A prison is a place where a person is remanded as punishment for not following society's rules. It is a penitentiary where its members are not allowed to advance until they are fully penitent. These penal institutions are not just brick-and-mortar buildings, they are also invisible, energetic, idea-institutions, which have been built on every corner and into the very fabric of the society of mind. You must bow on your knees at all times before the ruling-class norms to show you are submissive. The penalty for not obeying, or being a submissive spirit to the ruling-class authority is applied in these invisible penal institutions. The penalty for not playing along is you will be socially-jailed from moving up the ladder, financially penalized, or whatever measure of control is necessary, commensurate with your defiance and disloyalty.
What happens when people are not careful and obedient? What happens to those who live dangerously by being true to who they are? What would happen if one day you decided not to play along? Are there situations where you would be socially penalized or economically penalized if you did not suppress your true self? Are there consequences for your honesty? We all know that this type of opportunism and careerism is commonplace; we have all seen it or even capitulated to it. The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places. If there are consequences for honesty and defiance, then what does this say about society? What type of society uses coercion — which means persuading an unwilling person to do something by using force or threats; for example, the threat of homelessness, poverty, shame, no health insurance, or "losing everything," — to suppress a person's true nature? This is of course a form of passive violence; the threat of losing everything if you don't play along. If you tell the truth to your boss, will you be fired? If you speak your mind to your neighbors, will you be ostracized? Should you just sit down and shut up? If you are honest and free, will you lose everything? By being a free soul, will a perverse society attempt to execute your energy stream? Will you be punished materially, socially and mentally?
How can the cycles of violence be stopped when there are endless incentives to continue forward as things are, and endless deterrents and penalties for rocking the boat and not participating in business as usual? Most people can be and are controlled energetically, and physical violence is not needed. It is as though there is a static charge of oppression in the air. People know how to behave if they wish to be promoted up the ladder in society. They not only know what to say and do, but they are especially aware of what not to say, and what not to do. And this is how they live their obedient, oppressed and fearful lives.
We must all strive to self-reflect and to reject violence in all forms, from the subtle to the overt. We must all seek to unravel the deeply-rooted conditioning which has perverted us, and attempt to heal ourselves and set our inner-truth free. Love heals violence and all its sources. Love only serves and does not calculate. Love gives without expectation, while hate carries an endless tally of debts. Hate controls everything it touches, but love sets everything it touches free. To end violence we must only look within ourselves, understand ourselves and evolve ourselves. Innocence still lives within our hearts and the child within each of us knows right from wrong. All violence demands reform, and all violence desperately begs to be healed.
Violence is that which causes harm or forces unnatural change upon its victims. We are all artificial and have been unnaturally changed by violence and unwholesome conditioning. We all know there is something wrong with our culture, the state of our world, and with ourselves. Humanity has been institutionalized and we are all the products of commercial and institutional life. We are now born in institutions called hospitals. We are raised in institutions called schools. We are trained for institutional corporate life in institutions called universities. We serve in institutions called corporations. We exist under the master institutions of military and government. We die in institutions called hospitals or nursing homes. From birth to the grave, mankind is an institutional creature. These institutions have processes favoring efficiency over loss, and process over people. As children of the institution, we have all learned various processes and ways of behaving, consuming and producing. We have been made in the image and likeness of that into which we were born and raised. We are violence. Our children are bullies in school, because they are our children. We cannot trust our own minds, traditions and beliefs. We must reevaluate our needs and addictions to see that we have been unnaturally developed in the likeness of our cultural creator, and are predators. We eat life. Drunken consumption of unnatural goods, whether it be food, media, the environment, or other people and companies through "deals and acquisitions," accumulates within you, until you eventually become what you feed on. Rather than the limited concept of, "you are what you eat," consider that you are what you consume, and as an organism and consciousness, you in fact become a commodity and predator yourself. We become prisoners through unnatural consumption, because we must continue to feed to live. In contrast to this, consuming what is natural, good and untainted frees you, protects you, and realigns you with what is natural, peaceful and safe. By consuming what is good and pure, and rejecting what is artificial, you free yourself from being a commodity, and you then transform from a predator, to a producer and creator.
We live in a culture of violence. We have been trained by a culture of violence and we are all agents of passive violence. This is because all of our relationships are based on self-interest, discrimination and a perverse need for gain. The need for gain, and advantage over others, is one of the chief driving forces behind all human misery. We are always being forced to achieve some gain from others in order to meet our basic needs, or to vampirically feed our lifestyle excesses and greed. People have always had preoccupations with vampires because the concept has energetic roots in reality. The vampire is a cultural articulation of a creature or process we know exists in actuality, but we cannot fully describe or perceive. It exists just outside of our perceptive reach, but we know it is there, real and feeding on us and our energy. In nature, most prey cannot see their predator's attack until it is too late, and this is why we cannot see that which feeds on our fears and energy. Man's super-predator is camouflaged and hidden in plain sight. It is the system itself that is the invisible mega-predator which feeds on our life force. The passive violence permeates the ambient environment of human life in toto, and we pass our progenitors' dark traditions of enslavement forward to our progeny. We are almost carriers of the disease of our own servitude.
Governments potentially represent instruments of tremendous violence, both physically and by the word, or law. As far as physical violence is concerned, governments have historically shown themselves to be the most effective and deadly terrorist organizations that have ever existed, at least this is true if body count means anything. Corporate capitalism, unchecked by restraint and morality, quickly becomes a steady source of passive violence, which extends as far as its greedy reach can grope what it covets. Capitalism places individuals into direct competition with one another, with their minds and words as their weapons. The objective of life under capitalism is to capitalize or realize a gain — materially or socially — over your competitors. To realize this gain one uses the primary weapon of assault against his environment and competitors — the mind. The mind is an awesomely powerful pattern recognition, problem-solving and strategizing computer, which is highly specialized at inventing clever ways in which one may achieve dominance and gain over those in the field of competition. It is in the ways that people are employed, levied against by bond, lured into borrowing money from so-called reputable financial institutions, educated, sold goods, and peer pressured, that violence is perpetrated against the common person at every step of life. In essence, modern consumer life is a form of extreme passive violence against all people. The problem of people not understanding the inherent power of their own minds, and not understanding the true nature of violence, combined with the irresponsible institutions of unchecked capitalism create the conditions allowing enormous injustices to occur. We find ourselves lost in a perfect storm of consumption, greed, fear, suspicion, treachery and violence in the deepest and most meaningful sense, to thinking and feeling creatures such as the human.
Acts of economic war and violence in the deepest sense are commonly perpetrated against people with a "gentleman's" handshake and a smile. These villains hide behind a mask of legitimacy and integrity. Part of their illusion of legitimacy is achieved through the custom of costume, by wearing the official uniform of competitive business, the euro war-dress called a suit. These extreme fiscal bloodsport competitors are the top predator savages of the concrete jungle. These predators eat people's dreams, vitality and youth, along with their 401ks, retirements, savings and security; they eat their lives and their hopes for living a beautiful life. Executive savages who eat human resource energy and soul-joy, by feeding on life-force in these ways, are discomfortingly similar to cannibals, minus the flesh.
The homeless, street gangs, "thugs" and other mostly powerless people with legitimate anger concerning poverty and class, are commonly media and police targeted, and portrayed as dangerous, menacing undesirables. Young revolutionaries, students, activists, and protesters are similarly portrayed as misanthropic juveniles and lazy ne'er-do-wells vandalizing public spaces. But too little attention is given to truly dangerous and powerful political and corporate thugs who loot, vandalize and burn communities to the ground every day, with the mighty stroke of a pen. The boardroom is the ultimate war-room, where history's most destructive acts of violence and aggression against human dignity, safety, and justice have been strategically orchestrated.
The total objective of the violent system is to take a free human being, and convert that human being's speculative gross lifetime output into controllable revenue. Human beings and their gross lifetime product, are practically traded like super-commodities — a pseudo, and perhaps even literal preferred stock of the corporation of the United States. The path of the common citizen is voluntary serfdom as a speculative commodity. This sophisticated nouveau slavery represents the supreme form of usury. Our quality life, in the most significant and meaningful ways, have been devastated by placing people in stressful and artificial environments away from their families and communities. But ultimately, the current social contract we have accepted represents a supreme form of usury, because we use everything and everyone in the process. America and other "developed" industrialized nations have become like the executive hands, or middle-management orchestrators for a large international conglomerate, that could be called Rape the Natural World, Inc. (RNW). At RNW, Inc. nothing is off the table, from irresponsible genetic manipulation and patenting of plants, to copyrighting DNA, the molecular assault on the biosphere, and using every natural resource and human hand, no matter the cost to create and concentrate wealth. If children's tears could be made into diamonds, corporate thugs would indenture children and force them to cry. This is what happens presently to children in the diamond mines and the electronic assembly sweatshops. How many people have to die before we are rich enough? The endless victims of the system exist in a perpetual tsunami of violence in the form of this economic enslavement. The violence inherent in our common institutions, corporations, and governments is without competition.
