Lifestyle & Debt Propaganda

You want slavery - or a mortgage from Che?

• Mind traps lock us into the pursuit of small truths

• What we knew has gone the way of Kamala’s unburdening

• Yet our small victories may outweigh grand causes

Related:
Defend Our Networks - Why we don't need 'dream teams' of prominent commentators (Sep 23, 2021)
Rule By Censor: Talk Is Cheap - U.S. presidential election shaped by multiple vectors; the mind is formed (Nov 01, 2024)

See also:
Bankers Infect the Economy - Rivals for Power, Part 2. Their Covid Cure was Premeditated (Jul 14, 2021)

(2,500 words or about 12 moments of your companionship)

Get a mortgage from these guys?

March 31, 2025

To be free is to live outside the system. We cannot all have a garden, nor live off grid. Many struggle to leave the cities due to family ties.

We still can buck the system to varying degrees.

Some frame this question in grand terms of an agorist philosophy or extreme preparedness. Others subscribe to the strict machine of idology, Marxist or Libertarian.

In my experience people respond positively to the small things and if they like the idea they will adopt it.

The press exists first and foremost not to tell you about what's happening "over there" but to instruct the population as to how they must live at home, in order to benefit the institutional and financial structure.

That's why you see so many lifestyle articles, telling you what to wear, do or buy.

Searching freedom

The mind trap demands we confront the few truths we hold dear — or in which we were schooled — while embracing "right think."

You may have been raised in a conservative family (60 years ago even staunchly anti-communist) or that into which it evolved: the Freud-friendly, gestalt-therapised, anything-goes liberal... We many of us experienced the same.

What we knew is no longer so.

Rejection should be liberating if you follow VP Kamala Harris, whose only words she could utter without stumbling were: "What can be, unburdened by what has been."

This was the logic of Pol Pot's Year Zero: to wipe out what has been to arrive at the new

See 3 Crises: War Flares, Harris Snorts, Soldiers Flee - Israel, Ukraine, Hollywood, Starmer-Maxwell, Geoengineering (Sep 27, 2024)

She tempted us with a cul-de-sac, a circle back to the start — or was it a dead end?

Leaving aside the toxic world of lads' and girls' magazines, just look at The Guardian.

Beside the masthead we have: News, Opinion, Sport, Culture, Lifestyle.

Under the latter: fashion, food, love and sex, home and garden... travel... money.

The advertising next to the articles used to reveal the intent but the press has been losing advertising to the internet.

According to professor Robert Epstein, an American psychologist, Google uses "ephemeral experiences" or nudges, that manipulate our behaviour in real time but leave no recordable trace.

That's why newspapers remain the best way to see the topics and language in all their persuasive glory.

The financial pages persuade you to hand over your income to insurers, or critical illness cover, or a variety of scare stories that are, at best, Ponzi schemes — at worst outright theft.

You desire to look after your loved ones in case you die, by handing your money over to a third party instead of saving it within your family.

Makes sense... not

I know this better than most. As a financial reporter I fully imbibed and spat out the propaganda of the financial services. And I'm washed up and finished financially.

Please listen to an expert in self demolition!

Now I can see that the stuff of the news pages, along side lifestyle and financial, simply backs up this world view of profiteering Cassandras: they tell you that only those financial institutions and big papa government can save you from the random terror "out there" that could "visit here" at any moment.

«Что делать?»

What are the steps to live free?

Stop listening to or reading the press and media first of all:
1 the abiding terror of "happenings;"
2 the lifestyle pages telling you what you must have;
3 the finance pages luring you to hand over your labour and produce.

Act, in that order.

Free your mind from the doom mongering of the institutions. The world is unpredictable. It's just that the institutions are the source of the threat.

Then stop buying. You don't need the constant supply of new stuff. It does not matter what other people think of your shoes. For every one person that ridicules you, there are two or more who will take note.

Finally, change the very way that you live your life - so that it does not involve handing over money to the institutions.

Oh, and turn that paper money into real stuff.

Glass walls

Yevgeniy Zemyatin described a society in which people were trapped.

George Orwell took it further: from glass walls to an all-seeing eye — Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. (Note we are not trapped in the world, but by society).

Nothing new but, please, if you haven't internalised these concepts, go do it.

Brutal truths

The following points are brutal, and some may reject them outright - especially the youthful who rightfully seek to make their way in the world.