The Individual vs. The Collective

In the 1950s, before television had numbed minds and turned them into jelly, there was a growing sense of: the Individual versus the Corporate State.

Something needed to be done. People were fitting into slots. They were surrendering their lives in increasing numbers. They were carving away their own idiosyncrasies and their independent ideas.

But television, under the control of psyops experts, became, as the 1950s droned on, the facile barrel of a weapon:

"What's important is the group. Conform. Give in. Bathe in the great belonging..."

Recognize that every message television imparts is a proxy, a fabrication, a simulacrum, an imitation of life one step removed.

When this medium also broadcasts words and images of belonging and the need to belong, it's engaged in revolutionary social engineering.

Whether it's the happy-happy suburban-lawn family in an ad for the wonders of a toxic pesticide, or the mob family going to the mattresses to fend off a rival, it's fantasy time in the land of mind control.

Television has carried its mission forward. The consciousness of the Individual versus the State has turned into: love the State. Love the State as family.

Are you with the family or not? Are you with the group, the collective, or not? Those are the blunt parameters.

"When you get right down to it, all you have is family." "Our team is really a family." "You're deserting the family." "You fight for the guy next to you." "Our department is like a family." "Here at Corporation X, we're a family."

The committee, the group, the company, the sector, the planet.

The goal? Submerge the individual.

Individual achievement, imagination, creative power? Not on the agenda. Something for the dustbin of history.

Aldous Huxley, wrote in Brave New World: "'Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines'! The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. 'You really know where you are. For the first time in history.'"

George Orwell, 1984: "The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought."

The soap opera is the apotheosis of television. The long-running characters in Anytown are irreversibly enmeshed in one another's lives. There's no escape. There is only mind-numbing meddling.

For some people, the collective "WE" has a fragrant scent---until they get down in the trenches with it. There they discover odd odors and postures and mutations. There they discover self-distorted creatures scurrying around celebrating their twistedness.

Whose idea was it to become deaf, dumb, and blind in the first place?

In the aftermath of the 1963 assassination of JFK and the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the covert theme was the same: a lone individual did this.

A lone individual, detached from the group, did this. "Lone individuals are people who left the fold. They wandered from the communal hearth. Therefore, they inevitably became killers."

In 1995, after the Oklahoma City Bombing, President Bill Clinton made a speech to the nation. He rescued his presidency by essentially saying, "Come home to the government. We will protect you and save you."

Clinton framed the crime in those terms. The individual versus the collective.

The history of human struggle on this planet is about the individual emerging from the group, from the tribe, from the clan. The history of struggle is not about the individual surrendering and going back into group identity.

Going back is the psyop, the intended psyop.