People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
– Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
What this country needs is a revolution.
Not one of blood and guns. But a revolution of the mind.
We are a people who do not believe in the courage of their own convictions anymore. We don’t change things for the better because we don’t believe in our ability to do so.
We are taught to be insignificant, so we become that. We think that ministers and political parties are demigods who will solve everything. We have lost faith in their own ability to change our status quo. The man on the street feels defeated, downtrodden, demoralised, disregarded, disenfranchised, and certainly down in the dumps.
With the sudden dissolving of parliament and a snap election during flood season, it’s become extremely clear that they don’t care about us. For the elitist who run the system, we are merely collateral damage in the quest to control, use and destroy. They mock the systems set in place to protect the people and we just look on helplessly.
What is puzzling is why we don’t seem to see it and demand change. Why do we accept such callous behaviour from politicians who squabble for power for themselves and have no regards for the people who they were elected to serve? Why do we shake our heads ruefully, and sigh ‘but what else can we do?’
It’s because we are psychologically weak. We have lost our ability to be independent as an individual. Independence scares us. We want Big Brother to watch over us, as George Orwell predicted. But it gets far much more Orwellian – we want Big Brother to not just watch over us, we want Big Brother to tell us how to think, what to think, make decisions for us, take our money and we won’t even ask how they use it , and we fight with one another constantly due to an ever increasing division of race, religion, nationality, sex, caste, affluence and more.
Why did we get this way? Well, we stopped being free the minute we were born. We get regulated like commodities from birth till death. From birth certificates to school certificates to marriage certificates to identity cards to health trackers to death certificates to online banking to social media trackers … We are not free. We are regulated, tracked, owned commodities who think we are free.
Our thinking is not free either. We are indoctrinated from school to university to become consumers and producers. We are cowed into believing we have to toe the line, and never question the narrative. We live in a bubble of other people’s validation. We have been crafted to be more afraid of displeasing society than living for ourselves.
Critical thinking is frowned upon and herd mentality is applauded.
We are, today, living in Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.
We are in Fahrenheit 451 where books are burned and we are constantly force fed rubbish from the communication technologies around us – television, movies, social media, our minds numbed and stupefied, engorged by what we are mind-fed, unable to differentiate between truth and lies.
And so we become passive and meek.
We forget we are the strength that keeps it together. The wealth of a nation comes from the taxes of our labour. The taxes that pay all the politicians, who in turn regulate businesses that pay the taxes and who in turn are appointed by powerful lobbyists who in turn ensure that the system is kept that way to always ensure that a select few control the majority.
And we think this is OK because there isn’t any alternative system. There is – a free market system.
We are told that in a free market system, the small man will be pulverised by big monopolies but I think it is a lie. In a heavily regulated system as the world is in today, you actually have the biggest monopolies running wild. The small man and small businesses have no chance anyhow, and a free market system will probably be the only way to break the monopolies.
Less interference from the bureaucracies of the government and more freedom for people to get value for the labour they put in. Look at how the medical industry is so regulated that even cheap cures are circumvented to favour those controlling the monopoly on drugs. Look at the current war against small farmers but big cartels.
This is the totalitarian tiptoe where the system gets so corrupt but you can hardly feel it because you have been a frog that gets boiled so slowly you cannot feel that the end has happened.
A revolution of the mind begins with the power of one. Think big, think for yourself, think like the powerful beings we each are. And believe that you can change the destiny of a nation, if everyone thought like you.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
