Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.

As Michael Parenti once put it:

“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”

Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.

  • davel@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Getting onto individual billionaire’s security teams doesn’t do anything. These people just get replaced. UnitedHealth Group already has a new CEO, and the same would happen at Palantir if you took out their chairman, Peter Thiel. You can’t solve a structural problem this way.

    Lenin on adventurism vs. organized mass movement:

    We, however, are of the opinion that it is only such mass movements, in which mounting political consciousness and revolutionary activity are openly manifested to all by the working class, that deserve to be called genuinely revolutionary acts and are capable of really encouraging everyone who is fighting for the Russian revolution. [
] We believe that even a hundred regicides can never produce so stimulating and educational an effect as this participation of tens of thousands of working people in meetings where their vital interests and the links between politics and these interests are discussed, and as this participation in a struggle, which really rouses ever new and “untapped” sections of the proletariat to greater political consciousness, to a broader revolutionary struggle. [
] We believe that the government is truly disorganised when, and only when, the broad masses, genuinely organised by the struggle itself, plunge the government into a state of confusion; when the legitimacy of the demands of the progressive elements of the working class becomes apparent to the crowd in the street and begins to be clear even to part of the troops called out for the purpose of “pacification”; when military action against tens of thousands of the people is preceded by wavering among the authorities, who have no way of really knowing what this military action will lead to; when the crowd see and feel that those who have fallen on the field of civil war are their comrades, a part of themselves, and are filled with new wrath and a desire to grapple more decisively with the enemy. Here it is no longer some scoundrel, but the existing system as a whole that comes out as the enemy of the people, against whom are arrayed the local and the St. Petersburg authorities, the police, the Cossacks, and the troops, to say nothing of the gendarmes and the courts which, as ever, supplement and complete the picture in every popular uprising.

    • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      14·
      2 days ago

      Disagree. French Revolution. Depose our rulers.

      Also, y’all MLs are stuck in the past. What worked in 1900 isn’t going to work today. Stochastic terrorism picking off our leaders one by one is how things are going to go in 2024.

      You’re not going to “revolutionize” the public. Most don’t give a shit. They care about their property values and their 401Ks. Y’all live in fucking la la land where it’s still the late 1800s.

      • BrainInABox@lemmy.mlEnglish
        41·
        2 days ago

        Disagree. French Revolution.

        Also, y’all MLs are stuck in the past. What worked in 1900 isn’t going to work today.

        Lol

        • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          13·
          2 days ago

          French Revolution deposed rulers. Didn’t take many to get shit done. ML is a whole bunch of organizing people who’ve been brainwashed for a century to suddenly lose their brainwashing. Doesn’t work.

      • davel@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Disagree. French Revolution. Depose our rulers.

        Also, y’all MLs are stuck in the past. What worked in 1900 isn’t going to work today. Stochastic terrorism picking off our leaders one by one is how things are going to go in 2024.

        That’s how things are going right now, yes. And it’s going to lead to more cop cities, more surveillance, and fewer civil liberties.

        The French revolution was a very different situation. It was bourgeois revolution that overthrew monarchs, replacing feudalism as the dominant mode of production with capitalism. It wasn’t a revolution by, of, or for the masses. It was a small group of wealthy people overthrowing an extremely tiny group of wealthy people, who couldn’t simply be replaced. Power under capitalism is much more diffuse, distributed, and resilient than under feudalism.

        You’re not going to “revolutionize” the public. Most don’t give a shit.

        The only reason we’re talking is because we just saw people giving a shit about Brian Thompson getting popped.

        They care about their property values and their 401Ks.

        The half or so that own property and 401Ks do. Those numbers are shrinking and will continue to shrink under grinding neoliberalism, continuing wealth concentration, and collapsing empire.

        • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          11·
          1 day ago

          To be fair Luigi is a member of the bourgeoisie.

          Also re cop city, that was going to happen anyways. the state has been steadily consolidating power and removing the ability of meaningful dissent for decades now - arguably since 9/11 but even before they were clamping down on the left although with less of a security state apparatus.

          The half or so that own property and 401Ks do. Those numbers are shrinking and will continue to shrink under grinding neoliberalism, continuing wealth concentration, and collapsing empire.

          And they’ll blame anybody but the elites responsible. If only they’re good little boys and girls they too can be members of the elite. The idea that society will revolt en masse is comical in 2024. Unlike the late 1800s early 1900s there was not nearly as much propaganda and brainwashing as there is today. The elites already won when it comes to manufacturing consent for labor slavery.

          Which is why stochastic terrorism will be the way forward. Pluck off enough elites and they’ll be frightened into serious reforms.

          History rhymes it doesn’t repeat - this revolution will not be a repeat of any prior one.

          • davel@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            Pluck off enough elites and they’ll be frightened into serious reforms.

            Could be that we’d get some temporary, milquetoast reforms, which they’ll inevitably claw back.