A demonstration of the everyday censorship of knowledge production is difficult. The main obstacle to acquiring it is the clash between this demonstration and our individual identity.
There are those who are quite frightened by the prospect of being led into a post-human society. Be it a society in which humans are expendable, replaced by machines, or a society in which humans are transformed into machines, for example, used to maintaining social distance to avoid pandemics, informed of who is sick around them through mobile phones´ applications, conditioned by chips that serve, at the same time, as a vaccine and georeferenced of the position of each and every one. It would be impossible to imagine the viability of such plans if humanity were not already conditioned by mechanisms, social technologies, of which we are not aware. As robotization would not be possible without the prior taylorization and fordization of productive activities, the post-humanization of society would not be viable without the previous dehumanization of humanity through the misuse of language.
Communication between living beings is indispensable to life, even microscopic or vegetal life. The special importance of language, the use of symbols in communication, later enhanced by writing, by the democratization of writing, by electronic writing, and by the internet, on the one hand, cannot be overstated and, on the other hand, has been concealed. No conspiracy theory is needed to show this conspiracy: it is self-evident. It is produced by us, common mortals, including the reader and the scribe here.
Better than explaining it is to show it. Imagine that you agree with me on this: the imperial tradition, carried on by the Roman Catholic Church since the fall of the Empire, is characterized by promoting a misogynistic, elitist, and disguised state of mind all over the world. The exercise is simple: look at this banal photograph of St. Peter’s Square, sold at Vatican kiosks as probably the most common souvenir, and think about how this photograph shows and hides, at the same time, the imperial state of mind as defined above.
Anyone can repeat this exercise anywhere with the same result. People, alone or in groups, look at the image and only see still life: a monumental part of a city whose symbolic interpretation eludes us. Even when one or another person has an obvious interpretation of what he sees, he quickly dismisses it as inappropriate. However, what is in sight is obvious and could hardly be said to be unintentional. It corresponds to an older tradition originating in the time of the Pharaohs, a tradition cited by the architecture of the square itself.
The photograph, taken from the top of St. Peter’s Cathedral, where God could be looking down, shows what do see someone looking down on himself: an enchanted avenue-sized phallus, supported by two huge testicles and an Egyptian obelisk that offers a triple dimension to the phallus.
St. Peter’s Square was built to mean something. Certainly, to impose an empire, at least at the spiritual level. What, from the point of view of the architect who designed the site plan, and who hired it and accepted its design, characterizes the spirit of the Empire? The simple answer is a) evident misogyny, which can be confirmed in many other ways, including the problem of Church agents with child sexual abuse, which has become intractable and has occupied that institution in the last two papates; b) Pope Francis, referring to this problem, expressed his opinion that the root cause of the difficulty of purging the protections that child sexual abuse practices benefit in the institution is clericalism. The expression means the abuse of power practiced in a habitual, naturalized way, which consists of the agents of the papacy considering themselves people with the right to privileges, as members of an elite. Sexual abuse, according to the Pope, will be both a radical and indispensable expression of the privileges self-assigned by organized Vatican agents who resist policies condemning this type of practice.
The demonstration experience that has just been made – and can be replicated worldwide under Catholic influence – should not be interpreted as an attack on religion or the Church of Rome. It is the Church of Rome that has a known influence of using language as a spiritual power capable of continuing to resist the fall of the Empire, centuries after it was declared extinct.
Helped by many companies, brotherhoods, and religious secret societies, all competing between them and, at the same time, in solidarity in the recreation of covert and misogynist elites, the Church of Rome continues to publicly exercise its misogynistic, elitist and covert services in the name of the Christian ideology. This ideology, before those who judge it, claims to be alongside the poor and the brotherhood of all human beings. There is no need to do any scientific research to demonstrate the existence of censorship of knowledge production within the conscience of each of us, long before Bill Gates become rich making chips.
How were these spiritual cognitive chips implanted in people, believers, and non-believers, under the influence of the Church’s action, even – or above all – in secular societies, as modern societies are?
In traditional societies, societies in which religion was the way in which people self-identified themselves, their family and other broader social grouping, the local influence of Catholic agents (the same happened and still happens with Muslims, Jews, or others religious agents) was superlative, in the eyes of the laity who today we are. In these societies, the idea of being secular was not even considered. What was at stake was survival: disconnecting from the social support network, becoming a vagabond, represented becoming at the mercy of not only nature but also social human distrust and violence. With the gradual secularization of Western societies, to abolish the religious wars, the wars of identities, individual freedom created a space of self-identification to fill. As Marx and Engels discovered, enslaved workers found in wage labor reasons to live proudly self-identified with their communities, at the same time in solidarity, mutual, and spiritual aid.
The best theory about individual and social identity is that of George H. Mead, the self that dialogues, in intimacy, with the generalized other. However, its theorization is mixed with the amalgamation of symbolic interactions, with theories about children separated from theories about adults, walled between disciplines, as social psychology. Anyway: several mechanisms to cover up the scientific value of Mead’s social theory are in use to disqualify the possibility, which in its time was pursued and desired, of social philosophy becoming a science like the others, instead of the soft science that today the social sciences are claimed to be.
The self is produced and maintained in an incorporated way by each and every one of us, including in modern and secular societies, due to the implicit conceptions of what society is, what the generalized other is. Each one of us builds a self by himself, in interaction with whatever life experience background it. The self is an indiscernible part of our personal and social consciousness, which we cannot do without or disconnect from. Of course, we must put it up with ourselves with enough courage and hope to survive the mishaps of life. As Pierre Bourdieu explained, we do it based on dispositions, incorporated abilities acquired in childhood and youth, which we then use as adults as second nature, as identities. These dispositions are mainly non-rational: they are the result of our experiences of incorporation, including as adults.
In modern times, confused with the supposed granted freedoms, which are also obligations and responsibilities of self-identification, for most of us professional self-identification, we are often looking for what we truly, spontaneously, are or want to be. What we truly are, beyond what we strive professionally to be: is the search for freedom, which could be experienced in free time, but which modern people have a hard time finding.
Our modern identity is made up of a self-division between that which is artificially learned, in schools and jobs, and that one learns at home. These divided identities are presented to us as free, even responsible; that is, we are guilty of not knowing what to do with our socially limited freedom.
Modern societies produce abundant institutional differentiation. Growing myriads of institutions solicit collaboration from each person according to the capability of manipulating specialized, professional languages, all of which offer suggestions for other generalized and freedoms that can be used, albeit in a partial way. Each person is called upon to choose – this is freedom! – the institutional references that she considers to be useful for her – her vocation – and to dedicate her life, or part of it, to meet the needs of participation, maintenance, differentiation, of the institutions that intend to join.
Modern institutions are small empires: misogynists, elitists and covert, that is, discriminatory, hierarchical, and specialized in a tight way related to other specializations.
This is no surprise to anyone. Whoever enters a school or a company or a state agency or a bank knows very well that the secret is the soul of the business. And when someone whistle blows corruption, for example, he knows that not only his personal identity – linked to the profession and the institution from which he takes resources, including his own identity -, but also the social networks that are his direct connection to the life one lives, all can be compromised for the rest of one´s life. One can imagine that there are other social networks that value the need of struggling for social justice. And you can also experience disillusionment, like Manning or Assange. Their experiences led Snowden to abandon his family and seek protection where he found it: next to a strategic enemy of his own country.
These modern institutional functions that are self-organized and integrated, at different, local, regional, national, international, continental, global levels, produce a lot of garbage. Not only material garbage, but also human and, therefore, spiritual garbage. Many of us are educated to stay out of any institution. In fact, we all are educated to do so. The secret of each institution seems to us to be sacred – it opens the space to conspiracy theories. As sacred as the secrets of our families and of the institutions one is part of. We are authorized, through competitions or otherwise, to access places inside the institutions. This is as valuable to people as life. For this reason, we have traded the freedom of free time for paid courses and unpaid internships, in the hope that we can prove to be reliable in keeping business secrets. When we show it, we know it, we may eventually have an opportunity to make a professional living in the future. Of course, we quickly discovered that institutional secrets are well kept by hierarchies with access to coded information and knowledge and with controlled circulation circuits of information in such a way as to make different levels of reality watertight.
The dissimulation of institutional secrets – the soul of business – is done through the hierarchy of the circulation of information encoded in specialized languages. The hierarchy as much as the specialized and professional connotations of words are incorporated, through school and professional training, in each person, without any chip. Secrets are thus kept socially by the elites.
This imperial and modern process of functioning produces a lot of garbage, including human garbage. The human garbage is the people who are educated to consider themselves as garbage and who serve as a doormat so that the people who manage to integrate the institutional professional functions feel intimately the need to be faithful to the institutional secrets.
It is true that the hierarchy and hyperspecialization of communication are effective in protecting secrets. But it is also certain that their public exposure causes a tremendous alarm among those who can decode information – the elites. They fear that other people, although not initiated, people from lower social circles, despite being outside the ranks, despite not been through initiatory circles, can understand what is written.
To fight these people who learned to point out the naked King, the elites learned two strategies: one is denial and the other is the most radical repression. Often, it is enough to deny the evidence for the factual denunciation to mix accusations with misunderstandings and misinformation. Most of the time accusations are dissolved in the torrent of conspiracy theories and opposition ideologies games. This is the knowledge washing machine, generated by institutional secrets and the exclusion of the majority of the population from the most important strategic information works. All those who once turned against any institution, even if innocently, imagining to enter in the democracy game, experienced the hatred and disgust that such a stance provokes in the elites and, often, also in workers who are keen to protect the institutional secrets on which their social status depend on. Most of these situations do not even deserve denial or repression: modern societies stifle the issue on their own.
The elites, of course, rely on societies to keep the Empire functioning. Obviously, the Empire is produced and reproduced every day by those who work for it. People who do not want to work for the elites, who do not want to discriminate people from each other, much less produce waste, in particular, human waste, those who preferred to live in a transparent and corruption-free society in the 19th and early 20th centuries were censored, persecuted and repressed. However, the Empire was able to drastically reduce political prisoners, as hyperdisciplinary policies were disseminated and organized by democratized access universities, starting in the 1970s. Today, the organized confusion in the media by think thank and utilitarian sciences that provide professional commentators and disqualify journalists leads to repression mainly on social networks, where private entities do the dirty work of censorship and feed the desperate public with fake news. Fake news allegedly with political consequences in the most recent elections.
Undoubtedly, currently, the manipulation of opinions is an industry with extraordinary capabilities. The depoliticization carried out by the normalization of democracy, the hypnotic effect of the screens, and the schooling of the masses may also have had an effect on limiting the intelligence of the new generations. Science may have played a relevant role in this process. See how obscure epidemiologists pre-prepared the response to the 2020 pandemic crisis, not knowing nothing about the virus and concentrating on managing problems of the mood of the people facing the disease.
Globalization was driven by the overpowering Cold War surviving superpower, encouraging people to dream of a planetary brotherhood, a global village enjoying human rights. However, contrary to hope, neither misery was eradicated, nor wars were abolished, nor ideological struggles were overcome. Religious disputes have reappeared, as neo-Nazi-fascism struggles to recover the ideologies of the III Reich, declared early defeated, and the Communist Party of China, reconciled with capitalism, become the apparent big winners of the bankruptcy of the western financial and political system.
More important than knowing who wins the dispute for staying with the seat of the Empire, Washington or Beijing, what matters is knowing how to build hope and a work program to be able to live in freedom. The answer is, without demonstration, the empire must be abolished. Starting with the empire in us. The empire that makes it impossible for us to read public messages, not at all secret, completely transparent, placed by elites everywhere, so that the imperial state of mind is incorporated as subliminal identity. Our naturalized, needed and loved identities.
The propaganda included in this video serves, of course, the empire, in the form of a charity whose revenue is millennial and whose results can be seen in the Vatican opulence, or in any of the many wealthy religious congregations. But it also carries with it a fundamental secret about the characterization of modern society. Prisoners, almost all, from children, are adults built socially, institutionally, and politically to be dangerous criminals, before they can have control over their identities.
Human waste is not just a waste of people who have not been able to get a job or who have been excluded from schools. Even the most humble and exploited workers, those whose income is not enough to survive and whose employment relationship depends on the will of the employer, to encourage themselves to continue the daily way of looking for work on an empty stomach, can count on the existence of sacrificed lives, like those of children abandoned by their families and / or captured by social institutions in modern states. Their intense and persistent humiliation, capable of feeding clandestine networks in the daylight, such as those of prostitution, where they are used almost only formerly abandoned girls, and those of crime, where almost only formerly abandoned boys are used, also serve as a warning for workers. How lucky seems to be those who are spared from this misery. When abandoned children survive in adults, they are dangerous marginals easily manipulated to cover up the black economy, eventually tolerated, eventually managed by the elites and feared by workers.
The positive empire, the celestial hierarchy, as the religious mind imagine it, depends directly on the social and institutional production of social and institutional hells, intentionally produced social exclusions, in charge of security and social workers, together. Police and social workers in precarious professional and social situations, themselves.
The gentlemen who organized globalization were not and are not capable of abolishing misery because modern societies live on top of that misery, without which the imperial model would be practically impossible to be accepted by people with sufficient freedom to behave with a minimum of morality. Professionalism, political ideologies, the hyperdisciplinarity of sciences, the schooling of the masses, advertising through screens, make the empire the dominant form of organization, on top of the greatest misery that humanity has ever known, producing material waste where a large part of the miserable people literally inhabits, in famine.
Institutionalized censorship of knowledge production is based on our own personal identity production. The naturalized blackmail applied to each one of us: we all know that those who do not integrate society will be persecuted, by forcibly social integration policies, in nursing homes, hospices, barracks, prisons, schools. Only the wicked, we say to ourselves, are opposed to the solicitude of modern states and societies. This urges us to be good. Good professionals, good family members, good citizens, good policemen, good soldiers, good patriots, that is, friends of our countrymen assigned by the national registers. Records where those who are formed as garbage resort, and the others who follow them in times of crisis, waving to others with the common flag, the only and last possible connection within society, while sinking in their respective inhumanity.
OpenEdition sugere que esta publicação seja citada da seguinte forma:
Antonio Dores (23 de Abril de 2020). The power of connotation. Libertação do império (Liberation from the Empire). Recuperado em 26 de Janeiro de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/qvmk