Manufacturing Serfs
Take a minute and suspend your judgment while you read this. Stand back from the reality you think you see and allow yourself to compare it to a different basis of thought. What do you see?
Stand back — What do you see from this angle:
- Ethics is a thing of the past.
- The internet put information flow on steroids. It comes to us at “near the speed of light.”
- Lobbying Congress has become a “thing” for corporations.
- Corporations influence “Congress” with “favors” to get what they want.
- Corporations enforce worker ethics to hire and fire.
- Corporations pay their executives according to their contribution to the “bottom line.” CEOs usually get Millions in salary and perks. Ackoff: “The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation.” Peter Drucker: “Profit is to a corporation as oxygen is to a human being: necessary for existence, not the reason for it.” Ackoff: “Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective.” Ackoff: “The most valuable and least replaceable resource is time. Without the time of employees, money can produce nothing. Employees have a much larger investment in most corporations than their shareholders.”
- Corporations pay an average of 4% raises to hands-on workers, which barely keeps up with the historical 3.7% average inflation.
- The government is a bloated apparatchik that works for Corporations.
- The government is run by high emotions, not by the rule of law.
- The 4th Branch of government rules The People’s universe.
- The People are governed by the 4th branch of government with regulations.
- The people are not the same under the law.
- Most people cannot afford lawyers.
- The flow of information is “Manufactured” to sell what they want us to believe.
- Manufactured lies prevail over the Truth.
- “Elections” today are shaped by the “news” to keep us from digging deeper into what we really need
Is our consumer culture of endless pursuit of material goods a Piñata illusion of life sold by the corporations that do not pay what we deserve to make those products?
In 2024, we have the traces of a perfect storm brewing in the world. In the 20th Century, we saw two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, etc.; the US became a Super Power; China came out of the ashes when Nixon opened it for trade; Russia lost communism a time after the death of Stalin; and European countries were liberated when Reagan negotiated the downfall of the Berlin Wall, all seemed good with the world. However, late in the Century, cracks started showing up, first with the Vietnam War. We, the people, made several bad choices when voting to elect governments.
In the preface of his book Dismantling America, Thomas Sowell compares our current reality with the fall of the Roman Empire: “The Roman Empire weathered many storms but lasted many times longer through several turbulent times, and yet, it ultimately collapsed completely.”
The result, he continues: “It has been estimated that a thousand years passed before the standard of living in Europe rose again to the level it had achieved in Roman times.”
The book is all about how the government operates with the written words of laws that create a totally different reality than what is advertised.
- Moral distinctions — “If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric (of what we desperately need vs. what we want to know) and make moral distinctions (besides being arrogant), then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.”
- What we see a lot of today — “One of the scariest aspects of our times is how easy it is for glib loudmouths to turn us against each other.” “People do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer (Trump vs Obama), and they don’t want explanations that fail to give them that.”
- Thomas Jefferson said:
We concentrate power “in the same hands” every time we elect the same people to Congress forever! If we wait for the government to commit “seppuku” by passing a term-limiting law, then everybody also believes in Santa Claus.
True knowledge is out there if you seek it with an open mind and read instead of watching TV and believing what you “see.”
Why? As Thomas Sowell said: “Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.”
I love The Declaration of Independence and…
