Caged in Oligarchic Contradictions
Edward Curtin
![](https://off-guardian.org/wp-content/medialibrary/adobe-stock-birdcage-scaled.jpeg?x66930)
A contronym is a word having two definitions that contradict each other. Two examples are the word bolt, which can mean to lock with a bolt and to flee, and clip, which means to attach and to detach.
There are many such words and there is also a system of thought based on them. It has no name except for the one I give it here, admittedly an awkward one: The Contronymal Circus. Like words that are their own antonyms, this system of thought confuses and traps, as it is meant to do.
Language is of course slippery and equivocal, with words often connoting multiple meanings. But language is also conditioned by history; even my phrasing it that way is an example of using words in a loose and sloppy way, for “history” doesn’t exist and can’t do anything, people make history, use and shape words for their own designs, even as language then uses them as well.
To say I am making a moot point is an example of my point: Is it arguable or irrelevant to consider? Is that clear?
The American oligarchic political system that is endlessly debated and fixates people’s attention is a contronymal system that contains positive and negative poles that cancel each other out while keeping the believer frozen and frustrated. Once you are in it, you are trapped because there are no outside references – the simulated system of thought is your cage. Biden vs. Trump is an example of this cage.
The great Irish writer James Joyce was born in 1882 in Ireland that was historically subjected to colonial domination by Great Britain. He realized early on that the English language bequeathed to him was not neutrally aesthetic but through usage was politically charged and that words meant one thing to the colonizers and another to the colonized. In The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, his autobiographical novel, he has Stephen Dedalus say about his conversation with his condescending Jesuit English-born dean of studies:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted his words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
For language constitutes “reality” as much as describes it. It is political. Therefore, all cultures of resistance need to reclaim language, which includes not just individual words and their meaning, but phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and narrative structures. When ruling elites can impose language usage on the ruled, they can control their thinking, their sense of “reality,” and their belief in what is possible.
This is why poets are so central to the resistance of oppressed people, and by oppressed people I include residents of the United States who may not describe themselves with that term. For when language is corrupted and thought twisted in sinister ways, all efforts to resist the colonizers of the mind are self-defeating. Double-binds are not reserved for personal relationships but pertain equally to politics and culture.
There is a reason why public discourse about politics (and most everything) in the U.S.A. is so circular in nature, so self-defeating, always ending in a dead-end as the system of oligarchic rule rolls along and even strengthens.
Think Bush vs. Gore, Obama vs. McCain, Hillary Clinton vs. Trump, Biden vs. Trump, Trump vs…someone.
Think of what has happened to reading, writing, and speaking skills throughout the society at every level. Functional illiteracy is widespread. Ignorance may not be bliss even when it’s folly to be wise, for the inability to grasp the contradictory nature of the story you are thinking in has no happy ending.
In the words of the Palestinian writer Edward Said: “As one critic has suggested, nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”
The French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, cast this language conundrum in terms of simulacra and simulation, simulacra between copies of copies that have no originals. He said:
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of the territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory….
Like a narrative structure that is a contronym – self-contradicting – there is no dialectical tension because the system has swallowed it. There is no critical negativity, no place to stand outside to rebel because the simulacrum encompasses the positive and negative in a circulatory process that makes everything equivalent but the “positivity” of the simulacrum itself. You are inside the whale: “The virtual space of the global is the space of the screen and the network, of immanence and the digital, of a dimensionless space-time.”
What I am trying to say is difficult to grasp because it is so twisted. To use language to untwist this example of what the poet William Blake called the “mind-forged manacles” that is the essence of explicit or implicit propaganda is hard because it involves uncovering the words used and the narratives we imbibe to understand our worlds. It involves grasping the presuppositions of a counterfeit system. It is much harder by the day because language has been radically reduced to slogans and words to images of images. Artificial Intelligence is further reducing all reality to illusions. We are caged in a system of contradictions, a narrative of contronyms through which we must see.
At the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce, the great wordsmith and experimenter with form who would go on to write Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, has Stephen Dedalus declare that he will leave Ireland to go and “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
It is time for us to leave as well, to abandon a way of thinking that offers us the false choice of the evil of two lessers in a corrupt system. We have been sold a counterfeit bill of goods, one forged in the devious minds of deans of deception who make Stephen’s interlocuter look like an obnoxious amateur.
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Artificial Intelligence is merely what passes for education at the ‘Uni/vers/ity’:
(One-version-ity).
“Holy Land” comes to mind…
Oligarchic Contradictions: Defending the Constitution by Fraud.
after signing the fraudulent letter, ascertaining the laptop story is a russian disinformation operation, by 51 security experts, former CIA acting director Michael Morell wrote about those experts:
evidence confirms inserting the Russians in the story was a total fabricatiorn and all of the 51 experts knew this.
highly likely -or, is it obvious?- the widespread of “Oligarchic Contradictions” is a factor in the increase in mental unease/exhaustion experiened by many these days.
‘They’ can forge and mould all they want. It seems to me that human-kind at large does not want to be freed from the manacles put around their thinking caps. To be freed from the propaganda word salad you’d have to feel a spark of independence, a penchant for freedom, a sign of free will, that is lacking in those who live comfortably within the bird cage. Stockholm syndrome, I think they call it.
This free will is willingly subordinated to whatever motivates the people – money, jobs, status, survival instinct. Our controllers know this; they have most of us by the throat.
It take extraordinary willpower and imagination to visualise a life outside the cage.
Living ‘outside the cage’ is simple: merely embrace being frugal and unambitious.
Off topic but the BBC’s (and, let’s face it, every other fucking media outlet’s) near psychotic fixation on women with willies continues: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7209lk8x2wo An article about renter distress presented by one “Emma”. Ain’t “she” sweet? Which leads me to a relevant tweet from Graham Linehan referring to an “(i)nteresting explanation of the BBC’s obsession with drag acts and crossdressers. A reply points out “The Head of facilitation of this org is one Kirrin Medcalf, previously of Stonewall, who had a starring role in the Alison Bailey tribunal”. Graham then links to a twitter thread from “SEENinJournalism” which I have reformatted here: * “The number of trans-identified men used as contributors on apparently random BBC stories has generated interest. The BBC has its own contacts database but one resource it uses for stories/contributors is a company called NEON. NEON is the New Economy Organisers Network – consultants who ‘help social justice movements win’. It routinely emails journalists, including lots of BBC journalists, offering story ideas and interviewees. They also offer media training. Emails from NEON will open with ‘we have five guests available today to discuss (insert story here)’. As an example, they offer ‘social justice’ activists like Cleo Madeleine, a trans-identified male from Gendered Intelligence, who’s had airtime on the BBC several times. There doesn’t need to be a story that’s already in the news – they offer ready to go items as well as ready to go guests, with a ‘full’ briefing for producers. This can be very appealing for talk radio show formats and live and continuous news coverage who have hours to fill. The BBC doesn’t officially endorse NEON, but the resources and contacts offered up are certainly used by some BBC journalists. Emails are frequent: they can be daily. It’s an intensive PR push for ‘social… Read more »
And for those with the strongets stomachs, drink in the glory of this smart and sassy spunky yoof culture social engineering outfit:
https://www.neweconomyorganisers.org/
Can you find it?
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_President_and_the_Press
Once you know it’s all fraud, that communism versus capitalism was a bankster ruse, voting is a con, the Constitution is invalid and unlawful, all the countries are privately owned corporations, centrally controlled so elections and politicians are meaningless, Kennedy’s speeches are comedic.
Nothing about Kennedy was true or truthful. Another Jesuit shill. Even his death was faked.
The fact that people misinterpret that speech to imply Kennedy was referring to the “Deep State” or “Illuminati” [when he was referring to Marx and the psyop of communism] is ironic.
We are at the epoch of socialized alienation and are caged by a false consciousness groomed by the universal religious dogma of the time: capitalism. Representations have replaced reality as the filter for perceiving what is real. Since most people are stuck in the representations that they see, whoever controls them controls the zombies. Harris is the representation that can represent president because Harris has been “seen” more than the others, or so they say. The others don’t have enough representation to be real, or so they say. If you are paying attention that is. Paying attention and defining what we want is the reality that will replace their simulation, as it collapses into it’s own exhausted reality.
Oh yeah! In the 1990s I wrote the first couple of lines
verse of a song I couldn’t finish, but which perfectly encapsulates this.
‘You’re not real unless you’ve been on TELEVISION.
You’re not real unless you’ve been
on the silver screen.’
JFK:
Even within oligarchical systems of government, there are real differences, real polarities, real alternatives and real choices.
it’s called communitarianism – and today Richard Hall is in court trying to stand up for himself – whilst not being able to defend himself courtesy of a member of the ‘justice’ fraternity who doesn’t believe in justice – unravel that …
The only “cure” to the insidious nature of language is a Disposable Language: use a word once then discard it. When you run out, make words up. Unfortunately, humans are social animals and therefore require shared words.
Any of us who are fairly well read and over time have acquired a substantial cache of words necessarily find less and less opportunity to use these words. All language is being reduced to the size of the smart phone. If it can’t be easily texted it will eventually be discarded. And then every word which cannot be reduced to initials will likewise be discarded – discarded, that is, entirely from disuse.
It’s as if people have come to an understanding that the species is winding down and will soon become extinct. So what do they need language for anyway?
Imagine a Shakespeare sonnet written in emoji’s.
Imagine the works of Montaigne as an interpretive dance.
Neuro-linguistic programming of a population. Semantic manipulation. Buzz words. New Speak.
Its like cooked bookkeeping. Like it is strictly forbidden to define 2+2 is 5 or anything else than 4, it is strictly forbidden to change personal pronouns and basic gramma.
You must not say: “We can just say grass basic colour is blue, and the sky’s basic colour is green. Because we can just say it, and then we are laughing our arses off, because we can just do anything. You cant!
You open Pandora’s box completely and karma will hit you hard. The solution is to know.
You know fools are changing figures and words meaning, creating confusion and crime stops in people’s conversations. You know it!
When and if you know it happens, you are prepared so you can defend yourself.
Fabulous. Thank you Edward. The only way out of this conundrum is to go inside and connect to the universal/divine in us, and remember who we really are: a soul living an earthly experience. To create a new reality, outside a whale, can only happen by manifesting a new paradigm from within through cooperation and connection with others and nature, away from polarity. Language creates reality, you very well said. It’s in our hands, but we need that connection with our true self to promote unity. Let’s not give our power away to a contronymial way of existence and dissolve the mirage once and for all. Alejandra Guibert
We Need Both Outer Work And Inner Work To Truly Free OurselvesJust as we all have a responsibility to help create a healthy and truth-based world, we also all have a responsibility to develop healthy and truth-based minds.
“It is absolutely true that the world and the cruel systems which guide it urgently need to change, and it is absolutely true that much of the suffering and mental illness we see in our society is due to the material, financial and psychological stress that people are placed under in this sick capitalist dystopia we find ourselves in. But that doesn’t mean you get to shirk your own adult responsibility to do the hard work necessary to bring the unconscious mechanisms of your own suffering and dysfunction into consciousness where they can be healed.
The truth is that even if you could snap your fingers and magically transport us into a socialist utopia where we are no longer ruled by tyrants and everyone has what they need, people would still find ways to make themselves miserable and would still act out their unconscious woundedness on the folks around them, because that’s just what the human mind does at this point in our development as a species. You see evidence of this all the time in the self-destructive behaviors and abusiveness of the rich and famous despite their having all their material needs taken care of.”
The Human Mind is a fractal in the holographic cosmos capable of adapting to anything.
always remember the lovely boy from my fair lady not the glorious jeremy brett the greatest sherlock holmes but his love interest.
the boy from breakfast at tiffanys a delicate creature who had a female character name of
you know her years later he she he worked with spielbergs and the united nations.
i always remember the bird cage hat he she wore at that rothschild eyes wide shut style party.the singer of moon river had his her head inside a bird cage google it
the images of jacobs wacky 1970s party are the bong .
merisa berenson was at the shindig 2 who was in kubricks barry lyndon
what was his name her name again you nose george peppards jeremy bretts love interest
elemental my dear watsons
The Rothschilds used to be the Bauers:
Could of also used the Jack/Knave.
jack bauer
from tik tok tik tok
tv shoah 24
always chasing arabs with nuke bomb suitcase who wanted to destroy the homo lands cos they hated ares freedumbs
… and “farmer” in today’s language. Was that their family’s heritage?
Scoundrel! Confess at once that the Fair Lady is the most graceful and beautiful nymph in the world, or deal with me in combat.
Audrey Hepburn. Her father was a British Consul and her mother a Dutch Baroness. Ordinary people aren’t allowed to be movie “stars”. Both her parents were in the British Fascist party and basically Nazis, as were the British (German) royals.
The Rot-Schilds (Red Shield) aren’t even Jews, they’re the Vatican’s and European “royals” bankers. Red being the cardinal color of the Vatican.
you sea the dutch merchants cohen made cromwell
the city was chock full of foreign merchant from the 10 century square mile foreign.
the khazhar ashkanazim non semite the trident on the ukrainian army uniform
oded yinon gaza new khazaria ukraine
audrey was a doll a non semite little man alas
hollywood babylon
waterloo could not escape if i wanted 2
history books on the shelf always repeating always repeating itself
baal molech baphomet
watch recent anthony hopkins speech pure satanism like mason carl sagan saying we are nothing but little specks
they openly deny God
funny thing is they never mention satan
all of them witches was the book mia farrow read in that master class act movie rosemary and her baby satan.
la la la la la la la la la la
A Surrealist Parisian Dinner Party chez Madame Rothschild, 1972 (messynessychic.com)
“He realized early on that the English language bequeathed to him was not neutrally aesthetic but through usage was politically charged and that words meant one thing to the colonizers and another to the colonized.”
He realized early that locutions were the play,
A wall is an enclosure.
An enclosure is a pen.
This is the place that the food is kept in.
A hem is an enclosure, and so is a wall.
Politicians support the western side, ensuring it won’t fall.
Bethel Park – Bethelhem – western wall – people are a battery.
And, that’s it for bad poetry.
Love is the most important thing because it means worship, and peace is a quiet population, which means suppressed/oppressed.
North Korea is a loving and peaceful nation, right?
*Dy means day, and a *dyeu is ‘of the day’, as in *dyeus, or ‘sky father’ (zeus). This is not jew, that’s just phonetics.
Justice is an ‘alleged’ wrongdoing, and a man is just if he harms his enemies whether perceived or otherwise. So, if I declare humanity my enemy for the perceived wrongdoing of climate change, I am just and right in punishing them. For that, their god is an oath.
All lies, know the words, it’s all a script and James Joyce knew it too.
“When ruling elites can impose language usage on the ruled, they can control their thinking, their sense of “reality,” and their belief in what is possible.”
They love walls, I wonder why….
My favourite contronym is “inflammable”
But pity the French !
“Personne” means person or nobody.
“Plus” means more or none.
But not quite as serious as the poor bomb disposal man told to “déclenchez”
Either deactivate or set it off.
do you lot use the same quote sites.? or read the same books.?
or is it the same person using different guises.
dassom CJ used Jean Baudrillard mixed with a Matrix quote 4 days ago.
I wondered about that too. Synchronicity ?
Getting the same Intel-handler memos probably.
Social distancing. Why They want you isolated and alone.
“…. totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it…
bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging in the
world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences
of man.
Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
https://zero-sum.org/social-distancing-why-they-want-you-isolated-and-alone
Clint Eastwood never cried he was alone not belonging. On the contrary he knew he was needed in this world.https://youtu.be/1V_xRb0x9aw
there are rorschach blots, and then the inevitable blots on one’s character…
and then there are bolts of cloth, to be used as gauze or bunting.
And then after that, there is Usain Bolt, and his cousin Insane Bolt.
Must be Nuts.
‘Artificial Intelligence’™ has an internal contronym, which Mind only can’t grasp, oligarchic hive or otherwise.
Knowledge by Identity is a whole other ballgame, possible in the obvious material world by a prepared human individual but the norm in a parallel – non physical existence, the actual source. The whole Internet is just a poor reflection of that region.
I’ve always thought that “Simulated Intelligence” was a more accurate description. AI as a concept has been around for decades but has been quite limited in scope because machines (“computers”) weren’t at all powerful.
I’m used to instructing — programming — computers. There’s an old saying in this business that “It never does what I want it to do, only what I tell it” — these machines are very literal, they’re as thick as a brick. If their software is sufficiently complex then they’ll appear intelligent and many of us might get fooled by this and start thinking that they have knowledge and understanding to the point that they actually start believing in them, they cease to be potentially useful machines and start becoming deities. If enough of us start doing this then the priesthood — those of us who know how to manipulate them (and are the “brotherhood” — deviancy from the orthodox is never tolerated) gain quite a lot of power over our fellow humans.
Could ‘artificial intelligence’ not be viewed as an oxymoron?
Words can mean many things, listen to someone speak “LEGALESE” and you might think you are listening to “English” being spoken, however you’ll need to consult Black’s Law to actually have an idea of what’s being said.
For instance to “UNDERSTAND” can be interpreted as to “STAND UNDER THE LAW”.
So being an exceptionally good listener and knowing what’s be said to you can be very important to one’s survival.
These days one must be very careful in choosing the appropriate word(s) to best convey the intended meaning, much cunnilingus one slip of the tongue is all it takes.
Words can be many things…
EDIT here: “much like cunnilingus one slip of the tongue is all it takes.”
Lol I should heed my own advice [snicker]
My mother’s tongue is ‘Strine (aka – Australian English)…
Some locals still speak it, but most mostly speak Marketing…
Marketing is not hard to learn – just tune into the ‘chat
shows’ on your teevee… It’s rare to get into a conversation
nowadays without feeling the other is a teevee talking to you,
sounding very much like an advertisement…
I used to think crossword puzzles were a big corrupter of
the meanings of words… they still corrupt, but not as much as
the talking heads (wannabe celebs) on the chat shows… And
you can readily tell, they’d underwent years of schooling…
We are born wordless and therefore in a state of thought-less-ness.
Everything we perceive is in the now.
Every sight, sound, smell and touch.
Everything is awe-some.
Then we are taught to talk, think and memorise, and the awesomeness of everything begins to diminish.
It’s how we function in this world.
It’s also how we lose touch with the numinous.
Unless?
The English language is a brilliant construct that has been designed to keep you in your head and not your heart.
And is there not something strange going on with homophones such as ‘morning’ and ‘mourning’ and there are other examples of light and dark homophones.
Time itself is construed to loop in an unchanging cycle… Sunday to Saturday, reinforcing weekly habits, in a twelve month calendar that doesn’t even synchronize with the lunar cycle.Each day is new unto itself, we never step into the same river, our bodies are always regenerating, forming new synaptic connections, the world continues to evolve effortlessly, under the waves.
Carlos Castaneda writes about the sorcerer don Juan explaining how the conditioning to embrace a particular view of reality takes place: “For the sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description. For the sake of validating this premise don Juan concentrated the best of his efforts into leading me into a genuine conviction that what I held as the world at hand was merely a desciption of the world; a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born. He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. According to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have any point of reference to compare it to anything else…. For don Juan, then, the reality of our day-today life consists of an endless flow of interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.
Modern physics would probably agree with that.
It’s all about the observer and the observed.
SOPHISTRY | definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary
Lol.
Hate to say this, but isn’t it *Finnegans Wake* without the apostrophe?
Excuse me if this a faux pas – but: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/19/james-joyce-and-the-missing-apostrophe
‘cuse me Regret, didn’t you mean <i>https://web.archive.org/web/20230514093109/https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/19/james-joyce-and-the-missing-apostrophe</i>
Dump the Guardian means nothing if you didn’t.
“You’ll own nothing and be happy”
Especially when you’re dead.
You don’t own your house, your business or your body as these things can be taken from you and given to someone else to use.
The only thing you truly own is your virtue. No one can take that from you.