Institutional Slavery

I have little patience for spinning words, read on and you will find out why.

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I do not believe in institutions, but I may appropraite the words of the masters the better to build my foundation upon which the ediface may fall. All of our institutions have been created to preserve the status quo, in fact they would have little to no value for the powers that be if they did not, and if they do not, you can be sure they are on the road to transformation, so that the pleasures we had once taken as free shall thenceforth be subject to costs of the most innocuous kinds. To say the least, it all begins with money.

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There are a couple of quotes I want to take heed of, before I restate what I have stated above. These quotes are from the work of Immanuel Wallerstein in his book Word-Systems Analysis.

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pg. 6

“Most historians decided to trace back the story as far as they could, using territorial boundaries of the present, or even the boundaries as they were claimed at present… This was of course quote arbitrary, but it did serve one purpose – reinforcing contemporary nationalist sentiments – and it was therefore encouraged by the states themselves.

“Still, it followed from the historians’ practice of restricting themselves to studying the past that they had little to say about the contemporary situations facing their countries. And political leaders felt in need of more information about the present. New disciplines therefore grew up for this purpose. There were mainly three: economics, political science, and sociology.”

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and pg. 7-8

“The four disciplines together (history, economics, sociology, and political science) studied in effect only a small portion of the world. But in the nineteenth century, the five countries were imposing colonial rule on many other parts of the world, and were engaged in commerce and sometimes warfare with still other parts of the world. It seemed important to study the rest of the world as well… As a result, two additional disciplines arose. One of these disciplines was called Anthropology. [The other was Oriental Studies]

“Ethnographers served in many ways as the primary interpreters of their peoples to the modern outsiders who governed them… They were thus useful to the colonial rulers by offering information that could make the governors more cognizant of what they could or could not do (or should not do) in their administration.”

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Perhaps the understanding behind these quotes won’t be clear enough unless I add a few more. I will now quote from George Bernard Shaw’s Fabianism and the Empire

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pg. 5

“No election, unfortunately, can be very reassuring under existing circumstances. The nation makes no serious attempt to democratize its Government, because its masses are still in so deplorable a condition that democracy, in its popular sense of government by the masses, is clearly contrary to common sense. Our only aristocracy is a hereditary aristocracy, which is an absurdity in modern society, where distinctions of caste are completely broken down by money. The hereditary aristocracy can stand in the way of a genuine aristocracy of capacity; but it is unable to defend its posts against the hustling of ambitions and successful representatives of commerce. The result is that our constituion, whatever it may be nominally, is in fact a plutocracy.”

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and pg. 16

“We thus have to Imperial policies: a democratic policy for provinces in which the white colonists are in a large majority, and a bureaucratic policy where the majority consists of colored natives. Consequently the Empire cannot be governed either on Liberal or Conservative, democratic or aristocratic principles exclusively, and cannot be governed on Church of England or Nonconformist principles at all. An Imperial issue between these parties and creeds is necessarily a false issue.”

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I’ll round off all this quoting with a short and sweet one from former National Security Advisor to the United States Zbigniew Brezinski from his book Between Two Ages

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pg. 116

“Today: Society is ruled by the elite.”

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What do we get when we take all of this together? We see that society is a highly planned mechanism which sheilds the power which runs it. Our institutions, and I want to focus and say not just our education system but our academic process is used to compile data about society and about people so as to run it more efficiently.

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What I say: We need to take back our efforts for ourselves. We have to realize that when we work within society’s instituional frameworks we are in effect working for an elite power class to maintain the status quo.

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I call on everyone to emancipate yourselves from slavery, both the physical and the mental kind. When I say the mental kind, I am referring to the way that a reliance on popular media will keep us stuck in this quagmire that is our own institutionalized slavery.

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We must gather together and form communities which can sustain themselves. Our conversation is not with the powers that be. We cannot rely on the system as it currently stands to provide us with an escape from our enslavement, this will merely give the powers that be the opportunity to mould that conversation within the perameters that preserve the status quo.

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When we build self-sustaining communities we must practice open communication, delivering both questions and answers to one another so that we will have a ground on which to judge the veracity of one anothers sentiments.

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While we are part of the system we should act as gremlins to gum up its mechanisms.

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We must begin by constructing our communities amongst ourselves, and avoid climbing the highest mountains from which we bellow the calls which reveal our presence. It is only after we have learned to sustain ourselves that we shall practice civil disobedience and demand the right to break away from the system entirely and live in a society of our own creation.

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I have not given a description of what that society should look like, and in fact I never will. It is for each individual to think, plan and create for themselves the lives that they would like best to lead, and then use your energy to the fullest of its capacity to bring that reality into existence. Again I call on all to learn, even the words of those we act in spite of can be appropriated to build our ediface strong so that the foundation of our current system of hidden power shall crumble and we may attain freedom to live in a society of our own creation.