Playing Checkers in a Game of Chess, Bringing Knives to a Gunfight – Part 2, by Ray Zwarich

“Come on talk to me

So you can see

What’s going on (what’s going on)

We got to find a way to bring some loving here today”

                       — Marvin Gaye, ‘What’s Going On‘

Dear All:

Some weeks ago, (in mid-January), I directed people’s attention to a tremendous, spiritually uplifting article by one of my very favorite writers, Patrick Lawrence, (he’s here on this recipient list), entitled ‘Pessimism of the Mind; Optimism of the Will‘. Some might recall my pointing out that ‘mind’ and ‘will’ are only two legs of what is at least a three-legged stool. Our human psychology is so complex that we could talk about many of its ‘legs’, I suppose, but surely if we do not consider ‘heart’, along with ‘mind’ and ‘will’, the stool will not stand on the two legs alone.

I expressed my hope that Mr. Lawrence, so obviously a much better writer than a broke-down old carpenter like me, would think about, and write about the whole stool, about all three of its legs, heart, mind, and will, not just about the two having to do with cognition and intention. Of the three, is heart not surely the most crucial? Where our hearts go, do our minds and will not always follow?

Mr. Lawrence is among the many writers like him, (including our very best writers), who often decry the transformation of one relatively smaller segment of our immensely powerful and centrally controlled Mass Media, specifically the News Media, into a giant, lying propaganda machine. Well, it’s obviously and definitely true. Surely ALL here on this select list know that our centrally controlled News Media have been FULLY transformed into a giant, lying propaganda machine, which seeks to control our cognitive functions, which seeks to control, (with considerable success), what the Common People in the general population think we know, and therefore what we come to believe.

I have often chided these writers, (whom I consider our best), however, for limiting their own consciousness to an awareness of the control being exerted by Mass Media over our cognitive functions. Where the heart goes, the mind and will will always follow. The News Media exert immense power over our cognition, to be sure, but the power of this one facet of Mass Media is not NEARLY as powerful as the MANY other its facets that exert control over our hearts.

The News Media are only a relatively small part of the total (as in totalitarian) power of Mass Media. The MUCH more significant degree of social, cultural, and psychological control being exerted over us, as individuals, by our Common Enemy, (by the Elite Forces that rule over our nation and over every aspect of our lives), through the immense power of their totally and centrally controlled Mass Media, is their control over not just what we think, but over what we WANT.

They control our human Desire. They control how we FEEL, in real time, in the time that ticks out the passing of our daily lives, as we walk down life’s city streets with our noses in our smartphones, as we sit alone staring at our computers, and TVs, absorbing the estimated 10,000 coercive messages that bombard each and every one of us, each and every day. That’s about 417 coercive messages per hour being insidiously ‘injected’ into our consciousness, about 7 each passing minute of every passing day.

They, (our Common Enemy), control, in real time, how we FEEL at any given moment. They control what we WANT, as we breathe and walk and strive. They control human Desire. And where the heart goes, the mind and will will follow.

And the Mass Media’s power to control how we feel, in real time, goes even far beyond simply the psychologically coercive messages in advertising. These people who now have ‘total’ control over our Mass Media, (the means of communication are the means of power), control the ‘content’, they control the programming as well.

They control what movies and TV programs are produced. Anybody seen (or read) ‘Grapes of Wrath’ lately? The book was and remains, like a ‘bible’ to me. I just watched ole Hank Fonda as Tom Joad again a few days ago. Where is our generation’s ‘Steinbeck’? “Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio? Our nation turns its [desperate] eyes to you. woo woo woo”. No great literature, stirring our hearts by asking the deep and difficult questions about our human existence, is translated into pop-culture anymore.

But how many movies and programs about desperate deadly dystopias do we have to choose from on Netflix, or Amazon, or Hulu, or HBOMax, etc? Look at the thumbnails of the program lineups on any streaming site. How many picture a person holding a gun? How many advertise horror movies designed to use pornographic violence and gore to stimulate raw unfocused fear in us? How many feature attractive females shamelessly flaunting their sexual charms at us? How many stupid, mindless glitzy-glamour movies and programs, about cops and FBI ‘special agents’, and daring super-macho spies, and their super sexy companions, how many programs about rich “lawyers and things” (Dylan, from ‘The Walls of Red Wing‘) can we choose from, to stimulate our envy and jealousy, and to make us despise ourselves as ‘ordinary’ people, to make us feel inferior to those our sick culture ‘celebrates’?

The Common People are taught to feel ashamed of not being celebrities. It’s not enough anymore, in our sick culture, to be a proud, honest, and self-respecting “good man among the Common Men”, or a “good woman among the Common Women”. If we’re not ‘stars’, if our very existence is not ‘celebrated’ by our sick culture, then we are NOBODIES, and we don’t matter.

They (our Common Enemy) control which books and literature are allowed to be published. Where’s the ‘new Kerouac’? Where’s the new ‘beat generation’, or ‘counterculture’ to challenge the pervasive sickness of the culture being rammed down our throats? Where’s the new Jack London, writing gripping novels about powerful mass movements rising to challenge the Elite Power Structure, which I read as a wide-eyed young man? Where’s the new Dos Passos, or the new Upton Sinclair?

Our Enemy controls the type of, and messages in, the pop-music that comes into our earphones on the subway, or walking down the street, or riding in our cars. Has anybody heard the ‘New Dylan’? How about the ‘New John Lennon’? Or any of the other serious social critics who used the combination of melody and literature to stir our thinking and/or touch our hearts deeply? I haven’t heard them either. But I’m assaulted by ‘gangsta rap’, and other porn music, everywhere I go.

Do we think that ‘the greats’ of serious, self-reflective pop-culture, people like Dylan and Lennon, or the greats of our literary intelligentsia, just aren’t born anymore? They used to arise from each generation. Has our gene pool been depleted? Or are these people simply being denied access to the nation’s means of communication?

“Golly gee, Martha… I just can’t figure this one out”, sez the Common Man to the Common Woman.

Our Common Enemy controls the comic books that our children read, and the cartoon shows they watch when exhausted working parents sit them down with the ‘electronic babysitter’. They control the magazines that 10 year olds and teen-agers read secretly, by flashlight, under the covers, after they’re supposed to have turned out the lights and gone to sleep, as they formulate their own conscious dreams, in secrecy, dreams they dare not dream in daylight. They must hide away to dream their own conscious dreams for a future that they are forced to see is disappearing into a promised dystopia of monsters and super-heroes, of zombies and deadly diseases, of apocalyptic war and bloody hate, as they plan how THEY will somehow survive to find love, to somehow make a life for themselves, against impossible odds, to somehow make lonely, withering dreams come true, dreams they now can only dream in secret lest a cruel world that they feel closing in on every side should crush them even as they’re being born. “Those not busy being born are busy dying”. (Attribution needed?)

Our Common Enemy controls us on an ’emotional’ level, folks, on a level far deeper than the cognitive level that the News Media can access. Where the heart goes, the mind will follow, and the will will always tag along. The News Media Propaganda Machine is only the tip of the IMMENSELY powerful Mass Media iceberg.

We’re playing a real good game of checkers, folks. Unfortunately the game we’re in, the game our Common Enemy, the Elite Forces who rule over us, are playing, is chess. A much more dramatically graphic metaphor would be to say that we’re arming ourselves with knives to engage against automatic weapons fire in a gunfight.

To try to expand our consciousness into a greater awareness of the realities of “what’s going on”, to try to get us ‘up to speed’ so that we can better compete in the Enemy’s ‘game’, (or metaphorical ‘gunfight’), in my previous dispatch I tried to get people to ‘see’ that since our Enemy’s primary strategy of social control is to keep the population, to keep the Common People, divided into mutually hateful, and therefore politically impotent, factions, the Enemy’s greatest fear is thus that the Common People will begin to ‘see through’ the Enemy’s ruses, that we will begin to ‘see through’ the way the Enemy has deliberately created and promoted the cultural and primitive tribal divisions that keep us divided and thus politically impotent, and that we will thus begin to reach across our intentionally inflicted cultural and tribal differences to form a powerful political alliance to fight and defeat our Common Enemy.

Once these morally depraved Elite Forces that now rule over us are defeated, we can begin to create actual JUSTICE in our nation. Justice for ALL people, of EVERY race and/or ethnicity. And we can work together in cooperation with other nations to create actual JUSTICE between and among all nations.

When we create Justice, Peace will follow. Lacking Justice, Peace will remain impossible, until the Nuclear Demon breaks its chains, (which could happen any day), and Humanity will be proven to have been God’s or Nature’s, (take your pick, they’re one and the same to me), unsuccessful experiment in raw life, gifted with Reason,1 becoming ‘civilized’.

The first, foremost, and primary factor in creating JUSTICE must be to arrange our economy so that a FAIR division of wealth can occur. The more gifted and talented among us will always be better rewarded, (as they should be), but in a FAIR economy, NONE can be allowed to have so much that MANY do not have enough. NONE can have more until ALL have enough. When we pass the platters and casserole dishes around our Thanksgiving tables, none get a second helping until all plates are full with a first. And when the meat tray passes to us, we are guided by an internalized moral culture, rooted in human moral decency, to gauge the amount of meat on the tray, as measured against the number of people to whom the tray has not yet passed, and to only take as much as will leave the last person to whom the tray is passed to get at least as much as we do.

The Common People know to behave that way. We know to be decent and kind and caring of others. It is this sick pestilent culture and society, which our Common Enemy has forced us to gag on, which these morally depraved Elites have forced us to live in, that teaches us to gorge on as much as our greed and lust desires, with no thought of those our sick behavior might deprive.

When ALL bellies are full, when even the least among us live in dignified housing, when the Demon Poverty is not prowling free to threaten us ALL with the deadly dangers that desperate poverty always engenders, (dangers to us ALL, poor or not), when all neighborhoods are safe, when every neighborhood is built on the solid foundation of a solid economic base, when all adults can earn at least decent incomes, when all children are thus well-nurtured in loving families, when a good school exists in every neighborhood to provide ALL our children with EQUAL opportunity to reach for their dreams, in other words, when JUSTICE, real actual social, moral, and political JUSTICE, exists in our nation, we will find that our cultural and primitive tribal differences will shrink to insignificance.

Instead, we have been ‘tricked’, by THE oldest damn trick in the book, (divide and rule), into fighting so hatefully over our primitive cultural and tribal differences, and we’ve become so crazed and confused in doing so, that we have no hope at ALL of being able to acquire ANY political power at ALL, let alone enough to defeat our morally depraved Common Enemy so we can begin the Big Job in front of us, so we can begin to create “Liberty and Justice for ALL”. (Gee… Where have I heard THAT before?)

What I tried to get us to ‘see’, in my previous dispatch, is the deviously cunning nature of the Enemy’s brilliant operational strategies, tactics, and methodologies, which, in these evil people’s unrestrained, morally depraved greed and lust, the Enemy uses to prevent actual moral, social, and political JUSTICE from existing, and to prevent us, as a nation, from even trying to create it. Even people of a more sophisticated level of consciousness, as represented by the people on this cultivated ‘select’ list, seem to largely remain effectively blind to the true nature of ‘the game’ (the gunfight) we’re in.

To try to get people to ‘see’ at least a small facet of this, I pointed out the tactics our Enemy would use to prevent the Common People from UNITING against the morally depraved Ruling Elites. Fearing the formation of a powerful alliance among the Common People’s heretofore divided factions, the Enemy would NOT try to keep an alliance from forming. They are MUCH more ‘sophisticated’ in their brilliant cunning than that. Their objective would be not to keep any alliance from forming, but rather to keep a POWERFUL alliance from forming. What better way to keep a powerful alliance from forming than to encourage, to aid and abet, and likely even to finance, the formation of an alliance that is designed to fail?

The nascent alliance that took shape by means of the ‘historic’ event of Feb 19, sure seems to me to be ‘designed to fail’. Well… I sure could be wrong. Perhaps this looming failure we’re seeing is caused simply by incompetence, by the lack of experienced, competent leaders. Yea… well… perhaps… But the way this event has unfolded, the shape and form it has thus far taken, and its lack of any apparent strategy or effective tactics for moving forward, all suggest our Common Enemy’s hand at work in creating an alliance that is cunningly ‘designed to fail’, in order to forestall the creation of a POWERFUL alliance that is designed to WIN.

THAT is how our brilliantly cunning and immensely powerful Common Enemy functions. As my old dear friend Thaddeus Bethel used to say, “That’s how they do”.

And too few of us, even among a select group of the more sophisticated, even among the Common People’s intelligentsia, demonstrate an adequate awareness of “what’s going on”.

We, meaning not just our nation’s Common People, but even this selected and cultivated recipient list of more ‘sophisticated’ people, (that is to say, people with with a demonstrated higher, more expanded consciousness), just don’t understand what is happening around us. We don’t understand how cunningly we are being manipulated, and thus controlled.

Just looking on the broadest ‘macro’ level, we don’t even seem capable of ‘realizing’ what we ALL already KNOW. We have had a psychological cognitive fault induced into us, to inhibit our actual cognitive process. We don’t understand what we already KNOW, perfectly well, to be true.

For example, (to choose just one), we ALL surely know that our Enemy, the Elite Forces that rule over our nation and thus over all our lives, don’t even face ANY organized political opposition. NONE at ALL!

We ALL (on this select list) know that these brutally murderous Elite Forces have full effective control of BOTH political parties in our two-party political system. Is there anyone here, on this select list, (please remember that I’m not addressing the general public), who does NOT know that? By all means, speak up! Let’s hear your argument. Is there anyone here who would argue that the US Ruling Elites do NOT control BOTH political parties, in our two-party system?Is there anyone here who does not understand that the US Ruling Elite Forces control both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party?

Yet even knowing this full well, we’re unable to even form up into an opposing ‘political front’ of ANY kind. Instead, when it comes time to participate in what has become our ‘Democracy Charade’, we agreeably cooperate with, and thus abet, this ridiculous Reality-TV ‘Charade’. We agree to play a game that we ALL already KNOW is rigged. We ALL know that ‘the fix is in’, but we all play anyway.

One of the mutually hateful factions into which we, the Common People, have been divided, dutifully lines up to support the ‘woke’ Democratic Party. The other faction dutifully lines up to support the MAGA Republican Party. We, the Common People, thus dutifully engage in fighting each other, even though we KNOW that BOTH these parties are controlled by the Elites Forces that BOTH factions among the Common People consider to be their Common Enemy.

We’re behaving like mindless marionettes dancing on strings.

In fact, that is exactly what we ARE!

Why??… Why do we do this?… Why do we behave this way?… Why do we so obediently dance on the ends of our own avowed Enemy’s strings? Why do we act like mindless lemmings, rather than like the intelligent human beings we are? Why do we ignore what we KNOW, to behave exactly as our Enemy wants us to behave? What is the sophisticated psychological nature of this cunningly induced cognitive fault?

We choose a side, we choose one of our own Enemy’s fully controlled parties, and with full heart and soul, with all the courageous powers of our fighting spirits, we fight against the other side, even though we ALL know fully well, BOTH sides know fully well, that BOTH sides are controlled by, and represent the interests of, the Ruling Elite Forces that are the avowed Common Enemy of BOTH factions into which we, the Common People, have been so cunningly and artfully divided?

Why do we do this?

Why do we behave this way?

Why does even this select group of more ‘sophisticated’ people, why do even people who could be regarded as among the nation’s ‘intelligentsia’, behave this way? Why do such intelligent people behave in such a ‘stupidly’ irrational manner?

THAT is the question we must EACH ask into our own mirror. Why do I behave this way?

I know why. We behave this way because we have been culturally, socially, and psychologically ‘engineered’, by the IMMENSE power of Mass Media, to behave this way. We have been ‘engineered’ to feel a certain way, and thus to think the way we do, and thus to behave the way we do, which is how the Elite Forces that ‘engineered’ us want us to behave. The Elite Forces have used the IMMENSE power of their totally centralized and controlled Mass Media to train us to obediently act this way.

The means of communication are the means of power. Yet even our most cogent thinkers, writers, commentators, etc, even our ‘intelligentsia’, even our BEST, don’t understand the full measure of how brilliantly our Mass Media are being used to control our psychology, and thus our behavior.

The behavior of the highly centralized ‘News Media’, as a giant, lying propaganda machine, is only a relatively small facet of the Mass Media’s IMMENSE power to exert psychological control over our hearts, and thus over our minds, and thus over our WILL.

I’m going to cut this off at this point. There is SO much more to say. This discussion is just getting started, folks. I have somehow freed my own ‘will’ to act despite the heavy despair that weighs down my heart with hopeless gloom. All here can learn to do the same. I have faith in us. Hope is engendered in action, in formed by an expanded consciousness. Mine has expanded. Yours can too.

People who should be allies must FIRST stop being enemies. I have expanded my consciousness enough to know that. You can too. I have faith in you.

Simius Cognitius