Meta Is Aggressively Censoring Criticism Of US-Israeli Warmongering

October 10, 2024

OCT 06, 2024

I am at risk of getting banned from both Instagram and Facebook as both Meta-owned platforms keep censoring my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon, placing strikes on my accounts in the process.

Both Facebook and Instagram have deleted screenshots of a post I made on Twitter (or whatever you call it now) which reads as follows:

Iran is not my enemy. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are not my enemies. My enemies are the western imperialists and their Israeli partners in crime who are inflicting a waking nightmare upon the middle east and working to start a massive new war of unfathomable horror.

In the reasons given for this censorship, both Facebook and Instagram said “It looks like you shared symbols, praise or support of people and organizations we define as dangerous, or followed them.”

My appeals against this removal have been denied, saying the post “does not follow our Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organisations.”

Hours later, Instagram removed a second post citing the same reasons, this one about Lebanon and Hezbollah. It was two screenshots from a longer Twitter post which reads as follows:

Hezbollah are just Lebanese people. There’s this framing of “liberating Lebanon from Hezbollah” like they’re some kind of invasive, alien presence, when they’re an entirely native fighting force organically arising from the injustices and abuses inflicted by Israel and the west.

The imperial spin machine always does this. The empire uses narrative to try and de-couple the people it wants to kill from the rest of the population in the nation they are targeting in order to legitimize the violence they want to inflict upon the country. They want to take out a certain government or element within a nation that conflicts with their interests, so they start babbling about “terrorists” or “evil dictators” or “regimes” in order to make it seem like they’re not just attacking a country and murdering people who disobey them.

If they can uncouple a nation from the people in that nation who they want to kill in the eyes of the public, then they can portray that killing as a heroic act of liberation from a force which doesn’t belong there. If they can get you to believe that, then they can get you to believe they’re killing people for the benefit of the nation they’re attacking, instead of for their own benefit.

It’s literally always solely and exclusively for their own benefit, though. It’s literally always a lie.

As you can see, both of these posts are just criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States, the nation where Meta is based. Meta has an extensive history of working hand in glove with the US government to regulate speech.

This is indistinct from government censorship. If the US government designates its enemies as “terrorists” and massive Silicon Valley platforms are censoring criticism of US wars against those enemies in order to be in compliance with US law, then the US government is just censoring speech which criticizes US warmongering, using a corporate proxy in Silicon Valley.

https://x.com/WorldJewishCong/status/1810649171986149498

Meta has been ramping up censorship of speech that’s critical of Israel and its US-backed atrocities for a while now, with a sharp increase that was anecdotally noticeable immediately after the company announced back in July that it would be instituting vague new censorship protocols against the word “Zionism”. After that move, critics of US foreign policy like Aaron Maté, Jonathan Cook, and Tadhg Hickeybegan reporting that their posts about Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza were being unexpectedly taken down on Facebook.

I also had one of my articles which was critical of Israel removed from Facebook in July, which the platform refused to reinstate. This followed other acts of censorship that Facebook has been imposing on my account since last October, all for my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza.

Last November Facebook deleted a Twitter screenshot from my page which read, “You don’t understand man, Hamas uses human shields. Really really advanced human shields, the kind where there aren’t even any Hamas members anywhere near them. It’s just 100% human shield with 0% combatant, the most secure kind of shield there is.”

https://x.com/caitoz/status/1811234474551890062

Last January Facebook deleted a post which read as follows:

Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?”

This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural homegrown emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound.

If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure.

Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats.

Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable.

This is all self-evidently political speech which is critical of the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful government and its allies. But because the platform has been deleting my criticisms of US foreign policy so frequently, my page is now designated “at risk”, and whenever I log on I now receive a notification which reads, “Don’t lose your Page! If you get a few more Community Standards violations, you could lose Caitlin Johnstone forever. Nobody wants that — help out by appealing violations you that disagree with, but more importantly, try to share content that follows the rules.”

Facebook’s Page Status section tells me, “Your Page is restricted because it didn’t follow Community Standards. We know that we’re not always right, so if you think that we got it wrong, you can disagree with our decision and in some cases, get the restriction removed.”

My attempts to get these strikes reversed have been rejected.

I think it’s important to document all this in detail because Meta is such a massive tool of US imperial narrative control. Facebook has a staggering three billion usersworldwide, and Instagram has two billion. It’s impossible to overstate the impact that censoring speech in a pro-US direction will have on worldwide human communication.

From my earliest days at this gig I’ve been making a point of forcefully criticizing the world’s mightiest and most tyrannical power structure and then documenting the various ways the imperial narrative managers have worked to diminish my reach. I’ve been algorithmically throttled on Facebook since 2017, I’ve been permanently bannedon TikTok and keep encountering censorship there under my new account, and I was even banned from Twitter until some commentators with larger voices than my own intervened on my behalf.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and the manipulation of information on the internet is a major agenda of the US-centralized empire toward that end. These pricks won’t be happy until we’re all a bunch of mindless, bleating sheep.

____________________

Community Profile: Darth Vader

October 10, 2024

Darth Vader is perhaps the least understood member of our community. He has been the recipient of consequences that were not entirely of his own choosing, and yet he continues to battle through the trauma of his psychological injuries. He remains a warrior for what holds meaning and value despite being marginalized as a dark and shadowy character.

Q: What is your biggest fear?

A: I fear nothing. I am committed to expressing myself, despite those who would attempt to silence me. Those who have attempted to destroy me have failed, because they do not understand that I do not seek their approval.

Q: Who do you admire most in this community?

A: I admire The Grinch, for his integrity and flexibility, and a consistent dedication to his set of principles. I believe he is a genius, because he agrees with everything I say.

Q: What do you value most?

A: My children.

Q: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve discovered about our community?

A: I discovered that some of our community “leaders” are often the most mean spirited people, who target their neighbours and scapegoat those who hold views that reside outside of conformity to a puritanical political correctitude.

Q: What message do you have for other community members?

A: Think locally, act galactically!

Letter to the Editor – William Thomas

October 10, 2024

TOWARD ISLAND SOVEREIGNTY IN A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY

by William Thomas

Given government overreach and the schizophrenic mass psychosis characterizing so much of the media-bamboozled West, can we exercise local sovereignty in rural communities, where economies of scale and deep allegiance to place facilitate saner paced and prioritized lives?

Let’s ask “Simple Living” proponent, Dr. Ted Trainer. By his measure, even as overdeveloped nations wildly overshoot the carrying capacity of this shared space habitat called Earth, generations of Gulf Islanders are building a “very different kind of civilisation” in which co-existing wild and human kin “lead more fulfilling lives.”

How cool — and resilient — is that?

THROWING BRICS THOROUGH GLOBALIST GLASS

Even as the Two-Thirds World shuns Western colonizers for more supportive bilateral arrangements, those in the massively censored, propagandized and anesthetized West remain largely unaware of this world-changing power-shift away from Western bombast, bombs and broken promises to sanctions-proof trade alliances based on economic partnerships, commodity-based currencies, ongoing dialogue, non-interference and mutual respect.

This month’s BRICS Summit in Kazakhstan will speed the extrication of the Global Majority from the morally, politically and financially bankrupt West, where unjust and unsustainable “consumption without limit” remains the highest political priority.

HOW DEFIANCE FOSTERS RESILIENCE

Crushing independent-minded and self-reliant rural communities remains Job #1 for the World Economic Forum, whose anti-life high priest, Klaus Schwab, boasts of the WEF’s indoctrination of Canada’s Parliament and Prime Minister.

Here on Hornby, relentless corporate/government targeting of this island holdout sparked a four-year residents’ revolt against substituting water-intensive condominiums for a suggested eco-village, followed by two separate attempts to impose unsightly and unwanted cell towers on lives vulnerable to their continuous radiation.

ANTIDOTE OF PLACE

Perhaps the best response to systemic insanity is simpler societies. This means, writes Ted Trainer, “mostly small, highly self-sufficient local economies, putting local resources into meeting local needs” — rather than further enriching a few.

Importantly, this Aussie champion of “degrowth” and “conserver” lifestyles urges “much more cooperative and participatory ways” that enable communities “to take collective control” of their unique unfolding. Given our dependence on the world beyond our shores, are such “utopian dreams” even feasible?

ANECDOTE OF PLACE

It’s already happening! Our island co-op, recycling depot, community-built health clinic and recently upgraded community garden echo similar initiatives throughout the Gulf Islands. But local enterprises cannot foster self-sufficiency if local decision-making continues to be offshored.

“The important decisions about local development and administration must be made by town assemblies, local committees and referenda involving the participation of all,” Trainer exhorts all who understand that whatever the near future brings, it likely will not feature continued “apex” living atop wavering supply chains and an uprooted global village on the move.

“The Simpler Way is not an option among many,” Trainer emphasizes. With Washington, Ottawa, London, Kiev, Brussels and a rogue Jerusalem bent on ever-riskier global disruption to preserve fleeting personal power and loot — anyone who cherishes children and future meals has no choice but to embrace a just society whose “circular economy” ensures that what goes around comes back around in helpful ways. Rather than constantly smacking us upside the head.

If you live rural, you’re already subverting costly and vulnerable linkages. Just look at how a dozen eggs purchased or bartered from a neighbour’s backyard pen bypasses… “global networks of farms, factories, chemicals, ships, trucks, battery chicken sheds, supermarkets, computers, satellites, people with degrees, advertising, packaging, soil nutrient loss and ‘waste’ removal,” Trainer comments. “All generating” huge and rising “energy costs.”

Underscoring such localised threats, on October 6, unelected WEF’ers demanded a universal ban on home-grown food to “stop global warming.” And cement dependency on factory farms, whose megatons of nitrogen fertilizers emit powerful heat-trapping gases!

Meanwhile, Eco-Villages and Transition Towns seek to recreate the rural advantages and amenities enjoyed in countless island iterations. Since we daily practice Trainer’s “ways and values,” returning already cooperative communities to self-governance is the logical and desirable next step.

VOLUNTARY OR INVOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY?

Now is good! Even if the Straits of Hormuz are not closed to much of the world’s tanker traffic, Middle East oil production is not set alight, someone does not “pop a nuke”, and the overdue Big One is not rocking the Pacific Northwest by the time you read this — these tremulous trends are making many uneasy.

As we have recently seen, mass hysteria does not lead to coherent right action. Instead, transitioning ahead of time to more localized arrangements and regional confederations seems preferable to out-of-touch proxy governments and artificially sustained urbanization. Our own BRICS-mirroring shift will require full local autonomy, reciprocal off-island outreach, and as much “homegrown” resiliency as we can imagine and create.

Happily, those choosing rural living are joining a worldwide movement of shared vision, neighbourliness, and individual liberation rooted in locality. Only by harmonizing attentive grassroots governance with stunningly interwoven natural communities can we ensure our continuing spiritual and physical abundance, shared joy and well-being.

willthomasonline.net

BONUS SOURCES (for online Grapevine edition)

BRICS Summit: Kazakhstan’s Keen Interest in Deepening Partnership

How to Restore Our Relationship to Earth

What is to be done? Thoughts on degrowth strategy

Simpler Way VIDEO

WEF demands ban on homegrown food

Letter to the Editor – Carie McGregor

October 10, 2024

Dear Denman & Hornby Residents,

I just wanted to mention that Judy is retiring this week. Do you know Judy? She works at the Buckley Bay ticket wicket and has short grey hair. I don’t know her last name. For the nine years that I’ve taken the ferry, she has been sunny and warm every single time I’ve encountered her. She’s not just dialing it in like some of us might tend to do after working day in, day out with often grumpy customers year after year– she is genuinely engaged and kind. I think she should give workshops in customer service. Anyway, her last day is October 12^th so this is a bit late, but if you know her and see her, please wish her a Happy Retirement. Or, if you don’t see her but agree with my sentiments, maybe call or email BC Ferries to say nice things about her. Judy, if you’re reading, thank you for being so wonderful. I will miss seeing you and I wish you all good things for the next chapter of your life. Bon voyage!

Carie McGregor

Letter to the Editor – Earth Muirhead

October 10, 2024

A 42 year old friend of mine committed suicide recently. I am convinced he had untreated, chronic Lyme disease.

The leading cause of death for humans living with chronic Lyme disease is not the bacterium itself, but suicide. I have probably had Lyme for 45 years and I have often teetered on the brink of despair due to “idiopathic” i.e. unexplainable by Western medicine, nausea, vertigo, fatigue, pain, brain fog, frequent viral infections, etc. For a very immediate example, writing this article has taken many hours because I have to lie down and rest frequently. In August 2024 I told Dr. Jody Taylor that I had chronic Lyme Disease. She looked in my records and over the last 12 years of seeing all the doctors at the Denman Medical Clinic, there was no mention of my Lyme diagnosis. They could have at least said the patient thinks she has Lyme. One doctor spent over 30 minutes of your taxpayers money trying to convince me to take anti-depression drugs because the cause of all my symptoms was depression.

When my friend went to the BC Center for Chronic Disease Program (CCDP) he was “merely” diagnosed with the following: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, myofascial pain, central sensitivity syndrome and chronic idiopathic vertigo. THESE ARE ALL SIGNS OF LYME DISEASE. To be more precise, they are symptoms of NEUROBORRELIOSIS, Lyme infection of the central nervous system.

The CCDP program has had very poor reviews because their main focus is on “self-management.” Unfortunately, to self-manage, a patient must have extensive medical, social, financial and mental health supports. There has never been official support to help cope with the loss of employment and the resulting poverty, the shame of being poor and needy, or with the total lack of care from BC Medical. I spoke with a CCDP director today and she said they will ask for more feedback about how to improve their services. However, she seemed to insinuate that no doctor in that program will mention Lyme Disease unless the patient has blood work to prove it. So you have to pay 1,000.00 dollars to get tested. And then you have to pay the naturopath who ordered the tests because a regular MD will not do that. And then you pay for the naturopath’s time while he weighs the pros and cons of all the alternative medicines and herbs that may not even help.

In 2017, I suggested to my friend that he get tested at a US lab for chronic Lyme. He said he would, based on what he found out after going to the CCDP. As far as I know, and according to his parents, at no time did any of those health professionals ever suggest that he get tested for Lyme.

On their website they claim: “A study done by the Chronic Diseases Study Group could find no difference between patients with symptoms attributed to CDD (I assume that means Chronic Lyme Disease, although they also use the terms Post Lyme Disease and Late Lyme Disease) and those with ME/CFS.” ME stands for Myalgic Encephalitis (inflammation of the brain and central nervous system). CFS stands for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Their website states that they “will not see patients with Late Lyme Disease” unless they have positive serology. There are no lab testing for Lyme disease in Canada or anywhere else in the world that are covered by BC Medical. The recent tests I had for Lyme disease were done in the US and cost me 1K. Is the high potential testing costs to Health Canada and the fact that there is no allopathic “cure” for chronic Lyme disease the reason why they do not suggest or order tests for patients with symptoms of chronic Lyme disease? Ask your local current politician these questions and their eyes will glaze over in denial and ignorance.

Our medical system failed my friend. Most of his last 15 years on this planet were a brutal nightmare. Neuroborrelios in my friend also caused vertigo, hearing loss, mood swings, personality changes, and psychiatric disturbances.

If you know anyone who has any of the above symptoms, please relay this information. You can and might help them stay alive.

mite vacation

October 10, 2024

Otto of the beach

October 10, 2024

A Stroll Down the Memory Hole with Gwynne Dyer

October 3, 2024

Londoner Gwynne Dyer’s name was mentioned recently in a letter to the editor, providing a well timed opportunity to revisit the 81 year old military historian’s contributions to The Islands Grapevine since February 2022. Everything Dyer predicted about the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has turned out to be wrong, and worse still, the opposite has turned out to be true. And yet, for those stuck in a Cold War mindset, Dyer’s credibility never seems to take a hit when he carries water for the warmongering NATO cabal in Washington D.C., London, and Brussels.

Dyer’s prediction in April of 2022, was that the “devastating economic sanctions” would cripple the Russian economy. The sanctions that blocked foreign investment by Russian billionaires caused their fortunes to be repatriated into the Russian economy, which not only filled the void created by the exodus of Western corporate interests from Russia, it resulted in record investment in domestic infrastructure. Russian gas is now sold to third parties, and purchased by the same European countries enforcing the Russian energy boycott, at highly elevated prices. The Russian economy and currency are doing extremely well, and it is the European Union countries who’ve paid the price and are facing massive de-industrialization.

In May of 2022, Dyer employed his crystal ball to claim Russian President Vladimir Putin would soon be removed from office because “the war in Ukraine has fatally undermined his credibility among Russians.” According to Western polls, and the 2024 Russian General Election, Putin’s popularity has only been heightened to a level well above 80%. The U.S goal of weakening Russia, regime change in Moscow, and isolating Russia from the West, has only benefited the Russian government and inspired much closer relations with China. By October 2022, Dyer declared that “Putin still refuses to accept that this war in Ukraine is lost.” It’s nearly two years later and we see that it is the Western pundits like Dyer who refuse to acknowledge reality. Ukraine has lost this war, and they’ve lost it by a wide margin.

The two Minske Peace Accords had failed, with NATO admitting that it had been buying time to arm the Ukrainian ethno-nationalists in Eastern Ukraine, including Svoboda, Right Sector, and the neo-Nazi white supremacists of the Azov Battalion, who had killed 15,000 ethnic Russians since 2014. With the U.S. backed government in Kiyiv threatening to join NATO and put nuclear armaments on Russia’s border, Russia invaded the Donbas region in Feb. 2022 with a stated intention of protecting ethnic Russians, de-Nazifying the region, and demilitarizing Ukraine. We all know what the U.S reaction would be if Russia made a pact with Canada or Mexico to place nuclear weapons on its border, as we’ve already been through the existential drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dyer described the Russian incursion as “unprovoked.”

Today, more than 500,000 brave Ukrainian soldiers are unnecessarily dead, with an untold number of casualties, when a peace deal had been reached back in April of 2022, a deal agreed to by the respective negotiators in Istanbul, as confirmed by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet who was there. At the last moment, clown hair model and former Conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson arrived in Turkey as NATO’s emissary and told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the lifeline of Western financial support for Ukraine would be withdrawn unless he agreed to walk away from the peace agreements he’d made. Zelensky was offered billions of dollars more in military aid, and instead of an end to the war, the U.S. and NATO wanted to “fight until the last Ukrainian.” American arms manufacturers rejoiced.

Apparently, all these brave Cold Warriors no longer fear nuclear conflict, and the end to all life on the planet as we know it. While the Cold War was based on the dubious premise that fear of nuclear annihilation was a deterrent to a direct conflict between nuclear powers, octogenarian Gwynne Dyer is now praying for a nuclear rapture prior to his more natural expiration date. “Better dead than red” is Dyer’s Russophobic inclination when it comes to who governs the Russian speaking oblasts in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe prior to the war, and is now a failed state with no elected government, no functioning economy, no free press, no political opposition, and with some branches of the Orthodox Church having been outlawed. A quarter of Ukraine’s population now lives in exile, and most are unlikely to return. Nothing says, “freedom and democracy” like Volodymyr Zelensky’s martial law, his elected term having ended in May of this year. Thanks for the memories Gwynne!

Navigating troubled times.

October 3, 2024

Let’s not demonize the truth-tellers. It is normal in times such as these to feel so desperate and frightened by the news that we distance ourselves from information that is too hard, too painful to hear. We seem to be going from horror to horror these days – one minute wringing our hands over the Israeli deliberate obstruction of aid to the starving and homeless people of Gaza, the next, reeling in astonishment at the fact that the largest empire in the history of the world will be “presided over” until late January, 2025, by a man with dementia, who is blindly sending billions of dollars in weapons to a genocidal rogue nation, and the next, learning of a new kind of warfare – injuring thousands of Lebanese innocents and killing many by detonating communication devices, followed by devastating aerial bombings – warfare being conducted, once again by Israel, to terrorize a population.

It is all surreal, and the deep threat posed by these realities gets covered over by media and politicians’ endless absorption in the next US election. And by whether or not you like the writing of Caitlin Johnstone. If you don’t like her writing, don’t read her. Focus on what matters.

What matters in my view is that in the last several months, two of the more moderate leaders in the informal alliance called the “axis of resistance” (Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Yemeni Houthis) – Ismail Haniyeh (Head of Hamas’ political wing) and Hassan Nasrallah (Lebanese Secretary-General of Hezbollah) – have both been assassinated by Israel. These are two men who saw the big picture and have shown over the years their willingness and ability to negotiate. Naturally most people don’t know that because attempts to negotiate and offers of peace agreements “from the enemy” don’t make mainstream news. They are rarely reported, unless you go to such independent outlets as Democracy Now!, Helena Cobban/Just World Ed., Canadians for Justice & Peace in the Middle East, Max Blumenthal & Aaron Mate/The Grey Zone, Jewish Voice for Peace, Mondoweiss, Jonathan Cook, and Progressives International, to name a few.

If the moderates are assassinated, it is not rocket science to expect that those more radical will take their place. What on earth is Israel thinking? That is anyone’s guess, but Mouin Rabbani, a Dutch-Palestinian political analyst who has dedicated his scholarly career to Middle East issues, considers that Israel is deliberately using provocation. By murdering Hassan Nasrallah September 27th, and taking hundreds of innocents out with him, it is seeking to engage the countries surrounding Israel in a military conflagration that will necessarily involve the US and “fundamentally transform the strategic equation in the Middle East.”

Rabbani says that Nasrallah was known as a strategic thinker, for playing the long game. That after 32 years in his leadership role, where he had deep personal bonds with his constituents, he may well be replaced by a younger generation focused on seeking revenge for its losses.

Israel wants to de-link Hezbollah from Gaza according to Rabbani, but Hezbollah is “not a small militia. Decades in the making, it is a very deeply entrenched and sophisticated organization…it would take years of much more intensive efforts to dismantle it,…[as it] has a very deep bench”. (Owen Jones interview with Rabbani, 28 September, 2024) Hezbollah has for years

been part of the Lebanese coalition government, is an integral part of Lebanese society, and currently has two government ministries.

Over the course of the last 11 months, we have heard of numerous incursions by Hezbollah into Israel and the displacement of thousands of Israelis from Northern Israel, but it was only a BBC investigation that recently reported that 80% of the armed military exchanges came from Israel against Hezbollah. And how often do we hear that hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have been displaced from Southern Lebanon at the hands of Israel? This is just another example of media bias and why it can be so confusing to unravel.

More on the late Ismail Haniyeh, former Head of Hamas’ political wing, coming soon.

As my dear mum would occasionally say: “I’ve heard both sides and I just don’t know who to blame”. Well, in this case as with the US proxy war in Ukraine, it does not need to be about blame; it’s about responsibility and accountability. Who is supplying the weapons? Who is fueling the fight from the sidelines? What is our role as Canadians? Who is demonizing one side and making diplomacy a non-starter? Most of all for me as an old person, what are we teaching our young ones when we consider this dangerous state of affairs our “new normal”? We all know that violence begets violence and we must not ever become inured to it. We have to take a strong stand for an end to the violence and a return to other ways of resolving conflict. It is easy to negotiate with people we identify and agree with. Much harder and absolutely necessary in these troubled times is the act of “having tea with our demons”. Our leaders have to sit down like grownups and talk about their differences with “the enemy”. This is big work and there are many capable people who can assist in such endeavours, including Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, who is calling out to the world to recognize its double standards and abide by international law. So let’s not let ourselves become distracted by the blame game. Eyes wide open.

Capitalism Is Driven By Mental Illness

October 3, 2024

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

SEP 26, 2024

I saw a fascinating tweet by BloomTech CEO Austen Allred the other day that stirred up a lot of thoughts here.

“Of the Silicon Valley founders I know who went on some of the psychedelic self-discovery trips, almost 100% quit their jobs as CEO within a year,” Allred said, adding, “Could be random anecdotes, but be careful with that stuff.”

Allred tweeted this in response to writer Ashlee Vance sharing that he’d been told by a venture capitalist, “We’ve lost several really good founders to ayahuasca. They came back and just didn’t care about much anymore.”

There’s some very useful information in those words. They reveal a lot about the insane mess our species finds itself in in today’s world, and provide insight into how we might find our way out.

https://x.com/Austen/status/1838078134215991535

I mean, think about it. How bizarre is it that our entire civilization is structured around values and priorities which are so fake and ridiculous that ingesting an ancient psychedelic potion causes even wealthy CEOs to quit their jobs and change their lives?

All it takes is a slight shift in consciousness, a little tilt in perspective, and you immediately see that this whole rat race of domination and acquisition and productivity and wealth hoarding that all our political and economic systems have as their foundational premise is completely destructive to happiness and human thriving.

It’s not surprising that this is happening, though. People achieve their goals and become immensely wealthy, and they start wondering why they’re still unhappy. They do a little seeking and wind up taking ayahuasca in Peru, and then they watch all the psychological mechanisms which drove them to claw their way up the corporate ladder crumble before their very eyes.

Of course CEOs are now warning each other to “be careful with that stuff”; it poses a direct existential threat to their CEOness.

Psychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they provide but for the hallucinations they dispel. You actually have to be mentally ill to achieve what this profoundly sick society of ours defines as “success”. Your head has to be full of a bunch of fantasies and fictional narratives which have no basis in material reality. You’ve got to have a hole in yourself that cannot be filled with any amount of wealth or power or private jets or private islands. That’s the only thing that can propel you to step on top of all the people you need to step on in order to become obscenely rich. And those are the hallucinations that a good hallucinogen can knock right out of your skull.

It isn’t necessary to travel to the Amazon rainforest to be liberated from the madness of this capitalist civilization. It isn’t even necessary to take psychedelics. All it takes is rigorous self-examination and inner work, and a burning desire to perceive life as it really is. Devoutly and sincerely question all your beliefs about reality, right down to your most basic assumptions about the nature of fundamental aspects of your experience, like existence, self, other, perception, thought, and awareness. Find those gaping emotional wounds and maladaptive coping mechanisms within yourself, and with uncompromising self-honesty bring them into consciousness to be healed.

Do this and inner clarity becomes inevitable. The unavoidable fruits of deep, sincere looking make it impossible to sustain the will to do all the backstabbing and throat cutting necessary to obtain that next billion dollars, but they will give you the peace and wellbeing that you are actually looking for underneath that false desire. They will fill that hole you were trying to fill with wealth and achievement and our society’s perverse definition of success. They will allow you to have real happiness, not because of anything you have accomplished or obtained or won from your imagined competitors, but because you exist, and because this world is unfathomably beautiful.

That’s all we’re really seeking. That’s what people are really going for when they dedicate their lives to becoming millionaires and then billionaires and then trillionaires. We all just want inner peace and happiness, which we can have if we do what’s necessary to dispel the hallucinations that keep us from realizing it’s already here.

_____________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go hereto buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.