Photo by 16210667@N02 [cropped]
Now that this year’s Independence Day fireworks are long gone, it’s time to hit you over the head with a hard truth:
It’s all a sham.
We are not “independent.” Not anymore.
When we were still a colony, our British oppressors posed a familiar, old-world form of threat.
Their oppression was singular, visible, and involuntary.
Now, 240 years later, we face an entirely new breed of tyranny.
Through a combination of our own growing sophistication, market forces, and scientific and technological advancement, this new form of oppression is infinitely more complex.
This new oppression has three key qualities:
1. It is FRACTIONAL
2. It is INVISIBLE
3. It is largely VOLUNTARY
Let’s get in the shit and unpack these one by one.
1. It is FRACTIONAL
Just as the burden of owning a condo, boat, or jet is lessened when owned jointly, so too the burden of owning a slave is lessened when shared jointly with other oppressors.
The prime burden of slave ownership is the risk of revolt and insurrection.
When the oppressors are legion, their individual risk is mitigated.
Our oppressors do not work together in any orchestrated symbiosis. Rather, they operate within a “free market” of tyranny: an informal, self-organizing, leaderless system of oppression.
Here is but a sampling of the legion’s rank and file:
BIG FOOD riddles us with cancer, heart disease, and diabetes by selling us their abominable fake food concoctions.
BIG MEDIA riddles us with malaise, despair, and anxiety by filling our screens with every lurid, click-baity half-truth they can conjure up in order to sell more ads.
BIG PHARMA riddles us with addiction and side-effects by selling us their pills, convincing us that the human condition with all its vagaries is a neurosis to be medicated against rather than a spectrum of experience to be enjoyed and enriched by, mowing down human nature in favor of profitable numbness and stupor.
BIG GOVERNMENT riddles us with red tape and financial bleed, like a tumor charged with it’s own incision, self-corrupting ad infinitum in a vicious, ever-widening circle of greed and invasion.
BIG MONEY riddles us with dread and fear and the taste of doom in the back of your mouth, as those enslaved to the credit card companies will attest, using our wiring for immediate gratification to snare us.
BIG EDUCATION riddles our children with glib platitudes and groupthink, prizing test-taking and route memorization above problem-solving and creating thinking, preparing our children not for art and enterprise, but to serve as worker drones on the factory floor.
And that’s just for starters.
To see your oppressors all neatly laid out, look no further than your bank statement. See them there, lurking in the line items, patiently ripping their pound of flesh from your quivering body like clockwork each month.
2. It is INVISIBLE
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” – Goethe
In the old dispensation, the slaver and the shackle were clear to the naked eye.
In the new dispensation, the shackle is of necessity disguised.
Since we are “too smart” for any outright shackle, the shackles have been reimagined, retooled, and reformed, and hidden beneath new enticements.
That is why we see 0% APR, matching contributions, air miles, free samples, no money down, and installment payments as perks of modern living instead of seeing it all for what it really is: the grease on the chute to the slaughterhouse floor.
3. It is largely VOLUNTARY
Due to our modern system of laws, forced slavery is no longer possible in our self-styled “free society.”
The dark genius of the modern oppressors is the way they leverage cultural norms, consumption rituals, and addiction in ways that compel us to PUT ON OUR OWN CHAINS.
As a result, today’s slavery is largely VOLUNTARY.
Thus the oppressor can always say, “we are not FORCING anyone to buy our products and services. No one is putting the gun to their head.”
All the while, they are spending billions to engineer conditions that effectively serve the gun’s same purpose.
But therein lies the escape.
Though the new oppression we face is massive in scale, fractional, and opaque, it is still, by and large, a CHOICE YOU MAKE.
So this July, as the firework cardboard tubes lay discarded in the park grass, and as the toy flags lay rolled up on top of the fridge, waiting for you to put them back in the attic for next year, let your Independence Day celebration go deeper.
Let your indignation take hold, like a blooming festerance.
Cultivate within yourself the dark desire to fight, and win again, a second independence.
You will need every ounce of resolve you can muster.
For this time, the oppressors wield not chains or the hangman’s noose or the wigged judge’s gavel, but chemistry, and habit, and our own herd instinct systematically turned against us.
This time, the weapons we take up against them are not muskets or bayonets, but resolution: the vision and the will to opt out of a bogus scheme… the courage to say FUCK YOU to the standard American life they’re prepackaged for you.
To reject the drama and depletion and dulled wits of paycheck to paycheck living and instead create wealth.
To reject the shitty food in the grocery store and instead eat real food: bloody, dank, dirty and wild.
To reject the given role as dutiful consumer and become instead CREATORS.
To reject all the fake news, fake government, fake food, fake medicine, fake success, fake friendship, and fake happiness that surrounds us and create a life that is FUCKING REAL.
To see these countless leeches for the parasites they are, rip them from your body, and throw them to the fire.
Only then will you escape the tyrant’s clutches.
Only then will you be free.
***
Bryan Ward is the founder of Third Way Man and author of the LIT Black Paper
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