WHAT WILL IT TAKE?

by Eric Goodman

https://www.thespectacle.net/gallery/what-will-it-take

Three quotes from the beginning of my show Thus Spoke the Spectacle provide a pretty good glimpse into the project’s central concerns:

“If we succumb to a dreamworld, then we’ll wake up to a nightmare.”

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

Unreality, destruction, propaganda, monsters, bludgeons, waking up to a nightmare.... Hello 2020!

The Covid lockdown may be the most complete amalgam to date of the forces and phenomena Thus Spoke the Spectacle depicts. And now that the nightmare of our propaganda-soaked techno-fascist stage of late capitalism is finally visible to most (although surely more deadly to the poor), I have to ask the lockdown enthusiasts: What will it take?

What will it take for you to see that the lockdown is not about safety, but about money and power? What will it take for you to see this psy-op as the massive object lesson in obedience, conformity, and control that it is? What will it take for you to see that your rulers (yes, you have rulers) have dictated where you may go, who you may see, who you may hug, all the leisure activities you may no longer do, whether, how, and with whom you may have sex, how you and your kids will be educated, and that you must cover your face at all times, literally placing restrictions on your ability to breathe and exist in the world as a unique human being, increasingly punishable by law? 

What will it take for you to finally ask cui bono, who benefits? While we’ve been ordered to cower indoors, the oligarchs have handed themselves trillions of dollars on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars of increased profits the lockdown has conveniently siphoned to their companies. Working out pretty well for them, huh? How about us?

Tens of thousands of small businesses closed, millions thrown into unemployment and poverty, millions soon to be evicted, countless serious medical conditions neglected, prevalent hunger, skyrocketing suicides, rampant drug, alcohol, and domestic abuse, crumbling mental health, students turned into prisoners, kids denied a normal childhood and crucial socialization, the elderly quarantined, abandoned and left to die alone—all in the name of fighting a virus that thousands of doctors worldwide have concluded is no more deadly than a common flu.

So die-hard lockdown believers, what will it take to convince you that your rulers do not have your interests at heart? When they begin taking children away from people? When they take a child from someone you know? When they come for your child? When they come for you? What will it take?

After 20 years of presenting Thus Spoke the Spectacle as a window into and warning against mass media indoctrination, I’ve come to accept that most people are willfully, blissfully, belligerently asleep, and that trying to awaken them to the realities of the American-driven, Western imperial project is futile. I’ve learned to leave them to their insipid, vulgar, consumerist paradise and its accompanying spectacle-ized shit-show of psychic abuse that holds the system in place. I’ve learned to leave them alone and focus my attention and energy in the direction of allies, like minded-spirits, fellow mutants of the techno-prison. I’m a confrontational person by nature, but gave up years ago on useless sheeple, bolstered in part by Margaret Mead’s insight that the only thing that’s ever changed the world is a “small group of thoughtful committed people.” So my motto was to let sleeping dogs lie, let sleeping people be.

But now we’ve come to a place where the sleeping majority have been enlisted and weaponized by the oligarchs in a battle against their own interests, and mine. So it’s back on.

If you refuse to see the confluence of money, power, politics, media, technology, and the interests of massive global corporations playing out in the Covid drama, and instead simply see the lockdown as an honest attempt to reign in a deadly disease, then you and I have a serious problem.

If you believe that our leaders are benign heroes in a selfless quest to keep you happy and safe, and that anyone who sees through this ridiculous sham is an enemy and “conspiracy theorist,” then you and I have a serious problem.

If the very notion of cui bono infuriates you, trampling as it does the soothing mythology of the Benevolent Billionaire, then you and I have a serious problem.

If, in the delirious throes of your Stockholm Syndrome, you’ve committed to doing the oligarchs’ bidding, spreading their narrative, shaming their detractors, furthering their obscene interests at the extreme expense of the other seven billion humans on this planet (not to mention the rest of Earth’s creatures), then you and I have a serious problem.

I will not sacrifice my freedom—my life—on the altar of your ignorance and cowardice.

If you must insist on being terrified of a virus with a 99.9% survival rate and median mortality age of 82, and continue to condone the wholesale destruction of society and millions of lives in the name of “safety” from that virus, then by all means feel free to sit alone in your house, posting as many virtue-signaling selfies of you in your designer mask as you like, furiously scouring your screens for your daily dose of fear porn and ever-changing list of arbitrary plutocratic commands and illogical rationalizations, all the while fervently praying for a vaccine so that the very thing that’s been terrifying you all these months can be shot directly into your veins.

Have at it. But for fuck’s sake let the rest of us get back to life to try to salvage a world worth having, if it isn’t already too late.