Jon Rappoport April 9 2013

Of the many definitions of collectivism, this simple one is my favorite: “The practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it.”

When I was starting out as a reporter 30 years ago, one of my first editors sat down with me and said, “ In America, collectivism is what the government does to people to make them deaf, dumb, and blind, so the corporations can steal everything from them.”

He went on to tell me, off the record, that his paper wasn’t interested in collectivism, only the corporations. That was his line in the sand.

An early assignment was interviewing a congressman. As I sat in a tony cafe with him, an idea kept buzzing in my head: he was giving things away that weren’t his to begin with.

I couldn’t make that idea sharper. It was a stray thought, and it kept nagging at me, long after the interview was done. It somehow reminded me of the classic shell game. Three shells, one pea. Guess which shell is hiding the pea. What if the pea isn’t there at all?

I realized I was trying to understand something about collectivism, the psychology of it. Another image struck me: the old telephone game, where one person whispers a phrase to another, and that person passes it on, until the last person announces what he’s heard; and of course now it bears no resemblance to the original message.

How about starting the game with no message at all? You just make a kind of hissing mumble. And the last person in the circle emerges with “life is good.”

That’s a metaphor for collectivism.

Collectivism is a system by which people give each other what they don’t have.

If this seems like a magic trick, it is. It’s magic founded in mind control.

Collectivism is rife with contradictions. That’s why it bedevils the incurious mind and comes to dominate it.

People who don’t have freedom, because they renounced it, somehow give it to each other. People who don’t have money give it to each other. People who don’t have power give it to each other.

This is a perverse ritual, aimed at conjuring what has been forsaken and reinstating it in a mob.

The mob, in turn, maintains strength by destroying thought, language, and meaning: Freedom and money and power and equality become senseless grunts that translate into: “we have It.” “It” is never defined. It is felt, like an approaching wave of sudden gifts out of nowhere.

The mob is told that what they feel is, indeed, a harbinger of the Good, is a sign that their rights are being served. Justice has finally arrived.

Of course, such manipulations do not simply appear out of a void. As George Orwell wrote in 1944, “It cannot be said too often…that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.”

The tyrannical minority, posing as benefactors, use their elite status to work over the mob like a chunk of soft dough, shaping it to their ends.

In our time, these elitists are called Globalists.

The term “collectivism” has been dropped out of the public vocabulary. It has been made into a joke by pundits and academics, who treat it like a misbegotten child of bygone Cold War paranoids.

Now, just as Orwell predicted, we have the word “freedom” twisted to mean a property or quality of the group, as if there was never really any freedom of the individual; as if freedom was merely a construct invented to allow heinous criminals to run wild.

Interesting, because the true heinous criminals are the very ones who have reformed the language to conceal their own intentions.

Now they give us “the greater good,” “we’re all in this together,” “we have to work together to make freedom mean something.” These empty perversions ring hollow to anyone who is awake, but to the mob they signal the elevation of disability to paradise.

This is an extremely bizarre psychology. It is formulated on the basis of “give to everyone what you’ve forsaken for yourself,” “transfer every positive aspect of the individual—aspects which never actually existed—to the homogenous group.”

There is enough illogic there to submerge a rational mind.

But if you put every politician in Washington in a bag, from the lowest -ranking bureaucrat in some obscure federal agency all the way up to the president, shook the bag, and pulled out any dozen of the species, chances are quite good you would come up with men and women who are automatic living, breathing, and talking end-products of this through-the-looking-glass philosophy.

You could do the same bag trick with academics, and obtain the same result. These creatures are sniffing dogs with good radar. They sense which way the culture-winds are blowing, and they invent collectivist attitudes and words to make hay for themselves in their mad circuses.

Inside colleges and universities, there are, of course, hard-core collectivist minders and operators, who are straight-out sociopaths. They keep the dogs in line. They set the tone. They know how to work the levers and intimidate the fence-sitters.

In Hollywood and other venues of celebrity, the stars are mere dupes who can exercise their penchant for making humanitarian gestures and thereby contribute to the overall cause, because…

Collectivism is couched entirely in humanitarian terms. It’s all about help, it’s all about assistance for the needy, it’s all about leveling the playing field. And, at the upper levels of the op, far beyond the celebrities, it’s all for show. Nothing is genuine. Nothing is honest.

Collectivism all about replacing I with We. Whatever contributes to that infernal substitution will receive support.

Starting in the early 1960s, the spiritual component of collectivism was drawn into the West from ancient Asian practices, distorted selectively, and redesigned to produce a picture of enlightenment, in which the individual soul would ascend to universal homogenous consciousness. The One vaporized into the All.

Popular books and teachers preached a doctrine in which greater attainment was defined as merging with a Whole.

“As long as you are you, you are never what you really are.”

This was the essence. The individual is an illusion. The illusion can only be shattered by enlisting in the cosmic collective.

Then came the radical environmentalists. Their leaders and investors were vastly rich men, who cared about the environment only as their private preserve, who pursued depopulation as their holy grail, who bankrolled a philosophy of interconnectedness. Nature was one interlocked system, of which humans were a minor component, with no more status than that of a germ.

Humans, therefore, needed to sustain Nature by submitting to it, by becoming a worshiping biological corpuscle in the Great Body.

Stop pollution? Clean the rivers? Find new renewable sources of energy? Not enough. Not nearly enough.

Crowd more and more people into vertical cities? Leave millions and millions of acres of land under the stewardship of the “wiser, better” government? Smash the small farmer and replace him with titanic tracts of chemical/genetic pseudo-food? Yes, but more was required. The individual and his own mind must disappear into a mystical ecological network.

And now, the technocrats. These rootless nomads of the machine promise to cull, out of electronic soup, a parallel brain, a thing far more powerful than what resides in the human skull; and in order to gain intelligence and avoid hopelessly falling behind, we have to attach ourselves to master computers and access the wisdom of right decisions.

An ultimate super-brain will supply such decisions for us, to achieve our apotheosis. No longer individuals, we will jump the track and make our home, all of us, inside the new mathematical Oversoul.

The hive, the nest, the colony, the collective.

Knowing the agenda, the stakes, the battle, the war, we can forfeit to the default, we can finesse and tap dance and take the road to a false dead-end unity, or we can disengage from the program.

Stepping back from the enormous babble of collectivism, we hear a silence that reveals no one is there to tell us what to do. Each one of us must use and invent enough freedom for that choice.

And then make it. And then act on it.

Collectivism means everyone will share equally. Since this is both a theoretical and practical impossibility, the leaders of the pack, and their leaders, decide on the terms of the contract. No matter how much is given to whom, or how little, every particle of every gift is defined as a thing of beauty.

It is all coming from some dispensing god, who has thrown off selfish pride and instead is making offerings from the heart.

These invisible collectivist Royals are humbly bringing manna.

That’s the projected image.

“Who was I to think I could create abundance? No, it comes from above. I bend to the wheel and make my small contribution to the Whole. That is all. This should be the source of my contentment.”

If this sounds like religious speech, it is, adjusted to the philosophy of our time. Collectivism always was a religion. It was launched in ancient eras, by men who perceived that minds could be led and shaped by certain ideas. How better to build the future than by codifying those ideas in the center of a great crime and using them to recast the criminal enterprise as the highest Good?

What could possibly achieve more success than that?

On the receiving end, the bedazzled and bewildered soul, the individual, is driven to discard his every idea and thought and impulse and desire, thus achieving supreme emptiness, a condition longed-for by seekers of peace.

Triumph.

Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery.

Lord Acton, who coined the universally quoted maxim about power and corruption, also wrote: “By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.”

Acton assumed that the State might be willing, in the long run, to protect the individual against the influence of authority—when the State is that authority.

Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman and self-educated author of The True Believer, cut closer to the bone: “Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’”

Collectivism is the last refuge of the tyrant, the mob, and also the individual who refuses to discover his own strength. The outline of the true conspiracy includes all three participants. To try to excuse any one of these is an error.

It is also the result of intentional blindness.

People like to make a distinction between the criminal lunatics who launch war after war of government-corporate imperial conquest, those “run amok capitalists,” and the government leaders who, instead, want to “share and care and give for the sake of equality and justice.” The truth is, they are both on the same side. They and their banker-betters are engaged in an age-old operation of subduing the populace and bringing in a collectivist equality that labels every human with the same zero.

If we are blind to that as well, we will take the bait and enroll on the side of the angels, and there will be no angels.

My old editor was right in a way. The government uses collectivism to make people deaf, dumb, and blind to what is going on. And believing in what the government is dispensing to them, the people fail to notice that corporations, in concert with government, are stealing and poisoning their way to a level of control that would have made the ancient pharaohs stand back in awe.

“The individual is nothing. The group is everything.”

But it turns out that, under collectivism, the group is nothing, too. That’s the final turn of the card in the magic trick.

All the “humanitarian giving”, all the so-called justice, all the sharing and caring, all the sympathy; they’re props in a stage play invented to create a giant ant colony.

Back in the 1980s, I interviewed a Catholic priest for an article that was never published. I asked him about a recent Church scandal in Italy that involved the Vatican bank, a giant construction company, Immobiliare, and the P-2 Masonic lodge.

“Mistakes were made,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “but all that money originally came from church collection plates, didn’t it? Don’t you owe your ‘shareholders’ a coherent accounting?”

“Our work,” he said, “is to provide our people with a way to God.”

“What about the doctrine that everyone is equal before God?”

He smiled. “You’re not the first person to make this argument, you know. I suppose you’re going to say we, the priests, give ourselves special dispensation to be the guides, the conduits.”

“Yes. And you would say you’re providing the only connection possible. That’s quite an elite point of view.”

He said, “There are numerous references in religious speech to a flock and a shepherd. Think of the flock as a collective. They need a voice.”

“What about a direct phone call to the Higher Power?”

“Things don’t operate that way.”

Jon Rappoport