"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Oct 28, 2010

Wee Hours Thought

Yapping away at power confirms it. Acting reasonably towards those with the guns doesn't get them to play nice. It's showing them your soft white dog belly. Unless you're clever enough to use that as cover, it's to no avail.

Want [insert wealthy, powerful bastard's name] to listen, to pay attention?

Frighten him. 

It's no guarantee that you'll get what you want - but he'll stop treating you like one of the interchangeable, faceless help.

If you want to keep up the appearance of a faceless servant, well...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A truth.

Works because their motive is fear, which means it's also their trigger for action. If that's not too redundant.

Jack Crow said...

Thing is, most of us (in my experience) know this, because most of us have worked or are still working for a hierarchy which operates by (1) restricting or limiting information, (2) punishing transgressors, (3) promoting predators and (4) capturing clients/consumers.

It's all about fear - fear that we learn, because our evolutionarily useful limbic system, and instincts, have been turned on us by a decade of education. Or, in less complex societies, by abuse and degradation which is more direct, if less comprehensive.

We are conditioned - deliberately, see Gatto - to believe in a security and access (this changes according to your class, your level in it, and your degree of influence/worth to the ruling faction) that can, from time we join it and forward, *be taken away at any time.*

So all our fight/flight inheritance becomes reconditioned towards the preservation of status which is tethered to very material benefits.

This is the genius of "civilization,' to organize what should be unwieldy and chaos engendering orders of persons into manageable bits of data and activity, by training their evolutionary inheritance into schemes of self-limitation.

Respect,

Jack

Ethan said...

That's a comment that should be a post if I've ever seen one.