Citizen Journalism Part 3: Who Really Has The Power?
I consider myself spiritually agnostic for the most part.
But the interesting thing about power dynamics between the ruling class and the people is that there are so many parallels with the spiritual teachings of practices like Hinduism and Buddhism.
Going back to the idea of Moksha in Part 1, the freedom of the soul from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth...
What Hinduism teaches is that as you are travelling on this path to liberation, you must release yourself from the prison of emotional samsara – a never ending state of toxic, emotional pain that most of us find ourselves trapped in as a result of traumatic life experiences.
You do this by uncovering, identifying and then releasing yourself from the stories and belief systems that we have created in our own minds about who we are. Belief systems that literally keep us chained to a certain identity or pattern of behaviors.
As you are going through this process, one step at a time, you begin to realize and understand that everything you think you know about the world, everything that you consider to be reality, is in fact, an illusion. An imaginary labyrinth of belief systems that you literally construct in your own mind which keeps you lost and running around in circles, bumping into walls that you built yourself.
By tearing down these imaginary walls one brick at a time, we begin to see the world around us and experience liberation.
Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better
or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing
through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we
imagined to be true.
-Adyashanti
Power, authority and hierarchy works the exact same way.
All of their power – the ruling class – ALL of it… is based on BELIEF.
Without our BELIEF in their authority, they literally have NOTHING.
The only reason people go and fight and die for the oligarchs in their wars of empire and imperialism is because they BELIEVE they are doing the right thing.
The only reason people enforce unjust laws is because they BELIEVE they have no other choice. They’ve been told their whole lives that’s just how society works and there are no other options.
Without this belief, people would simply stop taking orders from criminals and the ruling class would have NOTHING.
The Only Power They Have Over Us Is The Power That We Give Them
Seizing control of the flow of information, seizing control over the narrative through citizen journalism is about shattering this illusion of power into a million pieces just like the fragile glass sculpture that it is.
And then sweeping up all those tiny little glass pieces into a dustpan and depositing them into the garbage can where they belong.
Now some people might read something like this and think all that stuff about Moksha and limiting belief systems and creating your own reality is just a bunch of new age mumbo jumbo.
However, the idea that perception is reality is something that has been proven over and over again in the real world in every situation imaginable.
“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
-Robert K. Merton, Sociology Professor and the
man who coined the phrase “self-fulfilling prophesy”
The collapse of the Soviet Union is an excellent example in history of this.
Here’s a great article that explains how the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union was not necessarily a result of economic circumstances or political circumstances (although those were, of course, huge factors), but rather the collapse happened because the beliefs that the Russian people held about the Soviet system changed. A change in the minds of the people is what ultimately triggered the collapse.
http://www.businessinsider.com/collapse-soviet-union-explained-2016-9
Money itself – or to put it more accurately: currency and our global financial system – is based entirely on belief.
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Money/Currency Is Based On Belief
The success of government requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not.
Government requires us to believe in the fiction that when a special group of people commits a certain action it is morally acceptable. But when an individual or another group that does not have the same “special” status commits the exact same action, it is a crime.
Our entire universe is basically a real time digital rendering of our interacting belief systems. So whatever your belief systems supports, that is truth, to you.
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"Power is a curious thing. Three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man.
Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword
kill the other two. Who lives, who dies? ...Power resides where men believe it
resides; it's a trick, a shadow on the wall, and a very small man can cast a very
large shadow."
-Lord Varys, Game of Thrones
Which of the two men will the sellsword kill in the example above? Whichever two men the sellsword believes has the least amount of power. He will obey whichever man he believes has the most power or “authority.”
"Authority is always in the eye of the beholder.”
-Larken Rose
Language is everything. Words are weapons. Language is a mental construct that creates the illusion of authority and legitimacy. Simply change the language/verbiage and “authority” can be transferred on a whim from one illegitimate gang of criminals to another.
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."
-Rudyard Kipling
In order to lift the veil from your eyes and demystify the aura of reverence and cult worship that surrounds the state and hierarchical “authority,” anytime you are reading a news story where the government is involved, simply replace some of the words you see on the left column with the parallel word found in the right column…
Politics Is The Art of Covering Up Crimes With Words
Compliance Cannot Exist Without Authoritarianism
And Authoritarianism Cannot Exist Without Lies
“The beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.”
-Christopher Hitchens
Now even if you don’t believe in anarchism, citizen journalism is absolutely essential to keeping power in check no matter what system of government you’re operating under.
It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself a conservative, a democratic socialist, a libertarian, an anarchist, a constitutionalist, a progressive...
Citizen journalism and an educated population is something that everyone can and should agree on.
"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own
government... whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they
may be relied on to set them to rights."
-Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789
"Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty,
and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked
on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the
people could be informed to a certain degree."
-Thomas Jefferson to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 1805
Citizen journalism is just one way of looking at it, but personally I see it as much more than that.
I think of it more as reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.
I view every person I come across as sort of a portal, a new set of glasses or a lense with which to view the world, a guide or information center that helps me navigate.
Don’t think of me as a separate person or entity.
Think of me as an extension of you. Think of me as one of your senses – like sight, hearing, smell, touch, etc.
Your purpose as a living, breathing organism on this planet is to observe and understand your environment as much as possible.
I am a part of you, you are a part of me. I’m like one of your antennae, one of your senses that you use to gather information about your surrounding environment. That’s all I am.
Just like an ant bringing information back to the colony about a source of food they found.
I’m passing information on to you for you to evaluate and decide what to do with. Some of the information may be useful, some of it may not be. You can accept it, you can reject it, you can set it aside for another time.
Maybe none of my information will be valuable to you at this time.
Maybe years from now something you experience or something you learn will trigger a part of your subconscious brain that has been storing this information and it will serve some purpose for you then.
I learn from you, you learn from me, together we help each other understand our environment better in a decentralized, peer-to-peer network… rather than through the traditional channels of information controlled by vertical institutions.
What citizen journalism actually is, is just people documenting the world around them. Or as Kyle Cease puts it – evolving out loud.
Just like how Gary Vaynerchuk talks about when you build a business you should simply document your journey/process and share it with other people so they can learn from your experience.
Well guess what?
The Entire World IS Our Business
And It Should Be Treated With The Same Sense Of Responsibility
As Our Own Personal Careers/Family/Households/etc
Do You Realize That Is The Primary Difference Between The
People Who Rule The World And Everyone Else?
What Do You Consider To Be Your Sphere Of Influence
And How Large Is It?
That’s how citizen journalism starts – by documenting and narrating our perspectives about the world around us.
Everything and everyone is just data, that’s all it is. We’re all just points of data for each other.
With social media and citizen journalism we are basically flipping celebrity culture upside down and through personal branding, we are decentralizing and distributing the power of the media throughout the masses.
Which network of data points/broadcasting stations do you think will give you a more all-encompassing view of the world and enable you to make better, more informed decisions...
A handful of national cable news networks that are all controlled by the same corporations?
Or hundreds of millions of independent stations all across the world that don’t take their orders from any government or any corporation?
Now, as much as I would love to see everyone doing this, as much as I would love to see everyone embrace their role as the new media, we’re probably still a long way away from that.
Will citizen journalism every become something that is a part of nearly everyone’s daily life? Or at a least a majority of people?
I do think someday that is possible, after we disrupt and deconstruct the educational-industrial-complex.
However, Even If We Never Reach A Majority Of People,
We Don’t NEED A Majority Of The Population Doing Citizen
Journalism In Order To Seize Control Of The Narrative.
It’s a well known historical pattern that a minority of people can create massive changes in society.
To back this up with more concrete data, scientists at the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will eventually be adopted by the majority of the society.
Using computational and analytical methods, they discovered that 10% is the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. This has very important implications for studying social interactions and the spread of ideas, belief systems and political movements.
reference: https://goo.gl/mi8SKq
So we only need 10% of the population actively practicing citizen journalism in order for us to change the course of this country and the world.
This is Part 3 of a 4 Part series.
In the final installment, I’ll talk about how we reach this 10% critical mass.
To read Part 1:
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@asymmetricanarch/citizen-journalism-part-1-the-key-to-achieving-a-moksha-state-of-panarchism
To read Part 2:
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@asymmetricanarch/citizen-journalism-part-2-control-the-narrative-control-everything
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