Enslaved in Pride

There was a most revealing rule: slaves were to remain illiterate. In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished. '[To] make a contented slave,' Bailey later wrote, 'it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.' This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.

Source: The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

A Stupid Song

Courtesy: Niquimania

A Stupid Song
Even if, the freewill was free, or, the freedom grew on tree,
There still, won't be enough, not enough, for you and me.

The world was always messed up, and, it shall always be.
Peace is nowhere on horizon, no matter, how far you see.

Conflict is a constant, constant like the change,
Everything is relative, just that its a wide range,
For one what is normal, to another will be strange.

Today what seems right, tomorrow will be wrong,
Thats all it conveys, its a stupid song.

- Maharishi Shivi

Source: 2nd thoughts------and 3rd too

Freedom For The Soul - fighting mind control

Courtesy: Ram Morrison 

13th August 2010 - I see a herd of children, innocent minds, as blank as the sheet of paper waiting to be written on, as blank as the white shirts on their shoulders, with blue shorts, with ties tied unkempt. Their steps mimicking each others, falling on the drumbeats; left, right, left, right, round, round around the ground. Some took the liberty to look at the moving traffic or the crow perched atop the fence. Some sought the pleasure of scratching their itchy scalp. The middle-aged teachers, adorned in sari and cane, were quick enough to obedient the wandering souls to fall in line, to look straight, to mimic the robotic movements choreographed to the beat of the drum.

The Censored Freedom

Be it democracy or dictatorship, its the ruler who writes the history and describes the truth. To ensure long life on the chair, it is essential to control the flow of information to the inhabitants of the land, announce the niceties and bury the misdeeds.

It was easiest in the times of no media, just destroy the mind which holds the defaming phrases. Even with press and television, it was not much difficult as they had to operate from the land and the authorities could locate them and strangulate them without much twist in the wrist. But with the advent of Internet, things changed a bit. It was all virtual. One need not be in a country to operate and do business there. Freedom, as it has been defined in books, was actually taking its meaning now. But the ruler is a ruler only when it can suppress the voices raised against it and it had to control what is being said. Hence, the information on the Internet too is regulated and fine tuned to suit the taste of government.

Internet companies have been receiving requests (actually orders) to block public information and reveal private information about users. All in the "national interest" they say! Google has come out with a nice initiative to publicize the info about such requests. Its called Government Requests. They document how many such requests were received by them from which country. A crude general rule to comprehend this tool would be - more the number of requests from a country, less the freedom there.

It has two categories:

A. "Removal Requests" which means "we don't want X info to be known by public, remove it."

B. "Data Requests" meaning "give me all the personal details about Mr/Ms X asap")

India stands third for "removal requests" after Brazil and Germany with 142 such requests. For "data requests," India secured fourth position after Brazil, United States, and United Kingdom. India seems to be doing good in keeping info out of public eye even as Internet penetration remains dismal.

By the way, there is no info about how much public info China wanted to hide and how private info it wanted to secure.

So, all the while we have been believing that "Internet" is the fodder for the animal called "Freedom." True to great extent. But true also it is that this animal, "Freedom," is a chained pet of the rulers. Hopefully, chains will be broken someday with efforts of individuals and corporates with a vision, like Google. Indeed, Google's dedication to transparency and open source is really laudable.

Google's Government Request Tool: www.google.com/governmentrequests

Outsourced Thinking

One of the greatest innovation of mankind is "division of work" which did what it was meant to, allowed an individual to be skilled in one task, perform that task for others, and be dependent on others' skills to carry out his/her life. This indeed enhanced human productivity many folds, reduced waste of energy in fulfilling various needs of life by oneself, and placed the whole human race on the fast track, but at the cost of increased dependence on each other, on society. So, some did hunting, some engaged in peasantry, some tool making, and some other, very few of them, did thinking.

Thinking is difficult task and is more taxing and hence, humans, to save energy, tend to outsource thinking to others who are given a name, leaders. This ability to think and guide the rest of the society puts these leaders at a very advantageous position wherein they are able to direct fruits of else's labor towards themselves.

These leaders in different walks of life take advantage of this human tendency to outsource thinking and decision making, eventually turning others into mere robots. Obviously, this has caused the number of views/ideologies to be limited in the world as only a few do the thinking. That is why we do not have thousands of religion,  but just a few. These leaders are like queen bee in a beehive for whom the whole community works, contrary to the opinion that leaders work for the community. Rather, it is the other way round. It is the followers who carry the ideology of the leader, work for that ideology, go on strike, and sometimes murder for that ideology and some other times die.

We human in general are programmable, obeyers of orders, just like robots. One needs to tell us in some specific manner. Just like Hitler did to the whole German population. And in my opinion, he was indeed one of the most capable leaders the world has ever seen. Who else could raise the ravaged Germany of World War I to a point just few steps away from controlling the whole Europe.

The above fact leads to another fact that this world has been shaped by the decisions of very few people who lived on this earth. The life of almost all the world's population is influenced by those decisions. These leaders, be it in the field of politics, religion, economic, or whatever, decided how the population must conduct their life and the population follows those instructions under the "illusion" that they are the kings/queens of their own life and that they have complete control of it.

So, of whom are you slave of? Here is a list of few of the owners of your mind, your conscience: Various leaders who lived on this earth who enslaved you through school textbook, political leaders of various colors who dictate your life to great extent, religion, environmentalist, scientist, media, corporates who tell you what you must eat, what you must wear.

And still you "think" that you are "free to think."


Another similar post: Is Freewill a Misnomer

Is Freewill a Misnomer?

Is there a way that a computer programs would know they have been programed and their actions are predetermined and controlled to large extent by humans. It doesn't seem as though they know. Similarly, most humans too do not know that they have been programmed or primed to perform actions which would be beneficial to those who programmed them. For example, the ruler of a state primes its citizen so as to act in ways to serve the purpose of the ruler, to let the ruler live a lavish life and histories be written praising the ruler. Another prominent example of this is religion which has become such a complex entity that it is difficult to point out who is the programmer since the programmer himself seems to be programed at first hand. On closer examination, it seems that even though the religious leaders are programmed themselves, they tend to do lot of fine-tuning in religious processes and beliefs so as to derive benefit from masses. Almost everywhere in this world, someone seems to prime someone else or group of individuals. But the general rule is that the number of programmers are far less than those being programmed and hence the harvest thus derived is concentrated among a few. Under so many influences on our mind, the concept of freewill, the ability of an individual to decide, seems to be a misnomer, something that gives the illusion of being in self control. Our so-called freewill seems to be rather limited to choosing between McDonald's and KFC, Pepsi and Coke. Someone called Jane Roberts wrote:

Your beliefs can be like fences that surround you. You must first see them or you will not even realize that you are not free, simply because you will not see beyond the fences. They will represent the boundaries of your experience.

True, our beliefs often become boundaries of our freewill. And how to gain more freewill? I suppose, we can do so by: 1. Questioning everything that we have been taught and that are being taught especially those that we have been told to believe in and not to question. 2. Doubting all including self wisdom. 3. Not treating your believes, ideas, and opinions as your belongings but rather discarding the old and accepting the new ones as and when more evidence become available. 4. Finally, always keeping your fingers crossed since you know not the truth but the perception of it, the shadow of it, which would change as the direction of light changes.