by Caitlin Johnstone, published on CaitlinJohnstone.com.au, August 10, 2024
One of the biggest lies we are sold in western politics is that election results paint an accurate picture of what the public truly wants. We are told that candidates who promote peace and economic justice lose elections because their platforms are unpopular with the wider public, as though the people are organically coming into worldviews which support poverty, inequality, war and militarism all on their own.
“Socialism just isn’t popular!” we are told, as though we don’t live under a capitalist empire that has spent generations violently stomping out socialism wherever it pops up and brainwashing the public into despising socialism at home.
“Americans just don’t care that much about foreign policy,” we’re told, as though Americans aren’t being propagandized to the gills every day of their lives into seeing their government’s bloodthirsty warmongering as normal and acceptable.
It is a well-documented fact that under the western empire not only are our political systems aggressively manipulated by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful, but public opinion is as well. Insane systems which rely on exploitation, injustice, ecocide, militarism and war are actively normalized via mass-scale psychological manipulation, and we are then presented with candidates and platforms which support those systems and told that anything else is fringe commie extremism.
If left to their own devices nobody would organically come to the conclusion that there should be people living on the streets while investment properties are left empty, that normal people should be working two jobs to feed and house their families while Machiavellian plutocrats amass billions of dollars, that we should be destroying the ecosystem we depend on for survival to increase profits for corporate shareholders, or that we should be encircling the planet with war machinery to terrorize and murder any population on earth who disobeys the dictates of Washington. But that’s what our elections serve us up year after year, decade after decade — because no part of this is organic.
So now we’re seeing a US election where two tyrannical capitalist warmongers are squaring off against each other, appealing to the votes of America’s two mainstream political factions which are only mainstream because vast fortunes have been poured into propaganda manipulations to make them mainstream. Then you’ve got candidates like Jill Stein saying normal, sane and common sense things about peace and justice while being framed as an extremist lunatic by the consent manufacturers of the mainstream press. And when Stein loses in this aggressively manipulated information environment within this aggressively manipulated electoral system, it will be framed as evidence that her politics were seen as too fringe and kooky for the mainstream public.
Whenever I talk about this dynamic during a high-profile election season I am always inundated with a deluge of knee jerk point-missers asking “Well who SHOULD we vote for then??”, which is kind of like Morpheus telling Neo he’s been living his whole life in the matrix and Neo going, “Okay but how do I get my boss to give me a raise in my cubicle job where I work?” It doesn’t matter, Neo. The whole thing’s an illusion. What matters is getting people to open their eyes to this reality so that real meaningful action can be taken.
If you’re having a dream about being chased by a lynch mob, your only concern is making sure your own interests win out over the interests of the mob. When you wake up from the dream, you don’t spend the rest of your day wondering how you’re going to get away from the mob. You concern yourself with your real material interests in your waking life.
That’s what this should be like. If you really grasp what’s being pointed to here, you won’t keep getting swept up in the mass psychosis of election season hysteria, and party politics won’t have any gravitational pull on your mind. Instead, your focus will be on helping people to realize that this is all a carefully manufactured illusion, because until enough of us are awake to the real world, there’ll be no chance of using the power of our numbers to overthrow the tyrants who’ve been pulling the wool over our eyes this entire time.
*Featured Image: by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian author who writes with her husband Tim Foley. You can follow her unique viewpoint on her substack and on her her website, and you can subscribe to her podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube.