The G is for George Jackson

There's a saying that history is written by the victors, but this is also true of the present story. Those who are winning the capitalism game get to set the narrative about what is currently happening in our world. If you succeed in dominating the humans you share a planet with using our current socioeconomic systems of labor exploitation and resource extraction, then you get to buy up politicians, media outlets, online platforms and influence operations which allow you to determine the mainstream narratives about what's going on in our world, in the same way the victorious armies of the past often had the power to shape the historical record in their favor. The present is therefore written by the victors. Those who've landed at the top of the heap have the power to circulate narratives which normalize the abusive system they benefit from, and to scare the public away from seeking to implement other systems of power distribution and resource allocation. They have the power to shape public perception of world events, to reverse victim and perpetrator in their narratives about international conflicts, and to frame the western empire as a passive witness to the terrible things that are happening around the world rather than the primary driver of those horrors. They have the power to determine which protest movements, mass atrocities and scandals receive widespread attention in our society, and which get conveniently overlooked. They have the power to determine which political parties are taken seriously, and which parties are considered unrealistic vanity projects which steal votes from the viable candidates. They have the power to make or break careers in media or politics, to choose which figures are elevated to celebrity status or marginalized to the fringes, and to fabricate antisemitism scandals out of thin air. Power is the ability to control what happens. Absolute power is the ability to control what people THINK about what happens. Those who are winning the capitalism game are able to exert absolute power over our society. The real source of power in our world is not money, nor resources, nor armies, nor weapons. The real source of power in our world is narrative, and the ability to control it. Narrative is the only thing that determines what governments look like, how power works, how money operates, what laws there are, and why nations operate the way they do. They're all completely made-up guidelines made of words which we have all collectively agreed to pretend are true. The only reason anything works the way it works is because enough of us believe the shared narratives saying it is so. It is our collective belief which gives those narratives their power. That's why our rulers pour so much energy into controlling the narrative. That's what you're seeing with all the news media consolidation, the centralization of internet activity into a handful of trillionaire apps, the aggressive artificial intelligence push, and the efforts to stomp out dissident speech throughout the western world. It's because the powerful understand something most of us do not: that their power comes entirely from narrative. They know that as soon as enough of us stop believing their narratives, we are free. We can decide to re-write the made-up rules of society whenever we choose to, and change everything about states, authority, money and labor which have allowed the plutocrats to live like kings at the expense of everyone else. We can stop playing the capitalism game they've been winning at any time, because the rules are completely made up, and we can just make up a different game. As soon as enough people stop believing the stories of the dominant storytellers, we can use the power of our numbers to force the creation of a healthy world.

Stop saying the Democrats will do nothing, that’s so unfair. Democrats do a lot of things. Genocide, for example.

The most significant political reality in the world is also the most under-discussed political reality in the world, and it can be summed up as follows: There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and we can force revolutionary change whenever we want. That's it. There are a whole lot more ordinary people suffering under the status quo system of capitalism, imperialism, militarism and authoritarianism than there are people benefiting from it, and we can use the power of our numbers to overthrow that system whenever we decide to. It's self-evident, and so simple that you can sum it up in a single sentence. But because our society is so deeply indoctrinated and mind-controlled, it simply doesn't show up in the normal every day conversations people have about politics and the problems we face as a society today. We are encouraged to discuss elections and party politics with great vigor. We are rewarded with amplification on large plutocrat-owned platforms if we fan the flames of divisive culture war wedge issues or mainstream partisan punditry. But what we are absolutely never rewarded for and never encouraged to discuss is the fact that the oligarchs and empire managers who rule our society would be completely powerless to stop a people's revolution of sufficient scale. We could all stop working and paying for things. We could barricade all the roads, railroads and infrastructure. We could demolish every bank, police station and government building. We could literally eat all the billionaires. Just, you know, hypothetically. We could do anything we wanted to do. No one could stop us. All mainstream politics, media, and schooling is designed to direct our attention away from this political reality, while the people who rule over us never stop thinking about it. It haunts them. It consumes them. It keeps them up at night. They obsess over it. That's why they're rushing to implement militarized robots, autonomous drones, and AI-driven mass surveillance. That's why they're pushing for easily controlled digital currencies and digital IDs. That's why they're working to re-centralize control of information to reverse the large-scale decentralization brought on by the internet. That's why they've been hammering us with mass media propaganda for generations, and have been developing increasingly sophisticated mass-scale psyops in the age of AI and smartphones. That's why we are actively herded into two mainstream political parties deadlocked in a perpetual tug-of-war to give us the illusion that we are engaging in meaningful political action. That's why we are trained from when we are schoolchildren to believe we live in free democracies where people control the actions of their government using their votes. It's because the rich and powerful are at all times acutely aware that the masses could turn on them at any instant, and must be kept in a perpetual state of manipulation and distraction in order to prevent this from happening. I dunno, man. Sounds kinda unsustainable if you ask me. Especially given how discontented people are becoming as the capitalist empire stumbles over its own contradictions and runs out of arguments for its continued existence. We're standing in a cage that isn't even locked. The door's not even closed. The only thing keeping us here is the recorded voice of the prison warden telling us "THERE IS NO ESCAPE" over and over again on repeat. One day our gaze is going to turn to that door. And we will step out of it. And we will be free.