Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.

As Michael Parenti once put it:

“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”

Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.

  • Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world
    51·
    23 hours ago

    Good. These monsters SHOULD be terrified. Note well that fear doesn’t get them to change their evil behaviors, it just makes them spend more on security. Every one of these bastards should never again get a good night’s sleep.

    • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      29·
      23 hours ago

      Spending more on private security out of their own pockets is the least of what they’re going to do. The capitalist class owns the media, funds the non-profits, and largely runs the government[1][2]. They’re going to crank up the security state/police state apparatus, which incidentally is Theil’s speciality.

      • TipRing@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        23 hours ago

        Recent events have certainly displayed how fearful the owners of media are of the masses getting ideas all on their own.

      • SoylentBlake@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        21 hours ago

        There’s a simple answer really, if you think eating the rich is the move, go into security.

        If your in high school and you have ideations of the new American pastime, consider this first.

        If yr fit, and aware there ain’t no war but the class war, join the military and make special ops. When yr time is done you’re a shoe in for private security to the elite. Not only that, but then ur trained up as well, and will know how to do it and not get caught. Will it be hard? Yep, but guess what, life’s hard, it supposed to be hard, otherwise what’s the point of it? What the fuck else you doing with your time? You think you’re gonna graduate and make a landing in the private sector? Buddy, that’s what everyone thinks and look around. People smarter than you can’t buy a house. I do not advocate defending a system that doesn’t defend you, but I canl suggest using the system as a means to your own ends. The system is working against us all but there’s still time to use the system to strike back from within. And if that means striking back with violence, then so be it. The law has shown itself to corrupt and hollow, not worthy of respect. With that goes the agreement that the government gets the monopoly on violence. They were supposed to use that to ensure life is fair for the rest of us, since they’ve abdicated, well, they put that ball in motion, not you, not me. They sold it out, we’re just calling the spade a spade. They’ll sacrifice everyone of us and our children before theyll accept even an inconvenience to their lives. We aren’t people to them, so don’t lose sleep over them.

        The diseases of wealth are a cancer on our society

        • Grapho@lemmy.ml
          2·
          4 hours ago

          If yr fit, and aware there ain’t no war but the class war, join the military

          Being the enforcer of global capital to own the
 capitalists?

          • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            4 hours ago

            You clearly missed the point. Ends justify the means - join the military, get excellent training and inside knowledge and connections into the private security world, become a guard for a billionaire, turn on them, profit?

            • Grapho@lemmy.ml
              3·
              3 hours ago

              Maybe instead of getting sent to kill brown people for oil cartels and the state department first, you can just join a revolutionary organization right away and do work in your community as well as build collective power that can be used to bring these rich fucks to heel.

              • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                1·
                2 hours ago

                I agree that is probably a better option. How do you get connects to be private security for a billionaire though?

                • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
                  2·
                  53 minutes ago

                  Getting onto individual billionaire’s security teams doesn’t do anything. These people just get replaced. UnitedHealth Group already has a new CEO, and the same would happen at Palantir if you took out their chairman, Peter Thiel. You can’t solve a structural problem this way.

                  Lenin on adventurism vs. organized mass movement:

                  We, however, are of the opinion that it is only such mass movements, in which mounting political consciousness and revolutionary activity are openly manifested to all by the working class, that deserve to be called genuinely revolutionary acts and are capable of really encouraging everyone who is fighting for the Russian revolution. [
] We believe that even a hundred regicides can never produce so stimulating and educational an effect as this participation of tens of thousands of working people in meetings where their vital interests and the links between politics and these interests are discussed, and as this participation in a struggle, which really rouses ever new and “untapped” sections of the proletariat to greater political consciousness, to a broader revolutionary struggle. [
] We believe that the government is truly disorganised when, and only when, the broad masses, genuinely organised by the struggle itself, plunge the government into a state of confusion; when the legitimacy of the demands of the progressive elements of the working class becomes apparent to the crowd in the street and begins to be clear even to part of the troops called out for the purpose of “pacification”; when military action against tens of thousands of the people is preceded by wavering among the authorities, who have no way of really knowing what this military action will lead to; when the crowd see and feel that those who have fallen on the field of civil war are their comrades, a part of themselves, and are filled with new wrath and a desire to grapple more decisively with the enemy. Here it is no longer some scoundrel, but the existing system as a whole that comes out as the enemy of the people, against whom are arrayed the local and the St. Petersburg authorities, the police, the Cossacks, and the troops, to say nothing of the gendarmes and the courts which, as ever, supplement and complete the picture in every popular uprising.