The financialized American economy and State are now absolutely based on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a putrid load.
Go on and be wicked, due to the fact that everyone else is wicked, too, since being evil serves everyone’s interests far much better than preserving stability, for integrity will cost you more than you can pay for.
Simply put, lying, fraud, embezzlement, misstatement of threat, material misstatement of facts, half-truths, the replacement of declarations of fact with propaganda and spin: these are not the work of a scattered handful of sociopaths: they represent the really essence and heart of America’s economic status quo.
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the banality of evil to catch the essence of the Nazi program in Germany: doing evil wasn’t abnormal, it was typical. Doing evil wasn’t an outlier of sociopaths, it was the daily “job” of millions of people, and not simply Nazi Party members.
Not naming evil is the crucial to normalizing evil. Evil must most importantly be derealized (a secret idea in the Survival+ review), removed from our realization and awareness by calling it something innocuous.
Here is an informing excerpt from the book Triumph of the marketplace:
Normalization of the unthinkable comes easily when money, status, power, and tasks are at stake … Intellectuals will be dredged up to validate their (actions). The justifications are hoary with age: government knows best, ours is a strictly defensive effort, or, if it wasn’t me someone else would do it. There is likewise the retreat to lack of knowledge, real, cultivated, or feigned.
Can any of the 10s of thousands of individuals dealing with Wall Street or in the bowels of the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Pentagon, and so on truthfully declare they “didn’t know it was wrong” to deceive the citizenry, the soldiers, the financiers and the purchasers of their fraud? On the contrary, each of those 10s of thousands of worker bees and managers understands complete well the institution they labor for is doing evil merely by concealing the fact of its operations.
The entire status quo of the American Empire is constructed on lies. Now the dependence on lies, scams and misstatement is complete; Wall Street and the Empire itself would fall if the fact were finally revealed and appropriately identified as evil.
Lying has been derealized; it is now the expected standard. To inform the truth– on your resume, on your loan application, on your tax return, and about your own actions– is now polluted and suspicious; the truth-teller is reviled as “putting on airs” of moral superiority, and they will be shunned and cut off by the phonies around them.
Cheating on tests no longer carries any stain of ethical corruption; “everyone” cheats lest they fail to enter the university of their choice, the one that represents “the short cut” to a “excellent task” with exceptional pay: yes, a task doing evil every day. But we no longer appreciate doing evil; we prevent it as an ethical slaughterhouse we choose not to see. Let the butchering of the ethical heart of the nation be concealed from our delicate eyes and trembling guilty consciences.
The concept that we may not have the ability to buy the McMansion/auto/tattoo/ toy we “deserve” enabled our killing of fact. Deprivation is a higher evil than the loss of personal integrity, therefore hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans went along with the lie and sacrificed their integrity to support it, feed it, breathe life into it and then pass it on to the next phony.
So the mortgage applicant lied, and the mortgage broker lied by accepting a file he/she understood was incorrect. And so the lie grew heavier as it passed from hand to hand, and the truth ended up being lighter than air and drifted away long prior to the falsified home loan was originated, packaged, tranched and offered as a AAA “safe” financial investment.
We now state and vouch for whatever is required to “win,” whatever “winning” is in a universe without any ethical compass. When the entire system depends on the steady ruthless flow of lies– from the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the Pentagon, the banks and Wall Street, the ratings agencies, the accounting departments, every nook and cranny of the American economy and empire– then nobody is willing to sacrifice their own income due to the fact that they understand it wouldn’t stop anything.
The maker would continue, processing lies, scams and propaganda, without them. But they would be outside the lucrative heart of darkness, and no longer able to buy their sought after McMansion/auto/tattoo/ toy that defined who they are.
Integrity has ended up being as light as the reality itself, and both have actually drifted away, unnoticed and unmourned. Hannah Arendt blogged about the Great Evil, Nazi Germany, and “The Final Option” of death camps. However the Nazi device gushed abundant chances to practice the banality of evil, and the death camps were simply one department of the everyday grind of pushing one’s palms on wicked and passing it on to the next “great German.”
Here is a memorial outside the village where my brother lives in France. It is a common town, quite small, perhaps a few hundred homeowners. The memorial commemorates 3 young French civilians who were taken out and shot by Nazi soldiers, either for presumed “crimes” or as a “lesson” to the civilian populace. 
The routine killing of civilians went on day after day; it was the “day job” of the occupying soldiers.
Americans toiling away in their different departments of evil reason their complicity by informing themselves, “no one died since I lied” (other than in all the places around the world where no one understands what’s actually going on in America’s name). Concealing the fact carries no charges or remorse since it is SOP now, standard operating procedure.
The ethical slaughterhouse is filled with corpses. We don’t really know what our Imperial Task is performing in the world. We likewise don’t understand what the Federal Reserve/Wall Street partnership is doing, either. Those inside understand, naturally, but extremely couple of are telling, due to the fact that the system depends on lies and distortion to continue its supremacy.
The truth-teller will lose their prestigious position, their generous wage and the acceptance of their peers. Consider the fate of Edward Snowden. In exchange for this sacrifice, the truth-teller gets just the radiant, ephemeral shards of his/her integrity: in the American culture and economy, stability has no value. The device will grind on without them, impervious to the small pricks of fact; the equipment of propaganda, artifice, misdirection and misrepresentation is well-oiled and skillful in the reach and scope of its operation.
There is no vengeance more remorseless than that of a State based on the banal evil of half-truths in pursuit of those who expose the State’s actions.
Lest you think this an exaggeration, please watch One Of The Most Harmful Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Documents. Daniel Ellsberg was just one of countless “great Americans” doing their task in a war device constructed entirely on lies and propaganda. Only one citizen out of those thousands, or 10s of thousands, wanted to trade his profession for his integrity and conscience.
That’s how the banality of evil works. Possibly one day somebody will break without the culture of lies and propaganda in the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, Wall Street and the “too big to fail banks” and inform the reality. They will be hounded, discredited, scorned and reviled for telling the truth, and the fact will quickly be concealed or shredded.
That’s how the banality of evil works. Reality has become too harmful to the status quo, so it must be strangled every day, by 10s of countless people, and its limp corpse hidden away.
Those toiling away in the Empire of Lies presume karma needs their belief: I do not believe in karma so it doesn’t exist. But karma doesn’t need belief; it works entirely independently of humanity’s belief or non-belief.
The effects have actually collected and the dam is about to break. Believing in the accomplishment of financial wicked will not save us, and preventing our gaze won’t stop the flood.
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