Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [63]
Thus our first step in parsing the politics of experience will always be to ask cui bono of all participants, and to dig through the simulacrum (both the illusions of authenticity and the disruptions of OODA loops) to the underlying realities.
The second step will always be to realize that complacency and complicity with the status quo will almost always be self-serving for participants, even those with little to gain from supporting the status quo. Why is this so? Losing whatever crumbs one does receive by challenging the owners of the cake will always be riskier than remaining passively compliant and complicit.
Put another way: maintaining the security of the known (status quo) is inherently less risky than embarking on a new path because the outcome is unknown; while change might bring improvements, it might also result in catastrophe: losing even a very limited security would be far worse than passively accepting the status quo. We might even posit that risk aversion is a naturally selected trait.
Risk-aversion certainly explains why people stay in jobs and marriages they loathe--the risks of change are perceived as more dangerous than the suffering of staying put. This mechanism works on individual and societal levels alike.
If this is so, then transformation/change becomes inevitable only when the supposed security of the status quo gives way--when, for instance, the State becomes insolvent and its "security" is revealed as illusory. At that point it will become obvious that change is coming one way or the other and so the "low-risk" option of passive complicity is no longer available.
Thus open insurrection only occurs when the crumbs have been swept away, and there is no reason left to support the status quo. This is why the State's greatest power is distributing crumbs widely enough that few will be served by challenging the State's growing share of national income and its steadfast protection of the Power Elites. The ideal situation for the State (and thus the Plutocracy) is every family in the nation receives a payment from the State and abundant free entertainment (bread and circuses).
The State will only devolve when it can no longer fund this universal largesse or the largesse is paid in a currency that has lost all value.
Both circumstances were present in the devolution of the Roman Empire, and so let us examine the forces at work in the patterns, waves and cycles of human history.
Key concepts in this chapter:
Infrastructure of Self
Self-organizing networks
Engineering consent
Full spectrum defense of the Status Quo
OODA loop
Chapter Ten: Legitimizing the Illegitimate
One of the key goals of the status quo's propaganda is to convince the target audience (the U.S. citizenry) that institutionalized deception, fraud, obfuscation and looting have always been "business as usual" and thus protests are specious.
The key technique employed to accomplish this goal is to derealize U.S. history, depriving the target audience of any context that does not support the soothing contention that "everybody has always cheated, politicians have always been crooks," etc.
Any history which suggests that the present era of fraud, debauchery of credit, State over-reach and Plutocratic excess is unprecedented or parallels moments in U.S. history which were immediately followed by financial collapse, strife and war is dismissed or expunged from the mass media.
This derealization of history has several moving parts:
1. Emphasize the present unceasingly and ignore the past as irrelevant. The "news cycle" shortens into soundbites and video snippets, eliminating any moment of relative calm for analysis or context. This could be termed induced amnesia.
2. Present a frenzy of images and emotional content that confuse and numb