 © Novelties Wholesale
When modern living destroys your family, and the only thing you can pay is attention, here are some time-tested ways to break free.
Nietzsche
says most people choose to be victims. He warns of "slave morality', the
guilt-ridden, pessimistic, mediocre, fearful, paralyzing attitude of "those
uncertain of themselves." How to avoid the high price of uncertainty?
1. Nietzsche
divides the world into Apollonian
and Dionysian, the latter embodied in Cassandra, the beautiful Trojan princess
who refused to "marry' Apollo even after he gave her the power to see the
future. The ancients did not recognize a woman's right to say "No," and Apollo
took it hard.
But
Cassandra knew her worth -- as I say in my Occupy novel
Trading
Dreams, "Pride is expensive. Prostitution is more expensive." This is
how much she was worth: Apollo punished her by making the world disbelieve her
prophecies, and humanity has turned a
deaf ear to women and squandered riches ever since.
Cassandra
warned the Trojans about the horse: the Trojans took the horse inside the city
gates. The Greeks captured Cassandra, 'she
who selects men,' as a prize of war and made her into a sex-slave. Her
"ravings' can still be heard today.
No
need to sanitize the story with another genius woman treated poorly-- there are
plenty of other Trojan horses lying around. You can see the omens better with
your own eyes. Foreign countries perform liposuctions of bad debt from afar and
explode from within! So we'll skip the first admonition and go straight to the second:
2. Read between the lines. Take any
article. Apart. A New York Times exposÃÆ'Â © on bogus book reviews called "The
Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy" pans Todd Rutherford for charging $99
for reviewing books, but fails to mention that bigger reviewers, Kirkus most
blatantly, have been functioning the same way all along. Why would the New York
Times omit the bigger story that Kirkus, a $70-million-dollar company, has been
charging $499 for its reviews for years? To sideline a little guy from
publishing? This article appears to contribute to the corporate hegemony, but they
forgot one thing. There are too many little guys to squash. With free people
reading between the lines, journalism like this will bring on the eventual
collapse of a crusty hegemony.
3. Avoid corporate beholdeness. Corporations have many techniques for
marginalizing the masses. No one who is drowning in debt, taking medicine to
cure the side effects from other medications, distracted by every temptation or
spending all their free time in therapy can threaten an oncoming oligopoly.
Most
of us aren't slaves, just like corporations aren't persons, so you probably
have every resource at your disposal to keep alert. Ask the questions that
matter to you.
Case study: America is in an election
year, and again, candidates from an essentially one-party system are debating
the irrelevant. As Noam Chomsky warned in his lecture "America is NOT a Democracy!"
the issues most people care about have not been allowed on the agenda.
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