The UAP phenomenon implies the existence of a superhuman authority that humans must submit to. By appealing to this authority, whether directly or by allowing the subject to suppose such an arrangement must exist, human power structures are able to reclaim the theological principle of a will and aims beyond human understanding. In doing so, all acts of inhumane violence, elite tomfoolery, and evidence for the invalidity of moral and ethical justifications for enshrining power in our existing institutions become handwaveable and invite the subject to these acts and arrangements to engage in the storytelling aspect of social mythmaking that is starkly lacking in the post modern global secular state order. - Any_Pilot6455 on the truanon sub.
So, in regards to the explanation for this UFO shit being "the military wants more money", I kept going "but the military can get all the money it wants, without making up nonsense about aliens".
... but I didn't consider a nascent desire for the ruling class to bring back a hightened religious fervor, as an opiate for the masses. In this God is Dead world, where even the overtly religious don't sound convinced of their beliefs, the ruling class needs human beings to stop thinking that human beings are in charge of human beings.
They need a new God to blame for everything.
Capitalists would much rather we blame aliens for our miseries instead of capitalists.
The ruling class would much rather have us believe they're just as powerless in the face of an omnipresent God-Thing / Alien-Thing, then to believe they - the wealthy and powerful humans - really are in charge, and that our miseries are the result of their choices and actions / inactions.
So much of our government and economy revolves around offloading responsibility for bad things. One party can blame the other party, one branch of govt can blame another branch, the feds can blame the states, the states can blame the feds, ceo's can blame weak regulations, regulators can blame voters, voters can blame non voters. How nice it would be for the people in charge if we all just collectively blamed aliens, while simultaneously assuming there's nothing we can do about it.
gentle reminder that the context of the "opiate of the masses" quote did not have the same (mostly negative) connotations that it has now
back in ye olde days, almost everyone who could afford to be was off their tits on legal drugs most of the time, with various preparations of opium being very popularit's closer to the "circuses" from "bread and circuses" than harmful addiction
And we don’t even get circuses anymore because the the animal shows were just animal abuse and everybody hates clowns, so now we have nothing.
Also isn't the point more that the people form their own defense mechanisms not that the bourgeoise create them? Like people want liberation and create religious traditions to give themselves hope of it. The UFO craze was at the start a clear government conspiracy to cover spyplanes. The government is not co-opting it, more just playing that card again
I guess I’ll believe this when I hear someone on CNN blame space aliens for the next stock market collapse.
This doesn't really make that much sense to me tbh. UFO grifters grifting everybody including congress with their bullshit? I could buy that. Weird psyop for more MIC funding? Sure.
Capitalists would much rather we blame aliens for our miseries instead of capitalists.
How exactly? The aliens (at least according to the stories you can find in various places) seem pretty damn elusive and don't really seem to involve themselves much in our affairs except the occasional abduction and dicking around with nukes.
Weird psyop for more MIC funding?
Why would they need one? Bernie tried to put through a tiny budget cut and got 11 votes.
Yeah it's an unlikely reason, it just feels more likely than "it's a huge secret weird psyop / propaganda campaign to control us".
Maybe internal excuses for why next gen fighters need to still be given insane funds relative to other projects.
As dumb as it is, it may be preferable to beating the war drums for China. Hm, yes, let's have our consumer economy ramp up tensions with our largest productive trading partner. If the gerontocratic oligarchs are gonna make stupid decisions, they may as well make stupid decisions about fictional things instead of geopolitics.
It's gonna turn into "the Chinese are working with the aliens and are traitors to all humanity"
Didn't they literally have the climax revolve around how the Chinese are inherently warlike culturally?
the climax IMO was the protagonist learning to perceive the non-linear aspect of time and of the alien language.
as for the Chinese, it's not a particularly positive depiction but I wouldn't go nearly that far. They initially demand that the aliens leave China because the aliens referred to a weapon (not unreasonable), but when the alien langauge is revealed to be the "weapon", they immediately stand down. There's nothing in there about Chinese culture being warlike.
The movie also portrays the US soldiers trying to sabotage Chinese communication efforts very negatively.
Listen, if you want to convince me, I need to see alien bodies
hot alien bodies who are dtf, I was promised alien cheeks to clap in the Area 51 raid, America is horny for the aliens, give us the aliens to fuck
The real truth is that the bourgeois consolidated it's power with alien benefactors ala Half-Life 2 and we're all trapped in City 17.
my most irrational fear is that the reason the bourgeoisie don't give a shit about climate change is because they already have an alien tech solution to it, but are just waiting for most of humanity to die off, before unveiling it as brand new wonder tech that came just in time to save humanity. "Yay for us, we did it! Too bad about all those brown people we had to gun down at the border, but what could you do, we just didn't know how to fix it yet"
Yeah, I could totally see this. Another QAnon PSYOP, but more controlled and manageable. And basically any real info on UFOs/UAPs necessitates government sources/equipment since obviously the average person can't go into space/atmosphere, etc. etc.
ruling class dopes bungling their way into doing the Ozymandius plot from Watchmen but in the laziest way possible
imagine rorschach screaming about qanon
So like Project Blue Beam? Basically a conspiracy theory about the NWO using powerful and realistic projections in the night-sky to simulate a religious or alien experience, and thus foster a new religion/economic order.
If we entertain that there's a grain of truth to the old stories (or that people have been inspired by these tales to make them real), maybe that's why there's been so much investment into AI and virtual/augmented reality, and the ruling class thinks there will be the potential for that kind of mass illusion soon, so they're trying to build the infrastructure and public buy-in of an idea like that.
But honestly, it would probably be a case of tech-illiterate congressmen and CIA guys getting scammed by Silicon Valley. The Thiels, Zuckerbergs and Musks probably sold all this AR and brain-implant shit to the Deep Throat Guys as a sure way to maintain control, but only because these dorks have no actual material analysis, only misunderstood and half-remembered sci-fi rattling around in their skulls.
It's going to be hilarious when they try to roll out the Mass Delusion Machine to make everyone think there's an alien invasion, and it just bricks because they didn't rent enough server space, or they lied about their progress to keep the grift going, or maybe people are just too poor to buy the latest Skull-Chip (because of course even your plans for world domination have to be in the framework of the free market)
Also, it would be a neat idea for the ruling class to just pretend that Earth has been annexed by the Galactic Conglomerate or whatever, deflecting all the blame for the exploitation upwards to a fictional villain.
"Don't get too uppity, or all of Earth will get turned into vapor by the Glorbaxians!"
"Sorry guys, we have to increase your quota for the month, the Grumerlak said they would eat a bunch of humans if we didn't produce more widgets."
"Oh I wish we could let you join a union, but the Overlords are very anti-union, and we really don't want to piss them off, not after they just lost a trillion people in the battle for Andromeda, right buddy?"If we entertain that there's a grain of truth to the old stories
I mean yeah, people have had delusional disorders, experienced hallucinations, and eaten various toxic things forever, and there are tons of bizarre atmospheric and other phenomena out there. There's even an outside chance some kind of space craft has show up in the last 1-3 thousand years.
that's why there's been so much investment into AI and virtual/augmented reality, and the ruling class thinks there will be the potential for that kind of mass illusion soon, so they're trying to build the infrastructure and public buy-in of an idea like that.
Nah, they've just saturated most of the entertainment markets and want to stop paying labor.
AR
Mostly useful for a bunch of technical work like overlaying schematics on machinery you're working on. It's not going to instill religious experiences or anything. Brain implants have been around for decades, Musk's company is mostly just re-doing decades old research badly.
You don't need anything esoteric or weird to explain any of this.
Yeah, that's my point, not that these things will work, but that the ruling class is delusional enough to think they will.
I was thinking about this exact thing. Aliens could just announce themselves tonight in the sky or project onto the moon and be like "yeah we're in charge now" the fuck are humans going to do, nuke them? GG kiddo
They'll have everyone convinced right up until the point where the alien spaceship makes a really loud "USB disconnected" noise
I don't think the capitalist class gives a fuck if their congressional lackeys are falling for UFO hoaxes, so long as they pass the right tax cuts. A large portion of these people have been chosen because they're dumb enough believe in the invisible hand of the market, of course they're dumb enough to believe in UFOs.
Aliens are so surreal to be a viable target for scapegoating capitalist failures and market externalities.
Gonna need a variety of sources on this. Sources that have been cited in peer reviewed research, because most of hte C-suite people I've met are some combination of dumb, incurious, and vicious fascists.
Also a bunch of MBA dorks being literate enough to even think about trying to pull off the plot of watchmen is a stretch.
So the elevation of "aliens" is the erection of a crisis cult of the dying imaginations of power elites that still have embers of their vestigial conscience.
How grim.
Disagree. The important bit in opium of the masses is not religion, but opium. We already have a new opium - the entertainment complex (sorry nerds but that includes video games). Personally I would prefer they just gave us the real thing, but the problem with opium addicts is, they’re not the most reliable workers and their not big consumers either outside of precious sweet opium. Agree the UFO phenomena is absurd, I’m not sure what’s driving it but my best guess would be - either organic stupidity, or domestic psychological warfare testing
Hard disagree on this one. Religious fervor, the bible thumping Christian type is far too gone, millenials were already atheist 15 years ago and we don't need to talk about Gen Z. If you think the easiest way to get some 18yo on your side is to make an appeal to a "higher" being/authority fallacy then this is so incredibly disconnected from reality its not funny.
The people who care enough about end of the world/rapture shit are literaly irrelevant, right wing chuds or worse that can be manipulated far more easily than through any complex/intelligent conspiracy.
I don't think they're doing this to shift blame away from capitalism, on the contrary, by focusing on the fact aliens are contacting only the US they're clearly focusing on the west as a whole and this can backfire in the public perception.
In general I think when climate change becomes the #1 issue I'm predicting the most obvious thing, they'll claim climate change is a hoax by the BRICS/third world to seek justice/retribution against the west, some dipshit US official already said recently under no circumstances the US will pay climate reparations.
This alien shit can be many things, an organized conspiracy is possible, just not the one proposed here.
I do think UFO and paranormal stuff in general is starting to coalesce into some kind of modern folk religion and that maybe some declining institutions might lean into it a bit a few decades from now in order to stay relevant (my money is on the catholic church) . But I don't think things are at a point where anyone can psyops a modern religion into existence, specially when existent religious movements are so effective at mobilizing the hogs. I have no explanation for the current UFO stuff though.
But I don't think things are at a point where anyone can psyops a modern religion into existence
chuds went from "end of the world" in Jan 2020 to "it's not real" in May 2020
That's true. If we think about how deeply ingrained apocalyptic christianity is in the chudsphere it is definetly doable since they already see the end times in everything anyway.
But it would be fundamentally the same
but they now believe Satan is a reptilian, not something new. Why mess with something that's been working very well so far?
there's no conspiracy dude: there isn't a cabal hiding aliens, or a cabal pretending they're hiding aliens. there is only a number of bad, stupid, and cynical actors, which failing us institutions can't help but amplify.
