Monday, February 28, 2011

and the band played on

the titanic's maiden voyage, 1912. with the tragedy of the ocean liner sinking, the mythology of human omnipotence over the natural world was dealt a savage blow. ultimately the titanic was seen as an impenetrable symbol of man's domain. of the superiority of the west. the inheritance of the disaster was an increased cynicism & ability of the masses to question the status quo & what lay previously in the untouchable realm. despite where they fell in the socio-economic class system.

and the band played on... under the direction of lead violinist wallace hartley following orders from the captain to maintain calm the band in what is now legend, continued to play rousing tunes on deck designed to dissolve panic.

"alexander's ragtime band", and "nearer god to thee" are remembered by survivors. it is still debated what the last song was that the band stalwartly performed before the atlantic ocean swallowed them up. an eerie theme song of death & survival as these heroes played instruments with their last breaths as others surrendered, sliding off the increasingly acute deck & the lucky rest watched on in disbelief from adjacent bobbing lifeboats.

the question i am confronted with now is, were they indeed heroes? did the captain make the best decision in how to crowd control the situation. obviously in hindsight wisdom is cheap & although i have no desire to disrespect their memories, what would have happened if the band had not played on? there are at least two obvious scenarios:

1. absolute mayhem could have occurred & if so, probably less people would have survived in the bedlam which would have occurred to scramble onto the insufficient number of lifeboats which were available. collective panic as evidenced in crushes has often been attributed to deaths in public spaces.

this is a very popular belief which carries across most crowd control models. there's a strong argument for any leader to maintain order in a time of chaos. through whatever means or channels available.

artificial systems break down we are told when there is transparency. but what of natural systems: we are part of the animal kingdom after all, aren't we [we can have this debate later]? do instincts at a time like this prevail? the subconscious can breakthrough social conditioning to enable what we conceive to be superhuman endeavor when uncaged.

scientific research on human behavior & the mass psychology of disasters & emergency evacuations yields often conflicting results. hypotheses of crowd panic have been disproved from case studies including the london bombings which demonstrated that crowd behavior in emergencies is both socially structured and mutual co-operation is the norm rather than exception.

2. george bernard shaw publicly argued after the titanic sinking whether the band playing on gave the people on board a false sense of security ultimately creating an artificial surreality to the scenario. thereby reducing urgency. perhaps more could have survived.

there were arguments at the time over vilified bernard shaw's apparent tastelessness questioning the romantacised vision of leaders' heroism when there were gross oversights in executive decisions which had inevitably led to the disaster.

"Though all the men must be heroes, the Captain must be a super-hero, a magnificent seaman, cool, brave, delighting in death and danger, and a living guarantee that the wreck was nobody's fault, but, on the contrary, a triumph of British navigation." - george bernard shaw, 1912
  
mass panic is potentially a myth. could the common proliferation of such a belief be a subversive method of mind control?

if there's a risk, should the people know? and who makes this decision. we see this moral dilemma increasingly introduced as the hollywood mafia leak these vital themes through disaster/invasion films in the last few years. there's a visible trend. 

let's take 2012.. do the people have a right to know once the few & powerful have scrambled about in order to preserve themselves & in turn what they deem valuable? what if it potentially jeopardises the survival of the species... what would/did noah do?


let's think about this logically. say the world is going to end in 2012: and everyone knows, not just some shadow government types. what do you think that's going to do to the inherent structure of society? not even then when disaster is nigh, what about now?

noone's going to go to work anymore, forget buying the latest gucci sunglasses or upgrading your whiteware... this is going to really hurt the people who sit at the top of the money tree [banks/royals]. mass consumerism of non-essentials will fall into a shallow grave where it rightly belongs & focus will be redirected, en masse. right now the banks theoretically need our money & our fragmented distraction more than ever. for their exit/entry strategy. they're like mercenary, dairy farmers, milking out every last drop.

not only that, the government that you think you voted for will have a revolution on its hands. the illusion of choice will falter. not all of us are going to go & get perpetually stoned or suicidal. although there will be a significant percentage. if you breakdown the control mantra of "conform, obey, consume" something terrible could occur beyond the projected hysteria. people will start to think, and independently work together. who does this NOT benefit?

george orwell's much cited novel, 1984 described a totalitarian society in which government had almost total control over the people. this commentary has become a prophetic bible of benchmark as increasingly our society under the guise of increased freedoms reminiscent of orwellian party slogans "freedom is slavery" is a mirror for that world which we now live in.


in order to cement absolute control, order can be created by the few from chaos. in fact chaos is an effective vehicle in order to exact change & control. david rockefeller apparent author of the new world blueprint is the champion of such a mentality. as is zorg [the fifth element]. personally i prefer both. nataraj is my personal icon. but then i love to dance.


there are many questions & anomalies in this world. a lot does not add up. far-fetched science fiction or not? there is a galactic sized black hole known as black ops in the immense US budget which transcends international boundaries. and that's only the beginning. the rabbit hole runs so very deep into the very fabric of history & our collective concept of news-fed/text book reality forcing us to question everything we think we know.



for example does an organisation like wikileaks actually promote transparency? as it appears to. or is it too an agent of intended chaos creating order to ultimately benefit those we think it is decrying. is it all a well choreographed farce? could julian assange be the puppet of a much more insidious marionette? could my pin-up boy be a wolf in sheep's clothing. or an unwitting pawn...

wikileaks has been connected to globalist george soros, 35th richest man in the world according to forbes list of billionaires. that's quite a patron. a controversial billionaire whose path is one of polarity. is it because he's an atheist, apparently left wing, promotes a war against fox news? we could potentially be best friends & i could certainly use a sugar daddy *cutely waves*. 

so the red flag is that he wants a global financial economy. i've barely got two cents to rub together, so i'm not sure i know what that really means [my uni education is in philosophy, political science & marketing not economics & i never keep receipts] but i can deduce some negative ramifications easily enough. perhaps there are positives for the people too? we know the spin doctors will assure us so. 

the deal breaker would be if he is in bed with the rothschilds & rockefellers sometime figureheads of the so-called 13 families. soros is rumored as being an anti-semitic jew but post world war rumours are cheap & plentiful. if true that would certainly put him in the same ballpark of his filthy rich brethren exploiting their own people with some insidious possibly shared goal. like a new world order. but without scratching the surface there's not enough to surmise. and then the bilderberg connection comes up. oh oh... can you say illuminati without a tom hanks accent?

a likely outcome of the progression of chaos to anarchy through to an eventual reformation of new government systems [perhaps just one] is typically more not less post-governmental control & complete loss of individual liberties. with so many possible agendas & rampant disinformation who can you believe? certainly not politicians. at least we know that much.


if there were answers which would change your reality in an unpleasant way would you want to know or would you prefer to go on eyes wide shut kubrick style & be gently dehumanised [as long as it doesn't hurt]? do you prefer to stay sleeping & not follow neo by taking the red pill & wander into the dark expanse of wonderland. sleep is nice. which colour pill would you take?

this is a serious philosophical question as i consider complete redirection. i've been warned by a close friend that despite a shared belief of our distorted reality, that we make ourselves unnecessary targets in doing so. thereby directly impacting the quality of our lives. 

but only if it's real right? otherwise i'm just another crazy freak. that's OK, i like egg. but if it is real... WHOA, isn't there a compulsion, a moral obligation to do something real in response? at least to investigate what all the fuss is about...

this is an underground conundrum which has affected thousands all over the globe. the zeitgeist speaks despite many of us not being especially expertly qualified to field & spar with skeptics or the establishment. but still there is an increasing sense of urgency, and the need to lend voice. like neo in the matrix we can feel something is not right. regardless of evolutionary opinion, we are animals & our instincts although smothered have been repeatedly demonstrated to have life-saving merit.

what if it were possible to galvanise people to find truth, even a series of truths to break through the enveloping blanket of fear? to bring the many folds into this crowd-sourced cause to uncover perhaps not one truth because like the world there are many which bind us all. in mono-culturism, in one world order: new or old only the hierarchy benefits, before they too ultimately fall. what is mightier than the sword? both the pen AND the sword. words & action rule.

the 2000 cochabamba water wars were an inspiration to people all over the world, not just bolivians, in that seemingly impenetrable corporate greed could be fought & vanquished when the people come together. the world bank still maintains that free access to "a public service like water leads to an abuse of the resource".

a recurrent theme in alien & disaster films is a cause which brings about the unification of people in order to overthrow an oppressor be it a catastrophe natural or otherwise: government, an invader, an idea if its very nature threatens our survival.

can it happen outside of the movies? or a random assortment of web pages on the internet from a mishmash of unlikely satellite characters... is conspiracy theory real?

the greatest attack strategy for the debunkers of conspiracy theory is what it is by definition. and so theoretically the most outlandish & unbelievable is possibly existing right before our very noses, marching proudly in der führer's inherited socks. we don't see the pulsing billboard's fine-print. the message between the lines. what lines?

propaganda really works. ask leni riefenstahl. we love big brother. the system protects us, the lambs' shepherd. yes, i would like fries with that, thanks for asking.


can purpose-filled revolution have the longevity & ability to maintain controlled focus outside of a burgeoning mob mentality after the initial shock subsides. to then perhaps supplant old leaders with new wolves in sheep's clothing or otherwise become once more corrupted by an archaic system in a hopeless cycle of rinse repeat? do the people ever really win?

ten years on, the people of cochabamba are still hungry, thirsty and poor. the infrastructure, or the lack of it afterwards failed them & the disparity between the haves & have nots continues.

they were not equipped to follow through. they did successfully demonstrate the ability to organise themselves, effectively resist oppression & to overcome fear and in doing so offer a beacon of hope to those still trapped within the status quo. but was it only allowed to happen because the big long-term picture was apparent to the power brokers? is anything as it seems?


sounds pretty hard. would we rather stick our heads back into the liquefied sand & numbly follow the signs, fix the fence, work for the man, pay the mortgage, gleefully take that three week holiday once a year, eventually succumbing to profitable [for some] pharmaceutically & engineered cancers whilst ignoring the underlying meaning of it all.

if any of this was even true how could it possibly be combated? all that power controlling flow of communications, money, information in the world. a david & goliath scenario with much worse stacked odds. i only hope that right now the NSA are sorting out my accounts [you might want to keep that IOU -- it's for a ferrari].

what kind of heroes does this world need? isn't the greater good as deemed by aristotle still greater than the individual, the common good, the polis, or was he being pimped out too... could all our voices together bleed into one super-sized spandex suit? service to others not self: is this too a programmable trait or closer to what could be the beauty or the essence of humanity, if we can even know who or what we truly are. 

or should we just mindlessly keep dancing to the beat of "nearer god to thee" & let the ship slowly sink?


NB. all images here have been indiscriminately lifted from the interwebs. there could be copyright issues. use with tenderness.

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