Idiocracy and our Volunteered Enslavement through the Surrender of our Minds

by Christopher Barr

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” 
 - Gustave Flaubert

Idiocracy is an underrated 2006 Mike Judge comedy that tells the story of a man, named Joe that is transported 500 years into the future.  What he finds when he gets there is a society collapsing and far too stupid to do anything about it.  The language has been all but lost with grunts and groans filling in most expressions.  Corporations have taken societies over and suffocated the natural world in the process to insure high profitability.  Most notably, replacing water with an energy drink called Brawndo because 'it's got electrolytes', as a result all crops are lost because the morons used the green energy drink to water them and not surprisingly, killed them all.

TV and movies in this future are dumb downed to the point that it’s just a farting ass or an unfortunate fellow that constantly gets kicked in his balls.  While garbage piles high as Everest these people remain helpless due to a society that over did itself, over consumed itself.  A society that allowed progress to entrap them rather then set them free.  This future is one without ideas, a future without hope and a future so dumb, that it wouldn’t know what to do if a thought crossed its devolved mind.  

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, A History of Western Philosophy

Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/s/stupidity_quotes.html#kxktbjfMD0CWhoG1.99

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, A History of Western Philosophy

Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/s/stupidity_quotes.html#kxktbjfMD0CWhoG1.99

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, A History of Western Philosophy

Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/s/stupidity_quotes.html#kxktbjfMD0CWhoG1.9

 
Today in our time stupidity is taking us down that path of destruction so corporations can squeeze as much money as possible out of the capitulating people.  Governments can maintain power over a population that only wishes to be entertained by stupidity itself.  We live in a time that in most circles, being book smart is threatening to most, having ideas and thinking for yourself is considered straying from the group and becoming different, and in their eyes, becoming a threat.

Loki was right in The Avengers when he ordered the crowd to kneel down.  He yells at them; “KNEEL!  Is not this simpler?  Is this not your natural state?  It’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation.  The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power.  For identity.  You were made to be ruled.  In the end, you will always kneel.”  Certainly fear is the main reason for this, people are afraid of the world outside their heads and demand rules and regulations to predict probable outcomes, and knowing what is going to happen next.  But what really terrifies people even more is what’s possible inside their own minds.  Because free will is an illusion up there with objectivity, people fear themselves and require routines to avoid their real self at every chance.  This fear of themselves, is so powerful that they are willing to take enslavement over it.

People today are not the authors of their lives in the way they think they are.  People are ruled over by corporations and governments that provide them with a false sense of freedom.  But because the culture has been so dumb down, they are too stupid to realize it, so they go buy their shoes and eat their burgers under the illusion that they made the choice to buy the shoes and eat the burgers.  What they don’t realize and likely will never is the choice was already made for them; they just fulfilled the expectation by behaving like they were supposed to.

“We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them.” 

 - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

For the most part we are safe in society, we get our thrills in life through simulations, not reality.  We go to movie theatres and watch cars explode and aliens invade, we watch TV to see relationships develop and criminals caught.  We don't get this in our lives, what we get in our lives are routines and deadlines and we feel misunderstood as we misunderstand others.  We are afraid of life so we maintain our ignorance to avoid having to understand that we are afraid of it, we defend our ignorance through the stupidity of core beliefs, avoiding evidence that contradicts those beliefs, so we rationalize our reality through cognitive dissonance to avoid feeling uncomfortable.  We under-think to avoid reality because it would force us to act in a world, more often than not, filled with inaction.

The paradox of stupidity; is one is too dumb to know they are stupid.  In all likelihood they would assume that everyone else is stupid and don’t get them.  Stupidity mutes reason, it is self-assured assertiveness without a desire to prove itself.  Marx said that society functions on three principles, economy, violence and stupidity.  Governments, corporations and the biggest business of them all; religion, not only count on the overly tranquilized people, they nurture them, because the fallacy of stupid people is they’ll believe in the most outlandish things.

In order for big business to maintain a constant flow of profits, congress is shooting down environmental efforts to help save this planet.  This is stupidity on a grand scale because it’s the kind we’d hope they’d know better.  Even President Reagan told congress back in the 80’s not to bother with the environment because, in his words, “I don’t know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns.”  

Language limits our access to reality and stupid people fall into the trap of thinking that it is a clear representation of reality, they assume what they think on their challenging scale is fundamentally true in the world.  They believe the nonsense their priests tell them as true accounts of the world and the creator they believe gave life to the planet.

The Vatican is opposed to condom use and are thus responsible for genocidal stupidity while millions die per year in Africa as a result of the spread of AIDS.  This is reprehensible for them to think that God’s divinity supersedes, the problem, reaction, solution paradigm that would be obvious to any free thinking person; give them condoms to offset the spread of AIDS.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, A History of Western Philosophy

Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/s/stupidity_quotes.html#kxktbjfMD0CWhoG1.99

There needs to be a standard of intellectual honesty that is required in order to dig us out of this impending calamity, we are a species is facing.  We need to call out all the priests and odious zealots for what they are, charlatans.  We have to do this in the same way we would if someone claimed to have the cure for cancer, he received by an alien species at his last abduction.  In order for humanity to move forward productively we have to let the campfire stories go.  We have to take ignorant people to task over their superstitious claims about the mythical realm of religiosity.

"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."

- Bertrand Russell

Transcendence and our Egotistical Desire to be Gods

by Christopher Barr

"The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity." 

- Ray Kurzwell 

Transcendence was a horribly executed film about a scientist, Dr. Will Castor that is shot with a poisoned bullet by an unrealistic group of 'grunge-rats' and before his death is uploaded into a powerful quantum computer.   Castor becomes the first person’s conscience that has been successfully uploaded into a computer and then uploaded onto the internet.  He does execute self-replicating nano-machines to help him 'save' the world from organic extinction. (The end of the film has another absurd notion of organic, nano-style.)

Sifting through the films many problems, including the lack of character chemistry, the plot holes and theme reversals, the film is at its core about loss.  It’s about how we grieve when we lose someone we love, and what we would be willing to do if we could prevent that loss.  Pet Cemetery dealt with this subject as well, when a dead child was buried purposely in an ancient burial ground knowing that this place resurrects the dead.  Obviously the child comes back but he’s not the same child his parents use to know and love.

Transcendence coasts along this same premise of selfish disbelief; people die all over the world but not my loved one, they’re special because I’m special.  So the film explores the idea of ‘transcending’ someone through a form of singularity into a computer and allowing them to live forever.  Dr. Castor’s wife Evelyn, unethically, uploads her dying husband into a computer to selfishly save herself the grief of his loss.

This film dives deep into how petty people can be, and how willing they are able go to not lose what they believe completes them.  This film explores selfishness to the ultimate decay of society itself.  It explores and exploits the structures of what is actually collapsing humanity in the first place.  Which is our unwillingness to let go of things even if it means it may hurt more people in the process.  We are emotional hoarders and we think that we are worth saving along with those that complete the story that we have built for ourselves.  We are microscopic in the universe and we only wish to be highlighted, we wish to be seen as special and we want those in our lives, family and then friends to see us as special, unique and worth saving.

It is phenomenal how wrong we are about ourselves and how we will most likely never arrive at that conclusion.  We as a species are not special in the universe, we are not even special on this planet, we are not special in the cities we live in, we are not special in our communities and generally, we are not special in our families.  But we believe we are bigger than life itself in some cases.  We celebrate our lives like they are worth celebrating on a universal level.  I’ll pose a scenario; what if only half the people on this planet were given the chose, to save themselves or the universe, what would they choose?  First most people on this planet are not educated enough to know that it’s a trick question.  If they choose themselves, they die, if they choose the universe, they die, the point is; how much outside of yourself is it possible for you to care about?  

This is not to say that half the people of the world are capable of killing us all, it just implies that they wouldn’t know better in the first place.  Meaning we are selfish not by status and community but rather by nature itself, which the Governments and Corporations in turn are easily able to control.  Evelyn, under the absurd odd circumstances of the film, even though she is a ‘smart person’, is knowingly and willingly conscious of destroying the world in order to maintain the illusion of her happiness.  This is and can only ever be defined as madness.

Technology isn’t the problem; it’s the people who misuse it.  This film attempts to display that these are two of the same but they are not.  At its best, technology is a marvel as humanity advances progressively through time.  The misuse of this technology by stupid people and corrupt people are what gives it a bad name.  It’s not the ice creams fault if the kid spills half of it on his face and shirt.  This film attempts to discredit technology but then in the end claims that it may save us.  It also attempts to discredit the idea of the soul and religious beliefs, through the scrutinizing quantum computation of artificial intelligence, only leaving us with the belief that this super computer has a soul that cares for individuals, for people.  Secular intellectuals like these scientists should clearly see this as an illusion but yet they don't, because there is a Hollywood dust that gets sprinkled on everything, distorting reality.

The problem with Artificial Intelligence is language as we know it, and how we use it all over the world, as well as consciousness.  First off, language is a system of signs that they themselves are only representations of reality and are not part of the real world at all.  It might be easy for one to say that we can program a computer to speak in a language, but the problem is; language itself doesn’t actually mean anything that can be computed as a value in the artificial mind of a computer that was designed by programmers, that they themselves, have no insight on the symbolic arbitrary nature that is language.   

Consciousness is a realm of the mind that is small compared to the vastness and the computational complexity of the unconscious, which stores a person’s every moment and every experience into a vast memory network.  To unleash that into an A.I. system without ever understanding it on any intellectual level is simply not possible.  Those that study the Singularity and the concept of Transcendence would hopefully and likely find this concept along with this film absurd.

This leaves us to the simple-minded people that are the masses that want to see movies with explosions, which this film about ‘smart people stuff’ is catering too.  This films biggest problem isn’t the subject matter; it’s the audience, the demographic it is trying to reach to make money.  By compromising this way, the potential film has become a movie, a movie where ideas go to die like that town dilapidated Brightwood where Evelyn goes to build Castor’s army of 'Hybrids'.

True transcendence is getting over yourself, by truly avoiding your narcissistic tendencies that govern “me-ness”.  This is the plague, the virus of humanity, this is and what will always pull us down from the peaks of progress; our desire to be celebrated as one even though we live in a world of many.  If we are unable to get over ourselves then we are all going to perish, because we can’t live in a world entirely built of Kings and Queens.

House of Cards: The Crack of the Whip and Dropping the Axe

by Christopher Barr

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way……”

       -  Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I have often found that bleeding hearts have an ironic fear of their own blood.”

       -  Frank Underwood 

House of Cards is a Netflix Original Series of 13 episodes per season about ruthless politics in America.  This ruthlessness is conveyed brilliantly through the thoughts and actions of Frank Underwood, played masterfully by the always stellar Kevin Spacey.  Alongside Frank is his beautiful wife Claire, played by the riveting Robin Wright, together they climb over the skulls of the casualties that they have either stomped out, black-mailed or killed to get to the top.  They are very aware that everything is just business, even adultery.  I think the heart of the show isn’t politics, it’s the toll ambition and power has over the human being.

 

I will refrain from revealing any major plot points in the 2 seasons that are available on Netflix but I do recommend watching the entire 26 episodes before reading any further.  The great atmospheric filmmaker David Fincher set the tone of the show by directing the first couple of episodes, creating a mood and ambience that holds throughout all installments.

Frank starts out at the beginning of this Shakespearian-type tale of deceit and murder as a Congressman that is House Majority Whip on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.  His job is to be the bull that ‘whips’ the party into shape when various bills or amendments need passing or crushing.  Numerous Congressmen on the Hill have their constituencies to think about first, as they should, before they agree to offer their name ‘yay or nay’ to a vote.  While in the legislature Frank must ensure party discipline and to maintain some order in all the political chaos, while often aggressively painting the bigger picture to these men and women of the government.

"It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave of the public's group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service." 

- Edward Bernays, Propaganda

One of the most impactful aspects of the show isn’t the politics but rather the environment that human beings themselves occupy and what they do to aggressively maintain it.  The relationships in this show range from hollow to vindictive, from off-putting to murderous.  To live this life as a politician one has to give up the very humanity that they claim to be fighting for.  To achieve any great level of success in politics one, it appears, must sell their soul to the devil to get what they want.

“Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.”

 - Machiavelli

Machiavelli said that politics has no relation to morals.  Frank demonstrates this all too well during his climb to the vice presidency where he must stabilize his new-found power in order to build an enduring political structure.  That means that violence may be necessary for the successful stabilization of power.  Frank not only has to win but has to have control of all his chess pieces in order to maintain this power.

Sometimes Frank has to create the illusion of power and the understanding by those around him, that he is capable of horrendous things if pushed into a corner.  Vlad the Impaler ordered a forest of impaled bodies to ward off the much bigger Turkish army back in the 15^th century.  Fear is a powerful weapon in warfare; politics is war without the guns just as war is politics without the suits.

House of Cards is quite Shakespearian in nature with a focus on two specific plays, Macbeth and Richard III.  The second season is over and who knows how many more seasons there will be but you can count on it not ending too well for Frank Underwood, much in the same fate as Macbeth and Richard III underwent during the denouements of their respective stories.  Even Frank’s wife Claire resembles Lady Macbeth to some extent.  She is often present and encouraging when Frank has to drop the axe on someone.  She in some cases pushes him to do so echoing Lady Macbeth.

The real tragedies of this show are the good people, they pretty much always lose.  It’s not good to be good in House of Cards because good in politics is weakness and weakness is death.  Oddly enough while watching you find yourself rooting for the bad people and hoping the good people don’t get their due justice.  Frank manipulates many people throughout this show and the one he manipulates the most during his many soliloquies… is us.

House of Cards is a very clever show and is quite grounded in realism.  The show has been praised for its authenticity as it sinks deep into the web of American politics and journalism.  A young journalist named Zoe Barnes gets caught up in that web in order to get what everyone else in that town is out to get… power.

The problem with the show is it promotes Frank and Claire Underwood as all-knowing strategic thinkers and everyone else are somewhat simplistic and asking to be deceived.  There are very little consequences as they slither their way to the top of the Hill.  In reality very little in Washington gets done because people on both sides operate strategically rather than like Frank expediting things quickly because he’s surrounded by idiots.  I suppose that does the show a service in the form of a moving plot.  Actual politics might bore an audience to tears and possibly suicide.

House of Cards is fun and it is addictive and that’s what people really like about the show.  The show isn’t 101 in politics no more than David Fincher’s masterpiece Se7en is 101 in police investigation, but by god was it not entertaining and forcibly grounding?  Watching Frank slick his way around the government is engaging because we want to see if he’ll ever get caught for all the horrible things that he’s done, or maybe some of us wishes he never gets caught.  Hopefully the show doesn’t go as long as Dexter because that got pretty tiring watching him constantly slip through the fingers of the cops around him week after agonizing week.

“Choosing money over power is a mistake almost everyone makes.  Money is the big mansion in Saratoga that starts falling apart after ten years.  Power is that old stone building that stands for centuries.  I cannot respect someone who does not see the difference.”  

- Frank Underwood

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Drones and the Secret Move to Depopulate

by Christopher Barr

Captain America: The Winter Soldier was the most reality based of all the Marvel movies since 2008’s Iron Man.  The movie played like a 70’s espionage thriller with spies and hidden secrets held by men in the shadows, as seen brilliantly in The Parallax View.  It’s not surprising that Robert Redford was cast to illicit that sense of intrigue and suspense so wonderfully captured in Redford’s All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor.

What gave it its contemporary ‘now’ feel was its subject matter, it was about population reduction, it was about striking at the enemy before they can strike at us, it was about holding the population hostage in a police state for their own good.  Since 9/11 a person’s individual freedoms have been hijacked by the very government sworn to protect them.

Captain America has to go off the grid when S.H.I.E.L.D tries to kill him because they think he holds information that an injured Nick Fury might have given him.  Soon we begin to see that some of the higher up officials at S.H.I.E.L.D are secretly Hydra agents fighting to push in a New World Order.  Cap enlists the help of Black Widow and the Falcon to get to the bottom of the conspiracy and to stop the Winter Soldier.

The Winter Soldier is MKUltra on steroids, part man, part machine assassin that is drugged to maintain obedience.  He is responsible for helping Hydra to offset the balance of power and create a world were fear eclipses freedom.

Cap ends up discovering that Hydra, using three massive flying Helicarriers, plans on reducing the population to help insure sustainability and take over the power structure echoing what Hitler and his Nazi soldiers were attempting to do in World War 2.  Hydra developed a system of singling out the weaker links in the population, based on their own assessments and then plan on killing them all.

In reality, World population is, by all intents and purposes, completely out of control. The New World Order Elite plan to implement a depopulation of the 7 billion people on this planet down to a more manageable 500 million to 2 billion.  This plan is to be achieved either by unsustainable international development, which will lead to massive hunger, starvation and famine worldwide, the fomentation of war, hatred and military procurements, such as chemical and biological agents and ultimately to nuclear war.  This will happen throughout various countries leading to millions of deaths worldwide, and finally, the creation and spread of infectious diseases leading to global pandemic, plague and pestilence on an unprecedented scale.   

We’ve already seen the poisoning and contamination of the planet’s food and water supplies, as well as the introduction and use of deadly pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines in society, we’ve seen weather modification through chemical dispersion in the sky and electromagnetic weapons that create massive climate change and destruction.

The previous century was the bloodiest in human history with the management of who lives and who dies becoming the central organizing principle.  Hunger, famine and disease have taken billions of innocent lives, World Wars 1 and 2, along with the despotic regimes of Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Reagan, Bush and now Obama took hundreds of millions of lives.  This new century is shaping up to accelerate this ghastly trend where hunger, famine and disease are reaping record levels of deaths.  Drones are the new weapon of the future, a weapon of mass destruction.

Drones are not extensions of ourselves, they use the freedom to kill at a distances while we are safe and sound in a command center somewhere far away from the kill zone.  They do make warfare safe for those that offer up their lives in the service of making the world a better place.  They take the shred of humanity that’s left in war and transform it into indifferent murder.

The use of drones in hostile situations prove themselves to be quite useful, but the real problem here is war itself.  War is a business and soldiers must be paid like any employee, so eliminating them allows for a much more profitable paycheck for the corporations and governments that are fighting the wars in the first place.

Like the problem with most technologies, drones allow us to free ourselves of the guilt over the atrocities we are executing in the service of profit, the lives we are taking for our stocks to go up.  It’s oddly heading to a point that wars, where actual people are being killed, will have the same indifference a video game has for a gamer.
In the United States, the dominant narrative for the use of drones is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling ‘targeted killing’ of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts.  But the truth is there is mounting evidence of the damaging and counterproductive effects of current US drone strike policies, with negative impacts to the civilians living under drones.

While their use might be a vital part of US counterterrorism, the collateral damage they leave behind is undeniable.  These drones are primarily used for surveillance and spying but there are weapons-carrying drones, which carry Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs that are used by the CIA and the military in anti-terrorist operations.  These drones are called MQ-9 Reapers, with the cost of 12 million per drone.  This is significantly lower than the cost of the US Air Force’s most advanced war plane, the F-22, which is 10 times that amount.

The unmanned Predators have been involved in lethal operations inside sovereign countries that are not even at war with the United States.  The legal ramifications for such operations and the very notion of the deployment of killer robots are deeply disturbing.  There have been 33 percent and upwards of 80 percent of innocent civilians killed during drone operations.  With technological changes within society in the form of the internet and sites like YouTube, there is a growing intolerance for the routine slaughter of so many innocent people.  The secret is out and many people are starting to ask questions about whether these robots are doing more harm than good.  But in the end they are here to stay because they are cheap, for the most part they work, some claim they are necessary and they are quite popular among politicians in the United States both Republicans and Democrats.   

This is all part of the international campaign to eliminate the ‘useless eaters’ on behalf of the planet’s privileged ruling elite, this ‘final solution’ to depopulate 4-5 billion people from Earth, will likely come in the form of an emerging biotech, using nanotechnology to create a super bioweapon virus, a global ‘kill-off’ pandemic through which they will only have the cure.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is but one of many films forecasting this inevitable calamity.  Unfortunately by most of the very population that will be targeted for elimination, will look at this movie and others like it as a complete work of fiction about a superhero that fights the evil bad men and finally saves the day in the end.

The hope that the elite could fail at their attempt to depopulate the world is the business class who run the world.  Business needs customers so killing off well over half the world’s population would effectively cut deep into their bottom line.  So the solace that can be found here, oddly enough, is in greed.  McDonald’s needs its Billion customers to be successful so you can be damn sure they would highly object to depopulation.  Many multinational corporations, like movie studios or car companies on this planet would object and will do whatever it takes to unsure it doesn’t happen.  So in this very rare situation, greed wins today.

This movie explores the ramifications of military technology and weaponry in the wrong hands.  Whether it’s Helicarriers in the movie or Drones in real life, there is a class within the government and the elite they work for, that wish to harm a mass amount of people.  While we are all distracted by social networking and dumbed-down TV, these crazed powerful elite might just get what they want.  We can only hope that the people wake up to their enslavement and take back their freedom.