George Kurtz ascended to the billionaire rankings on the back of soaring stocks immediately after the company went public, carried no doubt on the winds of the international fame it gained from its central protagonistic role in the most well-known hacking news story of all time. A loyal servant of empire well-rewarded.
Never mind that US government insiders like Hillary Clinton had been prepping for escalations against Russia well in advance of the 2016 elections, and that their preexisting agendas to shove a geostrategic obstacle off the world stage benefited from the hacking narrative as much as George Kurtz did.
Never mind that Crowdstrike is tied to the NATO narrative management firm known as the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO, Gulf states and powerful international oligarchs. Never mind either that Crowdstrike was financed with a whopping $100 million from Google, which has had a cozy relationship with US intelligence agencies since its very inception.
Never mind that to this day the DNC servers have not been examined by the FBI, nor indeed were they examined by the Special Counsel of Robert "Iraq has WMD" Mueller, preferring instead to go with the analyses of this extremely shady outfit with extensive and well-documented ties with the oligarchic leaders of the US-centralized empire. Also never mind that the Crowdstrike analyst who led forensics on those DNC servers had in fact worked for and was promoted by Robert Mueller while the two were in the FBI.
As I never tire of saying, the real underlying currency in our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even raw military might. The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.
As soon as you really grok this dynamic, you start noticing it everywhere. George Kurtz is one clear example today of narrative control's central role in the maintenance and expansion of existing power structures, as well as an illustration of how the empire is wired to reward those who advance pro-empire narratives and punish those who damage them; just compare how he's doing to how Julian Assange is doing, for example.
But you see examples pop up every day:
- The US State Department just got busted using a $1.5 million troll farm to manipulate public discourse on social media about Iran.
- Video footage has just surfaced of the OPCW Director General admitting that the OPCW did indeed deliberately omit any mention in its official findings of a report from its own investigation which contradicts the establishment narrative about a chemical strike in Douma, Syria, an admission which answers controversial questions asked by critics of western imperialism like myself, and which the mainstream media have not so much as touched.
- Mintpress News broke a story the other day about a new narrative management operation known as "The Trust Project", a coordinated campaign by establishment-friendly mass media outlets for "gaming search-engine and social-media algorithms in collusion with major tech companies like Google and Twitter."
- In a new interview with The Canary, UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer explicitly named the mass media as largely responsible for Assange's psychological torture, excoriating them for the way that they "have shown a remarkable lack of critical independence and have contributed significantly to spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives about Mr Assange."
- In a new essay called "Freeing Julian Assange", journalist Suzie Dawson reports that "Countless articles appear to have been obliterated from the internet" about Assange and WikiLeaks, amounting to some 90 percent of the links Dawson examined which were shared in tweets by or about WikiLeaks and Assange since 2010.
- I just finished reading this excellent Swiss Propaganda Research essay about the little-known fact that "most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris."
Because whoever controls the narrative controls the world.
Power used to be much easier to identify in our society: just look for the fellow with the sparkly hat made of gold sitting in a really big chair and bossing everyone around. As our society advanced philosophically, however, people began to tire of having every aspect of their society determined by some schmuck in a golden hat, and started fighting for ideals called "freedom" and "democracy" in their respective nations. And, as far as our parents and teachers have taught us, freedom and democracy are exactly what we have now.
Except that's all crap. Freedom and democracy only exist within the western empire to the extent that it keeps up appearances. Because the trouble with democracy, it turns out, is that human minds are very hackable, as long as you've got the resources. Wealthy and powerful people do have the resources, which means that it's very possible for wealthy and powerful people to manipulate the masses into voting in a way that consistently benefits the wealthy and powerful. This is why billionaires and narrative control consistently go hand-in-hand.
This dynamic has allowed for western power structures to operate in a way that western democracy was explicitly designed to prevent: for the benefit of the powerful instead of for the benefit of the voting populace. So now we've got people in so-called liberal democracies voting to maintain governments which advance wars which don't benefit them, to advance intrusive surveillance and police state policies which oppress them, to advance austerity policies which harm them, to advance labor policies which exploit them, and to maintain ecocidal environmental policies which threaten the very survival of our species. All because the wealthy and powerful are able to use their wealth and power to manipulate the way people think and vote.
This is why I pay far more attention in my work to narrative control than to politics. Politics is downstream from narrative control, which is why the 2020 US presidential race is already a contest to see what level of Democratic corporatist warmonger will be running against the incumbent Republican corporatist warmonger. The narrative-controlling class does its level best to hide the fact that anything's fundamentally wrong with the system, then when people notice it's deeply broken they encourage them to use completely impotent tools to fix it. "Don't like how things are run? Here, vote for our other puppet!"
The root of all our problems right now is the fact that human minds are very hackable with enough resources, combined with the fact that war, oppression, exploitation and ecocide are highly profitable. This dynamic has caused human collective consciousness to generally dead-end into a kind of propagandized, zombified state in which all our knowledge and all our thinking moves in alignment with the agendas of existing power structures. It's much easier to continue believing the official narratives than to sort through everything you've been told about your society, your nation and your world since grade school and work out what's true and what's false. Many don't have the time. Many more don't have the courage.
We will remain in this collective dead-end, hurtling toward either Orwellian dystopia or extinction via climate collapse or nuclear armageddon, until we find a way out of it. It won't come from the tools our rulers have given us, and it won't come from repeating any of the old patterns which got us here. In order to escape from the increasingly adept narrative control matrix that is being built around our collective mind by the powerful, we're going to have to change our relationship with narrative altogether. We will either pass this great test or we will fail it, and we absolutely have the freedom to go either way.
Reader Comments
The powerful church for years had been copying books; perhaps the REFORMATION was a deletion as much as it was redirection.
Magic, transmutation of metals, sorcery, had become esoteric and unusable so was redirected to the supreme being God thru prayer.
Even astrology, the interpretation of cosmic positions of the planets affecting people's lives, became a fancy not fact.
We have come full circle in science as we now realized the powerful aspect of magnetic rivers connecting stars and their systems.
The magnetic refraction we have seen in the corona of our sun SOL, produced by aligned planets and perhaps other cosmic bodies, may actually hold power for our insight and enable observational effects.
Science has discovered that the feeling of 'being watched' is generated by intense sound not detectable within our hearing range. Extreme pressure and magnetism are explored by science only just able to peer into the edge. Will this follow the examples of the past, where a bit of knowledge was camouflaged by power to create rulable people? Like passage tombs in Ireland? Like the Scilian tomb that echoes masculine speech to awe and cower? How many times has science understood this ultra low sound can be redirected for effect? And then protected it for power?
We today are ruled by media as the article suggests. In the past, perhaps a societal collapse allowed a few to grasp power by reproducing the effects of ultra low sound, maybe there were a few places that retained extraordinarily high magnetism that were used to support power.
Hypnosis is real, its effects are real, its power is real, and its abuse is real. Perhaps its greatest effect is the deleterious effect it has on the practitioner's moral compass.
One day the rest of the world will be where you are now.
While we accept and act from definitions and stories that express and reinforce such definitions, we act as if we are what our story makes us - and if we accept definitions of lack and powerlessness then we have already given power to an experience of subjection as our presumption of being.
One can also see this as narrative continuity to a personality structure or focus.
While the sense of identity in image, form and a world of things or objects is a time-bound and linear development or drama of unfolding outcomes and abilities, an identity in joy, as the rising presence of a recognised appreciation, flows and flowers within the Now - rather than as the persistence of a subject-object sense of judgement over or subjection to - a world set apart and 'other'.
It is possible to see 'the human condition' as conditioning - through which we explore and experience through limitation, generated by division and conflict. Through identity-in-grievance and lack seeking validation or completion OUTSIDE - because our experience of lack is associated with separation trauma of rejection, abandonment, betrayal and loss of love. For which we had no 'word' or concept for in being love.
The hackable human mind is already hacked. The wish to be what we are not is the attempt to make the world in our own image. But identification in image is to have already 'made a self' set against the flow or movement of being within Itself.
The deceiver is the lie and the father of it - and so the wish that wants the truth different than it is, seeks, finds and defends the story of its own mythic symbology.
Yielding illusion to truth runs the other way than sacrificing truth to illusion. Attempting to bring light to darkness, makes the darkness real and then seeks to escape from its own framing thought. Darkness or conflict and division is brought to light by no longer hiding or protecting it in masking thought, word and deed.
Insofar as others seek to manipulate or deceive, they can still do so only through our own willingness or unmindful habit of self-manipulative deceit. Self-honesty or transparency to truth is not something we can DO - but something we can recognize we are doing that blocks or undermines our awareness of integrity and thus be free to choose NOT to do it. This is very different from all our mind-training - and so is a course in retraining the mind from awakened purpose instead of as a masking or hiding from hates and fears that are NOT escaped thereby.
Opening to a reintegrative perspective, in place of fear and division set in narratives of good and evil, is a single unequivocal Call. Denied and rejected hates and fears may be put out of mind - but only to the limiting or filtering of a mind set NOT to know its own thought so as to persist in it while disclaiming any responsibility and freedom FOR thought. "See what you made me do!", being an example of assigning power to conditions rather than to the definitions that set the meaning of our experience.
That beneath all seeming, we are the scriptwriter of our own experience is not something to 'tell others', but something to open to and integrate in relation to others and our world.
An investment in untruth, becomes trapped in its own lies, until and unless a simple grace of noticing alights the mind in place of fear of exposure to illegitimacy and rejection. Rather than seeking to demonise or shame others for poor thinking and destructive decisions, we might reflect the nature of the choice they are making in a way that enables them to reclaim the power OF choice - instead of sacrificing choice to the tyranny of survival under the terms of a pact with a false sense of power - or deceitful thinking and hollow self seeking validation and reinforcement in fantasy acted out on the body, on their relationships and on their world.
We are always meeting ourself in every situation - but may not recognize the opportunity to release the false if we are seeking, seeing and validating our own story. Propaganda is manipulative. True communication is relational. The latter accepts the relationship as part of our Life. The former uses the relationship to GET something for itself at expense of the other - perhaps in the name of 'saving them from themselves'.
The mind is a projector. What you give out is what you get back, but also mind is NOT merely a personal private fragment unto itself whole - but lives within a collective agreement that includes agreeing to FORGET who we are as part of a shared script of awareness within a focus of experience of limitation.
When Confucius was asked what would HE do if in the reins of (political) power, he replied that he would redeem the dictionary (in terms of his own language of course).
The word spells the reality of the one who gives it, and the adulteration and corruption of the word is the misidentification of reality in fear and division - and hence in attack ON his or her reality as power of survival set against fear of pain of loss.
Logic is the extension of its premise - but magic is the mind by which to re-source our self in imaginary context. or to take things OUT of living context and give our reality TO the meanings we thus gain - at expense of real relation and communication.
What does it profit to gain a world at cost of awareness of our Soul?
Re-locating self, other and world in the Timeless or Always - is releasing our narrative demands and assertions to a true Inherence.