The elitist story will carry the day until it is regularly countered with a more compelling prosperity story....
But how, HOW? do you tell another story to people taught,no,trained,traumatized into ideas chopped into small sound-bytes,coerced into risk aversion from believing there can be no new story told or related to,without some elitist to tell it to us,to reassure us, and grant the story their permission and approval?
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IMPERIAL MEANING STORIES
We humans have long shared our deepest beliefs about the origin and meaning of our being through creation stories that help us make sense of what often seems an arbitrary and hostile world. Because creation stories are foundational to all human belief systems, the legitimacy of the dominator structures of Empire ultimately rests on creation stories that affirm the righteousness of unjust institutions.
http://www.greatchange.org/ov-korten,prisons_of_the_mind,html.htmlLong ago, before we bought our entertainment, people sat around the fire and told each other stories. The listeners stared not at the speaker but into the flames. There they could picture the people and the places the story-teller brought to mind.
Everyone could tell a story: in oral cultures today it remains a universal art. Even those who listened had an active role, as they would be called upon to respond at a certain point of a ritualized tale.
Today we sit around a boxed fire, staring into the flickering light, and listen to the stories of strangers.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/1994/06/02/fire-in-a-box/“Don’t take this personal, it’s just business”
The Hit Man’s Dilemma is about the tension between the impersonal conditions of social life and the persons who inevitably carry it out. This relationship is poorly understood, perhaps never more than now, when the difference between individual citizens and business corporations operating on a scale larger than some countries has become obscured. My starting point is a legendary remark made in a movie by a professional killer to his victim, “Don’t take this personal, it’s just business.”
http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/04/03/the-hit-mans-dilemma/#more-120http://www.classmatters.org/2006_07/The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.
The formation of a civil order (the state) was preceded by a Hobbes-ian condition, a war of all against all marked by the absence of law, which Rousseau insisted was the result of social development, not an original state of nature. He believed that this new social contract was probably arrived at by consensus, but it was a fraudulent one in that the rich thereby gained legal sanction for transmitting unequal property rights in perpetuity.
http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/09/01/toward-a-new-human-universal/So, in order to allow the free circulation of commodities in exchange for money, both the connection between persons and objects and that between persons in groups were weakened in law.
.... the social ties that make ownership possible have receded to the point of invisibility in the face of an atomizing economic ideology.
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And so , our kin networks undermined by the demand for conformity and thirst for cheap labor by the rich,and the holy lie of private property,we now live as aliens on islands,in our Alienated Nation where our"stories" are the manufactured fantasies of faceless marketers,social engineers, and imperialists and vicariously,we strive to become like the tales of people we will never know,we can buy it, we can fantasize but never become it...and we must never ever live and dream of something better, long to be happier, more empathic,more human than empire permits and we must never reject the fake corporate'family'..and nuclear family,and strike out of the game,drop out of the group fantasy called'success' and property that is killing us, to go out among the islands and aliens with longing in our hearts and build our own families,and go back to our tribes and leave empire to die from lack of maintenance and obedience to the top most wealthy parasites that created this sad social condition to begin with as they stole away our place to exist,and claimed they owned it,stealing the Earth from under all our feet as they silenced the stories that connected us to our roots our kin,the land and our essential humanity.