This will all play into the reinvigorated controversy surrounding the origins of the virus, which will ultimately lead nowhere. As Jonathan Cook argues in a thoughtful new article on the overnight pivot in the political/media class from attacking anyone who questioned whether the virus transferred to humans via a Wuhan wet market as a deranged and racist conspiracy theorist to acknowledging that a lab leak could be possible is due to scientific arguments gaining traction and forcing establishment narrative managers to engage in damage control.
Contradicting right-wing Maddowesque claims that this adamant opposition to the lab leak theory proves the media and the Democratic Party are in Xi Jinping's pocket, Cook argues that the western empire has been protecting not China, but themselves. The US scientific establishment and the WHO are both reportedly tied to controversial "gain-of-function" research practices in the Wuhan lab just before the Covid outbreak, which according to Cook means we can expect the imperial narrative managers to lead us around on a merry chase for truth without ever getting too close to it for fear of exposing the role that western power structures may have had the whole mess.
I've been staying abreast of all the many various theories, and I still remain unsure of where Covid came from. I've remained happily agnostic about many aspects of this story from the beginning, much to the chagrin of many regular readers who've wanted my voice to offer certainty and solidity on the matter. But I do think it's very revealing how instantaneously a story switched from unutterable conspiracy theory to mainstream orthodoxy, just because those who are responsible for overseeing the Official Narratives of the US-centralized empire deemed it so.
The same exact thing has happened with UFOs, but to an even greater extent. A few short years ago publicly saying that UFOs are real and that they may be piloted by extraterrestrial intelligence was a surefire way to get yourself laughed out of the building and dismissed as a nut job; now the US military is just flat-out saying it and it's in the news every day. One minute it was childish nonsense, the next it's an Official Narrative.
The fact that there can be that drastic of a shift from something no pundit or politician may say to something they're encouraged to talk about all the time — all at once, at the drop of a hat — says so much about what the political/media class is and how it works in our society. How utterly uninterested in truth and facts it is. How arbitrary its dictates are. How completely made-up its ongoing story of the world is. It just says what's convenient for the powerful, and when that's not convenient anymore it switches to something else.
In a truly free society, there would be no Official Narratives. There wouldn't be any monolithic authority construct deciding what's true and marginalizing, censoring and smearing anyone who said something different. There'd just be raw information and a bunch of humans arguing their opinion, and people would take all that and form their own beliefs, and that would just be accepted and allowed.
Think about what that might be like for a minute, if there were no Official Narratives. If everyone was allowed to just interpret reality for themselves, without the supervision of any overseeing authority. Would the sky fall? Would the world catch fire? Or could we find a way for that to just be fine?
You might argue that recent events show bad things would happen if there were no Official Narratives. People won't get vaccinated. People would distrust election results and raid the Capitol building. But think about it: why are people doing those things? It's because they distrust the Official Narratives they are being fed by the Official Narrative Managers, who as we've just discussed don't have the best track record for truthfulness. They manufacture consent for any murderous agenda the US war machine decides it wants, they normalize corporate malfeasance and an oppressive, exploitative, ecocidal, omnicidal status quo, and they just re-write their own Official Narratives a second after they were screaming at people for trying to write their own. This wouldn't be the case in a society where people weren't being bullied and shoved into untrustworthy narratives by untrustworthy institutions.
If we are to transcend our self-destructive patterning as a species, that movement will necessarily include an end to having our minds manipulated by the propaganda engine of an oligarchic empire which feeds on murder, slavery, and environmental destruction. We're going to have to pry the lies we've been told since birth from our minds and begin building a healthy world. One where we collaborate with each other and with our ecosystem toward the common good, and one where we respect one another's mental sovereignty without any institutional mechanisms exerting control over any of us.
It's entirely possible to have such a world. But in order to have it we'll all have to at some point relinquish the inner tyrant inside us which thinks it knows what thoughts everyone else should be thinking in their heads and seeks to impose control over them, because that tyranny is the same mind virus which led to the rise of the Official Narrative Management which holds us all captive today. We can only ever be as free as we allow ourselves to be.
About the Author:
Caitlin Johnstone: My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I've written) in any way they like free of charge. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do with this platform, click here.
Reader Comments
S-)
This would solve a lot of issues. (No more money for wars etc. for a start.)
It would also create issues ... like, how would extractive governments work ? They would not know who had the money !
Then again, the useless eaters (yes I'm thinking of politicians now ...) would get pretty hungry.
There are many in this world who like to enforce official narratives be they western governments or religious entities and governments (Taliban ... other Islamist states ... and Hindu states ... etc.)
Ahhh ... my mind is a bit wishful at times !
I’ve heard this theme my entire adult life, and generally have accepted it with little to no criticism.
But I’ve grown.
The “self-destructive pattern” does not appear ontological to the human species as a whole; instead it is limited to a small cohort of beings; an in-set within the species, mutations, human-like; but not human at all. Let’s call them the evil-elite (implies a good-elite?).
Maybe the true patterns of our species are being hidden in secret obscured - like all contemporary events. Maybe we are not inherently self-destructive collectively.
Maybe that’s part of the ‘long-narrative’.
Even a known sociopath curbs their behaviour out in the wild. Sometimes reality tv shows have these types in their midst.
Our patterning is learned and those who do not have or exhibit destructive patterns are usually and normally those who are, or have been at some point, more vulnerable - ie the poor.
I trust the poor almost instinctively whereas a smarmy lawyer type I would never trust ! RC excluded ... :-)
AND WORDS ARE JUST AS BAD IF NOT WORSE"
(updated "woke" version that they're learning in kindergarten these days...)
;>
The control of information is the key to the narrative as MSM presents. The change in narrative can mean preparing the population for an event like the UFO change. The change in narrative can be the recognition that the population is no longer buying it, like Cuomo and nursing homes or the Wuhan lab source. In this case MSM does not admit their former narrative, simply goes in a new direction
Unlike Caitlyn i would suggest there are no accidents in events nor the narrative. From this point of view, the plandemic "began" with a non-accidental Wuhan release of a "virus", followed by its labeling as a "pandemic" and the narrative for the last year. This would also mean that the research at Wuhan was part of the plan. This would also mean that the "vaccines" contents and effects were planned.