Nearly every aspect of modern society is designed with your enslavement in mind

Modern housing, food, money, private property, 'education', and more

Since I haven’t done so in a wholistic kind of way to this point, I wanted to write an article where I provide more of an overview on my thoughts both on the nature of modern society (essentially, a labor camp), as well as the various facets of society that serve to create, maintain or enhance your enslavement. I may lean on some valuable sources I've come across over the years to help me paint this picture.

For starters, an understanding of how capitalism works can provide a great foundation upon which to understand the wider system of enslavement, for indeed, capitalism, or a system predicated on the privatization of resources through money, private property and potentially other means, is the foundation of the enslavement system in which we all find ourselves existing. To get a sense of how capitalism came into existence, as well as what in particular about capitalism makes it so pernicious and damaging to life, I cannot recommend highly enough a book called Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici. In the book, Federici smashes the notion that capitalism arose naturally from feudalism, as suggested by modern capitalist economists and even the likes of Marx, and instead effectively demonstrates (with a bevy of source material to boot) that in fact the system of capitalism was hammered into the medieval European population through state-sponsored campaigns of terrorism, including what is known as the witch hunts, and then subsequently exported globally over the past five to six hundred years through the machinations of European monarchical (aka, ‘elite’) colonialism. Socialism...Seriously was a great early book for me to read on this journey, while The Anarchist Library has a lot of good content as well.

From ‘Caliban and the Witch’

To put it simply, a system, or a ‘world order’ if you like, has been created in which what should be a free planet Earth, where everything is considered and, indeed, experienced firsthand as sacred and holy, has been privatized through money and private property such that a small cadre of psychopaths can utilize the resources (including humanity) of the planet for personal gain. The system is arguably in its most efficient expression, having achieved such a state through centuries of brute force warfare and terrorism, as well as more subtle methods of propaganda and the like. World War II, in particular, seems to have been a very significant marker in a turn towards ever sharper global despotism, as massive social engineering projects were occurring around that time with significant ramifications leading up to the present day. For example, in an article called ‘The obscure history of suburbia’, Noam Chomsky describes:

Noam Chomsky: It [suburbia] was created in the 1940s by the biggest state social engineering project in history under the Eisenhower administration –beyond anything they did in Russia. The specific goal was to eliminate public transportation, destroy the inner cities, forces everyone to use cars, trucks. And in the 1940’s there was an authentic conspiracy, a real one, between General Motors, Firestone Rubber, and Standard Oil California to buy up the public transportation, destroy it, and force everyone into buses and cars. The conspiracy went to court and they were convicted and fined –I think $5000 or something. Then the government moved in and took it over, under cover of defense.

Stephan Truby: You mean President Eisenhower’s National Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956?

Noam Chomsky: Yes. The pretext of the National Defense Highway Act was that we have to move missiles around the country. But the point of it was to massively subsidize road transportation –cars, trucks, gasoline and so on- and to undermine public transportation.¹

Freedom?

From an article called ‘Suburbs are sinister places’:

Growing up, I used to refer to my home as a 'flowery ghost town'. Despite having a population of 30,000 people, there is an absence of life. When I went for walks in the evening, the streets were almost always deserted, the dim glow of television sets being the only sign of life. 

People have this strangely interiorized style of living, where they switch off the outside world, like it is some threatening television program. They lock their front door and switch on the alarm system and then watch TV and go online. That's not a recipe for healthy society. 

From a comment on the above article:

David Richards is right.   Young people are entirely unaware that the suburbs were designed essentially as minimum security holding pens for the "postwar generation".    Their grandparents or great grandparents that became young adults during WWII were separated by gender for the duration of the war, after which they scattered across the country.   'GI Bill' suburbs offered low cost houses for the war veterans to lure them away from established villages and urban neighborhoods.

I was born in 1955 when this was still new.  Still, I wouldn't have known what had been lost, if I hadn't been raised by my grandparents.  They could see that the suburbs would never become like the villages, neighborhoods and small towns people lived for generations before.  For thing, the businesses we used weren't locally owned.  The stores were all national chains.

So were the banks.  The first 'malls' were introduced during the late 1960's were supposed to provide a 'town square' but all one could do there is consume. …   Suburbs are a system that excludes self sufficiency, after the fashion of pastures and pens for livestock.²

To put it differently, my strong feeling that, like cities, modern suburbia is a centrally planned living arrangement designed to hold humanity, factory farm style, in such a way that people can get to and from work and the other basics, but wherein it is made exceedingly difficult by the design of the society itself for people to actually come together in any meaningful way, as to allow for this to occur would be to allow for the seeds to rebellion and revolt against capitalism and our modern enslavement to take root.

Here is another relevant quote from a 1981 film called ‘My Dinner with Andre’:

Andre: And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. Just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods, he's 84 years old, and he always travels with a backpack cause he never knows where he's gonna be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn, he said to me, "Where are you from?" and I said, "New York." He said, "Ah, New York. Yes, that's a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?" And I said, "Oh, yes." And he said, "Why do you think they don't leave?" I gave him different banal theories. He said, "Oh, I don't think it's that way at all."

Andre: He said, "I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they've built. They've built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners, and as a result, they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they've made or to even see it as a prison." And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree and he said, "This is a pine tree." He put it in my hand and he said, "Escape before it's too late."

Andre: See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. That we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here. Of course, the problem is where to go, cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. See, I think it's quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that, from now on there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there'll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts, and that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.

Another excellent article that hits upon many of these enslaving aspects of modern life, that I actually already reposted to this blog, is called ‘11 ways our society treats us like caged rats’:

Here are some ways to put a human being in a cage:

—Remove as much as possible all opportunities for meaningful self-expression and service. Instead, coerce people into dead-end labor just to pay the bills and service the debts. Seduce others into living off such labor of others.

—Cut people off from nature and from place. At most let nature be a spectacle or venue for recreation, but remove any real intimacy with the land. Source food and medicine from thousands of miles away.

—Move life – especially children's lives – indoors. Let as many sounds as possible be manufactured sounds, and as many sights be virtual sights.

—Destroy community bonds by casting people into a society of strangers, in which you don't rely on and needn't even know by name the people living around you.

—Create constant survival anxiety by making survival depend on money, and then making money artificially scarce. Administer a money system in which there is always more debt than there is money.

—Divide the world up into property, and confine people to spaces that they own or pay to occupy.

—Replace the infinite variety of the natural and artisanal world, where every object is unique, with the sameness of commodity goods.

—Reduce the intimate realm of social interaction to the nuclear family and put that family in a box. Destroy the tribe, the village, the clan, and the extended family as a functioning social unit.

—Make children stay indoors in age-segregated classrooms in a competitive environment where they are conditioned to perform tasks that they don't really care about or want to do, for the sake of external rewards.

—Destroy the local stories and relationships that build identity, and replace them with celebrity news, sports team identification, brand identification, and world views imposed by authority.

—Delegitimize or illegalize folk knowledge of how to heal and care for one another, and replace it with the paradigm of the “patient” dependent on medical authorities for health.

It is no wonder that people in our society compulsively press the lever, be it the drug lever or the consumerism lever or the pornography lever or the gambling lever or the overeating lever. We respond with a million palliatives to circumstances in which real human needs for intimacy, connection, community, beauty, fulfillment, and meaning go mostly unmet.³

‘We are all very anxious’ from The Anarchist Library makes some great points about how the modern form of capitalism damages and binds us:

The present dominant affect of anxiety is also known as precarity. Precarity is a type of insecurity which treats people as disposable so as to impose control. Precarity differs from misery in that the necessities of life are not simply absent. They are available, but withheld conditionally.

Precarity leads to generalized hopelessness; a constant bodily excitation without release. … Excessive anxiety and stress are a public secret. When discussed at all, they are understood as individual psychological problems, often blamed on faulty thought patterns or poor adaptation.

Indeed, the dominant public narrative suggests that we need more stress, so as to keep us “safe” (through securitization) and “competitive” (through performance management). Each moral panic, each new crackdown or new round of repressive laws, adds to the cumulative weight of anxiety and stress arising from general over-regulation. Real, human insecurity is channeled into fueling securitization. This is a vicious circle, because securitization increases the very conditions (disposability, surveillance, intensive regulation) which cause the initial anxiety. In effect, the security of the Homeland is used as a vicarious substitute for security of the Self. Again, this has precedents: the use of national greatness as vicarious compensation for misery, and the use of global war as a channel for frustration arising from boredom.

Anxiety is also channeled downwards. People’s lack of control over their lives leads to an obsessive struggle to reclaim control by micro-managing whatever one can control. Parental management techniques, for example, are advertised as ways to reduce parents’ anxiety by providing a definite script they can follow. On a wider, social level, latent anxieties arising from precarity fuel obsessive projects of social regulation and social control. This latent anxiety is increasingly projected onto minorities.

Anxiety is personalized in a number of ways – from New Right discourses blaming the poor for poverty, to contemporary therapies which treat anxiety as a neurological imbalance or a dysfunctional thinking style. A hundred varieties of “management” discourse – time management, anger management, parental management, self-branding, gamification – offer anxious subjects an illusion of control in return for ever-greater conformity to the capitalist model of subjectivity. And many more discourses of scapegoating and criminalization treat precarity as a matter of personal deviance, irresponsibility, or pathological self-exclusion.⁴

Lastly, ‘Mass Mind Control through Network Television’ By Alex Ansary discusses the ways in which that flickering black screen has come to dominate the thoughts and attention of the modern population:

Why do countless American people go along with the War on Iraq? Why do so many people call for a police state control grid? A major component to a full understanding of why this kind of governmental and corporate corruption is to discover the modern science of mind control and social engineering. It's baffling to merely glance at the stacks of documentation that this world government isn't being constructed for the greater good of humanity. Although there are a growing number of people waking up the reality of our growing transparent soft cage, there seems to be just enough citizens who are choosing to remain asleep. Worse yet, there are even those who were at least partially awake at one time but found it necessary to return to the slumber of dreamland. This is no accident; this is a carefully crafted design. The drive to dumb down the populations of planet earth is a classic art that existed before the United States did.

One of the most common examples of mind control in our so-called free and civilized society is the advent and usage of the television set. This isn't to say that all things on TV are geared towards brainwashing you. They're not. But most of the programming on television today is run and programming by the largest media corporations that have interests in defense contracts, such as Westinghouse (CBS), and General Electric (NBC). This makes perfect sense when you see how slanted and warped the news is today. Examining the conflicts of interest is merely glancing at the issue, although to understand the multiple ways that lies become truth, we need to examine the techniques of brain washing that the networks are employing.

The dumbing down of humanity is represented by another shift which occurs in the brain when we watch television. Activity in the higher brain regions (such as the neo-cortex) is diminished, while activity in the lower brain regions (such as the limbic system) increases. The latter, commonly referred to as the reptile brain, is associated with more primitive mental functions, such as the "fight or flight" response. The reptile brain is unable to distinguish between reality and the simulated reality of television. To the reptile brain, if it looks real, it is real. Thus, though we know on a conscious level it is "only a film," on a conscious level we do not--the heart beats faster, for instance, while we watch a suspenseful scene. Similarly, we know the commercial is trying to manipulate us, but on an unconscious level the commercial nonetheless succeeds in, say, making us feel inadequate until we buy whatever thing is being advertised--and the effect is all the more powerful because it is unconscious, operating on the deepest level of human response. The reptile brain makes it possible for us to survive as biological beings, but it also leaves us vulnerable to the manipulations of television programmers. This is where the manipulators use our own emotions as strings to control us. The distortions and directions we are being moved to are taking place in the subconscious, often undetected.⁵

Of course, the techniques and available methods to employ various forms of mind control have only expanded since this article was published in 2005, with the advancement of the internet and introduction of so-called ‘smart’phones leading the way in this regard.

I would also like to share here a post I made on reddit about this topic, which I feel contains some good further extrapolation of what I have discussed here.

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On the scale of absolute freedom to absolute despotism, humanity's current experience falls into about the 99th percentile of the latter, with current efforts to take it the rest of the way.

Sacred, holy and paradisiacal planet Earth has been turned into one giant labor camp. This has been accomplished by brutally hammering a money system into the global population*, and then siphoning the bulk of that currency (power) into the hands of those who control the (power)banks. (Liquidity, 'underwater', 'frozen assets', etc)

A free planet Earth would feature an infinite variety of both natural and human life, with as many different types of communities and living arrangements possible as human beings. The planet would still be covered in sprawling old growth forests and meadows, as much of it likely was in the relatively recent past (ie, probably as much of the world was pre-European colonialism of the past 500-600 years).

The gut-wrenching concept of spirit breaking as discussed in relation to horses applies to humans as well. 'Schools', which have been in place in much of the world for several generations at minimum, in fact serve as spirit breaking institutions for human brings. The input of a wild, caring, loving and free human being leads to the output of whatever the system needs of that human - for many it is to be an obedient worker drone, but there are institutions to train politicians and economic managers as well.⁶

It's a pyramidal system, in which humans at every level of the system have been warped and molded to serve a particular function, including the likes of Gates, Musk etc. Those types may enjoy certain privileges compared to much of humanity (though they experience a miserable existence as power-hungry, soul-blackened psychopaths), but they are ultimately still lackeys and cogs in the machine, enslaved to the market and a particular agenda, just at the top of the structure.

The architects of the system have also given themselves massive architectural advantage in an attempt to maximize their ability to maintain the system. What once were considered human communities, which were walkable, had town centers and a sense of common unity and goodwill (or may have in many cases been nomadic, as were many of the Northern American indigenous communities), have become a relic of the past, and been replaced largely by tightly packed urban centers or dispersed suburban sprawls dependent on automobile travel and lacking town centers or almost any sense of social cohesion. Even extended family units, which at least offered more opportunities for intimate social contact and multigenerational interaction, came under siege in the 1950s to be replaced by the 'nuclear family', and even that structure is under siege in an attempt to replace it with wholly atomized human 'units'.

The architectural design of the aforementioned living spaces makes mass human organization much more difficult to achieve (if those within were to even realize the necessity or potential positive outcome of so doing), because of the aforementioned dispersion and lack of any major common gathering or organizational space in modern living spaces. The fact that shopping and general non-residential spaces and activities are 'zoned' to be wholly separate from suburban neighborhoods further increases human alienation, as natural gathering opportunities in these places are reduced to passing someone on a sidewalk or kids playing in the yard.

Of course, the fact that people have been made to be wholly dependent on external entities for accessing the basics of human survival serves as yet another mechanism by which this unholy global system is maintained, as independence from such a system would require self sufficiency, of either an individual or a community.

I wish I could say why this has all been allowed to happen, or why there is not some kind of enforcement mechanism to prevent the wholesale destruction and enslavement of the very life force and resources of humanity and planet Earth. As it stands, it seems to me that we are currently in the midst of yet another process, similar to the one described in World War 2, designed to torture and subdue humanity into accepting yet further centralization of government, and further loss of freedom and of humanity's very soul essence, as those who wish to usher in such a system have not been shy in sharing their vision for the next phase of humanity's existence (for instance, Klaus Schwab's book 'The Great Reset), which would entail the full scale integration of machine technology into the human body, potential enslavement to an AI hive mind, and thus the complete and total death of human freedom and the human soul on planet Earth.

I also want to make a note about the concept of the 'industrial revolution'. Schwab and others have described the current situation as a 'fourth industrial revolution', pointing to the existence of three previous iterations. I would speculate that the last of these came during World War II, and that the terms 'fourth Reich' and 'third Reich' go hand in hand here, in the sense that each successive 'revolution' has entailed a major step forward in the subjugation of humanity. As can be seen in the nomenclature, these are revolutions not of human beings but of 'industry'. One way to look at this is in understanding the extent to which increasingly many (in the direction of all) facets of human life have been captured by industry (aka markets); for instance, the past few hundred years have seen the natural folk knowledge of how to heal and care for another, including significant matrilineal medicinal practices passed on over generations**, outlawed and brutally attacked to the point of destruction, so that the present day for profit medical industry could take its place. More recently, the natural and spontaneous realm of dating has increasingly been made into an industry under the control and influence of similarly massive corporations, in the guise of online dating, Brave New World-esque 'casual dating' apps like Tinder, and the like, not to mention the massive porn industry which unfortunately serves as a replacement for intimate connection altogether for some.

Food, shelter, communication, recreation (culture industry), are all further examples of the industrialization/commoditization of human life.

I feel it is also important to draw attention to the fact that (in my strong opinion) the idea of private property is not natural to humanity or any other species, but has been indoctrinated/conditioned into humans over generations. This is another topic that Caliban and the Witch discusses, as a critical aspect to the establishment of the powerful state in conjunction with capitalism in Europe in the middle ages was the enclosure of common lands to be turned into private property, with that property in turn being increasingly consolidated into a select few hands. Some will be familiar with the (UN or WEF) slogan of 'You will own nothing and be happy' as it relates to a potential near future, and I think this same concept applies to what was happening at that time as well - resources & areas that were once commonly understood as to be shared among all came to be owned by a select class, who then 'rented' out resources to the population in exchange for submission to wage labor and the doctrines of capitalism and state power as a whole.

If you understand that human nature is incredibly loving, caring and compassionate (as evidenced by how humans act when they come into the world before they are subsumed into the dogmas of modern life), you will realize that there is no need for greed or intense competition for basic resources between humans, and this applies to land use as well. There is no need (and in my strong opinion, no moral justification) for land privatization, such that the land comes under the exclusive jurisdiction of a single individual or corporation, to use and terraform the land as they see fit. I feel that the indigenous populations of the planet, whose way of life has been essentially eradicated and whose populations have been nearly destroyed, understood this, as evidenced by a great quote that I have always resonates with from Chief Seattle:

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people, every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clear and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.

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1. https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/history-the-obscure-history-of-suburbia-by-noam-chomsky-peter-galison-and-mike-davis

2. http://henrymakow.com/2015/08/suburbs-are-sinister-places.html

3. https://www.alternet.org/2014/06/11-ways-our-society-treats-us-caged-rats-do-our-addictions-stem-trapped-feeling

4. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/institute-for-precarious-consciousness-we-are-all-very-anxious

5. https://rense.com//general69/mass.htm

6. See ‘The Underground History of American Education’ by John Taylor Gatto for more. See also this wonderful description of what the youth experience should be like from Sudbury Valley School: https://hvsudburyschool.com/the-sudbury-model-of-education/