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.
I don’t believe this crap for a second - they can afford all the security they need to protect themselves. I think this is an attempt at manipulation to keep us at bay for a while until we cool off & resume living like before this happened, so they can continue doing what they’ve been doing all the while knowing that they shouldn’t push much further for now.
Let’s face it - human attention spans are short, and in three months or so this will be pushed back in most people’s minds as they continue dealing with their day-to-day struggles. This messaging is designed to make us feel “heard” so we wait to see what happens rather than risk our lives on taking further action, but after a while nothing will have changed & it’ll all be the same as before.
Remember two things:
- Their security are working class, no matter how you slice it. They only way you can avoid them turning on you/abandoning you is if they have undying loyalty to you. And that is very rare and very hard to maintain.
- Capitalism is inherently unsustainable. So collapse can only be delayed, not avoided. Eventually, the plethora of self-defeating aspects of Capitalism will become more than any of the elite can suppress or mitigate. Hopefully labor is ready at that point to rise up and take back what has been stolen, and recreate the institutions as a socialist structure, owned and controlled by the workers.
Having been both military and security, I will tell you that while military, my position was MUCH harder for me to ignore. As security, I could easily say “fuck this, it isnt worth it.” In the military, the job (in ones head) is the security of the nation and the people around you. As security, you’re more likely to have a family, and at some point you’re like “I wanna see my family again, $20/hr isn’t worth not seeing my kid again”. As security, you’re essentially a mercenary. You have no ideological points for it, it’s just a check. Security almost never has a situation where it becomes “this issue is something worth dying for”. That’s simply absurd. Even if I’m making $50/hr for Jeff bezos, there’s an amount of discontent that I’m not willing to deal with just for his safety, and that’s before you consider your own personal opinions/ideals/objections. Historically speaking, buying security is iffy at best.
I don’t believe this crap for a second
Which crap don’t you believe?
This messaging is designed to make us feel “heard”
Whose messaging? Michael Parenti’s? Caitlin Johnstone’s? Peter Thiel’s? Piers Morgan’s?
after a while nothing will have changed & it’ll all be the same as before.
As I’ve already said elsewhere in this post, one difference will be that the expansion of the security state/police state will be accelerated.
I think it’s a bit silly to think their security will protect them indefinitely. They have to be perfect 100% of the time, where someone else only has to be lucky once.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of Luigies there are. And I think this probably has woke a lot of them up.
This is the real answer. The rich know it’s just like school shootings. One can trigger several in a short period and they’re terrified of that.
They’re not worried only about stochastic terrorism. They’re also worried that we’ll become an organized & militant labor movement and gain some political power. Or worse still, that we’ll seize the means of production and depose them.
I agree with you but I don’t think that last point is where this is going. There won’t be any seizing of the means of production. That just isn’t happening in America, and is arguable if it’s ever really happened ever, anywhere. Power has transferred, but never to the people. However, they are worried that people have had enough of their shit. It’s very difficult to start a revolution. It’s much easier (as evidenced) to kill one guy and make the rest live in fear.
That just isn’t happening in America
It’s almost definitely not going to happen while the US is still the global hegemon. I think the US empire will have to further unravel before this can become even a slim possibility.
and is arguable if it’s ever really happened ever, anywhere. Power has transferred, but never to the people.
From Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds:
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.
It’s much easier (as evidenced) to kill one guy and make the rest live in fear.
Yes, it’s a helluva lot easier. But those people who live in fear also live in power. They have the state’s monopoly on violence at their disposal, and they’ve captured the regulatory bodies, they fund/bribe the politicians, they fund the NGOs, and they own the media.
Does he hang out a lot with zuckerberg, he talks in a very similar way, that stutter like pausing and air gasping, wth?
Of course he does. Since before Cambridge Analytica.
Wait having a mountain of money does not make you invincible?
He knows they’ve crossed a line into the most indefensible of behavior. He knows that they’re killing us for profit, and he’s begging us to stop defending ourselves.
The mask is off. They’re now openly asking us to die for their wealth.
They’re now openly asking us to die for their wealth.
He’s a dragon hiding in his cave guarding his hoard.
When dragons are about, there’s only one thing you can do: slay them.
It’s really telling that their fear is causing them to spend so much on security and separating themselves from the masses rather than, I don’t know, acknowledging the grievances of the masses and spending a paltry percentage of their wealth to solve some widely recognized societal issues that government can’t or won’t address.
Seriously, the cognitive dissonance on display is mind boggling when so much of the population sees you and your kind as greedy leeches, and your response is, “They’re simply wrong!” as you pump obscene amounts of money towards your security, bunkers, and electing politicians who will protect your widely despised position in the world.
Even the actual honest to god mobsters were smarter than this, with their soup kitchens and whatnot.
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.
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.
Recent events have certainly displayed how fearful the owners of media are of the masses getting ideas all on their own.
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
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?
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?
No end can justify what our military does on the regular https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/us_atrocities.md#imperialism
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.
I agree that is probably a better option. How do you get connects to be private security for a billionaire though?
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.
bunkers gotta have exhaust vents. those are super visible with IR.
And easily defeated with dirt.
They’re scared but they’re scared nowhere near enough.
“One dead CEO.”
“Many more to go.”
Just quoting my favorite construction equipment, please don’t ban.
Almost like Thiel knows he’s made a list.
Of people his robots dogs are going to murder?
Yep. They really will be coming for our guns.
Who’s “they”?
There’s more guns than people in America. This is what people don’t understand when they say “you can’t stop a drone with an AR” yeah, sure. But there’s only a handful of drones/drone operators in America. 250 million people with 350 million guns are going to win in the end. Full stop.
Edit: there’s not enough cops/agency people in the country to take guns forcefully in America. With the coming cuts to government agencies, there will be even less, both in enforcement and in discovery.
Come and get them. I dare you.
no they won’t. it’s too integral to the system of white supremacy holding the system up in the first place
I don’t understand, are they paying you to run interference? America is having a moment of class consciousness and you’re still hammering the racial identity politics? It’s the supremacy of capital, we’d all do well to remember that.
As it should have been since the beginning
