Consciousness is the State

By Greg -
Consciousness in many ways made us less intelligent, and may have been invented as a means of social control. We know it's possible to have language and culture without consciousness, but it may be impossible to conceive of the State without it. Consciousness made us vulnerable to illusions, and the State was the dream weaver. We know that consciousness is taught, that it didn't emerge as a high-level property of neurological processes. Language gave us imagination and populated the world with spirits. But consciousness gave us ideology, quieted the spirits, and gave us God.

The State had its origins in the bicameral kingdoms, and its kings, no doubt, had a degree of consciousness that grew more refined as their kingdoms grew. Consciousness spread, I think, not in the nurturing of a child by its mother (as was certainly the case with language) but as indoctrination. Far from being recognized as a precious cultural artifact, consciousness was the end result of a ruthless offensive against free will. It's counter intuitive to think of consciousness as freedom-limiting rather than freedom-enabling, but that makes it all the more powerful as a tool of social control. The self, which we define as the embodiment of free will, is the creation of the State that controls it. The self operates within the world it was defined by, the world we believe in. And the State, through both its propaganda and its equally-scripted revolutionary rhetoric, manufactures that world.

The State perpetually reinforces itself in our daily struggles and diversions, in all our arguments and obligations, in all our escapist fantasies and real resistance. It is nearly impossible to exercise free will over consciousness because to do so defies God, truth, and would seem to leave the self thoroughly untethered to anything real.

Truth is metaphysical and reality is physical. The God of State abides no truth but its own, and consciousness was created and is maintained to contain that truth. But truth is only a shadow of reality, a meticulously-crafted abstraction that presents itself as the "being" behind the real, its meaning, i.e., the "truth" behind mere appearances. That's the toxic thought, the pill we take that resigns us happily to servitude.

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