution is to equal. Those are the two ideologies we must choose from. Nothing in between is permissible.
Naturally, people whose income is above the median tend to gravitate toward what those with "cultural hegemony" have defined as "capitalism," while those whose income is below the median gravitate to communism or a milder form of redistribution called socialism. Since the median is the point at which those above are equal in number to those below, this coincidentally yields two groups of almost exactly the same size.
The oppressors further divide us by corrupting Gramsci's ideas, defining pseudo "oppressor" groups who oppress target "oppressed" groups such as whites vs POC, men vs women, cisgendered hetero vs LGBTQ+. This serves two purposes. First, it sets these groups against one another, further dividing the hoi polloi. Second, it distracts these "oppressors" and "oppressed" from the real oppressors (guess who).
The oppressors have been very successful with this divide and rule strategy until recently, but they are losing control because speech on the internet has become quite cheap, and dissidents have found ways to broaden their audiences in spite of the existence of collectives like Facebook, Twitter and Google. In addition, as Aesop said, "Liars are not believed even when they tell the truth." Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who believe in the ideologies favored by the oppressors and fail to see other possibilities. An example is those who fail to see the possibilities of a system where individuals retain their natural born rights but the rights and privileges of groups are sharply curtailed. Such folk are not quite red-pilled yet, though some think they are. We're working on it.
My understanding of cultural hegemony is shallow, but it seems to be an important insight into the obvious strategy of “divide and conquer.”
Ideologies divide us and keep us at each others’ throats, while the rulers rob us blind, collect their rents, and force us into indentured servitude or outright slavery. So while we suffer gravely at the hands of the rulers, we blame, fight and kill each other over some ideological triviality that is mostly manufactured and perpetuated by the rulers.
Just as we are now all mostly aware that the left/right political continuum is horseshit, we all also ought to be aware that the capitalism/communism continuum is, too, because those two things—however they get defined—exist simultaneously in some ratio in virtually every “collective”, whether that collective is a commune or an anarchist syndicate or a modern corporation (or a church, small business, or federal government). Yet we humans just to love to find reasons to fight, and our rulers just love to stoke the fires of our petty conflicts.
Those rulers are clever bastards. Or are we just dolts?
Right, those on top, who control the media, get to define the ideologies that everybody follows. In addition to the corpo-capitalist and socialist-communist ideologies, they created Critical Theory, which purports to identify "oppressor classes" like whites, males, cisgendered heteros. Critical Theorists assert that ALL whites AS A GROUP control, promote and benefit from "white supremacy" and "white privilege," that ALL males AS A GROUP promote and benefit from misogyny, etc.
For illustrative purposes, let's limit the scope to Critical RACE Theory (CRT). The upper class convinces many thought leaders (black and liberal white) to identify ALL whites IN GENERAL as "oppressors" who came up with institutions and customs that further "white supremacy," "white privilege" and benefit themselves as whites. These thought leaders think they have discovered some profound truth that the "white oppressors" have used their "cultural hegemony" to advance white supremacy. In reality, it is the upper class, the true oppressors, who use THEIR "cultural hegemony" to invent a largely fictitious oppressor class of all whites and get such thought leaders to blame ALL whites rather than focus on the true oppressors, the upper classes. The true believers in such garbage, like Ibram Kendy and Robin DiAngelo, might be "useful idiots." Patrisse Cullors is by contrast a self-serving race hustler.
Lower class whites did not benefit from red-lining, "block busting" or other institutional tools used to divide the lower classes. It is the financial elites, the upper class, that benefit from mechanisms like those or the use of black strike-breakers recently migrated from the South. "Critical theory" including CRT has been pushed into colleges, universities and law schools for decades by students of the Frankfurt School. Sometime in the late 20th Century, the financial elites who control the Democratic Party realized how useful identity politics was to distract the lower classes from real problems. Since then, they've latched onto Critical Theory as the ideological framework for such identity politics. We now have "charitable trusts," think tanks and corporations pushing such divisive garbage nonstop.
My take on CRT is this: I like the word “critical”, and I like the word “theory”, but I have absolutely no idea what the word “race” means. It is a semantic construct with tenuous sociological roots in cherry-picked historic periods, entirely designed by academics to secure career goals (which have more to do with status and financial return than adding to human understanding), and weaponized by politicians to the point that the totally divisive concept of identitarianism has largely replaced the much more valid, useful and unifying concept of class struggle of the legacy Left.
I look at CRT mainly through a historical lens, and I just don’t see it being supported in the overwhelming majority of past times or places. Try applying CRT to the history of the Greeks, Romans, or medieval Europeans, for example. It would be laughable, because virtually all historical analysis (which has plenty of other issues) is much better served by a focus on various other “non-racial” (i,e., real and definable) groupings (identities), such as tribe, nation, religion, and language. Further, I think history bears out that even those more valid non-racial groupings pale in importance to more universal human failings, especially greed and hubris, as well as to Machiavellian politics, and to the psychopathy of most rulers.
However, Whoopi Goldberg’s recent experience of cancel culture may hint at how CRT is now slated to become the primary lens through which all of history is viewed and completely rewritten. That would be an intellectual, if not actual, dark age, indeed.
Precisely. CRT is nothing more than an updated CNationalT whereby the monarchs and nobility of one country blamed all people of a "different" nationality for creating all the oppressive conditions under which the less privileged of "their" nationality labored. Gramsci was right that the upper classes define such ideologies through their "cultural hegemony." They've been at it for thousands of years. The Frankfurt School and their intellectual descendants bastardized Gramsci's insight by mis-identifying the "oppressors" just as Medieval kings scapegoated other nations or religions. Time to get back to real Marxian analysis (but not his proposed "solution" calling for authoritarian dictatorship).
most people? really? you know that from your first hand experience of talking to real individuals around you and they told you that they believe what corporate media tell them about anything? and you believe otherwise based on your own first hand "empirical" evidence? you're right there in person where the "event ofthe day" is happening?
most people around me are the opposite, and i meet dozens of peopleface-to-face and personally everyday due to my line of work. i thought the problem is that empiricism is nothing but a shiny cover for dominant narrative and propaganda.
The "Official Story" is that Bezos, Gates, Musk and the rest only get to vote ONCE - don't you know? - just like you and me - and they contribute so much more - out of the goodness of their hearts! And the worst aspect of all this thunderous idiocy is that intelligent people - well, they can tie their own shoe laces - believe this, and that Russians, Iraqis, and people who don't wear 3 piece suits or $350 sneakers don't value life - like normal people, you and me, so are apt to go against their own best interests just for the sheer joy of taking what we have from us.
Couldn’t agree more that we are bullied into accepting the official story, and that we are tricked or hypnotized into believing we actually have democracy. And it is astounding how easily we are convinced that it's just coinkydink that the rich and powerful keep getting richer and more powerful.
However, while we currently seem to have reached an unprecedented period of totalitarianism, it might help us put things into context if we recognize this is nothing new. It’s as old as time. Official stories were captured in the Anunnaki Tablets of Enki, the Vedas, the Bible, the Anelects, etc. Today, the official story warps every academic discipline—history, physics, law, economics. And it poisons every aspect of culture—music, movies, blog posts, and journalism.
The official story also infects every institution, including education, science, religion, finance, government, art, technology, and medicine. It’s damned near impossible to escape, and it’s easy to believe that almost everything we’ve ever been taught or told is just a damned lie. In fact, what other conclusion can a sane person come to?
While this official story is still being told everywhere and everywhen, the unofficial story tellers--the contrarians, free thinkers, witches, and heretics--are suppressed, condemned, tortured and burned at the stake. The only difference from one era to the other or from one geographic region to the other is that the guards change their uniforms and the rulers change hats.
Philip K. Dick was right: “The Empire never ended.”
Great piece as always. Have been following you for a few years now and you have yet to say anything i disagree with, which i find a tad disconcerting 2bh.
great piece kaitlin. You point out the obvious, with great flair, the system is a sham. Systemically corrupt. Needs an emema. Better still we need to recognize, as you point out, the system does not work for us. It feeds off us but because we allow it. In 2008 when the world was bailing out the banks Iceland did as th truckers do today. In just 3days the gov had left office peacefully and new elections were held and the constitution rewritten. It requires a mere 2% of the population to achieve such change. Do the math, we're talking 50,000 to show up at each provincial parliment. Far more people than any gov resouces could handle. Iceland does this time and time again. Women 1st got the vote in Iceland via this means and then womens right to vote spread around the world. We are only prisoners of this system for as long as we accept it.
Thanks !!
It is completely wrong and cowardly to minimize Russia-gate hoax that Obama-Hillary-Biden-Jake Sullivan inflicted on us and that is still going on.
The current "imminent" attack on Ukraine they are hyperventilating daily is an attempt of DISTRACTING us from their crime of a century.
Watergate (a break-in to install microphone in DNC office) pales in comparison....
Brilliant ❤️
So how is the population kept coincidentally "divided into two ideologically opposed camps of equal size?" As Caitlin explains, the rich and powerful exploiters, "the worst people in the world," hereafter oppressors without scare quotes, control the communication media and through the media enjoy what Antonio Gramsci called "cultural hegemony." Using this "cultural hegemony," they convince some people that all individuals have unalienable rights including property rights, that a collective is the same as a person and must have all the rights of an individual person and that the power differential between powerful collectives and powerless individuals is totally fair because after all, collectives are people too. They call that capitalism. They convince other people it's OK if nobody has any property rights at all, that government can legitimately redistribute property and that redistribution should make material comforts (property) more equal, no matter how much or how little an individual works to produce those comforts. They call that socialism or communism depending on how close the distribution is to equal. Those are the two ideologies we must choose from. Nothing in between is permissible.
Naturally, people whose income is above the median tend to gravitate toward what those with "cultural hegemony" have defined as "capitalism," while those whose income is below the median gravitate to communism or a milder form of redistribution called socialism. Since the median is the point at which those above are equal in number to those below, this coincidentally yields two groups of almost exactly the same size.
The oppressors further divide us by corrupting Gramsci's ideas, defining pseudo "oppressor" groups who oppress target "oppressed" groups such as whites vs POC, men vs women, cisgendered hetero vs LGBTQ+. This serves two purposes. First, it sets these groups against one another, further dividing the hoi polloi. Second, it distracts these "oppressors" and "oppressed" from the real oppressors (guess who).
The oppressors have been very successful with this divide and rule strategy until recently, but they are losing control because speech on the internet has become quite cheap, and dissidents have found ways to broaden their audiences in spite of the existence of collectives like Facebook, Twitter and Google. In addition, as Aesop said, "Liars are not believed even when they tell the truth." Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who believe in the ideologies favored by the oppressors and fail to see other possibilities. An example is those who fail to see the possibilities of a system where individuals retain their natural born rights but the rights and privileges of groups are sharply curtailed. Such folk are not quite red-pilled yet, though some think they are. We're working on it.
My understanding of cultural hegemony is shallow, but it seems to be an important insight into the obvious strategy of “divide and conquer.”
Ideologies divide us and keep us at each others’ throats, while the rulers rob us blind, collect their rents, and force us into indentured servitude or outright slavery. So while we suffer gravely at the hands of the rulers, we blame, fight and kill each other over some ideological triviality that is mostly manufactured and perpetuated by the rulers.
Just as we are now all mostly aware that the left/right political continuum is horseshit, we all also ought to be aware that the capitalism/communism continuum is, too, because those two things—however they get defined—exist simultaneously in some ratio in virtually every “collective”, whether that collective is a commune or an anarchist syndicate or a modern corporation (or a church, small business, or federal government). Yet we humans just to love to find reasons to fight, and our rulers just love to stoke the fires of our petty conflicts.
Those rulers are clever bastards. Or are we just dolts?
Right, those on top, who control the media, get to define the ideologies that everybody follows. In addition to the corpo-capitalist and socialist-communist ideologies, they created Critical Theory, which purports to identify "oppressor classes" like whites, males, cisgendered heteros. Critical Theorists assert that ALL whites AS A GROUP control, promote and benefit from "white supremacy" and "white privilege," that ALL males AS A GROUP promote and benefit from misogyny, etc.
For illustrative purposes, let's limit the scope to Critical RACE Theory (CRT). The upper class convinces many thought leaders (black and liberal white) to identify ALL whites IN GENERAL as "oppressors" who came up with institutions and customs that further "white supremacy," "white privilege" and benefit themselves as whites. These thought leaders think they have discovered some profound truth that the "white oppressors" have used their "cultural hegemony" to advance white supremacy. In reality, it is the upper class, the true oppressors, who use THEIR "cultural hegemony" to invent a largely fictitious oppressor class of all whites and get such thought leaders to blame ALL whites rather than focus on the true oppressors, the upper classes. The true believers in such garbage, like Ibram Kendy and Robin DiAngelo, might be "useful idiots." Patrisse Cullors is by contrast a self-serving race hustler.
Lower class whites did not benefit from red-lining, "block busting" or other institutional tools used to divide the lower classes. It is the financial elites, the upper class, that benefit from mechanisms like those or the use of black strike-breakers recently migrated from the South. "Critical theory" including CRT has been pushed into colleges, universities and law schools for decades by students of the Frankfurt School. Sometime in the late 20th Century, the financial elites who control the Democratic Party realized how useful identity politics was to distract the lower classes from real problems. Since then, they've latched onto Critical Theory as the ideological framework for such identity politics. We now have "charitable trusts," think tanks and corporations pushing such divisive garbage nonstop.
My take on CRT is this: I like the word “critical”, and I like the word “theory”, but I have absolutely no idea what the word “race” means. It is a semantic construct with tenuous sociological roots in cherry-picked historic periods, entirely designed by academics to secure career goals (which have more to do with status and financial return than adding to human understanding), and weaponized by politicians to the point that the totally divisive concept of identitarianism has largely replaced the much more valid, useful and unifying concept of class struggle of the legacy Left.
I look at CRT mainly through a historical lens, and I just don’t see it being supported in the overwhelming majority of past times or places. Try applying CRT to the history of the Greeks, Romans, or medieval Europeans, for example. It would be laughable, because virtually all historical analysis (which has plenty of other issues) is much better served by a focus on various other “non-racial” (i,e., real and definable) groupings (identities), such as tribe, nation, religion, and language. Further, I think history bears out that even those more valid non-racial groupings pale in importance to more universal human failings, especially greed and hubris, as well as to Machiavellian politics, and to the psychopathy of most rulers.
However, Whoopi Goldberg’s recent experience of cancel culture may hint at how CRT is now slated to become the primary lens through which all of history is viewed and completely rewritten. That would be an intellectual, if not actual, dark age, indeed.
Precisely. CRT is nothing more than an updated CNationalT whereby the monarchs and nobility of one country blamed all people of a "different" nationality for creating all the oppressive conditions under which the less privileged of "their" nationality labored. Gramsci was right that the upper classes define such ideologies through their "cultural hegemony." They've been at it for thousands of years. The Frankfurt School and their intellectual descendants bastardized Gramsci's insight by mis-identifying the "oppressors" just as Medieval kings scapegoated other nations or religions. Time to get back to real Marxian analysis (but not his proposed "solution" calling for authoritarian dictatorship).
s/corporation/collective and you make a point everyone who reads Caitlin agrees with.
Keep "collective" and you are arguing against the people Caitlin is talking to.
"It is just wrong"
Now, identify the specific people we should be campaigning against. Name some names. Name the corporations. Better yet, name the collective.
Sadly, most people choose to believe what they want to believe rather than empirical evidence.
most people? really? you know that from your first hand experience of talking to real individuals around you and they told you that they believe what corporate media tell them about anything? and you believe otherwise based on your own first hand "empirical" evidence? you're right there in person where the "event ofthe day" is happening?
most people around me are the opposite, and i meet dozens of peopleface-to-face and personally everyday due to my line of work. i thought the problem is that empiricism is nothing but a shiny cover for dominant narrative and propaganda.
I'm officially fed up with the official story, whether it be political or religious.
but dont worry they are telling the truth about the scamdemic...right Caitlin
Please be right on this. I do not want more war. Great read.
I think you've misread the piece if you came away thinking this was an there-will-be-no-war essay.
Thank you Caitlin ♥
The "Official Story" is that Bezos, Gates, Musk and the rest only get to vote ONCE - don't you know? - just like you and me - and they contribute so much more - out of the goodness of their hearts! And the worst aspect of all this thunderous idiocy is that intelligent people - well, they can tie their own shoe laces - believe this, and that Russians, Iraqis, and people who don't wear 3 piece suits or $350 sneakers don't value life - like normal people, you and me, so are apt to go against their own best interests just for the sheer joy of taking what we have from us.
Superb. I'm doing my best to spread this one as far as I can.
Couldn’t agree more that we are bullied into accepting the official story, and that we are tricked or hypnotized into believing we actually have democracy. And it is astounding how easily we are convinced that it's just coinkydink that the rich and powerful keep getting richer and more powerful.
However, while we currently seem to have reached an unprecedented period of totalitarianism, it might help us put things into context if we recognize this is nothing new. It’s as old as time. Official stories were captured in the Anunnaki Tablets of Enki, the Vedas, the Bible, the Anelects, etc. Today, the official story warps every academic discipline—history, physics, law, economics. And it poisons every aspect of culture—music, movies, blog posts, and journalism.
The official story also infects every institution, including education, science, religion, finance, government, art, technology, and medicine. It’s damned near impossible to escape, and it’s easy to believe that almost everything we’ve ever been taught or told is just a damned lie. In fact, what other conclusion can a sane person come to?
While this official story is still being told everywhere and everywhen, the unofficial story tellers--the contrarians, free thinkers, witches, and heretics--are suppressed, condemned, tortured and burned at the stake. The only difference from one era to the other or from one geographic region to the other is that the guards change their uniforms and the rulers change hats.
Philip K. Dick was right: “The Empire never ended.”
Great piece as always. Have been following you for a few years now and you have yet to say anything i disagree with, which i find a tad disconcerting 2bh.
It would seem the official story, like the mRNA 'vaccines', have only one side effect: coincidence.
The first part of this piece just gave new meaning to facious. Good one.
great piece kaitlin. You point out the obvious, with great flair, the system is a sham. Systemically corrupt. Needs an emema. Better still we need to recognize, as you point out, the system does not work for us. It feeds off us but because we allow it. In 2008 when the world was bailing out the banks Iceland did as th truckers do today. In just 3days the gov had left office peacefully and new elections were held and the constitution rewritten. It requires a mere 2% of the population to achieve such change. Do the math, we're talking 50,000 to show up at each provincial parliment. Far more people than any gov resouces could handle. Iceland does this time and time again. Women 1st got the vote in Iceland via this means and then womens right to vote spread around the world. We are only prisoners of this system for as long as we accept it.
Dear Spencer — Fuck Off