According to Plan

You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan." - Heath Ledger as "The Joker" in The Dark Knight (2008)

There is an established order to the world. Since the beginnings of civilization, there always has been. Be it the Catholic Church, the British Empire or the American Government, there has always been some "higher" authority telling average men and women what they should and should not be. (Since the Western World considers itself superior, I'll deal only with it. Specifically America.)

With the inventions of the steam engine, airplane, automobile and television in the 19th and 20th Centuries, this began to change. Men began to think more for themselves and not their country. Philosophers like Sartre, Bergson, Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard and Heidegger (along with other types of thinkers, such as Oscar Wilde and Voltaire) began to question the very nature of our existence to a point not seen since the Golden Age of the Greek Empire.

While the rise of technology gave birth to existentialism and other forms of free-minded expression, it also signaled the rise of war on a global scale. For the first time in our bloody history, men would have the means to completely obliterate his fellow man from the face of the Earth with the push of the button.



"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."- J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead of the Manhattan Project (creators of the Atomic Bomb.)

The Second World War, along with the so-called "Cold War" that succeeded it, gave rise to a brand new and terrifying method of subjugation: the threat of global war. For posterity's sake, I will focus my lens on these dark times, when the threat of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) was all it took to keep an entire country under control. After the end of the Cold War, they realized that a more subtle method was in order. The television.



The advent of mass media in the 1950's combined with the Reagan Revolution of the 80's combined to a rise in anti-intellectualism in the United States, a trend that continued through the 90s and into the 2000s, which may have been the dumbest decade in recorded history. This is a country not just of ignorance, but of prideful ignorance.



This culture of ignorance is not accidental. Those in power, be they government or corporate, do not wish for an educated and intelligent populace. They would much rather prefer you quiet, stupid and interested in what they have to sell. You may be thinking me overly-critical, but ask yourself one question. When was the last time you can remember someone in power asking you to think, to analyze? They tell you what to think, what to believe. "Freedom is the right to say that two plus two equals four," Winston Smith said. But what happens when those in power tell you it doesn't? What happens when two plus two equals five? Do you have the ability to fight for it? Will you stick by something no one else will? Will you resist? To me, this is the true meaning of intelligence.



You might say that I am paranoid. You might say that I'm grasping at straws, or that I'm seeing connections where there are none. Maybe I am.

But maybe I'm not.

You are not paying attention.-
Cosmis