Being anti-establishment is easy – just condemn it, oppose it, and make a lot of noise. Public displays of anti-establishment are very fashionable, especially among the youth. However, achieving something useful is something very different. I’ve always liked the Rosicrucian injunction to “wear the clothes of the country in which you travel”, since the Inquisition never really went away, this principle is fairly important, you see, the Inquisition just made itself more publicly acceptable; it hired public relations companies and image consultants and went mainstream, all carefully funded with your tax dollars and donations from those with a vested interest.
Meanwhile, the self-declared guardians of liberty started wearing uniforms and making themselves stand out in the crowd – rebellion became fashionable, and for each fashion, there is a brand, and for each brand… well, that brand is supplied by those who fund the New Inquisition. These days, just walk into the main street store, and you can buy rebellion off the peg. Rebellion, it’s hip, it’s trendy, it’s bling, and it’s a brand. Meanwhile, Agents of the New Counterculture really need to educate themselves as to the history of the marketing of change.
When any government wants to introduce change, it immediately meets with resistance, so the end aim is to make the people want this change. Bring the masses to a consensual opinion whereby they demand the change that you wanted to force upon them all along. Meanwhile, those who protest and throw stones simply make themselves look ugly and give all the appearance of a threat to the middle classes, who demand protection from what is ugly.
Several obvious examples of this in action can be observed during the 20th and 21st centuries. When hemp paper and hemp products from Asia threatened the paper mill industry in the USA, it made sense from an economic perspective to get people to reject the hemp industry. But how to do this?
Well, readers may wish to acquire a copy of the classic propaganda movie, “Reefer Madness”. With the threat to the paper mill industry, the dope fiend was born. Those vile little dope smokers who, with a single puff, transform into murderous psychopaths ready to rape your daughters and eat your Christian babies. Yes, hemp was very bad indeed, and we know this because the movies told us so. If you want to make effective propaganda, well, make it entertaining and make it fun. Keep it simple and repeat it often. Von Hippler told us this, and he really knew a thing or two, just go ask the Hitlers at no. 66.
As the American-Vietnam War continued, people demanded action, they wanted the insanity to stop. The protest movements grew and began to threaten political stability. Protest movements were dangerous; recent history demonstrated this as people’s power had already achieved changes in political and social ideologies. Two such changes were the vote for women and the right of people with different coloured skin to no longer incur extrajudicial lynchings at the whim of Christian Conservatives who preferred to hide their faces. And it got really serious, I mean, Black people even got the right to sit down on buses after some busybody called Rosa Parks got frustrated with standing up all the time.
So, America needed a new war to both (a) quash the protests and (b) turn the middle class against the protesters. And hence, the War on Drugs commenced. You see, it wasn’t the communists that threatened democracy. No, the government needed a new enemy, and it needed those nasty little long-haired freaks; it needed the work-shy and the party generation with their free love and contraceptive pills, their psychedelic drugs and Mary-Janes.
You see, it was this undisciplined youth movement that threatened the new democracy. People are dying for these hippies’ right-to-protest, and to see what these incessantly intoxicated, undisciplined, unwashed, and ungrateful ingrates go and bloody do?
Well, they… uhh… they protest. So, they played right into the Government’s hands and became the new enemy, the rotters! These days, the mass media has changed the face of protest movements. Mass marketing has propelled corporate brands and branding, and as Naomi Klein so eloquently demonstrated, today it is almost impossible to escape the face and effect of the Brand Generation.
Pepsi, Coke, Gap, and Nike bear down on us on every street corner from oversized billboards. Meanwhile, children victimise their fellow inmates in the school playground for failing to wear and publicly display this week’s overpriced fashion.
Meanwhile, these same children work from branded schoolbooks supplied by multi-million-dollar corporations as the nurse comes around to administer psychotropic drugs to subdue any resistance that the omnipresent surveillance cameras may fail to observe. But we tell these children that such measures are in their best interests. After all, remember that child who shot up the school? Well, he “suffered” from Attention Deficit Disorder, and so this explains the severity of the problem facing schools.
You see, kids have guns, and kids have drugs, and it is these psychotropics and the constant surveillance that keep us safe. Safety is the key issue facing modern Western and democratic living. I know this to be true because the politicians appear in the mass media and they tell me so. These days, it seems that any trace of rebellion inside of a school may be a clinical sign of a serious disorder – and if you have this disorder, you present a sufficient threat to the entire school. After all, you have played violent and satanic computer games such as Doom and Half-Life, you have spent hours on the internet, and you have listened to Marilyn Manson and smoked some pot – your tender and impressionable brain may have been seriously affected.
Action is needed, and action is needed now! You may well have a disorder that not only means you are going to question authority but, statistically, means that you are going to shoot up the school, get addicted, go to prison, or something.
Won’t somebody please think of the precious children?
So, come here, son, and take this Ritalin, and you will be welcomed back into the conservative family fold. You see, you have an illness and we understand that, and before we couldn’t understand why you didn’t like us – but now we go to church, burn those Black Sabbath LPs, and unhook your brain from the internet. Ritalin and conformity will not only save your soul but will also save your school. Remember Columbine? We love you, son, so here, for God’s sake, take this Bible, this Ritalin, this Prozac, this sign that we really do love you. We do, we do.
So, from all of this, it is evident that no one banned or legislated against teenage rebellion, they did something far more sensible, they pathologised it into a clinical sign of a serious medical disorder. So behave yourself, kids – they won’t beat you with a cane anymore because you might sue them, you ungrateful little fuck. Instead, they tell you that you are ill and that they will help you. There is medicine for you. There is still hope.
Beating kids with sticks is ugly; it makes the middle classes and the left-wingers a little uncomfortable. But at least the little shits could readily see who their enemy was. The New Righteous needed a new tactic – medicate the little darlings and be seen to be concerned for them. That’ll do it. Beautiful mental castration and conformity in a neat little bottle that comes with the doctor’s approval and a bitter-sweet aftertaste of “understanding” and love. Bittersweet love.
And so here is where the problem occurs for any Agent of the New Counterculture – if you fight against this, you will prove their case. Should you accept it quietly? Then again, you prove their case. If Gregory Bateson is to be believed, such lose-lose double binds are a necessary precursor to psychosis, and you already know how dangerous these loony psychotics can be. They shoot up schools, they take drugs, have their rifles, and climb up the water towers, and they don’t just go there to enjoy the pretty view.
Meanwhile, over here in the UK, we have the popular concept of the “rent-a-mob” or the “professional protester.” That’s right, kids; there is an organised group of protesters who move from cause to cause simply to have a fight with the police. They are not really protesters; they are professional agitators and antagonists, it is their job. And so, each night of the latest protest – against that new road bypass that is bulldozing its way through an area of natural beauty or against yet another law that erodes yet another personal liberty – the media eulogises the lot of professional protesters. He is aged 20–30, unemployed, and from a good state education system. He hates the middle classes and he hates us. Most of all, he hates the police and wants to fight them. It is this man who is the new threat to democracy, and he must be stopped before he corrupts our helpless children. In the early 1990s, enormous amounts of protest grew over the proposed “criminal justice bill” (CJB) over here in the UK. The CJB proposals snowballed after we were all informed of the serious dangers of unlicensed and unregulated free parties that came with the Acid House trend.
Ecstasy/MDMA was a new evil killing our children, and Acid House parties were the vehicle used to push this new evil onto the poor innocents. Many were left wondering if these evil drug pushers ever actually slept, what with hanging around the school gates giving out free samples to get the kids hooked by day and pushing the drugs at the raves by night. The life of an evil drug pusher certainly can’t be an easy one.
And so, with each new highly publicised police raid on the latest rave and every incident relayed to the chattering masses via the front pages of the tabloid newspapers, the evil partygoer began to look much like the rent-a-mob, the professional protester, the hippy, the man who hates us, hates democracy and especially hates the middle classes. This man, who hates you and me, and if we don’t watch out, he is most certainly the same man who will be giving drugs to your children shortly before they go and shoot up their school in some unpredictable orgy of violence. If this is all too much for you, just blame Marilyn or Marshall or Husker Du.
Now, governments are well aware that peaceful protests just don’t generate the right kinds of headlines. It is the peaceful protest that tends to generate sympathy from the voting classes. The government really, really doesn’t like a peaceful protest – so send in the antagonists and stir up some trouble. That way, we get the headlines we need. These antagonists are often easy to spot by their uniforms, much like the idiot protester. Having antagonists on hand makes the protest and cause ugly. Because when such a protest is peaceful, and the bastards just sing nice songs and are nice to the men with the big sticks and guns, such behaviour only serves to make the government look ugly.
Just ask Gandhi, because he knew a thing or two about how to make the agents of the government oppression show their ugly side. That dangerous fiend just sat there whilst they beat him. Who knows how many police batons that bastard damaged with his head? Had Gandhi led a violent movement with sticks, stones, and guns, how quickly would the government have acquired the excuse it needed to suppress the masses with further violence and oppression?
Peaceful protests block roads, and blocking roads is a block to the democratic process, so break out that tear gas when they refuse and resist arrest. Tear gas makes for good TV images as the people break and run for cover. It might not be as good as a riot, but at least the police get to stand still whilst the protesters do the running. It makes for good TV, showing how tolerant the police are as those nasty hippies run and scream about the place.
But can we blame the individual policeman? Can we blame the police en masse? What about the teachers and school nurses who dish out the Ritalin en masse? If you fight them, who are you really fighting? A father, a husband… Someone who joined the force so he could make a difference and be the good cop? Wouldn’t you be better off if this guy was on your side?
I’ve often wondered about riots, you know, the real ones where people go and turn over cars, set fire to them, burn and loot shops, and destroy stuff.
How is looting Mr. Patel’s shop or torching Mr. Reeve’s car going to further whatever political cause is supported by such activity? All such stupidity achieves is that the government gets its media images and the middle classes have their views reinforced about the threat to the democratic process.
Too many supposed Agents of the New Counterculture demand their right to free expression. Yeah, right; just make it so damned easy for the feds, why don’t you?! I have a good friend who is a cop – he tells me that criminals make his job so flipping easy, they put on the uniform before they leave the house, drive a stereotypical car with stereotypical maintenance faults, hang out in stereotypical places and behave in stereotypical ways.
Young offenders may well act from an anti-authority point of view, and they may indeed hate us middle-classes. But you know what? They scream for their lawyer at the first sniff of the arrest. Yes, that lawyer, the middle-class, educated, wealthy conformist that he is.
This whining of the young offender is not too dissimilar to the cries I hear from some Agents of the New Counterculture. They are all too ready to oppose and criticise, but what alternative do they offer?
Recently, I talked with an NLP trainer who was speaking critically of the psychiatric services in order to support his beliefs about personal freedom and liberty. I asked him what alternative he was offering other than his critical viewpoint. He was troubled over the question; after all, he wasn’t a psychiatrist. “So”, I ask him, “let’s go find a schizophrenic, liberate him from the oppression of psychiatry and give you legal, social, and personal responsibility for him. What are you going to do, and more importantly, how are you going to do it? Right here, right now? Where are you going to keep him?”
He floundered, much like an opinionated fool out of his depth. You see, we need to be realistic – yes, we can criticise our leaders, our teachers, and our doctors, but would we want to be in their shoes? It is easy to criticise and offer idealistic solutions, but when looking at the logistics and pragmatics involved, what effective solution can you offer?
The deepest cover Agent is the agent who doesn’t know who he is really working for; he wears no uniform, follows no fashion, and, horror of horrors, he thinks for himself.
As Tim Leary suggested, Think for yourself; question authority. I’d add two more. Rebellion is the new conformity, so gain power and be invisible.