CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: “Mental Stories in Our Heads”

“So much of our society is made out of mental stories in our heads. From news media propaganda to Hollywood to internet censorship to government secrecy to think tanks to Bellingcat to Wikipedia entries, vast fortunes are continuously poured into controlling the dominant worldwide narratives by the power structures who benefit from them. The dominant narratives all tell us the same few things over and over again. Capitalism is working great. Your government is your friend. The governments who oppose your government are bad. If you are a Democrat, you have been hearing that the country is now a thousand percent better without the Orange Menace in charge. If you are a Republican, you’ve been hearing that it’s a thousand percent worse. In reality, in terms of the overall operation of the empire both domestically and internationally, hardly anything of significance has changed apart from the narrative overlay. This narrative management campaign is so far-reaching and ubiquitous that even highly intelligent people are swept up in its manipulations, simply because they are receiving the same narratives from so many different sources and receive insufficient contradictory input to create doubt in them. And this is just such a perfect illustration of how pervasively human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative.”