Jon Rappoport April 9 2013
Of the many definitions of collectivism, this simple one is my favorite: “The practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it.”
When I was starting out as a reporter 30 years ago, one of my first editors sat down with me and said, “ In America, collectivism is what the government does to people to make them deaf, dumb, and blind, so the corporations can steal everything from them.”
He went on to tell me, off the record, that his paper wasn’t interested in collectivism, only the corporations. That was his line in the sand.
An early assignment was interviewing a congressman. As I sat in a tony cafe with him, an idea kept buzzing in my head: he was giving things away that weren’t his to begin with.
I couldn’t make that idea sharper. It was a stray thought, and it kept nagging at me, long after the interview was done. It somehow reminded me of the classic shell game. Three shells, one pea. Guess which shell is hiding the pea. What if the pea isn’t there at all?
I realized I was trying to understand something about collectivism, the psychology of it. Another image struck me: the old telephone game, where one person whispers a phrase to another, and that person passes it on, until the last person announces what he’s heard; and of course now it bears no resemblance to the original message.
How about starting the game with no message at all? You just make a kind of hissing mumble. And the last person in the circle emerges with “life is good.”
That’s a metaphor for collectivism.
Collectivism is a system by which people give each other what they don’t have.
If this seems like a magic trick, it is. It’s magic founded in mind control.
Collectivism is rife with contradictions. That’s why it bedevils the incurious mind and comes to dominate it.
People who don’t have freedom, because they renounced it, somehow give it to each other. People who don’t have money give it to each other. People who don’t have power give it to each other.
Continue reading →