Caitlin Johnstone: Empire Psychosis

Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us. By Caitlin Johnstone Caitlin’s Newsletter Listen to Tim Foley read this article. More and more humans are suffering from empire psychosis. People who can’t go ten minutes without checking their phones, losing hours a day to social media and mindless scrolling. People talking to chatbots, learning about the world from them, learning about life from them, making friends with them, forming relationships with them. Binging on podcasts, binging on streaming services, binging on video games, binging on apps, binging on vapes, binging on treats delivered to their door by underpaid workers from bombed-out countries. The bread was designed in a lab to be furiously addictive, and the circuses track your preferences to serve you up all your favorite performances. Empire psychosis keeps us in a constant state of distraction and escapism, always scrambling to avoid the here and now like we’re trying to climb out of our own skins. It’s a frenzied discontentedness. A persistent delusion that satisfaction exists right around the corner after the next restless squirm. It’s an artificially manufactured mental disorder. And it’s worth trillions of dollars. In the capitalist empire, there is no value to be generated by contented people. Our minds must be continually prodded and diddled to manipulate us out of our natural serenity so that we are in a constant state of toil and dissatisfaction, at all times reaching for the next fix of the next product. Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us. We are psychologically hammered with advertisements and consumerist messaging from mainstream culture to convince us that we need more than we have and that we aren’t okay the way we are. That we’re not beautiful enough, not stylish enough, not successful enough, not abundant enough. The products are designed to be dependence-forming so we need to buy them, and they’re designed to quickly become obsolete so that we need to keep buying more. They trick us out of our natural state of contentedness and then sell it back to us. They deceive us into leaving our home and then charge us an admission price to come visit. Something went wrong. Humanity went off course. They enclosed the commons, colonized the new world, constructed a tiered society of haves and have-nots, and now we’re all living like space aliens on our own home planet. We do not have to keep suffering from their man-made madness. We can do the inner work necessary to come back to our own contentedness, and we can do the outer work necessary to take back what the manipulators have stolen from us. We don’t need to keep consenting to this abusive relationship any longer. A healthy world is our birthright. We will tear down the madness machine and stand at peace in the soil of the planet we were born on. Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley. This article is from Caitlin’s Newsletter and re-published with permission. The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News. The orchestrated theater is we need to hate any people who have resources our criminal elite rulers want to steal from. Then we need to hate those who hate the people who are being murdered, then we need to hate their religion or their skin color. Every 4 years we go to the ballot box to finally dump the President we have grown to hate, only to elect someone we will hate even more. This is all being done so a few people with a billion dollars, can have a few billion more. We know this, but there is no way to escape this madness. The one that gets me is Russian energy sanctions that have massively contributed to global inflation without doing a single thing to change the course of the Ukraine war. None of the extra money paid by motorists, farmers, et al, goes to Ukraine – it’s taken by the large energy corporations and distributed to their rich shareholders. Then we die and are reborn and do it all over and over again “A healthy world is our birthright. We will tear down the madness machine and stand at peace in the soil of the planet we were born on.” Indeed! This reminds me of recent email and recording sent by cellist Rebecca Hartka … here’s the link: hxxps://www.desantproductions.com Interesting. None of this applies to me. And I am grateful for that. All of what is described above requires your voluntary participation. You have to go to the websites. You have to download the apps. You have to log in. All of this can be turned off. Thus, when I see a fine piece about what is driving everyone around me mad, it is interesting to observe, but none of it gets through my defenses to me. That is victory. That is by design. I have turned them off. My message to others, it is possible to live outside the Empire Psychosis. “Though I could not caution all, I still might warn a few Don’t lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools” — ‘Ship of Fools’, by The Grateful Dead. Whew! Brilliant. What’s truly sad is the disappearance of third spaces. Obviously it’s one of the reasons many of my fellow American citizens are feeling lonely and isolated which helps to spur on addictive-compulsive behaviors like Johnstone outlines above. This erosion of third spaces really escalated during and after the big hysterical Covid freakout of 2020. Worldwide, there have been at least a calmative total of 7,000,000 Covid deaths. 1,720,000 in North America. Of course, those of us who got in the way of the profit machine by not wanting to die are described as “hysterical”. That 7,000,000 is a vast undercount. It relies on official stats, some from oligarch controlled, pro-death governments. Governments that believed in quack theories like herd immunity, and which worked hard with statistics to undercount the numbers (usually by classifying them as something non-covid). Some places that had very limited testing with which to confirm a covid death, and thus were places where many unconfirmed covid deaths occurred that do not make the above official stats.