July 8, 2009 by Notsilvia Night
Now in our reality at the beginning of the the 21.century the blogosphere has become the only really “free press”.
This blogger believes that we can no longer take the things for granted, we have been taught in school. Neither can we trust the media to diligently inform us objectively about the most important events in our world.
It seems more and more so, that those, who control the content of what is presented to the public in the media, do not believe in democracy or the ability of the general population to use truthful information to make reasonable choices.
The elites who have the greatest influence on the mainline media outlets use them to create false images of the world we live in, in order to manipulate the population to move into the direction the elites prefer.
The power to manipulate information and populations at will has corrupted the minds of our western elites and alienated them from the common principles of ethics. The result is a political culture which shows a disdain for human life and it´s dignity. The direction those elites prefer us to go leads on a path to endless war and destruction.
These elites, however, are not isolated from the rest of us. They have created an ever more intrusive authoritarian structure of power and control. At the moment, we all, the elites and the rest of us are imprisoned by this system. Everyone lives inside this system and very many work for it.
A growing number of people on all levels from top to bottom have come to hate this system more and more. But even though, the system has now become so overpowering that even many of those, who are seated in power-positions within the system, feel helpless to change anything.
Group-pressure within the structure and more often just self-censorship will lead them to conform their actions and words to the perceived demands of the system. This happens on every level of the power-pyramid.
And while some ethnic, national or religious groups are indeed very much over-represented in the power-structure and others are very much under-represented, you cannot reduce the issue to a single ethnicity, religion or nation. Of course, the elites have different sections who sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete for power. But if one section would be removed, another one would take it´s place, as has happened in the past.
The problem doesn´t lie in the individual or the section of the system, it lies in it´s philosophical underpinnings, the belief that human beings are not of equal value, and it´s ever more centralized authoritarian structure. These are the factors which create today´s culture.
This harmful culture cannot be changed by single individuals, no matter how virtuous they might be. It only can be changed by the cumulative effort of millions of voices coming from different cultures all over the world and from different stations in society. In the past all resistance to the growing power of an unethical elite has been neutralized by infiltration and defamation.
Experience has shown, that resistance is most effective, when it is decentralized. Different people work on different aspects. They work in small groups and sometimes those groups cooperate with one another. If there is no central leadership who sets the agenda and a dogma everyone has to agree upon, there also is no power-struggle of who gets to do that. Infiltration and instigation of inner-group fights, the method of divide and conquer, will be a lot harder this way.
Most decent men and women all over the world have far more in common with all other decent people than what sets them apart. The things we disagree on, are not unimport. Indeed they are often very important for us, but we must remember, that they are actually the smaller part of our views. What we agree upon is enough to make us cooperate and resist an elitist agenda where human life and dignity is in constant danger.
When we share our ideas with one another, accepting that there will always be things we seriously disagree upon, we still will find common ground enough to cooperate on the most important issues. We don´t have to convince others, push our views down their throats by force, neither do we have to change our own views against our convictions to please others. We must realize, that even though we disagree, we need one another to create this cumulative effect, which eventually will change the world to a better, more peaceful place.
The internet is the best example of a decentralized and non-authoritarian system where cooperation is not enforced but comes naturally and easy, just look at all those wikis, open source programs and file-sharing sites.
The internet is a non-commercial market-place of information and ideas. It crosses all national borders, all religious and philosophical boundaries. It can create a better understanding of the world in many of us, and eventually and hopefully more tolerance and respect for other people´s ideas and views.
By becoming members of the global blogger community we are entering the closest thing to a global democracy we have at the moment. It´s a true democracy, one which crosses borders, but does not abolish national sovereignty, neither does it take power away from the individual and his or her local community.
Blogging alone cannot change the real world, but the online-community of anti-war-bloggers is one of the models for non-violent political activism in small groups, who occasionally meet in large demonstrations. Over time, this activism subsequently will create this cumulative effect we need for a change of thinking within the whole social system from top to bottom. And when we think ethically, we will act ethically, and then war will be over.
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