Posted on August 4, 2014by arnierosner
The Cheapest, Most Efficient Prison of All – Your Own Mind
From the cradle onward we are deliberately taught to think in ways that profit our predators. This is done by those who stand to profit from these purposefully engendered failures of logic. For example—remember yourself as a child playing with a set of colored blocks, marbles, or similar objects. What were you taught to focus on?
You were taught to focus on and identify differences—- difference of color, size, shape, texture, material, transparency—any kind of difference at all was important and emphasized and you were required to recognize and note it. The sameness or similarity of things was used merely as a means to identifydifferences. Why?
Why isn’t recognizing similarities inherently as important as recognizing differences?
Without recognizing similarities first, we wouldn’t be able to discern differences, but similarities are downplayed because similarities provide the basis for unity and peace and compassion.
Those who profit from keeping us divided and endlessly at war don’t want us to think in terms of similarities. If we did, we would see the way this learnedemphasis on differences allows us to be manipulated and misled, how it teaches us to fear, how it nurtures prejudice of all kinds, and how it makes us susceptible pawns for war-mongers and demagogues. This early emphasis on perceiving differences also leads us to think in terms ofparts instead of wholes, and in terms of “us” versus “them”.
This same learned perceptual prejudice results in instinctively thinking in terms of “either/or” when we would be better served by thinking in terms of “and”.
We are taught to think in terms of endless duality: good versus bad, rich versus poor, right versus wrong, black versus white, Democrat versus Republican, Baptist versus Catholic—-all because it is easier to limit and control and manipulate us when we think this way. The slave masters set up the two goads and drive us endlessly between them, and our patterned way of thinking prevents us from breaking free. We become like “dumb, driven cattle” caught between the carrot and the stick, never questioning who is manipulating us or for what reasons.
In the same way we are taught to think in terms of groups, not individuals. The value of “teamwork” and “command structure” is drummed into us until we feel useless and paralyzed as individuals. We innocently accept such concepts as “collective guilt” or “shared pain” or “group action”—–none of which really exists.
The individual is the unit of human experience—and is also the limit and expression of all human experience. All the pain that can ever be felt is felt only by individuals –one by one– and it is the same with guilt, happiness, or any other emotion. All actions are taken by individuals—one by one. If you stop and think beyond the outright false or half-truth assumptions you’ve been taught—- “we” are only sums of “I’s”.
The purposefully induced habit of thinking in terms of groups instead of individuals makes us susceptible to harmful, self-defeating assumptions of all kinds. This is why I meet patriots who feel paralyzed like deer in the headlights: oh, my, I don’t have a group! So what do these well-intentioned people do? They set out to create a group or to find a group—not realizing that they already belong to a magnificent and powerful group known as “State Citizens”.
What they really accomplish by this “group forming” is splintering off into thousands of worthy little specialized closet groups concerned about this or that small aspect of the whole problem, all claiming turf and fighting with and discrediting other such groups, everyone competing for donation money, and nobody getting any closer to seeing –much less addressing– the very real problems that are bearing down on us.
Hand in hand with the rest of the Group Think Tradition, we have been taught that our country is a democracy. It’s not. It’s a Republic. Democracy embraces mob rule, which means rule of the individual by the group. If the group wants your house, they can take it. If the group wants to tax you to pay their bills, they can. That is democracy.
Our American form of government is not based on groups of any kind. It is based on Individualism. It says very forthrightly that the individual is owed supremacy over the group when it comes to matters of free will, conscience, religion, and property rights. In a Republic, the mob can’t tax you to pay for their bills. They can’t take away your house or your land to serve themselves just because 51 out of a 100 group members say so.
Thinking in terms of groups instead of individuals has been taught to you on purpose and with malice-aforethought by the self-interested governmental services corporations. These government entities want you to subject yourself to the whims of the crowd, to derive your own identity from your group, to conform in every respect to the herd mentality—-because, again, this makes it easier to defraud you and control you, easier to train you as a soldier, and easier to milk you dry as a taxpayer.
Hand in hand with “Group Think” comes the learned behavior of looking for authority outside yourself –which leads us to misunderstand the nature and source of authority. All authority, like all experience, depends entirely on individuals, not groups, not hierarchies. All groups and hierarchies always derive any authority they possess secondhand, by delegation. Authority simply does not exist apart from the authority of individual people who may retain their own rulership or give it away as a proxy, recall it at will, or ignorantly deny that they have authority.
How many modern Americans stand around whining about this or that, without it ever entering their heads that they have the authority to choose otherwise? That they are in fact responsible for making other choices if they want things to change? That they can withdraw their granted authority at will? And that they are responsible for doing so, when the “government” defaults on its contracts?
How many Americans have meekly assumed that a foreign governmental services corporation headquartered in Washington, DC, has the authority to order them to buy health insurance from the company store?