Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
āWeāre run by the Pentagon, weāre run by Madison Avenue, weāre run by television, and as long as we accept those things and donāt revolt weāll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche… As long as we go out and buy stuff, weāre at their mercy…Ā We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other peopleās Villages, but we are all prisoners.ā
– Patrick McGoohan
This is not an election.
This is a con game, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko, a swindle, a flimflam, a gaffle, and a bamboozle.
In this carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, āwe the peopleā are nothing more than marks, suckers, stooges, mugs, rubes, or gulls.
We are victims of the Deep Stateās confidence game.
Every confidence game has six essential stages:
1) the foundation to lay the groundwork for the illusion;
2) the approach whereby the victim is contacted;
3) the build-up to make the victim feel like theyāve got a vested interest in the outcome;
4) the corroboration (aided by third-party conspirators) to legitimize that the scammers are, in fact, on the up-and-up;
5) the pay-off, in which the victim gets to experience some small early āwinsā; and
6) the āhurrahāā a sudden manufactured crisis or change of events that creates a sense of urgency.
In this particular con game, every candidate dangled before us as some form of political saviorāincluding Donald Trump and Joe Bidenāis part of a long-running, elaborate scam intended to persuade us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we live in a constitutional republic.
In this way, the voters are the dupes, the candidates are the shills, and as usual, itās the Deep State rigging the outcome.
Terrorist attacks, pandemics, civil unrest: these are all manipulated crises that add to the sense of urgency and help us feel invested in the outcome of the various elections, but it doesnāt change much in the long term.
No matter who wins this election, weāll all still be prisoners of the Deep State.
We just havenāt learned to recognize our prison walls as such.
Itās like that old British television seriesĀ The Prisoner,Ā which takes place in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village.
Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom,Ā The PrisonerĀ (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in The Village, a beautiful resort with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.
While luxurious, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked. Residents of the Village are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.
First broadcast in Great Britain 50-some years ago,Ā The PrisonerĀ dystopian television series ādescribed as āJames Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafkaāāconfronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.
The seriesā protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan is Number Six.
Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.
āI am not a number. I am a free man,āĀ was the mantra chanted on each episode ofĀ The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role.
In the opening episode (āThe Arrivalā), Number Six meets Number Two, who explains to him that he is in The Village becauseĀ information stored āinsideā his head has made him too valuable to be allowed to roam free āoutside.ā
Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to āpersuadeā him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.
Number Six refuses to comply.
In every episode, Number Six resists the Villageās indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors.
āI will not make any deals with you,āĀ he pointedly remarks to Number Two.
āIāve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.ā
Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, itās never far enough.
Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Sixās attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as ārovers.ā Still, he refuses to give up.
āUnlike me,ā he says to his fellow prisoners, āmany of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.ā
Number Sixās escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettlingĀ Groundhogās DayĀ that builds to the same frustrating denouement:Ā there is no escape.
As journalist Scott Thill concludes forĀ Wired, āRebellion always comes at a price.Ā During the acclaimed run ofĀ The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode āDo Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,ā his mind is transplanted to another manās body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.ā
The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain oneās freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress,Ā national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.
As Thill noted,Ā āThe PrisonerĀ was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in aĀ dystopia masquerading as a utopia.ā
The Prisonerās Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.
The American Police State, much likeĀ The Prisonerās Village, is a metaphoricalĀ panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.
Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy BenthamĀ envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of āobtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.ā
Benthamās panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance stateĀ in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.
Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the new mantra of the architects of the Deep State and their corporate collaborators (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Instagram, etc.).
Government eyes are watching you.
They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what youāre watching on television and reading on the internet.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that youāve got nothing to worry about if youāve got nothing to hide no longer applies.
Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, weāre approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between obeying the dictates of the governmentāi.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to beāand maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.
When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under oneās clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an āexpectation of privacy.ā And technology has furthered muddied the waters.
However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living oneās life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), itās no oneās business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.
Unfortunately, George OrwellāsĀ 1984āwhere āyou had to liveādid live, from habit that became instinctāin the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinizedāāhas now become our reality.
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of beingĀ monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologiesĀ that answer to government and corporate rulers.
Consider that on any given day,Ā the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20Ā differentĀ ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether youāre walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.
This doesnāt even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
Stingray devicesĀ mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones,Ā Doppler radar devicesĀ that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that canĀ record up to 1800 license platesĀ per minute,Ā sidewalk and āpublic spaceā camerasĀ coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for policeĀ āpre-crimeā programs,Ā police body camerasĀ that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, theĀ internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which thereās little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independenceāespecially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.
As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 bookĀ Discipline and Punish, āVisibility is a trap.ā
This is the electronic concentration campāthe panopticon prisonāthe Villageāin which we are now caged.
It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.
As Glenn Greenwald notes:
āThe way things are supposed to work is that weāre supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: thatās why theyāre calledĀ publicĀ servants. Theyāre supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: thatās why weāre calledĀ privateĀ individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed.Ā Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. Thatās the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.ā
None of this will change, no matter who wins this upcoming presidential election.
And thatās the hustle, you see: because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, the day after a new president is sworn in, weāll still find ourselves prisoners of the Village.
This should come as no surprise to those who havenāt been taking the escapist blue pill, who havenāt fallen for the Deep Stateās phony rhetoric, who havenāt been lured in by the promise of a political savior: we never stopped being prisoners.
So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.
Think for yourself. Be an individual. As McGoohan commented in 1968, āAt this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slavesā¦ As long as people feel something, thatās the great thing. Itās when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, thatās tough.Ā When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.ā
You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep Stateās con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.
As I make clear in my bookĀ Battlefield America: The War on the American People, until you come to terms with the fact that the government is the problem (no matter which party dominates), youāll never be free.
Source: The 2020 Election Bamboozle: We Are All Victims Of The Deep State’s Con Game | Zero Hedge
