The Slaker's Guide to the Great Remission: Why Slack? (part 1)

Maybe you're perfectly happy with the way the world is. Perhaps you don't want things to change. You're okay with your nine to five existence, the cube farm, the long commute, the pressures from upper and lower management. Maybe you are getting enough money to buy as much junk as you desire and that junk is making you very happy. Maybe you don't need a long vacation away from all those responsibilities and don't mind having your entire life dictated by your occupation. Perhaps you are unaffected by perpetual warfare that kills women and children in their homeland so that you can have that built-in garbage compactor you so desperately need. That's wonderful. I'm happy for you. But if you feel that something may be amiss, please read on.

Ours is an upside down culture at odds with the reality of Nature that supports us, a culture of slaves with their noses to the grindstone; a carrot and stick society that offers rewards to those who cooperate and punishes those who don’t.

We live in a civilized prison dead-bolted from within by centuries of doublespeak propaganda, insidious lies that insist that slavery and its shackles is the essence of freedom.

Listen closely to the news and you’ll hear that we should feel unhappy when food costs are coming down, when gasoline prices decrease, when housing prices trend toward affordability, when people save instead of spend, when sweatshop jobs are drying up, when people are planting gardens, shopping closer to home and wasting less and driving less, and when dinosaur corporations go extinct, disgorging the small busyness niches they usurped over the last few decades.

We are supposed to applaud government decisions to appropriate billions of our dollars for aristocratic scoundrels who gambled away generations of treasure while millions of victims of their excesses face the loss of their homes, retirement savings and livelihood.

We are supposed to applaud our legislators for starting the cycle anew, to go deeper into debt, destroy the value of our money, mortgage our children’s future and retighten our restraints to feed the delusional psychoses of the psychopaths who walk the halls of power.

So occult is this programming and ingenious is the looking glass doublespeak, one who dares to throw off his cultural shackles, who chooses to live off the kindness of others and the bounty of the Natural world while taking advantage of innate rights and opportunities to avoid overt perpetual employment endures assault by fully programmed slaves parroting epithets or wielding billy clubs—sometimes even guns.

If ‘freedom isn’t free,’ it isn’t freedom

C.Z.

By program definition, a Slacker is a person who shirks responsibility and sponges off other people; a bum, vagabond, tramp, ne'er-do-well, good-for-nothing, vagrant, mendicant, loafer, deadbeat, idler, beggar, one who is feckless, fainéant, indolent, otiose, and slothful. But these definitions function only within the old, dying western culture—a dysfunctional civilization on the verge of collapse.

Vagabond is another synonymous term that has romantic connotations as well. Vagabond elicits visions of adventure, of travel, and tramp can mean simply to sally forth on foot, which invokes the image of freedom we so cherish.

If we like, Slacker could also mean savant, one who is learned, attuned, talented and aware. Visionary is another good synonym though idealistic equates with unrealistic in this whacked-out society.

Why not elevate the term Slacker to an even loftier position: how about sage or even prophet? Whoa, I can feel those knees jerking already.

Let’s face it, we’re as programmed as any computer, conditioned like Pavlov’s slobbering dog. We suffer from cultural indoctrination that begins the moment they drag us screaming from the womb. Can’t you hear you mom saying, “Eat your peas,” or “Good boys don’t pee on the drapes?” We’re conditioned from the get-go.

Soon it’s daily incarceration in the day prison known as school. Full of youthful energy we’re forced to sit at desks and learn that squiggles on the blackboard have other meanings and beyond that, these squiggles can be pushed together to form words or equations that must be manipulated in only one way to produce verifiable answers. Such abstractions are claimed to be reality and “If I catch you staring out the window again mister, you’re going straight down to the principal’s office” (again!).

If you’re born with a penis you’re supposed to dress and act a certain way and play with certain toys and like certain things and if you’re born without a penis, well, you have other accepted behaviors, at least until you’re an adult when all those rules change.

Nowadays, in some places, grownups dress or act any way they choose and people with penises even have sex with other people with penises, likewise so do the penisless. But in other places activity like that might get you beaten up or thrown in jail or even stoned to death. It’s so confusing.

And the abstractions and inconsistencies keep coming. Cultural overseers provide examples of the past to encourage planning for the future. Carefully crafted history is force-fed to kids to prepare them for a future that may not happen at all. They tell us that those who win the wars are the good guys and those who lose them were the bad guys, at least until the bad guys win and become the good guys. Then some of those who lost the old wars become good guys and vice versa. And the further back you search in history the good versus the bad distinction becomes less and less clear.

Was Alexander the Great a good guy? How about Attila the Hun? Christopher Columbus kidnapped his hosts to display them in Spain like animals. Andrew Jackson scalped Indians for bounty. In the US, Benedict Arnold was a traitor. In Canada Benedict Arnold is a hero. Tell me again why Hitler’s picture isn’t on the dollar bill. Oh yeah, looooser!

Cultural mores teach us that the future is vague and full of danger unless we learn our required behavior. Carefully cultivated fear forces us to swallow our programming pills to focus our consciousness on a vision of a tomorrow that grows ever more vague. If we falter in our endeavors authority figures demand we examine our mistakes to correct our deviations even though some of our “aberrant” behaviors may have resulted in unexpectedly enjoyable situations.

In certain cases, if our compliance falters, the “justice” department may turn us over to the department of “corrections,” who put us in a cage to think it over for a few years.

Ironically, even with our ability to reflect and correct, successive generations of the culturally brain-scrubbed continue to make the same errors in judgment as their predecessors adding fervor to misdirected efforts that, as would be expected, produce similar negative outcomes.

Meanwhile, we spend little time learning about the here and now and the joyful experiential reality of life. No wonder the vast majority of citizens are confused and depressed!

Let’s take a small peek at manipulated cultural tectonics in action.

To be continued...

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