At the risk of being branded a psycopath….
If you believe it is wrong to have sex with small children, start fires for fun, smash car windows to steal the ICE, drink and drive, etc, then the chances are you won’t be doing those things, or if you do do them, you’ll do them badly and in a way that gets detected as you are wrung by guilt and pangs of “cry for help”.
So belief’s are a pretty good way of controlling people, and as Vonnegut said, people project their beliefs upon a blank canvas, so you only have to look at the canvas to read the person.
“I believe Hitlary should be the next Prezzident” is not merely a statemeant about Hitlary vs the other contenders, quite essentially it is also an implicit statement that the role of Prezzident is meaninful and capable of being a thing of good, a beacon of light and warmth.
By controlling the belief’s of the individual from an early age you can quite easily convince them that fucking adults is fine, that executing adults is fine, that stealing from adults is fine, that black adults are inferior to white adults, that female adults are inferior to male adults, that christian adults are inferior to muslim adults, thet Freddie Kruger was / is a real person, that lizards living in volcanoes control the world, that Gaddafi was a tyrant and that the USA is a democracy.
And once held beliefs are something that people will fight for long after their posessions have gone, I have no home / car / stereo / friends / prospects, but I BELIEVE I am a good person.
The whole purpose of junior school when I was a small boy was to instil a set of beliefs into me, in my particular case that did not take so well, because I started at 7 not 5, and because I had already travelled the world and seen much, so when presented with a “self evident belief” (self evident because all my peers believed it) I would ask “Why?”
I soon learned not to ask, because nobody can actually explain their beliefs logically, they all believe they can, but when they attempt it and you respond logically, they get angry at you.
I was told that on day 1 of creation god said let there be light, and that on day 4 of creation (after creating sky and water on day 2 and dry land and all life on day 3) he creates the heavenly bodies, including the sun and the moon, day 6 is adam and eve and day 7 is the rest day.
So I asked obvious question, where did the light created on day 1 go when god created the heavenly bodies, because now it gets dark at night, and did this mean the earth (as a barren dry dark husk) existed before day 1, because nowhere does it meantion the earth being created, presumably day 1 god turns a light on and sees earth, because day 2 he adds sky and water to an already existing earth, and come day 3 he creates land, which was by definition already there before day 2 and the creation of sky and water.
So I am then told it is an allegorical tale, not a factual tale meant to be taken literally.
So I say that what you are telling me is that it is just a story, it is not true at all, the world and everything else was not created in 7 days.
I am told it is true, and stop being such a naughty boy, DELIBERATELY misinterpreting and questioning what I am being taught.
Up until that point at the age of 7, I was quite happy to belive in God, because God made us all and everything else, and God liked people who did good things, and did not like people who did bad things, and that was about as complex as the story got…. it was so vague that you could not poke logical holes in it, nevertheless, it gave a map of how to behave, so that was good.
It pretty much coincided with things my mum and dad said, and it pretty much coincided with everything the Bhuddists and Muslims and Hindu and others around me said, albeit they had different names for God, like they had different names for people or for a watermelon, but we were all talking about the same thing.
Don’t think for a moment that when I talk about “belief” I mean just religion.
My life from then until the late eighties consisted of much of the same, no matter where I went in the world and what I did, you were basically not going from one country to another or region to another or anything else, you were going from a place where most people believed one thing, to a place where most people believed a slightly different thing, and the definition of a bad place to be was somewhere where they believed something very different to what you did, and in those places and time it was the power of violence or implied violence that kept the sides in check, until you left that place.
“Home” was England, where most people believed pretty much what I did, which made interaction easy, even if I did not go to one of the two main churches (catholic and protestant) every sunday, and even in Northern Ireland back in the day, it was never about religion, it just so happened that if you were a protestant then you’d believe a whole load of non religious things that clashed with someone else, and there was an extremely high probability that that person was a catholic, and vice versa.
See small boys going to preparatory school and being inculcated with beliefs.
And I say up until about the late eighties for a reason, because everything changed then.
Computers and CNC technologies came in, so instead of just being able to publish Personal Computer World, a magazine that covered all of personal computing and had specialist sections within for those that had say a BBC micro, suddenly one publishing house could publish 20 different personal computer magazines, you could buy an Amiga sepcialist magazine, a Sinclair specialist magazine, and Atari specialist magazine, a Commodore specialist magazine, and in doing so you went from being a small regular section in a telephone book to the entire magazine, and you also never got to see or read anything about anything else, if someone who owned an Amiga wrote into a Commodore magazine and asked why Commodores had such crap sound chips they got shouted down as an Amiga fanboy, by the resident Commodore fanboys.
We got both kinds of music, country AND western.
And then the advertisers woke up, snorted a few lines of coke, and surveyed all these new lands, it was like day 5 of creation all over again, and instead of just Adam and Eve, it was Jim the Amiga guy, Joe the Marlboro man, Steve the Heavy Metal guy, Frank the beach bug guy, Harry the sailboat guy, and then the advertisers went forth and procreated with their own offspring, Harry could also be the Rolex guy, Frank could also be the surfer dude, Steve could also be the Technics guy, Joe could also be the Jeep guy, and Jim could also be the penthouse pet of the week fanclub guy.
And it got ever more incestuous and iniquitous, and then the cunts discovered the naescent world wide web, and advertising to individuals got so cheap as to be effectively free, and fuck all the rules and gentleman’s agreements about truth in advertising, or at least some faint semblance of it.
Meanwhile human beings were going around doing what humans do, which is comparing memes and beliefs, and Darwinian forces were at work there too, and there was plenty of fallow soil eagerly awaiting the seeds, all those “torches of freedom” wimminz lighting up cigarettes in the 30’s and all those on the pill and all those feminist liberation types, and suddenly there were all those so cheap as to be effectively free new channels for sending memes and ideas and micro-belief soundbites to the masses.
Where once there was England with mere generational blips on the cultural radar like rock and roll and punk rock and standard trunk dialling, now the new memes were coming out every week, then every day, then every hour, every minute, every second…
Mass constant civil war and anarchy in a bad way down at the meme / belief level, people who are now feminazi members of the state who twenty years ago were affiliated with the paedofile information exchange, but that is all forgotten in the current chaotic white noise, and can’t happen again as it is drowned out before it can rise to prominence in the all pervasive white noise.
Not just nobody believes in anything, but everyone disbelives a whole separate slew of contantly changing things.
Hitlary can stand up in public and ask why, since she spent 150 millions dollars more than Trump on her campaign, why isn’t she 50 points ahead?
Because, chaos in beliefs…
Causal strings of relationships and dependencies dissolved away in the chatoic churning soup of disbelief.
And even if I fucking do believe in something for a day and vote for it, if twenty four fucking hours pass and I don’t get my fucking payola, fuck you I’ll stab you in the back for betraying me you cunt.
Trump or Hitlary winning makes no odds, neither of them can pay off sufficiently large and sufficiently rapidly to avoid an instant voter backlash.
Meanwhile back at the ranch marketing and propaganda has gotten so cheap and so instant that even the Daily Mail, I literally cannot look at a single front page on their website without almost immediately spotting a glaring typo or mistake.
Sure, this blog is fucking full to the brim of that shit, but this blog is not a massive multinational media system with tens of thousands of employees and staffers and *more* than enough headroom to ensure that every single article is prrofread before being posted, a delay of maybe 5 minutes to publication, which goes on 24/7 nowadays, no more of this of shit we missed the presses it will have to wait until tomorrow and we get scooped by the Times.
The rot has set in so far that typos and other errors are a continual daily occurence in arguably one of the top news media sites in the world… they no longer give a fuck.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
HFT has come to the media, being 5 seconds before anyone else means your story gets linked and syndicated, not theirs.
But in chaos comes the opportunity for Joe Bloggs to also reach a fairly wide audience for free, and you can look at youtube for videos in such diverse subjects and Union Carbide Bhopal, 9/11, Egyptian Spring, Ukraine, and find videos with tens of thousand of vews, hundreds of thousands of views, millions of views, some of them tens of millions of views.
Which leave us where?
In interesting and chaotic times, times where something that did not exist yesterday can become a force of nature by tomorrow, and things that are immense rocks today have diseappeared below the seething foam tomorrow.
It is not the best or most superior or most moral or most enlightened ideas that coalesce from chaos, merely the fittest to survive the chaos.
People who do not belive in anything get angry very quickly, and everywhere I go from on the roads to in shops to on the streets, people are getting angrier, faster, for less real reason, than I have ever seen before.
I contantly remind myself not to lead the pack, it would be unwise to be the first person to kill everyone in a silver car just because some cunt in a silver car cut you up at the lights.
Far better to bide your time and wait until they are all brawling in the intersections, then go do my own nefarious deeds elsewhere under cover of that.