Certain words grate on me – they are used to avoid using using other words. It is part of how we process things, I suppose, a way of denying reality.

For example, on NPR and I suppose elsewhere too, they do not use the word “advertising.” They say “message.” They don’t even say “commercial message,” just “message”, as in “Car Talk follows after this “message.”

When I purchased a Kindle, I wanted one free of advertising, and said that to the Amazon.com gal on the phone. She corrected me, and said “you mean messages.” I said “no, advertising” and she corrected me again. So this is a conscious policy, like “support the troops” or “drill baby drill,” a PR way of undermining our thought processes. Advertising is an intrusive and subversive pain in the ass. Call it what it is.

It is like saying “mental illness” rather than “people who are suffering.”

Yes, the is that other phrase that annoys me, “mental illness.” “People who are suffering” places the blame for the pain that people endure correctly on outside influences. These would be things like advertising, agitation propaganda, alcohol and drugs (including the legal ones like antidepressants), fake news, and financial stress. They all interrelate.

Advertising is a huge negative influence, for instance, creating pent-up demand and unhappiness with current stuff, causing us to spend too much. Advertising works because it makes us unhappy. It also leads to credit card debt, a source of stress.

Agitprop was very properly described by NATO during Operation Gladio as a “strategy of tension.” These days they run fake shooting events (it used to be fake serial killers) and false flag events like 911, Boston, Paris. San Bernardino and now Brussels to keep us in a state of anxiety. Fear is a governing tool. It is how they control our thoughts and more importantly, draw support for their never-ending wars of aggression.

“Mental illness” implies an internal source for our pain, a brain defect, normally fixed by pills. But oddly, we don’t find mental illness in primitive societies. To me, this lays the problem not on us, but on our culture and our leadership. Left to our own devices, free of advertising and agitprop and bankers and the tax man, drug free and sober, we tend to be happy and well adjusted. Virtually all of us.

Of course now and then we will find someone truly off-center, someone unable to cope due to bad wiring, but it is rare. Very rare. And we have the social outliers – people who suffer alienation due to things like very high IQs or homosexuality – they don’t fit. But in a healthy society, outliers are not condemned or mistreated. Rather, they are accepted and treated with respect.

So what to do about “mental illness?” That is clever misdirection. It leads to more pills, interventions, more nanny state stuff. Merely asking the question in a different manner produces a different result.

How do we control the outside influences that are making us angry and agitated? It is not our fault. It is our leadership. It is the TV, the movies, the spooks, the financial predators (now selling “reverse mortgages,” one of the most abusive financial tools ever invented.) How do we break free?

1. Turn off your TV.
2. Avoid movies that contain unnecessary violence and gratuitous sex or embedded propaganda. Kind of like … most of them.
3. Ignore “news.” (“I get all the news I need from the weather report.” (Paul Simon))
4. Vote, but only by means of write-in. We choose the candidates, rather than having them selected for us.
5. Take no drugs other than those that actually cure physical ailments, like antibiotics.
6. Meet your neighbors, enjoy their company.
7. Drink in moderation. Excessive drinking, labeled “alcoholism,” has many bad outcomes, one of which is the “ten twelve-step program,” a perverse form of groupthink.
8. Don’t gamble.
9. Meditate. (Praying is merely a form of meditation.)
10. Read. That too is a form of meditation.

I got lectured earlier this week about mental illness, told I am a fool who just promotes the whole “just tough it out” thing. It is as if I am blind to people in agony or the need for intervention during crisis to save lives. I am not blind, but dammit, if you blame people for their troubles when the causes of the suffering almost all external, nothing will ever be solved.

Of course we are witnessing more and more people in pain and suffering. We need to discuss why.