Why NSA = STASI

The individual is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence. It can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct. (Wilfred Trotter, British psychologist, 1916)

We live in the post-Lippmann, post-Bernays, post-Dewey, post-Le Bon and post-Trotter age. Their work is long done, generations have passed. Their efforts have been inculcated into our attitudes and industrial practices. Most of it had to do with framing the employee mindset in the industrial society. People had to be melded into efficient groups of employees, unions eliminated, with everyone accepting dominance by others as wholesome and natural. The work of these men translated easily into politics and consumerism.

I was a poor student in high school, a lousy employee who didn’t take well to dominance by insecure territorial dictators, and so escaped (or grew out of) most of it. Self-employment* is true freedom.

This is why most of what I write here seems strange to people. They are the finished product of the work of the conformity brigades of the early twentieth century. It never occurs to them that pledging allegiance, standing for the national anthem, belonging to one of two parties, taking standardized tests, answering a bell and then marching down a hallway, working forty hours a week (if lucky) with two weeks a year for ourselves (if lucky), having a supervisor who has a supervisor…, reading only selected works (and being graded on the ability to read them back), supporting the troops and being afraid of boogeymen … is all unhealthy and unnatural.

I don’t know what it was like in 1810, the year after Jefferson left the presidency, but I imagine that his dream of a nation of shopkeepers was alive and well. “Shopkeepers,” to me, means people of modest but independent means, unsupervised, engaged in a trade and left alone in their thoughts to absorb the world around them. Newspapers of that era did not circulate widely, so that they were not all discussing the same issues at the same time. Local matters probably dominated debates. They did not celebrate the 4th of July. (That came about from the Creel Commission era.) The primary means of communication with outsiders was the postal service, so important that it was part of the Constitution. Dedication of section 16 of every township for local schooling even predates the Constitution.

Who really knows the mood of eras long passed? The likes of David McCullough and Joseph Ellis write for modern audiences and are utterly conformist. Gore Vidal did his best to make statues into real humans. But it is late, and what we are now is probably what we will be until some cataclysmic events shocks us in the right direction.

I get 200 hits a day here writing about quite a different world than most people can embrace. That’s enough, I suppose, though I am much more pleased when nonconformist personalities emerge in the comments and become regulars. The defining events of my life were the JFK assassination and 9/11, each done to ourselves by ourselves. The heavy fog in the room, the fear to know what is so obvious, to pretend it is otherwise and suppress subversive thoughts, is the totalitarian mindset. I have now seen Newton’s Third Law altered to conform to this fake reality.

This is totalitarianism. We are a nation of proper mindkeepers.

NSA, via Snowden, has fulfilled a STASI-like function. I don’t care what technology they dazzle us with, they cannot watch all of us all the time, and they don’t. They are only interested in ferreting out dissidents, as are all totalitarians. “Terrorists” (which hardly exist outside of Langley and Tel Aviv anyway) are a convenient invention. The STASI mode is this:

“We cannot watch you, but if you think you are being watched, we have achieved our purpose. You do our job for us. “

Our inability to stand up and give them a big “Fuck y’all!” is a sign of our ultimate submergence into the totalitarian mindset.

It’s a gray, cloudy, boring country now, shopkeepers most likely franchisees, teachers’ eyes looking at the class over an approved text, people afraid to think or speak up and uttering empty meaningless phrases like “support the troops.” Hatred is stoked and directed outward. Trotter, Le Bon, Bernays, et al, succeeded beyond their wildest expectations in aligning the herd to travel the same direction.

NSA is only looking for mavericks. There aren’t many. As of 2008, there were eight million on the Main Core watch list.
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*Amazingly, when I first became self-employed, I wore a suit each day and arrived at my office at 8:30 AM, the exact time I had to be there as an employee. I thought it natural. If I had nothing to do, I thought I was failing rather than succeeding.