Guest Post by Caitlin Johnstone
The late psychonaut/philosopher Terence McKenna once said “The cost of sanity, in this society, is a certain level of alienation,” and I think my regular readers will immediately and experientially understand exactly what he was talking about.
It’s not always easy to be on the outside of consensus reality. Our entire society, after all, has been built upon consensus — upon a shared agreement about what specific mouth sounds mean, on what money is and how it works, on how we should all behave toward each other in public spaces, and on what normal human behavior in general looks like.
We all share a learned agreement that we picked up from our culture in early childhood that it’s normal and acceptable to stand around with your hands in your pockets and babble about the weather to anyone who gets too close to you, for example, whereas it would be considered weird and disruptive to stand around slathered in Cheese Whiz shrieking the word “Poop!” But we could just as easily reverse that consensus on behavioral norms tomorrow, and as long as we all agreed to it we could do it without missing a beat.
In exactly the same way, there exists a general consensus about what’s going on in our world at the moment. There’s a general consensus that we live in the kind of society we were taught about in school: a free and democratic nation which maybe did some not so great things in the past, but is now a supremely virtuous beacon of light on this earth that kicked Hitler’s ass and then surfed into the present day on a wave of truth and sensible fiscal policy. There’s a general consensus that the news reporters on our screens paint us a more or less accurate picture of world affairs, that there are a lot of Bad Guys in our world with whom the Good Guys in our government are fighting, and that most of our nation’s problems are caused by the people in the other political party.
This consensus is grounded in delusion. It is insanity.
In reality, of course, we live in a world where our understanding of the world is constantly being deceitfully manipulated by oligarchic media propaganda and the utterances of oligarch-owned politicians. Where elections are mostly just a live action role-playing game which allows the rabble to pretend that they have some degree of influence over the things that their government does. Where our government routinely forms alliances with the worst Bad Guys on the planet while manufacturing consent to topple governments whose downfall would be utterly disastrous. Where our nation’s problems have almost nothing to do with half its population disagreeing with our personal ideology, and practically everything to do with the loose international alliance of plutocrats and government agencies who actually run things behind the facade of the comings and goings of official elected governments.
Sanity means seeing this as it is, rather than subscribing to the mass delusion of the consensus worldview. Which, as you probably already know, can make it difficult to relate to others in some ways. Conversations about politics often either get heated very rapidly when you challenge a tightly-held orthodoxy or dead-end in awkwardness. Friendships can end. Family relationships can be ruined. Collective narratives about you can be woven and circulated within your social circle which have nothing to do with how you actually see things.
And that’s just if you talk about your worldview. If you keep your views to yourself, as many do, that’s just another kind of alienation. It’s to stand outside of public political discourse completely, unable to participate out of fear of the backlash you’d receive from your friends, loved ones and acquaintances if you started talking about Trump as a symptom rather than the disease, or said that Corbyn is being targeted by a transparently bogus smear campaign, or said that Russia’s interventions in world affairs are clearly dwarfed by America’s by orders of magnitude. The specific heresies will vary depending upon the social circle, but the inability to voice them necessarily comes with the same sense of alienation.
But the alternative to that sense of alienation is to live a lie. It’s to climb back inside the distorted funhouse-mirror reality tunnel of the establishment narrative control matrix and plug yourself back into the same delusions that everyone else is living. Most of us couldn’t even do that if we wanted to. Even if we could the intense mental gymnastics we’d have to perform just to avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance would make it not worth the effort.
We close ourselves off from a full sense of participation in our society when we depart from the consensus worldview, but in closing that door we open so many more. Because, as it turns out, all that effort that people pour into staying on the same wavelength as everyone else closes them off to a vast spectrum of potential human experience. The allure of the mass delusion is that you need to devote yourself to being plugged into it in order to achieve what the mass delusion defines as “success”, but in so doing you lose the ability to leap down psychological and experiential rabbit holes of consciousness that those still jacked into the matrix can’t even imagine. And in so doing you open up the possibility for an immensely more fulfilling and enjoyable life that has really deeply explored the more intimate questions about what it means to be a human being on this planet.
Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And a profoundly sick society is indeed what we have here. The alienation which we experience is an alienation from something that isn’t worth belonging to anyway.
I began this essay with a quote from one of the celebrated thought leaders of the psychedelic movement, and I think the question of what we can do to cope with the alienation McKenna spoke of is best answered by ending with a quote from another such leader, Timothy Leary:
“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the ‘normal people’ as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like ‘Have a nice day’ and ‘Weather’s awful today, eh?’, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like ‘Tell me something that makes you cry’ or ‘What do you think deja vu is for?’. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.”
~
Find the others.
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The Others vs. They….as in They Live.
Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of man to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow man, and to himself. Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. Yet this whole creation of his stands over and above him. He does not feel himself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which his hands have built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He confronts himself with his own forces embodied in things he has created, alienated from himself. He is owned by his own creation, and has lost ownership of himself.
– from “The Sane Society,” Erich Fromm (1956)
THE most difficult and the most necessary of renunciations: to give up resentment. This is almost impossible, for without resentment modern life would probably cease to be human at all. Resentment enables us to survive the absurdity of existence in a modern city. It is the last-ditch stand of freedom in the midst of confusion. The confusion is inescapable, but at least we can refuse to accept it, we can say “No.” We can live in a state of mute protest.
BUT if resentment is a device which enables man to survive, it does not enable him, necessarily, to survive healthily. It is not a real exercise of freedom. It is not a genuine expression of personal integrity. It is the mute, animal protest of a mistreated psychophysical organism. Driven too far it becomes mental sickness; that, too, is an “adaptation” in its own way. But it is an adaptation by way of escape.
THE problem is to learn how to renounce resentment without selling out to the organization people who want everyone to accept absurdity and moral anarchy in a spirit of uplift and willing complicity. Few men are strong enough to find the solution.
– from “New Seeds of Contemplation,” Thomas Merton (1961)
Okay, Caitlin, I’m the kind of person who might walk right up to the General after a “state of the command” meeting to introduce herself.
I posted
which was just a re-title of the essay from your page. I brought over a couple of comments from your own readers there, hoping to engage a sort of “crossblog dialogue” which I’ve coined as a Committee of Corresponders.
At least a couple people said it sounds like something worth exploring, even if only as a stepping stone to a GOOD IDEA for a way to maintain sanity in the shelter of an underground network.
Crossblog Dialogue
How do you start a real grassroots movement? Plant the seeds.
Love the Leary quote. No one is any more alienated than a centrist in Leftist heaven Santa Cruz ,CA. I don’t know why I bother even, but I speak at City Council meetings and I crush Leftist politic every chance I get. However, some of the Leftist on the council use their bully pulpit and unlimited time and stage to call me right-wing, anti-diversity, my postings hate-speech, etc. I give them hell back for these lies and mistruths. Maybe they are a little mad because I’m a force behind the recall of two of the Leftists coming to a vote Mar 3.
They are alarmed at a city wide resurgence of ordinary people having had enough of the Leftist crap and 11x the national population ratio of homeless.
Anyway, they are all in a rush to throw everything they have at screwing up the city before Mar 3. One of those is a policy called “Health in all policies” which the State has also adopted. It is a Leftist collectivist totalitarian dream installing all the defective politic of Leftist into law justifying anything they want to do. It is poison. In so many words it says (my paraphrase but it’s accurate)
“All people are entitled to an equal life outcome because there are factors we (government) define as unhealthy or an inequity in any way we choose” (based on the loose correlations of this to that in the social studies, which are not science, and may confuse correlation with causation), or it alludes to the right of people to achieve their “potential” being obstructed by again whatever they define as “potential” or causes of preventing “potential” that theoretically results in thier definition of an inequity.
They call it the “Three Pillars of Community” – health, equity, sustainability but the definitions of those words are believe me anti-American Leftist collectivist garbage.
One such is the idea is that you can measure someone’s potential, or know what it is, and the government should then pass laws to ensure that it is fulfilled. However, potential truly is an un-measurable abstraction at best, unknowable, and here is an excuse for totalitarian abuse of power. As the underpinning of this policy, it begins with blatantly defective logic. I say, “Tell me what my potential is, I dare you.”
No kidding, they are undergoing a massive rewrite of the cities policies with the aim of installing this defective politic into every one of them.
The list of “inequities” is a laundry list of leftist stale grievances and collectivism including the usual racism, sexism blah, blah, but also wealth inequality and immigration status. I simplify , but you get the idea.
Civil war stuff, or should be. About 50% of the last two generations now think socialism is A-OK (millennials, gen-z). Way more than that think Leftism is A-OK here. In one more generation of this – POOF goes America and what ever it stood for. The council meetings are loaded with Leftist activists of all flavors blasting the mere liberals on the council for not being Left enough (and calling them fascists and personally responsible for homeless deaths and all many of human suffering). We have far remote activists coming from hundreds of miles away to parade children in front of the cameras and this and every council they think they can influence. It is rot and stench stuff.
Alienation yeah.
I saw a news clip the other day, about a mountain lion that was out and about, terrorizing a neighborhood in some CA mountain town, the cat had eaten a few local dogs, and injured a few other dogs and people, and the crazy cat lady from the dept of CA wild life says “we have no plans on tracking or controlling that animal, it is in it’s natural habitat”
good, good for you, be cat food, that is your destiny.
I would run from a state like that.
either you do not develop human habitats in wild life zones,
or
you figure out how to deal with wild life in your human habitats zones.
You do not “do nothing” as you created the problem in the first place.
fucking idiots.
I bet you still hate your parents for causing your birth. Why didn’t they provide you with a lifetime income and safe spaces every 20 feet? Fucking idiots.
Well, we do relocate mountain lions, but the coyotes pretty much do as they want and can be seen moving down the center of streets (not often, but I have seen this) moving quite fast, effortlessly, head scanning back and forth, and gone like a ghost in 10 seconds a block away. Lots of missing cats here. We are surrounded by greenbelt and redwood forest on three sides and the sea.
My brother from another Mother!!!!I live under a rock on Mt. Madonna!!I thought I was the only dissenting spirit in S.C. county..I would like to have a beer with you sometime..Ed
MY FB group . https://www.facebook.com/groups/195553317728967/
“The Cost Of Sanity, In This Society, Is A Certain Level Of Alienation”
no. unless you let a captive propaganda organization like our news/entertainment/social media monopoly/collusion tell you what our society is, then you’ll be alienated, sure, because that’s the intent. mckenna is just trying to tell you that this situation is normal, to make you think that because you can’t connect rationally with the misleading insanity they feed you then that means you can’t connect rationally with your own society. this leaves you isolated, while THEY continue to connect with their own background society just fine and act against you.
Stop it, Admin, stop messing with me. I recall writing recently about coping in life by relying on a sense of alienation. I recall writing that our leaders don’t represent us. Is this you, admin? Is this me?
Oh, great, another article by that Commie Aussie bitch.
Ask her how she makes her living. Controversy.
When the masses reject you, they also free you. You discover who your real friends are and how many enemies you had right next to you. You start telling the truth about everything, not just some things. When people assume the worst about you, your’re able to remove the obstacles that kept you from being your best.
The biggest mistake we make in life is thinking that everyone is just like us; that the only reason that they don’t see the world the way you do is because they haven’t thought it about or reasoned things out. The truth is that while there are plenty of people who do share similar opinions and ideas, the vast majority of humanity doesn’t think at all.
Alienation from a corrupt and dishonest majority is liberation. There is nothing to fear and everything to gain.
What’s wrong with alienation. It’s always worked for me.
I distrust those who want to join groups and drag me along with them. I dislike the glee club mentality, the pep rally, the rah-rah team spirit, team player nonsense, essentially because I see it as a means to avoid thinking. There are people who cannot be alone, they seek stimulation and company, noise, anything to avoid contemplation and quiet. I avoid them and crowds, Ol’ Remus is my mentor.
The truth is that the average American is so brain washed by the constant barrage of propaganda coming over their idiot box that their concept of reality is nothing more than a fantasy. Most are completely incapable of understanding reality in any way, shape or form….
https://needtoknow.news/2019/12/refugee-resettlement-watch-urges-citizens-to-stand-up-against-mass-immigration-and-who-to-contact/
https://sputniknews.com/society/201911121077285193-black-finnish-politician-apologises-for-fake-racism-story/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7665629/Father-two-left-paralyzed-coma-half-skull-vicious-one-punch-assault.html
The others are too busy bickering with each other on the comment section of the latest TBP thread…
A big part of our society’s problem is social media. We should band together to demand freedom of speech with no censorship. Works fine right here; it will work elsewhere. The current totalitarian set up isn’t fair or honest and will only lead to more bullshit.