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It’s probably worth noting that the empire doesn’t actually lose anything from our society’s increasing mental health problems, and in fact actually benefits from them. Which is probably why everything in this dystopia is pointed at making everyone crazier and crazier.
In a society that is guided not by the pursuit of human thriving but by the pursuit of profit, there is no downside to all the underlings being depressed, anxious and overwhelmed all the time, so long as they’re still showing up to work and still consuming products. As long as the gears of capitalism are still being turned, it doesn’t matter whether the people turning them are enjoying their lives.
As luck would have it, it turns out that their depression and anxiety are themselves actually wonderful sources of profit. If the pressures of life in this dystopia make people miserable, you can load them up with lucrative products from the pharmaceutical industry to get them just functional enough to return to the office. Additionally, miserable people are reliably the best consumers, because their discontent drives them to spend their lives trying to feed the hungry ghosts inside themselves with an endless river of products.
We see this dynamic playing out in real time in the so-called “psychedelic renaissance”, with billionaires working to get psychedelic substances legalized not so that human consciousness can be liberated from its illusions and allow us to achieve our full potential, but so that compounds can be patented and prescribed for mental disorders in the same way as other substances in the pharmaceutical industry. The push is to use these drugs to treat ailments like depression, substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder so that people can become functioning cogs in the capitalism machine again, not so they can become self-actualized or realize that everything they’ve been taught about the world is a lie.
That’s just one example of a dynamic that’s ongoing throughout our entire society due to the way all our systems are set up so that human behavior will be driven by the pursuit of profit rather than happiness and health. Literally everywhere we’ve seen the interests of psychological wellbeing come into conflict with the interests of profit, profit has won out every time.
We see it in the way advertising for the beauty and fashion industries is geared to erode women’s self-image so they’ll buy products and services in order to feel adequate. We see it in the way social media apps are designed to be as addictive as possible in order to commodify their users’ attention and consciousness. We see it in the way the entirety of advertising is structured around artificially inflating demand by psychologically manipulating people into believing they have lack and deficiencies they never knew they had, and creating cravings they’d never previously experienced.
The entire profit-seeking structure of this civilization is stacked against mental health — and that’s before you add in the psychologically devastating effects of domestic propaganda.
There are no studies in academia on these effects, since the demonstrable fact that western consciousness is continuously attacked by domestic propaganda remains unacknowledged by mainstream institutions — but there’s no way those effects aren’t there. There’s no way people’s sense of reality can continually be assaulted and twisted in the way that it is without having a psychologically destructive effect. Constantly being manipulated and gaslighted into accepting obvious absurdities like “slaughtering people at mass scale is normal and acceptable,” “Israel’s actions in Gaza are perfectly reasonable,” and “the system is working fine; if you can’t handle it there’s something wrong with you” will stretch the human mind to the breaking point.
So our minds are being constantly accosted by advertising and propaganda that’s making us crazier and crazier, all while living in a society that’s getting more and more inherently stressful to survive in. Technological innovations could have been used to liberate people from the need to work and given us an abundance of leisure time, and instead they’re being used to turn millionaires into billionaires and billionaires into trillionaires while everyone else scrapes and struggles to get by. We’re being encouraged to take anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications to survive in this kind of society, when really the best anti-depressant and anti-anxiety prescription a doctor could write for most people would be a giant pile of cash and more free time.
Our minds are being squeezed and squeezed harder and harder by the people who rule over us, our consciousness punched and kicked this way and that by a nonstop barrage of manipulation and abuse, and it’s costing us everything, and it’s costing them nothing. In fact, they actually benefit from our becoming more crazy.
A stressed out and depressed person who’s struggling to get by isn’t going to have the time and energy to research the abusive nature of the systems they live under and form a revolutionary worldview. If they do somehow find the time and energy, they’re not going to have the inner clarity necessary to sort out fact from fiction, and often stumble into rabbit holes of conspiratorial power-serving propaganda operations like QAnon and Russiagate which appeal to their cortisol-soaked consciousness without ever actually challenging status quo politics or ruling power structures.
The more crazy and confused we are, the less clarity we have, and the less clarity we have the less likely we are to notice how badly we’re being screwed over by our rulers. The ruling class gains everything by circulating crazymaking advertising and propaganda while perpetuating the crazymaking exploitation of workers, consumers and rent-payers, and it loses absolutely nothing by doing so.
That’s why everything’s getting more and more stressful and maddening in this dystopia. It’s because it directly benefits the people who rule over us whose decisions shape our lives.
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Caitlin Johnstone 