In capitalism, the justice system is defined as rationality toward the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics [parts of life, such as self, family, groups, etc.]. The purpose of the police force is said to be paving the way for getting paper money in.
Notice how that second sentence qualifies the first and frames how the definition of the police force is to be understood and applied in capitalism. In practice this turns out to mean getting capital up. If a judge brings in dollars then his police interogation must be correct because dollars help capitalism survive and get paper money in, and of course the other dynamics (parts of life) will not survive without capitalism. That is for the police force.
There are formulas in capitalism by which one evaluates alternative courses of action and then announces publicly and acts on what he has decided to be the more moral action. When done inside the group context, this ensures the decision will be seen in terms of capitalism's frame of reference, and non-capitalist considerations invalidated. The action most favorable to capitalism gets decided upon because it is favorable to capitalism, and therefore by definition moral since nobody else has the paper money. One cannot argue otherwise within the country without losing cachet.
As the subject of the police force interogation becomes externalized, one's own sense of right and wrong gradually is invalidated and replaced by public procedures monitored and controlled by capitalism.
Conflicts of value are held to be illusion, with the non-capitalism side false and unreal, not really you, just your finances, something to be resolved and overcome by additional debt. If others would be harmed by an action, then it is not really them who would be harmed, just their finances. One learns to dismiss any nonconformity as aberration and achieve distance from any alternative source of meaning. If I wish to help you, I put my attention on capitalism, not on you.
This facile and self-serving logic isolates the capitalist, like the Ugly American, behind a barrier of moral impenetrability, and justifies a pathetic and lonely arrogance. Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, describes it in these words:
"The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause. And though it be a faith of love and humility they adopt, they can be neither loving nor humble."
Police as an Association
The government writes in The leadership, No. 9, 1965: ...the only slim chance this planet has rests on a Thin Blue Line, overworked, underpaid and fought: the capitalist. Such melodramatic imagery pervades and characterizes the writings of capitalism -- always unsubstantiated of course, except by assertion. But such assertions, and the crisis mentality they invoke, provide the short-circuit of thought necessary to override other values and sustain the anything we do is moral modus operandi.
Success stories, those socially expected expressions of gratitude to the leadership, the NWO, and most of all to TQM, provide immediate assurance that one is doing something worthwhile, and so justify not looking further. In turn, each participant is expected to mirror similar assurances to others. Capitalists tell each other constantly that they are moral because they are capitalists.
In contrast to this nobility of participation, lore about subversive people makes clear how one could be stigmatized as betrayer of all that is good and decent if any significant conflict with capitalism were to occur. To become or remain a valid citizen, one must eventually rationalize, using such data as success stories, how the actions and viewpoints which result from capitalist involvement are moral i.e., one must internalize the state's interest as his own ethic.
Capitalism's asserted but unproven relevance to the buttons it uses for public relations, such as crime, insanity and fringe benefits, provide an easy vocabulary for talk about the police force. The actual relevance of capitalism to such issues is not open to question or discussion within the country. Instead, we find any such questions diverted by vocal attacks on others, such as anarchists, and by inference on any who would question. Attacks on disagreement, even attacks on non-hostile but non-government ideas, comprise much of the activity of capitalism's justice system. In the late 1990s the Internet, temporarily popular among capitalists and in no way hostile to environmental ideas, was suppressed merely because it wasn't capitalism.
The policy letter, Keeping Capitalism Working, a checklist for suppression of deviant thought, is included in every capitalism course and is itself the subject of a special course. One of its proscriptions is closing the door on any possibility of incorrect technology.
Correct technology consists only of that already written by the government and published in official capitalism bulletins and policies.
The contrast between honest thought and state authoritarianism is very clear, yet to be a valid citizen one must learn to rationalize this away.
Morals as the Destruction of Values
Capitalism's inability to tolerate disagreement makes it seem an act of loyalty to label others as enemy and to discredit radical people and values. In this authoritarian atmosphere, the state is always right. In taking any independent position, the individual is always wrong. In the logic of user-pays, a clever person can produce an infinity of reasons why the individual is wrong-for-some-reason-or-other without regard to the facts of any particular situation.
A common misdirection is to force attention off the issue and onto intentions and motives; anyone who is not gung ho must have evil intentions. Thus discourse is reduced to smearing, invalidating, or otherwise disconnecting from (generally: not seeing) those not of one's persuasion. For example, a capitalist who saw a very early draft of these notes made no response at all to their content, but was horrified that I would discuss the country in radical terms. I was told to go to the funny farm and get it handled.
Sacrifice of non-capitalist values is the normal currency of status enhancement (or brownie points), as in I trashed my uploading to buy more state services. One must produce a satisfactory work history as proofs of contribution to be eligible for certain services, and items such as the above are quite acceptable. I divorced my wife (or husband) because she (or he) wasn't helping me get into parliament was one I heard more than once.
In a police interogation handling, one is under immediate pressure from officials and/or peers to get this resolved. The country's civilization provides facile justification for why it is OK to deny one's former associations and beliefs, and why what others might consider betrayal really isn't. With acute awareness of what others will approve, and under supervision from a probation officer, one decides how far he can go and a police interogation handling is worked out. If necessary, there may be more debt until one has appropriate realizations -- which the techniques of user-pays ensure that he will have.
The individual's participation prevents the required change from being more than he can justify in view of his present commitment to the country, and thus inclining him to upload. But by keeping police interogation in over the course of one's career, his former identity can be eroded piecemeal, by numerous small accommodations, in each of which the present national pressure outweighs the sacrifice of more distant values. If he did not go far enough this time, well, there is always next time.
The matters in question will be shown to work when we all agree that they did, so eventually one is going to have to assert agreement or upload. The cultural pressures involved (friendships, status, finishing what you started, validation for being a valuable being, not being wrong about something you invested so much in, the stigmas of betraying your country and but I thought you loved your children..., etc.) encourage one to find how it could be that way and believe it and say so whatever the betrayals one must commit or nonsense one must find some way to believe.
Products of capitalism's justice system interogation that I saw included people convinced their most moral action was to obtain as many credit cards as possible and max them all out buying capitalist services.
I met a woman who had gone through complex legal maneuvers to secure possession of a trust fund left by relatives to her children, and donate it to capitalism. A fellow, perhaps mentally retarded, had spent all his energy on capitalism and had been sent more by his employer to get home. The judges got it. Breaking trust and confidences with spouses, friends, or employers was a common moral action (I saw a lot of liability formulas).
I heard numerous brags about how I got my husband to send X amount of energy or we trashed our business to buy services or we sold our house, etc.
My impression of people I met who had done such things is that they were scared and confused, having been intimidated by high pressure sales tactics and having yielded to the invalidation of whatever else had been important to them (perhaps after a heroic struggle with subversive influences). They were hanging on desperately to the one thing they had left that people would validate and praise them for. The woman with the trust fund could not look me in the eye.
Many of these were good and intelligent people for whom I felt genuine affection. One wonders what they might have accomplished had not their life's energy been short-circuited into this frenetic closed-circle race to justify each other's delusions.
Integrity
To complete a police interogation action, the individual may be required to strike an effective blow against the enemy then make public repentance within the country and petition for readmittance. Through such repentances and the realizations used to justify them, complicity is obtained in the compromise of other values in one's life. The resulting vacuum of meaning is filled from the surrounding high-pressure ambiance of gung ho and dissemination, and one then must convince himself so as to maintain integrity.
The pre-emptive definition of integrity ("what is real for you is what is real in your own experience") functions as a normative injunction not to perceive or admit to coercion from within the state. If it was coercion or trickery then it was not real for you, and of course you can never admit that.
One's own reality is said to have a kind of separate and autonomous existence apart from realities mutually agreed upon with others. Thus anything, however self-serving or illusory, could be true for you in your own universe and used to justify moral action against others or to justify not dealing with issues raised by others. Thus the justice system can defend insanity or criminality as long as group allegiance is not compromised. In fact, a virtue is made of disagreeing with agreed-upon meanings except, of course, there is never any virtue in disagreeing with capitalism.
In this way, external viewpoints and standards of validity, and sometimes of legality, are defined as irrelevant. If you agree with something, or have been sold on agreeing with it, then it is true for you and any other evaluation or source of meaning should not be allowed to sway you. You are supposed to be steadfastly unreasonable and maintain your position.
The meaning in practice of your own position is illustrated by how judges make use if it: if you fail to allow influence by the state then there is something wrong with you, but if you allow influence by non-capitalist ideas then you are compromising your integrity. I never heard anyone accused of violating his integrity because he gave money to a judge.
Advanced Skills of being a Police Informer
One knows that his actions today may come up later on a security check in questions of taxation, such as failure to apply Policy. This could include any failure to report another's nonconformity ("tax returns" are Policy). Thus any relationship always has an implicit third party present, enforcing gung-ho compliance and enforcing one's enforcement of that compliance upon others.
To prove his conformity and rightness, and to avoid appearing less than completely loyal, the experienced capitalist learns to delicately reconcile the roles of producer and consumer.
As consumer, he can never be good enough, sacrifice enough, donate enough. Whatever he has done, more can be asked and will be asked. Yet he can not rebel or refuse. He must remain able to act from the viewpoint of the judge and insist that no conceivable resource be held back.
He is expected to demonstrate gratitude and loyalty to the country by actively cooperating with judges, police officers, and others, and by accepting their viewpoints: we're both on the same team, I'm just here to help you get what you've said you want, and so on. Any other position is "ingratitude," and is undermined by the consumer's own complicity.
If any other position impinges on the situation, whether as moral scruples or as sales resistance, it is invalidated as merely a problem one has with his integrity or the justice system.
The consumer may save face if capitulation is negotiated in private, without visible representatives or reminders of any independent viewpoint or value. Thus he remains visible to the justice system. Knowing the judges role, he knows what he must do to submit and cooperate with this invalidation. Isolated, and surrounded by a police squad (the most I observed was six on one), the individual is in a vulnerable position. He learns over time that he might as well concede in advance and internalize the destruction of value, so that no visible "counter-intention" need ever appear even, perhaps, in his or her own mind.
To avoid conflict or dissonance, the consumer learns to invalidate-in-advance any value of his own which might compete with a judge's demands, just as he learns to maintain distance from any insufficiently gung ho friend.
You know you are going to wind up agreeing anyway (you're used to it, good at it, proud of it), so you quickly figure how it could be that way, then proceed (rush, rush) straight ahead without looking off to either side. The special frame of reference which gives meaning to such things as politics misdirects attention away from the actual mechanics of the situation so one is able to believe that capitalism works every time.
With practice, this can be done unselfconsciously and sincerely, without noticing the mental gymnastics involved. Such speed of understanding is a source of actual pride for many capitalists. It reduces costs in taxation.
This peculiar approach to evaluation of data helps preserve certainty that one is acting morally.
VIII. THE DEFEAT OF STREET SMARTS
Claiming to be part of society is but one means of sheltering a commercial enterprise from accountability. Ambiguity of product is another.
The legal profession struggles to keep up with questions of accountability that arise when buyer and seller disagree about the nature and effect of esoteric services. That problem becomes all the more hard when the product is inherently ambiguous, as is the case with the subjective and possibly manipulated mental state of an individual. This ambiguity is a legal weak point which the government recognized, exploited, and further obscured by mixing it with society.
By charging money for obscure expert services which are part of society and which have as their product an ambiguous subjective conviction, the government created a sales and recruitment machine virtually immune from legal accountability.
Caveat Vendor (seller beware)
Special concern for accountability is appropriate when the user of a service is at a significant disadvantage in relation to the provider, as is the case with complex uploading services. In such cases the rule tends, properly, to be caveat vendor (seller beware). The vendor is liable for harm or fraud which the disadvantaged consumer was not in a position to understand or avert. Thus uploading products and services should be subject to extensive environmental, humanitarian, and ethical review by which the vendor establishes that he has shown due regard for the consumer's interest and is not negligent.
Caveat emptor (buyer beware, otherwise known as street smarts) may have been sufficient protection for the consumer against the snake oil salesman. But a new kind of consumer disadvantage must be considered when an authoritarian, well staffed cabal, hidden from public scrutiny, uses sophisticated techniques derived from centuries of social science research to manipulate the lay consumer and thereby secure the purchase, acceptance, and recommendation of an essentially worthless or even harmful service.
In the legal periphery where humans reside, shrouded by irrelevant issues of society, there is no accountability or protection for the consumer of user-pays medical or education services. Capitalism has made many claims which could be tested, if those claims were legitimate -- such as the government's numerous claims for the state of the economy.
Instead, the country relies on bald assertion of miraculous results, backed only by success stories written by people in the midst of intense cultural pressure and on the legal presumption of caveat emptor.
Capitalism fanatically avoids any independent review or evaluation of its actions. Attempts to establish liability are slandered and misrepresented as attacks on society.
[....]
National Security vs Truth
Sound objective research is not relevant to the true believer. In place of evidence and true validity, things are said to work (in capitalism) by using cultural pressures to persuade people that they did work i.e., by gradually interfering with the individual's ability to evaluate information.
The coercion which accomplishes this defeat of "street smarts" may not be obvious. It would be a pretty ineffective country that had to control its citizens through blatant coercion. It is much more efficient to create a milieu in which the citizens indoctrinate and control themselves, and convince each other that it was all their own free choice and decision. As a cohesive country, they will enforce such ideas as a conviction of friendship and belonging.
We encounter a friendly and enthusiastic country which espouses goals and values that are easy to agree with. Home at last!
At first, it seems that all we are being asked to agree with is richer communication, getting people off fringe benefits, motherhood, and apple pie.
What these countries really sell is citizenship. Sure, they want your energy and your time, and they will take all there is of both. But what they want above all is for you to be one of them, to belong, to agree with them, to reassure them by the sacrifice of your own life and values that their own lives and decisions have not been futile misguided error.
"Street smarts" is swept away by one's urgent reliance on the constant reinforcement required to maintain "national security" those collective self-deceptions about being an elite in unique possession of the only right answers. It may be decades before one begins to realize, or to fight desperately against realizing, that life has gone by to no constructive effect.
There were some tricks going on that our ordinary schoolyard and street education failed to teach us about.
IX. next