© Robert WeaverArtwork by Robert Weaver (c. 1960s-70s)
"The invisible hand has created an invisible cage...blinding us and dividing us,
allowing the ruling class to exploit us and subjugate us."
-Hiroyuki Hamada
When the whole society becomes a theater of absurdity, the puppeteers become kings and queens of insanity. The society loses its logic, history, facts, honesty, sincerity, creativity and imagination, as the monstrous imaginations of the deranged ruling class devour humanity and nature.The invisible cage of authoritarianism comes in the shape of a bottomless pyramid. Fear and hopelessness fill the dimly lit bottom layers.
Layers and layers separate us, alienate us and dehumanize us. The pain of "others" becomes your gain.
The power of oppressors becomes your safety: The safety of living in the dangerous imaginations of the kings and queens.
But such a thought vanishes as quickly as our minds get flooded back with the numbing noises of the insane theater, while our remaining logic, seriousness and honesty are ridiculed and attacked by fearful fellow humans with cynicism, hopelessness and cowardliness.
The world doesn't look like that at all for those who belong to the club of kings and queens. The unruly mass with no understanding of the righteous path of "humanity" has been inherently expendable for them. This has been shown over and over: colonization of natives by Europeans, enslavement of African people, genocides of many sorts.
But one also sees the same blunt inhumanity embedded among us today: homelessness, deaths by treatable diseases, hunger, deaths by substance abuse, suicide, poverty, refugees, mass incarceration, state violence, the psychological torture of alienation. The kings and queens don't recognize those as issues to be solved with their resources.
Instead those issues represent
forms of punishment for those who fail to secure viable positions within the capitalist hierarchy. The fear of the punishment and the fear of the authority work together to lock us in positions in the hierarchy, forcing us to protect our positions which systemically and structurally threaten our wellbeing 24/7;
we live in a system of structural extortion.
Comment: Trump was correct in his evaluation of most of the buildings that house government services. They are ugly. Everyday Americans feel it