The politics of brutality (Part 1)

A series on the extreme levels of horrific abuse and mistreatment to which we are all exposed in the modern world

In this series, my aim is to shine a light on the devastating amounts of brutality that we all experience in our daily lives, living on 21st century planet Earth.

In beginning this series, it seems to me that a lot of people seem to believe that brutality, violence, and other maladies are simply something experienced by others elsewhere. If you haven't had a bomb dropped on your house or in your neighborhood, the story goes, you don't know what it's like to be at war or to feel pain, or destruction, or loss. While it is true that the impacts of direct physical war as manifested through the use of bombs, guns and other weaponry constitute a horror all unto their own, I would argue that everyone alive has experienced a more highly sophisticated and pernicious form of warfare that almost anyone can imagine. Take, for example, a document supposedly found in an IBM copier in the 1980s, titled ‘Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars:

https://stopthecrime.net/docs/SILENT%20WEAPONS%20for%20QUIET%20WARS.pdf

Surely, if the reader has an open mind, you will be able to recognize many of the descriptions of warfare as described in this document in your own lives. It is my belief that we are all indoctrinated into an understanding of warfare that is very limited compared to the actual present day applications of war on planet Earth. Again, many seem to believe that if bombs, guns or other physical explosions or noises are not present, then it can be said that such a place is not an in a state of war.

However, the aforementioned document makes specific reference to a type of warfare that in fact does not leave physical traces in the same way that an artillery shell would do, and the reasons for this should be obvious - if actual artillery fire were to start shelling New York City, everyone would recognize that New York were under attack from somebody.

In the case of so-called 5th generation warfare, however, the idea is to deploy weaponry that is sophisticated enough so as to present itself either as innocuous in the mind and experience of the viewer and experiencer, or in fact to present itself as something good, something altruistic, and something beneficial for the targeted population.

Take, for example, smartphones. Like any technology, smartphones can be used for incredible good - indeed, I am currently recording this through the use of vocal dictation on a smartphone - or for great evil, for example through the widespread proliferation of rape disguised as pornography, which has in many ways laid waste to a generation of men through the normalization of rape and torture of women as something sexually desirable. This preface is necessary when considering any application of subtle or so-called silent weaponry - by the same mechanisms that a silent weapon can be used to control and dominate, it can also be used to in fact liberate or aid a population without direct knowledge of said population.

One of the ways that smartphones have been used with a negative application from a silent weaponry perspective, is through providing a means of escape for humans from a increasingly drudging, grinding, and monotonous daily waking reality. Many have become increasingly addicted to the rapid fire dopamine loops created by the use of social media in general, and apps like Vine and Tick-Tock in particular, where the next six second dopamine loop is always, well, 6 seconds away.

Social media certainly has very positive potential applications, through the potential use of it to democratize and otherwise increase access to political and democratic speech.  On the negative side, social media can be (and has been) used - particularly when the algorithms are designed in such a way - to increase angst, animosity, and overall polarization within the target population.

A great example of this in my mind is what we saw in 2020. Social media was weaponized by democratic operatives (or those that back them), in order to attempt to effectively cancel not only Republicans and Trump supporters, but any dissenters from establishment orthodoxy as a whole. Anyone who dissented from The Establishment narrative in any way - even to point out the significantly detrimental consequences of policies such as masks, lockdowns and mass testing on the health of the population - was in many cases automatically decried as crazy, or racist, or conspiracy theorist, and intensive efforts were made to ‘cancel’ said people.

Google-owned YouTube joined the fray on this issue through pledging to censor any videos contradicting not even just the CDC, but specifically the W.H.O, when it came to advice regarding the purported health crisis that began in early 2020.

Circling back to the titular topic, I want to spend a bit of time talking about one of, if not the most obvious examples of intensive brutality experienced by all of us in our lives, that being the normalization of sending young people aged 6 to 18 to a place called school for 13 out of the first 18 years of their lives. Apparently, the story goes, to do so is a necessary evil or even considered a good thing, in order to ‘educate’ the next generation to be successful in an increasingly competitive and stressful world in general, and job market in particular.

However, the reality experienced by myself - and, I would argue, everyone else, whether they are aware of it or not - is that by forcing young people to go to a place called school - perhaps more accurately called youth prison - young people are explicitly and implicitly instructed that this is not their world. It is as if they have been born into an alien land that they must strenuously adapt themselves to, lest they effectively be fed to or fall amongst the wolves and be devoured in the pits of homelessness and despair and rejection.

Indeed, I would liken the overall youth experience of the 18-year parental dictatorship, in combination with the 13-year prison sentence to which we are all subject, as all of us being squished against the wall with some sort of heavy machinery - it is only over the course of our lives following this insanely intense and brutal youth experience, that we slowly begin to ‘unflatten’ ourselves and process some of the immense trauma undulating beneath the surface of our consciousness. Indeed, it is likely to me that many are barely even able to scratch the surface of processing the immense trauma of this experience before before their time comes to leave this world.

One article that I've always resonated with on this topic, called ‘We are all very anxious,’' describes the increasing implicit and explicit experience that many have had, of being born into a world of ubiquitous surveillance, where the slightest wrong move, wrong word, or even wrong thought could completely torpedo their life prospects - at least, that appears to be the prevailing wisdom wasted upon the previously exuberant and joyous youth of our world.

Of course, within the larger construct of grades and tests and yelling teachers and ever increasing pressure to perform at insane levels academically, comes many specific individual experiences of massive torture. I, myself, experienced a horrifically traumatizing event on a school trip that I was of course forced to be on, though I otherwise never in a million years would have consented to go on such trip.

In so many cases, aggressive male and female youth use bullying- AKA torture for sport - as an outlet for massively pent up frustrations over the insanely confining reality of their lives, and this practice only makes things worse for those that could never imagine resorting to such behavior in order to cope with the insane brutality of their experience. The tragedy of youth suicide is far, far more common in our world than it ever should be - in fact, I would argue that even one suicide of a young person per year should be treated as a national emergency, and given the same level of attention and focus as if a nuclear bomb had been dropped on an American city.

The reality, of course, is far worse - countless thousands and thousands of young people across the world successfully commit suicide on a yearly basis, leaving seismic pits of grief and anguish in their wake, as the ever-increasing regimentation, confinement and otherwise emmiseration of the youth experience has become too much for even some of the strongest, most joyous, and bravest souls that have come into this realm.