Remember The Common Cold And Shell Beach

Reminiscences of reminiscences of accepted risk.

“Can you imagine what it was like to be first to erase your own past?”

Forget To Remember
The social engineering must go on. We are now not even being asked to forget to remember that the common cold once existed and we used to never let it interfere with our lives. It is assumed that we will automatically forget to remember by virtue of bad habits that form when people have been sufficiently scared and controlled to the point where they invite the controllers to take the wheel that steers their lives.

It is silently assumed that we are all still sufficiently afraid to part with our steering mechanisms. It does not matter to them that this memory is less than two years old, or how we go about forgetting it. As with most facets of our present age our participation is not required, only our reflexive obedience and compliance. The forgetting will be done for us, like the injecting of the characters’ brains in the dystopian sci-fi film “Dark City”, we will be manipulated to remember to forget and it will be an implicit memory function.

Focus is the seed of attention, and attention is the nectar of memory. Our world of hyper fragmented attention through stimuli-overload has debased our ability to focus. This too has been engineered through a decades-long conditioning of lethargic attention with engineered distraction for explicit memory deprivation. In this biological dance, as Maggie Jackson calls it, the interplay between focus, attention and memory work together for information retention and knowledge acquisition. The competition for our engineered distraction erodes our ability to master this biological dance. She warned us in 2008 of the consequences as a “coming dark ages.”

Explicit memory involves conscious recall of people, places, and facts stored first in the prefrontal cortex, then converted by the hippocampus into memories etched into the circuitry of the cortex, or brain's surface. …Such memory making is all about the rich, carefully cultivated connections that thinkers since Aristotle have understood as the roots of knowledge. Today, it is not memory's vastness but its selectivity that we should admire, as literary critic Alberto Manguel points out in his tribute to the icon of cultural memory-the library. "Every library is by definition the result of choice and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made." In the realm of nature, we are built to eternally select and reject the present as it melts into the past. But are we as a society willing to do so?

Chances are two-thirds of you are no longer reading this piece at the end of the first section. I know this because the last essay got 8700 “views”, and only 29 readers liked it. Now, it’s possible it wasn’t likeable, and it’s possible I failed in my words, I can accept that. Though it is likely not probable as it did garner 200+ new subscribers - welcome Good Citizens! My guess is most of those 8700 did not even make it to the Urban Man section where they would have recognized a few things about themselves. I’m not insulting you dear reader, we must face this sad reality of attention deprivation and focal deficits together. It shapes our world, and as we can see by the present shape of it, if we do not rededicate ourselves to focus our attention to remember basic simple facts related to things like risk assessment and the common cold, we are all well and truly fucked. Like these poor souls waiting hours in line to be told if they have a cold. 78% of them will be told “No, you don’t have a cold but you must be incessantly testing yourself to see if you do”, information which they would have just two years ago gleaned not from a test, but rather from simply observing the condition of their own health and asking a basic question like: “Do I have any symptoms synonymous with a cold?”

Dear government, please, can you tell me if I have a cold?

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”I’m sorry, I don’t remember that. None of us remember that. Who we once were. What we might have been.” - Dark City, 1998

Remember To Forget
Our heightened sensory perception of invisible harm, now guides our intuition, herding millions of people like hapless lemmings to cue for hours in winter weather to be told something we used to tell ourselves with common sense. Now a good portion of the population have been successfully conditioned to outsource their thinking and memories to our sophisticated information gatekeepers, who are presently pushing the levers of narrative control to ensure millions are reminded to forget the common cold. They are already obediently complying by testing themselves at home with kits that contain the deadly poison chemical Sodium Azide. Look for many inexplicable deaths from the hundreds of millions of self test kits getting pumped into homes for the common cold at the insistence of governments, whose best asset has always been destroying governed lives with horrific policies. Expect them to label these poisoned deaths as “Covid deaths” if they test positive postmortem.

The greatest social engineers of the twentieth century were psychologists who worked in advertising or marketing, working from Edward Bernay’s playbook of manifesting behavioral action and control through manipulating the subconscious desires and wants of whole populations. Intelligence agencies took notice, as they partnered with corporate media monopolies, and more recently behavioral management firms you’ve never heard of like Fors-Marsh to manage impressions, instill fear for manipulation and control and guide the herds of millions toward the narratives and paradigm corals where they will obediently graze on carefully prescribed morsels within the confines of a managed habitat. The memory holing basic facts, recent history, distant history, it’s all part of the totalitarian propagandist’s toolbox of remaking the future on terms that satisfy management’s agenda.

In the HBO series Carnivàle, a traveling carnival meanders dust bowl towns to perform for the locals. The decision making powers of this outfit reside with someone known as “management”. They cannot be seen, only heard in the voice over of a decrepit old woman who resides behind a curtain inside a wagon trailer. From this point forward, those who constitute the squares, triangles and elites of the Squid Game we are living will all fall under the all encompassing term ‘management’. It’s suitable for our corporatocracy world and nicely implies our individual station as servants or subjects to be managed by social engineers.

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“You don’t understand John, our entire past, our entire history is a fabrication, an illusion.” - Dark City, 1998

The Illusion of Memory
In Dark City the inhabitant’s brains are injected with a substance to keep them from remembering anything. They compliantly go about their day, in a state of half consciousness, none of them ever realizing there is no daytime, only darkness. When the clocks strike midnight they fall asleep and are injected again so that they are incapable of making new memories, and are given new identities and new lives. Everything is a repetitive cycle of habitual performance under an illusion of past, present and future. There is no past, no future, and the present is reset each day so that the cycle of nothingness continues at the behest of the City’s management known as ‘strangers’.

We must face the probability that our entire history is also a kind of prepared and engineered illusion that exists insofar as we collectively agree on the formation of the illusion, the participants, the narratives, the players, the processes we fund and endorse daily through purchase and consumption. How easy it would be to engineer this illusion through an indoctrination system that combined controlled public education from K-12, followed by hyper-indoctrination on university campuses pushing those who thought they were enrolling for an over-priced better outcome in life toward a singular ideological orthodoxy that would leave them worse off than before, all the while engineering constant illusions through interconnected media sources that worked in unison like a finely arranged propaganda symphony. Witness the complete and unhesitating obedience by university students to totally absurd and inhumane rituals on campuses around the west. Not a single protest. Not a single march. Not a single organized occupation of a dean’s office. Such dedicated obedience by a subset of society to which no virus was ever a threat does not bode well for our future. They eat the propaganda unquestioningly like Generation X once ate mushrooms and cannabis brownies after a long campus march against genetically modified Monsanto franken foods being served on campus.

The most impressive and fascinatingly spectacular thing about propaganda today is the people trapped in its spell believe they are simply and passively engaging art, education, cinema, late night entertainment, news and online information searches and consumption. When they wake up in the morning they’ll go about their day the exact same way, as if their brains were injected with something to keep them lumbering along in a catatonic state of blissful ignorance and total obedience. Their lives constantly controlled. Their impressions and stimuli always carefully managed. Their perception of it all under the spell that they are freely making choices in life that haven’t already been made for them through behavioral conditioning and predictive engineering.

Individual Risk
There was a time we accepted all manner of risk as part of daily life. We understood that fear was a contagion fueled when irrational hysterias were allowed to spread through populations. Wiser leaders of the past who cared for their people wouldn’t dare intentionally unleash it as a weapon for manipulation and control. We do not have wise leaders, we are encumbered with preselected globally interconnected lock-step scheming diabolical traitors.

The intentional aim of collectivizing risk, and transferring it as an individual choice for assessment to one that must consider the risk tolerance of others in society by assuming the worst case outcome based on the potential of an invisible ubiquitous threat whose dangers require an abundance of absurd caution (mostly useless theatre) be exercised to alleviate the neurotic feelings of others from this hypothetical imaginary and invisible harm is one of the most insidious aspects of our present moment and half as comprehensible as this sentence I just wrote. To compare it to wearing a seat belt “to protect others” or stopping at a stop light in automobile traffic is to reveal one’s incapacity toward reason, logic, or rudimentary comparative analysis.

This insidiousness is compounded now with the emergence of symptoms that we once associated with the common cold but are now psychosocially conditioned to apply to our new variant of Covid. It’s the common cold, but because it’s called “covid”, and can only be diagnosed with a “covid test”, our fear response requires a continuation of keeping up all inhumane ritualistic cautionary measures that never worked for any other variant and are by design a test of obedience and submission to willingly partake in the engineered insanity.

Those who refuse will of course be labeled “selfish” and a “threat” to community health and safety. This pathologizing of absurd behavior as our collective response to a social risk of interconnected “collectivized” harm is all part of priming populations for medical police state tyranny. It’s insidious but also genius. An invisible threat that once existed as the common cold can so easily be weaponized for mass manipulation and control. We have been conditioned to accept this, like everything else prepared for us, without question or dissent. While many narratives are collapsing in the face of further absurdities, many new paradigms for further social tyranny are also being reinforced by the least astute and most maladjusted louts among us, a shockingly high number of them over-educated maladjusted louts.

End of The Line
In “Dark City” Shell beach is at the last station, end of the line. It exists in memory only, as an abstraction of a place we all wish to go again, a familiar place of comfort and ease where we were sure of too much, yet fearless enough to still be blinded by our certainty. It’s a place that we might now collectively call our old normal, and like Shell Beach it’s an abstraction of a place that no longer exists. Many will try to go back, believing their continued obedience to malevolent governments or corporations will somehow land them the keys to a time machine that will get them there. It may take half their lifetimes to realize there are no keys, and no amount of compliance with the commands of tyrants will materialize the life they once knew. It exists only in memory, and soon far too many of them will be sufficiently conditioned to remember to forget it ever existed at all. If they cannot be sufficiently conditioned to remember to forget then management will have other plans for them.

For the rest of us atop the mountains across our great planet who refuse to be conditioned any longer, with unobstructed vistas toward all the madness near and far, we cannot just wait for a protagonist like John to emerge with special powers to tilt our dark city toward sunshine again, the guiding light for life from a distant star. We are the protagonists we’ve been waiting for and we must guide ourselves out of the darkness, helping one another on their journey toward remembering, toward understanding our present age. We can remember together who we thought we once were, who we imagined we could have been. We can all do this by focusing our attention on what truly matters most in our lives today and fostering, cradling and nurturing the best attributes of our shared human experiences. It's the difficult path for sure, but the righteous one.

How easy it would be to assume our place in the darkness among the obedient louts, and remain in the cave without having to constantly unlock the chains that keep us latched there, the metaphorical chains that are all around us inhibiting our natural disposition toward freedom, curiosity, truth and enlightenment. If only we could remember to forget to leave the darkness and accept those chains and assume the passively catatonic existence prescribed by our sickly managers. We must remember to remember not to forget.

The clock strikes midnight here.

What the hell was I just writing about?

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