3:19:22
Russell Brand:
"Conversation is being shut down. The ability to communicate is being shut down. The ability to criticize power is being taken away."
Wasn't the literal lockdown of cities and towns around the world a clear symbol of the discursive and social control systems to come? Wasn't the iPhone? How could we be transhumanists and digital slaves without hacking that pathway? What is the point of unveiling and knowing all these horrible truths if there are no consequences for the lies? This bothers me more than anything. It is awful to be lied to and fucked over. It is worse to be given the truth and to see nothing come of it. To see it continue to operate as the lie. To watch it to still be controlled by the narrative we know is a lie, by the people who know are liars. As Karl Von Wolferen puts it, these crimes "[go] beyond our ability to imagine things." We lived with the lie for centuries and we thought it was the truth, now we live with the truth of being lied to.
"When Catherine Austin Fitts and Karl Von Wolferen speak, their emotions are subjugated to their knowledge, not vice versa" .
A great interview between Fitts and Wolferen via Celia Farber. Link is at the bottom of Farber's Substack post, via Fitts' Solari Report.
P.S. I love all the flowers and books in Von Wolferen's beautiful, sunlit library. And I love when Fitts tells Wolferen: "Americans are not agreement capable." To be honest, I never felt intellectually or creatively free in America, a country in which I was born and raised. I have traveled and lived all over the world and I never felt more culturally and socially repressed and restricted than in the US. I always felt free and more encouraged to say and feel things abroad, so this censorship and repression is not a new problem in America. I never felt embraced by or at ease with any of my peers or colleagues, who all felt like groupthink and hyper competitive conformists to me way before the COVID regime. My publishers didn't make me feel any better and were often just antagonistic and unsupportive and morally questionable. Most of the editors of the major magazines I have written or worked for have been terrible, kowtowing censors. So I say this with the dual-perspective of someone who not only has Russian/Armenian-European parents, but someone who is well traveled and has been around and learned from multi-generations of artists and thinkers from many different countries. Americans are not freethinkers and have always had an authoritarian, conformist, stupid, unsophisticated streak. They do not like people who are different or people who go their own way. So their approval doesn't mean much to me. This is not to say it didn't make me suffer. It did. A lot. I think the past two years have completely liberated me from whatever low-grade status anxiety I had left. The feeling that the way me and my work was treated by my peers all my life had to do with my not being good enough somehow. I knew it was mostly corruption and groupthink and competition that was behind it, but I also felt it was my fault. These are deep-seated insecurities, these are not my rational thoughts or beliefs. I felt this way at times, but I also knew better and always resisted anyway. I have always said that you can be punk, but it still secretly stings to be booed off a stage. I see everything very clearly now and I want no part of their world or approval. So ultimately it's freeing. How can we want the professional or moral approval and sanctions of institutions that are corrupt and complicit? This is just a way of saying I never felt at home in my own culture, or country, or field, so I am prepared for this moment in time, but I am sad about all the lost chances that these horrors deprive all of us of. And that I never really got to have the life I wanted, the life I want, even though I have lived a very passionate, interesting life, full of amazing adventures and experiences. I love solitude, I love the simple life, I love the inner life, I have deep reserves, and life is never boring. But I am also a social, gregarious person who wants to be around people and have fun. Which makes being politically marooned complicated and painful.
The Sopranos, S1, E5.
