The thing about capitalist society is that everything in the mainstream is designed to manipulate us in some way. Sometimes these means are subtle. A jingle you can’t get out of your head. An image you can’t seem to escape even when you close your eyes. Regardless of the means, the fact is that everything around us is in our capitalist world is based around selling a product, an idea, or to distract us from the problems in our own lives, our communities, and the world overall.
We learn to accept manipulation as virtue, or, at the least, to tolerate them as normal behavior. From an early age, we’re taught to play a game in which we are in a constant war for survival. We’re taught that we must overcome our neighbors, our friends, and our families to get ahead in a world that seeks to use us. We’re taught that to live in peace, we must live in pieces — fractured to our very core.
If there’s something that doesn’t appeal to us or that we don’t agree with, the best thing to do is to not participate. Why support a system that sees us as cattle with ideas we could use to free ourselves? But so often, we use these mainstream platforms to voice those thoughts. We launch campaigns espousing change in spaces that foster conformity and homogeny. We use hashtags, catch phrases, and hollow rhetoric to feel as though we are making a difference and being heard. It’s a half-measure. A compromise in self-determination and freedom of thought. Rather than breaking away, we are always buying in. Rather than creating an alternative, we’re creating a sect — a cultural trap to reign in those on the fringes so that individuals who want to wake up can shut their eyes and go right the fuck back to sleep.
The capitalist world doesn’t want us to cooperate. It feeds on our division. It feeds on sweat, tears, conflict, and death. It will fight peace at every avenue and turn we walk. If we want change, we have to be willing to put in the work to create the space for that change in our own communities. We have to be willing to abandon societal norms and find our own normal in spaces that belong to us and us alone. Spaces where we are heard and can share ideas freely without being controlled, looked down upon, or outcast. The only way to free ourselves is to stop looking to the establishment to tell us what to believe and learn to think and reason on our own. To learn understanding and tolerance of our differences. Without those basic virtues, we will always be in chains.
Sour Revelry 