Undermining US Global Hegemony Is Good, Actually: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article:
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China and Russia are right to try to undermine US unipolar hegemony. The planet is not America's property and efforts to stop it being treated as such are good.
It's not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and still believe the US is a force for peace and justice in this world.
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The belief that China is trying to become the next unipolar global hegemon is premised on the idea that Beijing has been watching the floundering US empire burn itself out and get crushed under its own weight after just a few decades and thinking "Oh that looks awesome! Let's definitely do that!"
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"No no you don't understand, the US needs to keep bombing and starving civilians and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship and arming extremist militias and supporting dictators and destroying any nation who disobeys it. Otherwise the world might be taken over by a tyrannical regime!"
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You could very easily fill a list with one thousand things Americans should care about more than the one year anniversary of a few wingnuts wandering around the Capitol Building for a bit and then leaving.
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Americans have always had a special love for fake fighting. Civil War reenactments. Pro wrestling. Jerry Springer. Democrats vs Republicans.
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Biden is a better Trump than Trump was; he's advancing all Trump's policies more effectively than Trump and actually doing things that Trump only talked about. If Trumpers had any actual ideological consistency instead of vapid partisan hackery they'd all be Biden supporters.
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Please consider the possibility that it's not a coincidence that Democrats have done literally exactly what those who oppose "vote blue no matter who" said they would do when they took power.
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Nobody gets censored for "covid misinformation"; that's just today's excuse. Before that it was the so-called Facebook whistleblower, before that it was domestic extremism, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinfo and fake news. The reality is much simpler: people are being censored on the internet to normalize censorship on the internet.
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Don't underestimate how badly our rulers need to regulate speech on the internet. Their very survival depends on preventing awareness of the exploitative and oppressive nature of the status quo from spreading into the mainstream. They'd do literally anything to stop it.
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Leaving mainstream social media platforms for fringe social media is just marginalizing yourselves. It's doing the narrative managers' job for them. By all means join alternative platforms also, but don't quarantine yourself from the mainstream crowd as long as that's where the people are. That's just giving the bastards what they want.
The whole objective of internet censorship via de-platforming and algorithm manipulation is to quarantine the mainstream herd away from wrongthink. Leaving is just doing exactly what they want you to do. You need to stay and disrupt establishment narratives where you can be seen.
Sure you maybe have free speech on those small fringe platforms. You have free speech on a desert island, too. It doesn't matter what you say if people don't hear your words. If you oppose the status quo, you need to oppose it wherever your voice can influence people.
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There is no "human nature" apart from our immutable physiological features. What we're dealing with in matters of societal organization is the human condition; conditioning by propaganda, by early childhood trauma, by generational trauma. And we can heal all of that conditioning.
People who cite "human nature" to argue that society must necessarily be organized a certain way are only ever talking about their own conditioning. If they think it's human nature to be selfish and competitive, they're just telling you how they've been conditioned to be.
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The narratives about what's going on in our world had already become unsustainably shrill and muddled before Covid; now it's gotten so bad it affects the decisions people make in their everyday lives. Humanity is approaching a white noise saturation point with narrative itself.
Which could end up being a good thing, in the long run. All of humanity's problems ultimately boil down to an unwholesome relationship with mental narrative. If that relationship becomes so strained that it snaps, maybe we can replace it with something healthier and more truthful.
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Completely agree. Bullseye comments. Will the American people eventually do the right thing “after they’ve done everything else”?
Regarding human nature, I see the best and worst of it as just that: humans are social animals and therefore empathy and cooperation are in our DNA, however, so is folly, greed, violence, and territorialism. Slavery in the Americas didn't start with Columbus. Claiming that only benevolent impulses constitute who we are I find a problematic proposition. (This in no way means I endorse the enactment of said darker impulses; an alcoholic is still an alcoholic but can choose to no longer drink.)
Other than this one quibble, another outstanding series of insights.
+1 for again mentioning professional wrestling.