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February
16
2022

The Official Story
Catlin Johnstone

The official story is that we live in a free democracy where our teachers tell us the truth about our nation, our government and our world when we are children, and then the free press continue telling us the truth about our nation, government and world when we are grown, and then every few years we have free and fair elections in which we use this truthful information to make decisions about which politicians and policies to vote for, and it is only by pure coincidence that what we vote for just so happens to benefit the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet.

In the official story, the democratic process consistently fails to let us progress beyond a status quo of profound inequality, injustice, oppression, exploitation, war and ecocide because that’s simply how people are voting in their free and fair elections. The official story maintains that this occurs because the populations of all free democracies coincidentally happen to be organically divided into two ideologically opposed camps of equal size, creating a political deadlock which just so happens to benefit the people who profit from profound inequality, injustice, oppression, exploitation, war and ecocide.

Per the official story, society is driven by the majority, and it is only by an immensely widespread and startlingly consistent series of coincidences that society remains perpetually shaped in a way that benefits a small minority of rich and powerful individuals.

“These are some pretty strange coincidences,” you might find yourself thinking. “What are the odds that a society which is driven by the will of the people would so consistently benefit a small minority of rich and powerful individuals to the disadvantage of the voting majority, across so many separate nations, from generation to generation for many decades, without ever deviating from this pattern? Seems like the rich and powerful must be tipping the scales in their favor somehow.”

The official story holds that you are a crazy conspiracy theorist if you say this, and should be shunned and denied any platform from which to speak to a large number of people.

The official story is that this sort of society, which only serves the worst people in the world by pure coincidence, is so wonderful that it needs to be exported to every corner of the earth. Also by pure coincidence, all of the nations which most urgently need freedom and democracy always just so happen to occupy land of immense geostrategic importance for planetary domination and resource control.

In the official story, the United States and its allies are always on the right side of every international conflict, and it is only by a series of unfortunate accidents and intelligence blunders that this alliance is killing far more people with military violence and starvation sanctions than any other power structure in today’s world. The news media feed us accurate information about each and every one of those conflicts, explaining truthfully why each country’s government needs to be toppled to free the people of that nation, and it is only by coincidence that we suddenly stop getting news reports about how those people are doing once they have been liberated from their tyrannical oppressors.

The official story tells us that while the US might not always make perfect foreign policy decisions, it’s better to have them leading the free world than to risk some tyrannical regime like Russia or China taking over. If the US wasn’t constantly invading countries and dropping bombs and staging coups and starving civilians and fomenting unrest and arming terrorists and torturing people and escalating cold war aggressions against nuclear-armed nations, the world could find itself ruled by bad guys.

The official story protects the official story. Anyone who disputes any part of the official story is peddling misinformation, or is a Russian propagandist, or is an anti-semite, or is a dangerous extremist, or is mentally ill, or is whatever they need to be in order to ensure that they are never taken seriously by anyone and are silenced on social media and are never given a mainstream audience. Any dissent from the official story is evidence that you must be prevented from interfering in the official story, according to the official story.

In the official story, our world will be guided by this truth-based free and democratic status quo in a way which benefits all of humankind. If it seems like inequality is getting worse or governments are becoming more authoritarian or capitalism is becoming more exploitative or wars are getting out of control or the ecosystem is dying or we’re hurtling toward nuclear war on multiple fronts, that’s just your stupid brain trying to trick you, and you should stop listening to it immediately and re-acquaint yourself with the official story.

Here. Here’s some celebrity gossip. Did you see that Superbowl ad? Come watch a movie on this streaming service. Take some time off, calm down, have a beer, and then plug your mind back into the official story. Just ignore the parts of yourself which find it intolerable. Only the official story is trustworthy. Only the official story has the answers. Block out all the other noise, jack your mind firmly into the matrix, and be the loving loyal gear-turner you were born to be.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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Every year around my birthday I like to write an article outlining my overall perspective and what’s driving my output on this little platform of mine. I do this primarily in the interests of transparency: I believe that all journalists and commentators have biases and agendas, and the best they can do given that reality is be transparent about what those are. As a crowd-funded writer it’s important for me to be clear about where I stand and what I’m trying to do so that people can decide if my project is something they want to contribute to advancing. What follows is my most recent article about who I am, published on December 11, 2020, and an article detailing my strange business model that was first published as My Experiments With Hacking Capitalism on May 24, 2021.

So first a little about me. I’m an Australian mother of two working in collaboration with my American husband Tim Foley. Everything I publish is the result of an ongoing all-day conversation between myself and Tim about what’s going on in the world and how we can push to create a healthy and harmonious world for future generations. I have editorial control over everything published here and the ideals and ideology promoted here are very Caitlin Johnstone in origin, but Tim and I are in consistent agreement on how we see things and at this point we operate pretty much like a single unit in the way we create content together.

I have a journalism degree but it became clear to me before I graduated that there’s no real path to doing real journalism in the legacy media which was dominant at the time, so I focused on the motherhood adventure until I stumbled into this commentary gig by accident in 2016 just from writing my opinions about Bernie Sanders and how unjustly the progressive movement was being treated by the mass media and the Democratic establishment.

Since then I’ve been trying to put out articles as close to daily as I can manage, writing what I see as the major obstacles to human thriving in our world based on what I’ve learned and come to understand over the years. When I first started out my perspective was as unrefined as you’d expect from any novice, but over time I’ve cultivated an understanding of global power dynamics and the way power structures use mass-scale narrative manipulation to advance their agendas which has given my analysis a lot more lucidity.

 

 

https://caitlinjohnstone.com