Our most successful project has obviously been to get so many people to think that death is in fact trendy. It may be a big Hollywood moneyspinner, and consumed by hordes of mortgage-bound lager-soaked redbrick Tory morons, but you can always wallow in cheap no-budget tack about serial killers, skinheads and others with variously destroyed psyches and pretend that somehow you are still being “subversive”. The fact that authority relies on mutually assured fear of death to keep its power intact, and therefore that death-love is in fact deeply reactionary, should not perturb you. You can always argue that because you don’t have enough money for large-scale death reproduction, that makes you somehow special in your mediocrity. Thankfully, nobody has realised that fear of death is the fuel that drives all Our schemes, and that the fear of death can actually be overcome. So instead everybody hates sex and wallows in death, because although they don’t want to die, they have to obsessively keep “consuming” others’ deaths as a second-rate act of therapy.
Concerning such matters, we are presently busy preventing anybody from realising that the present debate over violence on screen and in books is largely irrelevant. Thankfully, practically nobody so far seems to have cottoned on to the real effect of consumerised violence (where “consumerised” means off-loaded into the information overload network we all wallow in these days). For the record, that effect isn’t to make people into “copycats” — it’s to depress those who consume it. The best way to keep people under the thumb is to inject memes of extreme violent psychosis into them, whether via TV news, cult horror films, newspapers, supposedly “alternative” industrial music groups, or potboiler paperbacks about serial killers. When people encounter details of demonic activities over which they have no control, they become agitated, frightened and above all demotivated. A nice feedback loop starts up where they refuse to accept anything good can become of the world, and slump into apathy, thus making sure that things become that little bit darker — and of course easier for Us to control. The masses, both straight and “underground”, meekly accept that while organised religion is rubbish, it was right when it said the world was hell. So we get to keep the best bit of religion — the bit that keeps people under control, scared, worried that they’re here in the first place. This has been our best control mechanism yet -to involve supposedly “underground” organisations and individuals in doing our “overground” work of circulating despair. Everybody is so deeply addicted to some vacuous, unexamined “need to know” that they will happily gorge themselves on second-hand reports of real and fictitious atrocities without ever lifting a finger to improve either their own lives or those of anybody in their vicinity.
For those with too much sensitivity remaining to stomach endless depictions of cruel death and violence, we came up with other forms of “entertainment” and kept the working week absurdly long, decades after technology could have shrunk it drastically. The Spectacle was designed to fill life with Modified Starch Time (MST) — the temporal equivalent of that mysterious gloopy bulking substance that gets into most manufactured food simply for the purpose of making it seem more substantial. You only get one life at a time, and we manage to ensure that when you’re not working you spend the rest of your time cleaning, tidying up, going shopping, being tired, watching TV, and generally behaving like a dull bastard. We’ve also pretty much got it accepted by everybody of any political persuasion that having a job is what makes you a worthwhile human being. And just to ensure that nobody ever relaxes, we managed to get “laziness” (i.e. genuine relaxation) looked down on by everybody. We can already see what that does to the self-esteem of the unemployed.
Obviously the mind keeps all incoming material in the subconscious, and will therefore become full of garbage as long as we can make sure that’s what people are tricked into thinking that they want. And that’s very easy to do when everybody’s scared to the back teeth with both death and life. With almost no prompting from Us, they flock to the false security of 9-to-5 wage slavery, and the unthinking submission to authority that comes from an inability to trust themselves. They blot out their panic with depressant drugs, depressant films and vacuum-ous plastic shrunk holo-representations of non-existent histories. And then when they might show some sign of waking up, we employ Our army of biologists, intellectuals, artists, physicists, rationalists, and ismists to point out that human nature is No Good, there is No God but Man and Man is No Go(o)d, but even so you Must Keep Alive At All (Lo-)Costs. Yes! It’s Official! Humanity is Crap! Existence is a Mistake! Now get back to your job and stop whining, and don’t even think about all those woolly-minded dreamers who actually seem to know how to enjoy themselves!
We enthusiastically promote self-mistrust about sex, because sex makes people happy. With both sex-negative feminism and the right-wing female-hating backlash we have wrapped up pretty much most of the debate on sex. Of course the apparently opposite viewpoints of PC and anti-PC were in fact both dreamt up by Us to severely curtail the spontaneity of sex, bringing hyper-accurate argumentativeness right into the middle of the most gloriously irrational and spontaneous aspect of human behaviour. Women who show “too much” interest in sex, or any sexual originality, or any ability to set their own agenda, are now hounded by feminists and right-wing tabloid dupes alike. Also it is now almost universally accepted that Men Are Rubbish — but even though they are Irredemable, Moral-free and Weak it’s still worthwhile spending enormous amounts of time and energy reminding them of these facts and futilely hectoring them into being better. There must be no aspect of human behaviour free from cutting loose, free from constant self-checking, otherwise people might wake up and question our authority! And with sex being such a source of energy, once we’ve got that tied up, everything else from humour to creativity to individuality tends to go down the plughole. Thank goodness.
Praise be to Us!
When it became clear that due to increased education people were rejecting religion, we simply encouraged a form of scientific materialism that gave people a sense of release from the punishments of the biblical Jehovah, but at the price of a choice variety of intellectual despairs to suit all temperaments. For those who grew out of organised religion, life is now kept miserable by sophisticated theories of anomie, denial of the transcendent, reductionist materialism and so on. Interestingly nobody notices the huge incongruity that while there isn’t meant to be any ultimate truth, it is somehow obligatory to shackle oneself with these tormenting, life-denying ideas, because somehow they are in fact “right”, i.e. some kind of ultimate truth. Yet if the universe is meaningless, then so is the statement that it is meaningless. So whereas in medieval times the masses were kept docile by fear of hell, nowadays they are kept docile by a fear of this life! We rejoice in Our ingenuity. This scheme also meant that when Patriarchy began to fall apart, a new macho spirit of mean-spirited numbness could be cultivated whereby it was those who could stomach the worst atrocities who were actually the “coolest” in their peer groups. The ability to chuckle ironically at full-colour close-ups of extreme violence is now valued as a mark of “maturity” in many, many circles.
Whereas in Victorian times there was a large-scale hypocritical repression of sexuality, these days much the same attitude prevails with regard to spirituality. Almost nobody admits even being able to feel spiritual any more. It is viewed as something to be grown out of, with however much pain and repression this takes. If this is not possible, it is to be kept to a bare, utilitarian minimum, and never acknowledged in public. It is to be viewed as a weakness, and in the curtain-drawn darkness all manner of strangeness and self-tormenting perversity flourishes (e.g. born-again Christians). Naturally this creates an enormous pathology of spirituality, which is then used in a circular argument to justify its repression. Organised religion is a good example of this — most Christians are so repressed and uptight, so scared to actually live properly that they’re a perfect advertisement for reductionist materialism.
With Our control over Death, Sex and Religion so strong, it looks like this planet should remain Misery Central for quite some time to come. There are reports of a few people who seem to have instinctively realised how to live properly, but they’re a minority and We shall have to crack down on these shiftless scroungers off the state ...
THEM (TransHuman Existential Materialists) International, 1995
This document was intercepted from the aether by the Out of Order Order, BM Indefinite, London WC1N 3XX. This is our full address — don’t be scared to use it, and enclose an SAE if you want a reply.