Burgers, Bees and Apocalypses

Let's start off with a little mental calisthenics.  We'll use a common metaphor to see how we are controlled, corralled and channeled through a process called the dialectic.

Remember a few years back, a certain well-known burger chain had an ad campaign called, "Have it your way."  There was a catchy jingle, and signs and posters.  We were told that we could add and subtract anything we wanted to get the burger made 'our way.'

On the surface, this seemed like a great idea.  It made us think we had endless choices and that we were free to select endless combinations that expressed our individual tastes and desires.  The catchy song promised, "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us."

We were suddenly free!  The Other Burger had only one possible combination.  You either ordered it or you didn't.  That was the choice.  Now, we could mix and match and toss and turn and create a meal that was uniquely us.  What could be more democratic and wonderful?

The part that was unspoken and that few people ever stopped to consider was that in the end, no matter how much you mixed and matched, it was still a burger.  At some point, all the choices boiled down to two pieces of bread with a slab of questionable meat in the middle.  In point of fact, we really had no choice.  What we were presented as vast possibilities was actually just window dressing.

In a somewhat simplistic nutshell, this is the thing that everyone is talking about these days.  Thsi is the System, the Matrix, the PTB, the Elite, the Command and Control Structure.  On a very large scale, this is exactly how it all works.

On the surface, we are told that we have a myriad of personal choices.  We have communities and peer groups and any of a dozen other descriptions of channels for molding our thinking.  We think that democracy presents us with choices, so that the government we have is one that we have personally chosen for ourselves, and so we capitulate to it.  No one ever stops to consider that it is all just one big album, with Side A and Side B.  Both sides have different songs, but in the end, it is the same album in the same jacket played on the same turn-table.

You must either choose Devolvacan or Repulsicrat.  There is no other choice.  If you are a libertarian, socialist, communist, constitutionalist, ad nauseum, you don't get a choice.  You are ridiculed and labelled 'extremist'.  And the fun part is, even if you are among these 'fringe' groups, you are still herded because you self-identify with a pre-selected group.  You are not allowed to cherry-pick from all of them, or create your own.  You must pick a pre-selected definition for your political expression, and the parts you don't agree with, you must support because this is YOUR group.

The whole system of Command and Control began with religion.  There was the standard doxology that was unchangeable.  You could argue semantics all day long...did Jesus own his clothes?  How many angels fit on the head of a pin?  The answers to those questions were always engineered through a process called 'concensus,' that led us to believe that the majority agrees with this idea, so you must accept it.

At it's base, religion presented a core set of beliefs that you could not challenge.  In the case of Western religion, there was One True God Who gave His Only Begotten Son, and on and on.  You were not allowed to question this part.  If you did, you were sentenced to 200 Hail Marys, lashing yourself with birch branches and attending First Friday Mass for a year.

All that has happened in the past couple thousand years is that those processes were adapted from religion into the secular State.  Law, Democracy and Regulatory Agencies have replaced God, the Ten Commandments and the Church, but it is the identical system redressed to make people think they have thrown off the Old Ways and reformed society into the modern Nation-State.

A really good metaphor for how all this works is a bee hive.  If you've ever had the chance to keep bees, it's really a fascinating hobby.  Watching how they organize and go about their daily business can really open one's eyes to the world around us.

In general, bees are stratified into Queen, Drones and Workers.  Within those layers are various specializations.  For the most part, they all go about their individual tasks of collecting, building, refining, and serving the various parts of the hive.  When times are really good, a small group will band together and create a new Queen.  When they succeed, they are chased off to form another hive.

All this activity stops, though, when there is a threat from the outside.  When an invader comes, the bees immediately drop into defense mode, with some protecting the Queen, others the brood, and still others directly attaching the intruder.  But, puff a litte smoke into the hive and every singe bee, without exception will cling to the comb, become very docile, and will do only one thing...fan the comb with their wings.  All other divisions and specializations and concerns fall away, and the hive performs a single-minded operation to protect the comb.

Now, replace the comb with the Structure of Society.  The Queen and Drones are the Command and Control.  The rest are we Workers who actually produce everything.  In good times, there is sufficient free time for groups to sit around and plot the creation of a new Queen.  But when a threat is introduced, we all drop every other concern and protect the comb, the Structure, regardless of how we feel about it in normal times.

The difference between the bees and us is that the Queen and Drones have figured out how to make the smoke without actually destroying the hive.  We call it the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Boogeyman du Jour.  Regardless of what we call it, it is nothing more than artificial threats to keep us busy defending the comb and not questioning what exactly we are doing and for whom.

We get so busy fanning the comb that it doesn't occur to us that the smoke is not from a real fire.  We never consider the nature of the threat, only that the possibility exists for everything we know to be destroyed.  It doesn't matter whether the things we know are good or bad, or even desirable.  Our instinctual response is to protect it first, and ask questions later.

Out natural instincts have been perverted and used against us.  Because most people never question their instincts, most of us never stop fanning long enough to look around for the fire.  Those who do realize there are all the symptoms of fire, but no cause.

The threat message comes to us through all our senses.  The media, our neighbors, the sights and smells around us.  Somewhere deep in our brains, a trigger is flipped and we fall into blind obedience mode.  Only those who are self-aware enough to recognize their base animal response and override it to analyze the cause, will be able to see what's going on.

Our 'fight or flight' responses are good and healthy, and serve a valuable purpose of keeping us alive.  But if we don't control and analyze what we are doing, those natural responses can be perverted and used against us as a means of control, to keep us docile and unquestioning.

Let's say you are walking down the street.  You turn a corner and see hundreds of panicked people running towards you.  Your first response is a tingle up your spine.  You muscles tense and your senses go into hyperdrive.  You feel overwhelmingly compelled to join the herd and start running as fast as you can.  At this point, you haven't seen any threat.  All you've seen is other people's reactions.

It's at this very moment that you must choose.  Do you follow the crowd, assuming they know something you don't, or do you wait a moment and assess the situation.  If there is a threat, then all those other people may not be making the best choice.  And if there is no threat, then there is no need for you to react at all.

On 9/11, 0.01 percent of the population was directly threatened, yet an entire nation, and by extension, the entire world, has been in a blind panic for more than a decade.  People are finally starting to slow down and ask, "What the hell are we running from?"

Make no mistake.  As soon as the effect starts to wear off, there will be another and another.  The only way the mass of humanity can be controlled is to keep puffing smoke and keep us madly fanning the comb.

Threat after threat is manufactured.  Global Warming, asteroids, terror, aliens, Y2K, 2012, etc. ad infinitem.  All this is puffing smoke at us to keep us fanning.  All it is, is a secularized version of the Second Coming.  None of it ever actually happens, but the perceived threat is enough to keep us docile and clinging to the Structure that has been given to us.

Be warned, though.  Humans can not maintain this level of threat alert forever.  Eventually, they burn out or just stop running and actually look behind them.  At some point, enough people start to question what they are running from, and after burn-out they no longer respond to further threats.  It's the 'boy who cried wolf' syndrome.

What happens then?  It's usually not pretty.  That's when revolutions break out.  That's when society convulsed and destroys itself, becoming the threat to itself that was once perceived as external.  People don't usually react well to being played for fools, especially when it's been for the entertainment and benefit of someone else.

We are seeing this reaction beginning in a dozen places around the world.  Riots, protests and revolts are the effect of people stopping to look around.  We are seeing the 'boy who cried wolf' on a global scale.  All of the threats that have been promulgated on us for so long are loosing their grip on our psyches.  The result is a massive global upheaval, or something so large and so overwhelming will present itself as the new threat.

I can't help wonder if all the strange sounds being reported worldwide aren't part of the next Big Puff of Smoke.

Regardless, this time don't run.  Stop for a minute and look around.  Are you really being threatened?