Until we understand how we are obliged to lead our lives in ways we don’t particularly enjoy (“The mass of men enter into social and productive relations independent of their will.”—Marx), until we understand more of those reasons why so many of us feel dead inside so much of the time, yes, until we recognize how much of that is not due solely to our lack of imagination or the grinding confines of a responsible life, but is also the product of vast institutional systems of greed, injustice, and manipulation that we are schooled to perceive as relatively benign manifestations, we have arrived nowhere. The only way I can tell something terrible is going on is that I feel a little duller than I ought to. Very often that’s at the end of a long chain, you might say, of social processes designed to keep us malleable, amenable, and short on such powerful emotions as outrage at injustice.
Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art
What percentage of the populace has to be anti-government before the government collapses? How many people have to be declared outlaws? How many people must routinely break laws they consider unfair? How many put into prison or saddled with an arrest record? Surely the rates to all those phenomena are rising and have been for quite some time until they now near a critical mass and the established powers are finding themselves besieged and thus fighting back as best they can, believing that to be their only defense. And they are not ineffective at it, just wrong. They are devastating in their death-throe lashings. Oppression is a natural, very human inclination of those like-minded individuals whose propensity is to form into a cohesive group to insulate themselves against any wayward type of thought process to make certain their own decided way of life predominates, and they set about to make sure their domination prevails, pushing back against all forces of change that do not benefit their cabalistic position. They may be the past, but the past hangs on for as long as it can. And meanwhile people unjustly suffer and die. I too feel a little duller. And the only way I now how to stir myself up to fight back is to write: Death to all tyrants. The only problem is, the tyrants don’t believe they are; and if you put them to death, then you become the tyrant. So we die inside instead, little by little, and the oppression continues. But there’s a light beyond the darkness:
If you don't want people to use the dark net, don't mess up the legit networks with back doors and warrantless wiretaps, 'express lanes,' censorship, using them for political pressure. … Or people will create worse versions and route around you.
The Huffington Post
They just don’t get it. Their greed and hubris blind them to reality. The truth is, if they’re going to coerce people into bending to their will, the people will find another way to do what they want to do. They’ll do an end run, they always do, and there are a whole lot more ends today than there used to be. Progress used to be slow so that the oppressors might survive a lifetime in their oppressive roles and die natural deaths. But with technology speeding up geometrically there’s no way the oppressors can maintain the oppression in postmodern society. They’re going down. Their days are numbered. They’re increasingly becoming irrelevant. They can’t keep it up. The anti-system will increasingly press in on them. Their defense of the realm will get harsher and harsher the harder it is to maintain. Increasing numbers of citizens will die as the oppressors try to keep the system together. But they’re already dead but just don’t know it yet, which is what the popularity of the zombie symbolism is all about: they’re the walking dead and we’re cutting off their heads all around the world.
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